A grave shock, as disheartening as it must be debilitating, runs through her body the instant she realizes what Gudcur’s victory implies. To fight off the sense of gloom that is about to engulf her and also to make sure that it doesn’t weigh her down or get her worked up into a state of consternation, Cambara decides that it is best that she give Kiin a version of the events very close in general outline to the truth. Of course, she will do the best she can and, if need be, stretch the mode of telling it the way she knows best, adjusting the narration here and expanding on it there, especially where it is pliable, and naturally trimming it whenever the tale does not yield, because it lacks suppleness within its original material.
All the same, she perspires heavily, despite the cool air-conditioning in the room. Feeling tired, her sweatshirt sticking to her back, she paces to the extreme ends of the room on tiptoe. She looks at herself in the mirror on the back of the bathroom door; tall. She admires what she sees: a curvaceous body, shapely waist, breasts firm for a woman her age.
With her adrenaline in overdrive, she is thinking how sad it will make her if, untold because distrusted, Kiin not only does not buy into the version Cambara feeds her but also uncovers that she has misled her. Cambara, meanwhile, pictures herself trying to light-foot her way across a city peopled with misbegotten miscreants at the very time when whatever empathy Kiin has had for Cambara comes to an untrusting end. Where will she go then? From whom will she seek help? Not from Zaak, who will most likely turn his back on her too; nor from Bile and Dajaal, two men she hardly knows. Her only hope is Kiin, with whom she thinks she shares a special empathy, even if this affinity remains undefined. Maybe it is this chemistry that each recognizes in the other. Cambara senses an onrush of unease when she imagines the woebegone scenario in which, having uncovered Cambara’s untruths, Kiin shows her out: out of the hotel, out of her life, all contacts severed. How weak the legs of untruths; how sturdy the legs of truth, how much faster they run than falsehood, which never gains on them. This projection results in her decision to confide in Kiin, to tell her what she is all about, why she is in the country, hiring plumbers, and so on. One woman counting on another, a woman yoked to another, a woman trusting another, a woman choosing to be truthful to another in the service of a higher ideaclass="underline" of peace, of communal harmony.
What should she tell the plumber, who is much more likely than anyone else is, including her, to become a potential victim, if Gudcur, in a moment of ire, kills? What explanation should she give Zaak if he asks why, even though she is no longer putting up with him, she continues meddling with his life? He will probably remind her of her changing his wardrobe and his dressing style, her making him wear clothes with a content higher in cotton than polyester. Before parting and divorcing, Zaak will complain that she made him exchange his austere living for a high-flying life of staying up till the small hours of the night, of mornings spent lying in, of behaving in a cavalier manner when it came to expenses, seldom worrying as if every day dawned bearing its special gift. If he takes this line with her, then she will remind him that she has ceased to be the woman he used to know from the instant she unloaded him and that in her reinvented self, she cares less about what he wears, more about her own problems.
Taking the plumber to her family’s property without serious thought to the consequences of her action has made Cambara’s commitment a more perilous concern. There is no running away from it, and there is no turning back either. She soaks up a few motionless seconds as she considers the matter. Meanwhile, she occupies her fidgety hands with an activity that she has been meaning to undertake: She bothers a blackhead, picking at it until she has almost removed it; then plucks at her armpit hair with the concentration of a woman applying eye pencil.
Someone starts the engine of a car, revving it, and then reverses it out through the gate, the harshness of the gear grating on her nerves. Cambara looks at her watch and, deciding it is time to choose what to wear for the evening, she pulls out the suitcase in which she has put her few changes of clothing. She has no difficulty choosing what to wear: a beautiful sleeveless up-and-down linen dress she received as a gift from her mother, who it bought it from a mainly African shopping mall in Toronto on her last visit before Cambara went away. She admires the dress, feeling it, her hand going against the grain, now along with it, and finally placing the top portion of it on the bed, studying the denkyem, the Ashanti symbol that the tailor sewed into it, the embroidery adding a natural balance and beauty to the material, its color close to her own.
She remembers the wisdom behind the Ashanti symbol; she remembers her mother telling her about the Ashanti proverb based on the system. According to her mother, the saying implies that even though the crocodile lives in water and has the enviable ability to stay on land too, the fact is it does breathe water; it breathes air. She interprets the symbol as meaning that like the crocodile, which lives in and off the bounty of water and the land surrounding it, she, Cambara, inhabits two contradictory states of mind: She dwells in peace even if the menacing closeness to the attrition that defines Somalia engulfs her. That is to say, she must adapt to the conditions that obtain in the city where she is and confront the situations that abound with uncomplaining hardiness, poised for worse scenarios, including death. She commends herself for reconciling herself to the continuously altering circumstances that are as formidably strenuous as they are dangerous. Ergo, she will put on the dress in deference to her acute sense of adaptability.
She has hardly had the time to shower when there is a gentle tap on the door. Cambara stays stock still, answering only when the person knocks several more times, every time meeker than before. She asks, “Who is it?”
“It is me,” says a voice. “Kiin.”
A spate of questions about where Cambara took Kiin’s driver, bodyguards, and the plumber to whom she has introduced her invade Cambara’s mind. These questions, coming as they do in the form of a deluge, each flowing from a tributary that brims over into an agitated river of self-doubts, fluster her. Praying that all is well with everyone who went in that vehicle with her, and her voice almost breaking, Cambara says, “Just give me a moment, please.”
“No need to open the door,” says Kiin. “I’ve come to find out how you are doing and to tell you that it is teatime and that I am at the café. So come and join me whenever you are ready.”
Cambara opens the door, dressed in her linen outfit with the denkyem symbol embroidered into it.
On letting Kiin enter, Cambara observes, as if for the first time, that her rooms are host to the inevitable mess travelers create, with a bevy of plans they do not follow through on for one reason or another, when there are more suitcases and little in the way of a sense of how best to unpack and when. Strewn around on the floors in both rooms and on the beds therein are books of coffee-table dimensions and other paraphernalia that indicate the current occupant’s abiding passion for masks and theater, including a couple of miniature masks of wood. Kiin takes keen interest in the books, opening an illustrated one designed to help bring such a play to the stage before moving away and focusing first on the masks, which she picks up and fingers, her fervor evident, and then a flimsy book, the size of a pamphlet, titled The Eagle and the Chickens.
From the expression on her face — open as though with a vista of possibilities — Kiin is apparently enthused about puppet theater and all of Cambara’s material. “I wonder if you will tell me about all of this — if you have plans that I should know about and can help you with, that we, the Women’s Network, can help you with. Perhaps you would consider putting on a play? The network could fund it. Would you? For peace? About peace? For women?”