Without honoring any of what she thought of as her mother’s harebrained plans with a reaction, Cambara stared at Arda, as if trying to puzzle out what her mother meant when she spoke of her making “a work-related visit” to Nairobi. What “work” did she have in mind? But she wished to deal with what bothered her most first.
Cambara said, “Why would I want to become the wife of a man I haven’t thought about in that way or seen for a number of years?”
“That way, you’ll do me a huge favor.”
As she sought succor from the long silence, in which she considered the implication of her mother’s statement, Cambara discerned a trace of her mother’s fragrance in the form of uunsi scent, which Somali women traditionally wear to welcome back their husbands after a long absence.
She said, “Mother, you’re too much to take.”
“You’ll be a wife only on paper.”
“What would that make me in other people’s eyes?”
“You can act as a wife, can’t you?” Arda says.
“I don’t want to act like a wife to Zaak.”
“In the amateur theater you’ve been in,” Arda said, “I’ve seen you act as a lowlife, seen you play the role of a wife to a man who is not your husband. Why can’t you pretend to be a wife to Zaak? Pretend. Isn’t acting your dream profession?”
If you had seen Cambara in her current state, you might have thought that she was strong on the outside and weak on the inside. Could it be that her mother was at last breaking her spirit? Was she about to relinquish all resistance? Admittedly, she had squandered her opportunity to set her mother right; maybe it was much too late to fend her mother off.
“Think of it as a favor to me, as I said.”
“I wish you wouldn’t ask that of me.”
“There is no else I can ask.”
“It is unfair.”
“Let’s think of it as your dare.”
“It’s unlike you to do this to me.”
“A dare to an actor. A wife only on paper. Think.”
Since they meant the world to each other, and since the word “no” seldom passed the lips of the one of whom the other requested a favor, Arda relied on the art of persuasion, softening the inner core of her daughter’s defiance not with authoritarianism but with pleading. Do me a favor, please, my daughter! Now a species of unequaled sorrow was beginning to take residence in Cambara and was becoming a tenant with full rights. She felt as inanimate as a puppet with broken limbs and no wires to get it moving. Even so, she doubted if acting as a wife to Zaak — pretending and only on paper, as her mother put it — would lend a greater dare to her acting ability or sharpen it. Knowing herself, she might take it on as a challenge, if only to try and turn it into a triumph to revel in. She wished the idea had come from her, then she could have determined the parameters of the relationship and walked out of it when her heart was no longer in it. If the original idea had been hers, then she might have experienced the real thrill from the perspective of her creativity. As things now stood, she would have to think of what Arda might say before instinctually terminating it. Zaak was not worth the candle that her mother was burning.
“I repeat: You won’t have to marry him.”
Cambara put on a worn smile, exhausted from trying to weather the storm that was her mother. Her head between her hands, she said, “Take me through it all. Tell me what you have in mind, this panacea.”
The way Arda explained it, it was all easy. She was to travel to Nairobi on a commission from CBS to interview the Somalis as they arrived and work with a local crew to film them. While there, she was to look up a counselor at the Canadian High Commission who would facilitate the processing of Zaak’s application so he could join them in Toronto after half a year.
Cambara said, “Everything is arranged?”
“Everything.”
Cambara said, “Still, I can’t understand why I can’t get him a visa with the help of this person whom I am to see? Why can’t you sponsor him and have a temporary visa issued to him? Why his spouse?”
Arda said, “The drag, darling, is that most visas issued locally would have period limitation. Three months, half a year, and two years at most. There is the added hassle that you cannot renew visas issued outside Canada. The applicant will have to go out of the country and reapply to enter.”
“Curse the day you became his aunt.”
“My sweet,” Arda said, holding her daughter’s hand, “I have it from good authority that Somalis wanting to come to Canada will find it very difficult to obtain visas, temporary or long term, in Nairobi. I have close friends in the relevant departments, some of them neighbors right here in Ottawa.”
“And marrying is the best option?”
“Two of my neighbors are on the case, as we speak, one of them having obtained the commission from CBS, the other liaising with the deputy high commissioner of Canada to Kenya, who happens to have gone to the same prep in Montreal, to make certain that your and Zaak’s papers go expeditiously to the relevant desk.”
“You’ve thought it all through, haven’t you? Why doesn’t he show up at the airport? He’ll be granted refugee status the instant he puts his foot on Canadian soil, being Somali. Why can’t he come the way the others are coming? He is not counterfeit currency or contraband.”
After a pause, Arda says, “A favor to me. Your mother.”
“Anyhow, where is the accursed fellow?”
“As we speak, Zaak has an apartment in the center of Nairobi, paid for on my credit card, via a Nairobi-based real estate agent. As his wife, you will be staying with him there.”
The Ottawa sky, darkening, made Cambara pause and stare at it as if daring it to rain. She knew that once her mother had made up her mind and had worked out the details of a plan, the likelihood of her backing down or finding fault with it would be minimal.
“You know what, Mummy?”
“What?”
“You wouldn’t do this if Dad were alive.”
“Let’s not go there.”
“Would you?”
“I would find a way,” Arda said.
“I am not so sure,” Cambara said.
In the silence that came after, Arda busied herself, attentively removing dirt from under her nails. This put Cambara in mind of a mother monkey picking lice off her baby’s head, then biting and chewing them.
Cambara asked, “Have you thought ahead, Mummy, on what Zaak and I must do about sleeping arrangements, first in Nairobi and then here, assuming that he is allowed to join me?”
“I have, indeed,” Arda responded.
“Yes. Go on. Tell me more.”
Arda said, “The imagination of most Somalis is prone to rioting as soon as they reflect on a situation in which a man and a woman share an intimate space alone, with no chaperone. They will assume that they are having it off.”