Crossbones (6 page)

It rankles Jeebleh that BigBeard has deemed the photograph of his one-year-old granddaughter, soaped and naked as she stands in a bathtub, “pornographic.” It goes to show how much energy religionists of the parochial variety squander on matters of little or no significance.

Malik joins him in the kitchen, refreshed and ready to take on the world, Jeebleh thinks. He informs Malik that Dajaal has retrieved the computer and is on his way back. When Malik asks for details, Jeebleh tells him that some of the files have been deleted, because they have been found to be uncomplimentary to the Courts.

“Is anything else deleted?” Malik wants to know.

Jeebleh tells him about the photo.

Malik says nothing. Jeebleh feels the sense of stress spreading, with Malik biting his lower lip, too angry to speak. Jeebleh thinks how stresses produce inexplicable results and he wonders how the stresses they are all under, the strain that is bound to invade them—Malik, Ahl, and himself—will affect them. What will they be like when they crack up? What will Malik be like when the nervous tension makes him go to pieces? He watches with worry as Malik steps away and stands before the mirror on the wall in the living room and takes a good look at his reflection. Jeebleh senses that even to himself Malik must look
older in a matter of moments, rugged and more wrinkled, his face careworn.

Dajaal returns alone and gives the computer without further explanation to Malik. Malik handles it with care the way a mother handles a sick child who is asleep. He takes it to the table in his future workroom off the kitchen, without bothering to open it.

Jeebleh asks, “Where is Gumaad?”

“He took public transport,” Dajaal replies.

Jeebleh’s mobile phone rings. It is Cambara, saying, “Where are you all? Bile and I are waiting, and the lunch is getting cold.”

“We’re coming,” Jeebleh assures her.

AHLULKHAIR, KNOWN TO FAMILY AND CLOSE FRIENDS AS AHL, OLDER
brother to Malik and the director of a Minneapolis-based center tasked with researching matters Somali, calls in sick, the first time he has done so in his long career as an educator. The truth is, the growing trend among Somali youths to join the self-declared religionist radical fringe, Shabaab, has thrown him off balance. Taxliil, his stepson, has now been gone more than six months, and is suspected to be somewhere in Somalia. In an earlier rumor, the runaway youth was seen in Kismayo, a coastal city that is in the hands of Shabaab and deemed too dangerous to visit. He was said to be training as a suicide bomber. But more recently they have heard, relayed to Ahl’s wife, Yusur, via her close friend Xalan, whose husband, Warsame, received it from a man in the Puntland Intelligence Service, that Taxliil, along with a couple of Shabaab-trained diehards, is headed for Bosaso. Warsame and Xalan live in Bosaso and have offered to host Ahl when he arrives in the region in a few days, in search of Taxliil. Nobody is sure of the whereabouts of the other twenty or so Somali-American youths who have
vanished from their homes (in various parts of the United States, but principally from Minnesota), but the rumor that Taxliil has been dispatched to Puntland, hurriedly promoted to the assignment of liaising with the pirates in a bid to build a bridge between them and Shabaab, is gaining plausibility. Taxliil is said to have served twice as an interpreter to a delegation from the Courts, to help them to communicate with hostages, some of them Muslim, held by Somali pirates.

Ahl’s whole body has lately been out of kilter, so unbalanced that on occasion he has been incapable of coordinating the simplest physical demands. A month ago, he woke up just before dawn from a deep sleep, and, needing very badly to pee, sat up, ready to do just that. Only he never got to the bathroom; he wet himself, like a baby.

Malik and Jeebleh vowed to ask around about Taxliil when they reached Somalia, attempting to trace his movements in the country, but Ahl knew he must go to Puntland himself. Of course, there is no guarantee that Taxliil is in Puntland, or that any of them—Ahl, Malik, or Jeebleh—will locate him. Or that even if they do so, the young fellow will be willing to return with them to Minneapolis.

