Secrets: a Novel, page 6
“What did you do yesterday after I left?” I asked.
“I changed some money, for starters,” she said, “got myself a bagful of local shillings in large denominations, took a taxi to a car rental agency, where I paid for a week’s rent in cash and in advance. Then I went places.”
“Where?”
“I researched into your private life.”
“What did you come up with?” I asked, not curious.
“I dug up a beauty of a discovery, name of Talaado.”
I tried in vain to speak normally. I rubbed my wrist as though it hurt, which of course it didn’t. Anxiety caught at my throat. I thought of roping her neck with a hangman’s noose, right now, in my kitchen. Would her corpse lose the warmth that was its blood before our cups of coffee or tea got cold?
“What point are you making nosing into my affairs?” I said.
“It’s just for the thrill of it, I suppose,” she said. “The things you discover, the secrets you uncover, just for the intimate thrill of it. It is like having a bat for a pet, and wearing it wherever you go, the bat dangling from your necklace. I saw a woman on TV with a bat for a pet. Anyway I bet you thought I would not know about your hush-hush affair!”
We went to lots of bother, Talaado and I, to have our rendezvous where no one knew either of us. Whereas my mother had not found out about us, even though we had been going out for several months now, it took Sholoongo only half a day to do so.
“Just the thrill of it,” I repeated.
“A bat for a pet,” she said. “Imagine the excitement.”
I had my omelette in silence, she her scrambled eggs. She talked and I listened with all my body as if searching for clues. I suspected she felt the anxiety in my eyes and in the way I held my hand still, as if worried I might become violent.
“If you want me to leave,” she said, “I shall do so. I’ll go on your say-so, no sweat. I would hate to impose myself on you. Tell me when to leave.”
I made some more tea and coffee, and availed myself of the opportunity to alter the course of the conversation. I said, “What ever have you done with the lice?”
She might have been speaking about her children who were sleeping next door. She replied, “They are in a tiny jar, the size of a matchbox, which is in my handbag. They have enough jelly-stuff to live on. It’s the jelly which smells awfully.”
I felt delicate as I listened to the detailed care she was giving to the lice. Possibly this inhibited me from further pursuing the matter, and I dropped it altogether. Perhaps she sensed my unease, for she said, “Relax, Kalaman. We’ve done more hilarious things together, you and I, weirder, more out-of-the-way, bloodcurdling stuff. What are lice in a jar, with jelly in it? This is kid stuff compared with what you and I have been through together.”
The hard reality of my childhood secrets dissolved in my coffee. I could savor it, in the way I smelt an amalgam of odors with a savage bitterness to them, smells-as-spells, the scent of jujube’s dried wood. It was to the smoke of jujube wood that Sholoongo used to expose her private parts, in the traditional belief that such fumigation would help protract her sexual performance. These animant revisits to our childhood were so overpowering that I suffered the anxious dilation of a sinus cavity. I sneezed and sneezed and sneezed and sneezed, and got myself a wounded membrane. I hurt badly. When my eyes cleared of the fog bedeviling me, I asked, as though nothing untoward had occurred, “What do you do for a living, where you are?”
She was silent for a long while, as if she were shuffling her words in her head, deciding which trump card to show. “I am a shape-shifter,” she replied.
“A shaman, in a manner of saying?”
At her nod, doors opened in my imagination, houses shifted. The earth moved, the sky came nearer, birds flew in and out of human skulls, discarded by the roadside of my memories. One of the birds flew higher and higher into the seventh heaven of my expectations, and I waited for it to return with a secret, about Sholoongo, clutched in its beak.
“I mean to do no one harm,” she said.
“Have I accused you of planning to hurt anyone?”
“Your mother will.”
“Have you seen my mother since coming back to Mogadiscio?”
“I understand she’s had problems adjusting to your refusal to give her a grandchild,” she said, “and I am told she has been seeing nightmares. Not that I don’t have nightmares myself, we all do, now and
then.”
