Secrets: a Novel, page 28
Even so I could hear Nonno’s voice from where I was, in the corridor. But I wasn’t certain if he was invoking the name of Sulaiman (Solomon) or beseeching aid for Kalaman. King Solomon has a revered standing among the practitioners of the science of magic, Solomon the king whom Allah helped “subject the wind blowing strongly” in order for “the devils to dive for him in the sea and to bring forth from it jewels,” Solomon upon whom Allah “bestowed knowledge in judging men” and whom Allah taught to speak “in the language of birds and other matters.”
When I looked in on him later, Nonno was turning the house upside down. He was going into areas of the house which he hadn’t set foot in for ages. He was opening and closing cupboards, he was emptying drawers and leaving things where they fell, a man in flight who wanted nothing to do either with the room or the mess. Now and then he emerged, dragging out metal cases. He broke the locks, because he had no keys to open the locks anymore. But what was he looking for? Why was he searching with so much haste, as though it were a matter of life and death to locate it?
The hammer was out, the hammer going mad, bang-bang-bang, chests falling to the floor and being picked up, the metal end of the chest echoing with the violent onslaught of the hammer. Hitting the hardest he could, Nonno missed his target: Ouch! He cursed, paused, sucked the hurt forefinger. He stared at his thumbnail, gashed, yes, but not bleeding. He forced one of the ancient padlocks open. He rummaged in the interior. Nothing. Another dramatic pause, as brief as the ephemeral nature of parental rage. Then my senses were invaded afresh by further disparate noises: cabinets being ransacked, cupboards being demolished, kicked at. Because they failed to deliver the promises memory had invested in them? Further curses, more pronounced lamentations. Had Nonno lost his mental equilibrium? Was he looking for it among the items in his chest of drawers, in his metal cases? Somalis say that, out of despair, a man may look for his camel in a milk container, hoping to find it there. “Curse the day!”
It was for my own peace of mind that I asked if I could be of any assistance. Because, knowing him, he would do his utmost not to involve me, especially if getting me involved meant possible peril.
As we stood unspeaking in the midst of the ruin he had wrought upon everything within view, I wondered if we were not witnessing, within the confines of the house, a replica of the civil disorder occurring without. Nor would he say anything to me. He might have been a man deposited by his misfortune on the outskirts of madness, thinking of the change coming around the bend in the blind spot, where his past had been. I remembered that as a young man, Nonno had replaced the letters s and b in his name Misbaax with the letters ƒ and t, a journey long and short at the same time, Misbaax, “light” in Arabic, becoming Miftaax, “a key”!
“What are you looking for with such fury?” I asked.
His voice shaking, he replied, “I am searching for the first identity card the Italian colonial authorities issued to me in my true names, mine and my father’s and my grandfather’s, in that order. Curse the day!”
“Will you please tell me why you are looking for it?”
He disregarded my question, saying, “Tragedies have a humor to them too. In fact, such was the Italian clerk’s ignorance that I am described in that first Identity Card as Inglese, apparently because I hailed from what was then the British Somaliland Protectorate. His superior officer, when signing the ID card, crosses out the word Inglese and in its place writes in his clumsy hand the word Brittanico. Other Somalis of my acquaintance had their clan names where I had Brittanico. Fancy that!”
“Why are you looking for it now?”
“I thought I might as well put my life in some order,” he said. “A man of my age, after all, might as well be prepared for all eventualities.” He looked absentmindedly at a paper he held away from himself, at trombone distance. He searched for and found a pair of reading spectacles, which he placed on the bridge of his nose. Then he picked up a second and a third paper, with Italian writing on them. From where I stood I could see what these were, title deeds to the estate, bought the Lord knows when. He was a man comparing the details of the past with the minutiae of the present ensconced in the manifold possibilities of the future.
“Take a good look at these,” he said.
My heart missed a beat, then ran off with my worries, upwards, until it came past my Adam’s apple into my mouth. There I managed to detain it, thanks to having had the foresight to bite my tongue, which now hurt.
