Secrets: a Novel, page 4
“Where is she, then?” I asked. “My guest!”
Not a word out of her. She was the darkness of a tropical night filling one’s eyes with dusky obliteration, her eyes wide open but unseeing. For an instant I took hold of the lower portion of her bony elbow in the attitude of a drowning person grabbing a watery foam, only to let go of her arm abruptly, all the more because I couldn’t work out the meaning of the scent, or if my guest had something to do with it. We were now in the part of the flat which received more sunlight (how we got there I had no idea), the afternoon’s brightness shining in and the contagious allergy of worry abating temporarily.
“Did you see her come in?” I asked.
“I didn’t let her in, and didn’t see her enter either, I swear.” And the brown of her eyes became a shade paler, as if she had sighted an ethereal being.
“You must have been out of the flat when she got in?”
“I was in,” she said, “from when I came in, working.”
In my impatience, I walked away from her toward the corner room where I presumed my visitor to be, some poor clanswoman from some famine-stricken region of the land, out to make proprietorial demands of some kind. If I stopped in my tracks, it was because I thought of other possibilities, such as that the woman might be not a relative but a former lover, come to rekindle a romance that was dead.
Lambar lowered the volume of her voice to a near whisper as she came closer. “I thought you supplied her with a key. Not that I heard her enter, I repeat. But anyway,” she said, and then lifted her shoulders in a meaningless way. I knew from previous experience that she was no good at lying or hiding her fear.
“You insist you were here all the time?”
“I was engrossed in mopping and other chores and then she was here.” As if I failed to follow her meaning, she corrected herself by looking in the general direction of the corner room, and she rephrased it thus: “Or rather she was there between one instant and the next.” She invested a variety of significances in the word “there,” a concatenation of linked associations with space, time, and place too. With her arms wide apart you might have thought that she had at that very instant brought the cosmos into being, and along with it a sense of mystery and an attendant enigma.
Lambar’s pupils were like the eyes of needles, as if the sun shaft joined them with the dark threads of my imagination, in and out, fast as a sunbird swooping across a pond. I stood right in the center of an open parenthesis, in a time without past or present or future. Then I felt something scratchily pulling at the hairs inside my nostrils, and sneezed so loud the world shook on its stilts. My nose was runny with mucus, my lips were wet with saliva and the palms of my hands moist with a motley of discharges; I thought, what histamine inelegance!
“It could be that I hallucinated,” she said.
As I dried my hands, mouth, and nose with a handkerchief, her lips stirred. This put me in mind of a bird frightened in its sleep. An instant later Lambar’s eyes fluttered with the pained slowness of a fledgling lacking one of its wings but attempting to fly. Lowering her whole body into a crouched position, she now inserted her head in the embrace of a bracket which she formed out of her own hands. Was she fearful that I might hit her? I took a step away from her.
“Wait, Kalaman, wait,” Lambar said.
When I turned around, Lambar’s eyes flickered like those of an animal vaguely conscious of approaching peril. “Be very careful,” she advised.
A dangerous woman? An armed woman from one of the other clan, the enemy clan — how stupid can you get? — ready to make me do her bidding, prepared to put a gun to my forehead, in my own apartment and in broad daylight, to order me to empty my bank savings, make me sign on the dotted blood line, arguing my clan had been robbing hers blind for centuries? (My mother would say, “Serve you right,” and in an I-told-you-so wisecrack after the fact, she would point to the animalness of these people!) Surely she couldn’t belong to one of the militia groups using women to infiltrate the dictator’s corrupt citadel? If so, why me?
Not only could I discern a change overcoming me, but a sudden feeling of fear was beginning to play all manner of tricks on my perception. I was seeing a cow in the semblance of a woman; I was seeing a woman in the ethereal flimsiness of a ghost which entered my apartment, in broad daylight, without being heard, seen, or suspected by Lambar. Suddenly I knew who my visitor was.
When I put it to Lambar, she appeared to support my thesis. She said, “Your visitor has the quiet, confident look of someone who has chosen to be, if you follow my meaning. It was as though she chose to be a woman today, but that she could as well have been a man in another life, or a ghost or a goat.”
And no sooner had her gaze steadied itself as burning wicks do after the breeze has ceased blowing than she added, “When I last went in, she was sitting quietly, head bent over a piece of paper, drawing ugly things.”
There was no need to engage in a whispered conference anymore: my guest’s composite face called on my consciousness in bursts bright as shafts of lightning, in fits and spasms intimidating as doors opening in the squeaky dark of a Hitchcock horror film.
“Please ask her to join me for lunch,” I said to Lambar, who moved to do just that, but hesitantly, as if struck with fresh fear. “After that,” I went on, “you may leave us alone. We can set the table and serve ourselves.”
My housekeeper stared at me in disbelief.
“I won’t be needing your services for several weeks,” I said, “so I suggest you see my assistant at the office, for your pay. She has instructions to pay you a full month’s salary and bonus.”
For the first time since entering my employ, Lambar was on the verge of disobeying my command. I saw this behavior as a most inauspicious omen, and I got very close to unsaying all I had said.
She pleaded with me, “Let me be here, please!”
