Knots

Called “one of the most sophisticated voices in modern fiction” (The New York Review of Books), Nuruddin Farah is widely recognized as a literary genius. He proves it yet again with Knots, the story of a woman who returns to her roots and discovers much more than herself. Born in Somalia but raised in North America, Cambara flees a failed marriage by traveling to Mogadishu. And there, amid the devastation and brutality, she finds that her most unlikely ambitions begin to seem possible. Conjuring the unforgettable extremes of a fractured Muslim culture and the wayward Somali state through the eyes of a strong, compelling heroine, Knots is another Farah masterwork.

One

Zaak says to Cambara, “Who do you blame?”

“Blame?” Cambara asks tetchily, as she goes ahead of him taking the lead, although she has no idea where to go. As it happens, she arrived in Mogadiscio earlier today after a long absence and does not know her way about, the city’s landmarks having been savagely destroyed in the ongoing civil war to the extent where, based on what she has seen of the city so far, she doubts if she will recognize it.

Cambara has had the proclivity to keep a safe, polite distance, the better to avoid Zaak’s bad breath, diagnosed as chronic gingivitis. When both were younger and growing up in the same household, the dentist would prescribe special toothpaste with antiseptic and aromatic qualities, in addition to a medicinal mouthwash, and a very soft toothbrush with which he was to clean his teeth. Cambara remembers his gums bleeding prolifically and receding wastefully at a phenomenal rate, the inflammation, combined with the irritation on account of the tartar deposits, causing the loosening of several of his teeth. She remembers his suffering from persistent indigestion ever since Arda, her mother, who is also his paternal aunt, brought him from a nomadic hamlet during his early teens as her charge in order to facilitate his receiving proper schooling in Mogadiscio.

Cambara waits for him to push the door shut, which he does with a squeak, and she watches him as he turns the wobbly handle a couple of times in a futile effort to secure it, notwithstanding its state of malfunction. Meanwhile, she reminds herself that it has been years since she last set eyes on him or was in touch with him directly. Arda has carried words back and forth from one to the other and has persuaded her daughter to put up with him, at least for the first few days, since Cambara informed her of her wish to go to Mogadiscio. At her mother’s cajoling, Cambara acquiesced to stay with “her blood,” as she put it, for the first few days, until, perhaps, she has made her own contacts with a close friend of a friend living in Toronto. No doubt, Cambara cannot expect her mother to recall her nephew’s malodorous breath, nor is it fair to assume that this is reason enough to warrant her daughter’s not wanting to share the same space. But how on earth could she, Cambara, have forgotten the awfulness of it, so vile it is sickening? Nor had she known him to be a chain-smoker or a constant chewer of qaat, the mild narcotic to which urban Somalis are highly addicted.

“Surely someone is to blame?” Zaak insists.

“Who?”

Zaak lets her go past him and out the side gate—­she almost six feet, he a mere ­five-­foot-­seven. Scarcely have they left the compound and walked a hundred meters when she slows down, covers her head more appropriately with a plain scarf as the Islamic tradition dictates, and stays ten or so meters behind Zaak. Her eyes ­downcast—­again, as expected of women in ­Mogadiscio these days—­she reaches into one of the inner pockets of her ­custom-­made caftan to make certain that she has brought along her knife, her weapon of choice, if it comes to ­self-­defense. A glance in her direction will prove that she is bracing her courage in preparation for an ugly surprise, to which anyone in a civil war city is vulnerable. Herself, she looks in consternation from the dilapidated tarmac road to Zaak, as she releases her stiff grip around the handle of the knife. Then she tightens her lips and moistens them, her head sending two contradictory messages: the one advising that she remain wary, the other declining, as per her mother’s suggestion, to put all her trust in Zaak, because he has firsthand knowledge of how things are likely to pan out. Adopting an indifferent posture as she focuses for a moment on Zaak, she studies his expressions or lack of them, and remarks, with surprise, that he does not appear as if he is expecting an untoward occurrence: the telltale advent on the scene of armed youths intent on launching a virulent mayhem that might end in either of them being shot or killed. She tries to relax into a high state of alert, if that is at all possible, and then picks up Zaak’s pungent body odor, the unwashed detritus of a qaat-chewer’s unhealthy living. The power of the stench hits her forcefully, and she comes close to fainting.

