When he had finished speaking, Jeebleh relished the quiet drive, the silence of the hour, the fact that there was no fighting, no guns firing, no traffic in the roads. He could hear voices, but they weren’t threatening or frightening. The night they were plunging into extended a hand of welcome. Would that he could challenge his demons of despair, if these got in touch. On this trip, his life felt like it was on a mezzanine suspended between a floor marked “Ennui” and another marked “Hope.” While he knew that anything could happen, he was determined to do his utmost not to end up in a body bag, or in an overpriced coffin addressed to his wife and daughters, care of a funeral agency with a zip code in Queens, New York.
The driver said, “I’ll give you my telephone number so you can call me when you need to. And please don’t hesitate to get in touch if there’s anything I can do to help.”
“It’s very kind of you.”
The vehicle stopped in front of a hotel gate. The driver applied the hand-brake, turned to Jeebleh, and announced, “Here we are!”
4
JEEBLEH TOOK NOTE THAT THE GROUNDS OF THE HOTEL WERE MARKED off from the street by a large sign, handwritten in Somali, Arabic, English, and Italian, warning that no one bearing firearms would be allowed onto the premises.
At the sound of the horn, the gate opened slowly, and his gaze settled on two men, neither, evidently, with a gun. One of the men appeared to have only one arm, while the other was distinguished by an enormous pair of buckteeth, bright white against an otherwise obscure face.
Above the gate, up in the heavens, the sky was soaked in the blood of sacrifice: it reminded Jeebleh of the Somali myth in which the sun is fed daily, at dusk, on a slaughtered beast. He remembered being told, as a child, that the routine of feeding the sun daily at the same hour made her return for food the following day. Now that he had gained his adulthood and come back to this fragmented land, he lamented the tragic absence of a hero worthy of elevation to solar eminence. He might have been at the gate of prehistory, because the quickening darkness of the hour dyed the visible world with the dim color of yet other uncertainties. Would he be safe at this hotel? Did it have running water? How intermittent was its electricity?
Of the two men at the gate, OneArm advanced with the wariness of a chameleon, once all the militiamen had gotten down from the roof of the vehicle. He was so dark he might have been woven out of the night. He moved around the vehicle in the stylized goose-step of a sentry on duty. “No guns, please,” he told the driver, who assured him that neither he nor Jeebleh was armed.
Bucktooth stayed behind, focused with reptilian attentiveness on every possible movement, his right hand in his pocket — maybe because a firearm was hidden there. The gate firmly in his grip, he kept half of his body out of immediate danger in the event of a shoot-out.
His hands on his lap, Jeebleh was a study in concentration. He was totally taken with Bucktooth, who seemed intent on outstaring him and the driver — until they conceded defeat, and showed their hands, palms forward. In fact, Jeebleh probably would have felt bothered and offended if he had been treated differently from anyone else.
As the gates opened fully to let the vehicle through, Jeebleh was touched by an instant of remorse as the minute hands of his destiny gathered the hours of his emotion. He looked forward eagerly to calling his wife and daughters in New York, to assure them that all was well with him so far; he felt a surge of anticipatory elation.
The driver parked under the glow of a fluorescent tube with a crowd of moths around it. Jeebleh got out, and took two steps before tottering to an unsteady stop: his toes had curled up in an awful cramp. While he was stretching his legs and retraining his feet to walk, two youths, presumably bellboys, not in uniforms but in sarongs, grabbed hold of his bags, and went ahead inside.
He bid the driver farewell and, even though he didn’t think he would ever get around to calling him, wrote down his telephone number and thanked him profusely. Then he followed the youths, into an enclosed area where there were tables and chairs. He could not be absolutely certain, but it was possible that he took leave of his senses for a few exhausted seconds, during which he may not have known who he was, where he was, or what on earth he was doing there.
COMING TO, HE CAST ABOUT FOR A SOLID ANCHOR AND SOON SPOTTED A rather rotund man, with a cuddly look about him, struggling to heave himself out of a threadbare chair. He was tempted to offer the man a hand, but thought better of it when he saw him extricating himself from the deep chair and straightening up, then coming forward, his right hand outstretched. He was not the handsomest of men: his mouth protruded, boasting teeth that might have been molded out of soapstone, and his lower lip curved in the unlikely shape of a kilt of clouds covering the southern half of a full moon. The man introduced himself as the manager. Jeebleh was comforted when he shook the man’s fleshy palm. “Welcome,” the manager said. “I hope everything has been smooth and comfortable since your arrival.”
The accumulated horrors of the scene at the airport, the stress of meeting so many strangers in a city virtually alien, and now the necessity of staying in a hotel — these were taking their toll on Jeebleh, unnerving him, and making him lose his general equilibrium. Lest he should speak impulsively and say whatever came into his mind, he remained silent.
“Welcome home, our bitter home!” said the man, reading into Jeebleh’s silence. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his baggy trousers, in which you could hear the jingle of colliding coins. (Jeebleh wondered what manner of coins these might be, and assumed they were not Somali, considering the high rate of inflation: a dollar was exchanging nowadays for thousands of shillings; when he had left for the United States, it had been worth six.) “I am Ali!”
Ali offered a belated smile, as if now remembering that he had been trained to please his customers. “In an earlier life, in long-ago peacetime Somalia, I used to be the favorite of gossip columnists and the envy of other hotel managers,” he told Jeebleh. “I was appreciably more adept than any other hotel manager at getting the best of jobs. In my day, I played host to several kings of the petrodollar variety, not to mention a handful of African presidents on visits to Mogadiscio, and the secretaries-general of the UN, the Organization of African Unity and the Arab League too. And even though I am suitably qualified to run hotels anywhere in the world, having taken a degree in hotel management in England, I’ve chosen to stay. We are the sons of the land, to which we belong, you and I. I feel no regrets, though, none whatsoever.”
Jeebleh suspected he knew what Ali meant when he said, “We are the sons of the land.” He understood the manager’s “we” to be inclusive: Jeebleh, Ali, and many other known but unnamed clansmen of theirs, united in blood. But was he right to interpret it this way?
“Why have you chosen to stay?” he asked.
“I have a bedridden mother to look after.”
And here he was, Jeebleh, come to pacify his mother’s troubled spirits. Yet he couldn’t and wouldn’t be able to say, No regrets, none whatsoever.
“Anyway,” the manager continued, “we’ve been alerted to your coming, and we are at your service, to offer you our best.”
“Who alerted you to my coming?”
“A good friend of yours.”
“A good friend of mine?”
“Af-Laawe.”
Jeebleh let this pass unchallenged. Moreover, he purposefully radiated a false sense of confidence, if only to prove to the manager that he was on top of things. He thrust his chin forward and asked, “Where are my bags?”