Once inside the house, the two of them alone, Cambara plucks the courage to take SilkHair by the hand, and they walk up the stairway together, she with the resoluteness of someone with a purpose ahead, he with the growing confidence of a youth putting his trust in someone after what has proven to be an awful experience. Just then, she comes to a sudden stop in front of the door to her rooms. She turns her back on him, mouthing the words “Give me a moment,” and then, with circumspective care, she replaces her hand slowly, rather tentatively among the folds of her veil, eventually retrieving the key from where she put it earlier, in her bra. Her forefinger and thumb rubbing and chafing it, the key feels warmer from having snuggled near her breasts.
Again, she is indecisive, hesitating whether to take him downstairs to Zaak’s bathroom, where he should be having his shower, but, because she can’t be bothered to inquire if Zaak might mind, Cambara decides to go the easy way. She tells him, “Wait here.” Then, moving faster than she has done for a long time, she rushes into her room, as if something is chasing her, and in a moment returns with a towel in her right hand, her left engaged in pulling the door to her room and closing it securely behind her.
She points him to where the bathroom is, into which he goes ahead and waits a little warily, as if suddenly becoming conscious of crossing a boundary. He keeps some distance as she turns the tap on at the same time as she holds the towel in her left. Surprisingly, there is running water. She fills a bucket, into which she dips her hand. Even though there is a touch of chill in it, she thinks SilkHair is not likely to mind having a cold shower. In fact, she thinks that he won’t give a damn, at least not as much as she does, she assumes, because he may not know what it is to have it warm.
Face to face with him and a little closer, her heart goes out to him, and she can’t help wanting to touch him. On second thought, she feels she is too forward and, as if covering her tracks, pulls back. She walks over to the wobbly rack pushed into a corner and hardly used, and places the towel on it. She tells him to have his shower and, before leaving the bathroom, adds, “You will find the change of clothes, which I will leave for you outside this bathroom. I want you to put them on and then to join us downstairs, clean and dressed.”
In her room, she rummages in a suitcase marked “Dalmar’s: For Charities,” and she selects two pairs of trousers, several underpants, half a dozen T-shirts, and a portable CD player, which she tests, and having concluded that it is working, she brings along with her. She is confident that at least some of the clothes will fit SilkHair nicely. She leaves the pile for him outside the bathroom door before going down, dead set on shaking things up in Zaak’s place in such a way as to make a difference when she is done.
Cambara tears down the stairway, as though on a warpath, and strides over to the toolshed in the backyard, which has been converted to the qaat-chewers’ retreat. There, the driver and several youths are busy munching away, their cheeks bulging with the stuff, slurping very sweet tea and sipping Coca-Cola. From where she is eavesdropping on their conversation, barely a few meters from the door to the shed, she can hear them chatting lazily about cutthroat civil war politics and also debating about which warlord controls which of the most lucrative thoroughfares in the city and how much money he collects daily from his tax-levying ventures. Speculating, they move on to another related topic, mentioning the name of an upstart clansman of the same warlord, formerly a deputy to him, most likely to unseat said warlord with a view to laying his hands on the thriving business.
Having heard enough about warlords and their presumptive, empty jabbering, she decides it is time she barged in without announcing either her presence or motive. First, she takes her position in the doorway, blocking it — arms akimbo, her feet spread wide apart — and fuming at their conjectural politics and their slovenly behavior. Some of the men look appalled; others appear amused; yet others shake their heads in surprise, as they all unfailingly turn their heads in her direction and then toward each other. To a man, they stop whatever they have been doing, maybe because they were unprepared for her entry.
They are baffled, because it is unclear to them under whose authority she is acting, and because they have no idea where Zaak is on this or what part he is playing. One of them whispers to his mate that she is like a headmistress at a convent school who is disciplining her charges. His mate, in riposte, compares her to a parent waking his truant teenagers from a late lie-in, shaking them awake. When a couple of the others resume talking in their normal voices and some go back to their chewing or tea sipping, Cambara embarks on a more startling undertaking: She confiscates their qaat. The whisperer now says, “How incredibly fearless!” His mate remarks that it is not enough for her to barge in on them as if she owned the place; she must show us she is the boss. Another wonders where it will all end.
As if to prove the whisperer’s mate right, she gathers the bundles of qaat that they have not so far consumed from in front of them — they are too gobsmacked to challenge her — and she dumps the sheaves in a waste bin crawling with noxious vermin. Turning and seeing the shock on their faces, she does not ease off. She shouts, “This is a sight worse than I’ve ever imagined. How can you stand living so close to the fetid odor coming from the waste bin, which none of you has bothered to empty for a very long time?” And before the driver or any of the youths has recovered from her relentless barrage, she tells them, “It is time to be up.”
No one speaks. They are all eyes, fixed on her. After a brief pause, however, the driver gathers his things and joins her; several others do likewise. One might wonder why the driver or the youths act out of character and remain biddably unassertive when it is very common among the class of men to which the armed vigilantes and the driver belong to take recourse to the use of guns at the slightest provocation. Cambara puts their compliant mood down to the fact that her behavior has taken them by surprise and that many of the armed militiamen hardly know how to respond to the instructions of women.
She orders the driver to supervise the two youths who earlier had bullied SilkHair, whom she tells to wash the inside and outside of the truck, vacuum, and make sure they rid it of the execrable odor. When the driver retorts that he does not have a Hoover or any of the other sanitizers about which she is speaking, she suggests that they use a house disinfectant. Still, when each of them, except for the driver, picks up his gun — for they seem naked without one, now that they are upright, their hands uselessly hanging down — and they argue that they do not know where they can find any deodorizers, Cambara eyes them unkindly. Then she takes one of them by the hand, dragging him into the kitchen; she provides him with an assortment of these cleaning items from a stack of household goods, mostly for cleaning, which presumably Zaak bought and locked away in one of the cupboards. She returns with the youth bearing the stuff and breathing unevenly. She gets them down to work, on occasion swearing at them under her breath. On top of being amused, she watches them for a few minutes with keen interest. Good heavens, how clumsy they appear now that they are missing their weapons, which over the years have become extensions of themselves; they appear wretched without them. With their bodily movements uncoordinated, they are as ungainly as left-handers employing their right hands to lift something off the ground. For their part, the guns have an abandoned look about them, to all intents and purposes, just pieces of metal worked into pieces of wood and no more menacing than a child’s toy.