Talking about her miserable past and touching on the terrible things that had befallen her seem to provide Jiijo with a provisional easing of her agonies. She manages to wear the grave aspect of a woman hurt at the same as she displays the strength of her personhood.
Her expression crestfallen, Jiijo goes on, “There are odd moments of satisfaction in my situation when you consider it. Being illiterate, the men come to me to assist them in managing their lives in a way that is strangely gratifying. I also read and write their letters, and cook all the meals. Until a year or two ago, when some of the schools reopened, I used to teach Gudcur’s children.”
Jiijo is something of a raconteur. As she speaks, she attends, bizarrely, to removing hair from her half-plucked armpits. Cambara looks upon Jiijo as another actor, raw, untrained. It is the way Jiijo talks, the way she lets go of her words with a baffling ease, telling as she does a tale, her own and the nation’s. No doubt, the woman’s life has been difficult. However, from the way she narrates her story, it is as though Jiijo is laying herself bare to Cambara, in the expansive attitude of one victim to another. Cambara strains her ears, listening for changes in the tone of her voice, miraculously managing to wish away all intimations of fear in the secure belief that no one will hurt Jiijo more than she has been already.
There is order too to Jiijo’s narration of her story. There is also discipline in the choice of words with which she describes the current state of her mood. It occurs to Cambara that Jiijo, her countenance grim, is reveling in the telling of her tale; she is enthralling as she continues to improvise, letting go of a sentence at a time, an idea at a time. Captivated, she watches Jiijo reinvent herself right there and then. Cambara, through a combination of circumstances, senses that she has a glimpse of Jiijo’s strong sense of personhood, striving hard and desisting from showing how startled she is when she hears Jiijo say, “What help is there for our doomed nation?”
Wanting to bring Jiijo back to her story, Cambara responds with a question. “What was it like being married not to the father of your baby but to another man, albeit a cousin, whom your parents chose for you, presumably to preserve the façade of family honor?” she asks.
Jiijo works in total concentration on a corn on the small toe of her right foot, peeling off dead skin and tossing it away. “I could not bring myself to deceive my new husband. Instead, I chose to deceive my family, for I went to a ‘midnight nurse,’ as they say in these parts, and aborted the baby without letting anyone know except a school friend. I took ill, terribly ill. My mother was the first to learn of the reason, and she persuaded my father, without letting him in on our secret, to postpone the marriage until I was well enough. It grieves me that he never got to know what I had done before he died in the second week of the civil war.”
“Tell me about your husband.”
Then Jiijo lunges forward into her speech with the assumed gravitas of what she means to convey.
“He was successful in business, and, strangely, we were happy with each other for a long while, he and I,” she says. “He was a most gentle husband, wonderfully caring of me and all my requirements, granting me all my wishes and a lot more. However, I was unhappy in the marriage, because we were childless. After trying for several years and failing, he sent me off to Europe — no expense spared — to consult doctors, a number of whom I saw. The doctors did many tests, made me undergo numerous configurations, but to no avail. I wanted so much to bear a child, maybe out of regret for having aborted mine, or maybe out of guilt because he was such a nice man and I was a bad woman to whom something terrible would happen one day, I have no idea. I had the urge to take my body through a pregnancy, and I wanted him to share with me the experience, the tribulations and joys of motherhood. I thought this would bring us closer, would delight him and delight me too.”
The story moves Cambara, who, remembering how much joy mothering gave her, appreciates the dilemma.
“I could not decide whether to make a clean breast of the fact that I had undergone an abortion,” Jiijo continues, “but because I was not sure what good that might do, the doctors, who could read my body the way a blind person reads Braille, chose, for their own reasons, not to speak of my abortion to my husband.”
Jiijo has worked herself up into a heightened state of disquiet, one moment speaking with brio, the next falling sorrowfully silent and sullen, and then talking with slothful abandonment, the tone of her voice moist with the unshed tears waiting to be let go.
“When I look back on how Gudcur has treated me, the man who has fathered my children, and I think about my condition of enslavement,” Jiijo says, “I have difficulty reconciling his kindness to me, as his chosen woman, with the cruelty others associate with him. I will not deny having sensed his hard-heartedness. I’ve seen evidence of it when he plays mind games that are crueler than the physical pain the militiamen under his command mete out to their victims: beating, raping, looting, and plundering. And, of course, he beat me up last night. No denying that.”
A mobile phone rings somewhere in the house, most likely in the room opposite where they are. Jiijo sits up, first wrinkling her face into a frown and then falling silent, in self-rebuke. The phone’s ringing a few more times, with neither Jiijo nor Cambara answering it, coincides with the rapping on the pedestrian gate. On hearing the noisy arrival of her children’s familiar voices, Jiijo requests that she let them in, and Cambara is happy to do so.
Worn out from talking, too tired from having told Cambara her story, and too exhausted to minister to their never-ending indigence, Jiijo seeks a quiet retreat from the children. She takes leave of the scene, fleeing surreptitiously, and then closing the door behind her.
Left alone with the four children just back from the Koranic school, ages ranging from six to twelve, begrimed, hungry, eager to get to know her, and competing for her attention, Cambara asks them questions about their day away without listening to their answers, feeds them, and then offers them sweets and chocolates, which they eat to their heart’s content. Then she entertains them with an Indian fable, which she tells them from memory.
“Once upon a time, the pathways of kites and crows cross that of a wounded fox lying helpless under a tree. The kites and the crows concur among themselves that they will share the spoils in equal portions, with the upper half of the fox allotted to the crows and the lower part to the kites.
“The fox mocks at their options, and finding fault with the way its body parts have been apportioned, belabors the point that since, by the nature of things and in terms of creation, kites are superior to crows, it is baffled that its upper part has gone to the lowliest of scavengers, the crows. In the opinion of the fox, the head, the brain, and other delicate portions should go to the kites.
“Because they cannot agree among themselves, a war ensues between the kites and the crows, and a number of each group die as a result, the remaining handful fleeing the scene with difficulty. Meanwhile, the fox feasts for days on the dead kites and crows, leaving the place healthy, observing that the weak benefit from the disagreements of the powerful.”
When the smallest of the children pleads with her to tell them another story, Cambara looks at her watch, realizing that she has been here for more than three hours. She calculates on the best way of handing the responsibility of caring for the children over to their mother, pinning her hopes on the youngest to rouse their mother so she can go away. Woken up, Jiijo joins them, looking revived albeit groggy-eyed. And Cambara withdraws into the bathroom to read the pages the storm had kicked up. These turn out to be pages torn from an American oil-drilling company’s document detaling payments to one of Mogadiscio’s notorious warlords. Alas, she forgets it there when she emerges.