Links (4 page)

Maybe there was more to Af-Laawe than met the eye. He was shrewd enough, all right, and was resourceful, and courageous too. But was he trustworthy? Was he his own man, or a vassal to one or the other of the Strongmen? It would be atypical, Jeebleh thought, to find in Mogadiscio a man not solely devoted to serving his blood community, but working in pursuit of his own ideals.

An instant later, Jeebleh looked up and saw the first carrion-eaters—strong-headed, keen-eyed, with deadly claws capable of tearing into two disparate halves the surrounding cosmos.

 

 

“NO BODY BAGS, PLEASE!”

Those had been the parting words of Jeebleh's elder daughter as she implored him to take good care of himself. His wife's advice was simply that he should trust no one. In different circumstances, Jeebleh and Af-Laawe might have struck up an immediate friendship, exchanging telephone numbers, promising to look each other up. Here, however, things were far more complicated. And now this: A ten-year-old boy killed just for fun!

Jeebleh knew it would be unwise to talk about any of this to his wife and daughters, who would ask him to return home immediately. And if he tried to discuss his shock at the crowd's inaction, his wife would reflexively refer to “the Somalis' lack of moral courage,” even though, in her heart of hearts, she wouldn't want him to take a risky moral stand. His elder daughter, a senior at NYU, would tell him that it would be unbecoming of him—a man of such a venerable past, whose life was full of countless instances of moral courage—to die in vain. His younger daughter had speculated that if he was killed, it was unlikely he would be sent back to New York at all. “You'll just be buried within five minutes of dying. We would never even get to see your corpse. One of us would have to fly to that god-awful country to bring your body back so we could give you a decent burial.” They had opposed his visiting Mogadiscio.

He had heard it all before, the arguments for and against getting involved in any political or moral activity that might lead to death. He remembered his mother fondly, especially because even though he was her only son, she had never once suggested that he shouldn't risk his life by engaging in dangerous political work, when many parents in the days of the dictatorship discouraged their children from taking a stand. His mother was an exception. “You live only once, and I'd like you to live your life with integrity,” she would say. But he doubted that even she would have wanted him to risk his life unnecessarily in this instance—if, as Af-Laawe said, there wasn't much he could do.

The arrival of more crows, marabous, and other carrion birds set him loose from his memories. Had these birds learned to show up as soon as they heard shots, knowing that there would be corpses? They perched restlessly on the telegraph wires, waiting. People stood by, looking helpless. Af-Laawe led several men, who carried the dead boy's corpse to a vehicle with the words
“Noolaadaa dhinta!”
on the side, and below that the English translation: “Who lives, dies!” When at last Af-Laawe joined him, Jeebleh asked if the van in which the corpse now lay was his.

“It belongs to a charitable organization that gives decent Islamic burials to the unclaimed corpses littering the streets of the city whenever there is fighting,” he said. “I set it up in the early stages of the civil war, when there were bodies everywhere, at roundabouts, by the side of the road, in buildings. A large percentage of the dead had no relatives to bury them. They had belonged to clan families who had been chased out of the city.”

He fell silent, and looked in the direction of a four-wheel-drive vehicle that was arriving, bearing a VIP, perhaps a clan leader or a warlord on his way to Nairobi. Several youths with guns alighted from the roof of the vehicle and others stepped out of it, before an elderly man, whom Jeebleh recognized, emerged limping. A hush descended; even the bereaved woman, now in Af-Laawe's van, stopped her wailing. Jeebleh, a changed man, was far more frightened than when he had landed. He wished he could pluck up the courage to speak to the venerable politician as he walked toward the plane.

“Now here's how things are,” Af-Laawe was saying. “I had intended to take you in my van. You can still come with me, only I must warn you that I now have other passengers, including a corpse, a bereaved mother, constantly wailing, and several gravediggers. I am driving straight to the cemetery. Or I can organize a lift for you in that fancy car.”

“What are the chances of that?”

“I'll talk to the driver. I know him well.”

“And he'll know where to take me?”

“I'll tell him.”

