Jiijo sits up on the couch, in evident discomfort, her features pinched, her legs spread awkwardly, her skin showing signs of neglect, as dry as harmattan, flaky. It is possible that Jiijo’s physical distress with her pregnancy began in her mind before it made its presence felt in the rest of her body.
Cambara asks, “Will you tell me what’s ailing you so that I know what I need to do?”
“He beat me last night,” says Jiijo weakly.
Cambara wagers her intuition that she can tell the man who beat her up. She remembers coming in on him lying prone and snoring, surrounded with half a dozen pillows and cushions, a man in a world separate from the others, as they had neither pillows nor cushions. Disgusted, she is tempted to give in to the temptation to walk into the bedroom, where she will find him and his qaat-chewing mates sleeping off an all-night session, and maul him, if for no other reason than to remember how she dealt with Wardi. Cambara hesitates to put to Jiijo the questions that are presenting themselves to her, as a trespass of her privacy. She wants to know what the man is to Jiijo, what the nature of their relationship is before electing her course of action. She has to take care not to add further humiliation to the infringement already meted out to Jiijo, lest she should seize up and refuse to talk altogether. In a moment, however, Cambara is studying Jiijo’s situation from a perspective in which the two of them no longer dwell in distinctly autonomous spheres, marked off by their known differences in terms of class, provenance, and experience or by an invisible boundary of mistrust. She sees in this context that, as women, they share the communality of male violence, both having suffered in their different ways at the hands of their partners.
“Where is he?”
“He isn’t here.”
“What about his men?”
“They’ve all gone.”
“Where?”
“They are all taking part in a skirmish over the control of a bridgehead near the town of Jowhar with access to Mogadiscio,” Jiijo explains, drying her cheeks, now that she is no longer weeping.
“When do you expect them to be back?”
“No idea.”
Cambara’s quick thinking kicks in.
“Tell you what we will do.”
Fear inserts itself into Jiijo’s eyes and her voice too. She asks, “What do you want us to do?”
Cambara finds Jiijo’s use of an inclusive “us” a little unsettling at first, then, after giving it some thought, becomes excited to the extent that she makes a slipshod patter. She says, “We’ll fix you something to eat.”
“I don’t know if I can eat.”
“In the meantime go and have a shower,” Cambara says, convinced that she would persuade her to eat something. “We’ll talk when you’re done.”
Jiijo obliges.
As paean to her attentiveness, Cambara calls on Jiijo every instant she is able to, now holding her hands away from herself, given that she is busy chopping onions or garlic, now washing them and touching the back of her hand to her forehead. On one occasion, the fever in Jiijo’s gaze floats in the delirium of her high temperature, the pupils of her frenziedly restless look filmed with anxiety, her lips hardening as if encrusted with dried mud, her saliva flowing, much of her tongue out and motionless, like an alligator sunning.
Between cooking and attending to Jiijo’s needs, Cambara avails herself of the opportunity to study the lay of the place. She surveys the condition the property is in, this being the first time she has had the run of it, free to go where she pleases. Overall, the house is in terrible disrepair, its shabbiness the consequence not only of the coarse indifference of its occupants, who before moving into it may never have set foot in a house similar to it, but also of having been vandalized, some of the rooms severely so. However, she is delighted with the immaculate state the hall, used for receptions and parties, is in. Otherwise, the house will require very detailed ministration, the kind of purposeful care an artwork in a bad state of repair requires.
The meal ready and her surveying done, Cambara brings two platefuls of food, one for her, the other for Jiijo. “Feed a fever,” she says, encouraging her to eat, “and you will be on your feet in no time.”
Jiijo tucks into her brunch but not before feasting her eyes, delighting in the attention that Cambara has so far lavished on her. When they have eaten and she has cleared the plates, Cambara returns and says to Jiijo, “Let’s hear your story.”
“Where to begin?” Jiijo says.
As she prepares to listen, Cambara assumes that Jiijo has the baptism blood of sacrifice running in her arteries. She remarks too that there is a big difference in her bearing today; the poor woman appears more broken than before, no longer a capable enough woman. When they first met, Jiijo struck her as a strong and purposefully alive woman, behaving in a manner befitting a woman of noble upbringing.
Her voice grave, she says, “I do not know who you are or why I am pouring out my heart to you. You could say that misfortune is my second name. If I am holding back nothing, it is because I know that nothing can hurt me more than I hurt already.”
Then she pauses for a long while and, waiting for the story to develop in her head before she shares it with Cambara, her calloused right hand taking a good grip of her own thigh, which, like the rest of her body, appears lifelessly dry because of its exposure to the hostile elements. Cambara tells herself to remember to select a moisturizing cream from her own supply, certain that it will bring the shine of life back to Jiijo’s skin. Jiijo massages her thigh up and down to ease the ache in her bones and help relieve her mental anguish at the same time.
“I am the daughter of a tailor,” Jiijo introduces herself. “My father had a small tailoring business together with two of his younger brothers. We were okay, we had enough, there was always food on our tables, and we were happy with our lot. To make more money, my father ran a key-cutting service on the side, one of two such outfits in our part of the city. Because he and I were very close, I spent a lot of time with him in the tailoring business — something my uncles did not approve of — or helped him cut keys. From an early age, I felt wiser than my peers, many of whom I found to be shortsighted or immature. My father did not want to marry me off to one of my cousins, as we Xamaris tend to do, but allowed me to stay on in school. You could say that I am the only one among my cousins who has some kind of education. I was preparing to take my high school finals and then go to university when I became pregnant out of wedlock. There was no alternative but to marry, not the father of my baby but a cousin several times removed, who came from the richer side of my extended family. Then the collapse occurred.”
Then silence, as if resisting the storm of fury in the form of the rage she feels inside of herself. The muscles of her face tighten, as though the mere thought of what happened causes her tremendous pain. Cambara, alert to her surroundings, lights upon the fact that Jiijo’s plate, almost greedily cleaned up, is on the verge of falling off the table. She catches it in time and places it on the floor close to her feet.
Jiijo continues, “I have known gang rape as much as you can get to know someone on a first-name basis. Since the collapse, I have been a kept woman, living in a small room in a big house for much of the past few years, a small room with the lights off, which made me as frightened as a blind kitten. I suffered the daily humiliation of not knowing which of the many youths would come to the room and take me. It puzzles me that I did not go out of my mind totally or that I held on to the skirt of life the way a scared kitten clutches its mother’s flank. My days of misery lasted until Gudcur came to claim me as his. As much as it is hard to accept it now, I admit to having seen him as my protector arriving on the scene to free me from further fear. Once it became apparent to everyone that I was his woman, I settled on relaxing into my condition, accepting it. My usual good-natured manner emerged when he showed how gentle he could be when he chose to.”