“It will cost you four dollars a minute. Shall I send for him?” the manager asked.
“Yes, please!”
HALF AN HOUR LATER, A MAN CAME TO JEEBLEH’S ROOM WITH A BRIEFCASE full of gadgets, including a telephone linked to a satellite long-distance service. Jeebleh called his wife at work, and gave her a sanitized version of what had happened so far. Lest she beg him to return at once, he omitted any mention of death or tensions. As far as he could remember, this was the first time that he had deliberately kept things from his wife.
And he realized, when he was once again alone in his room, that he wouldn’t hesitate to lie if he believed that by doing so he might serve a higher purpose: that of justice.
5
BILE SAT UP, STARTLED, CALLING OUT JEEBLEH’S NAME, HIS VOICE HOARSE and his thinking addled. He was shaking all over, shivering fitfully one instant, perspiring heavily the next.
In a dream, a young woman in search of a physician had come for him, to tell him about a neighbor’s horse that had broken loose and, in the process of bolting blindly, trampled her elderly husband underfoot, wounding him badly. Hysterical, the woman had appealed to Bile to help her. And she kept repeating her plea, “Save me from becoming a widow. Have pity on me and my unborn child. You must save him from becoming an orphan.” She repeated the same sentences again and again, until the words merged one into another and he couldn’t separate them.
Bile sat up in the darkness of his nightmare, disturbed that he was unsure whether he had ever met the young woman, or known of her. In his discomfiture, he couldn’t resolve whether the dream had called on him for a reason as yet unclear, whether it had any bearing on his life or the lives of those who mattered to him.
THE NIGHT SOFTENED INTO DAWN, AND STILL RESTLESS, BILE GOT UP TO MAKE a pot of coffee the way he liked it: black, strong, no sugar. In his pajamas and dressing gown, and still a little shaken, he moved around in the apartment in which he had lived alone for a week now, half listening for the kettle to call when the water had boiled. He felt a chill of fluster in his bones, and a deep fear surged in him. Jeebleh, his friend, who was in Mogadiscio now, and Seamus, a close Irish friend, who was away in Europe, were of the view that he was in the habit of going into silent depressions, avoiding confrontations, or putting things off. He had never grieved enough, or been able to work through his rage at Caloosha for all the damage his half brother had done to him. Bile would retort that if he hadn’t acted on the deep-felt hurt, it was because he was a man of peace.
He returned to the kitchen in jitters, his hands trembling as he picked up the singing kettle. He poured the boiled water into the pot and, missing his target by a few inches, emptied much of the water on the flames, thus extinguishing the fire. He became even more agitated thinking about what Jeebleh might ask when he saw him. He was likely to ask whether Bile had done anything about Caloosha, and if so, precisely what. If Bile’s reply was in the negative, his friend was bound to say, “But what’s wrong with you?”
Wrapped in a fever of shivers, Bile took the coffee tray with him into his study and sat in a swivel chair by the window, whose curtains were open. He placed the tray precariously on the side of the crowded desk, because there were far too many books on the coffee table. There were books everywhere, on the desk, on the floor by his favorite rocking chair, on the windowsill, many of them open, some with bookmarks, others lying facedown. One book was splayed on its side, as though it had been knocked over recently. Bile knew the man who had written it, a fellow doctor famous more for his silly infatuation with the politics of his clansman StrongmanSouth than for his professionalism. Bile stared at a spot in the distant heavens, in the manner of someone abruptly stripped of memories, and balked at his own reaction to Jeebleh’s unexpected arrival.
When he heard the muezzin calling all Muslims to their dawn prayer, he pushed his enraged emotions aside and got up, intending to find a prayer rug for the first time in many years. He had no idea why, but a few minutes later he was standing before the blackboard on the wall, a piece of chalk in his hand, adding “Clean towels, sheets for Jeebleh’s bed, etc.” to the day’s to-do list. No sooner had he replaced the chalk and dusted his hands clean than he was appalled that he hadn’t said his prayers — and on top of this he was dismayed at reading what he had just written, for he had assigned Raasta’s room to Jeebleh without giving the matter any serious thought. He leaned against the wall, worried that he might sink into a delirium. With the sun’s early rays falling on his face, he might have been a rabbit caught in a mighty floodlight, its warren of possible escapes blocked off. When he went into the bathroom, he felt as closed in as a rabbit seeing its frightened expression in a mirror. Studying his reflection, he felt that he was staring at someone else’s face, remembering and reliving someone else’s history, listening to the thought processes of someone alien to him.
Bile was fifty-eight, tall, with a back straight as a ramrod. There wasn’t a single ounce of extra fat on his body. His mud-brown eyes were restless, and his lips were forever astir, in the active manner of a mystic endlessly reciting his devotions. His hair was cut short, in the style of a get-up-and-go man who hasn’t the time to comb it. He typically wore either jeans or trousers that didn’t need to be ironed.
Shaving, he cut his chin, and his forefinger came into contact with a trickle of blood. He dabbed the cut with toilet paper, and grew steadily calmer, until he remembered who and where he was. He dabbed the cut again, to see how much blood he was losing.
In these unsettling times, everyone’s fate, actions, dreams, hates, and aspirations were seen, understood, and interpreted in stark political contexts; distrust was the order of the day, and everyone was suspicious of everybody else. If Jeebleh were to express dissatisfaction with Bile’s way of doing things, Bile would contrast it to his friend’s lex talionis, affirming that he, Bile, did not feel indentured to an Old Testament law of retaliation. There was no doubt in his mind that the dark side of wrong would not be allowed to triumph. Now this: Raasta kidnapped; her father, Faahiye, missing. Rumor had it that Faahiye had last been seen heading for a refugee camp in Mombasa.
Bile’s fears and sense of despair came close to depression, as he thought of a western he had seen once in which the good characters were caught in deadly quarrels among themselves, while the bad, who posed a greater threat to the fabric of society, were all dealt winning hands in the first part of the film. He knew from personal experience how often people, like Faahiye and his wife, Shanta, eager to change the unreconstructed ways of Somali society, fought fiercely among themselves until they had no energy left to take on the reactionaries who ran the real show. In a civil war, there were no progressives and no reactionaries; everyone was a victim, seldom a culprit.
His knees and hip joints stiffening, he recalled how, with the prison gates left open after the Tyrant fled the city, he had taken his first step into what he assumed was freedom. For almost an hour, he had watched with detached amusement as other prisoners ran from their cells as fast as their feet could carry them. A few of his fellow political detainees, whom he hadn’t seen for years because he was kept isolated, came by his cell on their way out. He remembered saying to one of them, “What’s the hurry?” But why, why didn’t he flee?
The truth was shockingly mundane. He was merely having difficulty getting to his feet, suffering, as he was, from locomotor ataxia, in which the lower limbs are numbed. Try as he might, he would rise and then fall, again and again, his feet and legs failing him, his heels hurting, his eyes in pain when he opened or closed them, his head dizzy. As a political detainee, in isolation for seventeen years, Bile had been denied his right to take fresh air, to walk about in the prison yard, or to come into even indirect contact with the world outside. He had received no letters and no books.