Everything was done in haste, because Af-Laawe wanted to get the boy's body buried before night fell. Before leaving, he gave Jeebleh his business card, which on one side had the words “Funeral with a difference!” and on the other
“Noolaadaa dhinta!”
Jeebleh found himself thinking that maybe someone with a dark sense of humor was having a bit of fun by sending a funeral van to meet him on his arrival. Only Caloosha would be likely to send him such a veiled message, with a death threat threaded into its cloth. Alas, Jeebleh couldn't tell whether he should take it lightheartedly, or with the heedfulness of a man being forewarned.

“Good luck,” Af-Laawe said, and he was gone.

JEEBLEH WAS UNCOMFORTABLY SQUEEZED IN THE FRONT OF THE VEHICLE, pressed between the driver and a man responding to the title of Major. In the seat immediately behind them were three youths with assault rifles. Perched on the roof were several others with grenade launchers and belt-fed machine guns. That he was uncomfortable sitting so close to so many guns in the hands of teenagers was obvious; he remained alert, and watched for the telltale signs of imminent danger.

As they moved, and once he was accustomed to his discomfort, his eyes fell on a young man lying in the rear. The handsome youth had the whole seat to himself, his right leg, which was in a cast, extended in the dignified attitude of someone showing off a prize possession.

Perhaps mundanely, perhaps revealing more about how much more American he had become than he would care to admit, Jeebleh wished that the driver, the Major, and the youths in the back would all refrain from turning the vehicle into a smokehouse. He kept quiet about his preoccupations, doubtful that they would oblige, and feeling silly that he would expend more energy on their cigarette smoking than on the fact that they were so heavily armed. Instead, he asked the Major where he had been when the state collapsed and the city exploded into anarchy.

The Major replied: “Here and there and everywhere.”

“But you were in the National Army, were you not?”

“How did you decide that?”

“I assumed, because of your title, Major.”

Saying nothing, the Major blew out rings of smoke straight into Jeebleh's eyes, irritating him no end. The driver sensed the tension building up and stepped in. He addressed his words to Jeebleh. “We're all shell-shocked on account of what we've been through—those of us who stayed on in the country. I hope people like you will forgive us our failings, and we pray to God that He'll forgive us our trespasses too.”

The Major cursed. “What fainthearted nonsense!”

Minutes passed with only the sound of the engine. The youths engaged in agitated whispers in a hard-to-follow dialect commonly spoken in a southern region of the country where militiamen came from.

“Where do you know Marabou from?” the Major asked.

Jeebleh looked from the Major to the driver and back, as he had no idea what this meant. His lower lip caught in his teeth; biting it, he mumbled, “Marabou?”

The driver helped him out. “‘Marabou' is the nickname by which the guy who runs Funeral with a Difference is known in some circles of our city.”

“He introduced himself as Af-Laawe,” Jeebleh said.

“And you met him for the first time today?”

When Jeebleh nodded and the driver vouched for him, this angered the Major. He turned on the driver, saying, “Why do you keep speaking for him?”

“Because I'm the one who offered him a lift, that's why,” the driver said.

And when the Major continued to stare furiously first at him, and then for a considerably longer time at Jeebleh, whipping himself into a giant fury, the driver was compelled to add, “I know this gentleman's reputation, and of the high respect his name is held in, in many quarters. What's more, I know this to be their first encounter, because Marabou told me so.”

There was silence.

A few minutes later, the driver said, “I am reminded of a story in which Voltaire, who is on his deathbed, receives a visit from Satan. Eager to recruit the French philosopher for his own ends, Satan offers him limitless pleasures that would make his afterlife more comfortable in every possible way. But Voltaire turns down the offer, and speaks a stern rebuke to Satan, saying that this isn't the time to make enemies, thank you!”

In a fit of pique, maybe because he had no idea what to make of the parable or why the driver had recounted it, the Major barked a command. “Stop the car!” he shouted.

No sooner had the vehicle come to an abrupt halt than the armed youths leapt from the roof, fanning out, their guns at the ready. But the youths inside did not move at all. On edge, the Major got out.

“Why this unplanned stop?” the driver asked.

