“How did you do that?”
“I was going to go out.”
If Jeebleh didn’t ask pointed questions to get Bile to devote a few minutes to answering Af-Laawe’s and Caloosha’s allegations about murdering and stealing, it was because he didn’t wish to interrupt the flow of the narrative. He was sure they would have the opportunity to talk about this and many other subjects too. “And?”
“It was when I was looking for some clothes to carry away for my immediate use that I stumbled on a duffel bag full of money, in large denominations, in cash and ready to go! The amount was staggeringly high, close to a million U.S. dollars. It was there all along, only I hadn’t seen it.”
Jeebleh stared at the scar on Bile’s forehead. An inch long, and pale, no bigger than a caterpillar that would mutate into a butterfly. He stared at it, because he sensed it moving. Now he said, “What did you do?”
“I went to sleep,” Bile said.
“But what on earth for?”
“Not being a thief, and not wanting to tempt fate,” Bile explained, “I decided I no longer had any reason to hurry. I was determined to take my time and decide what to do with the money, whether to appropriate it, or just leave it where I found it.
“But I became afraid of the looters, whom I knew to be stronger than I, and who I knew would come. If I was clear in my mind about one thing, it was that I should ultimately hand the money over to the government. I hadn’t thought about what I might do in the absence of a reconstituted national government.”
He paused, helped himself to more tea, and then went on: “I’m not a religious person, but for the first time in years I thought about God and His purpose in me. I also thought about a couple of small things I might use the money for. Then Plotinus came to me. And I thought about peace, about the misery and poverty of our people, and how, if the money were mine and I used it judiciously, even a small sum could help a lot of people.”
“You didn’t think the owners might return?”
“I stayed on in the house with the money,” he said. “I was in no hurry — remember, I wasn’t a thief. And when I slept — and I slept for a very, very long time, almost three days I should think — I dreamt at one point that I was setting very, very many small things right. Then I came to, because I heard a god-awful noise!”
“What?”
“The dog was barking and barking.”
“When would this have been?” Jeebleh asked.
“At dawn, I cannot be certain which day it was, my first intimation of danger was at more or less the same time as the muezzin’s call. The barking, interspersed with the eerie quiet of the hour, struck fear into my heart. I thought of running away, and there was a great deal of sense in that. But I decided to sit it out. I waited and waited. No one came, and the dog stopped barking. I resolved to take the money, and use it for other people!”
“And you left?”
“In search of Shanta.”
“Had you any inkling where she might be?”
“No.”
“Had things calmed down by then?”
“Not much,” Bile said. “But it made sense to take the car in the carport, despite the moral question — although this irked me. Would I be stealing if I took a million dollars stashed in a duffel bag ready to go, from the house of people who had looted the coffers of the state before its final collapse? Would it be a good thing or a bad thing if I used the embezzled funds to set up a charitable refuge? We could argue about these moral issues at length. In the end, thief or no thief, I said to hell with it, took the car, and quit the house.”
“And the dog?”
“Where would I take the dog?”
“Fair enough. You drove off,” Jeebleh said, “alone.”
“In Somalia the civil war then was language,” Bile said, “only I didn’t speak the new language. At one point, a couple of armed men flagged me down, and one of them asked, ‘Yaad tahay?’ I hadn’t realized that the old way of answering the question ‘Who are you?’ was no longer valid. Now the answer universally given to ‘Who are you?’ referred to the identity of your clan family, your blood identity! I found the correct responses in the flourish of the tongue, found them in the fresh idiom, the new argot. I was all right. I was a good mimic, able to speak in the correct Somali accent, nodding when my questioner mentioned the right acronym. The men who flagged me down had in their gaze the shine of well-fed guard dogs. What’s more, their four-wheel-drive vehicle was loaded, because they had just robbed the Central Bank.”
“So they let you proceed?”
“With a warning, after I spoke the acronym of the period,” Bile said, head down, as if embarrassed to have done so.
“What was the acronym of the period?”
“The initial letters of the clan-based militia movement that ran the Tyrant out of the city.”
“They just let you go?”
“They suggested that I take care. I gathered from this that it would be unwise to ask if they knew where I might find Caloosha. I didn’t think it likely that they would lead me to Shanta.”
Bile’s hands were beginning to resemble those of a baby, clutched tightly into fists. Maybe he was wishing he had done something cavalier by challenging the looters.
Bile continued, “I had barely gone a kilometer when a pack of knife-wielding urchins flagged me down. I was trying to appease them, when my prayer was answered: a man in uniform, armed but not looting, came driving by. He asked if there was a problem. The youths fled. I introduced myself to the gentleman, who told me his name: Dajaal. Taken aback, at first I assumed it was an alias, some sort of nom de guerre. When it became obvious that I could trust him, I told him that I wanted to get in touch with a sister of mine, and gave him some spiel, the gist of which was that I had no idea how to reach her. It was my good fortune that he knew my name, knew Shanta, and knew where she lived. He and I belonged to the same family — he said so right away, as if to assure me that I could trust him. That didn’t matter to me as much as it mattered to him. What mattered to me was to find Shanta, and I said so. He told me to follow him, but for obvious reasons this didn’t appeal to me. I wanted to get rid of the Volkswagen, I wanted to have no associations with the house I had gotten it from, or the family it had belonged to. So I got into his car and felt safe in his hands.
“Ours was the only car on the road in that part of the city, but there were pedestrians everywhere — at crossroads, ahead of us, behind us. Many were entering houses empty-handed and emerging with their loot. At one point, Dajaal nearly ran over a man carrying what appeared to be a very heavy load. I got out of the car and helped the man gather his scattered loot. I had half expected to find the roads blocked with checkpoints, and curiously, they weren’t. I was relieved also that Dajaal hadn’t inquired about the contents of my duffel bag!”
Bile learned from Dajaal that Shanta had married Faahiye, who was nearly twenty-five years her senior, and that she was heavily pregnant at forty-three.
“I had thought that she was past childbearing age, and reasoned aloud that if this was her first, I would have to prepare, for such a pregnancy might bring along its fair share of problems. ‘A miracle baby, then?’ Dajaal said.”