“She was brought to my clinic,” he offered.
Jeebleh remembered Dajaal’s mentioning that his granddaughter had been blown away in a helicopter’s uprush of air.
“Dajaal came along to the clinic with the girl and her mother.”
“I’ve been meaning to see her,” Jeebleh said. “Perhaps Dajaal can take me to her.”
Shanta was the first to yawn, and the yawning became contagious, everyone agreeing that it was time to turn in. Bile reminded Jeebleh that just to be on the safe side, he would take him to the lab first thing in the morning.
Shanta overheard and worriedly wondered if all was well with Jeebleh.
“Just a checkup,” he reassured her. “I’d also like to go to the barber for a haircut,” he told Bile.
“I’ll ask Dajaal to drive you. And maybe on your way to or from the barber’s you can make a detour and visit his granddaughter and her mother.”
Shanta said, “Good night, then!”
Instead of saying good night, Seamus left Jeebleh with an admonition: “Let no madness hurt you into bearing a gun!”
Not rising to it, Jeebleh said, “Good night!”
“Night-night!”
“Night-night!”
26
“WHICH DO YOU PREFER, WALKING OR TAKING THE CAR?” DAJAAL ASKED, when he and Jeebleh, back from the lab, met the following morning.
“Are the two places far apart?” Jeebleh paused, feeling awkward, after taking a step. He put on the sarong he had brought from New York, and borrowed a conical cap and a shawl from Bile, wanting to look like a local when he went to the barber’s, and to visit Dajaal’s granddaughter and her mother.
Dajaal replied, “At most, it’s half an hour’s walk from my daughter-in-law’s to the barbershop. I’ve arranged for Qasiir to meet us there.”
Jeebleh had had a slight fever during the night and had been awake almost until dawn, tossing and turning, at times deciding to pack his bags and leave, then changing his mind and persuading himself to stay the course. Now his swollen glands were causing him discomfort, and several of his joints were burning from pain. Bile wouldn’t commit himself to a diagnosis until he had heard from the lab technician, who had promised to get back to them before the end of the day, tomorrow at the latest. If anything, Bile said, Jeebleh was lucky that he had a constitution as strong as a horse’s; Bile felt he was in no danger of imminent collapse.
“Let’s walk,” Jeebleh said.
“Are you sure?”
“Walking will do me good.”
The memory of what he had gone through hit him afresh with agony and anger. He felt an upsurge of masochism within, like a river rising in the Sahara. He told himself to withstand the pain with unprecedented stoicism, but not to forget what had been done to him, so that he might link yesterday’s agony and anger to those of yesteryear, and to what had happened to him as a child.
“Let’s walk and talk!” he said.
DAJAAL LED THE WAY AND JEEBLEH WALKED ALONGSIDE, CLUTCHING THE candies he had brought for Dajaal’s granddaughter. Death was no longer in every shadow cast by every wall. When he first arrived, he feared being ambushed by an unexpected death, and worried that he might die anonymously, killed by someone who did not know him and had no idea why he was administering death to him. Since then, he had wised up, coming around to the view that in the Mogadiscio of these days, death was seldom anonymous: it had a face and a name, and you were more likely to be killed by someone supposedly close to you or related to you. It was becoming rarer for total strangers to kill one another for no reason. Gone were the days of random killings. Lately, murderers were more calculating, factoring in their possible political and financial gains before killing you. Was it Osip Mandelstam who had said that only your own kind would kill you? To elude death of that sort, Jeebleh had fled south, where he was supposed to be an other, and where — here was the irony — he felt safer.
Dajaal interrupted his thoughts. “Are you happy in America?”
“America is home to me, but I doubt that I would use the word ‘happy’ to describe my state of mind there,” Jeebleh said tentatively. “I’m comfortable in America. I love my wife and daughters. I love them in New York, where we live. I can’t help comparing your question with one that I asked myself when I got here: Do I love Somalia? I found it difficult to answer.”
“Do you?”
“Of course I love Somalia.”
“What about as a Somali in America?”
“When I think about America from the perspective of a Somali, and reflect on what’s occurred following the U.S. intervention, then I feel I’m in a bind.”
Dajaal took a tighter grip on the ball he kept squeezing to help the blood in his hand circulate. You could see that he too was turning a thought in his head, stirring it, agitating it.
“Something happened that I hadn’t reckoned on,” Jeebleh said. “I discovered that I was not saddened by the deaths on either side as much as I was saddened by the ruthlessness displayed by the young fighters.” He watched the flight of an eagle briefly before turning to Dajaal to ask, “What did you think of the Marines and the Rangers as fighters?”
“I couldn’t fault the junior officers.”
“What about the commanding officers?”
Dajaal took an even firmer grip on the rubber ball, his knuckles protruding more prominently and appeared a shade paler than their natural color.
“My heart went out to the young Marines and Rangers,” Dajaal said, “even though on the night of the third of October, when I confronted them — man to man — I gave each of them as much of a piece of hell as I could. But during the lull in the fighting, I felt as though each of them was alone in his fear, like a child left in the pitch-darkness of a strange room by parents who were enjoying themselves elsewhere. I imagined them wondering what they were doing in Africa, away from their loved ones, and asking themselves why some skinny Somalis in sarongs were taking potshots at them. I imagined them questioning in their own minds the explanations put out by military spokesmen at Pentagon briefings. But you want to know what I thought of the commanding officers. From the majors upward, including the AIC?”
“Tell me.”
“I hoped to God they would be court-martialed, and wished them hell and much worse.” Dajaal squeezed the ball as though he might eventually succeed in getting blood out of it. “The senior officers were too ignorant to learn, too arrogant. If only they had had enough humility to put themselves in their subordinates’ shoes, I kept thinking. Their behavior was loony. But the young Marines and Rangers redeemed themselves with their fighting. They held up well, fought fiercely, and gave back as good as they got. As fighters, there was a major flaw in their character, however. They thought less of us, and that was ultimately the cause of their downfall. You should never think less of your opponent — we were taught this at military school. If you respect your enemy, you can be easier on yourself later, especially if you lose the fight, and it is of high moral value when you win.”
“They belittled StrongmanSouth’s militia?”
“They belittled all of us, fighters or no fighters,” Dajaal corrected him. “StrongmanSouth didn’t fight. I was there, and he didn’t fight. That was to prove the Americans’ undoing, the fact that they belittled the fighters.”
“You’re saying that pride can cause one’s ruin?”
“A lot of terrible things were done that night and the following morning by both groups, ours and theirs,” Dajaal said, “all in the service of the raging insanity. We had hardly wised up to what was being done on our side when we witnessed the worst imaginable horror in the shameful shape of youths dragging a dead American down the city’s dusty roads. But then I thought, A mob is a mob, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Mobs run riot, they are good at that: if they go mad, they do it everywhere, even in America.”