Secrets: a Novel, page 7
“Did it take that long for the cable to reach you?”
“I suspect we were made to come for a different purpose.”
“And what’s that?
He said, “Our clanspeople want us to contribute toward the arming of the militia which is to fight in the interest of our people. They have the weapons, not the ammunition. Since we come from America, we are being asked to make our contribution in dollars.”
I spoke my condolences, and only then inquired as to what had caused his death.
Timir said, “He wasted away, like an AIDS victim. He died a skeleton.”
Now that we were within arm’s reach of each other, I saw his hair was a tangle of bushes on his skull, with not a spot of thinness showing nor a single gray hair. Even though younger than he, I was going bald, and my eyes crawled with crow’s feet, shallow furrows on a skin otherwise smooth, like the scent of aloe. Timir had the sour smell of beer drunk hot at midday.
I thought how America had changed him.
He said, “How does death strike you?”
“How do you mean?” I said.
“I ask because Nonno must be getting on in years.”
His question sounded to me a little too contrived, at best a cueproviding ploy. It struck me that by putting such a question to me, he was in his mind paying homage to a yoga-practicing latter-day hippie with arty pretensions, the kind of thing you might say at a party in California. I imagined Timir having chilled Californian wine under an awning in Malibu; I imagined him in tight-fitting jeans, his chest bare, a key chain hanging on his trouser belt: I imagined him speaking this very line to a famous actor, or actress.
“Death does not induce as much sadness as dreamlessness,” I said, pretending I too was in the California. “Death is the tragic, sorrowful acceptance of an irredeemable reality, a notice served that one will no longer figure in the dream of one’s beloved.”
I could see that he was impressed: his state of inaction told me so, in a silence as compact as thumbtacks. I wondered what life would be like if I ceased to see Nonno in my dreams. This, I thought, was perhaps the most apt definition of death, not seeing one’s departed in one’s dream.
I asked, “And Sholoongo?”
He said, “I thought you would know.”
His voice was even as the waters of a placid river, with no ripples anywhere. Or was I being hoodwinked into believing that no secrets were concealed in the serpent’s coils, the serpent ascending from the mist of a mother-descended river, each of its moltings having the likeness of a tree-stump floating down a dusk-engulfed body of water?
“What?” I said. “What did you think I would know?”
I breathed the sourness of beer drunk when stale. He was fat in the face, his eyes getting more and more bloodshot by the second, his expressions emptying themselves of every iota of the worldly awareness they had contained when he first walked in. His lips had something unformed about them. It was as if, unlike the rest of him, the lips had ceased growing during his infancy. His jaws, ending in a strong pointed chin, had the shape of an ancient hoe in rusty disrepair. But when I looked into his beady red eyes, they held me spellbound in spite of myself, in the same way they did in our youth. And because I couldn’t bear the silence, I asked, “Have you any idea what your sister is up to?”
“Sholoongo’s waywardness is as mysterious to me as it is to you,” he said. “I learnt only this afternoon that she had checked out of Lafaweyn Hotel and vanished. For all I know, she may be putting up with you.”
“Tell me, what does she do for a living?”
“She is the chairperson of the New York branch of the All-America Shape-shifters’ Union, a body as powerful as the Artists’ Guild of the USA. She likes to describe herself as a Somali-born shaman married to a Moroccan-born fire-eater.”
“Did someone tell me that you are an active member of the gay movement in San Francisco —” I said and worked my face cunningly into a friendly smile. And waited.
“I am her half brother, come to buy a wife, she will tell you, were you to run into her, all the better if the said woman to be bought has a three-month-old baby and a recently deceased spouse,” he said.
Timir had his sense of humor, I thought. He could raise a laugh in someone’s eye, could even make a wisecrack at his own expense. “Death is . . . !” I said, and trailed off.
“Is that where she’s ended up, at your place?” he asked.
“Obviously I am not too difficult to reach.”
There was a silence with a disturbed meaning.