In a belated answer to her question “Who?” Zaak mumbles an unintelligible remark she is unable to make out. With so angry a face, she nervously scans the horizon, as they turn a sharp corner and are suddenly face to face with several ­sarong-­and-­flip-­flop-wearing youths armed with ­AK-­47s. Her instinct tells her to prepare, her hand making renewed, abrupt contact with the knife, even though two of the youths appear indifferent to her and are religiously chewing qaat and arguing, bansheelike, about yesterday’s match between Arsenal and Manchester United, and agreeing that the referee made a ­balls-­up of the game by unfairly ­red-­carding the Gunners’ captain. Her sense of caution remains relentless until they are well out of danger.

Zaak asks, “Et tu?”

She is in no mood to answer such a question early in her visit, not until she comes to grips with the complexity of what is in store for her. In fact, she is delighted that she has refrained from engaging him in a serious talk so far, worried that this might give him the license to zero in on her scant preparedness for what she intends her visit to achieve beyond perhaps getting reacquainted with the country of her birth and maybe reacquiring the family property now in the hands of a minor warlord. She is consumed with doubt, wondering if it is possible to accomplish such a feat without a lot of help from a lot of people. Of course, she is well aware that the warlord will give her kind no quarter whatsoever, it being not in the nature of these brutes to show mercy to anyone. What about Zaak, her cousin and current host? Will he extend a protective hand to her if she makes the resolve to confront the warlord? How will he react when she puts his loyalty to the test?

Whatever else she might do, she must not afford Zaak free access to her affairs, at least not before she has consolidated her position and fortified it against its inherent weaknesses, which might come to light after she sets the confrontation with the minor warlord and his armed minions into motion. At any rate, she must not allow Zaak to make her question the motives of her visit, what has prompted her to leave her peaceful life, husband, and job in Toronto, where she has been resident for ­three-­quarters of her life, and come to the ­war-­torn country. She could see questions forming in his head when he met her at the airport, sensing that he wants to ask if she has moved house and relocated to Somalia. Why has she brought so many hefty suitcases filled with all her movable assets?

That she has been unhappy in her marriage to Wardi is no ­secret—­everybody has been aware of this for a long time. Moreover, having once been Cambara’s “husband” on paper and having “lived” with her in confined spaces, first as children growing up, then as a couple who entered into a contract of the ­marriage-­of-­convenience kind, Zaak has his partisan views. He thinks of her as a woman capable of exemplary generosity, most loyal, above all, to her mother, very devoted to her close friends, especially to Raxma. But she also cuts the figure of an impulsive woman, difficult to please, harder still to pin down, and known, lately, to be off her rocker, understandably so, because of her son’s death. Cambara blames Wardi, her husband, and his Canadian mistress for her son’s drowning. And even though he has not dared ask ­her—­fearing she might flare up, presuming his question to be ­provocative—­Zaak supposes that she is here for a lengthy period, considering the weight and number of suitcases that she has brought along. She may have been attracted to the idea of relocating here out of her desperate attempt to put an ocean between herself and Wardi, but told everyone else, apart from her mother and intimate friends, that she is here to mourn the passing of her only son. But Cambara ­hasn’t dwelled on her huge loss, not even after Zaak offered his condolences, beyond acknowledging them and saying, “Thank you.” Nor has she let the name of her husband pass her lips or alluded to what is to become of their marriage. She has made a point of giving brief responses to his questions, now nodding her head yes and elaborating no more, now shaking her head no and preferring not to expand further. The last Zaak heard, Wardi is doing splendidly: He is finally a partner in the law firm. For his part, Zaak has steered a judicious course, ostensibly avoiding the obvious and the ­not-­so-­obvious pitfalls, and has refrained from pressing her. And whenever they have run out of topics of interest, their conversation has taken a detour and led them to Cambara’s mother, whom they both love.

However, if there is a subject that neither is comfortable discussing, it is their own shared past as putative husband and wife. Ill at ease, they have reined back from revisiting it, apprehensive that, unchecked, their talking might deposit them eventually at the door to a concern better left ­alone—­the two years spent together under one roof, in her apartment in Toronto, as man and ­wife—“Only on paper, ­I’ll have you know,” she will point out again and ­again—­which had been an utter disaster. Maybe she means to have no intimate talk, none whatsoever.

