“She is off to Mogadiscio,” Arda replies, as if going to Somalia is tantamount to committing a crime in a murder-free suburb in Ottawa. “She is off — to use her own words — to recover our family property. Do you remember the property, which you saw, loved, and then rented? She wants to wrest that property from the clutch of a warlord with lots of blood on his hands. No one is asking her to go in pursuit of trouble or of possible death. Not I. If she were to listen to my advice, I would suggest that she rid herself of her estranged husband, that she divorce him and not bother about the property. Alas, she will not hear of it. She just likes to complicate matters, maybe because the plainness of things wearies my daughter, drives her nuts. Up she must go to that wretched country and risk herself for nothing. Because I am sure that the property, which you and I know well and which brought us together, making us into the friends that we now are, is in ruins, unrecoverable. I keep asking, What is the use? I keep saying, What is the point?”
A sudden ruckus in the street brings Cambara back to the present, alerting her to the fact that not only is she in Mogadiscio, come on a reconnoitering walkabout, veiled, in disguise, she is now in a shop as part of her expedition and is bearing witness to two preteen boys locked in combat, kicking, punching, and tearing at each other’s sarongs. A large woman in a wraparound guntiino, bearing a club the size and shape of an alpenhorn, comes out of one of the houses, walks past the crowd of onlookers now gathering, just watching. Silent and serious-looking, she puts her club down close to her feet, from where she can pick it up before grabbing one of the boys by his hair, pulling it. Throwing him back as if he were no bigger than a greasy dishcloth, she steps in between them, frighteningly huge. Then she stares down at one, then the other, not speaking but domineering.
The shopkeeper, with a touch of pride, says, “Here is further evidence if you need it.”
“Evidence of what?”
“In former days,” the man explains, “two boys of their age from different clans would have settled a small dispute by shooting at each other; not now. And they would not have allowed a woman to stop their fight; they would have killed her, point-blank. Now you can see them going their different ways, licking their wounds in humiliation and silence.”
Cambara watches, mesmerized, as the amazon who a moment ago separated the two boys stands, elbows pointing outward, and waits for the crowd to disperse before returning to her house.
“Who is she to them?” she asks the shopkeeper.
“She is nothing to either of the boys,” explains the shopkeeper. “Not their mother or aunt. Or even a distant relative.”
“Where does she come into it, though?”
“She is a member of the Women for Peace network.”
“Please tell me more,” Cambara pleads.
The shopkeeper obliges. “In several of the city’s districts, women have been organizing against gun violence. Gun violence has led to a high incidence of rape and the deaths of many. The failure of the country’s political class to end the civil war has prompted the women to set up an NGO — Women for Peace — funded by the EU.”
“How come you know all this?” she asks.
“Because my wife is on the steering committee.”
Cambara realizes that he is looking at the back door, presumably through which he goes into his house, where his wife may be busy attending to some chore or other. She is about to ask if his wife is at home, when a young fellow enters the shop through the same back door to announce that he will take her to her waiting taxi.
The man does his sums for her benefit a second time, and Cambara collects her change in wads of Somali shillings, so bulky she does not know where to put it. The shopkeeper comes to her aid, giving her a handbag, almost new. When she hesitates, saying that she does not know when she will return it or how, he encourages her with the words “We’re bound to see you again and will be happy to. Take it, and bring it back when you come again.”
Thinking, “There goes my chance of asking the shopkeeper to give me his name or his wife’s, or the source of the items on the shelves,” she follows one of the assistants as he walks out through the front door, wheeling a barrel load of her purchases, covered in a toweling material. The young fellow turns a sharp right, then a sharp left. The taxi, an ancient Lada dating from the Cold War years, when the Soviets ran the show in Mogadiscio, boasts bald tires and is phenomenally rich in rust and paint loss, not to mention the number of things that she presumes will not work. She wonders if it is wise or safe to sit in it and be driven first to Hotel Shamac, where she can get to the business of tracking down Kiin, then perhaps to Hotel Maanta, and after that to Zaak’s place.
“Where to?” asks the driver, as the youth puts her purchases in the car boot, the driver struggling first to open it, then to fit them in. She can see the glassless window open, she can feel the seat sagging, even before she goes in and sits, She can also see, from where she is, that the space where her feet will be when she enters is a gaping hole. If she derives any comfort from taking the taxi, it is that there is no one with a gun; even the driver seems unarmed. She is immensely relieved. Nonetheless, just to be sure, she asks, after he has closed the trunk, “No armed escort?”
“My taxi is so old it is safe,” replies the driver, showing the cavities in his mouth as if she were a dentist requesting that he let her see his gums.
“Hotel Shamac, please.”
“Please get in.”
TEN
A small bother gains purchase in Cambara’s mind. She wonders whether to settle on the invented identity of a veil-wearer or reestablish her own, now that she is driving away from the area in a taxi that is about to move. She finds the requirements of her veil-wearing identity not only too demanding but exhausting, burdensome, too hot to lug along, and too cumbersome to accommodate.
She remembers coming out of the shop, feeling elated and believing that she has achieved a feat far in excess of her own expectations. She recalls emerging into the glare of the afternoon hour, majestically wrapped in her tentlike garment, slow-moving and imposing in an eye-catching way, doing her utmost not to attract unnecessary attention to herself, yet this is what she has ended up doing. She could tell this from the way in which dozens of loiterers hanging outside the shop like paparazzi now fasten their stares on her, as if she were a celebrity. In preference to going in and sitting in the taxi, she decided to make sure the youth put all her shopping bags in before she turned her back on him.
To make matters worse, the youth who wheeled out the cart loaded with her purchases took his time off-loading it, transferring the items one by one into the many-holed trunk of the taxi. On occasion, he even rummaged in the shopping bags. She had no idea why and dared not ask him, lest she upset him — who knows what he may do, or whether he will react violently?
Now, the taxi engine running, Cambara keeps her wary eyes on the driver gawking at her, and the small crowd that has gathered staring. For his part, the driver has his foot on the brakes and the handbrake firmly in his right hand, maybe because he does not trust its efficacy.
When Cambara gives the youth who has helped off-load a tip in a wodge of shillings the real value of which she does not know, she gets in and says to the taxi driver, “Shall we go?”
The taxi is ill tempered, and its engine stalls as the driver engages it into a second gear to get moving, perhaps because the first is dysfunctional, she is not sure. He turns the key in the ignition two or three times before he cranks it and it catches. This reminds Cambara of her horrid experience in the truck, with Zaak. However, once she ceases to worry, the vehicle moves without stopping. Now she is unnecessarily preoccupied, not only because it is the first time she has put on a veil but also because it is the first time since her arrival in Mogadiscio that she is in a one-to-one situation, alone in a car with a male stranger. It is important that she settle on a choice of identity that makes her garb match her behavior. Can she measure up to the challenge as a pretender?