Secrets: a Novel, page 18
“If by women you’re referring to Sholoongo and yourself,” I said, “perhaps I should remind you that murder, when committed, will become our business, both women and men. We cannot blind ourselves to the commission of murder, since we won’t be able to walk away from it.”
“Where is she, anyway?”
My mother was hoping to draw me into a quagmire. I brought her back to a drier place, saying, “Sholoongo is not hiding anywhere on Nonno’s estate.”
“I wouldn’t know how to believe him if he told me she was not.”
“How do you mean?” I said.
“Because it is as if every single undertaking of Nonno’s is a celebration of secrecy. The man has a penchant for secret-nurturing, secret-feeding, and secret-finding. He is not at all embarrassed to search for secrets among the Kleenexes in a woman’s handbag. He must be proud of you. For in keeping with Nonno’s tradition you never fail to discover a hiding place in any opening anywhere, teasing secrets out of trunks, a cupboard, from behind a tree, eavesdropping, overhearing people’s talk.”
“I do no such thing,” I said weakly. “Nor does Nonno.”
“He is your mentor, you his prize pupil and grandson.”
I made no comment.
“His late wife knew of this,” my mother went on, “and so does Zariba. Kathy, his American lover, spoke of it too. In a lot of ways, he shares a kinship with Sholoongo. Maybe this is why he sympathizes with her — because, like her, he too has gone to the precipice of death and come back. He too slept in death’s thorny bed before he fled south. Now he lives in the horror of death catching up with him. They say he lives longer who harbors a secret wish to die. He will be eighty-four next year. From the look of it, he will survive us all, to bury us all, Sholoongo in collusion with him.”
“Please!” I said.
Her face was crisscrossed with wrinkles. The stresses on her face were as prominent as the stretch marks on an old body. “After Sholoongo picked the lock of my jewelry box to lift a document of mine,” my mother volunteered, “she came here. It was here that she hid for a day and a night.”
Was my mother referring to the so-called letter Sholoongo left behind, secretly, in Rhino’s belly? I was glad that Nonno remembered the incident so many years after it had happened. But would he be able to lay his hands on the document?
My mother said, “I’ve never spoken ill of Nonno. Nor do I wish to do so now. However, my skin is covered with goose pimples at the remembrance of a great many bizarre activities involving him. Some of these were so weird I could swear that he dabbles in magic, or that he is a man with life-and-death secrets to protect. Like Sholoongo.”
The morning sun made good its promise. Ebullient in its youthful brightness, it was also hot as the temper of the young. The brightness formed the frontiers of the sun’s reach, a half circle of shades stretching farther into the areas it had not touched, like the fingers of a hand, into the enclosure of yet another darker shape. The shapes put me in mind of a crescent, the wings of a hawk-eagle poised in its determination to descend in furious attack on its prey. No sooner had I revised my reading of the shadow’s meaning than I heard my mother’s voice, wet as cheeks soaked in tears.
“Love is cruel,” she said.
“Irrational hate is more cruel,” I said.
“Love wrings my heart dry of blood.”
Love, I thought, is a mother armed. But I did not say it.
She said, “A sudden rush of blood renders me deaf at the memory of the humiliations which Sholoongo made you go through. I think of broad-daylight murder when I remember how she made you do what she made you do.”
I got up. I went to take hold of my mother’s handbag, which I opened. I pulled out the ancient firearm. But then I thought not of what the firearm might do, but of its beauty. I felt it with my fingers, unable to imagine that such a handsome thing could cause death. Would my mother use it to kill? I was not sure.
Nonetheless the firearm was creating much acrimony between us without her even pulling its trigger. Should I tell my mother that I knew a lot more about her than she credited me with, after having spoken to my father and Nonno? Earlier, I now suspected, Nonno had shaken her as if she were a fruit tree not yielding a fig of a manna. The poor thing was recovering from the shock of being shaken. I put the weapon back in her handbag, and set it down close to her.