“Has there been fighting here lately?” she asks, coming level with him. Then, seemingly tired, she squints at the afternoon sun, hesitating before cracking her jaws in the yawning attitude of a passenger in a plane clearing her ears of accumulated air pressure. The sun burns down so harshly that the contours of all visible items melt in its fierceness. She sees the giveaway evidence of civil war devastation wherever she turns: buildings leaning in in complete disorder, a great many of them boasting no roof, others boarded up, looking vandalized, abandoned. The ­road—­once tarred and good enough for motor ­vehicles—­is in total disrepair; the walls of the house fronting the street are pocked with bullets, as if a terrible sharpshooter with assault rifles has used them for his target practice.

“Skirmishes,” he says, as if an afterthought.

“How many militiamen died?”

“Only unarmed civilians.”

As though out of kindness to Cambara, Zaak holds his cigarette away from ­her—­in his left ­hand—­and he keeps the fingers of his right hand close to his mouth, almost covering it. Moreover, his head veers away from her; she is not clear if he is doing so to protect her from the slightest whiff of his nicotine or if he has lately become conscious of the ill effect his ­evil-­smelling breath is having on her.

All of a sudden, however, he springs on her a challenge with the strident voice of a man of huge contradictions, courteous in one instant, cruel in the next. He says, “Do not tell me that you are frightened.”

You might think from the way she takes a step back that she is readying to give him a slap across the face. Not so. All she wants to do is to look down on him from her great ­six-­foot height. She also thinks that there is the bravura of a young boy’s dare to his taunting, which irks her no less. She remembers their young years together in the same ­household—­Cambara’s parents’ house, to be ­exact—­and how she would do anything for a dare and he ­wouldn’t; Zaak was not a rebel by nature, was less inclined to act as wild as she would. After all, she was the beloved daughter of the house and he but a poor relation.

She would throw in his direction all manner of gauntlets, but he ­wouldn’t pick them up. Annoyed, she would goad him, “Three dares for your one.” And she would wet her index finger, which is a child’s way of timing the retort of the opponent: If the forefinger dries before the response, the challenger will forfeit, and the dare lapses, in which case she would declare herself the winner. He liked to stay out of trouble, preferring living and going to school in Mogadiscio to being sent back to his poorer parents in the hinterland, close to Galkacyo, in Mudugh. Always conscious of their difference in height, he was irritated by her rubbing it in.

She opts for a different tack. She says, wisely, stressing the validity of her point, “Only fools are unafraid.”

“Please ­don’t take it that way,” he apologizes.

As he prepares to walk away, Cambara remarks that they are close to an ­open-­air market. In fact, they meet shoppers returning, the forlorn expressions of the women swathed from head to toe in cheap veils evident, on occasion with only their eyes and hands showing. The women are carrying their small purchases in black plastic bags. To encounter these women in their miserable state saddens Cambara. Even though the men look equally dour and unfulfilled, they seem relaxed. Maybe it is because the men have preciously tucked away under their arms their fresh bundles of qaat, the stimulant that some of them have already started to chew. Whereas the women have nothing of importance to expect, save more ­war-­related miseries and rape and sick children to care for, useless husbands whom they serve hand and foot as they chew to their heart’s satisfaction and talk politics.

She thinks of herself as being, already, a victim of the habit. After all, he has dragged her out of bed and forced her to carry the lethargy of jet lag to escort him so that he might buy his daily ration. She has found proof of chewing in the upstairs room where she is staying, which is littered with the dried detritus of the discarded stems of the stuff. For a nonchewer, nonsmoker, she looks upon the upstairs room allotted to her as a hellhole, smelly, the walls green from the spit of the chewers, the crannies stuffed with the plant’s unchewed stems.

When Cambara puts urgency into her steps with a view to catching up with him, she trips, loses her balance, and almost tumbles over. Zaak stares accusingly at her sandaled feet, which are now covered with fine brown sand.

­“I’ll put on walking shoes next time,” she says.

“If I were you, I would also put on a veil.”

