Secrets: a Novel, page 13
Nonno said, “I won’t pontificate on the Prophet’s rhetoric as to the definition of Allah, but will confine myself to the morale if there is any in the storia whose wisdom lies in the simple idea that nothing is unknowable so long as another human has knowledge of it. It is my guess that, on a pedestrian level, the folktale’s purport is that when a secret is known to two humans, such a secret will be known before the death of both parties.”
I felt a storm gathering in Nonno’s head. I sensed the violent turbulence from the tremble in his voice, his eyes going far beyond what was visible to me, his nose twitchy as though he were smelling high winds from afar. Would he explode or implode? Would his death cause the earth to reverberate with a seismic instance of total shock? My memory of last night’s dream called on me again. I couldn’t help remembering the gentle breeze with which it all began, followed by the dreamer’s sighting of a heap of elephant bones. I remembered how a lone locust revealed itself, very tiny, sad in its aloneness, until it was joined by more and more insects, a skyful of locusts, a view which overwhelmed the central consciousness of both the tale and its teller. The dream ended before I had heard the rank roar of a beast in vengeful fury, a nabsi catching up with the perpetrator of a massacre, a nuuro coming in aid of a weaker mammal.
But now a less ferocious storm was brewing in Nonno’s pupils. These appeared dimmed in one corner and very bright in another, with a lightning coming on and then going off at regular intervals. He blinked his eyes, and I felt a chill deep in my viscera. I had the impression that the signs were not good. The cold in my belly was getting to my head, my thoughts frozen in a winter of incomprehension. The marrow circulating in my bones went icy suddenly. The air had a moistness to it, like a breeze bringing in rain from beyond a mountain.
He said, “Most societies have myths in which a nonhuman gives birth to their ancestors. There is a plethora of further possibilities, of an egg containing the cosmos in embryo, of humanity beginning at a specifically named date, of bulls’ horns keeping the world in perfect balance, you know the lot. But in most myths, one has a part-human ancestry. It follows naturally that those who are capable of regaining their animal self and merging it with their human self are deemed more powerful. They are worthy of our envy, not our disdain.”
I wished to defend myself. I wished to remind him that I had often envied Sholoongo the power of altering her nature, if that was what she did, exchanging her humanness for an animal one. What’s more, I had not been wicked to Sholoongo. I had been civil. The fact is, though, that a pain which avoided definition was gaining a foothold in my body. I had no inkling where the pain originated or what it might be. I kept quiet.
Comforted by the parenthesis of quiet, I excused myself.
Chapter Five
Kalaman my grandson was in finger-deep trouble!
I returned home with a hint of daylight still aglow and found Kalaman on the porch. He was hugging a shortwave radio to himself, listening to the news. His face loosened itself into a charmful grin when our eyes met, his features spreading into a buttery smile. There were traces of dried sweat marking the boundaries of his chin. My grandson had a forehead smooth like the inside of a seashell. I made a waving gesture as he rose to welcome me, and suggested that he wait. Because my irrational fear of snakes overwhelms me when I think they might be about, I lifted my feet off the ground with extra caution, lest I step on one. This aversion is so bizarre it used to be compared to that of an African who admits to being frightened of insects. But there you are!
A silk shawl was draped over my left shoulder. Since the occasion of Fidow’s funeral demanded it, I was in formal attire, including a crocheted conical hat which Zariba, my housekeeper, had presented me with to mark my seventh threshold. I also had on my favorite Egyptian jellaba, of the finest silk, this a gift from Kalaman. My feet boasted the loveliest pair of thonged sandals, a most handsome affair, designed by Yaqut, who made them himself with his own filial hands to celebrate my eightieth birthday. They had a special place in my wardrobe and heart, considering they were the only pair he had ever made from start to finish. That Yaqut is not born the son of a shoemaker is a fact I needn’t stress. But I hope this point is taken in the manner I am presenting it, Somali clan rivalry and lineage obsessions of begats being what they are. It would upset me terribly if a clannish snob were to behave loutishly toward him and treat him with haughty contempt.