“Why is she having someone else’s baby if she is married?”
He had as blank a look as the space a meteor has vacated. “Apparently you don’t know my sister,” he said.
“Please help me to get to know her a little better.”
“My half sister appeared to me as a maggot in a recent dream I saw,” he said. “With maggots, you can never tell where they’ve entered or where they’ve exited. Likewise, you discover that my sister has visited a place only when she’s already left the area, reasons undisclosed, motive unexplored.”
I decided to swap Sholoongo-induced nightmares with Timir.
“In one of my dreams,” I said, “she was a species of rat, the type of rodent with almost mythical qualities which is said to bite your toe and then blow on the spot, as if helping to reduce the pain. Only it claws you again and again. Pain and comfort, fingers entwined, the thorn on the pulpy fruit!”
But then I thought, Damn! Here we were, two men, one half a brother to her, the other once infatuated with her, mean men bad-mouthing a woman whom they called a bitch, witch, a whore.
He continued in the swapping vein, and I did not stop him, despite myself. “When last I talked to Sholoongo, she told me of a dream she had in which your mother wore a crocheted wrapper dyed in blood, and arrived looking visibly under stress. Did she say she looked insane? Anyway, your mother argued that she had been invited to her son’s wedding. But there was no bride. Then the most bizarre thing happened.”
“What?
“Your mother put on the wedding garment. When someone got up to call a qadi to officiate at the ceremony, your mother tried to make light of the matter. It was tragic, Sholoongo commented, to see a son marrying his mother in such a bizarre fashion.”
I changed the subject. “Have you seen Fidow?” I asked.
The name made him look dispirited. I hadn’t suspected a veil of sadness could descend so fast on him. “Fidow? No, I haven’t seen him. Why do you ask?”
Just then the tea lady arrived, bringing in coffee and biscuits. As he rose to help the young woman, two ideas called on me, like unexpected visitors. These were: magic and taboo.
“Magic and taboo,” I said. “Fidow and Timir!”
He cursed under his breath.
“So what do you do?”
“I am an all-around theater person,” he said. “I teach the theory of theater, I act semiprofessionally in plays whenever I have the time or the opportunity. I review now and then under a pen name for one of the local weeklies.”
“A shape-shifting sister in cahoots with an actor brother!”
His lower lip shrunk back to a dwarfish size, like a sheet of plastic too close to the tongue of a red flame. I was debating whether to apologize for my below-the-belt comment when he began to speak, his words having to them the numbed affectedness of someone out of a dentist’s chair.
“Magic and taboo are linked,” he said, “as centers of tension, their theatrical qualities infinitely enriching. But then the two notions are not subject to rational justification. Let me give a pedestrian example. X has magical powers. It follows that you do not approach X with the same ease as you might approach others without. On the other hand, taboos are connected principally with a woman having her period, or someone dying; taboos point in the main to uncleanness, sacredness, or fear. A person returning from the precipice of death performs certain rituals, a woman giving birth undergoes a standard set of purification rites. The idea is to remove the impurity which is attached to their ‘status.’ Now savoring a woman’s monthly, or for that matter messing with the magical nature of a passage from the Scriptures or violating the sexual norm of a Somali: each of these contains aspects of magic as well as taboo. As a man in the theater, I seem to appreciate the qualities that are inherent in magic and taboo.”
“There is truth to magic, but is there truth in taboo?” I said. “Like acquiring a strand of someone’s hair with a view to bewitching its owner? Or getting through to a mother newly delivered of an infant via a tendril stretch of her afterbirth? Or simple blood-drinking voodooism? You’re not speaking of these truths, are you?”
“No, I’m not.”
“What are you saying, then?”
“That there are push-start magical formulae such as as above, so below, key phrases spoken as shibboleths, which are said to lead one to a witch’s domain.”
“My mother used to make me wear on my upper arm an amulet folded in leather on which was inscribed the numerical power of my names,” I said. “Apart from its prophylactic value, as when she would plait into the charm a braid of her hair, fastening it with a drop of her menstrual blood. Equally, the tamarind concoction administered by Nonno following my birth contained a protective charm, a secret drink more potent than any magic.”
