Secrets: a Novel, page 27
“Even if it is all a fabrication, why is it, Damac’s aunt wonders, that Y.M.I. has picked her out of a million others? This is no lottery. What’s the truth?
“In her self-exoneration, your mother makes no mention of the fight between Y.M.I. and her escort. One of the neighbors, who witnessed the fight, tells on her. Your mother is asked about the fight. Not knowing about the neighbor or what she told her aunt, Damac tries to keep the fistfight between the men secret. Her aunt tells her to leave the house. She is not even nineteen, the poor girl, and has nowhere to go.
“Down on her luck, she seeks out an old friend from her elementary school days. The friend is kind enough to provide her with a temporary accommodation in a house where she is room-sharing with another woman. When we see Damac next she is in the bead business, and is doing fine. At Y.M.I.’s instigation, the men in the marriage racket business put the screws on her. They want her to pay, and pay handsomely. She refuses. A different group of thugs arrives, apparently because Y.M.I. has by then lost the certificate in a card game, lost it to one Gacme-xume, who comes to collect the loot. Nothing doing. Several men, led by Gacme-xume and Y.M.I., gang-rape her. Word gets around. Finally I hear of it.
“I search her out,” said Arbaco. “We talk, I promise to act as her facilitator. Confident of success, I follow a lead, the man’s initials, Y.M.I. Now, I knew the initials in some other connection, maybe from some artwork, your father’s. I do not recall why I suspected that Damac was pregnant. ‘Just as it happens,’ I say to her, ‘I remember there is this man who is in your line of trade.’ I hoped to Allah that the impostor’s initials were leading me to him. Because if Yaqut was the culprit, I was decided to hand him over to the police. If Yaqut was not the blackmailer, then we were in luck. Then I organized for Yaqut to meet up with your mother at my place. Thank the Lord, he was not the impostor, and because Yaqut and she got on like a summer fly and honey, we were able to arrange for them to marry in a week. Even in my facilitation trade, I’ll tell you a week is very fast. This was record facilitation time. Take it from me, it is!”
“And where does Gacme-xume come into this?”
“Gacme-xume belonged to the underworld in the fifties and sixties,” said Arbaco, “a period when forging marriage certificates was a boom business. The impostor with the same initials as Yaqut’s was a mate of his, a fellow thief in his den of secrets. True or not we do not know, but Gacme-xume claims that he had won the original “marriage certificate” as part settlement of a card game. The settlement included literally every stitch of clothing, every bit of anything worth pawning or selling or blackmailing with, everything the impostor owned. As I said, your mother wouldn’t deal with any of them. But when Gacme-xume discovers that the woman is now married to Nonno’s son, he reckons he can make a bounty out of a propertied man. What with one thing and another, there is that story about the theft of a pair of shoes from a mosque. I think this shoe business is a nail in the wrong coffin, if you follow my meaning.”
Choking on the phlegm of my uncertain reaction, I started the vehicle, turning its nose in the direction of Mogadiscio. I drove, hardly paying attention to the checkpoints, at which I did not bother to stop. I dropped Arbaco off after thanking her and apologizing for my unwarranted behavior earlier. We would be in touch, I assured her. Then I drove straight back to Afgoi, to be sad in Nonno’s company.
Chapter Ten
I sat in the west porch of Nonno’s bungalow, waiting for him to return with two million shillings. This money was to be paid in cash, on receipt of a document, to a blackmailer who had it in his scorpioid clutch. With his phenomenal sense of discretion, Nonno hadn’t pressed that I give more details than I was prepared to provide. Nonno and I agreed after much to-ing and fro-ing that he would have the first examination of the document. He insisted on this; I acquiesced. I doubt that I withheld any information of pivotal significance. It was unlike me to pour things out the way I had done, unlike me to tell him everything that transpired between me and Arbaco. Then I told him where to find Gacme-xume. Listening to me tell it all, I thought that Nonno sat in the placidity of his self-confidence, a man in a clear mind as to what he was meant to do and how he would go about it.