I stand over six and a half feet. I am large-boned for a Somali and heavily built. One of my tenants, an African-American, used to point out that there was too much of me to take at a gulp. One chokes, she explained. I knew what she meant.
Although I may not be of noble blood, whatever that means, I am of a noble age, a man who has lived for a mountain of years. I am using “mountain” to pay homage to Kathy, my African-American tenant and, for a time, my lover and a Catholic at that. She would pray that I might live, as she put it, for an Everest of years. In a roundabout sort of way, I am asking if somebody of my age nobility, my description and disposition, has an identity outside the perimeters of the one which other persons have invented, each constructed identity having a value, the mintage of a made-up currency. To Kalaman, for instance, I am a place, a vase capable of receiving the affections with which he fills it. To Yaqut, I am the threshold of an imagined hurdle of selfappraisal, an offspring’s tread traversing the face of a huge mountain, a most risky undertaking, especially when there is no foothold. To Kalaman’s mother, I am a serpent of the aquatic variety, dark as the mysteries it guards. To Kathy, I am membered, my sinusoidal body a precious stone, color ochre. To Fidow, I might have been a crow, uttering an unheeded prophetic cry. In short, I am many in one, and I am other too.
Ever since learning of Sholoongo’s presence in the land, and more especially after Fidow’s death, I’ve thought of Kalaman as my legatee, for reasons that are to do with my imminently awaited death. Anyway, he and I hugged.
“He who messes with elephants by massacring half the members of their immediate clan is bound to dwell within the radius of an owl’s cry from death,” I said. “How I wish Fidow had paid heed to my counsel not to accept the commission to poach elephants. How I wish he was not tempted by the fat fee in Hong Kong dollars. Now he is no more, and no ivory either. The Kenyan middlemen who hired him are at a loss, so are the Chinese dealers in tusks. And we are mourning a friend.”
Kalaman struck me as being anxious about something, I could not tell what. It was unlike him to speak in terrible haste and loudly for my comfort (a man of my noble age is touchy when others assume he is hard of hearing, or losing total power over his bodily functions). Why speak fast, as if he had paid for a three-minute transatlantic telephone call with a cash deposit in advance? Or had he meant to say his say with speed, fitting all he could into the already paid-for time, and then quit, vamoose? I recall how conscious I was of the embrace which came after the oration, as we hugged.
We often teased each other, he and I, about our respective sizes. I loom large. He is small. A pygmy to my Dinka stature. We sat down, and got to talking about his parents. Even though there was no call for it, he made several oblique references to death. Somehow he worked Sholoongo into our talk. He alluded to scorpions hiding under rocks, to dreams weighed down with elephant corpses. I spoke with sadness about my fraught mental state: how the door to the vestibule might open shortly, and then finito, before my ninth threshold, bringing to an abrupt termination my Kilimanjaro ascent of annuaries! It was no secret that I read the obituary pages first in newspapers and the front page last. Curiously, I’d begun to observe that the pages giving death notices, in dying autocratic states like Somalia, expressed a more popular form of newspaper reporting, far better than the first pages, which invariably concentrated on the despot’s or his deputies’ misleading doings.
Ever present in our thoughts and preoccupations, the odor of death overwhelmed us. I wish I had a way of linking the pungent smell to the country’s slow march towards collapse. Item: the bombings of cities, like Hargeisa, which was razed to the ground, its residents massacred, their corpses lying unburied where they fell, the survivors reduced to refugees. Item: Mogadiscio’s current daily civilian casualties, their bodies hacked to death with machetes. Item: the environment. Item: Fidow and his trampled-on body. Deaths everywhere I looked. Corpses bearing the name of a clan. No one innocent. No one of us. If I avoided mentioning Sholoongo’s name, it was because I feared it might upset Kalaman, who, while welcoming me to my own home, had the appearance of a man who had put his major personal problems on a back burner. Not that I was certain how we might broach the matter of Sholoongo when we finally did.