Miffed, the Major said, “I'll return shortly!” He went around to the driver's side, and told him, “You're a volunteer, and I'm in charge of this outfit, and you take orders from me. Keep in mind that we're at war, and I'll have you come before the disciplinary commission of the movement if you disobey my orders.” Then he swayed off down a dusty road, along with two youths detailed to escort him, their weapons poised menacingly.

“What's eating him?” asked one of the youths in the vehicle.

The handsome youth with his leg in a cast speculated that the Major was due to go on a dangerous mission, and was living on his nerves.

Everyone retreated into the disarray of an imposed silence, embarrassed. Jeebleh sat unmoving, like a candle just blown out, smoking its last moments darkly.

 

 

OUTSIDE, THERE WAS A FAINT WHIRLING OF SAND. AND THERE WAS LIFE AS Jeebleh might have imagined it in its continuous rebirth, earth to dust, dust to earth, wherein death was avenged.

With the vehicle parked by the side of the road and the Major and his young militiamen off on some mysterious mission, Jeebleh felt increasingly like a sitting target. His heart beating faster from fear, it occurred to him that they could all be dead at the pull of a trigger. The dead would be mourned and buried—Marabou would see to that—but the militia would regret the loss of the vehicle more. In the mid-eighties, before the collapse, corruption having reached unprecedented levels, poems had circulated on cassette about the ill-gotten money that had brought many Land Cruisers into the country. Jeebleh wished he could remember the words. Nowadays, many of these four-wheel-drive vehicles had ended up in the hands of the fighting militiamen, who mounted their weapons on them, turning them into the battlewagons that became a staple of the civil war footage shown on CNN and the BBC. He kept a wary eye on what was happening outside, in the dusty alleys. Two of the armed youths who had climbed down from the roof of the vehicle stood with their backs to each other, in imitation of what they must have seen in American movies. They nursed immense bulges in their cheeks, great wads of chewed-up
qaat,
a moderately mild stimulant. They might have been cattle ruminating.

The driver spoke: “Once again, I feel I must apologize for the behavior of our countrymen, who do not know what is good for them, or how to say thank you to those who mean them well. Our moods swing from one extreme to another, but we haven't the courage to admit that we've strayed from the course of moral behavior. I suppose that is why the civil war goes on and on, because of this lack in us, our inability to appreciate what the international community has tried to do for us: feed the starving and bring about peace in our homeland.”

Jeebleh wanted to know more about Af-Laawe. “What is Marabou's story?” he asked.

Thunderclouds of worry gathered on the driver's forehead; readying to speak, he made throaty noises similar in intensity to the rumble before a lightning bolt splits the heavens. “Marabou, for a start,” he finally said, “has many aliases, and he changes them as often as we change our shirts.”

Jeebleh wondered to himself whether Af-Laawe—meaning “the one with no mouth”—was also an assumed name, which, to a Dante scholar, might allude to the
Inferno
. He asked, “How well do you know him?”

The driver answered in a burst of impassioned speech, “How does one know anyone in a land where people are constantly reinventing themselves? How well can anyone know an Af-Laawe who does his damnedest not to be known?”

“My impression is that you've known him a long time.”

“True, I've known him for long, since his student days, when he was doing his doctorate in Rome. Then, I was the head of the chancellery at the Somali embassy there. I remember him coming to see me, when he learned that the National Security had put his name on a blacklist and issued a directive instructing us to discontinue his government-sponsored scholarship. Knowing I couldn't help him, I asked a junior officer to deal with him. He left the chancellery, angry and abusive. A few days later he visited me at home. This time, he pleaded that I extend his passport. I told him that there was no point in extending his passport if he no longer had a scholarship allowing him to live in Italy, but my son assured me that Af-Laawe, who was his friend, had received another grant to help him continue his studies and all he needed was a valid passport, with a valid residence. I renewed the passport, at some risk to myself, I must add, and heard no more about him until I met him several years later in France, with an Italian woman, his fiancée. By then he had set himself up somewhere in Alsace, in a town called Colmar, and he eventually married the woman.”