“Do as I say,” I ordered.
“Let me feed her with my own trusted hands,” she said.
Firm, I said, “Please. Leave!”
Sholoongo had the smell of grass freshly cut, the odor of spring. She had the look of a cow smeared with its runny waste, green as the season is wet. This sent a shiver of hirsute allergy up my nostrils, and my hay fever was back. I was utterly miserable, I was short of breath and incapable of relaxing enough to let go of my sneeze. And the more I searched for something to say, the more the pollen count of my anxiety increased and along with it my sense of agony, my general discomfort. I stared helplessly at her, thinking that, unlike the nails on the fingers of the dead, Sholoongo hadn’t grown an inch taller in the twenty-odd years since I last set my eyes on her. But she was heavier in the chest, like a woman meant to bear many children; her hips had widened too, as if she were intended to carry a roomful of them. Yet I deduced, the Lord knows how, that she hadn’t borne a single child. Broad-featured, not bad-looking, but full of stir, Sholoongo had an inexplicable vitality. But she had too short a neck for a human, more like a bird’s and just as agitated, forever moving back and forth, up and down, perhaps tracing mystical sevens, or else tying the knots of eights, or drawing the top loop of a nine.
She had a spot of brown stain on the tip of her nose. Also she had a startled stare as she returned my fixed gaze. She might have been a ratel, disturbed in the act of digging up recently interred carrion. I wrinkled my forehead with concern, part of me objecting to an unfair judgment of a woman I hadn’t set eyes on for almost twenty years. Just because my mother distrusted her didn’t mean that she was all evil. I decided to take the initiative myself, so as not to allow her to draw circles around me, or to dominate the conversation.
I said, “Would you like a glass of tamarind juice, chilled?” My tongue rubbed itself against my fricative palate without stumbling on any of the consonants. But my sense of triumph didn’t last long, for I sneezed several times and in quick succession soon after speaking. She showered no blessings on me. In fact she looked away as if she might have been partly to blame. Even so, I led her into the kitchen and poured out a generous glass of tamarind juice and passed it to her. She received the drink with both hands and sat down at the table. I was thinking about how I might disown the common past of our youth, when I sneezed with allergic inevitability.
She took a sip of her tamarind juice, the look in her eyes as distant as someone savoring an ancient memory in the flavor of a drink. I had the suspicion that for an unguarded moment she wore an impish grin, but her tone was matter-of-fact as she said, “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”
Her voice had become harder, I thought, more like my mother’s. It had a metallic edge to it, as if somewhere inside it half a razor blade had been buried. I dreaded to imagine what sparks my mother’s and Sholoongo’s head-on collision would produce when the sharp corners of Sholoongo’s blade encountered my mother’s, which was hard as a pebble. I sneezed yet again.
“I hope you’re not allergic to lice,” she said.
I had heard it said that the most efficient way to stop people hiccuping is to shock them. Which explained why the absurd question — was I allergic to lice? — had a salutary effect on me. My nose was suddenly cleared of its itchy irritability. “Why ask if I am allergic to lice?”
“Because I am carrying a couple on my person,” she said, sitting rather solidly in the squat posture of a pigeon cooing. There was no twitch in her anywhere, she was all seriousness.
With curiosity outweighing my discretion, I said, “But pray, where on your person are you carrying the lice, and why?” I might have been a U.S. customs officer inquiring if she had brought along with her some maggot-infested fruit from across the oceans.
“Don’t be a bore,” she said, leaning away, all shakara mystery. She didn’t seem likely to divulge where on her person she had hidden the lice, nor give the reason why.
My mother endowed me with an overwrought sensibility. In other words, I tend to infer that evasion is tantamount to telling lies, or hiding a secret. “I don’t believe you,” I said. But all she did was smile.
Annoyed, my head was abuzz with memories born of a moment being relived, these fraternizing with other remembrances from a remote past. I rummaged through the recesses of these recollections. Too embarrassed to recall them, I hoped nobody would ever get to know what Sholoongo and I had been through together, childhood mischiefs which were bound to put me to utter shame. Blood oaths there were, the veins of fingers cut, flints used, vows taken, till-death-pull-usasunder promises made. Put it down to a sense of guilt weighing on my conscience, but the truth was I felt trapped in a universe of knots, which the more I tried to undo, the more the clove hitches loosened up and the more the reef knots and the bowlines got more and more entangled.
“Is Fidow still alive?” she said.
I nodded my head lamely.
She drank her tamarind juice in small draughts, as I saw visions of the world tumbling around my ears, and of me falling, collapsing, and taking along with me Nonno, my parents, perhaps Fidow too. Imagine: a woman whose name hadn’t crossed my mind or lips for years turns up in my mother’s dreams, then shows up in my apartment into which she lets herself. My mother rings, asking if I have any idea where she might be. Now she is here, in my kitchen, a real blood-and-bones irritation. I dreaded to think what a novelist might say if a mere creature, and a weakling character at that, were to challenge his powers of invention!
“Is this all the welcome I’m going to get,” she said, “a glass of oversugared tamarind juice, just that, no hug, no kisses, nothing but questions and dead-end stares?”
