Secrets: a Novel, page 21
A woman the shape of a honey badger is dead and buried!
All his life Kalaman has lived in a state of perpetual anxiety. As a grown-up he has continued to suffer from the abject worry of not being on top of things. You wouldn’t know from the way he behaves nowadays that he lacks the self-confidence to say what is irking him. He is adept at hiding this from most people, encircling himself with a large perimeter of untaken space and being reticent to the point of being rude. Observe him from close range, and especially when he isn’t aware that your eyes are trained on him, and you will discern his awkwardnesses. Suspicious like an ostrich, he is watchful, unceasingly humming to himself an improvised tune. When he is on safer ground, he emits a clear sound, a signal like that of a crow warning of humans in the vicinity; among his familiars, he might signpost his worries, like a honeyguide alerting a hunter to the closeness of a bee’s nest. Telling you nothing (does he tell me of the women he is with? does he tell me if that evil woman is putting up with him? does he tell if Qalin is aborting his baby?), he would insist on sharing your harvest of secrets. He is more intimate with Nonno than he is with me and Yaqut, maybe because we are in the position of his immediate responsibilities, whereas Nonno, as a grandparent, is at a remove, the tension between them not as palpable. Sure, he confides his worries to Nonno, no doubt about it. My relationship with Nonno has always been ambiguous, because I am bothered by the unchallengeable position he occupies in my son’s scheme of priorities.
Oddly, Sholoongo stands to gain if she supplants Kalaman in Nonno’s mind; or if the old man accedes to her advances. The woman is seeking to satiate an insatiable lust. Who knows, Yaqut and Kalaman may consent to wait on the sidelines while she is busy servicing Nonno. Sholoongo’s designs on men are as dastardly as humankind’s original perfidy. Do not misunderstand me: I love Nonno, in spite of his awfulnesses. I wish I could tell him and Kalaman too that my lifelong ill will toward Sholoongo has less to do with the document she stole, more with an earlier incident I had better not divulge at this instant.
If Nonno were here in my pickup truck and if he were to ask me to divulge this, my secret, I would offer him a folktale of an oriental quality for his troubles.
A hawk attacks a baby chick. The chick’s mother hen defends with all her ferocious might. The hawk returns several more times. The old hen goes almost insane defending her chick, on one occasion encountering the assailant halfway, going for his eyes. Eventually, mother hen pokes the hawk in the eye, and he almost drops from the sky, the running blood half blinding him. But the hawk comes down in further ferocious swoops, more than ever determined to snatch away the baby chick — and maybe not spare the mother hen from harm either. A most savage confrontation takes place. The entire residents of the village come out to watch, the villagers taking sides, one section rooting for the fowl, the other applauding the hawk. Ultimately the mother hen wins. The hawk takes off and the heavens pour with the blood drops of vengeance.
I told him this tale just one week after I first met him. I remembered feeling intimidated, as he probed into my background during that encounter with double-pronged questions. To stonewall him, I stepped on the head of a baby snake. I was the hen, he the hawk in the tale, a mother defending her baby with all her maternal might.
He liked to have the last word, Nonno, as though he were able to have it even after death. To counter my tale, he told me one which takes place in a very distant land, where there is one of nature’s marvels, in the shape of a cock with a comb the size of Kilimanjaro and a tail several meters long. (I’ve since learnt that this extraordinary cock does exist and in Japanese is called Shinotawaro.) The long-tailed cock arrives on the scene at the very instant when the fowl is about to surrender to the assailing hawk. The villagers make way for the newly arrived marvel, full of bewilderment and awe. Such are the powers associated with this huge and handsome cock, it takes him only an instant to trap the hawk with a mere twine of his many-stranded wondrous tail.
Does the Shinotawaro stand for Nonno? Most likely.
