“I would be tempted to reach for a gun, if I owned one, whenever I hear phrases like ‘The Marines are here to serve God’s will,’ as the then U.S. president said, or when the religionists talk of having ‘popular support’ or of working according to ‘popular will’—or when they sentence a woman raped and then falsely accused of adultery to death by stoning. I am displeased, too, when someone spouts the obsequious fallacy that all Somalis are Muslim, especially if this is meant to offer legitimacy to a clique of religionists determined to impose their will on this nation. Let’s face it, the religionists are no different from the warlords they routed, or the Federalists. No one can convince me that the broad mass of Somalis will fall for the religionists’ falsehoods. In any event, the religionists will sooner or later split into radical and moderate wings, whether Ethiopia invades or not. Although I itch with anger at the thought of provoking the bully next door, our age-old enemy.”
Bile takes a bite of cheese, then adds, “I prefer a spineless secular state that is all-inclusive to a religionist one run by a bearded cabal.”
“Are the religionists clan-based?”
“They are and they aren’t,” Bile replies. “When someone is earmarked to be eliminated, they assign the job of killing him to a close relative from within their ranks, to avoid anyone ascribing the killing to someone from another clan family. If they take a town, they appoint as governor someone with no roots or history there. It is a kind of affirmative clannism. Still, I am not impressed. That they suffer from infighting is evident in the fact that the Courts haven’t set up a working administrative structure for the city, because they cannot agree among themselves.”
Jeebleh feels like a man in a lean-to, sitting out a raging hurricane that is leveling homes and destroying lives. Is it safer to stay inside or foot it as fast as he can?
He dishes out the food and they eat. He asks, “What is your and Cambara’s relationship with the religionists?”
Bile slowly rises to his feet, the fingers of his outstretched hand pressing against the edge of the kitchen table. He sways this way and that, his knees atremble; he looks askance at a world too shaky for his liking.
Jeebleh asks, “Where are you going?”
“My tablets are in the medicine cabinet.”
Jeebleh gets them for him.
“I wish I didn’t tire so easily,” Bile says.
Jeebleh is relieved that his mother did not live into a sickly old age. How the body falters! Bile was such an athlete when he was young, never batting an eyelid when there was a chance to compete. Now, sickly as he is, he shambles on, preferring coping on his own to being dependent on the help of others. Jeebleh can’t determine which category he would belong to if he were in such a state. Like Bile, he can’t stand a spouse’s overprotective fussiness. And his wife is of a fussier disposition than Cambara is.
When they’ve eaten their lunch, they move to the lounge, and more comfortable chairs, their knees almost touching, Bile drinking tea and Jeebleh coffee, both of them brooding.
Bile says, “If a city becomes the person who loves to live in it, then Mogadiscio befits me — and Somalia suits me more than anywhere else.”
Bile has often said he’ll leave Mogadiscio only on his way to the grave. His bullheadedness puts Jeebleh in mind of scenes from Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel. In this unique novel, one of the most memorable in fiction anywhere, Hagar, named for the handmaid in the biblical tale, is imprisoned in her pride as well as in the confines of her enfeebled body. She is an ill-natured ninety-four-year-old woman, who has constructed her life on uncompromising certitudes. She hates being helped because she hates being beholden to anyone, and insists on surviving into her old age with dignity, refusing to be put into a nursing home. She shrieks walls down, she is so strong willed. Unlike Hagar, Bile is a mild-mannered man, yet he, too, is headstrong, and old age has only made him more obdurate. He sees himself as a cosmopolitan who refuses to quit the city when everyone else has done so. Jeebleh’s thoughts are now edged with anxiety as he weighs how to encourage Bile to come to the United States to see specialists.
He says, “My wife, whom you’ve never met but who sends her love, wonders if you’ll ever visit us in New York.”
A touch of tenderness in Bile’s voice. “But of course, I will visit you one day, even if I cannot say when.”
Jeebleh thinks of Bile as a man drowning in discomfort, his eyes glazed over, his feet stretched forward, his body rigid. Maybe by their very nature, the sick and the elderly grow restive, depressive; they take up residence in that nowhere land, unreachably distant.
“What about you and Cambara?”
He says, “Commendably, she has invested in my worthless life, contrary to what often occurs. Many of my friends have been abandoned by their partners when they are ailing or in need. Cambara has stayed by me, a loyal, loving companion. She thinks of it as buying shares in the life of your partner, subject to capital gains and losses, as with all investments. ‘You gain some, you lose some,’ she says, in life and in love, too. She bought shares in my life when there was no working capital as such, and invested heavily in my recovery and stayed by me. I thought it was time I, too, made a commitment of a serious nature. So I proposed to her.”
“What’s been her response?”
“That she’ll love me, but not become my wife.”
Jeebleh is not surprised to learn this. The woman is formidable, a match for Bile. A man in the last lap of his life, too ill to matter — and she loves him.
Bile says, “She says we are the front line.”
The image of young men departing for the front line, healthy and full of the joy of youth, sets off a panic button in Jeebleh, reminding him of the imminent invasion. He thinks how in movies young men going to war commit themselves to their sweethearts.
Bile says, “Cambara became a wife, on paper, to Zaak, soon after the eruption of the civil war in the early 1990s; he had just fled Mogadiscio. Theirs was a paper marriage and was never consummated, and they both knew it would not be. Several years later, she fell for and wed Wardi, a refugee in Switzerland, where he had no other chance of becoming a citizen. She married both her previous men to get them citizenship in Canada. Maybe she sees me as a man apart from her previous men, even though I, too, am in a war zone, equally damaged by the conflict. She doesn’t wish to rush into marrying a third time, afraid it might not work for her. To a point, I can see what she means.”
Jeebleh asks, “May I get on her case?”
“No point badgering her.”
“That will get the religionists off your backs.”
“She has no faith in marriage,” Bile says.
They hear the voices of a man and a woman, a door opening, and Cambara and a young man walk in, laden with heavy shopping bags. Kisses, hugs, and then introductions. “This is Robleh, here is Jeebleh,” says Cambara, kissing Bile on the forehead and then on the lips. Robleh looks ill at ease.
“Food to last us for months,” Cambara says.
When Robleh and Cambara go out to the car to fetch in the rest of the groceries, Bile tells Jeebleh that their guest in the annex has been ratting them out to the Courts. He can’t help it, the poor sod. He seems to hope that squealing on them to the religionists will lead him to the gravy train. “It is the thing to do in Somalia these days. No scruples. No probity. This is what’s got us to where we are. Helpless.”
“Why not show him the door?” Jeebleh says.
“It’s Cambara’s call, not mine,” says Bile. “There’s only one way of doing things. Her way.”
The shopping in, Robleh says good-bye from a distance, but Cambara joins them.