“Be specific,” Kiin says. “How can I be of help?”
Cambara settles in to the agreeable feeling of Kiin sorting out all her problems. She addresses herself to difficulties that she is likely to encounter when she starts to get down to the business of putting on a play in a country no longer familiar with this mode of entertainment. She goes on, “In fact, this is why I’ve wanted to meet a carpenter so I can construct a stage and help make the masks I’ve designed for it. I need an especially talented carpenter who can double as a joiner and who is bold in his or her interpretation of my sketches.”
Kiin strikes a charming pose, visibly pleased. “I know such a person,” she says.
“Here in this city?”
“He is Irish and I know him well.”
“Does he live in Mogadiscio?”
“He’s lived here for a number of years, has adopted Somalia as his own and, what is more, survived it.”
“What’s an Irishman doing here?”
“That’s a long story.”
“What is his name?”
“Seamus.”
EIGHTEEN
Early the next morning, at eight o’clock, Cambara sits alone at a table in the hotel restaurant with her large writing pad open before her, studying her scribblings and then revising them, now adding and now deleting. She does this in the halfhearted way a professor not interested in what she is reading peruses a student’s text. She turns the pages of the pad, which boast of chicken scratches only she can decipher, among them a sketch, in the form of a diagram for a play that she has worked on more off than on for several years; she thinks it will be ideal to produce the play here. She hopes that agreeing to put on a puppet theater will not only improve her chances of artistic success but also release her from her feel-bad factor, in terms of never having pulled off staging her own work.
She wishes she could work out what has prompted Kiin to talk readily, knowingly, and convincingly about Cambara’s passion in producing a play for peace in Mogadiscio. She guesses that Raxma, their mutual friend, has most likely been in touch, intimating Cambara’s keenness, which, as Arda has put it, “is generated by an obsession to make a name for herself at the same time as an actor and a playwright.” To date, she has kept her dream alive but has little to show for it, apart from some amateur efforts of which she can’t be proud. Not to worry about anything in connection with her artistic pursuit, though, for that can wait until she has scored successes on other fronts; then, she feels certain, agreeing to produce a play is going to be a sinecure, no sweat.
She can only imagine how much pleasure it will be if Gudcur comes back from the fighting wounded or is fatally injured and dies; then she will be in a much better position. As is her wont, she starts to count her chicks before her eggs hatch and thinks ahead to the day when she may use the family property’s banquet hall as her rehearsal site. With Gudcur gone, his fighters no longer posing a threat to her plans, and Jiijo out of the way and having her baby in hospital — in view of the arrangements that are afoot, thanks to Kiin and Farxia — Cambara is convinced she will make headway fast. She interprets her dream at dawn, in which she saw several hawks overpowering the hyenas whom they were battling, as meaning that she will outsmart her opponents, whoever they are and achieve her aim, whatever that turns out to be.
She reminds herself that, according to one of the Horn Afrique radio correspondents who filed his dispatch at seven in the morning, Gudcur’s men have been sent packing, are on the retreat, having been hustled out of several more checkpoints. Moreover, unconfirmed more up-to-date bulletins attributed to other news agencies allude to the heavy toll of dead and injured among his men. However, in view of the fact that no reporter mentions seeing Gudcur in person, the hearsay that he is dead or at least badly hurt is gaining credibility, fueled by the rumor that his deputy is acting as if he is unmistakably in charge. At one point during the interview, Gudcur’s second-in-command let it slip that he is leading the campaign, now faltering, because of a faulty command structure. She sees the stand-in questioning Gudcur’s authority not so much as evidence of a humiliating rout but as indisputable proof of his powerlessness.
Fretful, she sits up, smiling in genuine welcome as the waiter arrives with an item of her breakfast: two slices of mango prepared the way Mogadiscians like them. Her mouth watering, she admires the sweet golden fruit that is cut in equal halves, the flat, rounded stone removed, the fleshy portion segmented, with a knife, into sections, ready for her to eat. When the waiter does not move, as though expecting her to say something, Cambara tells him not to bother bringing her the second dish, one of liver, to be eaten with canjeero-pancake, a favorite among middle-class Mogadiscians. In response to his gentle attempt to persuade her against her decision—“It is our specialty, liver and pancake,” he says — she explains that she doubts if she has the stomach for it. “Not this morning,” she adds.
Nodding, the waiter departs. Then just as she takes her first spoonful, an unheralded carnival of voices, as erratic as they are mercurial, unsettle her. A horde of young men are frenziedly carrying items of furniture, lifting and heaving them in the clumsy way untrained bearers pick up and hoist heavy, many-legged movables. She recognizes one or two of the young men, and she begins to worry that they may hurt their backs on top of disfiguring or breaking the odd table, chair, or sofa, which will no doubt set Kiin back a bit. She watches them with a mix of anxiety and amusement as they haltingly struggle to bring a table that by her reckoning seats ten through a door that is too narrow for it. What is more, these youths’ maladroitness — raising the table above their heads with the likelihood of breaking one of its legs instead of tilting it to the side or bringing it out a leg at time — fills her with such unease she wonders if they will be good enough to participate in her play. In fact, she finds that her fearful worries have been realized: The table’s two front legs are wobbly, and the young men are drenched with sweat and panting. They go past the well to their left, then stumble, ungainly, up a stone stairway to her right, in the direction of the outhouse with the thatched roof and the windows that open outward at awkward angles.
Following them with her eyes, her gaze finally falls on the outhouse, which has an added-on aspect to it, an afterthought resulting from a need not only for more space but for something like a hall. She understands that that is where the hotel holds parties overflowing with revelers. In her mind, Cambara thinks of a future when peace is supreme and when Kiin’s preteen children may employ it as a bachelor pad. How curious that she realizes, only after watching the youths putting themselves out, hoisting and hauling, that the outhouse has an upstairs hall and a downstairs eat-in, the latter boasting a dozen or so tables and chairs dressed in colorful cloths and arranged as though for a formal function. Cambara has high aspirations that she will enjoy herself at the women-only party to which Kiin has invited her and will try to muster one or two of the women to help her with her plans, thank Farxia for what she has done and maybe at last meet the shopkeeper Odeywaa’s wife.
She looks up startled, with doubts starting to gnaw at her insides. Then again, she is consumed by an overwhelming uncertainty the moment she considers the furious tempo at which the new developments have unfolded, with Kiin becoming the plinth upon which the pillars of Cambara’s causes rest, and Zaak and Wardi virtually out of her sight and out of her mind. She persists, against reason, to rely wholly on Kiin, even though she feels that she must cultivate the friendship of other people to whom she can turn; otherwise, Kiin will be the only one on whom she will depend, however well appointed she has been or will be. Sadly, whenever she has had a good reason to celebrate a moment of triumph, Cambara is given to suffering an attack of anxiety, fearing the consequences of future failures instead of gathering the robe of success around her. Basta, enough!