When I first met him, my father-in-law used to come into my dreams hardly invited. In the dreams, the poor arrived in hordes to be fed, the naked to be clothed, the sick to be healed, the limbless to have their missing organs restored. He was a miracle worker, in my visions. He had a hollow-ended voice, of the echoey kind. You thought that he was repeating every sound at least twice, for emphasis. Why did I not talk of those dreams to Yaqut? I hadn’t the courage. I was afraid of my dreams being misconstrued, worried that they might be taken out of context and given a sexual meaning. If people knew I had Supplementaries, they might wonder if I wanted Nonno to join his son and grandson to take my Multiples in their lips. It could be the visitations were more mine than his, and that I worked him into my nocturnal visions. Aren’t women, when raped, accused of cock-teasing?
Sure, he inspires a mix of adoration and awe in me, because of his size and his voice, both massive, with overflowing qualities like a silk robe. (“Thanks to the divine!” Kathy confided in me once, woman to woman. “I wouldn’t dare ask you how much of Yaqut there is, quantitywise. But my goodness, Nonno is immense!”)
Nonno was at one and the same time physically distant and near, placing himself out of your reach and then coming in upon you with the swiftness of a hawk in a furious descent. There was scarcely any part of my body that he hadn’t touched or teased in one way or another. More recently I have spoken with Yaqut about Nonno and how his presence affects me: how I imagine the old man in my bed, and how my whole body breaks out in goose bumps suddenly sprouting as do tropical grasses after the heavy seasonal rains. Yaqut said he sensed it all along.
Apart from Sholoongo and the scorpion-fingered Gacme-xume, Nonno is the one person wielding unhealthy powers over me, powers likely to break my will in half. I compare his powers to the screws a blackmailer drills further and further into a victim’s weak spot of flesh until the victim gives. I have a visceral distrust of their motives, a mistrust tucked away in the unreachable niches of the water in my blood. I am a mother hen defending her baby chick with all her ferocious might against the overpowering aggressiveness of a hawk, with blood for eyes. Mistakes abound, and the weaker you are, the more your mistakes, many imposed on you. Trust me, the mighty do not err in the same squeamish manner you and I do.
How much did I err dealing with Kalaman? For him the world was a keyhole, small, hard to get to and requiring him to go on his knees. Spying on us, Kalaman would risk being discovered. He hung about us, in wait of hearing things to tell Nonno. Later, he stayed up late into the night, eavesdropping on us or seeing us at it. “Give me,” he would plead. “Gimme, gimme?” From the day he crept in on us making love and first mouthed the loathsome “gimme” plea until he was eight, I heard him relentlessly ask that we “give him” a sibling. Gimme a brother, gimme a sister! “We are content with you, we are satisfied and want no more,” I would say. “We want no other baby, really, we do not wish to share our affection for you with another child or adult.” But Kalaman would say he didn’t mind sharing, that there was plenty of love to go around, with Nonno being near, within half an hour’s bus ride.
“We will,” one of us would say, promises made to a child who we hoped would forget it the following morning. A week would pass, at times months, and our son wouldn’t speak of this undelivered pledge. Maybe he thought we were busy making the brother or sister out of the overflow of our respective hormones, or maybe he thought Yaqut would carve it out of his wood or marble pieces, or perhaps I might exchange a baby for one of my Supplementaries. Kalaman repeated his pleas when we celebrated his own birthday, or when a child was born in the area, to a neighbor, or if one of Nonno’s farmhands was blessed with a baby.
“Where’s the baby?” Kalaman would scream, touching my belly, pulling at my dwarf breasts. “Where have you hidden it? Tell it to come out.”
We didn’t know what to tell him, whether to admit that we had tried our best but failed. We promised to try again, even though we knew there was no chance of my having another baby. Kalaman loved making vows, he liked making pledges. With the tip of his forefinger to yours, a small incision of blood dotting it, he would make you touch blood to blood, as if sealing a pact of loyalty.
Now and then he abandoned himself to the irritable impression that we didn’t love him enough. Otherwise, where was his younger sibling? Or, why were you less gregarious? Why didn’t we come naked into the river with him, like Nonno and Fidow? What were we hiding from him? Why did we hardly tell him anything, how babies are made? Why did we never show our real selves to him, the way Nonno did?