My inner anxiety pressing in on me, I found it difficult to breathe. It felt as if, hurting badly, my lungs were expanding into the very space of my heart. “Who’s your source?” I said. “Because you appear to know a lot about my private life.”
“I reiterate that I shall leave the very instant you tell me to,” she said. “I would not countenance the thought of being accused of all manner of evil when I mean no harm, only good. The proof of my goodwill rests in the fact that I’ve come to bear your baby.”
“But that is out of the question,” I said.
Like a broken vase her smile leaked droplets of sadness.
I was grateful for the arrival in the room of a fly, large enough to be mistaken for a dung beetle. It circled above the honey jar and wouldn’t be shooed away. Meanwhile I busied my mind with more homegrown thoughts: about a moral blur, of Sholoongo being accused of stealing a document from my mother; of Sholoongo as a mistress of lascivious wantonness. And there was of course the matter of her mysterious entry into my apartment. How did she do that? Shifting shapes, altering her own nature? Or changing the shape of things? Or was she a burglar with a master key? Could Lambar have left the door ajar, and forgotten, or lied about her oversight?
“I’ve been to your mother’s shop too,” she said.
The fly flew out of its own accord with no help from us.
“When did you do that?”
“The day before yesterday.”
“She didn’t see you, did she?”
“She didn’t recognize me.”
No wonder my mother had seen her in a dream. My mother saw her, but didn’t recognize her there and then. Only later did she acknowledge her presence in her unconscious, by dreaming about her. After all, she was not expecting to see her, was she?
Now there was a snarl in Sholoongo’s eye’s tangle. She appeared slightly confounded, like a traveler coming to the fork in a footpath, not knowing which one to take. Examined closely, she had the dusty look of a cow that had just given itself a sandbath after drinking from a trough. Her features, which had earlier been smile-paneled, were presently austere-looking and of a darker hue that suggested dead wood soaked in water. In my mother’s unconscious, perhaps she was the bride who stood me up? Because I wouldn’t give her a baby?
She fixed me with her fury of a stare. But I didn’t feel at all intimidated. Then she became fidgety. Restless, she moved her flowing gown about until I could see an eagle’s silver-lined wings spreading fully, a bird of majesty, the kind which seldom descended before nightfall, whose sense of privacy was exemplary. I got up with as little caution as an absentminded cook putting more salt in an already salted stew. I opened a kitchen drawer and pulled out a bunch of keys on a chain. I said, “Here are the keys to the flat. You may stay for as long as you please.”
Soon enough I felt wretched, asking myself why I was giving her a set of my keys, why I was getting myself into the murkier end of already muddied waters. My mother would argue that Sholoongo had bewitching powers over me.
She said, “By the way, my husband knows that I’m seeing you, but I would appreciate it if you were discreet when it came to the others.”
“I’ll be damned,” was all I said.
A fresher unease made me jittery. My head itched and I scratched it savagely. When I looked at my nails, they had dandruff under them, traces of eczema, a trail of it, the untreated patches of dry disease. “I’ll tell who I like.”
My unexpected hostility shocked her. But she was silent.
“I will see you later,” I said, and quit the apartment.
Noon the same day. And I am at work.
I started my company, Birders, with an initial capital supplied by Nonno. I began it as a small two-table affair, meant to provide a letterwriting service to Mogadiscio’s residents, the majority of whom are illiterate, or at best semiliterate. Once successful, I soldiered on with the help of my then secretary, Qalin, and provided more and more services, including document preparing, typing, photocopying. After receiving a bank loan, Nonno putting up his estate as collateral, much of which I’ve since repaid, I expanded into computer programming. More recently I’ve set up a data-processing network, a venture which now boasts a clientele among foreign-run nongovernmental organizations and foreign embassies, both lucrative, the bills paid in hard currency, preferably into an account bearing Nonno’s name in Italy. Thanks to the dedication of my fellow workers, this is a flourishing business. In fact, we’re stretching in uneven curves with the liveliness of a bird breaking out of its natal shell. If we are moving into dollar-making ventures, it is because this country is becoming a land of ruin. And we are working against the odds of survival, in possible exile, out of Mogadiscio, when it all collapses.
