Years later, only after he had spent two thousand days in prison, a thousand and one of them in solitary confinement, would Cambara understand what he meant when he spoke of training his mind for higher things. Everyone assumed, until a decade later, following his marriages to, respectively, Cambara and Xadiitha and then his relocation to Mogadiscio that he had come out of detention unscathed. Not so, apparently. Cambara thinks that maybe his current physical and mental conditions are symptomatic of the country’s collapse, a metaphor for it.
When younger, she was the more self-assured of the two, the one with the handsomer demeanor, blessed with everything you wanted in a child growing up. He was weak in the eyes and wore glasses as thick as an elephant’s posterior. He had a feeble heart and was given to complaining of sudden flutters. Quite often, you saw him holding on to his chest, doubling up in pain, or coughing nonstop. He was deficient in many physical departments but was very strong in the mind. Cambara’s mother admired his mental strength but so often worried enough about his health that she consulted doctors and, on occasion, other types of healers, some quacks of the duplicitous kind, others of the sort who sought cure-alls for ailments in the word of the divine.
Cambara became aware of their physical boundaries when she came in on him one day, naked. His pubes were covered with hair; hers weren’t. And he was fondling himself. To this day, she doubted if he had seen her or heard her tiptoe away. She would’ve been about nine and he about fifteen. She had gone to his room to ask him to help her with a math problem, and she had to slink away quietly. This would have been the first secret she had withheld from her mother. If she had spoken of what she saw to either of her parents, she was sure her parents would not have stopped at blaming him; one of them might have consequently punished him. Years later, as putative spouses sharing living spaces but no intimacies, she would often wonder to herself how much change would have occurred between his youth and then, as a grown man. Not that she was ever tempted to look through a knothole. She feels certain that in his current state — what with his distended paunch and his continuous consumption of qaat, said to affect a man’s sexual prowess negatively — Zaak’s manhood is as lifeless as a hangnail.
Furthermore, she recalls now that later the same morning, while she was alone and brooding, she happened to come across a peacock that was excited at seeing her and which behaved as though agitated when Cambara paid it no mind. The peacock was on full display, with an elevated peacock eye, vainglorious in bearing and gait, and with a most gorgeous train, which he now thrust forward at Cambara, or so thought the then pubescent girl. A nearby harem of peahens kept their safe distance, especially when the feathers of the peacock’s tail started to shake and he moved in Cambara’s direction, eager to make contact with her. From where she was, she remarked the shimmering quality of the peacock’s feathers at the same time she heard the rustling sound that, aroused, he emitted. She would hear it purported that young girls or women anxious about their own sexuality attract peacocks; these pick up their body odors, which, unbeknownst to them, they release into the biosphere. On that day, in her own dim recall, Cambara, weeping, ran off to her mother. She came close to telling her mother whom she had seen, where, and what he had been doing; she came close to speaking about being aroused at the sight of a peacock in full libidinous magnificence. Was it then, she wondered, that Arda began to think that her daughter and nephew were destined to become man and woman?
Cambara and Zaak’s relationship lost its childlike innocence soon after that, and she dared not look at him from then on without remembering these two, in her mind, related incidents. Even though she considered asking that he show himself to her again, she could not bring herself to do so, fearing that he might not. Meanwhile, he became more self-conscious in her presence, often displaying shy evidence that he had discovered his own body. Less voluble than before, he took refuge in sulky silences.
As she washes the dishes in the sink with soap powder intended for clothes, she wonders what his reaction might have been if she had broached the topic. She had never dared to allude to this incident in Toronto. She doubts very much if there is any point in doing so now.
“Tell me,” Zaak says. “How is Wardi?”
Cambara is at a loss for elegant words. This is because she wishes to avoid falling into a foul mood, in which her fury may run ahead of her and lead her astray, into a world of rage, remorse, or regret. She thinks it inappropriate to scamper after one’s rage, convinced that she will never be able to catch up with it. It is a pity, she reasons, that, because of her wish to exercise some self-restraint, she will not allow herself to express the full extent and source of her sentiments either. Her mother is loath to be around her daughter when her rage erupts, a rage she describes as being hotter than and more dangerous than Mount Etna. In addition, of course, Zaak knows that Cambara’s parents raised her in a way that precluded her being straitjacketed into the role of a traditional Somali female. He is doubtful if, having been told of it, he could have located her rage as a recent one, to do with her conjugal relationship. To him, Cambara was fine, until one day you would find her off her noodle, deluded, and highly impractical.
He looks on, expectantly silent, as Cambara speaks cautiously lest her words run into one another, like the felt pen scrawls on a blotting paper. How she wishes she could lean on the very rage that is crippling her; how she wishes she could draw sustenance from it. But her words come out a little too creakily, her voice, even if raised, remaining soft in the peripheries and hard at the center, like calluses rasping on sandpaper. She is aware that she will be talking about a man whom she hates to another whom she equally loathes: two men, both losers, with whom she has had a kind of intimacy, the one foisted on her, the other chosen by her. She has no doubts they are or will be in touch. Let Zaak relay whatever it pleases him to; she does not care.
“It’s daunting to explain what has happened,” she says, and, pausing, she looks him in the eyes until he averts his gaze. “For years, I have lived with an unarticulated rage that has since become part of me and that has taken a more murderous turn after my son, Dalmar’s, drowning. I trace the source of the rage and Dalmar’s unfortunate death to Wardi.”
She has tears in her eyes, but because she will not let go of a drop of it, she trembles. Cambara is a dyed-in-the-wool rejecter of other people’s unearned pity.
Zaak intercepts the course of their conversation, guiding it to terra firma, and asks if she intends to live in the property herself if she manages to wrest it from the hands of the man illegally occupying it. He adds a rider, “As I said before, I doubt very much that the man will go without a fight.”
“I have no idea what I will do with it once the property is in my hands,” she replies. “I feel certain deep within me that I will wrench it from his clutch.”
“You must know something I don’t,” he says.
“I do.”
“Will you share it with me? I’m curious.”
She does not repeat what she said to her mother about the warlords being cowardly et cetera; she chooses not to, because this way he will have a counterargument. She says, “I am a determined woman, and determined women always have their way.”