The liberties he allows himself, she thinks to herself, as she reflects on what he has just said. Of course, she is no fool; she has come prepared, having acquired a pair of veils, one in Dearborn, Michigan, the other in Nairobi. But she will don the damn thing on her own terms, not because he has advised her to wear one. She needs no reminding that she is dressed differently from the other women whom they have encountered so far, the largest number of them veiled, some in the traditional guntiino robes and others in near tatters. She is in a caftan, the wearing of which places her in a league of one. She wore it, she reasons, because it was close to hand and she ­hadn’t the time to open her suitcases and rummage in them, looking for a veil. Besides, this custom-made caftan permits her to carry a knife discreetly.

He asks, “Shall I take you to a ­who-­die stall? Where you can buy a veil?” She reads meanness in his eyes and interprets the expression as a male daring a woman to defy the recent imposition, which stipulates that women should veil themselves. When she was young, it was uncommon for Somali women to wear one; mostly Arab women and a few of the city’s aboriginals did.

“‘­Who-­die stalls’? Why are they called that?”

“Stalls from where you buy secondhand veils.”

Then Zaak explains at length that in recent years, dumping of secondhand clothing on the world’s poor has become de rigueur, as many citizens of these countries are in no position to pay the astronomical prices for new clothes.

“I see,” she says, nodding.

He is in his element, and goes on. “The ­who-­die stalls are run by local entrepreneurs who buy a shipload of secondhand clothes for next to nothing from a dump house in the developed world and then import these in. The importers and the retailers are all under the impression that everyone is getting a bargain. The truth is, sadly, different.”

“Why is that?”

“Because the practice has destroyed the local textile industries, as they can no longer compete with the dumpers. People have dubbed the practice with knowing cynicism; ­who-­die clothes from ­who-­die stalls!”

Soon enough, a vast sorrow descends upon Cambara, as she remembers how she had taken a suitcase full of her dead son’s clothes, and donated them to charity so they might be parceled out among Toronto’s poor. Of course she does not know where the clothes that have survived her son have ended up. Years back when she lived here, it was the tradition for ­well-­to-­do people to offer the clothes of their dead folks to a mosque. Now, in the harsh light of what she has just learned, she is aware that it ­won’t do to shrug it all off. She will have to think of how best and sanely to dispense with the garments to which she attaches fond ­memories—­her living, active son wearing them. She will wait for a few days before deciding what to do and among whom to distribute them, gratis, no doubt.

He says, “What do you say? Shall I take you to a ­who-­die stall to buy a veil?”

Cambara sidesteps his question, putting one to him herself. ­“Hadn’t you given up smoking many years before you left Toronto?” she asks.

“Yes, I did.”

“Then why have you gone back?”

“One vice leads to another,” he says with a smirk.

“How do you mean?”

“Qaat chewing is the first vice ­I’ve picked up coming here,” he says, waving his cigarette. “It passes the time.”

“What does? Smoking?”

“Qaat chewing helps me to bear the aloneness of my everyday life,” he says. “You see, Mogadiscio is a metropolis with none of the amenities of one. There is nothing to do here: no nightclubs, no places of entertainment, and no bars in which to drown your sorrows, as even the taverns are dry of liquor. Only restaurants.”

“No cinemas?”

“None to speak of.”

“No theaters?”

“None,” he says.

“What has become of the National Theatre?”

“The National Theatre is in the hands of a warlord whose militiamen have used the stage and props, as well as the desks, doors, ceiling boards, and every piece of timber, as firewood. The roof has collapsed, and everything ­else—­the cisterns, the sinks and the bathtubs in the washroom, not to speak of the iron gates, the ­computers—­all has been removed, vandalized, or sold off.”

“What if someone wants to put on a show?”

“It would be a hit, but it will never happen.”

“You mean because of the warlords who run the city?” she asks.

“Or the Islamic courts that will step in to stop it going ahead,” says Zaak.

“On what grounds?”

“On moral or theological grounds.”

“But you reckon ordinary folks will watch it?”

“I reckon they would,” he replies.

Cambara’s enthusiasm is unconcealed. “How do the armed youths entertain themselves when they have time on their ­gun-­free hands?”

Zaak replies, “They watch videocassettes of Hindi, Korean, Italian, or English movies.”

“Surely they are not schooled in these languages?”

“The movies are dubbed into Somali.”

“Dubbed? By whom?”

Chuffed, Zaak is clearly pleased that he has for once impressed Cambara with his knowledge about something of which she ­hasn’t an idea.