She was in a folktale-telling mood. “There is a tale in which a fly catches sight of a beehive in an orchard. The fly offers half of his property for the right to dip his wings in the sweetness. They strike a deal which gives half of the fly’s property to the queen bee, and which allows the fly to stay as long as he pleases in the honey. Eventually the fly tires of being in the honey, and wants out. A baby bee nearby asks what the fly will give, if helped. The fly lists many benefits. The baby bee is unimpressed. Finally the fly offers to escort her to a valley where honeyguides die by the million. ‘Now you’re talking,’ the bee beams with delight. She helps him to get unstuck. The fly takes off, leaving behind him nothing but the ugly buzzing noise of an unfulfilled pledge in the baby bee’s ears.”
As if on cue, Zariba brought us tea and left.
I with a surprising suddenness thought how powerful my once-upon-a-time calf-love Sholoongo was, making us take each other on, making us tear into one another’s viscera, impervious to the damage we were doing to ourselves. If she had power, I imagined this to be not animal power but the power of her personality. And if she were able to metamorphose into anything, she was in a position to do so only because we, my mother and I, were avowedly weaker than she. Not Nonno. Nor my father. Both were strong in the conviction of who they were, both agreeably more generous to her than either my mother or I. However, there was much sadness all around, my mother speaking with the slowness of an unseeing person negotiating blind bends, my mother who was known to cover a great deal of ground with her fast talk.
“Nothing makes sense anymore,” I ventured.
“What doesn’t make sense?” she asked.
“I cannot seem to follow the meaning of your folktales,” I said, “nor do I see the relevance of my dreams, mysteries, secrets threaded into a weftage serving as a veil. Meanwhile you and Sholoongo trade insults, you and my father trade hush-hush confidences, you and Nonno exchange innuendoes. Now, is there any man, other than my father, who played in your life before I was born?”
This was a small matter for my mother. “None.”
Then I remembered Nonno mentioning a man known by his alias Gacme-xume. And so I asked, “What’s his real name?”
Even though she was clearly shaken, she wouldn’t say anything. In fact she turned her back to me to make certain I didn’t see her face.
“I shall make a point of asking my father.”
Not a sound out of her.
“Let’s try this. What document did Sholoongo steal?”
Her voice level, “It was my marriage certificate.”
“Why?”
“You ask her yourself.”
“Why bring it here? Why hide here for a day or two?”
“You’ll have to put the question to her.”
“Did she give it to Nonno, do you think, for safekeeping?”
“You ask her yourself.”
My brain was a wire burning at one end. There was also an explosive mechanism attached to the other end. I didn’t know when we might all blow up in the air. I asked, “Were you planning to divorce my father?”
“Of course not.”
“Were you betrothed to another man, as his lawful wife?”
“What nonsense is this?”
“Why didn’t you get a duplicate copy from the municipality, no sweat, if you were not planning to divorce my father and were not secretly betrothed to another man? What was the fuss?”
“You won’t understand,” she said.
“You wanted the original back?” I asked.
She didn’t say anything.
“You wanted to punish her?”
“I doubt that you will ever understand.”
“Why kill her now?”
She stayed motionless, not speaking.
“Why, Mother? Why?”
Shifty, the fingers of her hands laced together into a wringing posture. I took an absentminded sip of my tea, my gaze falling on the skim of weak milk floating on it. Undrunk, the stuff presently resembled a paranoiac’s idea of a witch’s distillation of prophylactic cures.
I said, “Do you know what it was like for me to come into a room where you and my father were, and to find you falling silent the moment I entered? Or changing the subject of your conversation? Do you know what it was like? The thought did cross my mind more than once that maybe you didn’t want to have me. Or you were hiding something from me — maybe that I was an adopted child, and you wished me not to know that.”
Her voice hard, “What a very cruel thing to say to me!”
“Starving a child of knowing the loving side of its parents is more cruel,” I said. “You feed the child on self-mistrust. Paranoia eats into the heart of the unliked. In the end, such a child will imagine all kinds of untruths. Distrustful of humans, I sought the company of pets. When not with Nonno, who was more open with me than either of you, I ran errands for Fidow. Unloved, I fed on unhealthy diets of self-hate, when I came in and you fell silent.”
