Secrets: a Novel, page 3
The benefits I gained from being associated with Timir were of doubtful value. Even so, his kind interventions helped prevent Sholoongo from interfering with my mother’s unconscious. But then at the very time when my parents were at their most relaxed, Nonno advised caution, “because volcanoes, although they may not be active, are never extinct. For they explode, and turn into deadly lakes of lava.”
Timir would have his eruptions. I never saw anyone looking as pleased with himself as he did on the very instant of his final coming. He took his eruptions as seriously as his father did the smoking of his water pipe, rituals ensuring their unflagging vitality. Timir beat his five when dejected, gave himself a dry quickie when under stress. He admitted to having done it with other boys before, and to having made love to older women, some of them prostitutes. But he argued that there was nothing as enjoyable as coming in your hand with a little help from the leaves of a gob tree. Only once did I join him in chewing a palmful of leaves, and although we exploded together, my eruption wasn’t as satiating as when I had an escapade with Sholoongo. Even though I never dared ask either of them, I did wonder if he and Sholoongo had had it off too.
To find out I spent a night at their place.
Tense, I stayed awake for much of the night, feeling drowsy just before dawn. I am a light sleeper and remember stirring in my half sleep and sitting bolt upright when someone walked past my bed. Dawn hadn’t quite broken, nor had I heard the muezzin waking up the faithful Muslims to their duty. Madoobe, their old man, went out of the room, his movements quiet as the night. I presumed he rounded the hut to make water.
Unable to contain the upsurge of my curiosity, because no sound issued from him for a long, long time, I got out of bed and out of the room, and searched anxiously for any change in the general makeup of my surroundings. Stiff with attentiveness and noticeably uncomfortable, I relaxed only when I saw Madoobe standing ebony dark in the near distance. He was stark naked. He had in his hand an object resembling a wand with which he was rubbing his back, up and down, up and down.
To see better, I moved closer, half crawling on my haunches. But I frightened one of the cows, which, assuming my posture to be threatening, dug its hoofs into the ground with menacing repetitiveness, its horns at the ready, ears rigid from fear, like an angry elephant’s. I ceased moving, and remained in a half-bent position for some time before getting up to show my two-legged nature. The cow then lost interest and turned its back on me.
And where was Madoobe? What was he up to?
He dipped the wand in a metal pail which I presumed to be full of water, and as before rubbed the stick between his shoulder blades. He repeated the same process several times and then finally walked away from the pail. Now his nakedness was prominent with an erection. In a moment he was standing behind a heifer, saying something, his voice even. The nearer I got to him and the young cow, the clearer his voice was, only I couldn’t decipher his words, maybe because he was speaking to the cow in a coded tongue, comparable to children’s private babble. Was he appeasing the cow’s beastly instincts by talking to her in a secret language?
A little later and after a lengthy invocation, he inserted his erection in the heifer, still talking but also breathing hard. I might have been listening to a man and a woman making love, for the cow was muttering something too. When at last he came, Madoobe returned to where he had left the metal pail, to wash. He kept uttering a louder salvo in a secret tongue.
A few days later I broached the subject with inordinate caution. I didn’t expect a windfall confession, and was surprised to be told that I had misunderstood the symbolic nature of a ritual involving Madoobe and what I took to be a heifer. After all the cow wasn’t a cow.
“No?”
“It was a cow,” Sholoongo said, “whom my father has decided to domesticate, that’s to say, take as his wife.”
A couple of days later, Madoobe brought home a young bride.
When I pressed for a more acceptable explanation of how a cow metamorphosed into a woman and the woman became a cow, Sholoongo took refuge in prevarications. But I wouldn’t let go, insisting that she tell me more. To dissuade me from pursuing the matter any further, she told me a folktale her father had learnt from a Nigerian fellow seaman.
In the tale a hunter stumbles on a skull while chasing game, and exclaims aloud, more to himself than to anyone else, “I wonder how this skull got here.” To his surprise, the skull talks. “Beware of divulging secrets, because that is what got me where I am, dead.”