“There is a burgeoning dubbing industry in Mogadiscio,” he says. “There are also kung fu films, locally produced and entirely shot here.”

“Where are they shown?”

“In the buildings that once belonged to the collapsed state, which are now ­free-­for-­all, ­run-­down, and populated by the city’s squatters. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the city polytechnics, the secondary schools.”

“How are the films distributed?”

“The Zanzibaris, who have come fleeing from the fighting in their country,” Zaak informs her, “have cornered this side of the business. They have total control, Mafia-like.”

“Have you seen the dubbed movies yourself?”

“No, I ­haven’t.”

Maybe he has time only for qaat, she thinks, then she asks, “Do you know anyone who has?”

He shakes his head. “No.”

She needs to get in touch with Kiin, the manager of Maanta Hotel, who, according to Raxma, a close friend of Cambara’s back in Toronto, is well connected and might serve the salient purpose of Cambara’s accessing information about the videocassettes, and building local contacts, including the Women’s Network, which may help her with all sorts of matters.

Cambara will admit that she has made a faux pas arriving in Mogadiscio unprepared, with no addresses and no telephone numbers of anyone except Zaak and no personal contacts. Perhaps it is too late to think of ruing her impromptu decision to come. Granted, she mulled over the visit for a long period. No matter, she ­won’t engage Zaak in serious talk until she has been here for a while.

She has no idea what Zaak will think of it, but she cannot help imagining him being more sarcastic than her mother, who reacted with unprecedented bafflement when Cambara informed her of her imminent trip to the country. Asked why, Cambara, in a straight approach to the task informed by a touch of defiance, told her that she meant to reclaim the family property, wrest it from the hands of the warlord. Arda instantly fumed with fury, describing her daughter’s plan as a harebrained ruse. “This is plain insane,” Arda had observed. Then the two ­strong-­headed women battled it out, Cambara pointing out that those warlords are cowards and fools and that it ­won’t be difficult to be more clever than they so as to boot them out of the family property.

“This is downright suicidal,” Arda reiterated.

After arguing for days and nights, Arda consented to Cambara’s ­“­ill-­advised scheme” with a caveat: that they involve Raxma, who had wonderful contacts in Mogadiscio, and, while waiting for things to be put in motion, that Cambara should either wait in Toronto or go ahead and stay with Zaak. Being a schemer with no equal anywhere, Arda set to work clandestinely on setting up a safety net as protective of her daughter as it was capable of keeping her abreast of every one of the girl’s madcap schemes. Only then did Arda agree to “give her blessing for whatever it is worth for a plan as flawed as a suicide note.”

A battlewagon hurtling down the dirt road and coming straight at them startles Zaak, who grabs her right arm and pushes her off the footpath into the low shrubs. The vehicle is carrying a motley group of youths armed to their qaat-ruined teeth. Cambara picks herself up, dusts her caftan, and has barely sufficient time to stare at the backs of their heads before the battlewagon vanishes in the swirl of sand it has helped to raise.

“Are you okay? You are not hurt?” Zaak asks.

Cambara has already moved on. She asks, “Do the warlords themselves know why they continue the fighting?”

“I ­don’t follow you,” Zaak says.

“Are they and their clansmen economically better off than they were when the civil war erupted? And is their position more secure? Why ­don’t they stop destroying what ­they’ve illicitly gained?”

Zaak takes his time before answering the questions, but when he does, he adjusts the tone of his voice to that of someone quoting from someone else.

He says, “The warlords make as much sense as the idea of bald men fighting over the ownership of combs, knowing that they have no more use for it.”

“What manner of men are they, the warlords?”

“The scum of the earth.”

Hot with readiness to do battle with the notion of “dirt” in civil war parlance, Cambara relives with a sense of repulsion the memory of Zaak’s creative mess and downright filth in his living conditions. She is appalled to register how his tolerance level has grown since they shared a place, how he abides toilet floors wet with ­God-­knows-­what, bathtubs black as though smeared with the soot from the sweepings of a chimney, a kitchen crawling with cockroaches and other bugs, bedsheets brown with repeated use. Maybe the civil war has something to do with Zaak’s lowering the measure of his endurance. Maybe she ­hasn’t the right to claim to have known him intimately when she was assisting him in his application to gain his ­landed-­immigrant status in Canada. Even when he first got there, Zaak had unclean ways, above all the uncouth habit of wetting the toilet seat, which made flat-sharing a daily embarrassment. And rather than endure or put up with it, she will have to find an alternative accommodation.