“A woman like Arbaco,” he had said, “is not wholly of the underworld, even though she operates on the same principles as Gacme-xume. Quite often she fishes in the same waters as he, for she is a jetsam to his flotsam. I wish she had come to me earlier with these indiscretions. Why didn’t she? But never you mind!”
I asked him if he had known of the racket.
“One is always wiser after the event,” he replied. “One may claim, in retrospect, that one has had intimations of things, that one has picked up whiffs of it in the air. I would go as far as admitting to having been suspicious, yes. But I had no nail-hard evidence. Otherwise, I would have done something about it. I am not one to sit around doing nothing. I would have dealt with it!”
“What intimations had you before today of all this?”
“I felt there was a secret which bound Yaqut and Damac, a secret which held them together,” he said. “A pledge, perhaps, more solid than the words of a vow spoken to seal a matrimonial pact. I couldn’t tell what it might be. But given that they were happy with each other, I let them be, thinking, what the hell!”
Following this, we spoke about Muslim marriage — about how, whereas the husband-to-be is present, the bride need not be there at all. She is required to be there in person only under special circumstances. Otherwise, she is represented by a male relation, who speaks on her behalf. We speculated how Damac’s pesterer may have organized false witnesses, one of them claiming to be either her father or brother. The officiating priest may not have known of the deceit. When is a marriage described as khudbo-sireed?
“It is described as ‘secret marriage,’” said Nonno, “when the two parties getting married travel a masaafa distance to avoid being detected. They defy the authority of the bride’s family, who may have promised her hand to someone else, or override the family’s objections, by marriage in secret outside the juridical boundaries of a masaafa. You need two male witnesses whom you present to the officiating judge, not a male relation. The nineteen-sixties saw many such secret matrimonies, as the ideas of family authority over the individual were being renegotiated, following society’s fast transformation from a preponderantly nomadic and rural one to an urban one.”
“Can we assume that the purported marriage between my mother and the pesterer took place between either him or an impostor and a false ‘bride’?” I said. “She would have had to answer to Damac’s name, the witnesses of dubious character swearing to the truth of her identity. My mother would not have known of the deceit until later, by which time the municipality would have issued a marriage certificate, which purported that she was Y.M.I.’s wife.”
“I have known priests of dubious character too,” Nonno said. “But that is not our main concern now.” He appeared overwrought and exhausted. He might have been annoyed with himself, too, for not having caught out the deceit.
“The pesterer was in the marriage racket business, then?”
“Everything is possible in the underworld of thugs and Gacme-xumes and impostors.”
I had an image of the items being priced in a room full of smoke where a card game was in progress. I said, “I have a vision of the marriage certificate being valued at an agreed price, and of Gacme-xume winning the hand cards up. He calls on my mother, Gacme-xume does, but she is uncooperative. He returns with some of his mates at a later date, and they gang-rape her. Pregnant, she is helpless. Arbaco enters the picture as a facilitator. Damac meets Yaqut. They are man and wife inside a week. Word gets to the riffraff. He comes back in expectation of a potential shakedown, because of who you are.”
Nonno said, “So far so good.” Encouragingly, “Go on!”
“Gacme-xume presents himself to Yaqut to collect,” I continue speculating. “He receives a spit in the face. Stammering, Yaqut threatens him with murder. Because he operates in the shadier corners of human experience, Gacme-xume doesn’t despair, not so easily, at any rate. He communicates his frustrations in a number of ways, directly to Damac and via duplicitous networks. He raises the dust of a storm. As part of their con game, a pair of shoes are stolen from a mosque. Yaqut is blamed for this. I presume this was done because of your nickname Ma-tukade, which places your son at a disadvantage among the attendants at the mosque. Then, maybe because Yaqut does not budge, nothing happens for a long time, and we hear not a word the riffraff, in fact we have no idea of his whereabouts until Sholoongo’s return, her visit here. Did she look him up, with a helping hand from Arbaco? I cannot rule that out. We should pay whatever it takes to find out who was responsible for my mother’s misery.”
