However, if there is a subject that neither is comfortable discussing, it is their own shared past as putative husband and wife. Ill at ease, they have reined back from revisiting it, apprehensive that, unchecked, their talking might deposit them eventually at the door to a concern better left alone — the two years spent together under one roof, in her apartment in Toronto, as man and wife—“Only on paper, I’ll have you know,” she will point out again and again — which had been an utter disaster. Maybe she means to have no intimate talk, none whatsoever.
“Has there been fighting here lately?” she asks, coming level with him. Then, seemingly tired, she squints at the afternoon sun, hesitating before cracking her jaws in the yawning attitude of a passenger in a plane clearing her ears of accumulated air pressure. The sun burns down so harshly that the contours of all visible items melt in its fierceness. She sees the giveaway evidence of civil war devastation wherever she turns: buildings leaning in in complete disorder, a great many of them boasting no roof, others boarded up, looking vandalized, abandoned. The road — once tarred and good enough for motor vehicles — is in total disrepair; the walls of the house fronting the street are pocked with bullets, as if a terrible sharpshooter with assault rifles has used them for his target practice.
“Skirmishes,” he says, as if an afterthought.
“How many militiamen died?”
“Only unarmed civilians.”
As though out of kindness to Cambara, Zaak holds his cigarette away from her — in his left hand — and he keeps the fingers of his right hand close to his mouth, almost covering it. Moreover, his head veers away from her; she is not clear if he is doing so to protect her from the slightest whiff of his nicotine or if he has lately become conscious of the ill effect his evil-smelling breath is having on her.
All of a sudden, however, he springs on her a challenge with the strident voice of a man of huge contradictions, courteous in one instant, cruel in the next. He says, “Do not tell me that you are frightened.”
You might think from the way she takes a step back that she is readying to give him a slap across the face. Not so. All she wants to do is to look down on him from her great six-foot height. She also thinks that there is the bravura of a young boy’s dare to his taunting, which irks her no less. She remembers their young years together in the same household — Cambara’s parents’ house, to be exact — and how she would do anything for a dare and he wouldn’t; Zaak was not a rebel by nature, was less inclined to act as wild as she would. After all, she was the beloved daughter of the house and he but a poor relation.
She would throw in his direction all manner of gauntlets, but he wouldn’t pick them up. Annoyed, she would goad him, “Three dares for your one.” And she would wet her index finger, which is a child’s way of timing the retort of the opponent: If the forefinger dries before the response, the challenger will forfeit, and the dare lapses, in which case she would declare herself the winner. He liked to stay out of trouble, preferring living and going to school in Mogadiscio to being sent back to his poorer parents in the hinterland, close to Galkacyo, in Mudugh. Always conscious of their difference in height, he was irritated by her rubbing it in.
She opts for a different tack. She says, wisely, stressing the validity of her point, “Only fools are unafraid.”
“Please don’t take it that way,” he apologizes.
As he prepares to walk away, Cambara remarks that they are close to an open-air market. In fact, they meet shoppers returning, the forlorn expressions of the women swathed from head to toe in cheap veils evident, on occasion with only their eyes and hands showing. The women are carrying their small purchases in black plastic bags. To encounter these women in their miserable state saddens Cambara. Even though the men look equally dour and unfulfilled, they seem relaxed. Maybe it is because the men have preciously tucked away under their arms their fresh bundles of qaat, the stimulant that some of them have already started to chew. Whereas the women have nothing of importance to expect, save more war-related miseries and rape and sick children to care for, useless husbands whom they serve hand and foot as they chew to their heart’s satisfaction and talk politics.
She thinks of herself as being, already, a victim of the habit. After all, he has dragged her out of bed and forced her to carry the lethargy of jet lag to escort him so that he might buy his daily ration. She has found proof of chewing in the upstairs room where she is staying, which is littered with the dried detritus of the discarded stems of the stuff. For a nonchewer, nonsmoker, she looks upon the upstairs room allotted to her as a hellhole, smelly, the walls green from the spit of the chewers, the crannies stuffed with the plant’s unchewed stems.
When Cambara puts urgency into her steps with a view to catching up with him, she trips, loses her balance, and almost tumbles over. Zaak stares accusingly at her sandaled feet, which are now covered with fine brown sand.
“I’ll put on walking shoes next time,” she says.
“If I were you, I would also put on a veil.”
The liberties he allows himself, she thinks to herself, as she reflects on what he has just said. Of course, she is no fool; she has come prepared, having acquired a pair of veils, one in Dearborn, Michigan, the other in Nairobi. But she will don the damn thing on her own terms, not because he has advised her to wear one. She needs no reminding that she is dressed differently from the other women whom they have encountered so far, the largest number of them veiled, some in the traditional guntiino robes and others in near tatters. She is in a caftan, the wearing of which places her in a league of one. She wore it, she reasons, because it was close to hand and she hadn’t the time to open her suitcases and rummage in them, looking for a veil. Besides, this custom-made caftan permits her to carry a knife discreetly.
He asks, “Shall I take you to a who-die stall? Where you can buy a veil?” She reads meanness in his eyes and interprets the expression as a male daring a woman to defy the recent imposition, which stipulates that women should veil themselves. When she was young, it was uncommon for Somali women to wear one; mostly Arab women and a few of the city’s aboriginals did.
“‘Who-die stalls’? Why are they called that?”
“Stalls from where you buy secondhand veils.”
Then Zaak explains at length that in recent years, dumping of secondhand clothing on the world’s poor has become de rigueur, as many citizens of these countries are in no position to pay the astronomical prices for new clothes.
“I see,” she says, nodding.
He is in his element, and goes on. “The who-die stalls are run by local entrepreneurs who buy a shipload of secondhand clothes for next to nothing from a dump house in the developed world and then import these in. The importers and the retailers are all under the impression that everyone is getting a bargain. The truth is, sadly, different.”