Secrets: a Novel, page 22
“Where were you the night before last?” I said.
She turned her back on me and walked away.
“I’m talking to you,” I said, injecting a dose of menace into the artery of my voice. She paused, looked over her shoulder as if she were daring me to do something rash, and then continued walking. She turned left into the guest room, out of which she had emerged earlier, and then into the kitchen, where she sat down, her posture defiant. I stared at her, intuiting the relevant symbols and signs: we were two women conscious of our hostility for each other.
“Not in your son’s bed.”
“How could you tell such a lie?” I said. “You spent the night in my son’s bed, the one he uses whenever he stays overnight at Nonno’s place.”
“He wasn’t in it,” she said.
“But why lie?”
“I spent a night in his room when he wasn’t there,” she said. “What’s the big deal?”
“Where were you when Fidow was trampled by the elephant?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.
“Did you alter your nature into that of an elephant?”
“This is mindless madness!” she said.
“Where were you the night before then?”
Sholoongo’s momentary rage separated itself from the tone of her voice, in which she had buried it. I wondered how she managed to make her anger stand apart from the rest of her. There was something self-sustaining about her disparate identities, her fragmented selves, breakaway miniselves in a federal togetherness. She was in control of her rages, I was not.
“And where’s the document you stole?”
I began to wonder if she would kill me as I spoke, not I her. Lifeless, her eyes put me in mind of the seared knuckle of Gacme-xume’s mutilated finger, hard as a tortoise’s carapace. She didn’t speak.
I said, “Years ago, I had your fingerprints taken. This time I will take your life.”
She said, “You had me fingerprinted once and got away with it. Now you’ve come back with more heinous accusations. I am not going to take your nonsense anymore.” Her voice went up and down in puffs, like the steam in a busy restaurant’s kitchen, clouds of heat pursued into extinction by a parenthesis of vapor, and the active redness of gaseous flames whose tongues lick the rears of saucepans, casseroles, and kettles. “Imagine accusing me of bewitching Kalaman, or of making you grow two futilely dangling dwarf breasts!”
I shouted at the top of my lungs, “You are a ruthless, gutless bitch!” I was shaking all over, clutching my handbag closer to me, afraid perhaps that she might take the firearm from me, afraid that she might kill me.
“This is mindless madness!” she said again.
“And you are the cause of it,” I said.
She reached for the door handle of the fridge, which she opened. Her feet held apart, she turned around. “Please let us be civil with each other,” she said. “For once.”
“You stay out of our lives,” I said.
“Have you had lunch?” she asked.
I knew that Lambar hadn’t been here for a couple of days, and was certain I wouldn’t touch anything Sholoongo had cooked. I pointed at a yogurt cup in the still open fridge. We must have both been aware of the role that food-sharing played in people’s relationships, as a measure of their mutual trust. She had a penchant for wild honey, my son for her blood, Nonno for tamarind juice, Yaqut for my Essentials, I for his. She would be having honey with tea in all probability, not tea with honey! “What are you having?”
The afternoon sun reflected in her malevolent smile. She said, “I’m tucking into a take-out Chinese meal, which you are most welcome to share. You don’t have to fear, I won’t serve you with foods I’ve interfered with.”
It was an odd twist of fate, I remarked, that she was offering me food and drink in my son’s place. The startled expression on her face hinted at her discomfort. She said, “Your son is his own man. Please remember that.”
“I meant to say that you eat the food of those in whom you have trust,” I said. I took a spoonful of the yogurt and asked, “Why are you here, in Kalaman’s apartment?”
I was impressed that not a single twitch showed anywhere on her features.
She said, “I’ve asked Kalaman to give me a child.”
“Why should he?”
She had an indeterminate expression between a grin and a grimace, her diaphragm expanding with a portentous sigh of relief. She said, “Being his own man, I doubt that at his age he needs to seek his mother’s approval.”
“What will become of the baby if you bear one?” I asked.