Meanwhile we consulted gynecologists and medicine men, of the traditional and modern persuasion. The concoctions reduced my viscera to a rumble of noises loud as the heavens’ violent throes of rainless thunder. These herbal mixtures upset my metabolism, my period becoming irregular. May the barren devil be confounded, for I was! I was pregnant. I was not. “Will you make up your mind?” Yaqut pleaded. It wasn’t me. It was my body, as if it wanted to have a baby but also didn’t want one.
We sought Nonno’s opinion. He said, “Be honest with Kalaman.”
“But we’re not hiding anything from him. We’ve tried and tried and tried and haven’t succeeded. We’re not being dishonest.”
“Tell him everything,” he said. “Tell him what is what!”
I felt we were being unfairly accused of committing a crime. Not-telling and hiding were different aspects of the same thing, in a sense. But should we put down our not giving Kalaman a sibling to not telling? Were we hiding something from him, or were we simply unwilling to oblige the young boy’s demands?
We took Kalaman into our confidence, and told him.
He said, “Then how did you make me?”
A parental prerogative mandated against telling him more. We resorted to an equally corrupt method: bribing him with chocolate and other indulgences. We bought his peace on a provisional basis. We paid a lot for a thorny pause among the padded silences of the haystacks. Bless the poor sod in the Somali folktale who, in a room he has darkened for that very purpose, raises his forefinger, only to learn once he emerges into the light of day that everybody has knowledge of what he’s been up to, the fool! Curse the noon Sholoongo arrived at Arbaco’s bidding, hugging an empty jar to her well-developed breasts (I couldn’t believe she was only fourteen), asking, “Could you spare a spoonful of honey?” I did. I wish I hadn’t.
Arbaco had earlier that morning, and unfairly, charged me with marrying into a family that sang psalms of praise to secrecy. Nonno and Yaqut, it is true, celebrated reticence with as much regard as a deity. It was as if they were raising monuments of worship to one’s sense of discretion. Curse Arbaco who fell victim to one of Kalaman’s daredevilries — but more about that another time.
Arbaco knew a lot about me, more than I cared to share with anyone else. She knew about Gacme-xume’s blackmailing powers over me, why my blood relations kept their distance from me. But she knows nothing about two singularly significant secrets about me and Yaqut. Anyway we fell out, she and I, because she lacked the stamina to contain the ebb and flow of life’s trust and secrets. Kalaman described her as a holed sieve, in at one end and out the other. He was wrong. I say this from the experience of knowing her almost all my life. For she never divulged the one confidence I had entrusted her with. Yet it was Arbaco who brought damnations into my life, who introduced me to Sholoongo, Timir, and their father.
Curse Sholoongo!
Whom Kalaman fed, and who in turn had been finger-fed on a concentrate of her monthlies, thimblefuls of the accursed stuff.
Curse her and the devil’s day when she was conceived! Curse her and her diabolical intentions, curse her because she boasted that she could make him a younger brother if and when she put her mind to it, and nearly did: Sholoongo who filled his head with insane thoughts but emptied his pockets of everything he had, eating his potfuls of honey. It’s no longer a guarded secret that she came very close to keeping her pledge to Kalaman by offering him a sibling. She became pregnant with Yaqut’s child. Then she aborted it, with no help from me.
Curse her!
Curse her and her demonic vows! Curse the devil tempting the weak! Curse her too for making contact with Gacme-xume and for colluding with him, that evil blackmailer!
I didn’t take notice of her physical presence at first, only of an undecided odor, a medley of smells, layers of scents which she wore to create an extraordinary effect. The wind in the apartment was straggly with a scatter of aromas, strong fragrances pointing to a most disharmonious state of mind, smells as distinct as mountain air, as aristocratic as sandalwood, or as specific in their intensity as Arabian skin oils. The different perfumes insinuated themselves into my brain, and interfered with my own thinking. My self-confidence may not have been as robust as I might have liked, but I felt strongly about Sholoongo.
