His mobile phone rang, and it was Seamus saying that Jeebleh should come to the cemetery at once, to approve the design and the construction of an enclosure with a patch of green, a kind of garden. They wanted him to see what they had done. To the question of how he would get there, Seamus responded, without the slightest hesitation, that he would send Qasiir and his friends along in a battlewagon, and they would escort him. Jeebleh couldn’t help noting sadly what their world was coming to: He and Seamus were rubbing shoulders with armed youths and accepting lifts in battlewagons! He was about to share his worries aloud, when Seamus asked how Bile was doing. Jeebleh replied that their friend was in his darkened room, in bed, lost to the world, and contemplating the ceiling.
“Alone?”
“Raasta and Makka are with him.”
“What bothers me,” Jeebleh added after a pause, “is that our friend is soreheaded, and as quiet as a physician retrieving a bullet from a patient’s skull. And he’s his own patient.”
The two agreed that a man in Bile’s state of mind couldn’t be left alone. Whereupon Seamus suggested that Qasiir take a detour on his way to the apartment and escort Shanta there.
AT THE CEMETERY, SEAMUS, THE MASON, AND TWO ASSISTANTS WERE AT work, mixing sand and cement, and laying a rudimentary foundation for the structure. Qasiir and his posse were enjoying the sweet shade of the mango tree, the battlewagon parked nearby. They spread a mat where they could sit, and chewed their qaat. Seamus wore a hat that from a distance resembled a horse’s oat bag but on close inspection proved to be a cloth cap, like what a Yoruba farmer might wear working in his fields. He and Jeebleh chatted while the mason and his assistants pegged away, chanting a work song and moving quickly and deliberately.
Jeebleh felt humbled at the thought of being in a position, at last, to mark his mother’s memory with a white stone. And it was thanks to Seamus, the pith and the pillar of their friendship. “What was it you needed help with, Seamus?” he asked.
“For starters, I’d like you to perform the office of placing the marble headstone in the ground yourself, with your own hands. Then I’d like to know if you approve of our building a small cupola into the structure.”
“A cupola?”
“A cupola supported by fake marble columns.”
“Too ostentatious,” Jeebleh said.
“Neither would your mother approve, you think?”
“Nor would orthodox Islam!”
Jeebleh was surprised that Seamus was so conversant with erecting a monument over a Muslim grave, and able to suggest an alternative: a domed tomb that wasn’t in the least ostentatious. Jeebleh now performed the office of putting in the headstone so that it faced the Sacred Mosque in the Holy City of Mecca.
Seamus appeared to be in a dither, and Jeebleh asked him what was the matter.
Seamus explained, “One, the builder and I couldn’t agree as to the exact direction the headstone should face, even though we were agreed that it should face Mecca. Two, I wanted him to accommodate within the structure both a recess for an oil lamp to be lit for seven days, beginning tomorrow, and a cavity in the top of the headstone, in which we might plant flowers. But he wouldn’t hear of either, because he has never seen a recess or a cavity built into a headstone except in the tomb of a saint.”
“So he says my mother isn’t a saint?”
“Not in so many words, but yes.”
In an uneasy silence, Jeebleh looked from Seamus to the mason, who was an ordinary kind of guy, and clearly had an unusual way of assigning sainthood. But Jeebleh had no problem with that. Touched, he turned to Seamus, saying, “You’re the real McCoy, aren’t you?”
“Not genuine enough, when it came to convincing a builder what is or isn’t permitted in Islam, the religion into which he was born, but of which he has little understanding, less than I do. What’s more, I rubbed him the wrong way when I told him that although I was born Irish and into the Christian faith, I was agnostic. We communicate only in pidgin Italian, which he could barely use to order a meal at an eatery in Turin.”
“I wonder if he knows about Geronimo Verroneo.”
“Remind me who he was.”
“The Venetian who some say designed the Taj Mahal.”
“But your mother is more worthy than the empress in whose memory it was built,” Seamus insisted.
Jeebleh, speaking Somali, instructed the mason to create a recess and a cavity in the headstone, as indicated in Seamus’s design. Perhaps it was not the language, but the emotion in his voice, or the simple fact that Jeebleh was the son of the deceased, but the man acquiesced and set to work. Moving to further heights of enthrallment, Jeebleh took Seamus in his arms in a kissand-tell-all embrace. The mason and his assistants looked at them aghast. Qasiir and his boys first booed, then applauded Jeebleh’s action.
Jeebleh released his friend and held him at a distance. “If you’re not the most priceless thing that has happened to me,” he said, “then I’m done for.”
Standing opposite Jeebleh in the brightness of noon, and at that moment looking like a clown without his makeup, Seamus said, “Allow me and my colleagues to get on with the business that’s brought us here, please!”
Jeebleh looked away, amused, and his eyes clapped on three cars being driven slowly in procession. One of the vehicles was the kind that dignitaries are chauffeured in, the others were ordinary sedans. He found himself reciting one of his favorite sentences from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and revising it in his head to make it serve his particular purposes. “I might just as well say that ‘I see what I hate’ is the same thing as ‘I hate what I see’!” he told Seamus.
Seamus imagined becoming as many-eyed as a peacock with designs on the object of his elusive desire, when he looked and saw what he too thought he hated — Caloosha. Never mind that he was dead or that this would be the last Seamus would see of him: his funeral cortege.
Now a jalopy came running ahead of the tail of dust following it. Qasiir and his friends stirred themselves into a more restless mood at the sight. With a dark mood clouding his forehead, Qasiir approached Jeebleh, prepared to receive his next instructions. But none was forthcoming.
“From the way the driver’s beating that heap,” Seamus said, “pushing it beyond its limits, you’d think he was late for his own funeral.”
“I wouldn’t wish to be early for mine either.” Jeebleh found it necessary to elaborate when Seamus looked at him inquiringly. He paraphrased for him the Somali proverb that the mother of a coward seldom mourns her son’s early death.
Jeebleh spoke in agitated whispers to Qasiir, suggesting that he and part of his posse drive to the site of Caloosha’s grave, and that a second, smaller group, headed by Qasiir’s deputy, remain behind. And what was Qasiir to do? He was to stay as low and as still as a dog tag lying where its owner had fallen. Qasiir went off in the battlewagon, excited like a hound scenting the closeness of its prey.
“Is this really what we want?” Seamus said.
“What do you think I’m doing?”
“Do you want a shoot-out?”
QASIIR CAME BACK SHORTLY, WEARING A NEW PAIR OF MIRRORED SHADES through which you couldn’t see his eyes but he could see yours. Jeebleh was amused at his own reflection in the shades, and concluded that he had changed a lot in the short time spent in the city of his birth. Not that he bothered to consider the nature of the changes, or if they were to be permanent. He tethered his serious side to the job at hand, requesting that Qasiir kindly remove the shades, then asking where he had gotten them.