Momentarily I was subject to fevers of demonic anger. I wished I could call back my murderous impulses from other times, surrender my mind to a temporary insanity, in order to kill.
“Maybe you and I have nothing to talk about,” Sholoongo was saying. “It’s Kalaman you should be speaking to if you must talk to someone about the baby, not me.” After a pause, a smile broke on her cheeks, kettle-plain as the white of an egg.
Memories returned to me presently: of Nonno behaving as though he knew the contents of the document which young Sholoongo had stolen. He had made oblique references to it in our exchanges. I sat still and silent, wondering what to do to this evil woman or what to say to her. I felt that, for a while at least, no repartee would render my tongue active. I rose to my feet, a purblind woman sad to behold, my knees struggling to support the weight of my worries. A blank moment, followed by a fall. Who? Did I weaken at the knees? I woke to find Sholoongo towering over me, my upper arm in the grip of her right hand. She was helping me to sit, and had a glass of water pressed to my lips. It took me quite a while to regain my equilibrium and the use of my tongue. When I did, I said, “Why should he give you a baby?”
“Because,” she responded, “years and years ago I made a promise that I would give him a sibling. I kept my end of the bargain, but it wasn’t to be, because I miscarried. A pledge once made is as binding as an oath. I want to keep my word to Kalaman, cost what it might.”
Again I lost touch with myself. Then an ugly memory raised its head like the proverbial forefinger in the folktale about the nature of secrets, a sad memory pointed at the core of my hurt. Sorrow overwhelmed me with a doomsday rancor. I remembered a quote from Bukhaari who said that on the Day of Resurrection lead would be poured into the ears of those who betrayed the secrets entrusted to them. My body, alas, was no longer in communication with my mind! Two hours later I woke up in Kalaman’s bed alone, no Sholoongo in the apartment.
Part Two
Interlude
Kalaman felt oddly relieved, after throwing up all he had eaten.
It was as if he were vomiting not food but his nervous unease. He was under a most severe strain. He complained of a nerve-racking pain, half his head striking cymbals together, the other beating a precursory drumming with no rhythm or rationale. Asked what he thought was causing all this ache, he pointed to the moment when the feeling of nausea overcame him. He explained that he had fought the nausea even earlier, during his talk with his mother, managing to keep it at bay for at least an hour. It proved harder to fight it off once his mother had left. So he lay in bed, halfheartedly reminiscing.
The way Nonno saw it, Kalaman’s undealt-with troubles began the instant he introduced a decisive element of blame-the-other into his guilt-ridden sorrow. “There are moments in a person’s or a nation’s life,” the old man said, “when collapses can be avoided, even if at first they seem inevitable. The moments which matter come and, quite often, leave without one realizing. The climactic moments break on one rather in the manner of a hurricane with a mad eye, here now, gone the same instant, but with so much rubble and ruin left in its wake. And so very many memories: memories of hurt, of disappointment, of what-might-have-beens.” Kalaman had a world of chances to put a stop to his mother’s ruinous behavior; he had a universe of opportunities to speak to her before the hurricane struck, to deal a severing blow to the umbilicus and the placenta joining him to the things in his makeup which connected him to other persons. Something of a debilitated quality takes over the life of a Kalaman, who piques himself on his uniqueness, when he discovers that there is nothing special about his beginnings. As a result of this discovery, Kalaman did lose the ability to ride out his mother’s stormy unreasonableness, or to make sense of Nonno’s riddle-informed evasions.
Likewise, his mother could have intervened earlier and taken a crucial step in Kalaman’s involvement with Sholoongo, or anyone else for that matter, in the years when the boy’s life was in its early formation, being put together, as it were, out of the contributions his friends and family made to his general growth. Equally his father could have taken a keener interest yesterday in what went into the making up of today’s Kalaman.
