Her eyes half open, clouded from exhaustion, Cambara stirs at the sound of the kettle singing downstairs and calling to her host, saying to him in kettle-speech, “Come and make your early tea, Zaak.” She lies motionless in the bed, revisiting her first days with Wardi in Geneva, when love was good, and the two of them made it with the leisure of a man and a woman who could not have enough of it or of each other.
Wardi and Cambara met by chance, in a café. Both had been stood up by the person each was waiting to meet: She had an appointment with a screenwriter working on a script about a Somali refugee being deported from Switzerland, and Wardi was to meet with an immigration lawyer to help him present his case to the refugee authority at the canton of Geneva. Drawn to each other as two lost souls, each sought salvation of some sort in and from the other. For Cambara, it was holiday time; she had just completed a two-week film shoot funded by a Swiss-Canadian outfit. Wardi, for his part, was a penniless Somali, eager to receive the papers on which his refugee status in Switzerland depended. She was charmed with immediate effect, and she felt there was no way to undo that; they were bound to each other.
They left the café feeling each other, touching, holding hands. She was giggly, because she found him funny and lighthearted, and being with him excited her in a way she had not thought possible. Hours later, in the same day, she treated him to a gourmet meal at the first upmarket restaurant he had been to since arriving in Switzerland. He walked her to her hotel, where they sat in the lounge and talked until the small hours of the night. Just before dawn, she exchanged her single room for a double so they could chat some more and get to know each other better. He fell asleep with his clothes on. At nine the following morning — she had not slept a wink the entire night — she went out shopping and returned with the clothes she had chosen for him.
She found him awake, just after a long shower. He stood handsome and desirable in a towel wrapped around his waist. Then she gave him the shaving kit she had bought, plus a pair of trousers and a couple of shirts, which fit him perfectly. He behaved as kept men are wont to do — taking their paramour’s continued loyalty and love for granted without ever reciprocating either. This should have sounded warning bells in Cambara’s appraisal of what to expect, but no. In love for the first time at the age of thirty-five, she was unwilling to hear anything but the sound of her adoring heart beating in rhythm with his.
When he told her about Raxma and her mother’s phone calls from Ottawa, Cambara wore an amused expression, in the secretive attitude of a younger girl having her first date. She did not show interest in knowing what her mother had made of him. Why? Because she knew Raxma and her mother well, knew they could prove to be difficult and uncompromising when it came to Cambara’s choices of men, especially after what she had been through with Zaak. Arda located flaws in character, clan affiliation, educational background, or some other shortcoming in all the men in whom Cambara had shown interest.
At some point, Cambara sent him out on the pretext of getting her Le Monde. While he was gone, she returned Arda’s call. Unsurprisingly, Arda segued into a song, in which the word “love” chimed not with stars shining most brightly but with the notion “ruse.” In short, Arda did not like the way Wardi’s voice presented itself well ahead of the rest of him. She had no liking of him, because she felt he was hard at work to make her fall for him. “Crafty bugger” was a phrase she employed more than once. Yet she had not met the man! Arda’s advice was: “Fly back home minus him.”
For her part, Raxma thought that Cambara was deservedly having a delightful time, and, as such, she would not dare to suggest to her friend, who was swooning in the embrace of her fresh infatuation, to give him a wide berth — not until she met the fellow. Told about Arda’s take and how she had inferred the man’s character from a single, brief telephone conversation, Raxma reiterated that she would reserve her judgment at least until after Cambara had filled her in on the hiatuses in their story. She concluded that, not knowing enough, she would be inclined to a more prudent approach and cautioned against hasty marriage.
Now, lying in bed in Mogadiscio, Cambara remembers with a good measure of self-recrimination that she did not heed her mother’s advice. Cambara returned to Toronto a few weeks later, minus Wardi, but that was not all. Cambara married Wardi at one of the city’s registries, unbeknownst to Arda, Raxma, and many of those very dear to her, convinced of her true love. It did not seem to matter to her what other people might say, or if they would or would not approve of the union. The hush-hush affair took place in the presence of two of her Canadian colleagues on the film shoot, who served as her witnesses. Before the ink of their signatures on the forms had dried, Wardi was urging her to file copies of their marriage certificate with the Canadian consulate, “for our family reunion,” he explained.
Even though she found nothing terribly wrong with Wardi’s request to file the marriage papers the same day, Raxma felt a little uneasy, though she hesitated to describe it as distasteful. Compared with Raxma’s reaction, Arda’s was over the top. “What did I tell you?” she said. “He is a con man, not to be trusted.” Cambara proceeded with understandable caution from then forward, and she resolved not to reveal that Wardi was urging her to draw up a legal document clearly stating in legalese that what was hers was his too. It was her aim to humor him as best she could; that was all. Nothing else to it. Nor did any cautionary bells sound in her unhearing ears. How love deafens!
Back in Toronto, her mother made her position very clear: She wished to have nothing to do with the whole affair and would not help or hinder her daughter’s effort to get him to join her. Meanwhile, Canadian immigration took its time, cognizant of the fact that she had been married once before to a Somali and been granted a family reunion on that basis. The waiting took its toll on Cambara, who filled in multiple copies of more forms and more papers with the help of Maimouna, who acted as her lawyer. She rang Wardi almost daily, and if she failed to do so, he phoned her collect, her bills mounting and her anxiety likewise. Although she took no delight in her daughter’s misery, Arda hoped that Cambara’s enthusiasm for Wardi would wilt, like a tree in unseasonable weather, the longer she had to wait for the situation to resolve itself. To the contrary, Cambara claimed that her love grew and grew the more the immigration authorities put bureaucratic obstacles in her way, which she was confident Maimouna would clear.
She had no satisfactory answers when, in passing, Maimouna asked why she had granted Wardi every demand he tried, offering him more than he had ever dreamt possible. More desperate than she cared to admit, she considered relocating to Geneva to be with Wardi. Arda thought her mad and said nothing, but Raxma would not hear of this. “Why, an unemployed couple — one of them a jobless makeup artist, the other a Somali with no refugee papers — couldn’t live on the welfare benefits of meager monthly Swiss handouts.”
Finally, Cambara came clean about everything, including the fact that she had put down Wardi’s name as a co-owner of her own property in Toronto. Now that the onus was on Arda, she did what she knew how to do best. A fixer, she stepped in, calling up someone in authority. Within a month, Wardi’s application moved speedily from the junior desks and landed on much larger escritoires where prompt decisions are initialed at the end of a phone call. Notwithstanding this, Arda stuck to her original guns, in view of Wardi’s unhealthy hold on her daughter. She used Raxma to carry her messages, saying that she would remain forever suspicious of Wardi and, given the choice, would not allow him to get within her own parameters.