The late afternoon held sufficient brightness for my eagle eyes to notice that Kalaman had been to a dentist. As I prepared myself to light a cigarette, I remarked how, with the residual tobacco stains removed, Kalaman’s teeth looked TV-commercial clean. My hand, in a purposeful detour, tapped gently on my shirt pocket to ascertain that I had enough smokes to last me until the morning, a near-full packet. This prompted my grandson to provide me with an ashtray, and I indulged my smoker’s appetite in quiet as I dragged on my fag, a present from the Nairobi Airport Duty Free Shop bought by no other than Kalaman. “If you must smoke, you must,” he would say, and present me with lighters and the nicotine in its pleasantest form, in addition to packets of the rough-hewn tobacco of a Gauloise and the Italian Nazionale, and throw in something of a Turkish blend, unadulterated wonders of smoke, so I would burn in my own heaven!
Restless, Kalaman pushed around the chairs and turned off the radio, which he put next to a ceramic plate full of fried cassava and a vinegar-and-salt dip. I ate a charred slice of cassava and took a mouthful of water to gulp it down. I asked him if he would be spending the night here, or did I question Zariba? I can’t be certain.
Again I can’t be certain if it was then that Kalaman repeated his conversation with Timir the day before. One or the other of them speculated that “death stipulated dreamlessness, the tragic acceptance of a great loss. Those whom you love, when dead, will no longer figure in your dreams.” Perhaps I am not quoting correctly. Even so, I sensed that he appeared bothered as he revisited his and Timir’s respective positions. When next he fell silent, he wouldn’t speak for a long time, as if his tongue had been turned into a tangle of thorns. Possibly the idea of Sholoongo living and figuring in his mother’s dreams was at last getting to him; or maybe Fidow’s death had begun to sink in just then. He looked his years, a youth caught in the trappings of his age.
Before his teens, Kalaman had the habit of carrying a conch shell with him wherever he went, a conch shell to which he spoke in an invented language of sorts. Holding the conch shell close to him, he would ask a question, then put it near his ears, as if listening to an answer. He insisted that, this way, he received secret whispers from a distant surf, and that he was in touch with the beyond. Infatuated with Sholoongo, who had built her house of stone inside him, he pleaded that I feel his stomach to confirm that he was irredeemably pregnant with “the baby of his affection.” I thought, frankly, that he had given us the best description yet of a child’s infatuation.
When not awaiting private communications from the conch shell, or whispering received secrets to his manikin, Kalaman spent the greater part of the day with Xusna in my woods, now and then attaching himself to one of the farmhands, and now and then joyfully serving as apprentice to Fidow, then a crocodile hunter and my general factotum. A child of obsessions, Kalaman fell asleep with the conch shell in one hand, a palm-filling talisman in the other, and Xusna either beside him or embracing him.
Our conversation that late afternoon straddled several subjects. For one thing I meant us to have a good reunion. For another, I felt that there was no benefit to be had from speculating either about scorpions or Sholoongo’s intentions or whether it was wise to censure her for Fidow’s death. The man had been an obstinate fool, and fools die wasted deaths. But because many things were coming to a head, what with the ruin being visited on the nation as we spoke, I put my effort into finding a safe haven in abstractions. Hence I touched on the notions of nuuro and nabsi. I cannot for the life of me remember by what circuitous route we got to the abstractions.
Kalaman gave me in a parenthesis a rundown of his news so far, because I wanted him to. When he finished, I detected a sense of regret. I felt that the grieving had to do not only with a capitulation — appeasing Sholoongo by granting her what she had come for — but also with a loss, Talaado. Once infatuated with Sholoongo, he had long outgrown, her and was currently in love with Talaado. It was most unfortunate that Talaado showed up at his apartment unexpectedly, and in tears. The beast of the mystery was: how did Sholoongo gain entry into his apartment? And how did she manage to insinuate herself, demon that she was, into Kalaman’s mother’s nightmares a couple of days before turning up at her shop? I put down much of these happenings to a simple coincidence.