He was in a garrulous mood, Nonno was, he was expansive. He said, “Let’s push aside Kalaman’s doings and predicaments for a moment, and let’s for a change talk about the entire country, and its impending collapse into blood-letting anarchy. And let’s agree for what it is worth that our nation’s predicament is our own predicament too, collectively and individually, each of us an accomplice in its ruin. Can anything be done to stop the country from fragmenting into family fiefdoms? I doubt that this is feasible at this stage. Because what is happening to the collective identity of the nation and in the individual lives of its people is not tiddlywinks, a game played with pieces of plastic made to jump into a container. What is happening is a life-and-death matter. The games are becoming more deadly on a daily basis. The bullets are out, the guns have been oiled, power at the center and power at the peripheries are both up for grabs, on battlefields which different claimants are prepared to fight on, and to win.”
Was Nonno of the view that whoever wins power in his own family’s fiefdom on the periphery is likely to take power at the center too?
“One doesn’t preclude the other.”
“And the dictator?”
“The dictator otherwise nicknamed ‘the mayor of Mogadiscio’ in reference to his political power base, which is confined to the metropolis?” he said. “He is no longer of relevance to the final outcome. The mad hurricane has gathered its momentum, and nothing short of a miracle can prevent the greatest damage from being unleashed. As for the tyrant himself? He will be swept aside by the ferocity of the hurricane, will bear on his person the brunt of the collective rage. You see, I’ve never seen him as his own man, only as some cold-war automaton, guided by a remote control mechanism. Just before the Ogaden debacle, he changed masters, without adjusting himself to his new circumstances, a defeated man at the helm of a people desperate for a statesman. Siyad Barre might have prevented a worsening of the crisis if he had resigned then. He was a tragic figure, a victim of his own small-mindedness.”
Kalaman could have brought an end to this rigmarole sooner too, if he had been true to his own instincts, honest to Talaado and his mother, or if he had been forthrightly frank with Sholoongo herself: the Somali collectivity could have reversed the coming decline. He had no right to blame his parents or Nonno or others for his own failures. Nor had he the right to blame Sholoongo, a classical other. You could apply the same yardstick against which you could assess the contributions others had made to the construction of the collapse, brick by destructive brick. Give people a chance to speak their pieces, and many will display their personal and collective hurts: Kalaman, his parents, Nonno, Fidow, the environment, the nonvocal animals, they all see themselves as ill used by the dictatorship. Press them further into the corner, ask them for their contribution to the struggle against one-man tyranny, and they fall silent, many unable to deny being accomplices in the ruin. Quick in self-defense, they blame the former colonialists, and they blame both the Soviet Union and the United States for bankrolling the cold warriors, gamers in weapons of mass destruction. Our challenge is to locate the metaphor for the collapse of the collective, following that of the individual.
Nonno was saying, “There is no further bottom to reach, when it comes to the self-esteem of many a peace-lover, a self-esteem that has gone as far down as a lintel posing as a mudsill. There is a martyr I mourn. If he had survived, Ismael Ali Giumaleh might have pulled us away from the precipice of self-savagery. We all participated in his funeral in our hundreds of thousands, many of us burying him in our hearts, out of love for what the man wanted to do. He worked so hard to prevent the clannish lot from moving their self-serving stones in order to uncover an exclusive life for their own, to the detriment of all others. The nation had invested all its hopes in Giumaleh, a man able not only to put together a viable opposition to the tyranny of the ruling autocracy, but to provide an alternative to the misguided politics of associating each militia grouping with a clan.”
Kalaman remembered meeting him once, and liking him.
Nonno went on, “Displaying a hurt is tantamount to goalpost-shifting. Scorpions have their safe hiding places, so does a hurt. So do lies. Termites too have their way of hiding out in sandhills built with their own saliva, after they have destroyed one’s timber construct. Mark my words, many of the self-serving men leading the armed militias are opportunists, former members of the tyrant’s coterie, fellow conspirators of his or, worse still, corrupt yes-men, and potentially future tyrants. We can’t all blame the one man, for we too are sharers in the censure.”