It is no easy matter preparing for a trip to Somalia these days. The country has been in the throes of unending violence for the past two decades. Moreover, Ahl and Malik, born and raised in Aden, were brought up to think of Somalia as their father’s land—and even the old man himself never knew or visited the place. Even so, he made sure his sons spoke the language from childhood. Although the country is unfamiliar, Somalia’s troubles haven’t been very far from their minds.

In preparation for his visit, Ahl has taken the required vaccinations and has begun ingesting his weekly malaria tablets. He has also been collecting as much information as he can on Puntland, poring over maps and consulting others on what to do, where to go, and whom to contact. He has been in touch with Xalan, whom his wife, Yusur has
known since childhood. Ahl knows from her that Xalan’s nephew Ahmed-Rashid, her older sister Zaituun’s son, has been missing for more than a year from Columbus, Ohio, vanished during his first year at a community college there. But because Zaituun, the boy’s mother, doesn’t seem bothered about his disappearance, Xalan and Warsame and the rest of the family act as if they are not worried, either. Perhaps this has something to do with the bad blood that exists between the two sisters, Xalan and Zaituun, although they both live in Bosaso. At any rate, Yusur has assured him, it won’t affect his rapport with Xalan.

Ahl has trusted this and given the dates of his visit to Xalan in the hope that, with her husband’s help, she will set in motion security arrangements for him. He prefers putting up in a hotel to staying with her and her husband for the first couple of days, if only to get an initial take on the place and a grip on his own priorities. He has his round-trip ticket to Bosaso via Paris and Djibouti. Xalan has offered to have Warsame pick him up from the airport and has confirmed that she has booked a room for him in a hotel.

Sitting with a book about Puntland open before him, Ahl has his cell phone by his side, willing it to ring; the landline is also within his reach. He is anxious to hear from Malik, who will have just landed in Mogadiscio. He wants to know if everything has gone according to plan. The night before, with Yusur on night shift, he stayed up late watching Al Jazeera, the BBC World Service, and CNN; and supplementing the information gleaned from these sources by reading American and European newspapers online. He wants to know the latest about the impending Ethiopian invasion of Somalia.

The phone rings: Yusur asks if he has heard from Malik. When he replies that Malik hasn’t called, she lets out a whimper. Ahl reminds himself that he must remain strong for everyone’s sake. His wife has a way of pulling him down with her to a point so low that there is
nothing but despair. Since her son left, she has been prone to long bouts of depression; at times, she has found it difficult to hold down her nursing job at a hospital. Of late she has been working night shifts at an old people’s home, and she seldom comes home even during the day. There is always something to do at an old people’s home, especially for a mother desperately mourning her missing son.

When Ahl arrived in the Twin Cities in the mid-1980s, there was only one other Somali in town, a delectable young woman studying art. He had been recruited from the UK, where he had taken his Ph.D. in linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, to teach in the Education Department at the University of Minnesota. He bought an apartment in downtown St. Paul large enough to host Malik two or three times a year, between assignments for the Singapore-based daily in which he published his syndicated pieces. The two brothers set themselves apart from their birth communities, hardly socializing with the Yemenis with whom they had grown up in Aden, or with the new influx of Somalis with whom they shared a loose-knit communality. Later, when Minnesota became inundated with Somalis because the then governor offered them better facilities than they could have enjoyed in San Diego, Nashville, or other places where they had initially been concentrated, the two brothers communicated in whichever language would exclude those they did not wish to understand them: Somali when among Arabs, Chinese when among Somalis, and English with each other and when they wanted to be understood.

Malik made a name for himself as a foreign correspondent. Their mother went back to Malaysia to look after her own aging parents, and their father to Somalia, his ancestral land, where, bizarrely, he melted
into the rangelands of the north, tending hundreds of camels he had bought with the help of herdsmen in his employ. Their old man went totally native, as Malik liked to say, and married a woman in her late teens to produce additional offspring, in hope of making sure that his bloodline would not die out, a responsibility he no longer trusted either of his sons could fulfill.