Ridden with uncertainties (his mother pushing him one way, Talaado and Sholoongo pulling him in different directions to their respective bosoms, the one small and neat, the other complicatedly cluttered with multiple contradictions), Kalaman decided not to postpone his ten-day trip to Nairobi with Talaado. After so many years, the prophetic significance of throwaway phrases as in fathers matter not, mothers matter a lot was getting to him. He was confronted with no easy matters, and was having to reexamine his beginnings. You cannot help entertaining your past as you entertain an unwelcome guest, when you cannot think of a pleasant association with which to celebrate the present. You cannot help wanting to construct the solidity of a future with the female companion of your choice, when the world, in the form of a haunting past, is collapsing around your ears. Before rounding it all off, Kalaman alluded to yet another circle of boomerang cycles: all in the construct, mystical concept of nabsi. I might have been wrong, but I was under the impression that he was holding back from me a secret, he was not telling all. But what was he withholding from me, and why?
The scene changed. So did our moods.
Kalaman’s eyes lit with the candles of memory.
He asked, “Who was the riffraff who accused my father of stealing his shoes from a mosque?”
I attempted to dampen his enthusiasm for this sort of talk with a dismissive face-drying gesture, in the attitude of a devotee whispering secret salvos to Allah. But he wouldn’t be discouraged. Shaking my head in sorrowful remembrance, I said, “You do not have to worry yourself, or to recall the incident, because I am certain that it has no bearing whatsoever on the present crisis.” He was not impressed. Then I chose to be economical with what little I knew, which I shared with him, seemingly out of the generosity of my spirit. He listened most attentively. He might have been a computer saving an item in its memory, to which it gave its own directory heading.
“Things look more complex than they seem when you study patterns,” I said, taking refuge in abstractions, “of a bird’s cycle of migration and return, of the moon’s phases and how they affect human relationships. If Sholoongo and you had never made a pledge of mutual trust by cutting open each other’s forefingers and touching the blood of each to the other’s, if —” Here I paused, to ask, “Just out of curiosity, what curses did the two of you invoke, when making your pledges to each other?”
He was ill at ease. He shifted in his chair. “Touching the tips of our bleeding fingers together,” he said, “Sholoongo and I spoke the words of the oath, she leading, I repeating: ‘May death rock the fundament of our earth, if either of us breaks this vow.’”
“The fundament of the earth?”
He nodded his head.
I discerned a distillation of an abstraction from the text of the oath, my apprehension taking me to a different plane. I couldn’t help remembering how both the elephant and I were referred to, in our particular ways, as “fundaments.” I thought about the prophetic qualities of the vow, how the two young people had set a history in motion, in canny prediction not only of what might happen to them but of what might happen to the nation in its hour of imminent dissolution. It also meant that I could no longer dismiss this heavy-handed reference to my own death, I who had been described as a fundament by no less than Kalaman, fundament in the sense of being “grounded.”
“After Fidow, who?” I said.
He rejoined, “Not who, but what?”
The fact that in his calculations Sholoongo had a hand in Fidow’s death was not lost on me. I had to reinterpret his “Not who, but what?” in an altogether different light. It was as if he was pointing to “the collapse of history,” which was, in and of itself, more important than the catalysts deemed to have set it off.
I frame a scene in front of me, then listen to the gentle slapping of the river a few hundred meters away.
The scene is one in which Kalaman is bathing in the sweet memory of a dream, naked, in Sholoongo’s company. Out of the alluvial land, a muddied figure emerges. The figure has found a treasure in the deposited wash on the riverbank. Then, at the “Sesame” command, a door is pushed open to reveal another treasure trove of remembrances. I see a seventeen-year-old once-upon-a-time ambitious scholar from the environs of the northern city of Berbera. The youth is fleeing the scene of death. Dressed in near rags, he is heading south in flight. The youth will overhaul his identity, he will adopt a made-up name in the new environment, in order to break with his past totally. He will find a low-paid menial job, denying that he has ever trained as a scholar. He will marry a woman from the southern River People. This will help him bury his past in the tomb of oblivion.
“Could you get it up?” I asked him.
My words were lost on him.
I rephrased my question. I said, “Could you, Kalaman, get up sufficient enthusiasm to absolve yourself of your and Sholoongo’s pledge? Might you not produce a sliver of sperm, bang, bang, zoom, and then basta?”