My mother buried her head in her cupped hands, sobbing. I sat down beside her, but hadn’t the courage to touch her. There was a spot of sunny brightness in a mandala of a solar circle and, surrounding it, a number of lighter shades with their own life-energies. She raised her head. We rearranged our bodies so as to embrace.
She must have held back a flood of tears, for her words, not her cheeks, were dripping with emotion. “We have done everything we have done out of love.”
“Crying, loving, hating are all as natural as a mother loving her son to self-ruin.” Now I kissed away her tears, tasting a touch of kohl. “Nonetheless I do not consider your attitude to have its origin in a healthy maternal sentiment. Not all the time. Open your mind and your heart to me, Mother. I am your one and only son.”
She took my hands in hers, and kissed them. Then she stared at a dark smudge on the ball of my thumb, which I withdrew when I saw the worry on her face. I rubbed the kohl stains from her soaked cheeks, and eventually from my lips. I said, “The kettle-plain question, Mother, is why so much ugliness? Is it because true knowledge is gained through a kind of death? Or because true self-definition is attained through a total overhaul of one’s identity? Name changing, a child outgrowing its parents, the maturing of something altogether new out of the old: where am I in all this?”
She might have said something if Nonno had not joined us. Then the three of us chatted amicably, making it a point to mention Fidow’s name in our conversation. It was late morning when she left. But before doing so, she said, “We love you, your father and I.”
My mind strayed soon after her departure. I took off skywards in the company of a crow which flew low. The crow kept the world in his sharp carrion-eater’s vision, and the cosmos in the clutch of his claws.
It was high noon now. In the dining room, the residues of my mother’s perfume mixed awkwardly and well with Nonno’s smoke.
My imagination kept wanting to wander off. I would smell the whiff of gunpowder and would hear a shot. A day later, I would come upon the rotten stench of a corpse, Sholoongo’s, lying in my room, unburied. I was sad to be conjuring up all manner of aberrations clad in tawdry anomalies, the produce of my fevered mind. The presence of firearms complicated matters. If there is beauty in death, there is beastliness in murdering the innocent. Many a person may see beauty in an elephant taking revenge on Fidow, whose unappeased ghost, now unchained, was bound to haunt our memories.
I was too strung up to sit still. I was so tense I could not bear the thought of standing either. I paced back and forth, regretting that I hadn’t buried my head in the ostrich sand of parental confidence. What you don’t know cannot harm you. Now, because I’d spoken, everyone’s image seemed to suffer a dent. Was I being insensitive, merely distributing blame among my seniors? Had I laid censure at my parents’ doors without knowing the full extent of what happened?
And there was the matter of Hanu, too. He sat not very far from where Nonno and I were, quiet as an eavesdropper, full of I-told-you-so posturing. It was as if he were sharing his simian secrets with us. Then we heard the soft whistle of a bird wading in the shallows of the river, and I saw Hanu’s eyes sporting a sparkle of excitement in his startled stare. He sat up. Our curious eyes followed his
We had a mysterious visitor. A blackhead plover was now perched on the edge of the dining table. This enthralled Hanu, who made us ask ourselves questions as we listened to the bird’s shrill whistle, as indistinct as the first utterance of a baby. Our newly arrived guest had strolled in, its crest reminding me of a hairstyle popular in the heyday of my infatuation with Sholoongo. The blackhead plover’s red-eyed contemplative look had a sobering effect on the three of us, above all Hanu. He got up and left the room, tiptoeing out. He was as considerate as a parent going out of the room in which an ailing child has fallen asleep. Hanu meant to abandon center stage to the blackhead plover. I thought, how magnanimous.
We sat, the three of us, my grandfather, the xidinxiito plover, and I, in a suspicious silence, as if a new relationship were being forged between a species belonging to the unspeaking world and two inarticulate humans. I spoke my thought aloud: “But what on earth has made Hanu leave?”