I had a firearm in my handbag. My mood was that of a belligerent warrior, prepared to murder. The firearm was got for me by a distant cousin in the police force, who had been of use to me before, when I wanted Sholoongo’s fingerprints taken. It was he who gave me a quick run-through of how a firearm functioned. With no bullets in, I pulled the trigger, bang-bang and all was fine, the ratel was as good as rotten dead! Carrying a firearm when you are not used to it weighs heavily on your conscience. And hiding it in my handbag amid the innocuous paraphernalia did not ease my worry. I brought it to Kalaman’s apartment on a just-in-case basis. Use it if threatened, or show it to Sholoongo the way they did in gangster films. As a mother I needed to defend my young, first with cunning, and only ultimately with my life. The water was getting muddier. Because Gacme-xume was resurfacing as if he too were driftwood. For how long were we guaranteed peace?
I hadn’t rung the bell when the door was flung open. Had she been expecting me? My heart missed a beat or two, and I recalled the police officer cousin saying that firearms shoot quickly and kill those who are of a cowardly nature! I stood there asking myself, was I brave or mad enough to use a firearm? The door was soft on its hinges and creaked. Was I trigger-unhappy?
Sholoongo stood aside to let me in, short as a witch is tall, a wizard on stilts. She moved away with unease and I listened for sounds emanating from inside of me, inner whispers. I went in and pushed the door shut, then followed her down the narrow corridor, wishing my son would emerge out of one of the rooms, wrapped in a towel or a robe; it would have delighted me more if Talaado had been there. But I knew where my son was and that Talaado wouldn’t be there either. So where was the mother hen in me, chicken that I was!
“Where’s Kalaman?” I asked.
“You know he isn’t here, so why ask?” she said.
We were in the kitchen, the dining table separating us. Embarrassed, I looked away. I wanted to make sure I did not look nervous. I was mother to the young man in danger. I recalled how I had thrown out of Kalaman’s life that arrogant fool of a Kenyan woman, who had nothing good to say about Somalis, even though she claimed to be in love with my son. I had told him he could not bring into our lives a woman who had no respect for his people.
“Why must you always lie?” I went on the attack. It was my intention to fault her, blame her, somehow humiliate her before finally shooting her. I tried my best not to flounder in the mire of my own worries. There was no turning back. The weapon had been seen in my handbag by more than one person, and it had better be used. Murder? Suicide? Or were there other choices? If so, what were they? Many more wicked thoughts than I care to put into words crossed my mind. To weather the ordeals of the moment I convinced myself that self-control never harmed anyone’s viscera.
“I wish you’d grow up,” she said. She sat down, full of dare.
I put my hand in my bag, as if touching base with the firearm. But I didn’t pull it out, thinking that her death would be quicker if I surprised her, one moment alive, the second moment finito, dead! I had failed to act when it would’ve been more effective to shoot her at the entrance. Then I could’ve pretended that I had thought her a burglar. Still, there were many others we could blame her death on, the militias, for instance.
When I asked her the pedestrian question, “Why was the door locked?” I knew I was not going to pull the trigger for quite some time. I had hoped by provoking her to burrow open a tunnel in my head and go straight to the core of my memory’s store — Sholoongo whom I associated in my mind with a posy-ring wrapped in a lick of her menstrual blood — and then shoot, but no! Here lay the origin, the source of my ominous fear, Sholoogo taking Kalaman into her feminine trust of blood. I couldn’t bear the thought, couldn’t speak of these matters straight to her face. How could I? So I charged her with minor crimes, with having stolen things precious to me. Instead of accusing her of dispossessing me of my son’s affection, I accused her of thieving, of stealing my marriage certificate, which, as Kalaman had pointed out, I had no need of.
We circled around each other for some time. We ended up in the apartment’s long corridor, within arm’s reach of each other, my hand tucked in my bag in uninterrupted contact with the firearm. I thought, it is one thing killing a baby snake by smashing its head in, to stonewall a strong-willed Nonno, it is something else altogether pulling a trigger and murdering a human, in cold blood. Moreover she hadn’t as yet incriminated herself or given me reason to humiliate her first before shooting her.
It was obvious I hadn’t worked on my killer’s instinct. Yaqut had become inured, maybe because he dealt in death, carving headstones, inscribing funeral messages of affection on marble. I was sure too that Nonno and Kalaman would be better at it, Kalaman who had experienced death in the company of Fidow, a professional killer. Could I hire one? Pay. Sit back and relax.
