The phone rings: Yusur asks if he has heard from Malik. When he replies that Malik hasn’t called, she lets out a whimper. Ahl reminds himself that he must remain strong for everyone’s sake. His wife has a way of pulling him down with her to a point so low that there is nothing but despair. Since her son left, she has been prone to long bouts of depression; at times, she has found it difficult to hold down her nursing job at a hospital. Of late she has been working night shifts at an old people’s home, and she seldom comes home even during the day. There is always something to do at an old people’s home, especially for a mother desperately mourning her missing son.
When Ahl arrived in the Twin Cities in the mid-1980s, there was only one other Somali in town, a delectable young woman studying art. He had been recruited from the UK, where he had taken his Ph.D. in linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, to teach in the Education Department at the University of Minnesota. He bought an apartment in downtown St. Paul large enough to host Malik two or three times a year, between assignments for the Singapore-based daily in which he published his syndicated pieces. The two brothers set themselves apart from their birth communities, hardly socializing with the Yemenis with whom they had grown up in Aden, or with the new influx of Somalis with whom they shared a loose-knit communality. Later, when Minnesota became inundated with Somalis because the then governor offered them better facilities than they could have enjoyed in San Diego, Nashville, or other places where they had initially been concentrated, the two brothers communicated in whichever language would exclude those they did not wish to understand them: Somali when among Arabs, Chinese when among Somalis, and English with each other and when they wanted to be understood.
Malik made a name for himself as a foreign correspondent. Their mother went back to Malaysia to look after her own aging parents, and their father to Somalia, his ancestral land, where, bizarrely, he melted into the rangelands of the north, tending hundreds of camels he had bought with the help of herdsmen in his employ. Their old man went totally native, as Malik liked to say, and married a woman in her late teens to produce additional offspring, in hope of making sure that his bloodline would not die out, a responsibility he no longer trusted either of his sons could fulfill.
Though neither had regular contact with either parent, the brothers went out of their way to keep each other abreast of one another’s whereabouts, troubles, endeavors, and successes. Occasionally, Malik would disappear from view for months, covering some terrible war unfolding in yet another wretched, remote country. Then he would be back, exhausted from travel and needing Ahl to listen to his adventures and to read the pieces he had written. A run of intelligent women had fallen for him, and he’d had brief affairs with many of them.
Ahl was the first to marry. He met Yusur, a Somali woman seven years his junior, at a refresher course in public health meant for Somalis newly arrived in Minneapolis. He had given a lecture on teaching Somali grammar to non-native speakers of the tongue. He and Yusur struck a heartfelt amity immediately when they talked but maintained a deferential distance for quite some time, knowing that no closeness between them was possible. She was separated from her husband and lived alone with her infant son. Her marriage was troubled — she had an unemployed husband who passed his days chewing qaat with his likewise jobless mates. To a man, they received welfare benefits and, when possible, sponged off their wives. Yusur worked and attended classes part-time and so had to hire a babysitter. Not only was this expensive, but her husband’s bad behavior reached new depths when he was arrested for sexually assaulting the babysitter.
Yusur’s in-laws were furious when she declined to pay the lawyer who had been hired in an attempt to have the charge reduced from rape to aggravated assault. And when her husband was finally released and she wouldn’t have him back, her in-laws made physical threats against her. In the end, his family, fearing he would continue to be a blight to their name, sent him off to Detroit to cool his heels and then helped him move to Toronto, where he submitted his papers as a freshly arrived Somali by virtue of a slight change to the order of his names.
Yusur and Ahl saw each other discreetly for a long time before becoming man and wife. Their wedding was private, known only to Malik and his parents. Their mother graced the occasion with her presence, but their father merely sent a terse telegram from Hargeisa: “You have my blessings.”
The boy, Taxliil, and Ahl developed a father-son rapport, and while he didn’t use the word, Taxliil behaved as though Ahl were his father.Ahl, in turn, made sure Taxliil was not lacking for anything. For most Somali children in the diaspora, he was aware, life was a chore: punishments at home; humiliation at school; mothers not assisted with the children, fathers seldom involved in raising their offspring. In many homes, relatives came and went from Somalia, bearing horror stories about what was happening in their country. The phones would ring at two, three, or four in the morning, the caller needing money to pay the burial expenses of a clansman killed in an intermilitia skirmish back home. With all the turmoil and the constant noise of the television, youngsters often lacked the will, the peace of mind, and the time to do their schoolwork.
But this was not the case in the home where Taxliil grew up, thanks to Ahl. The three of them lived as a nuclear family: a man, a woman, and a child, with Uncle Malik occasionally visiting, an ideal model, one would have thought, for a boy growing up. There was order and abundant love in the household. Ahl made time to supervise Taxliil’s homework. Twice a week, Taxliil went to the neighborhood mosque to receive religious instruction from a Somali teacher with rudimentary Arabic, and often Ahl would subtly set Taxliil right without pointing out the teacher’s failings.
On his first day of secondary school, Taxliil met a green-eyed Kurdish boy, Samir. The two became inseparable. They played sports and computer games together; swapped clothes; swam and took long walks on weekends. They spurred each other to achieve their ambitions. Neither admitted to knowing what the word impossible meant. Doing well wasn’t good enough; they did better than anyone else.
One summer vacation, Samir flew out to Baghdad with his father to visit Iraq for the first time since the American takeover. He was sitting in the back of the car with his grandparents, his father in the front next to the driver, Samir’s uncle, when an American Marine flagged them down at a checkpoint. Samir alighted speedily and waited by the roadside, away from the vehicle, as instructed. His father helped Grandma in regaining possession of her walker and held his hand out to her as she shakily stepped out of the vehicle. Meanwhile, his uncle bent down to assist Grandpa, who was still in the car, in retrieving his cane, and he took a long time, half his body hidden from view. Panicking that one of the two men would shoot him, the young Marine opened fire, killing everyone except Samir.
Back in the Twin Cities, Samir became morose. The two friends still spent time together, but their life lacked the fun and ambition they had previously shared. Then Samir began to speak of attending to his “religious responsibilities,” and shortly thereafter he vanished from sight. A month or so later, his photo appeared in the Star Tribune, the caption reading: “Local boy turns Baghdad suicide bomber.”
The FBI came early the next morning and descended with unnecessary force on Taxliil, Ahl, and Yusur, as if they had detonated the bomb that caused the death of the soldiers. They were taken in separate vehicles and fingerprinted, their histories together and separately gone over again and again. Taxliil was made to endure longer hours of interrogation, with repeated threats. The FBI showed keen interest in Ahl as well, because of his birthplace and because he, Yusur, and Taxliil now lived in a house close to potential escape routes along the Mississippi. An FBI officer accused him of being a talent spotter for radical groups in the Muslim world.