Secrets: a Novel, page 8
“Quick as a crocodile coming,” I said.
“Arriva, arriva!” chanted Timir, a reference to a brief eruption, no doubt as joy-giving to him as one that required a longer time.
The following morning, we joined Fidow to help in the skinning of the crocodile, in whose second stomach we found a manikin of unknown origin, no bigger than my thumb, made of some sort of ceramic, perhaps Russian, Nonno guessed, when I showed it to him that evening. The manikin became mine. Finders keep!
A few days later I saw Fidow and Timir together, having it off.
They were in the river and were at it, assuming that no one would see them. It was very early in the morning. Their bodies clinched together like dogs, Fidow behind, Timir in front and half-bent, Fidow in in-and-out motion, Timir submissive. The King of the River of Leopards came at last. Timir then took his turn mounting Fidow from behind.
The afternoon is longer than the shadow it has cast, a shadow which, in turn, has something disfigured about it. There is a heavy, uneven drone of an air conditioner, and I listen to the vapory water dripping into the bucket outside my office window. And in the imagination of my recall I hear the sound of an oar going in and stirring the river into action, a raft up and down steep waves. All is a splash. All is wetness. I feel an ugly chill in my bones. I get up and switch off the air conditioner. The room is stuffy with humidity when I go out.
I get into my car and drive, with no idea at all where I am headed. I can see smoke in the distance as I drive north, smoke spiraling upwards. What I cannot tell is whether, as a result of a militia attack or a reprisal by Siyad’s regime, a bombshell has struck home and in a deadly way, setting people’s houses alight, or whether it is wood smoke rising. Like a cow knowing where it is going after a day’s grazing in the green grass on the outskirts of a village, my car leads me somewhere but I know not where.
Chapter Three
My exasperation with myself heightened to the point where I began to hate what I was doing to myself. I came close to being hit by a sniper as I drove around at night, trying to delay returning to my own apartment. Nor did I feel like seeing Talaado, or being in the company of other friends. Once or twice I parked my car at the marina, switched the engine off, and listened to my favorite jazz records, with the ocean breeze caressing my cheeks. I sat, not knowing why I was exposing myself to so much peril; I sat, wondering what was making me suicidal. After all, there were marauders stalking the night with their guns at the ready, their fingers on the trigger, prepared to kill and blame the death on the armed militias or on the evil men the regime fielded to counter their attacks.
I arrived home after midnight and let myself in, quiet as a secret. I could not decide whether Sholoongo had deliberately left her door ajar, on the off chance that I might join her in bed, or whether she slept in innocence and the draft pushed it open. I could see into her bed if I craned my neck slightly. She lay in a fetus curl of clumsy sleep.
As I made breakfast the following morning, I watched eagerly for a silk sleeve with as wide a circumference as the fully opened wings of an eagle. In fact I positioned myself so as to spot her the instant she swung into view. Five minutes of waiting, six, but before the hand of the seventh made it to the dot of the eighth, I sensed an alien shadow scattering the rays of the morning sun’s light into fragmented beams. And there she was, a clearer stretch of light coming toward the kitchen. Dry of scents, she was scratching her eyes awake. Was she itching?
Which reminded me, where were the lice? The human nostril and the human mind, I thought, can domesticate any odor, familiarity breeding a dullness of the senses, the damping of enthusiasm, perhaps a lack of interest in hairsplitting distinctions. The human mind annuls these differences, leaving one with two principal categories, bad smell and good smell. Sholoongo was bad, so was her smell, lice or no lice.
But on seeing her, I welcomed her as a well-brought-up host welcomes a guest. I got up, and remained on my feet until she took her seat. Whereupon (I couldn’t determine if she meant to do it or not) her left hand let go of her unbelted kimono. This afforded me a glimpse of the terraces of her flesh, to me a sign of ill health. No way, I thought, would I entrust my future to a body so besieged by fat!
