Knots Read Free Page B

telephone numbers of anyone except Zaak and no personal contacts. Perhaps it is too late to think of ruing her impromptu decision to come. Granted, she mulled over the visit for a long period. No matter, she won’t engage Zaak in serious talk until she has been here for a while.
    She has no idea what Zaak will think of it, but she cannot help imagining him being more sarcastic than her mother, who reacted with unprecedented bafflement when Cambara informed her of her imminent trip to the country. Asked why, Cambara, in a straight approach to the task informed by a touch of defiance, told her that she meant to reclaim the family property, wrest it from the hands of the warlord. Arda instantly fumed with fury, describing her daughter’s plan as a harebrained ruse. “This is plain insane,” Arda had observed. Then the two strong-headed women battled it out, Cambara pointing out that those warlords are cowards and fools and that it won’t be difficult to be more clever than they so as to boot them out of the family property.
    â€œThis is downright suicidal,” Arda reiterated.
    After arguing for days and nights, Arda consented to Cambara’s “ill-advised scheme” with a caveat: that they involve Raxma, who had wonderful contacts in Mogadiscio, and, while waiting for things to be put in motion, that Cambara should either wait in Toronto or go ahead and stay with Zaak. Being a schemer with no equal anywhere, Arda set to work clandestinely on setting up a safety net as protective of her daughter as it was capable of keeping her abreast of every one of the girl’s madcap schemes. Only then did Arda agree to “give her blessing for whatever it is worth for a plan as flawed as a suicide note.”
    A battlewagon hurtling down the dirt road and coming straight at them startles Zaak, who grabs her right arm and pushes her off the footpath into the low shrubs. The vehicle is carrying a motley group of youths armed to their qaat -ruined teeth. Cambara picks herself up, dusts her caftan, and has barely sufficient time to stare at the backs of their heads before the battlewagon vanishes in the swirl of sand it has helped to raise.
    â€œAre you okay? You are not hurt?” Zaak asks.
    Cambara has already moved on. She asks, “Do the warlords themselves know why they continue the fighting?”
    â€œI don’t follow you,” Zaak says.
    â€œAre they and their clansmen economically better off than they were when the civil war erupted? And is their position more secure? Why don’t they stop destroying what they’ve illicitly gained?”
    Zaak takes his time before answering the questions, but when he does, he adjusts the tone of his voice to that of someone quoting from someone else.
    He says, “The warlords make as much sense as the idea of bald men fighting over the ownership of combs, knowing that they have no more use for it.”
    â€œWhat manner of men are they, the warlords?”
    â€œThe scum of the earth.”
    Hot with readiness to do battle with the notion of “dirt” in civil war parlance, Cambara relives with a sense of repulsion the memory of Zaak’s creative mess and downright filth in his living conditions. She is appalled to register how his tolerance level has grown since they shared a place, how he abides toilet floors wet with God-knows-what, bathtubs black as though smeared with the soot from the sweepings of a chimney, a kitchen crawling with cockroaches and other bugs, bed-sheets brown with repeated use. Maybe the civil war has something to do with Zaak’s lowering the measure of his endurance. Maybe she hasn’t the right to claim to have known him intimately when she was assisting him in his application to gain his landed-immigrant status in Canada. Even when he first got there, Zaak had unclean ways, above all the uncouth habit of wetting the toilet seat, which made flat-sharing a daily embarrassment. And rather than