“I think it is,” Zaak assures her.
“What is the relevance?”
“I’ve heard his side of the story.”
“So what?”
“What’s yours?”
He moves as though he is preparing to launch into another of his skirmishes, but she raises her right arm in time calmly to stop him from saying anything. When she thinks she has imposed her way on him, she touches her fingers to her lips, as if to seal the contract with the silence that is about to become her destiny. She stands stock still, wincing, her arms akimbo, in the likeness of a bird readying to take off. She makes as if to depart.
Then she says, “Good day to you.”
“Wait, don’t go yet,” he says.
Cambara goes to her upstairs room to think things over.
FOUR
How can she cure her grief in the briny condiments of her tears when her secondary fury — directed at Zaak, and consequent upon his churlishness — is so overwhelming that her primary anger at Wardi for what he has done pales in comparison? Truth is, she will at no point question the wisdom of coming to Mogadiscio, nor will she regret it. However, what course of action must she take to undo Zaak’s misdeed?
She believes that whatever else she does, she will not want to allow her rage to go on a rampage and thereby ruin her chances of success, compelling her to give in to the allure of remorse. There is no sense in admitting defeat hastily either, especially to losers like Zaak and Wardi, or in throwing her hands up in the air in despair. She is determined not to permit Zaak’s declared animosity to dampen her newfound bravado, which is the result partly of her having beaten Wardi in his dastardly game and partly of her deciding to come home, so that among other things she can reclaim her family property.
She wishes she had Raxma close by or had the opportunity to ring her up right away so she could bring her up to speed about Zaak’s inappropriate comportment. Of all the people she knows and with whom she might discuss such a sensitive topic, Raxma is the one whom she trusts fully and whom she thinks might advise her on the best approach to extricating herself from the complex tangle of relational webs — as intricate as they are destructive — into which Zaak has led her unawares. Cambara replays in her mind Raxma’s emotional valediction, spoken as they hugged each other good-bye at the Toronto airport, to which Raxma had given her a lift. Raxma had promised that she would not give up her attempt to locate someone who might have functioning phone numbers for Hotel Maanta, owned and run by Kiin, a very close friend of hers. However, when Cambara called her from Nairobi, Raxma had been sorry to report that the two numbers she had often used to reach Kiin might have become faulty, because they had been permanently busy. She urged Cambara to set her mind at rest, though. She was very optimistic that in a couple of days she would call her with Kiin’s coordinates because she was continually ringing the number she had for Kiin as well as trying to contact some of her business associates in Abu Dhabi who might help. If, in the meantime, Cambara obtained a local SIM card, then it would be worth her while to try the numbers herself. Raxma, who was more familiar with matters Somali, in that she had kept abreast of political events in the country from which she had been away a mere decade, as compared to Cambara, who had been away for almost two decades, explained that there were some telephone network providers based in Mogadiscio with no international connectivity. Alternately, Cambara could call her once she was connected and had her own number and, if there was need for her to make a reverse charge, then Raxma would place the return call immediately.
Now she remembers, with charged emotion, Raxma’s words of farewell. “We are here for you, our darling, you can rely on us,” Raxma assured her. “You want to be flown out at half a day’s notice to Nairobi or anywhere else, let me know. Keep in touch — that is very important.”
Cambara counts herself lucky in many instances. Lucky that, to date, the world has been kind to her by offering her never-ending possibilities. Lucky that she has Raxma, who, short of acting like an older sister, has taken on a surfeit of tasks and helped out as her most trustworthy ally when the Zaak or Wardi affairs were difficult. Lucky that Arda, despite her occasional bloody-mindedness in the roughshod manner in which she deals with her daughter’s crisis-ridden liaisons, is one with her unceasing love and her untiring care as her mother. Indeed, if there was any time in her life when Cambara could very well benefit from the support of someone to advise her on matters highly personal, a friend to whose counsel she would pay heed, then today is the day.
Cambara was always impressed that Raxma’s approach to all the affairs of the heart was, to a large degree, informed by the pragmatic sense of a mother who has had to raise a set of twins when her irresponsible husband abandoned her for a younger woman. A good, patient listener with a long-term outlook, Raxma had a canny way of knowing when the right time to intervene had dawned and how to go about doing so, which words to use and what to suggest, seldom giving in to the schmaltzy side of an argument. Her every action was deliberate, calculated to improve on what was there before she came on the scene, her counsel tailored to be of advantage when or if similar situations arose in the future. Raxma, trained as a medical doctor in Odessa, was turned down by the Canadian Medical Association when she applied for a license to practice in Canada. Because she would have had to requalify, needing no less than three years to graduate, she and her husband agreed that she would give up her profession for the sake of their school-going set of twins, which she did reluctantly.
Her former husband, on the other hand, had marketable qualifications: an undergraduate degree in gynecology, in addition to a postdoctoral in a related subject from Germany. He became one of the few Somalis to whom the CMA granted a license, and he was in high demand, serving as a consultant to two hospitals. Well paid and highly sought after as he was, it was not long before world bodies with UN backing, including WHO, recruited him for assignments here and there, eventually posting him to the Indian subcontinent as its representative. By then, his professional success and her apparent lack of self-fulfillment became the third party in their lives, which he gradually opted out of. He started having affairs, first with the women working with him as assistants and then zeroing in on one of them as his mistress.
On discovering these shenanigans, she went about her business in a mature style, neither letting on that she knew about his infidelity nor displaying any signs of tension or unease in their day-to-day intercourse. She put the two boys in a boarding school and then, thanks to a lawyer, put the screws to her wayward husband, making him agree to a large one-time alimony payment and, in the bargain, taking possession of their five-bedroom family house. Then, with the money in the bank, topped off with a guaranteed loan, she set up an import-export business with an office she ran from home and, when necessary, traveled back and forth between the various cities she had to get to, mostly in the Arabian Gulf. Rarely, however, did she spend more than two consecutive weekends away from Toronto, making certain she was available for her two sons, especially when they were younger. She brought her elderly mother and a younger half sister, almost Cambara’s age, to fill in for her in the event she did not get back in time. Now that both boys were at universities — one at Guelph, the other at McGill — the responsibility of looking after their mother and running the house fell to her younger sister. In addition to her important role in their household, Raxma remains the main bedrock to a community of Somali women, among whom Cambara was proud to be one.
The two women first met barely a month after Cambara had set up a makeup studio with seed money from her mother, following two years of apprenticeship at another one similar in conception but different in its clientele. Cambara intended hers to appeal to the up-and-coming young black professional classes, in particular the women, who, as a group, were conscious about their appearance and wanted to “improve” the flow, ebb, and texture of their hair. Many of these women, being of an independent cast of mind, were more likely to be single, even if they were of the view that the reconstructed men with whom they might be prepared to set up a life and a home were seldom easy to come across. Because of the particularity of their status, the women spent a lot of money to look good.