What was I holding in my trembling hands and looking at? I had before me a single sheet the years had been unkind to, a carbon copy of a document, which Nonno’s mad search had unearthed. If I couldn’t read it, it was because I felt the approaching storm which had begun to brew in my head the moment the sheet was proffered. I was staring at a form of death. Death was arriving from a blind bend, and there was nothing I could do to prevent its coming. I did what I could to postpone its arrival, which was why I read as slowly as an analfabeta does, speaking the individual letters. My mother’s name was given as the wife in the marriage certificate, and in the space for “husband” the name Yussuf Mohamoud Isaaq was given. The document was in pedantic Italian, with renderings in flowery Arabic. It was dated sixteen months before my birth.
“How did you come by it?” I asked.
“Sholoongo left it in Rhino’s belly, years ago,” he said. “I remember retrieving it. Not wanting to read it then, for reasons I cannot fathom now, I put it away, intending to return to it. Is it possible I never bothered to scrutinize this document because I believed her to be innocent of blame? You see, I mistrusted your mother. That, in my opinion, made Sholoongo a victim of your mother’s slander.”
“What are we going to do with Sholoongo now?” I said.
“Leave her to me,” he suggested. “I’ll deal with her.”
All of a sudden I collapsed into a chair between one bilious moment and another. When my eyes encountered Nonno’s, I saw death being forecast, death being anticipated, I saw death stalking the entire country, pursuing it with the determination of an elephant gone amok.
“There are many myths,” Nonno said, “myths bestowing unparalleled importance on the idea of motherhood, the certainty of mothers.” He paused. “The best illustration I can think of is the Somali parable about the Milky Way. Do you know it?”
“The Milky Way myth?”
“An ingrate son beats his mother to near death,” said Nonno, narrating the parable, “and then, as though meaning to finish her off, pulls her along a rocky surface in the scorching heat of noon. The woman is badly hurt, her skin breaks, bleeds, her bones ache, she faints. Heartlessly cruel, the young fellow drags her until she is a dead weight, a lifeless being bearing no resemblance to herself alive. The woman’s sister, his maternal aunt, asks that he allow her to give the woman a decent burial. Pleading, the aunt looks up at the heavens and invokes God’s sense of justice. The son won’t hear of it, saying she is food fit for vultures.
“Again his aunt pleads, and again she looks up at the heavens as she speaks. The sky darkens with clouds, there is unseasonal thunder, there is lightning. The son is struck with epilepsy. He dies an agonizing death, in horrific misery and loneliness, and his corpse is dragged across the heavens. We say that the act is etched on the body of the sky in purgatorial remembrance of all the mothers who suffer unkindnesses meted out to them by their offspring.”
Silent, his gaze filled to bursting with tears.
I spoke the words with the deliberateness of a sadhu speaking his mantra. “Fathers matter not. Mothers matter a lot. Fathers matter not. Mothers matter a lot.”
Nonno closed and opened his eyes to the rhythm of the spoken mantra. His eyes were awash not so much with lachrymose sadness as with sightlessness. Now he held his breath in terrifying suspense, perhaps waiting for the well of his eyes to be drained of the fluid that was blinding him. Eager to engage my attention, he stood still, making sure I heard every single word. He wiped away the moisture from his cheeks.
“Motherhood,” he said, “is the off-and-on light in the darkness of night, a firefly in joyous dizziness and rejoicing, now here, now there, and everywhere. Our problem as a society is that we pay mothers only lip service, nothing else. In fact, the crisis that is coming to a head in the shape of civil strife would not be breaking on us if we’d offered women-as-mothers their due worth, respect and affection, a brightness celebrating motherhood, a monument erected in worship of women.”
Suddenly like a tropical night his eyes dimmed. Then with equal abruptness, as if the veil of darkness had been lifted, his face opened up, vistas of historico-theological awareness. As though inspired with atavistic irrationality, he rose to his feet and went around and around, repeating again and again, “Fathers matter not. Mothers matter a lot!” He looked every bit his age now. He had grown afternoon shadows under his morning-gray eyes. It seemed to me as if he were planning death, the removal of riffraff dirt. He blinked with the nervous tension of an exhausted cat.
Tea. More tea. Hot stuff too.