Apart from Qalin, a most capable executive, we have three assistant deputy managers, two of whom are women. We also have seven full-time scribes, three doubling as typists. As support staff, we employ three simultaneous translators (a first-rate Arabic specialist, a second specializing in English, and a half-Italian woman). The scribes take dictation notes in Somali. The job then is passed on to the relevant person, depending on the language the letter is be rendered into. The scribes themselves do an excellent job for those wanting missives in Somali because they are illiterate.
We occupy three floors in a high-rise. (We are the first to go when Mogadiscio collapses, predicts Qalin.) Now many people ask why we named our company Birders, in much the same way as they say “Kalaman?” To her credit, Sholoongo did not put either question to me now or at any time.
Why Birders? In response, I tell the story of a Yoruba-speaking man from present-day Benin, in West Africa, whom the French had detained together with his coconspirators, some of whom were released earlier than he. Before they parted, one of them offered to take a message to his wife. The prisoner requested they take to her a stone, a bit of coal, a sniff of red pepper, and a rag. When the would-be bearer of the message asked what each item meant, he was informed that the wife would supply him with the clue to the riddle.
I suggest you make up your own clue to, Why Birders?
I couldn’t concentrate on my work and, restless, paced back and forth in the corridor separating my office from the foyer. I had the ominous sense of descending a declivity, only I remembered the age-old Somali wisdom in good time: that little lies had bigger ones on their false heels. If truth was the first casualty resulting from my reticence, then discretion was the second. Moreover there were bound to be disasters as a consequence of these lies, future heavy losses, of face, of dignity, of self-pride, of family loyalty, and eventually even of life. Why did I not call up my mother? Why not tell her, Sholoongo is my guest? What I was afraid of? I was wise enough not to set much store by the questionable idea that I was buying time. After all I was not. I was merely affording myself the luxury of a pause, as I waited in anticipation of a storm brewing, which I hoped would blow over without harm to any of us. From the sound of her, Sholoongo was a traveler in possession of an air ticket with no expiration date. A guest, my guest. Forever.
If I wanted to stop this lie-telling, then why not take the first step: since journeys start with the first pace, why not speak up? I pressed Qalin’s numbers on the intercom. She came into my office, a little nervous. She was nearly as tall as I, six years my junior, with intelligent eyes and handsome bearing. She stared at me now with bewilderment, and now with affection. I thought of her as the one friend who wove a kind of webbed continuity around me. We were once lovers, but we parted with our friendship intact, something quite rare. Discreet, she aborted my baby and never bothered to tell me, for fear I might bear her ill feeling. Such a generous soul! I knew a lot more about her life than she about mine, knew that she was seeing a man but, in my heart, suspected that she would have dropped him if I suggested she and I marry.
Now I was fretted with inarticulateness, for I did not know how to tell her about the complications in my private life. I was tentative in my approach, and spoke, with long pauses and a couple of stammers, about the fact that my problems might not go away soon. And that I might not go away on a ten-day vacation to Nairobi, as I had hoped, because of these complications. I noticed disappointment lift itself up out of the calm of her eyes. I was touched.
“Is there anything I can do?” she said.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
There were shadows under her eyes, shadows abounding in interstices. Were these dark eye-bags the result of staying up, an insomniac having night visions?
“Are your worries about your mother?” I sensed a hint of ambivalence in her voice.
“What makes you ask?”
“Because she came to see me last night,” she said, “at my parents’, and wondered if I knew that you were planning to elope with a woman. Was I the woman? If not, did I have any idea who it might be? I told her that you were not planning to marry.” A pause. “Are you?”
I shook my head, no.