There was nothing handsome about Kalaman today. The pain all over him and spreading made sure of that. His lips drooping, his mouth drooling, he didn’t look intelligent either. Nor did he appear well heeled, or as charming as he used to be, a man, like Nonno, able to reach into areas of people’s hearts, to affect them in a positive manner. He used to be of a malleable appearance, of the kind people fell in love with, assuming they could mold him into a friend to their liking. Qalin once said that he warmed her blood to the point where she felt cooled when he penetrated the center of her openings, deep, deep down.
Now Kalaman had the shivers. An instant later he was so hot the sheet covering him seemed to curl up at the edges, like a piece of paper close to a tongue of flame. His reflection in the mirror startled him. He had difficulty acknowledging his own face. So much change in such a short time, and such a loss of weight. Could a day’s stubble be that preponderous? He felt alien to himself when he looked in the mirror, as though he were face-to-face with his nightmares, of which he had so far had several.
In one of them, Kalaman had come in on his mother chewing away at the soft ends of a human skull. Disturbed, he asked her whom the skull had belonged to, when alive. His mother explained that it once belonged in the head of a person from an “enemy clan.” Would he like a bite of it? In another nightmare, he was a newt in the vast belly of a whale, at whose intestine it pulled in an effort to get out. The whale was branded with the identity of his mother’s clan on one flank, on the other his father’s. He was a prisoner in the whale’s allinclusiveness, a newt-man with no recognizable identity. His wish to reclaim his deracinated, not-clan-based identity was denied. He was given the choice of dying at the hands of a nonmember of his mother’s clan or his father’s, or to roam in the belly of the whale as a newt. He chose to be a newt, preferring this to allying himself with the murderers.
It had been night. They had been at sea for a few days, fleeing from civil savagery. He saw his dearest friends, and they showed up decked in their clan identities. He was reminded of the fact that Nonno had once refused to have the name of his clan in his identity card, as was the custom in the Italian colony. He spent a while in detention, accused by the Italians of being an anarchist. Later he was released and issued a card with the word “British” marked in it, because he had come from the protectorate to the north, ruled at the time by Britain. Kalaman asked him, why did he prefer being “British” to having his clan identity? “Because ‘British’ is a political notion, alluding to the state, the Crown, et cetera,” explained Nonno, “whereas being English, Welsh, Irish, or Scottish points to one’s tribal provenance. One’s ‘Somaliness,’ as opposed to being identified as belonging to a given clan, defines a political entity. The clan is nonpolitical, based as it is on one’s primordial blood identity.”
Intimate friends betraying one another on account of narcissistic differences, a man raping his sister-in-law and emptying her of her fetus just because the woman belonged to a different bloodline from his. Someone had earlier beaten a drum, a mob walking behind him, as they marched through the thoroughfares of the metropolis. They were chanting a nursery rhyme, invoking the sentiments of hatred against the clans from elsewhere.
He would rather he died a newt, and from suffocation, than be killed by a friend with an ancestral memory different from his own.
Kalaman woke up at last. And Nonno came to comfort him.
He went out for a jog.
He ran in what had been the woods of his childhood, sadly remarking the sandy dryness of the earth. The Shabelle River wore a jaw-fallen expression, like a boy deprived of the joy of play. He wished the madmen fighting over contending memories would realize how wars were linked to famines, how one came as a result of the other. Running back, he was a great deal sadder because, like a falling star bursting in utter brightness and then vanishing in a puff, he saw his mother holding a firearm to Sholoongo’s head. The women were vicious to each other, his mother calling Sholoongo some terrible names just because she was born in the Ogaden. Sholoongo, in self-defense, threatened to blot Damac’s name out of the screen of Kalaman’s consciousness, “for I will kill you with my bare hands, and drink up your blood, out of spite.” Finally he conjured up images of horror, a man whom he had never set eyes on, Gacme-xume.
He asked himself, had his mother killed Sholoongo?
Back from his bout of running, Kalaman came in on Nonno sitting by himself in the living room, hardly breathing and not at all moving. The old man might have been breaking wind, or ridding his body of a belch. Equally, he might have choked on a hiccup.
