“What manner of men are they, the warlords?”
“The scum of the earth.”
Hot with readiness to do battle with the notion of “dirt” in civil war parlance, Cambara relives with a sense of repulsion the memory of Zaak’s creative mess and downright filth in his living conditions. She is appalled to register how his tolerance level has grown since they shared a place, how he abides toilet floors wet with God-knows-what, bathtubs black as though smeared with the soot from the sweepings of a chimney, a kitchen crawling with cockroaches and other bugs, bed-sheets brown with repeated use. Maybe the civil war has something to do with Zaak’s lowering the measure of his endurance. Maybe she hasn’t the right to claim to have known him intimately when she was assisting him in his application to gain his landed-immigrant status in Canada. Even when he first got there, Zaak had unclean ways, above all the uncouth habit of wetting the toilet seat, which made flat-sharing a daily embarrassment. And rather than endure or put up with it, she will have to find an alternative accommodation.
She won’t ever forget the shock at meeting him at the airport, when she detected cynicism and hostility both in the expressions on his face and in the remarks he made, as he hauled her half a dozen pieces of luggage to the four-wheel drive. Soon.
“Have you brought a department store?” he said.
Not rising to his comment, she said, “You know what I am like.”
“I know what women are like,” he chided her.
In a fit of pique, she almost asked him to take her to a hotel — and to hell with what her mother might say. She has come with enough cash and can afford to take a room in one of the best hotels for the duration of her stay, however long that might be. But again, she will only do it under her own terms; she won’t be pushed into making hasty, regrettable decisions. Her impatience tested, he knows what she is capable of and how often she takes umbrage at men and allows her anger to act as though it is independent of her.
As soon as they got to his place and he showed her to her room and pointed to the adjoining toilet and bathroom that were to be all hers, Cambara’s entire body suddenly went slack, and, in an instant, she was visibly suppressing a yawn, and he was offering to leave her alone for her to shower and settle in and, if she could, sleep off her jet lag. He explained that he had an urgent meeting about a conflict between two warring militias from the same subclan, a frequent-enough occurrence. But he would come back and take her along on her first expedition to the open-air market, where he would buy his daily ration of qaat. Then she heard the sound of his steps going down the staircase, a door opening and slamming; she decided to take a nap without changing into a nightgown. She remembers ceaseless noises near enough to lead her to believe that he was hanging outside her room — so close that she imagined sensing his nervous breathing.
Then she remembers him snottily shouting, “Wakey, wakey, rise and shine,” when in her drowsy reckoning she couldn’t have been asleep for more than five minutes.
Maybe she ought to have slept on, sparing herself a long walk to the open-air market so that Zaak could feed his craving for qaat. She is so exhausted that she finds it difficult to keep her eyes open, so overwhelmed by accumulated fatigue that her head feels as heavy as a wet mattress, her tongue as lifeless as the faulty stitching of a quilt. She curses under her breath in Québéçois French, knowing he wouldn’t understand a word of it.
New, all of a sudden, she awakens to a mélange of fragrances emanating from ancient spices; she is in front of a spice stall at the open-air market where a woman who trades in them is offering to sell her a selection. Other potent scents from a jamboree of mints almost knock her sideways, they are so powerful. Not far from where she is standing as if jinxed, another woman is beckoning to her. The second woman is encouraging Cambara to buy from her spread of edible plants and roots.
“I’ve brought no money,” Cambara says apologetically to the woman, who is offering her fresh cinnamon sticks, cumin seeds, roots of ginger, and cloves of garlic.
The woman is very pushy, and Cambara is more irritated with herself for not bringing some cash. A dollar would make a big difference to any of these women. As Cambara walks a couple of steps away from the stall, feeling foolish, the woman follows her and says, “Take everything that is on the mat for a dollar. This is a bargain.”
How has this woman worked out that Cambara is from elsewhere — a dollar country? Amazing.
Finally the woman says, “And since you haven’t brought any money today, why don’t you take these and bring the money tomorrow?”
But Cambara won’t hear of it; she hates the thought of being in debt to anyone, no matter how small the sum. In fact she says it in so many words and as plainly as she can, but the woman won’t let her be.
“How can it be that you haven’t any money?” the woman challenges. “Tell me where you are from, so I know. Are you from Amriika? Igland? Swiidan? Filland? Put your hand in that pocket of yours and bring out the dollar. Please do not waste my time.”
Cambara finds herself automatically putting her hand in the deep pocket as the woman has instructed, and her fingers meet the knife. She brings out her empty hand and rubs it against the other hand. She says, “I have no money today. Not a cent.”
“I’ll take what is in that pocket in exchange for my entire spread,” the woman says.
When Cambara reiterates that she has no money in her pocket, the woman’s look forthrightly questions her statement, and the two of them stare into each other’s eyes. The woman says, “Take the entire spread of spices and vegetables in exchange for the single item that is in the pocket out of which you’ve brought your hand.”
Cambara searches in vain for Zaak, whom she cannot locate. Curiously, however, she doesn’t feel abandoned or threatened. It is because she is among women. She enjoys seeing so many women trading in local produce and wearing colorful guntiino robes, the traditional attire, and the fact that they are dominating an entire section of the marketplace. Many are past their prime and don’t seem bothered about their exposed breasts; they strike Cambara as easygoing both in the way they carry their bodies and in their attitude toward one another.
She shakes herself loose from the vegetable seller and goes deeper and deeper into the mud-choked portion of the marketplace, pressing on, with one part of her conscious mind hoping to locate Zaak and the other busy working out what she might do if she can’t find him. Then she sees a child sitting on a straw mat next to an older woman, presumably her mother. Cambara is grief stricken as an image calls on her. Careworn, drowned in the suddenness of a renewed distress related to her recent loss, she relaxes a little when she identifies the gender of the child — a girl. Next to the girl and sitting in a self-contained way, the woman has a spread of tomatoes, a pile of onions, and some emaciated-looking and nearly dry potatoes.
Zaak is back. He is saying, “Touché.”
Cambara pays him no heed. She stares at the girl until she cottons on to the little one’s tender adult movements. The girl’s expression reminds her of Dalmar, her son, whom she misses terribly and whom she has begun to see in every child of either sex or any age. That’s not all; the small girl has only one leg, her second leg having been replaced with a wooden one, crudely constructed out of grainy wood. Furthermore, as Cambara’s fragmented memories gather themselves around the girl’s grainy wooden leg, she sees Dalmar, who had a keen interest in constructing puppets. The little girl’s sweet smile, coquettishly flung in her direction the way an older woman might dart one at a man, takes Cambara back to Dalmar’s last day on this earth, as he got into the backseat of his father’s car, sweetly making smile-throwing gestures toward her and waving. Such a sweet smile in a girl so young and knowing, formulated in the carefree attitude of one who has suffered hugely at such an impressionable age. The girl is holding in her arms a modestly dressed corn-husk doll, which she is gently rocking to sleep.