Without saying anything, Qalin now placed a bunch of keys on my desk, then stood at a distance, back straight, formal. I was taken aback by this, wrongly assuming that she was tendering her resignation. I stared at the ring holding the keys together and thought of other rings, including the one Qalin had on her middle finger, a gift from me when we believed we were to marry to each other. Until this day, I couldn’t tell why we decided not to. Or who called the engagement off. For the sake of our friendship.
She halved her attention between me and the keys, now focusing on my eyes, now on the ring. “Is there any point my keeping the master keys if you aren’t going on vacation? In particular, the coded ones for the safes and the generator,” she explained.
“Please hold on to the keys,” I said.
“Sure,” she said, as she picked them up with the care one uses to pick up a grenade. Then, with a worrying suddenness, she raised a wall of privacy around her. She consulted her watch and was gone, fast as a woman responding to her baby’s cry in an adjacent room.
Alone, I felt Sholoongo weigh on my thoughts. It wasn’t in my nature to be unkind to women, and for whatever this was worth, Sholoongo had already disabused me of some of my earlier misconceptions, proving, as the folktale has it, that I was as powerless as a dik-dik picking a fight with an elephant. I turned these burning questions over in my mouth with the same touch-and-drop wariness of a child handling hot potatoes. Then I overheard the voice of a man rejoicing in the name of Timir. He was insisting that the receptionist announce him.
It was a few minutes before she buzzed me. As I waited, my door ajar, my hands and my eyes fidgety like an anxious rabbit’s, a scatter of ideas gathered around me. These were as insubstantial as the shadows of a man in whom disparate thoughts formed and unformed the way seasonal clouds in the sky do, now knotting themselves into fists of dark ominous rain, now dispersing before a finger of water has pointed earthwards.
I remembered how Timir described Sholoongo, saying, “My half sister is a consummate trickster. She insists on you paying up what she thinks you owe her, but fails to honor her vow.” Yesterday she posed as a victim of my male machination, seeing herself as a woman giving her self in exchange for a morsel of food.
And Timir?
He was the first to speak. “My God, Mogadiscio is a dangerous place, what with all these heavy weapons randomly being fired! I hear Muuse Boqor and two of his companions have been blown up in their vehicle. Do you know if Siyad is responsible for these deaths? Or are the armed militias the culprits?”
We shook hands after an uneasy pause. He said, “How good to see you,” his voice making a reluctant admission of our strained reunion.
I made pleasant noises about seeing him too.
Fretful, my fingers entwined in the fashion of a child’s crisscross game played with threads. I sensed I itched all over as if I had come into contact with a poisonous ivy. Maybe the thought of having his sister as my guest had brought about an allergic tendency in me. I sneezed. I hoped Timir’s presence wouldn’t cause my body to break out in rashes.
He looked rough, stubbled with a day’s growth of hairs, his eyes feverishly active. He was taking in everything all at once: Nonno’s framed photograph, which occupied its place of pride on my office wall, a portrait of my parents, my personal computer, printer, and all the paraphernalia that came with my responsibility as a programmer, not to mention the highly customized interior design of the room where we were. Uptight, I stood upright. My forefinger was on duty, as it were, tapping away nervously. I felt dwarfed by the large thickbodied escritoire which lay between us, a referee stopping a fight. I sat down.
I pointed him to a chair, but he wouldn’t take it. Was he planning to speak his part and leave forthwith? You could say this in Timir’s favor: he had as much gumption as Sholoongo had stir. Nonno had once commented, “The boy and his sister between them have shared out a large portion of the world’s stir and gumption, lizards forever alive to the changes of the shades in the surroundings.”
After a great to-do with his hands, and a homely expression with as brief a life as a recently struck match, Timir, as if he couldn’t help it, fell into the chair. I scratched my head, and thought of a well in a semiarid land, dandruff dry. My neck, with which the palm of my hand came into contact, felt rough as a giraffe’s coat of stretchy skin.
“We received a telegram to come and bury our father,” he said, “and we obliged, Sholoongo and I. Only to discover that the poor sod had been dead a month and a week.”
