Bile was in the vortex of a huge sorrow, but he concentrated his mind wholly on the telling of the story. His features took on the darker hue of fabric soaking overnight in water. Now that he was immersed in his sorrow, Bile’s expression put Jeebleh in mind of the color of southwestern Nigerian adire cloth at its finest.
“Do you think he’s taken the girls hostage?”
“I don’t know,” Bile said.
Jeebleh could see the weight of Bile’s gloom lowering him into further despair. His pupils reduced to a darkness extending inward, into infinity.
“With help from Caloosha?”
“I wish I knew,” Bile said.
Jeebleh watched another cloud of sadness descending on Bile, much like the one before, an acknowledgment of a huge loss. A few seconds later, he sensed a pale reverie spreading itself over his face.
“The sorrow that’s home to us!” Bile cried.
Jeebleh wasn’t sure whether Bile was articulating a difficult concept with death in mind, but he was obviously withdrawing into himself, barely aware that Jeebleh was in the room with him.
“I think I am the cause of the hurt of which Faahiye has never been able to speak, given that he is so correct and proper in his demeanor,” Bile said. “It’s possible, however, that the source of his hurt, which in the end ruined their relationship, was sex, or rather lack of it. Memory is regret! Memory is regret. But what can I say?”
Jeebleh reached out to touch Bile, pat his knee.
“If only he had left when he should have, and taken his wife and daughter with him,” Bile said, “things might have been different for all of us. Now sorrow permeates our air, pricks it, and we hurt. Everyone hurts. And there’s no hurt like that of an innocent man wrongly accused of a crime he hasn’t committed, no hurt like that of a wife spurned, a love not reciprocated, a matrimonial bed abandoned, children turned into battlefields.”
Bile held his head between his trembling hands, and Jeebleh was not sure if he heard a faint sobbing. He could hear his friend’s breathing, soft like the patter of a baby’s footsteps. A big hush, then Bile lifted his head. His cheeks were moist. “It was a real shame!” he said.
“What was?”
“That Shanta accused Faahiye so unfairly.”
“Of what? What did she accuse him of?”
“A crying shame!”
“This is why he left?”
But Bile wouldn’t go into more detail, he wouldn’t answer the question. His head shaking, he would only say, “I believe Faahiye is innocent, a man wrongly accused!”
Jeebleh could think of nothing to respond.
“Let’s blame it on the civil war,” Bile said remorsefully. “Let’s blame it on our sick minds, on the tantrums that belong in our heads. Let’s blame it on the endemic violence, the cruelty that’s been let loose on the weak. Let’s blame it on our damaged sense of self.”
“But what did she accuse him of?”
Still Bile wouldn’t say, and he left the room.
16
“HAVE WE GRIEVED ENOUGH?” JEEBLEH ASKED.
“I doubt that we have,” Bile replied.
“Do we know how to grieve? And if we don’t, why not?”
“I don’t know if it is possible to have a good, clean grief when people have no idea how big a loss they have suffered, and when each individual continues denying his or her own part in the collapse.”
“Aren’t many Somalis mourning?”
“We mistake a personal hurt for a communal hurt,” Bile insisted. “I find this misleading, I find it highly unproductive.”
Jeebleh recalled Bile’s early loss of his own father, allegedly at Caloosha’s hands. Seamus had lost his brother, a sister, and his father to sectarian violence in Ireland. Does a child mourn a loss in the same way an adult does? Is there a time limit, a cutoff point after which grieving becomes ineffective?
“How have you coped?” Jeebleh asked.
“I’ve kept myself infernally busy, and I attend to other people’s needs, not mine. I haven’t had the time or the strength to grieve or to deal squarely with the ruin that is all around. Instead I wallow in my sorrows often enough, and feel a more profound despair when I think I might have achieved something more substantial if I had intervened politically, and tried to make peace between the warring sides.”
“Why haven’t you tried to do that?”
“I hadn’t realized until seeing you that I jumped in at the deep end on the day I gained my freedom and decided to stay, and when I chose to set up a refuge, look out for Raasta, be close to Shanta, who is forever needy, and not enter what passes for politics hereabouts.”
“Is there anybody for you to talk to?”
“It’s too late for me to search out interlocutors worth taking seriously and trusting, too late for me to get involved in peacemaking now.”
“Why is that?”
“I would be like an ant that got distracted and went out of the line and is now trying to find its way back into the ranks after a storm has disorganized the line.”
Bile’s worries were posted on his forehead, visible signs of what weighed on his mind. Jeebleh’s own restless thinking led him to his preoccupations. Unlike Bile, who had stayed away from “what passes for politics hereabouts,” he had taken the plunge into the chaotic energy of the place. Now, as a consequence, he was getting lost in the claims and counterclaims of clan politics.
A cat entered the room as though it had more rights to be there than Bile, the resident of the apartment, or his guest. To judge from the way Bile stared at the creature, they were strangers to each other; Jeebleh sensed an unspoken hostility. The cat looked at Jeebleh, then at Bile, then blinked at them both, and made itself comfortable as only cats can in a place where they do not belong. It took its feline time, stretching, yawning, looking at them again. It looked at Jeebleh and smiled, then at Bile without smiling, and caressed its whiskers, Jeebleh thought, in the brooding manner of a man pretending to be thinking.
“Have you met StrongmanSouth?” Jeebleh asked.
“I’ve never met him, and I have no desire to shake the hand of a murderer,” Bile said. “Nor would I want anyone to misunderstand the purpose of my visit, if I were to visit him, and give it a clannish spin, considering that we belong to the same bloodline, he and I. I’ve chosen to take my distance from him, not least because I want everyone to know that I do not approve of his murderous policies, precisely because The Refuge is in the territory under his nominal control.”
“Have you considered asking him to give a hand in recovering Raasta and her companion? After all, the abduction took place in the territory under his nominal control.”
“To what end?”
“You don’t think he will help?”
“I am doubtful that he will.”
“But do you think he knows of the abduction? Might he even be behind it? Or do you feel that he won’t help you in any way, knowing that you are a man of peace and he is not?”
If one’s life was made up of a million moments of truth, Jeebleh thought, his sending off the clan elders and his subsequent intervention on behalf of the Alsatian were among his momenti della verità, actions that were undeniably significant, leading, as they did, to a sea change in him. It wouldn’t do to dwell on these grave moments of truth.