Stymied for an appropriate reply, she remains silent.
He says, “We have all the time in the world to plan so that we make things work to our advantage.”
“We do, do we?” She singles out the one word, the first person plural in “to our advantage.” She is surprised by his feigned keenness to include himself, remembering that he has been saying that he does not wish to have anything to do with her folly.
He scrutinizes her features for a clue and, discerning none, goes on, “The way you are going about it — calling on the man and his family who are occupying the property without having the slightest idea what we will do after the visit — is downright foolish.”
She is not responding or reacting to what he is saying. It is as though it has only just now dawned on her that it may make sense to have a rethink and beat a hasty, face-saving retreat. Excited, no doubt suddenly scared, her heart palpitating hard and speedily, she wonders if Zaak can hear it pulsating in disquiet from where he is sitting behind the steering wheel. Even though she is in a fluster, she manages to stay phlegmatic in her bearing, barely betraying her unease. The truth is that deep inside her, she feels like a swimmer who is barely able to keep afloat in a pool of medium size, who is thrown into an ocean. Moreover, her skin is alive with irritability when he releases the brake and his hand meets hers on the way back to his lap, where he has been keeping it ever since getting into the vehicle. She is aware of the difficulty that comes with sharing cabin space. This, after all, has its unpredictable bodily configurations, like being in the same bed with someone you have no desire to touch: unsettling.
He throws his hands around, making nervous gestures whose meaning is not obvious to her. He says, “I would rather we worked together, you and me, on several what-if scenarios before we called at the property and came face to face with the new reality of civil war Mogadiscio, with which you are hardly familiar, because you arrived only yesterday. That’s all I am saying.”
Cambara can scarcely believe her ears. She thinks that he may mean well, but can she trust his motives for speaking to her this way? How is she to react to a world in which her eyes gaze in a different way on her altered circumstances, into which she has brought along her unease and her long history of diffidence when it comes to men?
He tells her, “People here are sensitive to one’s nuances, the hidden and surface meanings of what one says. Every action and every spoken word must be made in an implicit recognition of these. If we do not want the guns dug up from where they have been buried, after the humiliated departure of the U.S. Marines, then we have no choice but to take these sensibilities into account.”
She thinks she understands his meaning only partially, and she reacts to that portion. She says, “It is hard to think of these people as sensitive or sensible,” she says, her teeth clenched in silent fury. “I think of them as bloodthirsty, clan-mad murderers. That’s how I imagine them. Maybe I am wrong in my judgment. Of course, there have been many others — Somalis and non-Somalis — who have described the warlords differently, as clan elders, which they definitely are not. These approaches have been of no avail and have led this nation nowhere, most emphatically not to the house of peace. I cannot understand how you can speak of them as sensitive and sensible.”
“Trust me,” he says. “I am in the business of conflict resolution, and I spend a lot of my time mediating between warring groups. Easily hurt, people here carry with them egos more grandiose than any you’ve encountered anywhere else. The result is that everyone reacts in a self-centered way to every situation. That’s what I am talking about when I say they are sensitive.”
She waits in the futile hope of further clarification. When none is forthcoming, she asks, “What are we waiting for?”
“We’re waiting for the armed escort.”
“Where are they?”
“Somewhere in the back garden.”
“What are they doing?”
“Chewing a couple of morsels of qaat.”
“Even the two that are in their preteens?”
“Every one of them is a chewer.”
He might be talking about a heroin addict needing his daily fix. Her hand instinctively moves to sound the horn, but she does not, as she realizes that in readiness for this eventuality, Zaak is leaning forward to prevent her doing so.
“Tell me something.”
“What?”
Apprehensive, she asks, “By any chance, are you afraid of what the armed youths might do if you order them around?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Please correct me if I am wrong.”
“We’re hostages to their guns, that’s true.”
“They put the guns to your heads whenever they want to blackmail you into granting them more concessions than you are prepared to grant them?”
Zaak nods his head in agreement, adding, “We do their will, bribe them with qaat, pay them extravagant bonuses, and humor them as best as we can. With death being near, as close as their fingers are to their trigger guards, we value our life and appreciate every second of it.”
“What a sad spectacle,” she says.
When he does not react to her throwaway remark, her thoughts move on, dwelling for a few moments on her personal tragedy. She tells herself that when an old person dies, you accept it, reasoning that in all likelihood his or her time has come. That is not the case, however, if a nine-year-old full of life and laughter drowns. This is because you sense deep within you that the boy’s time has not come and that calamity has come a-calling. No wonder that at first she felt suicidal and then homicidal the day she learned of Dalmar’s death.
Her sorrows, because of the tragic loss with which she has lived up to now, devolve into a moment of intense injudiciousness. She asks, “Can’t we go by ourselves?”
“Not without armed escort.”
“Why not?”
“Because it is not done.”
“How far are we from the family house?”
“Pretty far.”
“What about Hotel Shamac?”
“That is even farther.”
She unmoors herself from whatever is going on in the truck, whose engine is not running because he has not switched the ignition on, and from the conversation that is going nowhere and says, “What a travesty!”
After an uneasy silence, he says, “What travesty?”
“That because life is so precious, we need a couple of boys in their preteens bearing guns to protect us?” She pauses, then adds, “Do you know I could dispossess them of their weapons as easily as I could chase a chicken away from the grains at which it is pecking?”
“They are tough, these boys.”
“Have you seen them in action?”
“I won’t want to see them in action.”
“I bet you’ll wet your pants, come to that.”
“Our lives are less precious than a handgun or the vehicle we are driving,” he says. “If we hire armed escort, it is because we do not want to die at the hand of other armed gangs more interested in the four-wheel-drive truck than they are in who we are, what our clan affiliations are. To those whose services we hire, pay salaries to, humor, bribe, we are worth more alive than dead, but to all armed thugs, we are worth more dead than alive. Tell me what is so perverse about this line of reasoning?”
She stares at him, her chin raised, jaws clenched, eyes burning with her unengaged rage. Not an iota of empathy informs her hard look; if anything, she does not wish to admit that he has a point. In her surreptitious glance in his direction, she means to convey her fearlessness, despite her altered situation, brought up by his unmitigated cruelty, both when they separated as putative spouses and since her arrival here as his guest. From the way she is looking at him, you might think that she is giving him notice: that she will eventually do away with him, his deceits, and double-talk, as if she intends him to serve as a lesson to all the betrayers of our unearned trust. In her sober moments, when she does not give in to her giant rage or her disapproval of all forms of inactivity, she knows that there is no wisdom in rushing, and no mileage in employing shotgun approaches; these will hardly help her in her desire to stay on top of things or ultimately assure her of becoming a winner.