Silent, I was sad. I could do with therapeutic talking, but I was afraid I might make a fool of myself by promising to murder every single one of the men who had raped my mother. For there was I: Kalaman, the issue of a gang rape. What was there to say? I was conscious of my equivocal status, I was a changed man. Of that I was certain. Even so, I could not put my forefinger on the nature of these changes, which, it being too early, were still imprecise, vague.
I observed, with sadness, that tears had collected in the corners of Nonno’s eyes, his gaze now adrift, off its own set course, like a boat about to go under. He began to shake. I couldn’t tell why the tremor, but I put it down to a belated rage. Maybe this was taking hold of him in the way malarial bouts grip an overwrought body too tired to cope. His was the kind of anger with a stench. I could smell it from afar. The odor his rage emitted was so penetrative it took my memory back to Sholoongo’s first afternoon in my apartment. It was unlike him to be so enraged, his every breath fraught with curses, his speech punctuated by inaudible damnation.
Barely a meter away from Nonno, I looked away from him, unseeing and, insofar as I was concerned, unseen. I might have been someone with eyes emptied of light and sight. It felt as if the blackness of my pupils was a shade paler than normal, my brain deprived of its strength, its characteristic human resolve. My head seemed peopled with monstrous beings, some half human, some belonging to the animal realm.
“As a citizen of the crossroads where several worlds meet,” Nonno said, “you will find the weight of contradictory signs beginning to appear. You will come upon footpaths forking in all sorts of directions, signposts giving you confusing directions to where there is no return.” I could see his lips moving, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. Ill at ease in my company, or so I thought, his eyes evasive, he looked withdrawn. He had known me as his grandson. Now I wasn’t his grandchild anymore? There was I: the offspring of a gang rape. I had nothing of certainty linking me, as his own blood, to him. Maybe because he had no idea of what to do or say, Nonno left the porch with no explanation whatsoever.
While I waited for him to return from his money-gathering errand, the night arrived. I thought ahead with horror to the day when the world I had known until then and had taken for granted would be no more. Nonno not my grandfather. Yaqut not my father. I thought ahead to the moment when my mother would give me her version of what occurred. How would people react to the news that I was the issue of a gang rape? I didn’t want sympathy or pity from anyone, I wanted to see palpable anger. Naturally, it would confound a lot of simpleminded, clan-obsessed persons who might feel cheated of their right to know the name of the rapist, my biological father, if only to assign me to the one of the clans. If they pitied me, it would be because I was the poor sod who hadn’t a blood family to be loyal to, to kill and die for, in this epoch of clan-kill-clan! I wondered how someone like Qalin, my deputy at the firm and once my lover, might react to this. How would my employees receive the news? I could only compare it in my experience to learning that X, a friend, had AIDS. We didn’t know what to do, at least I didn’t. So what do you say to someone afflicted with an identity crisis like mine, akin to AIDS in that it points to a kind of death?
Time and again my ideas were ambushed, I was thrown off course!
My thoughts were ambushed now by the sight of a shooting star in earthward motion. In Somali mythology, meteors are associated with jinns who, as tradition has it, were created two thousand years before Adam. Stories abound which ascribe to these pre-Adamite beings the genius of having been the architects of the pyramids during the reign of their king with the most enchantingly musical name Jinn ibn Januun. A wealthier harvest of tales spun out of jinn-related anecdotes tells of how the jinns’ dwelling place was in the vicinity of a body of water. It is said that they frequent intersections of roads; that their favorite musical instrument is the flute. The ghuul is a special category of jinn, believed to appear in both human and animal forms. As well as being carnivorous, the ghuuls haunt the environs of tombs, hence their association with death. King Solomon is the most celebrated non-jinn king, whose dominion included possession of the keys to all the world’s secret caves. According to the Koran, meteors are hurled at the jinns eavesdropping at the gates of heaven in an effort to discourage them from overhearing divine secrets.
