They put on a show for public consumption, now and then, to wit, when they were attending Somali wedding parties together, they could be seen touching, holding hands, and she would address him as “darling.” And they signed cards as wives and husbands do. When they invited friends or acquaintances, she would make a point of almost picking a genuine fight with him, which was how she felt; she presumed others would see it differently: a wife nagging her husband. She was better at playing the part and was more comfortable in the role than he was. Asked by her mother how she was coping, Cambara complained that he was cramping her free-flowing lifestyle, crowding out all her favorite male friends, who wouldn’t call her anymore or invite her to the parties she used to go to. Arda knew where she could phone her if she wanted to talk to her — at Raxma’s — but she never bothered to enlighten Zaak about any of this.
Cambara soldiered on. Home alone and with no friends, Arda having discouraged him from frequenting the teahouses where Somalis in Toronto gathered and exchanged political gossip, Zaak watched some of the rental videos about Swiss and American immigration officers snooping into the private lives of aliens who applied for citizenship in their countries. He must have seen Pane e Cioccolata, in Italian with French subtitles, and Green Card, in the English original, to improve his language proficiency, so many times he could recite the exchanges of the actors.
Seven, eight months passed without much of a worrying event, when he gave himself a pass mark and was not so much impressed with his input as he was with the fact that he hadn’t messed with Cambara or put her off. When she deigned to come home, cook, and eat with him, she would ask him questions about how he was doing. Not only that, she would not tell him much about herself, neither her work nor where she had been or with whom. He became progressively lonelier by the day, more and more bored, depressed.
One late evening, after he received confirmation that his papers had been approved, Arda rang to congratulate him and also to tell him to pick up a prepaid ticket at the airport counter and fly to Ottawa, where he would spend a few days with her. She must have touched a sore nerve, because he spoke rather uncontrollably about his aloneness, how, although tempted, he had not been in touch or mixed with other Somalis, worried that, in their probing, he might talk and then things might come to a pretty pass because of him letting on what was truly happening to him.
For some reason, maybe because he regretted sharing these confidences with his aunt and wished he hadn’t, Zaak did not go. Cambara returned home early, expecting to find him gone, and was surprised to find not only that he was there but also that he was ready to lay into her. By then, of course, he had his papers and had done his language course and knew he could try his luck with another woman and also find a job. She reckoned she knew where his winded anger was taking him to, even though it may have been a one-off burst, an aberration, a detour from his norm.
He said, shaking with rage, “This is your world, and I am made to feel privileged to live in it the way a poor relative lives in the house belonging to his well-to-do kin.”
She imagined several months on, when he might behave like a man with a mind to beat her up because he couldn’t have his way with her. She saw his unwarranted behavior as being like the red traffic cones in the middle of their journey, warning her that danger lay ahead and that she must act promptly.
She was so incensed she left the apartment without packing even an overnight bag, flew to Ottawa late the same evening, and informed her mother that she wanted Zaak out. Arda agreed — now that he had all she had wanted him to have, his nationality papers — that the time had come for him to make a world where he might be comfortable to be his own man, live his own life, and marry if he had the wish.
He moved out of the apartment into another in a borough that was the farthest suburb from hers. He became an employee-consultant to a Toronto-based NGO, tasked with resolving clan-related conflicts in Somalia, used his first salary to rent a more convenient place, and then a few months later made a down payment for a two-bedroom apartment with a loan from the bank, underwritten by Arda, who also topped up his monthly mortgage payments. When he landed a decent-enough job that allowed him to settle the bills himself, Arda announced it was time that Cambara filed her divorce papers. Two weeks after they came through, Zaak surprised everyone, including his aunt, by taking a wife. Arda was hurt, because she had hoped he would let her in on his decision and consult her. Several years and three children — all of them girls — later, everyone except Cambara was in for another surprise: Zaak appeared before a court, accused of excessive cruelty to his wife and his three daughters, whom he beat almost to death.
Unwelcome among close family and his friends, Zaak relocated to Mogadiscio to be the local representative of the NGO with which he worked. He was made the coordinator of its peace-driven line and, from all accounts, redeemed himself, at least in the first few years.
Showered and dressed and ready to go down, if need be, to prepare a meal for the two of them, since she won’t imagine eating his food, she tells herself that Zaak is a hopeless man in a ruined city. In Nairobi, while on the CBS job, she did not benefit professionally from his input on the documentary on the fleeing Somalis, about which he too had a lot to say. It was he who profited from her visit, becoming a husband to her and moving to Canada. Sadly, he reduced himself to a wreck and destroyed whatever opportunities might have come his way. He was a wife-beater, an abuser of children, and an ingrate fool. She supposes that this being the fourth time when chance brought them together — first as children, then in Nairobi, after that in Toronto, and now in Mogadiscio — she will endeavor not to make the same error, however one might define this.
Will she capitalize on her presence here in Mogadiscio and make something of herself, or will she waste the opportunity and return to Toronto empty-handed? If she hasn’t let Arda know much about the plan taking shape in her mind, it is because she wants to be her own woman, not a marionette her mother might control from as remote a city as Ottawa. Only one other person is aware of the bare bones of her plan: her closest friend, Raxma.
Cambara hears a knock at the door. The tapping insinuates itself into the gap between the sounds made by the proverbial owl hooting and warning her to take care, and Cambara’s recall of what took place between her and Wardi, her current husband.
“You are coming down?” Zaak asks.
She interprets this as “Are you going to cook?”
“Half an hour, and I’ll be down,” she says.
THREE
Cambara enters the living room, half of which is bathed in amber light, the other curtained away and covered in the somber darkness of a black cloth, similar in color and texture to that of a common everyday chador.
As she walks in, her hand instinctively inches toward and eventually touches her head, which is swathed in a head scarf. She is self-conscious that she did not ease the tangles in her matted hair, considering that she did not succeed in running a comb through its massy thickness before coming down. A smile crosses her face, but whether for her remembrance of Arda scolding her, as a girl growing up, whenever she slept without first neatening her hair and then grooming it or for seeming to have wrapped her head as if she were going into a place of worship, Cambara can’t decide. Either way, she steps into the softening hour shaping into the shadowy twilight of a world with which she is not familiar.