Though neither had regular contact with either parent, the brothers went out of their way to keep each other abreast of one another’s whereabouts, troubles, endeavors, and successes. Occasionally, Malik would disappear from view for months, covering some terrible war unfolding in yet another wretched, remote country. Then he would be back, exhausted from travel and needing Ahl to listen to his adventures and to read the pieces he had written. A run of intelligent women had fallen for him, and he’d had brief affairs with many of them.

Ahl was the first to marry. He met Yusur, a Somali woman seven years his junior, at a refresher course in public health meant for Somalis newly arrived in Minneapolis. He had given a lecture on teaching Somali grammar to non-native speakers of the tongue. He and Yusur struck a heartfelt amity immediately when they talked but maintained a deferential distance for quite some time, knowing that no closeness between them was possible. She was separated from her husband and lived alone with her infant son. Her marriage was troubled—she had an unemployed husband who passed his days chewing
qaat
with his likewise jobless mates. To a man, they received welfare benefits and, when possible, sponged off their wives. Yusur worked and attended classes part-time and so had to hire a babysitter. Not only was this expensive, but her husband’s bad behavior reached new depths when he was arrested for sexually assaulting the babysitter.

Yusur’s in-laws were furious when she declined to pay the lawyer who had been hired in an attempt to have the charge reduced from
rape to aggravated assault. And when her husband was finally released and she wouldn’t have him back, her in-laws made physical threats against her. In the end, his family, fearing he would continue to be a blight to their name, sent him off to Detroit to cool his heels and then helped him move to Toronto, where he submitted his papers as a freshly arrived Somali by virtue of a slight change to the order of his names.

Yusur and Ahl saw each other discreetly for a long time before becoming man and wife. Their wedding was private, known only to Malik and his parents. Their mother graced the occasion with her presence, but their father merely sent a terse telegram from Hargeisa: “You have my blessings.”

The boy, Taxliil, and Ahl developed a father-son rapport, and while he didn’t use the word, Taxliil behaved as though Ahl were his father.Ahl, in turn, made sure Taxliil was not lacking for anything. For most Somali children in the diaspora, he was aware, life was a chore: punishments at home; humiliation at school; mothers not assisted with the children, fathers seldom involved in raising their offspring. In many homes, relatives came and went from Somalia, bearing horror stories about what was happening in their country. The phones would ring at two, three, or four in the morning, the caller needing money to pay the burial expenses of a clansman killed in an intermilitia skirmish back home. With all the turmoil and the constant noise of the television, youngsters often lacked the will, the peace of mind, and the time to do their schoolwork.

But this was not the case in the home where Taxliil grew up, thanks to Ahl. The three of them lived as a nuclear family: a man, a woman, and a child, with Uncle Malik occasionally visiting, an ideal model, one would have thought, for a boy growing up. There was order and abundant love in the household. Ahl made time to supervise Taxliil’s homework. Twice a week, Taxliil went to the neighborhood mosque to
receive religious instruction from a Somali teacher with rudimentary Arabic, and often Ahl would subtly set Taxliil right without pointing out the teacher’s failings.

On his first day of secondary school, Taxliil met a green-eyed Kurdish boy, Samir. The two became inseparable. They played sports and computer games together; swapped clothes; swam and took long walks on weekends. They spurred each other to achieve their ambitions. Neither admitted to knowing what the word
impossible
meant. Doing well wasn’t good enough; they did better than anyone else.

One summer vacation, Samir flew out to Baghdad with his father to visit Iraq for the first time since the American takeover. He was sitting in the back of the car with his grandparents, his father in the front next to the driver, Samir’s uncle, when an American Marine flagged them down at a checkpoint. Samir alighted speedily and waited by the roadside, away from the vehicle, as instructed. His father helped Grandma in regaining possession of her walker and held his hand out to her as she shakily stepped out of the vehicle. Meanwhile, his uncle bent down to assist Grandpa, who was still in the car, in retrieving his cane, and he took a long time, half his body hidden from view. Panicking that one of the two men would shoot him, the young Marine opened fire, killing everyone except Samir.