In silence I chased a most elusive question about lovemaking: why some people preferred it in the morning, why some were nocturnal romantics, why some liked having the lights on as they manufactured it, why others the dark. I knew a woman who liked it best in the afternoons, the curtains drawn, the radio playing loud rock music; I knew another whose body enjoyed rising to the morning’s flirtation. Perhaps there was more logic to sex than many of us realized. If my body had its own timetable, then surely Sholoongo’s was no potential partner of mine.
“I went to see Arbaco,” she said, sipping her honeyed tea. Arbaco was one of my mother’s closest friends.
“How’s she?” I asked.
“She wonders why you never bother to visit her.”
Arbaco’s name now took me back to the days just before I met Sholoongo. But for the moment I had to put my memory on hold as I listened, with feigned interest, to the latest news about Arbaco. Not that I learnt much from Sholoongo’s babble. In fact I edged our conversation to Timir’s visit yesterday afternoon as soon I felt it was politic to do so.
“What did he talk about?” Sholoongo asked.
“He wants me to be his best man,” I said.
“Have you accepted to be his best man?”
I felt wicked saying, “I told him it’d be my honor to be associated with him in the hour of his wedlock to the woman of his choice.” I meant to provoke Sholoongo’s venom. I got what I wanted: she was all hackles, her bloodshot eyes darting every which way like an enraged porcupine’s quills.
“But that’s scandalous!” she said.
“What’s scandalous?”
“Because you are abetting him in a fraudulent crime against women,” she said. “The man has the self-serving idea of buying the gratitude of a woman no better than a slave, a woman who won’t interfere with his false life, considering that he bought her.”
I said, rather actorly, “Aren’t you yourself pursuing self-serving motives, coming to me as you’ve done, when you are married to a Moroccan fire-eater? Why have you come to me? As a self-serving woman, you have no right to be occupying a high moral ground.”
“There are essential differences,” she said.
“How?”
“You and I enter into this as equals,” she said.
“I haven’t entered into anything,” I said.
She said, “That’s my point. You are under no obligation to do my bidding. No money changes hands. And then, in any case, if you choose not to oblige me, I know I am free to go to someone else, and you have no way of stopping me. The woman, once she is wedded to him, has no free will.”
I moved to a less contentious subject. “Why is it that you and Timir come to Somalia, the one to get married to a woman with a baby, the other to be impregnated with one?”
“We both feel unfulfilled,” she said. Her teeth gleamed, reflecting the sun in their shine. For a second I mistook that for a smile, and almost responded to it. “What else did Timir talk about?”
“We talked about magic and taboo.”
“Did he talk about his African-American boyfriend?”
“What’s interesting about his lover?”
“Because they get up to bizarre deeds,” she said. “They swap roles and call each by the other’s name, and now and then stand in for one another. Wayne loves to pass himself off as an African, Timir as an African-American. Timir introduces himself to people as an actor, Wayne presents himself as a substitute teacher at an elementary school. They keep exchanging roles, they wear each other’s clothes, and because they resemble one another to some extent, this can be quite confusing.”
“Isn’t Timir in the theater, an actor?”
“He’s not. He’s done walk-on parts, that’s all.”
I don’t know by what circuitous route we got to our next topic: sex, which we were now approaching with the courtesy of a courting couple. Was she aggressive in bed? Was I quick in coming, like a crocodile? Or did I take my time as frogs do? We came round eventually to her fire-eating Moroccan husband. Was he bisexual? I garnered from what she said about her man that, in various ways, their partnership had left inordinately positive impressions on her. I remarked that sex had its logic, and she agreed with the sentiment. I added that, at its pinnacle, sex had a tense center, lavalike: a hot body cooling, the phases of the moon entering a decisive turn. Give me a child! I asked myself, would our sexual encounter, if I were a willing partner, end in a bonanza harvest, a healthy Somali-looking baby with round cheeks and dark brown eyes?
The phone rang. I felt mean, and chose not to answer it, knowing it was my mother who, courtesy of Arbaco, now knew not only that Sholoongo was in town but that I was hosting her. When the alarm bells of the telephone ceased sounding, I got up and said, “Just a matter of detail. Supposing I consent to father your dream-child, and supposing you have a baby, what position will I occupy in the scheme of things?”