Confused, the hunter returns to his village to share his worries with his wife and friends. Eventually the king hears of the hunter’s story and asks to be taken to the talking skull. But the skull won’t respond either to the king’s queries or to the hunter’s appeals. Put out by what has occurred, the king orders that the hunter’s head be cut off right there and then, and that it be left there, unburied. When the king and his men are departed, the skull asks the hunter, who is dead now, what got him there. His unburied head replies, “Divulging secrets got me here, dead.”
Part One
Chapter One
I felt there was something afoot as soon as I opened the door to my apartment, something to do with an alien aroma. I had scarcely crossed the threshold when a pageant of odors invaded my senses, odors reminding me of Taj, the Ethiopian honey-beer. Also I was struck by the odd presence in the flat of a fly, whose helicopterlike drone taxed my frail nerves.
An instant later I encountered the startled expression on the face of my elderly housekeeper, who, meeting me in the shadowed halflight of the corridor, placed her forefinger close to her lips in an effort to hush me. But what was she doing this for? I was a bachelor, I lived alone, I had no children and, so far as I knew, no guests. Don’t ask me why, but the thought uppermost in my mind as I stared at Lambar was to run a comb through my unkempt hair, suspecting that, in any case, the clue to this urge lay elsewhere, something to do with the pectinal nature of a number of matters coming to a head. My housekeeper Lambar whispered as she approached, “Why didn’t you warn me of your visitor?” I felt there was a touch of blame in the tone of her voice.
It was quite some time before I knew what to say. In the meantime I heard the drawn-out cooing of the telephone ringing with the quality of a homing pigeon calling to one of its own. Temporarily nonplused, I went past my housekeeper in inelegant haste to answer the phone, and as I did so bumped against two chairs placed upside down. In all the years that she had worked for me this was first time I had returned home to find her job undone to my full satisfaction. From what I could see, it seemed she had not finished mopping the floors. With my mind opening a parenthesis, which housed both a thesis and a counterthesis, I reached the telephone in its last breath, just before it died. I panted “Pronto?” and waited, convinced that I had arrived too late.
In the inventory of voices stored in my memory I couldn’t for the life of me place my mother’s, which was rather an odd thing to happen. But there was something agate-hard about her voice, and that wasn’t how I remembered it. “Are you all right, Kalaman?” she said.
Before I was conscious of it, I had gained entry into another universe and there was no turning back: my mother’s confederacy of demands, her legion of requests, of pleas, her do-be-carefuls, on account of the possible violence on a large scale, as she predicted the federations of clan families taking on one another. She could date the day when she became certain that there would be civil strife in Somalia. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, right in the heart of Mogadiscio. She was driving her pickup and, it being a hot day, had all the windows down. She stopped at a traffic light, waiting for the green to come after the yellow. Before she knew it, she had two gunmen in civilian clothes in the cab of the pickup, one of them brandishing a revolver and asking her to stop the vehicle, get out, and hand over the keys. She did no such thing. She drove on and on and on, faster and faster, confident that one or the other of them would get dizzy and plead for her to let them go. In fact that was how she saved her vehicle and her life. When asked how she thought of doing what she did, she simply responded, “The man’s accent told me he was not familiar with cars and how they worked, and would be frightened of speed.”
Already there had been intimations of a civil war erupting and of civic society collapsing into total anarchy. But whereas many of us thought these were early days yet, my mother held the view that we were approaching a collapse, what with the rumors reaching us that armed vigilantes were in the outskirts of Mogadiscio. It was as if someone had sold an idea of doom to her and she bought it as offered, wholesale. And she started to acquire all manner of weapons, preparing herself and her family for the worst. My mother did not wish our family to be caught by surprise, following the inhumane destruction caused to the people and property in the northern regions. The second largest city of the land was bombed by Siyad’s regime, its residents massacred, almost all its buildings razed to the ground. From the day we received the news of the massacre, my mother remained on edge, a suitcase packed, and herself ready to depart at short notice. She would call me every now and then on the phone and inquire as to my preparedness for the approaching collapse. So what did she want today?
