In an effort to ease the tension and hardness in Bella, Marcella takes the young woman’s feet in her hands and gently massages them until she feels a kind of calmness taking hold both in her own as well as Bella’s body. Then she blurts out, “Where is Aar’s corpse?”
When Bella does not answer, Marcella persists. “Any idea when and where he will be interred?”
Marcella has always had this tendency to say the unspeakable in public, to ask the unanswerable in private. And before Bella can think what to say, the old woman says, “Will you have time to get there before his burial? I wouldn’t go to that dreadful country if I were you — but I can understand if you choose to do so. But I suppose, knowing them, they will not wait for your arrival.”
Marcella’s questions remind Bella how little even educated Europeans know about Islam, let alone about Somalis and their culture. “He’ll have been buried before dark the same day he died,” she says.
“Already buried — but where, when? Before dark?” Mercifully, Marcella stops herself before she blunders in deeper, and she stares at Bella in confusion. It is obvious that Marcella is upset with herself for asking inappropriate questions at such an inopportune time, but Bella waits to be certain Marcella is done before she says, “Aar was buried the same day he died.”
“What a way to go!” This time not even Bella’s expression of palpable distress is enough to keep Marcella from continuing in this vein. “What a way to end the noble life of a man who served everyone with honor, untainted integrity, and purpose.”
At last, Bella, wincing, takes her first sip of the latte.
“Has anyone been in touch with you officially?”
Bella looks at the blinking answering machine, and Marcella goes to it and presses the button to play back the messages. A woman speaking in perfect English with a Nordic-sounding voice has made several attempts to leave a message. In the most recent, she scarcely gets past Bella’s name before she bursts into tears and hangs up; the second time, she says, “Gunilla here,” and then, “There’s been terrible, terrible news from Mogadiscio—” She breaks off, then attempts to continue, stuttering, stopping, and weeping copiously before she again hangs up. On the third try, she says her piece, as if she were reading from a script: “Aar lost his life in a terrorist suicide bombing. The Somali authorities have ordered that his corpse and the others will all be interred in a mass grave in Mogadiscio.”
Bella utters an Irish curse, wishing the killers hell and worse in the spirit of all the saints of every faith anywhere. This message is followed by several earlier messages from Aar, who sounded desperate to speak with his sister. At the sound of them, Bella breaks down again. Marcella shushes her, tapping her cheeks and then holding her face in her gentle hands until the weeping ends. And for the first time, Marcella allows herself to wonder to whom the responsibility of informing Aar’s children and Valerie will fall.
Aloud she says, “Would you like me to call the children or had you rather do it yourself?”
Of course, Bella insists on being the one to tell her nephew and niece about their father’s death. As for Valerie, Bella will start by calling her mother, who will know how to locate her if anyone can.
Bella remembers that the Hausa way of informing a relation living far away about the loss of a parent, a sibling, or another intimate is to send an emissary to deliver the news in person. The emissary dispatched on such a delicate mission does not share the sad news, however, until they are in close proximity to a place where a wide community of friends and relatives are on hand to provide support. A pity, Bella thinks, that whoever it was who called and left the news of Aar’s death on the answering machine — or whoever turned it into international headline news — did not take a leaf from the Hausa book of etiquette.
Actually, Bella is not certain from whom she learned about this custom. Perhaps it was Marcella, come to think of it. As a former senior obstetrician at a Vatican-run hospital in one of Rome’s poor neighborhoods, she had become deeply familiar with corpses and what becomes of them, depending on the faith of the dead and their relatives. She and Bella had often discussed the Irish and their wakes, the Yoruba and their drawn-out rituals, the Muslims, the Jews, the Zoroastrians, the Hindus, and the Catholics, each in their own way confronting the moment of death with a rationale that is unique to their culture and belief systems. But Bella suspects that it was not Marcella but her Malian lover who told her of the Hausa’s sensitive handling of news of bereavement. And as much as she wishes she could spare Dahaba and Salif the pain of receiving the news in the same boorish way it came to her, she is aware that this is impossible in the age of the Internet and round-the-clock news channels that jabber on and on, forever upsetting one.
But before she can telephone her nephew and niece, she needs to stop Marcella from yammering away. She asks the old lady to go to her own apartment and call the airlines to buy Bella a business-class ticket to Nairobi on the next flight available. “Use my credit card,” she says, offering it.
“Business class at short notice?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“It will be prohibitively expensive.”
Bella says, “This is a once-in-a-lifetime purchase. Or at least I hope so.”
With Marcella gone at last, Bella picks up the telephone to dial her nephew. It has barely begun to ring when her weeping and wailing starts anew. This is no good, she thinks, as the phone rings and rings. She hangs up without waiting for voice mail to kick in. To fortify her resolve, she pours herself a strong drink, which she downs in a single gulp. Thus hardened, she calls Wendy, Valerie’s mother. The two women are fond of each other. What is more, Wendy got on very well with Aar and looked upon him with great approval, not only because she saw how devoted a father he was, but also because he gave her as much access to her grandchildren as she wished. For their part, Dahaba and Salif loved their grandmother and looked forward to spending a month a year with her in Leicester when the schools in Kenya closed for the summer.
As soon as she has recognized Bella’s voice, Wendy lets out a long whimper and then stammers weepily, “I’ve been in a state since hearing of it. You know, I loved Aar more than I’ve cared for my own daughter.”
“Where is she?” asks Bella. “Any idea?”
“She is currently in Uganda, with that woman.”
Bella knows that there is no love lost between Wendy and Padmini, whom she blames for Valerie’s decision to walk out on her marriage. But when Wendy offers to call and break the news of Aar’s death to her daughter, Bella is all too glad to accept the offer.
They talk some more, and when Wendy speaks of being overwhelmed by the barbarity of the killings, Bella silently remembers something Hurdo once said after their country collapsed into anarchy and they fled Mogadiscio: “Death in Somalia seldom bothers to announce its arrival. In fact, death calls with the arrogance of a guest confident of receiving a warm welcome at any time, no questions asked.”
The church bells in Trastevere chime, as if in tribute to Aar. Bella pictures death riding a tide of undulant waves of unheralded emotion — and she weeps again, unable to stop shaking, the hour as dark as a cave.
“And what do they say down in Somalia?” Wendy is asking.
Bella, despite herself, recounts some of the gorier details from one of the Somali websites, which reported without giving any evidence that one of the terrorists who entered the UN building after the suicide bombing held a knife to Aar’s throat and then stood by, waiting and watching, until his blood drained like a goat being made halal.