“Is the generator on all day and all night?”
“It’s not on when we can tap into an ice factory in the proximity,” replies Mohammed. “We turn it on whenever the owners of the factory are load shedding, and they do this without prior notice.”
She remembers in the days when power was supplied by the municipality of the city and cost almost nothing, and no one ever heard of load shedding. Realizing that she is lagging a few paces behind Mohammed, she catches up with him, and they walk up another flight of stairs, down an asphalted lane, with trees and shrubs on either side of it, through a metal door, up the stairway to the first floor, and along the corridor.
Finally, Mohammed comes to a shuffling halt and points out the metal door with no number on it to her. She inserts the key in the lock somewhat tentatively and after several attempts, turns it with resolute thrust. She thanks him again and lets herself in, securing the door behind her with a bolt.
The two-room setup — neat, decent-sized, boasting two beds, both pushed against a wall — faces away from the two generators, one of which is on now, maybe because the minimal daytime supply of power provided by the privately run electricity company is off. That the air conditioner is on and that she can barely hear the noise of the generator assures her further that she will like it here.
Moving about the two rooms to explore the extent of their combined spaciousness, Cambara paces out the distance between the rooms and then the two beds, and then concentrates on measuring out their relative nearness to the bathroom. Like a spoiled child making a choice by going meeni-mano, now pointing at one bed and now at the other, she settles eventually on the bed on the right side in the belief that she will enjoy sleeping in it more. She stretches herself on it, testing how comfortable lying on it will be. Then she pulls open one cupboard after another until she discovers, discreetly worked into one wall, a safe, with instructions in Somali, Arabic, Italian, and English. Cambara is agreeably surprised to find, when she pulls the handle toward herself, intending to set the combination number of the safe to one she will remember, that her luck is favoring her with a good smile. This is because there is a Post-it note from Kiin informing Cambara that she has left a mobile phone under the mattress of the bed to the right-hand side of the room and asking her to “please ring her up” to let her know that all is well. She does as Kiin suggests, pressing the Menu button and speaking right away to her kind host. Then Kiin tells her that she has also arranged for a plumber to see Cambara in an hour or so and asks her to wait until he arrives, then take him and show him the jobs she wants done. Mohammed, on Cambara’s say-so, will be only too glad to organize a vehicle and bodyguards for her.
Cambara rings off, her unbounded sense of exhilaration spreading to the point of affecting her so deeply that she is almost tearful. She decides no one can touch Kiin for out-and-out kindness shown without obvious ulterior impulse. Civil wars or not, there are people like Kiin who are by nature generous to a fault, well meaning, and excessively munificent. In contrast to the uncharitable Zaak, who is her cousin, her former “spouse,” and her current host, Kiin has taken to seeing to all of Cambara’s immediate needs despite the fact that they are not blood relations. Cambara thinks that this goes to prove that not every Somali is obsessed with the idea of clan affiliation and that many people behave normally even if the conditions in which they operate are themselves abnormal.
Cambara’s display of marked, positive attitude toward Kiin’s generosity is short lived when she starts to sorrow over the general state of decay in the compound opposite the hotels. The unsightly scene before her pulls her up for further grief. She stands directly behind the window, looking out and surveying a wasteland of heartbreaking ugliness: trees that have not grown to their natural height, scraps of wood and metal thrown any which way, children rifling in the arid waste all around, as though in search of something precious that they can sell. The fact that she sees adult men squatting and defecating in full view of the road, which is about fifty meters to their back, troubles her no end. Then her wandering gaze dwells for a few moments on a man wielding an ax and turning a huge metal pipe of industrial size into fragments, chopping it into cartable portions. She reckons that men giving themselves in to insatiable greed employed similar destructive methods first to dismantle the national monuments and then to break them up into bits before selling them off dirt-cheap in the one of the Gulf states.
It is when she turns away from the desolation outside and reenters the bathroom that she is impressed with how clean its floor is. She even forgets about all her other disconsolate impressions for a minute, and her eyes shine forth with radiance. Finally, she removes her boots and then takes off her clothes, item by item, dropping them on the floor and trampling on them, the way her son used to do whenever he was in a mood to try his father, Wardi’s, patience. How Wardi would go berserk, ready to hit the boy for his obduracy. Cambara, in maternal circumspection for her son’s well-being, would intervene, picking up the offending items herself from where her son dropped them and telling Wardi: “I want you to take it easy. And please let peace reign in this house.” Remembering the turf wars fought over the raising of her only son, whom she failed, as she could not safeguard him from Wardi’s filicidal tendencies, she is unable to keep her rage in check. She wishes that she had acted like a hen, clucking away in watchful frenzy over her chicks, shielding them from harm.
She is so full of rage that she takes a huge karate kick at the door. Fortunately, she doesn’t break it in two. But that doesn’t stop her from letting go a scream so ungodly that running feet come and someone taps gently on the door to ask after a decent interval if everything is okay with madam.
“Everything is fine, thank you,” she says.
Then she sinks into a crouch, her fists balled into a fist, her teeth clenched, and her whole body in a tremor as if she is fortifying herself for a final showdown with her inner demons.
When her desperate attempt to calm her nerves leads her to mutter self-recriminations of the remonstrative kind, in which she blames Wardi for her own shortcomings, the activated part of her mind pulls itself back in the rational belief that this is self-destructive. Has she not come to Mogadiscio in hope of chancing upon a noble way of mourning her loss, not in anger but while recovering the family property to devote herself to the service of peace?
Then for the first time since her arrival in Mogadiscio, Cambara delights in walking barefoot in a bathroom, eyes closed, and her hands joyously caressing her naked body in the tactile appreciation of a blind bathing.
She considers taking a room at Maanta as a test of her commitment to making her own way toward her independence from Zaak. It is also to provide her with proof, if there be a need to show some, that, as a mistress of her actions, she is not beholden to someone else, not least of all to a man, be it Zaak or Wardi. She will most likely keep certain aspects of her life private and will treat the room as her hush-hush retreat, rather like the way one keeps an affair secret. It amuses her now that she never had the temptation to have a love affair in all the years that she was married sadly and miserably to Wardi.
Cambara comes out of her rooms after a hot shower, her first. She feels refreshed, with a younger spring in her step, as she bounces downstairs, past the cubicle that serves as the reception of the hotel wing, where the deputy manager of the hotel sits, reading. She assumes that Mohammed is reading a textbook, because he is underlining paragraphs of the text with a marker, very bright yellow. He is also mumbling something to himself the way semi-literates recite the letters of the alphabet when they have just mastered it. She nods her head to him in welcome acknowledgment of his warm grin.