I didn’t answer her for fear that my voice might sound hoarse, and didn’t move, wondering if my manner would strike her as intimidated. I countered by regarding her with malice. She stared back at me with the self-confidence of a woman in whose eyes the majesty of an afternoon sun has found a residence.
“How did you come in?” I asked.
Her lips burst into a daredevil bud of a smile. “Did you expect me to use a back entrance, as if I were the day’s hired help or something? How did I come in? The cheek of it!”
“My housekeeper says she didn’t let you in.”
A fresh fit of panic took a tighter grip of me, the moment the words left my lips. And for some reason I was remembering a murder committed, Nonno fleeing southwards, away from his birthplace in the city of Berbera, then in the British Somaliland Protectorate. He ended up in Afgoi of all places, to don a new identity and emerge into an altered perspective. Why on earth was this woman making me revisit in memory some of the things I had clean forgotten? There was no way of knowing what her visit might bring forth, what mysteries it might unravel, what manner of disastrous debates it might generate between myself and my mother on the one hand, and between Talaado, the woman I was seeing, and myself on the other. In other words, there was no telling how much havoc Sholoongo would cause.
“You have no idea,” she said, “how much the blood in my forefinger’s veins thrilled at the thought of touching yours after so many years. You shock me. Because all you seem to be interested in are mere mundanities: how I managed to enter your apartment, or why I was carrying lice on my person, or where. Have you forgotten how to think big? Are you fearful stiff of what the impending disasters might do to your lifestyle, your clan pitted against mine? Is this uppermost in your mind?”
Reduced to a flutter, I stared tongue-tied and in dumbfounded frustration. Doors cracked open in my head and then just as suddenly were slammed shut with a loud thud, as I abandoned the attempt to speak in self-defense.
Now she flung a question at me. “How’s Nonno?”
“He is like a well-tuned drum, his skin still tight on his body,” I said. “He looks a great deal younger than eighty-three, and going stronger, with a great deal of spring in his gait.”
“And your father?”
“Attending to a world in messy disrepair.”
“I won’t ask about your mother,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Perhaps you can offer me a stronger drink?” she replied.
I have no idea why, but as well as thinking of Chinese rice-names, I mouthed the French expression nom de lait, remembering that just before naming me Kalaman, Nonno had wet my lips with a drip of tamarind drink. Only afterwards did my mother breast-feed me. “What stronger drink would you like to have?”
“Two fingers of any available liquor,” she said.
As I moved toward the drink cabinet, I wondered if Sholoongo had been my invention, reminding myself that a quarter of a century is a long time to account for. A pot of honey lasts not forever; a glass of tamarind juice, chilled, sours within a couple of days into a stimulant, a bar of chocolate melts into a smudge soon in the tropical heat of the day. Two fingers of liquor, indeed! I brought out an assortment of bottles, which I placed before her, suggesting that she help herself. Obliging, she poured into her glass more than several fingers’ worth of whiskey.
“Why didn’t you alert me of your coming?” I said.
“How you are bourgeois and boring!” was her cutting reply.
I felt oddly secure in my silence.
“What have I meant to you all these years?” she asked.
I dared not tell her that I had celebrated her absence by allotting it a central place in the scheme of my life; or that her ubiquity extended to every opening of every door I entered; or that I thought about her whenever I looked at a hole in a wind instrument, or played it, stopping it with a finger!
She said, “Remember the maxim: Finders keep!”
“Finding and keeping what? Or whom?”
“We played that as children!”
“And so?”
“I was eleven and you were ten,” she said.
“You were fifteen, I was nine,” I corrected her.
“Not in my passport,” she said.
“I didn’t think you had one in those days,” I retorted.
“In my U.S. passport I am only two years older than you.”
The thought occurred to me that perhaps she was flaunting her U.S. passport, assuming that I would be interested in her as a holder of it. After all, it would provide one with a way out of the crisis in Somalia, should the country collapse into total anarchy. I let that pass without comment.
She was reminiscing. “We had so much fun, didn’t we, when young, you and I? We lived a free-for-all life, didn’t we? And things being what they are today, we can maybe look forward to a lifestyle unhindered by today’s narcissistic banalities, where I am faciis and you are a member of the other clan confederacy!”
“America, the land where differences are made to melt?”
She was suddenly irritable. “You can do better than that, clichés stood on their heads! Where is the Kalaman with the restless intelligence, the cork to prevent the genie from flying out of the bottle, into the smoke of dissipation?”
No witticism came pat to me. Helpless as a cockroach on its back, a cockroach with all its tiny feet searching up in the air for something solid to latch onto, I sat staring at her.
“You don’t recall much, do you?” she challenged.
I said, “The landscape of my memory is strewn with discarded bits of a life as useless as driftwood. A host of these hang askew, picture frames too heavy for the nail holding them up.”
“Do you know why I am here?” she said.
If there were byzantine traps lying in wait for me, let them, I thought. I replied, “You’ll tell it all to me, won’t you, sooner or later.” Hoping I sounded convincingly indifferent to why she was here, I got out the plates. I set one down on the kitchen table, then the other, and dished out the meal, giving her a larger portion. I took a spoonful, food as prophylactics!
