A dragon-fly flew into the room, slender of body, elegant of movement. Mesmerized, Duniya watched it. The dragon-fly flew out of the window just before the young woman returned.
Nasiiba changed the subject again. She had a way of springing surprises on her mother, over whom she undoubtedly had a certain burchi-hold. Obligingly, Duniya seemed happy to lose command, in her maternal element.
“You see, Mummy, we your children know precious little about your past and you know next to nothing about our present. Don’t you think it’s time we got to know each other better? Come with me for a swim at the sports club one day and meet my friends; and you could go for a ride on Mataan’s bicycle, let him teach you. I’ll teach you to swim. And get Mataan to tell you about his woman-friend, whatever her name is.”
Duniya smiled faintly, a commotion inside her head, noises pressing on her brain. She tried to remember the nebulous name of the young face she had seen at the clinic; but she couldn’t.
Nasiiba was saying, “I met Taariq today, for instance. I had a long chat with him. Yet there was a time when I hated the notion of him as my step-father. But what do I know about him when the two of you were married, or even before that when you were his tenant? Nothing. I want us to talk about these things — what I was like with him, what Mataan was like. Just to get things into perspective, if you see what I mean.”
“How was Taariq?”
“He’s in top form, looking a decade younger,” Nasiiba said.
“That’s good,” said in an amiable sort of way.
“He’s getting his journalism published. Have you seen his article in today’s daily?”
Duniya hadn’t.
“And he’s seeing a woman he’s serious about,” added Nasiiba.
Mataan is seeing an older woman; Taariq, my former husband, is serious about a woman he’s seeing. What about me? Who am I seeing? Duniya reminded herself to avoid Nasiiba’s traps.
“What was Taariq like, Mummy?”
Duniya didn’t like what she remembered. Drunken bouts. Depressive days. She remembered the decisive night when she had walked in on him pouring out tots of whisky for himself and little Mataan, then eight years old. Mataan had barely taken a sip of his when Duniya entered. God, she was mad, so furious she threw Taariq out of his own house.
“Tell me, Mummy. Tell me about Taariq.”
It seemed strange to Duniya now that she had never talked to her children about the father of their half-sister. It was in this spirit that she consented to tell Nasiiba a little. She spoke slowly at first, undoing the knots of inhibition entwined round the telling. “Taariq was wonderful with your twin-brother, not with you. He and you didn’t get on well at all. He found you very demanding, a self-centred child. Being a newspaper columnist he worked at home, in his room all day at times, writing and rewriting. A perfectionist, he would submit his pieces at the last minute. When writing he drank a lot and ate little or nothing. Drinking gave him energy, a reason for exerting himself, some kind of self-coercion. There was pain on his face when he wrote, every word leaving its mark somewhere on his body.”
“Why does he bother then?” Nasiiba asked.
“I took a keen interest in Taariq’s welfare,” Duniya continued, “because he was marvellous with Mataan, like a father to him. I would cook larger portions and invite him over to our side of the house. He would accept the food but made it clear he preferred eating alone, like a dog with its bone’ as he put it. He had a sense of humour, and the uncanny ability to laugh at himself, which many Somalis are unwilling to do.”
“I don’t recall any of that,” said Nasiiba regretfully.
Duniya returned to her theme. “I was on night duty once, and, because I had asked him, Taariq tried to put you to bed. In your rage at the thought of him even touching you, you called him all sorts of wicked names, including one he didn’t like: alcoholic. It was obvious you hated him, hated him so much that you woke up if he entered the room you were sleeping in, as though you had smelt him. Your contempt for him was pathological.”
Nasiiba said, “I must apologize to him one of these days.”
“To please you, Taariq drank less,” said Duniya. “Also he fetched two girls your age, his nieces, to be your playmates. He did all this with fatherly patience, and because he was fond of you. I was pleased that you got on fine with his nieces.”
“And Mataan?”
“I never saw my son happier than when in Taariq’s company, running errands for him, delivering his idol’s late copy to the editor in person. Taariq became so dependent on Mataan that he even trusted him with personal messages.”
“What do you mean?”
“Taariq had a woman-friend whom he’d known for years and to whom he was very close. Mataan, maybe because he didn’t like the woman, decided to give her the wrong meeting-places and times whenever Taariq asked him to deliver messages to her. This happened several times, with neither suspecting Mataan of sabotage. When they wised up to his tricks, it was too late to mend matters.”
“How very wicked of my brother to do that!”
“Anyway —” Duniya paused. “During this period I returned home unexpectedly one evening, having swapped shifts with another nurse, I don’t recall why. You were in bed asleep, cheeks tattooed with dried tear-stains, alone in the bed the three of us shared. And where was Mataan? The light in Taariq’s room (the very one we are in now) was on and his door half open. I shouted a greeting from the courtyard and apologized for disturbing him, but had he seen my son? ‘He’s sleeping here, on my bed,’ he said. We chatted briefly when I went to fetch Mataan. Well, things aren’t that easy when, as Somalis say, donkeys are giving birth to calves.”
“I know,” Nasiiba said wisely.
With a strained look, Duniya asked, “Do you see this barrier of bricks? I tripped on it and fell forward, nearly hurting my teeth when I hit my head against the bedpost. All because I hadn’t minded the bricks. I was in excruciating pain.”
“What did you do then?”
Duniya chuckled. “I got up to take Mataan away when the dizziness no longer impaired my vision. Then guess what? As I bent to lift him off the bed, the smell of Mataan’s urine made my head turn in whirls of shame, call it guilt, or whatever.”
A smile touched Nasiiba’s lips. “And since Mataan had wet his bed, you decided that you and Taariq would share the one I hadn’t peed on. Result, this corpse of a heavy sleeper, that is me, was transferred to the bed on which her brother had emptied his day’s intake of liquid.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I remember waking up in the bed of the man I hated,” said Nasiiba.
“You remember that?”
“Oh, yes.”
“But you’ve never mentioned it.”
“There are a million things I’ve never told a soul.”
Duniya said, “How could you still remember that?”
“For one thing, I hated Taariq so. For another, it was my brother who wet the bed, not me. Someone else’s urine always smells different from one’s own, but that’s beside the point. I woke up. I’m not sure you want to hear this.”
The older woman sat up, alert. “What?”
“Well, I heard your voices, yours and Taariq’s in lusty whispers. I came closer to eaves-drop, then watched. I saw everything through the keyhole and heard everything, every single groan, every no and every yes.”
“Everything?”
Nasiiba nodded.
There was amusement in Duniya’s voice. “If you saw and heard everything, then what’s the point of my telling you anything? You probably remember things better and know more than I.”
Nasiiba shook her head. She leaned forward. “How did you come to be Taariq’s tenant in the first place?”