“Why do you never return my calls?” my mother said.
“I was going to come and see you,” I lied.
Did she sense the proverbial limp in my walk: proverbial as the Somali adage in which it is said that a lie has a lame leg, truth a healthy one. I would have been the first to concede that my voice was wanting in firmness, its quality unsteady, that it was comparable to a limp in one’s gait.
“Why do you lie to your mother?” she asked.
“Where are you?” I said.
“You should be ashamed of yourself, lying!” she said.
I derived comfort from remembering the proverbial black pot with the additional spout which, being tongued, called the other kettle all kinds of mean names. I said, “Mother, you have no reason to accuse me of wrongdoing. Because when you rang me at the office three or four times earlier today, I was busy with clients with whom I was tying the loose ends of a contract worth a lot of money to the firm.”
“Are you still planning to take a week’s holiday?”
If my mother approved of my planned trip to Nairobi, it was because she hoped that once I was out of the country, I might decide not to return to Mogadiscio. She urged me often enough to leave, suspecting that the civil strife might start any day. I kept postponing my date of departure, giving my workload at my computer business as the reason.
“I am planning to go, but I haven’t a date yet,” I said.
“Is anyone going with you?” she asked.
The question wrong-footed me. “I’m not decided. Why?”
I could hear a touch of hurt feeling in her voice as she said, “There you are, my thirty-three-year-old son Kalaman. In spite of your grown years, you have never stopped lying through the gaps of your teeth, cozy as a whirl of wind entering a keyhole.”
We say, in Somali, that you don’t ask someone whom you know to tell you about themselves. I knew where my mother was coming from. Maybe by calling me a liar she hoped to club me into a tight corner, so I would tell her everything she wanted me to, no secret withheld. I knew what she would do if her strategy did not produce a satisfactory result: appeal to my sense of filial loyalty.
She said, “I know you’re not going away alone.”
“I wish you wouldn’t provoke me,” I said.
Having completely forgotten about the alien aroma which greeted my senses upon my reentering my apartment, and having for the time shelved away my housekeeper’s worries somewhere, I made myself as comfortable as I could under the circumstances. But then Lambar entered my peripheral vision and I began to see myself as a victim of my women’s proclivities, of their wish to look after me better than I did myself.
“Who are you going with?” my mother said.
“Do you never tire, Mother?”
“How could I tire thinking of you?”
My housekeeper was hanging about me too, wanting to tell me something. I wondered if what she had to say might have any bearing on my conversation with my mother.
“I’d hate to hear about your news from a third party!”
My mother had a way of denigrating my women, whom she turned into a subject worthy of being celebrated in a limerick. Not that she was religious, but she didn’t approve of seeing me with a woman I had no intention of taking as my lawful wife, proof enough that I intended not to offer her a grandchild. When she liked one of them, the poetics of her enthusiasm would entice her into a rapturous intensity. The words Give me a child were starting to haunt me. And in my memory I am a child and am requesting that my parents Give me a sibling! The words may have changed, possibly the speakers too; it wasn’t I repeating the give-me plea, it was now my mother, who had never given me a sibling. Presently things were so quiet I thought my mother had hung up on me.
“Mother, are you there?”
“I am here, at your maternal beck and call,” she chanted.
I had asked Nonno if he knew what caused my mother’s exuberances. He said, “People with secrets have such an overabundance of energy for which they must find an outlet. My suspicion is that your mother talks unceasingly to hide her worries, whereas your father’s silence is a tunnel in which he finds solace.”
And then all of a sudden my nose felt clogged with the sweet scent of as pure a potful of honey as you were likely to find anywhere. Meanwhile my mother spoke on and on. And Lambar’s shadow spread itself right before me, hovering in the attitude of a vulture in the vicinity of an abattoir.
“You’re not getting married, Kalaman, are you, my darling?”
“Not that I know of. What makes you ask?”
“For several nights now I’ve been having dreams in which you get married. I just thought I should ask.”
