Cambara makes herself look into the eyes of the little girl as into the mirrored sorrow of her loss. She feels that, despite everything, the girl has about her a sense of comfort, of being a child and a mother at the same time, and of grimacing at the discomfiture of what it is to be so young and drawn. Cambara stoops over the little girl and then crouches down pretty close to her.
“What’s your beautiful name, sweet little love?” Cambara asks.
She stares into the girl’s big dark eyes as she might look into the unfathomable black hole with which she has become intimate since her son’s death.
Even though the girl says her name several times, Cambara fails to disentangle the girl’s guttural consonants from her mute vowels. Then she looks from the little girl to the woman and then at the surrounding chaos, and back finally to the little girl, who is singing to her corn-husk doll a lullaby about a mother who has been raped, a father killed, an uncle dispossessed of his property, and a sister gone and never heard from again.
“How old are you, sweet little love?”
“I don’t know.”
Cambara remains in her clumsy crouch, her every bone creaking, her every joint aching, and her thighs enflamed with pain. She can tell that Zaak is close by, chain-smoking and unwrapping the bundle of qaat and helping himself to its shiny, leathery leaves upon which he chews meditatively, like a cow attending to its cud. His eyes redden, and his right cheek bulges gradually, chipmunklike.
She says to Zaak, “Can I borrow some money?”
“How much do you need?”
“A couple of dollars’ worth in shillings.”
He says, “I have less than a dollar.”
Her stomach turns at the disturbing thought that he has bought qaat and paid money sufficient for several families to live on for a week. How wasteful! She can’t bear the thought of receiving the money from him herself, she is so disgusted.
She says, “Please give them the money.”
And she extends both her hands to receive the plastic bag into which the woman has stuffed the produce that Zaak has paid for.
They walk back to the house, Cambara furious with herself all the while for having accepted her mother’s condition that she stay with him. As they tread along, he stops every now and then to select juicy young shoots of his precious qaat and consumes them hungrily.
She looks away, in revulsion.
TWO
Fretful, Cambara is in the upstairs bathroom, bracing for a cold bucket shower, her first in many years. The thought of having one brings on goose pimples. As she readies for the first drop of cold water, she clenches her teeth, closes her eyes, and, standing in rigid expectation of the water descending from above her head, trembles all over. She considers giving up the idea and finding a hotel with warm running water and all the modern amenities she is used to. On second thought, however, she carps at admitting defeat so soon after arriving, conscious of the fact that more civil war — related travails lie in wait for her and that it is high time she took this small challenge head-on.
She remembers talking to Zaak earlier and cannot get rid of seeing the bemused look on his face, as he informed her, almost with a touch of glee, that the geyser in the upstairs bathroom is no longer working, but if she wanted, she could have a warm shower in his downstairs bathroom. Truth be told, she declined his invitation to use his bathroom, because she did not wish to repeat her Nairobi experience years ago when they shared an apartment and she found him wanting. She wonders if the disparaging smile his face wore earlier meant that he hadn’t forgotten how much she disliked cold showers. Whatever the case, she thanked him and said that she preferred getting accustomed to the conditions prevailing here right away to postponing the inevitable, for, sooner or later, she would have to confront similar situations and worse. She puzzles over the problem of sharing a small space and living in intimate proximity for a few days. Can she suffer it and for how long? Will they rub each other the wrong way?
Even though she doubts that Zaak will knock on the door on some pretext or another or walk in, she makes sure she bolts the bathroom door from inside, just to be sure. She opens the window wide to let in the early-evening sea breeze, which in its own way weakens her resolve to have the cold shower after all. Her chest rises and falls as she fills her lungs with sea air and breathes in nostalgic memories of the city’s salted humidity. The puff of the wind washing over her helps stimulate her powers of recall, and before she knows it, she is in her preteens, mischievously baring her budding breasts in Zaak’s presence and daring him to touch them. Because he hadn’t the nerve, she accused him of being a shirking coward. Naked and in flip-flops, her right hand resting limply on her hip, her admiring gaze falls on her waist, which is too narrow for a woman her age, especially one who has had a child. Cambara wonders how much the exposure to civil war horrors has affected Zaak’s outlook on life and, if so, in what significant ways.
As if asking now the right profile and now the left one to yield up their cheeky confidences one at a time, she stands slightly to the left of the mirror and then to the right of it. She listens to a faucet dripping, a cistern running, a rusty window shakily creaking on its hinges. Then, when she least expects it, she distinctly picks out the sound of a bird calling to its mate, in mourning. She regards the face looking back at her lengthily from the depth of the looking glass with renewed apprehension. She ascribes her inability to compose herself in the way she likes to the fact that, like the bird, she too is grieving.
Her eyes bulge with so many unshed tears, and she senses a sudden, almost blinding rush of hot blood flowing to her head, but she catches herself in time before losing her balance and dropping to the wet floor in a dead faint. She stands upright and breathes in deeply, harder and longer, and more frequently until she is sure that the world won’t pull away from under her feet. Now steady, and not likely to founder, she inhales some more sea air, and when she imagines that she has taken in enough, she regains her normal bearing. She first bends down slowly with deliberate willfulness, and then lifts the scoop, which she dips into the bucket filled to the brim with water. Lest she lose her grip, she clutches at the scoop as if making a grab for an item that is, of necessity, an extension of the self. She raises the scoop, preparatory to pouring the water on her head. However, before a globule of liquid has reached any part of her body, her face wears an expectant, tense look, and then ready, set, go. The first drop is insufferable, causing her body to be covered with tiny bumps; the second drop is not so unbearable. By the time she has emptied scoopfuls on her head, she feels she has acclimatized to the inclement temperature, and no part of her body raises a single goose bump. Because she is no longer breaking out in cold spots, she compliments herself for a small achievement, the first since her arrival.
After she has toweled down and gone back to the privacy of her room, which she bolts from the inside, and has chosen what to wear — a discreet dress, decent and not in any way provocative enough to make Zaak wish they had been lovers — she revisits a scene that is permanently etched on the screen of her memory. In it, she and her mother are on an afternoon walk in a park in the suburb of Ottawa where her parents had relocated a couple of decades before Somalia had collapsed into stateless anarchy and where her father, a diabetic, had had two legs amputated in a matter of six months and had been bedridden for nearly two years. At the time, Cambara was not doing as well as she might have hoped in her dream profession, acting. She was worth no more than cameo parts, nothing big, and even then didn’t have her name in lights. She had not landed any role that might turn her overnight into a household name anywhere. No one showed the TV commercials in which she had had parts, even though they had been commissioned, and none of her other short skits were ever aired in prime time. In fact, earlier that month, Cambara had failed to get an audition for a role about a young, ambitious Somali woman who is at loggerheads with her in-laws over the infibulation of her seven-year-old daughter, a story that her agent made her believe had been written with her in mind. No wonder she was in a downbeat mood.