“It occurs to my jet-lagged brain that you are making a fool of me,” he said. “Are you leading me up some kind of a path? Talking of magic and taboo, similar to the kind you watch on TV or which is performed by circus hands. I’ve come here not to speak of these, but about you, me, and so on.”
“Does Sholoongo have the power to commit the demons to doing her bidding?” I asked. “Is your sister truly a shape-shifter, a shaman capable of altering her own and other people’s nature?” Then I told him all that had come to pass, from the instant I walked into my apartment and found her there. However, I chose to underplay Sholoongo’s role in my mother’s nightmares.
A surge of energy made him rise. He was up on his feet, clearly eager to say something important and then leave. Timir, it seemed, had other pedestrian preoccupations on his mind.
“I haven’t come to talk about Sholoongo,” he said.
“What has brought you here, to my office?”
He said, “If I asked you to be the witness as well as the best man for my wedding, would you agree? That was why I came, because I cannot think of anyone else to ask.”
That took the wind out of my lungs.
“What sort of a wedding?” I asked, as if this mattered.
He assured me it would be a very simple affair.
“It is my honor to accept.”
“And my pleasure to ask.”
He dashed out of my office: a child with a toy to show off.
As soon as I was by myself I telephoned Talaado to tell her I wouldn’t be seeing her that day after all, the first of many appointments I would cancel. It would be hard to remember a day when she and I didn’t touch base at least once. She wondered if she might be of help, being still under the impression that we were leaving for Nairobi in less than a week. The vaguer I was when answering her question, the more eager she was for us to meet and talk. But I did not wish to talk. Nor did I want to raise the antennae of her suspicions. I lied so as not to cut her short, suggesting that my troubles were work-related. We agreed to meet on the morrow.
She said to call her. I knew I wouldn’t.
Another memory intrudes, from the remote past.
Timir and I hanging around too close to where a mother crocodile was guarding her nest against predators, the eggs ready to hatch. You could hear the crocodiles’ squeaking appeal to clear away the soil with which they had been covered during their incubation. Neither Timir nor I was keen on testing a crocodile’s patience. Dusk was gathering. And yet we wouldn’t leave, in expectation of Fidow showing up. We knew that, as a hunter of crocodiles for their skins, he would come, armed with a huge spear, his chest and the whole of his elbow neatly sheathed with layers of metal, this strengthened with a Goodyear tire stitched end to end. All because he wished to protect himself from imminent crocodile harm. Fidow used to kill crocodiles, hippopotami, and rhinoceroses on commission, and doubled as a collector of wild honey. I also knew that he would sell all the items found in the killed animals’ second chambers, silver bracelets, gold earrings, watches, belt buckles and suchlike, which the crocodile’s digestive systems could not handle, to my father.
Nervous, Timir and I knew the tropical night’s wont to fall with the suddenness of an eagle descending on its prey. Lest we enrage a hippopotamus emerging out of the waters or an entrapped crocodile returning to its watery habitat from a sunbath among the shrubs fringing the river, we hid in the bushes, waiting. All the same I managed to suppress my fearful instincts by showing off how much more than Timir I knew about crocodiles.
I was the lucky witness to marvelous sights: of a marabou stork digging with its beak deep into the open mouth of a crocodile taking his sunbath; I saw a wading bird which, without fear of being harmed, pulled a fish out of a crocodile’s mouth. I was fascinated to learn, from Fidow, that crocodiles had friends among the birds. Like the water bird, a spur-winged plover, who was not afraid to pick leftover food from between the crocodile’s teeth. Usually silent, the plover will make a shrill yak-yak-yak flying-away cry when disturbed in its own nesting area, alerting the crocodile of impending peril. I being younger and of a disposition to boast, Timir did not believe what I was telling him about the relationship between the birds and the crocodiles. “Are you taking me for a fool?” he said.