She ­won’t ever forget the shock at meeting him at the airport, when she detected cynicism and hostility both in the expressions on his face and in the remarks he made, as he hauled her half a dozen pieces of luggage to the ­four-­wheel drive. Soon.

“Have you brought a department store?” he said.

Not rising to his comment, she said, “You know what I am like.”

“I know what women are like,” he chided her.

In a fit of pique, she almost asked him to take her to a ­hotel—­and to hell with what her mother might say. She has come with enough cash and can afford to take a room in one of the best hotels for the duration of her stay, however long that might be. But again, she will only do it under her own terms; she won’t be pushed into making hasty, regrettable decisions. Her impatience tested, he knows what she is capable of and how often she takes umbrage at men and allows her anger to act as though it is independent of her.

As soon as they got to his place and he showed her to her room and pointed to the adjoining toilet and bathroom that were to be all hers, Cambara’s entire body suddenly went slack, and, in an instant, she was visibly suppressing a yawn, and he was offering to leave her alone for her to shower and settle in and, if she could, sleep off her jet lag. He explained that he had an urgent meeting about a conflict between two warring militias from the same subclan, a ­frequent-­enough occurrence. But he would come back and take her along on her first expedition to the ­open-­air market, where he would buy his daily ration of qaat. Then she heard the sound of his steps going down the staircase, a door opening and slamming; she decided to take a nap without changing into a nightgown. She remembers ceaseless noises near enough to lead her to believe that he was hanging outside her ­room—­so close that she imagined sensing his nervous breathing.

Then she remembers him snottily shouting, “Wakey, wakey, rise and shine,” when in her drowsy reckoning she ­couldn’t have been asleep for more than five minutes.

Maybe she ought to have slept on, sparing herself a long walk to the ­open-­air market so that Zaak could feed his craving for qaat. She is so exhausted that she finds it difficult to keep her eyes open, so overwhelmed by accumulated fatigue that her head feels as heavy as a wet mattress, her tongue as lifeless as the faulty stitching of a quilt. She curses under her breath in Québéçois French, knowing he ­wouldn’t understand a word of it.

New, all of a sudden, she awakens to a mélange of fragrances emanating from ancient spices; she is in front of a spice stall at the ­open-­air market where a woman who trades in them is offering to sell her a selection. Other potent scents from a jamboree of mints almost knock her sideways, they are so powerful. Not far from where she is standing as if jinxed, another woman is beckoning to her. The second woman is encouraging Cambara to buy from her spread of edible plants and roots.

­“I’ve brought no money,” Cambara says apologetically to the woman, who is offering her fresh cinnamon sticks, cumin seeds, roots of ginger, and cloves of garlic.

The woman is very pushy, and Cambara is more irritated with herself for not bringing some cash. A dollar would make a big difference to any of these women. As Cambara walks a couple of steps away from the stall, feeling foolish, the woman follows her and says, “Take everything that is on the mat for a dollar. This is a bargain.”

How has this woman worked out that Cambara is from ­elsewhere—­a dollar country? Amazing.

Finally the woman says, “And since you ­haven’t brought any money today, why ­don’t you take these and bring the money tomorrow?”

But Cambara ­won’t hear of it; she hates the thought of being in debt to anyone, no matter how small the sum. In fact she says it in so many words and as plainly as she can, but the woman ­won’t let her be.

“How can it be that you ­haven’t any money?” the woman challenges. “Tell me where you are from, so I know. Are you from Amriika? Igland? Swiidan? Filland? Put your hand in that pocket of yours and bring out the dollar. Please do not waste my time.”

Cambara finds herself automatically putting her hand in the deep pocket as the woman has instructed, and her fingers meet the knife. She brings out her empty hand and rubs it against the other hand. She says, “I have no money today. Not a cent.”

­“I’ll take what is in that pocket in exchange for my entire spread,” the woman says.