In the meanwhile we roamed in our respective imaginations. We wandered in a mythical territory peopled by an Adam without parents, an Eve without a mother, a Jesus without a father. We talked of miracle babies born to beings from the animal realm. We invoked the authority of the moon, which Egyptian priests of old referred to as the Mother of the Universe. We recalled how, in India, a girl-child having her first monthly is described as bearing a flower.
My wanderlust led me further afield. I came upon Yaqut, named for a highly respected Islamic theologian, who entertained a most vivacious interest in inanimate things. My wanderings led me to Damac, a woman with the sting of a bee, the foresight and the determination of a honeyguide. Happy, her natural kindness is overwhelming, as is that of a contented woman. We tried to avoid Sholoongo, but she wouldn’t be avoided, insisting that she too was a woman, even if unfulfilled. I didn’t know what to think of her, having none of the healing powers of a shaman!
Then there was a long silence. But, restless, I couldn’t bear the quietness, especially after spotting Nonno’s sorrow in the unfocused quality of his look. Maybe I was quoting someone, for I said, “Like life, every story has logic. I wonder, does death have a rationale? The life of a young brute, dragging his mother dead across rocky footpaths, is emblematically turned into a parable. The brow of the heavens is marked with his shame.”
He said, “The dead, we are told, hear nothing.”
“Do the living hear anything?” I asked. “Did the young fool?”
“The living listen to stories, which they tell to others in the hope of weaving strands of their personalities into the mysteries of the tale.”
I asked myself if I should interpret his statement as an indication of his preparedness to let go, after putting his life in some order. I took a gentle grip of his large hand in my small one and tightened my clasp around his fingers. I said, “What about the dying?”
“If they are lucky,” he said, “the dying are so attuned to what is happening that they can hear the sound of a cricket, or a mosquito buzzing in their ear. Like your grandmother. We had lain side by side all day, she and I, alone in our bedroom. Not only was she conscious that she would be dying that day, but she could have specified when she would expire.”
I was very glad I was still his grandson, and was moved when he talked of my grandmother, meaning his late wife, the mother of Yaqut. Nonno was a certainty
I said, “Do you know when you are to let go in advance, and will you?”
“The day that I have organized my ragtag of ideas into some order, I will let go,” he said. “I’ve lived for an eternity of years. Because of this I have so many loose threads to tie together into a neater shape. I can’t tell how much time I require.”
He then looked about himself, maybe wondering why he was where he was. One moment he had the expression of a man too tired to invest energy in this day-to-day living; the next moment he was a visitor saying his good-byes but who wasn’t gone. Everything he did hinted at the contradiction: his posture, the way he held his body a little off his chair, as if he might get up at any instant, leave, and let go. Besides, it was taking me a long time to get used to the idea of a nonsmoking Nonno, an entity as outré as a naked man in a mosque. Bizarrely I thought of pleading with him to go back to the habit of smoking, light one and puff on it, let the smoke curl up, a chimney of cigarettes held filter tip to filter tip. What the hell!
Two men, both strong and wide-shouldered, were preceded into the room by their own shadows. Their shadows were preceded in equal measure by their whispers. Nonno welcomed the two men in.
One of them, Yarow, the son of the late Fidow, had given his hair a crew-cut look, as if in haste. The other man, who would remain nameless to me, had on a pair of hand-me-down shorts and a dirty T-shirt with a huge tear in the back. He was all muscle, veins rolling snakelike when he moved. I didn’t know who he was. Even so, he bore a certain physical resemblance to my idea of a thug. He had a roughness to his manners, an uncouthness to his tongue. He looked ruthless, sadistic, sporting a set of artificial front teeth of the cheapest metal. He had the habit of grinning. When he did so, it seemed as if his entire face stood back from the rest of him. Then you spotted the wryness of his grimace. You knew he was there for an extrajudicial purpose.
No one said anything about murder. And yet I felt the word “death” hanging in the air. Had Yarow Fidow’s companion been assigned to murder Gacme-xume, plain and simple? All his fee paid in advance, in cash, no questions entertained?