“You and your sister pull such incredibly tall tales out of the stilts of a beanstalk,” I said — alluding to but not saying that I didn’t trust Sholoongo’s story about their father, the cow becoming a woman, and the woman metamorphosing into a cow — “and you want me to believe you all the time? My friend, at times, you insult my intelligence. Now if you don’t trust what I am telling you, ask those who know. Ask Fidow.”
“I will,” he vowed.
“Ask him too,” I went on, “if just before embarking on his search for wild honey, he blows through an appropriately perforated snail shell, which produces a high whistling tone. Ask him if he means to alert the honeyguides to lead him to where the hives are hidden.”
“What’s all this?”
“If you were not such a fool,” I said, “you would know that the honeyguide helps Fidow by leading him to where the hives with uncollected wild honey are. You would know too that the spur-winged plover, being generally on friendlier terms with the crocodile, is protective of his friend.”
“I’ll ask Fidow,” he promised.
Timir and I spotted Fidow’s figure. He was bringing with him a bedraggled smell, an odor charming enough. I thought about the tale of a robber who has in turn been burgled. At Fidow’s approach, there were ugly stirs in the vegetation fringing the river. All the crocodiles, especially the young ones, moved fast, returning noiselessly into the river, except for the nest-guarding mother. Readying herself to attack, she wouldn’t budge, but waited while Fidow, unafraid, went forward toward her.
“What is the putrid odor?” Timir whispered.
“Fidow has the habit of smearing his body with the very strong odor crocodiles emit just before mating,” I said. “It is his intention to confound them.”
In an instant, Fidow would be issuing a bellow similar to that of a bull preparing to mate. And as if on cue, the female crocodile would open her mouth and make a throaty sound which, as Fidow had explained to me, was that of a female responding to a bull’s lusty advances. Stark naked now, except for an immense amulet dangling from the upper part of his arm, Fidow came closer to where we were, as though to validate the truth of all my claims. He moved toward the aroused crocodile. And while we waited for Fidow to go on the attack and for the mother crocodile to defend her territory, I shared a gossip with Timir: that according to what my father had told me, Fidow went both ways in matters of sex.
A silent spell, hollow like a vase with many perforations, and into which more sound is purposelessly poured. This put me in mind of Sholoongo, and therefore of fingers playing a flute with unstoppable holes.
It was all happening right before us: Fidow holding a short dagger, sheath unremoved, in his left hand. In his right hand he had a long spear. Years ago Fidow had earned the mellifluous nickname King of the River of Leopards. Now he moved royally toward the confused crocodile, with its diffuse stare on the hunter’s laurels for bravery, immense scars now healed, which he displayed as one did medals acquired in battle.
We watched his studied movements with awe. The King of the River of Leopards turned his back on the crocodile. He stopped at the edge of the water, his right foot in, his left out, and his lips atremble with Koranic prayers overlaid with additional salvos in gibberish Shiidliana. He waded farther and farther in, until the water was navel high, whereupon he washed his body with ritual attentiveness. This was to provoke the crocodile into hasty action. Now that the beast was moving toward him, he walked backwards, taking each step with the caution of a man ready to defend himself, all the while spraying the river with a magical fluid which he had brought along in a container. In his wake Fidow left a pathway clear as the Milky Way. At last he was in the shallower part of the river, where the water was knee-high. First one, then two, and finally a dozen or so crocodiles emerged out of the river, and they all swam toward him in Indian file. Appearing mesmerized, they looked as harmless as a baby’s fist. They came to him one at a time to receive pats on their heads, and for Fidow to call them by name. All this time the mother, watching over her nest, refused to trust his motives but still seemed confused. Then, all of a sudden, he was aware of her menacing growl as she moved from behind the bushes to attack him. The King of the River of Leopards wrongfooted her. She raised her tail to throw him in the water before grabbing him with her open jaws. But he stuck a dagger and a spear in her belly before she could do so.
