“Will you be able to stay overnight if need be?” Duniya asked one of the three cleaning women.
“Sure.”
“And no one will worry about you not returning home?”
The second woman said, “When you are our age, Duniya, you’ll discover what it means not to be missed. In any case I live within walking distance from here and can help organize food and mats for my colleagues too.”
“I’ll sleep anywhere, even on the bare floor,” said the third cleaner.
Having put in nine hours’ labour, Duniya and her entourage returned to her old flat, leaving the new one in the trusted hands of the cleaning women. It was late in the afternoon: tea was made and drunk, and Duniya showered, changed into a house garment and rested. Bosaaso went home to shower, then returned to Duniya’s as agreed. He met her, nervous, anxious, but also light-hearted as though his adulthood had provisionally given way to a younger self, brightly glowing in the happy atmosphere their eagerness had brought forth.
When the children’s backs were turned the two of them slipped away noiselessly, like naughty adolescents. She had the car keys in her hand and was saying, “I’ll drive.”
The nine-day-old moon led her towards Bosaaso’s house.
The sky was starry and spacious. The car stalled now and then, but this disturbed neither of them, producing only laughter. Doggedly, Duniya restarted the engine whenever the car stopped, both behaving as if they had all the time in the world to cover the distance separating their respective houses.
But wouldn’t she be missed? he wondered. Or had she told Nasiiba where she would spend the night? But the twins were so excited at the prospect of Uncle Abshir’s visit they might not give their mother’s absence a moment’s thought, he reasoned.
Now Duniya’s feet operated the clutch, brake and accelerator and the car ran smoothly, albeit anxiously, towards Bosaaso’s house, as if relying totally on its homing instinct. Duniya’s eyes grinned with the joy of anticipation. Bosaaso sat back, envying her calm. He kept his hands to himself; she wouldn’t have liked it if he had touched her while she was driving, he knew that.
“I love you,” he said.
Nothing suggested that she had heard his proclamation.
He repeated the words to himself: and then they touched.
The roads were more or less empty of cars, and they were driving through a district in which power had been cut. People, because of this, came out of their houses, poured into the streets where the air was fresher and where there were cage terraces, turning the nuisance of the lack of electricity to their advantage, going for walks by moonlight, or standing, in groups, chatting. At one point, there was a small gathering of men and women engaged in an argument in the centre of a crossroads. With full headlights on, Duniya had come on them without slowing down, causing them to run helter skelter, cursing, speaking all manner of insults, one describing her as a mad woman.
“I’m sorry,” she said, when in a state of mind to speak.
By then, she had eased the vehicle into total submission, and was clearly in a light-hearted euphoria, winged like a griffin. She pressed the accelerator, speeding up more and more. She did this to shorten the distance existing not between her body and Bosaaso’s but between herself and her brother, Abshir. Only hours separated them and she wished to spend these in self-abandonment, in Bosaaso’s house and company. She wanted several questions about Bosaaso out of the way before she embraced Abshir.
To enrich itself, her memory returned to that ambiguous zone between myth and religion, where griffin-like buraaqs rubbed shoulders with jinns eaves-dropping at the gates of heaven; where shooting-stars were said to be aimed at the latter to discourage them; where bored women engage jinns in illicit love affairs; where jinns, out of wickedness, mounted sentry duty at the door to Zubair’s sight.
Tonight, Duniya had a deep-seated wish to give herself to him, a wish that had taken days to mature. She was glad he hadn’t rushed her. Now the timing was right, and its suddenness lent her decision more power, like unexpected thunder in a season of awaited rains. She wanted to know what he was like in bed; if he snored; what were his quirks; was he fussy about which side of the bed he slept on; was he in a foul mood when he woke in the mornings?
From the way he stirred, she sensed he wished to say something. “Yes?”
“We’ll have time to talk,” she heard, and yet he appeared dead from worry, pale almost, the blood drained out of him. She touched his hand which felt cold, lifeless.
“Say it if it can’t wait until we reach your place,” she said.
He hesitated. “It’s just…” but he hadn’t the courage to finish whatever it was he had intended to say.
She slowed down. He would have to give her directions from then on. But he told her to turn left when he meant her to go to the right. She decided he had a terrible sense of direction, which she attributed to his having lived in a sign-posted city where one had maps and didn’t depend on one’s instinctive sense of direction. She didn’t understand what he was talking about, but she let him talk on and on, because it did him good, reducing the tension considerably. But what exactly did he want to say?
A woman who has brought up three children isn’t easily surprised; she can see anxiety on her children’s faces, knows what they want long before they speak. As a nurse, she listened to a great many silly questions coming from otherwise intelligent people who, because they’re unwell, lose the ability to use their heads wisely.
“Do you know how long Abshir is staying in Mogadiscio?” he asked.
“I’ve no idea,” she replied.
He is a worrier, she thought. A heart-eating, self-questioning man, with little confidence in himself. He is possibly the kind of man who gets up at day-break to worry about whether or not he will keep his midday appointments.
She was glad when they got to his gate, in front of which she braked. There were lights on in the upper floor of the house, and she could see a balcony badly in need of repair. Was that the balcony from which Yussur and the baby had dropped to their deaths? Duniya, with the engine still running, came out of the car, saying to him, “You drive it in yourself.”
A night watchman, from the River People, showed her the way with a torch, indicating to her the small side gate by which pedestrians entered Bosaaso’s house. But when he had parked his car in its shelter and joined her, in fact, just as he had taken her hand to lead her inside, there was a power cut whose suddenness made her start. The night watchman’s faint flashlight provided enough light for them to see the steps to the main door.
“I have a generator and enough diesel to run it,” he said.
“If the rest of the district has no light, why should we?”
“Fair enough,” he said.
As she entered the door which he had held open for her, Duniya saw her shadow severing, in two halves, the moonlight looking in the doorway She stepped on the tail of her own shadow, as if it were a doormat on which she was meant to wipe her shoes clean. Walking further in, she sensed that the house had something spiritless about it. She walked straight ahead, but stood out of Bosaaso’s way, imagining that he would want to look for a box of matches or candles or to pull open curtains or windows. An instant later, however, she could hear the french windows being dragged open scratchily, and he was saying, “There is an armchair here. Please come.”