The woman nods feebly.
Cambara works her fingers to the bone, intent on completing as much of the job as possible before the return of the young children. She has seen evidence of clothes, boys’ broken plastic toys, girls’ dolls — when she surreptitiously entered the room with mattresses on the floor.
Cambara does the best she can under the rushed circumstances. She does not take leave of the woman or of the house before she gets a couch for Jiijo to lie on. In fact, she tiptoes out only after Jiijo has started to embark on an exhausted woman’s snore.
NINE
Cambara makes a detour. She decides that instead of returning to Zaak’s place directly she will walk to the shopping complex in the neighborhood in order to buy a few necessary items. This way she may gain some insight into the area, discover more of its features.
She sees the grocery shopping as part of her attempt at easing her way into the lives of those she has met so far: Jiijo, the armed youths, and Zaak’s driver too, a hungry, needy lot worth cultivating for their loyalty. If they do terrible things to one another and to victims whom they do not know, it is because they are malcontents born into tragic times taking out their despair on other quarries who are just as unfortunate as they are.
She intends to buy locally bottled potable water to drink, a chopping board, a kitchen knife, and a couple of other items for Zaak’s place. She also wants to get what there is in the way of vegetables, eggs, and sesame oil from the fresh-produce stalls nearby for the armed youths. While at it, she may purchase an item or two for Jiijo, as a token of appreciation. Even though she has no desire to raise her hopes only to dash them, Cambara will work on the assumption that she will get a taxi that will take her first to Hotel Shamac, from where she will go to Hotel Maanta, to link up with her friend’s friend, Kiin.
It is getting into early afternoon. The sun is luxuriating in pursuit of its tropical routine, coming closer and closer by the second, its heat assuming a more vicious harshness as if taking vengeance on anyone who is not indoors to enjoy the cozy coolness of the siesta hour. Cambara’s eyes secrete a clear liquid and are itchy; she scratches them. She is all the more uncomfortable because of the body tent, which she has redonned. She considered just carrying it back but thought better of it, for the sake of consistency.
The sharp wind raises a sudden storm. The dust — clear, very fine, and powdery — whirls upward with such ferocity that a dervish of memories descends on Cambara. In one of these recollections, she is strong of heart and of mind, a beautiful young athlete, the most coveted, the most adored, the one who gets the highest grades in her class; in another, she is the darling of her fellow students, male and female, the one everyone pampers with affection. In her memories of recent times, she is not a mistress of her own fate; rather she is a woman in bondage. If her marriage to Zaak is written off as an aberration and that to Wardi as an anomaly, then how is one to describe her decision to come to Mogadiscio on impulse and then take on a warlord to recover the family property?
In the long time it takes to get to her destination, Cambara does not meet a soul or a vehicle on the road, not until she is within a hundred meters of the row of buildings facing the unpaved half-circle that the shopping complex comprises. She avoids looking into the staring eyes of a couple of chador-wearing women. Averting her face, she tells herself that she must do something about her elsewhere look, which is setting her apart from the other women, labeling her, in their eyes, as an alien in their midst. It is not the women who worry her so much as the men, who will zero in on her foreignness, which will produce, in and of itself, hostility. God knows, she can do without enmity, especially given the formidable hurdles that she must clear.
Just as she turns into the dusty road leading to the trading tenement, walking with the caution and care of a woman carrying the cosmos balanced on her head, an abrupt sorrow disheartens her. She thinks about the weather in this part of the world, which has been hostile for decades now: the drought without end, the soil and the environment degraded, the sea emptied of its fish. These conditions have been tough on humans and animals, driving the pastoralists, poor and needing food aid, to the urban areas. With no government to put these people’s lives into some order. And no international help to come to their aid.
Then she notices several lean-to stalls covered with rush matting; these are set apart from the complex. Farther to the left, down in the direction where she is headed, there are low grotty tiny boxes that may have been put there erroneously in the first place, and then, as an afterthought, assembled by a one-eyed builder, because the geometry, the shapes, and the distance between them is so lopsided. As another whirlwind, bearing more dust and other debris, wafts at her boots with some fury, Cambara concludes that the nature of her circumstances have undergone some remarkable changes since she decided to make friendly gestures to the armed youths by catering to their stomachs and to Jiijo by, making a woman-to-woman contact. She is confident that both deeds will pay valuable dividends.
Unable to push her thoughts any further in any direction, she turns her face away from the shanty complex and stares into the glaring brightness of the afternoon sun, as if the solar omnipresence will provide her with an idea to pursue. Just then, as she is preparing to move again, the sudden noise made by a lizard crawling out of a clump of cacti gives her a startle. Then, fascinated, she watches the lizard doing push-ups, which reminds her of the fact that she has not been doing her routine exercises with regularity for quite some time now. Even so, she believes that she will have lost weight before long here, because of the unavailability of so many items.
Finally she goes forth, conscious of the reptiles and other small, unseen denizens of the low shrubs, their sudden, noisy appearances on the scene or at her feet bringing to the fore her nervy state, rattling her. At one point, she stops to focus on the movement she hears, and her eyes light on a pair of human feet, very dry and cracking at the heels. It takes her a long time to work out that the feet, clumsily wearing a pair of Chinese-made platform sandals as ugly as any footwear she has ever seen, belong to a man, most likely homeless, fully stretched out and asleep among the cluster of bushes. For all she knows, the man may be dead. Disturbed, she walks away faster and with more purpose.
Now that she has reached the edge of the shopping complex, she stops not so much to study the scene as to work out what to do next and where to go. In the event, she walks past the fresh-produce stall, giving it a cursory look and deciding that she will come back to it if there is need, and makes a straight move toward the general store, which promises, according to a board written in hand, that you can get “everything here.” This being the second time she has been to a civil war Mogadiscio market, she finds it curious that the money changers, the armed youths, the women running the vegetable stalls, and those selling bundles of qaat all mix freely, as if amicably. One may be lulled into believing that everything is normal. Some people put forth the idea that economics is the spark plug that ignites the fuel that makes the civil war engine run. You buy, you sell, and everyone and everything is okay. Looking around, she thinks that everyone here is hard-core local, their accent rough on the edges and jarring on her ears and senses. In addition, Cambara observes that there are fewer veil-wearing women here. Maybe because everybody knows everyone, women feel safe among their own menfolk.
She pauses twenty meters or so before the general store. She is looking for telltale intimations of trouble in the shape of a gang of armed youths loitering at its entrance or in its vicinity. Finding none, she feels safe within her to go in.