“Was there any way someone could’ve prevented it?”
“It all happened so fast,” Dajaal said, “we couldn’t have done anything, even if we had wanted to. We were aware of the mob gathering, chanting the usual anti-American slogans. Then, before you could say, ‘Please, let’s not do that,’ the youths, mostly urchins and riffraff, were rampaging, my grandson Qasiir among them. No one was in control. Many of us were too exhausted from the nightlong fighting and couldn’t be bothered. You must remember, there were so many deaths on our side, over a thousand by our reckoning. Many of us went straight from the fighting to the burial grounds. We were all out on a limb for all of thirteen hours or so, fighting to keep death at bay, and I doubt if we could’ve raised our voices against what the youths were doing. I can assure you that we were shocked. Were you not shocked?”
Jeebleh remembered seeing the scene on TV. He had thought of beasts of prey roaming the streets of the city and the countryside, beasts inhabiting the minds of the youths. But when answering Dajaal’s question, he moderated his reaction. “I thought of life-in-death, if that makes sense to you.”
“The mob had hardly dispersed,” Dajaal continued, “and we heard on our short-wave radio that the Americans were leaving, body bags and all. Some of us would’ve liked to talk things through. I’m sorry that wasn’t to be.”
“StrongmanSouth wouldn’t have wanted to talk?”
“Of course he wouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because he was a spent force until the AIC gave him a new lease on life by making him ‘Wanted’ and placing a reward worth thousands of dollars on his head,” Dajaal said. “Thanks, but no, thanks, to the AIC!”
Jeebleh remembered the discussion of the previous night, and he asked Dajaal to tell him who, in his opinion, had fought whom. “Americans versus Somalis?”
Dajaal explained that the Somalis, fragmented in their sectarian loyalties, did not see the battle as having been fought between “Somalis” and “Americans.” “The fighting was between the clansmen supporting StrongmanSouth, and the AIC,” he said. “Truth was one of the first casualties of the war.”
“Did you see yourself as a man provoked into deadly action? What finally made you decide to dig up your gun? Were you in a rage?”
“Anger had nothing to do with it,” Dajaal replied, “but justice did.”
“Were you afraid?”
“I was prone to fear, like the Marines, and alone in my fear too. But I wasn’t in a strange country, I knew why I was doing what I was doing, and I knew where I was, even in the dark! That was the difference between our situation and that of the young Americans.”
They came across a zinc wall on which someone had scrawled “Dal-dalo maidkaada, tagna!” Jeebleh rendered this to himself as “Take away your corpses and leave our country!” He knew where the line came from. His memory galloping, he recited lines from a poem composed at the turn of the twentieth century by Somalia’s greatest poet, Sayyid Mohammed Abdulle Hassan.
“I have no cultivated fields, or silver
Or gold for you to take!
The Country is bush.
If you want wood and stone,
You can get them in plenty,
There are also many termite hills.
All you can get from me is War.
If you want peace, go away from my Country.”
Then a silence, which neither was prepared to break, came between them, like a referee stopping a fight. And into the silence walked a rabble of armed youths, like extras in a film about Mexican bandidos. As though on cue, one youth came forward. He was very short, stocky, and showily dressed as an outlaw — boots, bandanna, and Stetson hat. You could see that he was the kind who would waste you without blinking an eyelid. Jeebleh was expecting to hear a crescendo of gunshots, and death calling, when his worried gaze settled on Dajaal’s nonchalant expression. The youth shouted, “Nothing to worry about, Grandpa. We’re just having some fun, me and my friends!”
“Come and I’ll introduce you to my visiting friend, then,” Dajaal told the youth. He turned to Jeebleh and said sotto voce, “He’s my grandson, whom everyone calls Qasiir. A rascal, really. He can tell you how he partook of the fighting on the day his sister was hurt. He has been involved in a lot of tomfoolery too.”
Qasiir strode as though on a movie set, cameras rolling to catch every one of his antics. The combination of boots and Stetson made him appear taller; he put on a tough expression, thumbs stuck deep into his ammunition belt, teeth biting down on a chewing-stick the size of a cigarillo. Jeebleh imagined a harmonica being played nearby, and Clint Eastwood making a cameo appearance. For all his posturing, he struck Jeebleh as a youth who had come through muck, in which he wallowed; death, which he courted without fear; and humiliation, which he fought hard to subdue in his own way.
His voice firm, on edge, and low, Dajaal told Qasiir that he was fed up to the back teeth with his tomfoolery. “Send your sidekicks away, and follow us to your mother’s house, pronto!”
But first Dajaal made a detour to the spot where the helicopter had fallen that October afternoon in 1993. The place looked like any other in a dusty city where furious wars raged. Here, however, there were pieces of metal, once part of a war machine — elegant, noisily powerful, and threatening when up in the air, but unimaginably ugly when fallen and dismantled. A group of rowdy children kicking up a storm of dust abruptly suspended their ball game at Dajaal’s bidding, and they gathered close to him and Jeebleh. The children were curious about Jeebleh; they understood he was a visitor to the city. They guessed that he, like a number of other strangers before him, was calling on the disturbed girl and her mother who lived nearby, casualties of a battle that didn’t concern them.
Qasiir joined them now, and for Jeebleh’s benefit pointed out the battle lines: to the right, where the fighters supporting StrongmanSouth had been, and to the left, where the Americans had been. In a wall improvised from sheets of zinc, they could see evidence of liberal hits from all sides, by bullets of all sizes.
More children joined the group, and a handful of adults came out of their shacks. Dajaal ushered Jeebleh away from the curious onlookers, and led the way to the compound where Qasiir’s brain-damaged sister and her mother awaited them. Just as they reached the gate, a cat came out from underneath, flattening against the ground to avoid being cut by protruding nails.
It dawned on Jeebleh that he was acting out of character: there was nothing to gain from a visit to the little girl and her mother. No doubt, they had suffered as casualties of a senseless battle, and had survived huge personal ordeals. But he didn’t wish to cut the figure of the war tourist, making a voyeuristic study of a sordid aspect of a sad war that shouldn’t have taken place at all. Everything seemed more ominous as they moved into the compound, Dajaal holding back as tradition demanded, stopping outside and announcing “Hoodi!” and awaiting his daughter-in-law’s welcoming “Hodeen!” before going any further. Qasiir entered the squat building without ceremony. A moment later, music came at them from inside, James Brown screeching, hooting, and grunting to the timbre of his soul.