When Cambara reiterates that she has no money in her pocket, the woman’s look forthrightly questions her statement, and the two of them stare into each other’s eyes. The woman says, “Take the entire spread of spices and vegetables in exchange for the single item that is in the pocket out of which ­you’ve brought your hand.”

Cambara searches in vain for Zaak, whom she cannot locate. Curiously, however, she ­doesn’t feel abandoned or threatened. It is because she is among women. She enjoys seeing so many women trading in local produce and wearing colorful guntiino robes, the traditional attire, and the fact that they are dominating an entire section of the marketplace. Many are past their prime and ­don’t seem bothered about their exposed breasts; they strike Cambara as easygoing both in the way they carry their bodies and in their attitude toward one another.

She shakes herself loose from the vegetable seller and goes deeper and deeper into the ­mud-­choked portion of the marketplace, pressing on, with one part of her conscious mind hoping to locate Zaak and the other busy working out what she might do if she ­can’t find him. Then she sees a child sitting on a straw mat next to an older woman, presumably her mother. Cambara is grief stricken as an image calls on her. Careworn, drowned in the suddenness of a renewed distress related to her recent loss, she relaxes a little when she identifies the gender of the ­child—­a girl. Next to the girl and sitting in a ­self-­contained way, the woman has a spread of tomatoes, a pile of onions, and some ­emaciated-­looking and nearly dry potatoes.

Zaak is back. He is saying, “Touché.”

Cambara pays him no heed. She stares at the girl until she cottons on to the little one’s tender adult movements. The girl’s expression reminds her of Dalmar, her son, whom she misses terribly and whom she has begun to see in every child of either sex or any age. That’s not all; the small girl has only one leg, her second leg having been replaced with a wooden one, crudely constructed out of grainy wood. Further­more, as Cambara’s fragmented memories gather themselves around the girl’s grainy wooden leg, she sees Dalmar, who had a keen interest in constructing puppets. The little girl’s sweet smile, coquettishly flung in her direction the way an older woman might dart one at a man, takes Cambara back to Dalmar’s last day on this earth, as he got into the backseat of his father’s car, sweetly making ­smile-­throwing gestures toward her and waving. Such a sweet smile in a girl so young and knowing, formulated in the carefree attitude of one who has suffered hugely at such an impressionable age. The girl is holding in her arms a modestly dressed ­corn-­husk doll, which she is gently rocking to sleep.

Cambara makes herself look into the eyes of the little girl as into the mirrored sorrow of her loss. She feels that, despite everything, the girl has about her a sense of comfort, of being a child and a mother at the same time, and of grimacing at the discomfiture of what it is to be so young and drawn. Cambara stoops over the little girl and then crouches down pretty close to her.

“What’s your beautiful name, sweet little love?” Cambara asks.

She stares into the girl’s big dark eyes as she might look into the unfathomable black hole with which she has become intimate since her son’s death.

Even though the girl says her name several times, Cambara fails to disentangle the girl’s guttural consonants from her mute vowels. Then she looks from the little girl to the woman and then at the surrounding chaos, and back finally to the little girl, who is singing to her ­corn-­husk doll a lullaby about a mother who has been raped, a father killed, an uncle dispossessed of his property, and a sister gone and never heard from again.

“How old are you, sweet little love?”

“I ­don’t know.”

Cambara remains in her clumsy crouch, her every bone creaking, her every joint aching, and her thighs enflamed with pain. She can tell that Zaak is close by, ­chain-­smoking and unwrapping the bundle of qaat and helping himself to its shiny, leathery leaves upon which he chews meditatively, like a cow attending to its cud. His eyes redden, and his right cheek bulges gradually, chipmunklike.

She says to Zaak, “Can I borrow some money?”

“How much do you need?”

“A couple of dollars’ worth in shillings.”

He says, “I have less than a dollar.”

Her stomach turns at the disturbing thought that he has bought qaat and paid money sufficient for several families to live on for a week. How wasteful! She ­can’t bear the thought of receiving the money from him herself, she is so disgusted.

She says, “Please give them the money.”

And she extends both her hands to receive the plastic bag into which the woman has stuffed the produce that Zaak has paid for.

They walk back to the house, Cambara furious with herself all the while for having accepted her mother’s condition that she stay with him. As they tread along, he stops every now and then to select juicy young shoots of his precious qaat and consumes them hungrily.

She looks away, in revulsion.