“Maybe we should offer our guest a drink,” Nonno said, half in earnest. The blackhead plover appeared as intimidated as a human finding himself in a place where the language was alien.
I said, “Shall we offer a lemonade, sugared?”
“Shall we?”
“Shall we pour it into a glass?”
But neither moved.
Nonno wondered, “Does the idea of a blackhead plover paying us a visit out of the mysterious nowhere disturb you in any way, Kalaman?”
“Why should it,” I said, “when a stray cat walking in on me in my apartment does not?”
“Our visitor is no domesticated Hanu,” Nonno reasoned, “a Hanu whom we pamper with a personal name and our affection. This xidinxiito plover is a freeborn, freethinking bird. Now what makes you think that he will receive our sugared indulgence in a jar, as served?”
My curiosity was aroused by a thread which had been tied to the bird’s shank. Dangling from the shank was a tiny piece of paper, neatly folded up, very similar in shape to chits on which Koranic inscriptions, to form part of an amulet’s charm, are written. Was the plover a message-carrying bird in our dining room? Contrary to Nonno’s view, the bird was no free agent, roaming the winds at will and storming the desert’s whirlwinds. Unless we freed him from the thread of his enslavement, he would remain in bondage.
Nonno’s voice had in it a touch of humidity, which affected his delivery, making his words emerge curled up like the pages a fax machine spits out. “Somalis in their mythology,” he said, “speak of the xidinxiito plover as having once been a member of the society of prey birds. One night, however, while the plovers slept, the other carnivorous birds devoured all the available provisions. Their king called a council meeting, at which the plovers debated whether to continue forming part of the society of prey birds or not. All those present pledged on oath never to fly with the other birds and never ever to eat flesh. To distinguish themselves from other prey birds, they elected not to abstain from eating during the hours of darkness. When they see anything in the dark, they repeat the oath. In chorus, they confirm that they are still bound by the not-meat-eating pledge. They keep a watchful night, lest they be cheated out of their share. A large number of them nowadays are purblind during daytime, but they rise from under a traveler’s feet, crying loud the damnation Gaalow! We consider the xidinxiito to be an ill-omened bird.”
I looked at the plover in curious awe, noting to myself that his shank folded away like a turtle’s neck. It was as if it were disappearing in cautious self-preservation.
Somewhere in the kitchen the fridge shook. A grin of vaudeville richness crowned Nonno’s features. Was a pleasant memory calling on him, in spite of the presence of the ill-omened bird?
Zariba came, carrying a tray. Bizarrely, she brought us three slices of avocado. For whom was the third cut of the fruit? Was it meant for the plover, or for Hanu? Before leaving the porch hurriedly, she shook her head in a desperate attempt to forget what she had witnessed.
“A visitor equally as mysterious as the blackhead plover arrived out of one of the sky’s secret folds on the day you were born,” he said. “A crow turned up as if in routine deference to your being born. Before the crow came a sparrow, tapping Morse code messages on dawn’s windowpane.” He repeated the story and what happened. I listened to it, fascinated, as I had listened many, many times before. I listened, my mouth filled with the buttery taste of the avocado, the pores of my whole body alert as ears. Aware that there were two of us paying him full attention, my grandfather’s voice rose and fell in recognition of the significance of the tale he was telling.
In my grandfather’s recall, the day I was born would be forever associated with a sparrow. The small, square-tailed bird pecked at his windowpane and uttered handsome trills in semitone Morse codes, trills ranging from three to five notes, insistent as the frightened bleating of a lost baby goat. This threw Nonno into a terrible fluster. My mother had been laboring at having me for more than forty-eight hours. There was little hope of bringing her dolorous pangs to a successful end before another day had lapsed. Anxious about the system of ditches he had dug, my grandfather had driven back to Afgoi after a two-day vigil, in expectation of averting untoward disasters to his irrigation plans. He had slept little in the night, but intended to get into his jalopy and be with my parents after sunup, to welcome the new baby. He awoke just before daybreak, to a bird pecking at his pane in dots and dashes and double-dashes. The message?