“The way I see it, fathers are an outdated irrelevance.”
“So what is in it for me?”
She said, “Maybe I should quote the hyperbole you yourself coined as a child: that fathers matter not, mothers matter a lot! You were then passing through a phase when you debated whether to add your mother’s name to the tail end of yours.”
“Have a good day, madam!” I said, and took leave of her.
As I drove, I felt I was traveling through layers of time, in lengths of colorful clothing, each length representing a given phase of my youthful years: now menstrual-blood scarlet, now dark as the fertile earth near the Shabelle River, now green as the walks in the woods of my daredevilries, now quick as the termite crawling out of the coziness of its nest of powder, and now watchful as my Xusna, my pet, my vervet.
There was a certain method to my reveries, though. For I could at last see where I was headed, toward my childhood, in concrete terms my parents’ house. I was behaving, oddly enough, as though I too were a recent returnee to Mogadiscio, calling in memory on the scene of my earliest years. The impulse to react to the presence in my life of Sholoongo and Timir had little to do with my behavior, I thought. No, I was at the wheels of my own destiny, guiding it left, then right, straight, then down a bend, all in the hope of going to my own watering point.
An imagined sound reminded me of a honey collector. A child resisting its mother’s instruction took me back to my own infancy when my father washed me, or when Arbaco teased me. A smile pinched my lower lip as I recalled a vignette of a dream in which, with baby fingers, I had closed shut my father’s eyes, my father who had the habit of sleeping with his eyes wide open, their whites dominating, their darks hardly visible. I recalled now that I had woken up, that dawn, from a nightmare in which two immense, crowned eagle hawks swooped from a great height. The eagle hawks took turns, now one, now the other, with the aim of frightening and eventually flying off with Xusna, my handsome vervet. My cries for help had been as jarring as the hawks’ calls. And in my dream I had hoped that by closing my father’s wide-awake eyes I would startle him; that once awoken he would come to my aid and Xusna’s. Reminiscing, I drove in circles. Then I saw my father’s features in the windshield, figures etched in the wipers’ stumbly scrawls in smears of dusty artistry.
Finally the dirt alleyway in which I grew up. This lured me with its labyrinthine bends, seduced me with its sweet memories. In my recall I am six, and climbing a baar tree with a hollowed center located directly above a spot where the honey collector has built a fire. As his errand boy, I have cut maize stalks or green plants with which he means to choke the flames. Bless Fidow who lets me munch crunchy mouthfuls of the honeycombs, the occasional egg or piece of coagulated wax finding its way into my system. Standing at the threshold of dawn, eager like a groom joining his bride, I look into a hole in which aromatic herbs have been burnt to give the honey a touch of piquancy. With the odd odor at the beck and call of the my memory, I am the scent, the whiff of incense curling its way into the evening’s idol worship.
I drove as I created an Identikit of a face out of the hesitant windshield wipers’ to-and-fro motion. I drove as I quoted a Somali proverb with the gist that a woman’s vulva never forgets the penis it has known.
My father was on the porch, engrossed in mending a silver bracelet of elaborate design. Standing, he was stooped in concentration. From where I was, I assumed that he was dealing with a broken chain, a scroll of patterns, geometric curves pursuing the ideals of a system of syntax. Or perhaps I was meant to see a termite submerged in its sand dune? Or a stone figure with a raised fist, chanting salvos of triumph? Or a spiral within a circle where, in the ascending bend, winding around the principal point, rather fringing it, my gaze was meant to follow a bird half lifting its body but not quite making it, a bird in half motion, its posture suggesting a breath withheld? Wait, feathered one, wait!
