Qasiir says, “I know where he lives, I know the mosque at which he prays, the teahouse at which he plays cards with a couple of his pals. I’ll get him. So see you shortly.”
While waiting for Qasiir to return, Malik wanders aimlessly around the apartment and ends up in his workroom. He picks up a piece of paper from the floor, and a few lines in his own hand catch his eye, part of a longer piece he has completed and sent off to some editor, he cannot recall which: Somalis are a people in a fix; a nation with a trapped nerve; a country in a terrible mess. The entire nation is caught up in a spiraling degeneracy that a near stranger like me cannot make full sense of. It is all a fib, that is what it is, just a fib.
On second thought, the scribbler has run a hesitant line through that last sentence and continued with these words: This conflict has nothing to do with clan or religious rivalries. Rather, it has everything to do with economics. There is a Somali wisdom that it is best that the drum belongs to you, so that you may beat it the way you please. If not, the second best thing is for the drum to belong to someone close, like a relative, who will share it with you. In other words, the Somali civil war has a lot to do with personal gains and personality conflicts.
Qasiir waits in the TV room, watching sports, while Malik gets down to the business of interviewing Muusa Ibraahim, aka Marduuf.
Marduuf has the deportment of a man whom, if he walked into your home and declared himself the owner, you wouldn’t feel fully entitled to challenge. He is of medium height, with a broad chest and the fists of a pugilist. Veins run all over the back of his hands, and they move as he gesticulates. He is soft-spoken, though, for a man his size, and his smile is disarming.
Malik asks him where and when he was born, how many siblings he has, and where, if anywhere, he was schooled. Marduuf’s voice is so soft that Malik brings the tape recorder closer to his mouth and adjusts the volume. There is something of the hillbilly to his accent as well, and Malik has to pay a great deal of attention to catch his nuances.
“I was born in Daawo, the twin sister to Eyl,” Marduuf says. “I am the firstborn. My family started large, but became reduced to three. Five of my siblings died before they reached the age of four; there were deaths from diseases like TB and malaria, or because there was no doctor in our village to cure a cough. Very few of the children born in our area survived. You had to be very strong from birth to live.”
Malik cannot decide if it is nerves or anger, but something makes Marduuf pause every few words, like a reader who has come late to literacy.
“How old are you?”
“I am thirty-five.”
“Where are your remaining siblings now?”
“My sister works on planes, as a stewardess.”
“And your brother?”
“He is recently dead. Shabaab killed him.”
Malik wants to ask why, but he doesn’t want to get diverted from his real interest in Marduuf’s story.
He asks, “How old was he when he died?”
“He didn’t die. He was killed,” Marduuf says, with emphasis.
“But how old was he?” Malik says.
Marduuf bristles slightly, then collects himself and says only, “He was small for his size. He had the face of an old man, but the body of a boy. He was sixteen, maybe a little older. Now that he has been killed, he has become large. In our memory.”
Malik notes that Marduuf’s voice goes up a decibel when he speaks about his murdered brother.
Malik asks, “Do you know Fidno?”
“Yes. I worked with him several times.”
“What work did you do for him?”
“I was a pirate,” Marduuf says.
“And Fidno — what was he? A pirate, too?”
Malik thinks he catches a slight sneer or even a snicker. Maybe he finds the thought of Fidno becoming a pirate either ridiculous or amusing. Malik waits. Ultimately, his patience pays its dividend.
Marduuf says, “If you are educated, you do not want to become a pirate.”
Now that is something new to Malik. He feels certain that it is equally new to many others: that it is the barefaced privation of opportunities, the total absence of any chance to improve your life that turns one into a pirate, especially when one’s livelihood has been threatened, interrupted, and destroyed. This runs counter to the theory that the presence of a strong central state guarantees a cessation to piratical exploits. He thinks of maybe one day writing an article titled “Poverty Is the Invention of Piracy.”
“What work did Fidno do?”
Finally, Marduuf is in his element, and the words pour out of him, with little stammering and fewer pauses. “Fidno is book-educated,” he says. “He reads all the time. Every time we saw him he had a new book in his hands, books in the white man’s language, not English. Maybe German, or so somebody said, because he lived in that country, a very powerful man there. When he talked on his mobile in one of these languages, he spoke fast, as fast as water running down a glass window after it has rained. But he is a bad man. He cheats his own pockets. He is the kind of cheat who puts something in his shirt pocket but makes sure that the ‘thief pocket’ in the front of his trousers has no idea what is in the shirt pocket. Do you know what I mean? You can’t trust him. He is too clever. With money, Fidno is a dangerous man.”
“Did you make a lot of money from piracy?”
“Not much,” Marduuf says.
“What do the pirates do with what they make?”
“Many buy Surf, a four-wheel drive.”
“Did you buy one yourself?”
“I have bought a small pickup. More useful.”
“Not lots of money in piracy, eh?”
“We went into piracy when we were told there was a lot of money in it,” Marduuf answers. “The BBC says that people on the coast of Somalia were rich, the pirates all getting the most beautiful women, every night a wedding. But I never saw any of the money everyone was talking about, even after working as a pirate for several years. The largest share I received was seven thousand dollars.”
Malik asks, “Can you name any of the ships you took hostage?”
“A Korean ship; a very, very big Saudi one, bigger than the biggest house I’ve seen in Mogadiscio — don’t ask me to tell you their names, because I cannot remember them. There was that Spanish one, we caught the Spanish ship fishing in our waters,” Marduuf says. “We used small boats to chase them and made gun noises heavier than rockets, and they stopped. We took what the ship workers had in cash, maybe three hundred dollars, we took their smart phones and expensive watches and ate their food and waited for three months. After that we received a thousand dollars each. I swear no more than that.”
“What business do you do now?”
“I sell rugs straight to some of the mosques. I have a shop high up in the Bakhaaraha,” Marduuf replies. “That is how my youngest brother entered his first mosque. Kaahin was with me, a young thing then, when one day I went into a mosque to conclude a sale. He said when we went out of the mosque into the sun, which beat into our eyes, that he felt comfortable inside the mosque. He left me a week or so later and joined the mosque as a pupil. He said they were teaching him to read the Koran and to write. A month and a half later, he showed me he knew how to write his name in Arabic. I was happy. Then I heard from Wiila, my sister, that someone from our family who also had a son in the mosque had heard that Kaahin had taken an oath and joined a special group inside Shabaab, very secret. He came back to see me less often after that. And then I learned he was dead, killed.”
“How did you learn that he was killed?”
“I asked his mucallim where Kaahin was.”