“You hear of all-out war between the autocrat’s army and the militias wanting to overthrow his regime,” I said, “and you have night visions which have to do with the impending disaster. I am thinking that these nightmares are brought about by an individual’s private, un-thought-through reaction to a major crisis which is likely to disrupt the life of the whole society.”
“In one of the dreams,” she continued, “you are a mere child in every aspect save the fact that you invite us to your wedding, but your wife-to-be stands you up. In last night’s dream, you slash open a vein of your middle finger and make a pledge of trust with your partner, a woman whose face bears a striking resemblance to Xusna, once your favorite pet, the vervet monkey.” She paused. “You remember Xusna the monkey, don’t you?”
“How could I forget!”
“But the weirdest thing is that Sholoongo’s name is repeated by everyone I talk to in all these dreams. Have you any idea where in the world she is or what she is up to?”
“No,” I said and, discerning the quiet movements of a short afternoon’s shadow, which I assigned to Lambar, I resorted to the strategy of appeasement. I said, “I’ll come and see you soon, because I must go now.”
I held the dead receiver in my hands, not certain who hung up first. Anyhow, my eyes were misted over with a dejection of spirit. I was contemplating the idea of ringing her back, if only to apologize to her, when my entire world became all smells: putrid invasions of undomesticated odors, alien scents everywhere in the apartment, as if a cat had brought in a mouse and abandoned it, the rodent rotting under the sofa or the kitchen sink.
I hoped Lambar would explain the origin of the odor.
I found Lambar sitting in a huddle at the dining table in the kitchen, wrapped up in lengths of sorrow. She got up when I entered, her shadow as tight as a mean person’s fist. I said, “I’m sorry, but did you mention something about a guest I hadn’t warned you about?”
I occupied a first-floor two-bedroom apartment in one of Mogadiscio’s most sought-after residential zones, and seldom entertained anyone claiming to be from either side of my parents’ extended families, clansmen and clanswomen whose demands would range from being put up and fed for months to having their medical and their children’s school bills footed. I had no time for them and didn’t hesitate to show them the door. I would remind them that I was no member of a clan, that I was a professional. I had never had any of them come and stay as my guests, fearing what their nimble fingers might remove between the time you went into the shower and the moment you got out. To me they were pickpockets who arrived empty-handed but whose departures were as lucrative as corruption money. And social blackmail was their ploy!
“I have no idea how to explain,” Lambar now said.
She was in her early fifties, and had been with my parents for years before coming to work for me. She had known me since my early teens, and I had always been impressed with her orderliness, her diligence, and her self-pride. She was from the River People, two villages farther down the Shabelle from Nonno’s estate, and had a bedridden husband whose condition had remained unaltered until his death several years ago. And although she received full pay, she worked for me three half days, mopping the floors once a week, dealing with my laundry likewise, and preparing the traditional specialties cooked in the lean-to kitchen in my backyard. We got on very well, Lambar and I, and I loved her cooking, even if it was a bit too oily, with the vegetables overdone to the point of death.
When she didn’t speak, I asked, “What gender is my guest?”
Her lips moved. If they managed to formulate the faintest of sounds, I didn’t hear what she said. Lip reading is as difficult as deciphering hand signs drawn in the air. I am good at neither. I requested that she repeat what she had said. It took some time before I worked out that I had a female guest, who was not Talaado, my current woman-friend, whom, in any case, Lambar knew only too well. What’s more, my guest had apparently let herself in, with her own key.
We were becoming more tense by the second, especially because Lambar was having difficulty getting her words out. I wished I knew, and learnt soon, what was causing so much discomfiture. Now we were nearly touching, and as I listened to her halty breathing, almost that of an asthmatic, it occurred to me that I was inhaling an odd mixture of odors with histamine caution, my nostrils gradually flaring, my lungs turning into a pair of bellows in expansive flames. I stood rock still, my head inclined backwards, as I held back a sneeze. Whereupon Lambar sneezed. This inspired me with an uncanny feeling. I blessed her. A moment passed, then another. Then the alien smell insinuated itself again and started to interfere with my thoughts.