Intuiting, I stayed silent, a shadow falling on his worktable and its scatter of tools. With his serpentine tongue out of the corner of his mouth, a lizard’s on a fly-hunting errand, searching before returning to base, you might have mistaken my father for a child tracing the alpha and omega of his literacy initiation. My father now held a wedge-shaped instrument, which he used to give delicate restoring touches to a spot on the work before him, a spot looking grayer than the rest. When he first looked up, he either didn’t see me or didn’t recognize me, his eyes widening in the manner of a man choking on a gizzard. Being as orderly as I was disorderly, he put away the bracelet in a polythene bag marked “Fidow” in red. Only then did his face open with a smile of wondrous acknowledgment, and we embraced. He was in his fifties, slim. He was handsome.
“Are you taking care?” he asked.
I responded I was.
“There are many stray bullets lately,” he said, “which are in search of where to lodge. There is talk, too, of the armed clan militias choosing to victimize the members of other clans. I suppose you know what that means? You must take care and stay out of the bullets’ way as best you can.”
I lied, saying I was staying out of the bullets’ way.
“How’s your visitor?” he asked.
My thoughts were a shambles. My scabrous head itched. I scratched it. I reminded myself that it was the second time in as many days that I had been disabused of my naïveté. My father then teased me, comparing me to an ostrich which, burying its head in the sand, imagines it can’t be seen. He volunteered that he had come by the news of my guest’s arrival courtesy of my housekeeper. “Lambar has been here,” he said.
When I gave my father a summary of what had transpired so far between me and my visitor, his eyes, like the surface of water, rippled with the sun’s reflection which rose and fell in them.
“I am glad you could come and visit,” he said. His voice had in it a touch of discomfort. Had Sholoongo’s coming unseated his composure? It was unlike him to talk a great deal. “And how does she plan to make you give her a child? Does she envisage making you do so at gunpoint?”
“We haven’t come to that yet.”
“What on earth have you come to, then, in two days?”
I explained that she and I were having a civil discussion about the matter, that we had breakfast in the mornings and that I got home late every night. I waited anxiously to see if he would ask where I spent my hours at night, since I was avoiding returning to my apartment.
He looked away from me, focusing on one of the pigeons pecking at an assortment of grains. Now he plunged clumsily into what caused him irritation.
He said, “I wouldn’t know what to do if I were you.” His eyes partially closed, their rainbow white more prominent than the dark hemming it, he continued, “Mark you, she is as cheap as a popular rag dishing out pornography in the sophisticated idiom of a highbrow program.”
It was good to see him in such a devil-may-care attitude.
When I didn’t say anything, he shouted, “Why doesn’t she ask Timir to give her a child? You know that Arbaco always believed that they were doing it, right under their father’s eyes.”
Still I said nothing.
“From whichever angle you look at it, you are staring at an incongruity,” he said, “a pack of half beasts engaged in an incestuous orgy, just like their half siblings the animals. My feeling is . . .” and he trailed off, like a man who has given away more secrets than he ought to.
I dipped my hand in an old tobacco tin and fed the half dozen or so pigeons in my father’s courtyard. Nonno had trained several of this species as message carriers, our feathered friends traveling between Nonno’s and my father’s compounds, a million times more trustworthy than the nation’s mail services, which were nonexistent, and much cheaper and more discreet than humans bearing verbal messages between father and son. For this purpose my father had constructed a palatial dovecote in each yard. The homing birds were made to convey messages tied with rubber bands to their legs between Mogadiscio, where my father lived, and Afgoi, where my grandfather’s estate was. Unconfirmed gossip had it that, envious and eager to gain access to their secrets, one of the neighbors waylaid and fed on them. And he was taken ill.
“Timir has gone to see your mother,” my father said.
“When I think of the trouble you took to help Timir and me to become bosom pals,” I said, “what would your reactions have been if I now showed the same sexual preference as he?” A young pigeon landed on my shoulder. My attempt to feed it off my palm failed, maybe because it sensed that I was no Franciscan.
“Your mother would’ve been most unhappy.”
“What about you?”
“I’ve known about Fidow, and that has never bothered me.”
“But you knew about me and Sholoongo?”
“I knew that you would outgrow her.”