Yarow Fidow’s features were etched with a look of worried expectancy. He listened to Nonno as the old man pontificated on a point of detail. Then he turned to his companion and gave a shortened version of what he had heard. Then he looked again at Nonno, who spoke some more, this time offering directions. Because much of their conversation was in soft whispers, I suspected that he was giving them instructions to lead them to where the supposed victim lived. You might have thought, from the way he gesticulated, that he was taking them from a projected scene of death to a part of the woods where the corpse might be safely hidden. I caught the name of the victim — an alias, to be precise: Hangaroole? Translated, the alias meant Arachnida. I was now sure they were talking about Gacme-xume.
It had been agreed that I would stay out of Nonno’s and Yarow Fidow’s arrangements, that I would withdraw into the privileged privacy of my room while they held their conference within a few feet of me. For the sake of pretense I even pushed the door to my room shut against the possibility of anyone suspecting that I was overhearing their talk.
A tremor had informed my voice as I said to Yarow, “My condolence, Yarow!” We shook hands. He was at least fifteen years my senior, as private a man as his father had been gregarious. I liked him. We got on well, maybe because we seldom met. After my words of commiseration, I hardly knew what to say to him, on account of the deadpan expression on his face.
He mumbled his thanks, adding, “We’ll all die sooner or later.” Then Nonno, Yarow, and the unnamed man exchanged a quiet look. I am sure we all thought about Gacme-xume in our different ways.
Nonno said to Yarow, “You know what you’re expected to do?”
Both men nodded.
To give them more privacy, I went outside for a few minutes, confident that Nonno and the two men would discuss the salient details while I was out of their hearing. Just in case. We were preparing ourselves for the possibility of a murder charge. The old man pointed out, in a whisper, that they oughtn’t to let me hear either of them mention the name of the victim. All hush. And then boom, bang, and dead. Whereas I, his legatee and grandson, would pretend not be privy to any of this. In a sense the whole thing derived its origin from Nonno’s wish to “organize his ragtag of ideas into some order” before letting go. If something went terribly awry, the old man would take the full blame. He was prepared to hang. “Compare your long years ahead of you to mine, which are as short as a midday shadow, compact, curled up at one’s feet,” he explained.
To make his communion with Yarow and his companion less awkward, Nonno switched off almost all the lights in the area of their hush-hush operation. They stood in the dimness of the outer porch, with two or three small yellow and red bulbs. The dim yellow light was meant to discourage mosquitoes from coming into the area at all.
While listening for them to go away I imagined all sorts of scenarios. In one, Nonno was betrayed by Fidow’s son. In another, the foreign-looking thug struck a deal with his supposed victim, who came to us to take his vengeance. All that night I would have in my vision two bones crossed, signs indicating danger, death.
Suddenly nervous, Yarow and his companion were eager to leave. Neither said anything to me as they walked past my door, although they knew that I was there. When I last set eyes on my mother, she too was planning somebody’s murder. Did I begin in death, in the thought of a man fleeing it, coming south and changing his name? Then deciding not only that his dying-time had arrived but that others must come with him too? Did I start in death, in my mother planning to kill every single one of the thugs who gang-raped her?
Yarow said good-night to Nonno. The other man did not say anything at all. Then I heard their footsteps. These receded and then totally faded as they walked away. The ignition of Yarow’s car failed to catch, the engine refusing to turn over.
I thought it odd that Yarow’s companion didn’t look Somali. Was he a foreigner who had come to this country following Fidow’s death, on instructions from his Kenyan masters, to look into Yarow’s father’s encounter with an elephant of misfortune and miscalculation?
After many attempts the car started.
The door was let go. It shut on Nonno’s silence.
A dust storm: whirly, powerful, life-endangering.
Something is falling, a coin dropping into a tin can. For an instant the world is reduced to a tingly, gentle twinkle of two pieces of metal touching. I see fingerprints of complicity, I see ample evidence of a crime perpetrated, I spy traces of proof. In my paranoia, I imagine court cases. I think of runaway scandals, my name in the newspapers, Nonno’s too, my mother being mentioned. I stare at the grooves, the turns, the curves in the prints, as if hoping to read therein the identity of the person to whose hand the prints belong. Prints are a mystery to those who know not how to decipher them.
