After a while, she picks up Zaak’s general whereabouts by scenting him in the manner in which a shark might become aware of blood in the vicinity. With pinpoint precision, she identifies his presence by his body odor before she actually sees him. He is the bare-chested, sarong-wearing, heavily perspiring figure with the distended belly sitting on a rug, legs extended in front of him and jaws active. His eyes, which he narrows to the size of the eyelet in a shoelace, are bleary. He leans languidly backward, with his right elbow resting on a cushion and his head, laid back, on yet another, the latter one propped up against the wall.
He is masticating, the pouches of his cheeks filled to bursting. His features retain the inebriated look of a commonplace and homeless alcoholic, chomping his swollen tongue, which now and then he mistakes for food. Her gaze falls on the uneaten, unopened bundles of qaat, now delicately wrapped up in wet dish towels to keep the leaves fresh. All around him are Coke bottles, two of them empty and on their sides, a third close to him. This one is open, and he takes sips now and again, and there are two flasks. She presumes one of them is filled with sweet black tea, the other tea with milk. There are also several bottles of imported mineral water.
He tries to get up, as though out of courtesy to her. His attempt to rise to the occasion, however, comes to naught, and he falls awkwardly backward, tipping over like a mechanical device that a child has wound up and that has run its prescribed time, in the process exposing his bare bum and balls before restoring what little there is to his sense of decorum. He lies on his side in obvious discomfort, with the part of his distended paunch that is now visible to her spilling over and spreading in a downward direction. The image of Zaak, relaxed and yet tensely waiting, brings to Cambara’s mind the tortured posture of a hospital patient bent over and almost on all fours into whose rectum a nurse is introducing a suppository.
His demeanor discomfited, he pushes the morsel of qaat that he has so far chewed out of the way with his tongue, which, for a fleeing second, is visible in all its glory, fumbling, fondling, agitated, and slobbering too. She imagines a baboon fingering the mess of a just-peeled rotten banana and lavishly gorging on everything in sight. It is no wonder that despite the distance she has kept, Cambara, in a state beyond bearing, momentarily suffers a dislocation on account of the odors invading her senses. She has the bizarre feeling that she is at the entrance to a stable reeking of wet cattle dung mixed with horse manure. What is she doing here?
He says, “Will you join me?”
“And do what?” she asks.
She waits for him to say something before she goes off on a tangent in pursuit of her memory, which is now afloat and which leads her back into the murkiness of their time together. She journeys past that to a period after they divorced and he married a semiliterate woman, fresh from Mogadiscio with no family to speak of and no one to advise her. Zaak fed terrible stories into the rumor mills of Somali Toronto, turning Cambara into a figure of fun. Asked why his and Cambara’s marriage did not prosper, he would speak of how he had surprised her late one evening when she was frolicking in the nude with one or the other of her female friends; if browbeaten with persistent demands to tell it all, he would mention Raxma by name. When his fellow qaat-chewers would inquire what she was like in bed, Zaak would reply that the two of them did not get it off often, “once every six months, if that.” Someone in the select audience, every member of which was from his immediate clan family, was bound to want to know more, and Zaak would oblige. To the questions of whether it was his fault and he had failed her, or whether she was just not interested in sex, period, or was frigid, he would deliver his reply with a cheeky finality: “Because she is a woman’s woman, not a man’s woman.” Not that it bothered her what any of his mates thought of her, one way or another. But to think that she and Arda, through the latter’s intercession with her, had done him such a good turn, which made it possible for him to obtain landed immigrant status in Canada on arrival, frankly she expected him to behave differently, at least amicably toward the two of them. Because in his attempt to paint a sullied picture of Cambara, Zaak was alleged to have insinuated that Arda had been the lover of the Canadian diplomat who, while stationed in Nairobi, staffed the Somali desk at the High Commission, the same diplomat, now stationed in Ottawa, who speeded up his own paperwork. He based his innuendo on something that Cambara may have said and that he either misheard or clearly misinterpreted: She had described Arda’s relationship with the said diplomat as being “close.” Of course, she never let on, nor did she ever breathe a word about this to her mother. What would be the point? Maybe it is in the nature of those who are denied sex or do not have enough of it to be so preoccupied with the subject that they view everything else through its distorted lens.
“What do you say?” he is asking loudly, chewing.
“About what?”
Her voice sounds like that of someone awoken from a deep sleep. Suddenly she comes to know where she is and with whom — the rank miasma emanating from Zaak’s corner. I cannot endure it, I will die from this before long, she tells herself. This is torture.
“You see, my fellow chewers, all of them men, have declined to come, knowing that I have a female guest,” he says. “You may know it, but I can tell you it is a darn curse to chew alone.”
“No, thanks.”
“I have a lot of qaat. Please.”
The thought of joining him leaves her cold, worse than having the earlier shower a second time. All of a sudden, she is furiously scratching her head, her pulse throbbing speedily, and her ears filling with the sound of her deafening heartbeat. She looks at her arm, at which she has a dig, almost making it bleed, and then at him. From there, she looks at the bundle of qaat with the string undone and lying spread out, waiting for Zaak to consume it. Time was when only the Somalis from the former British Somaliland protectorate and those in the Somali-speaking Ogaden of Ethiopia chewed it, not those in the southern portions of the peninsula. When Cambara lived here, neither her parents nor any of her friends or acquaintances, in fact nobody she knew ever touched the stuff. Lately, however, the habit has become widespread, to the extent where even at clan council meetings, to which pastoralists are invited, the organizers pass it around, to make certain that no one will question the addled thinking of the attendees, not least that of the warlord and his deputies. Looking at Zaak now, she remarks a worrying dullness in his eyes, reminiscent of the stoned expression her English-language instructor, who was from Hargeisa, used to wear to the primary school here in Mogadiscio after an all-night chewing.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look it,” she says cockily.
“What makes you say that?”
“The unhealthy way you’re sweating,” she comments.
“You don’t like sauna, à la tropics?” he says.
“This is no steam bath, and you know it,” she says.
“I like my sauna this way,” he says.
“How misguided can you be?” she says.
He is silent — a man alone with his fever.
She takes a measure of the low depth to which Zaak has descended since their last encounter several years ago in Toronto, when he spent a couple of nights in a police cell for beating his wife and maltreating his children. She raised and paid his bail at Arda’s behest. When you combine his chain-smoking, his frequent chewing of qaat, and his living in unaired rooms stinking as awfully as the armpit of piglets, then you have a recipe for unmitigated dissonance between what is expected from someone you think you’ve known all your life and the unbecoming behavior they come up with when their situation has changed.