“And do what?” said the driver.
“I’d like to have a feel of the place, if I may.”
“We would advise you not to,” the driver told him.
Jeebleh nonetheless got out of the vehicle, leaving the door ajar, and crouched in the bent-knee posture of a supplicant before a deity. Passersby, men and women hurrying to catch the bus that would take them somewhere, gawked at him, some looking amused, others uncomprehending. What was he doing? Humbling himself before the god of peace, or Mother Earth herself? The driver shouted to him to get back in the car.
A quarter of a kilometer later, they stopped so unexpectedly that the car slid forward when the driver braked. Several armed youths in military fatigues, who had materialized out of nowhere as far as Jeebleh could tell, flagged them down. The oldest would have been in his twenties, and none of them had proper shoes to give their uniforms respectability. They seemed thuggish to Jeebleh, all boasting the armed youth’s standard chipmunk cheeks, their jaws busy chewing qaat. Their eyes were bloodshot and sore with exhaustion.
One of the youths recognized Dajaal, and said, “What if I hadn’t recognized you? We could’ve shot you. Be careful next time. Now get going, and fast!”
Once the car had driven off, Jeebleh asked, “What do they do to people they don’t know?”
“They make a nuisance of themselves,” Dajaal said, “they open the trunk of your car, pretending to check for weapons to confiscate, or for contraband goods on which StrongmanSouth’s income revenue police levy a hefty duty. Often, they take the goods themselves as their share, since they are members of StrongmanSouth’s militia. I would say every major and minor warlord runs the territory under his nominal control profitably.”
“Does StrongmanSouth provide them with the uniforms?”
“No.”
“Who, then?”
“Gadhafi has sent a planeload of these army fatigues,” the driver said, “and the AK-47s are available in the open market and cost only six dollars apiece. StrongmanSouth allows them a free run of the place every now and then, and supplies them with their daily ration of qaat, or at least enough cash with which to buy it.”
Another kilometer and three more checkpoints, and the vehicle came to a halt. Informed that they had arrived, Jeebleh gave a sigh of relief. Here, it was all peaceful. They were before a huge building, which he remembered serving as the State Secretariat. In the sixties, soon after independence, the prime minister and other important ministers had had their offices here. Now the building was rundown, the pillars about to collapse, and thatch and mud huts occupied what used to be parking lots. Jeebleh relaxed when he saw people behaving normally, children playing, women busy at braziers, cooking or washing.
“Is this The Refuge?” he asked.
Dajaal shook his head.
“What is it, then?”
Dajaal called out the name of a man, who then came running out of a side door. He was introduced as the day watchman, and Jeebleh learned that he would take him to the apartment where Bile awaited him.
8
JEEBLEH WALKED A COUPLE OF PACES BEHIND THE DAY WATCHMAN escorting him to Bile’s apartment, serene at the sight of sunlight on the old man’s bald patch. He walked in step with the man, and tried to remain attentive to all his movements, as he expected he’d be returning without a guide.
They were now in a narrow corridor, with a closed door to their left, and one slightly ajar on the right. The watchman led him past a metal gate, then down a ravaged staircase. They walked past a huge void, which may once have housed an elevator; who knows, Jeebleh thought with a chill, dead bodies may have once been thrown down the shaft. He wondered where they were, in a basement of some sort, close to a building that had been an annex to a government ministry. He was disheartened by the water he saw leaking everywhere. Scarcely had he decided that the building was not at all inhabited when he heard the distant voices of children and smelled onions being fried. Somewhat relieved, he followed the watchman down another half a dozen devastated steps before they were out of the building. Then up a stairway a-scatter with geckos, past a half-demolished wall crawling with cockroaches, past a bricked-up door, past a window with half a glass pane, and then through cavernous rooms with no doors. Jeebleh was depressed to bear witness to so much destruction, and to the fact that what the plunderers didn’t have the will to destroy simply fell into destruction on its own.
Soon they exited again, and walked through an arch and into a large courtyard with a communal kitchen where women were cooking, and where toilets, their doors hanging on broken hinges, emitted a foul odor. The place swarmed with well-fed children at play, like puppies after feeding time. Jeebleh’s furtive look fell on the watchman, who comported himself in the reverential way of a commoner approaching royalty: deferentially, knees slightly bent, as in a curtsy, and with a smile of sterling quality. From this, Jeebleh deduced they were on Bile’s floor.
The open courtyard, kept spotlessly clean, boasted a freshly painted wall, and windows apparently recently repaired — there were X’s on the panes, evidence the glass was new. They walked to a metal door, and the watchman pressed a bell. As they waited for an answer, Jeebleh read the verse scrawled in an upright Celtic hand on a plaque attached to the door linteclass="underline" “Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, O God!” He was pondering its meaning, whether it was from the Bible or some other scripture, and wondering who might have put it there, when the door opened.
BILE WAS STANDING IN THE DOORWAY, CLAD IN A SMILE OF WELCOME, HIS ARMS open and raised, in anticipation of taking Jeebleh into his embrace. The two friends hugged very warmly.
At about six feet, Bile was a head taller than Jeebleh, but Jeebleh was a lot heavier. With the tears of joy suppressed, the emotion of their reunion seemed momentarily under some restraint, as each remembered how he had visited the other in many dreams. In Jeebleh’s dreams, Bile’s arrival would often be heralded by the buzzing of a bee quietly, busily, and positively constructing a cosmos of harmony, a bee knowing not a moment of idleness — generous, loving, and kind to all. Jeebleh’s arrival, in Bile’s dreams, would be announced by the neighing of a young horse breaking loose; and when Jeebleh came to take his leave, the horse would be replaced by an eagle flying into the outer reaches of the heavens.
“How wonderful to see you,” Jeebleh said.
Bile was blessed with young-looking skin of a reddish hue that reminded his friend of a light wood treated to assume the darker tint of mahogany. He wore jeans, a T-shirt, and Indian thongs, and was much thinner than Jeebleh had remembered; he had a slight stoop, the result, perhaps, of aging in a prison cell. Otherwise, he appeared to be in good physical shape, his gaze bright, with the gentlest of smiles. When they hugged again, even more warmly, the crown of Jeebleh’s baldness came into raspy contact with Bile’s day-old stubble.
Even though visibly happy to be reunited with his friend, Bile had the expression of a man who had just emerged from a very long night of sorrow; now frowning, now grinning, he might have been suffering from an upset stomach. His thoughts provided their own subtext, prompting a shudder in Jeebleh as Bile broke the calm by reciting the verse above the door in a booming voice: “Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, O God!”
They became conscious of the watchman, still standing at the open door, looking rather sheepish, waiting, perhaps, for baksheesh and a thank you before being dismissed. Bile brought out a wad of cash and gave it to the man. Once he was gone, Bile slammed the door shut and turned his back on Jeebleh, ready to bring his idleness to a profitable end. “Would you like some coffee?” he asked.