My eye pressed to a keyhole, I could see Nonno in quarter profile, silhouetted against the half-light, his half-moons poised on his nose. He was writing from right to left, most likely in Arabic. In the look on his face, I could discern a seriousness of purpose. What was he up to?
Disregarding good manners, I walked into the room without bothering to knock. Nonno, I sensed, was in a perhaps-land, maybe that of his teens, a place from which he had been exiled for more than sixty years. What light there was in the room came through the door by which I had entered, from a corridor where a night-lamp, essential as an exit sign, was lit. On moving further, I upset the smoky compactness of the burning incense. Not even this distracted Nonno from his purposeful note-taking.
Like a juju man, he had all his wares around him, everything within reach. His books were open at specific pages. Within reach too, for consultation, there was a scatter of tiny pieces of paper, yellowed with the passage of years, scraps of scribbles piled on top of each other, memorabilia from half a century ago or more. The evening had gathered in his eyes. Though I could see him, he seemed unaware of my presence in the room.
From my vantage point directly behind him, I saw that he had written the letter K in Arabic. The K was joined to an L, then marked with the appropriate vowel-point for the sound he wished to achieve: accents of focus, of a skirmished relevance. His eyes were distant in the attitude of a man predicting final ruin. Here was I, the issue of a gang rape; here was Nonno, no longer my grandsire, working his way toward invoking a Koranic law to effect justice against men of dubious beginnings. We had lost everything precious to us. Maybe he was doing all he could to avert further disaster? To be sure, there was the odor of death in the air.
As I watched him, I pondered how different people reached into the pocketed depths of their souls. Some found firearms. Others sought the quietest recesses of their self-restraint, their reticence. And others traced the journeys of their souls in varied forms of study, now in figures and now in images, the secret keys to the mysteries of embryonic magic: the kahanah, the darbul mandal, the faal, the darbul ramal, finally the dacwa. These in their respective ways owed their origin to an inspired reading of the Holy Scriptures, the Prophet’s Tradition, and the Saints.
Nonno tabulated the lists, as he wrote them out, into columns: letters of the Arabic alphabet, each with its value of kahanah as opposed to numbers, meanings of attributes or classes of attributes, the signs of the zodiac, the planets, and the “perfumed” letters. He copied out words like “cinnamon,” a phrase like “red sandal.” He encircled the names of the elements. He enumerated the titles of the jinns, taking ages to copy the Qaypuush, the Twayush, the Danuush, and the Badyuush. He was most patient when writing the value of the Number 20 against the letter K. Just below these, he wrote the Number 111. Opposite the letter L there was the Number 30, to the right of it God’s attribute Latiif and the correlated Number 129. Now the letter M, valued at 40, abreast God’s attribute Maalik. But I lost interest in what he was doing when I noticed that he looked immensely sad, as though something was eluding him, like a blur in the distance receding the closer one got to it.
As a child I used to think of the unraveling of magic and all the related mysteries as being comparable to an extremely large manikin holding in its abdomen several more, the smallest in the second smallest, that one in the third smallest, and so on and so forth. Timir, on the day he called at my office, had argued, I now remembered, that if magic essentially had to do with one’s occult control, then taboo is magic’s correlate, magic having a secret influence, and taboo affording privileged status to the thing interdicted. Interpreted thus I asked myself if Nonno was accessing the occult world through a magic rite involving the copying of letters and numbers and their correlates.
To check, I looked at what he was doing. I saw that he had written down Kahf (sura xviii), Kaahin (sura Ixix, 42), Laxd. Below these he wrote and then underlined the phrase Kanzul Makhfi (said to be the secret treasure, Kanzul Makhfi being a term used by the Sufis for the essence and personality of God). Presently Nonno copied down a combination of mysterious numbers and letters, then organized these into tables, under columns, in fours, fives, sixes, and nines. He also drew a strange set of diagrams. Maybe these were charms, which those in the know think of highly; others doubt their significance, calling them balderdash. I didn’t know what to think. I quit the room.
