At long last Bile spoke, but only to say, “I don’t know.”
“Why haven’t you been in touch with Caloosha?” Jeebleh asked.
Bile looked quizzically at Jeebleh: Had he too heard a knock on the door? A moment later, their gazes traced the tapping to a sparrow throwing its weight against the windowpane. The cat looked up expectantly. Bile rose, hesitating over whether to let the bird in or not, and then opened the window to let the sparrow decide. The bird flew in, wheeled around the room, turned, and flew off, safe.
“I wish not to have any dealings with either Strongman or Caloosha,” was all Bile was prepared to say.
“A boy murders his brutal stepfather in cold blood,” Jeebleh said. “Does such a boy, who has suffered years of cruelty at the murdered man’s hands, mourn his death? Does the son of the murdered man, a half brother to the killer, mourn the loss of a father he’s never known?”
When Bile didn’t react, Jeebleh recalled the words of Bile’s mother, couched in regret, referring to her own role in raising Caloosha. “It’s very difficult,” she had said, “to rid yourself of the monster whom you’ve given birth to yourself, fed, raised, and looked after, and then let loose on the world.” She was responding to the clan elders, who were all men, and their tendency to blame women and point to what they called “the lax side of a mother’s nature.” Caloosha had killed his stepfather, yet the clan blamed his mother for it.
HAGARR, THE MOTHER OF CALOOSHA, BILE, AND SHANTA, MARRIED THREE times. She was a strong-minded woman, and didn’t hesitate to do as she wanted. When the opportunity to go to Italy on scholarship to train as a midwife presented itself soon after the nikaax, her engagement, she went, in opposition of her future husband’s wishes. Later, when he suggested that she give up working, because he could afford to provide for her and their son, Caloosha, she refused to do so. She was one among a handful of Somali women who had finished their secondary education, and could earn their own keep, and she dreaded the thought of relying on a man’s handouts. A woman with foresight, she knew that the day wasn’t far off when her husband would look for and find a younger, prettier woman, one prepared to do a wealthy man’s bidding. And as soon as this happened, Hagarr insisted on a divorce.
She moved out of his house into that of her elder brother, where she and Caloosha, then a three-year-old, were given a room with a separate entrance. It wasn’t long before she discovered that sharing space with her sister-in-law was no easy matter. She found accommodation in a rooming house, and hired a series of young maids to look after her son. She didn’t care when society accused her of what some called “dereliction of duty as a mother.” But she was bothered when her husband threatened her with court action.
Caloosha was a very difficult child to raise. He was impossible to discipline, and he displayed unusual cruelty early on. Already at age three he was adept at throwing knives, the way you throw darts at a dartboard, though he preferred living targets. He lit matches out of mischief, nearly setting the house on fire. Many of the young women Hagarr hired to look after him left within a short time.
She had her job and made a sufficient income, but Caloosha was too great a challenge for her to raise as a single mother. So she contracted a second marriage, as she believed that the boy needed the sobering hand of a male to bring his wild, satanic cruelties under control. Within a month of the wedding, there was considerable change in Caloosha’s behavior. He was much more restrained in his dealings with the house help, and was calmer, less prone to violence. Hagarr attributed this to her husband’s calming influence. But then she discovered bruises on the boy’s body. Once his eyes were swollen shut for days, his nose bled, and his wrists and back were sore. It turned out that her husband was in the habit of tying Caloosha’s feet together and hanging him upside down. Hagarr came home from work one day and found her son hanging there. She didn’t know what to do, short of threatening her husband to move out. The trouble was, she was close to having their first child, her second. And even though he had been beaten to the point of death, Caloosha seemed to have made peace with his own and his stepfather’s violent natures. He never complained. He took the beatings “as a man.”
Caloosha was nine and in the second grade at school when he had a particularly unpleasant altercation with his stepfather. A few days later, his stepfather was found dead, a poisoned arrow stuck in his throat. Hagarr was away on night duty. According to the two sisters of the dead man, who’d shared a room with the boy, there were no untoward noises during the night. Only the following morning, when the maid knocked on their door, did they learn of their brother’s death. He was buried the same day. There was suspicion that Caloosha had shot the poisoned arrow, but there was no proof. The boy showed no outward signs of guilt.
Hagarr went to her grave believing that her son had killed her second husband. And Bile would insist, at least in public, that he bore his half brother no grudges for seeing to an early grave the man who had fathered him.
JEEBLEH AND BILE SAT WITH THE COFFEE TABLE BETWEEN THEM. JEEBLEH was studying the photographs in an album: Raasta in her mother’s arms, in her father’s, the pictures showing clearly how engaged she had been since birth. The gaze of the one-week-old followed the movements of the photographer.
Now he wanted to know what Bile’s first thoughts were when he joined Shanta and Faahiye.
“I feel embarrassed when I look back,” Bile told him. “Regrettably, I haven’t shared my shame with a living soul. It grieves me to remember what I did.”
A hush, as quiet as early-evening shadows, descended on Bile’s face. He tilted his head slightly toward Jeebleh, in the posture of a pet being stroked.
“Why is that?” Jeebleh asked.
“I wanted to touch,” Bile said.
“Just to make physical contact?” Jeebleh recollected the urge to make contact when his solitary confinement came to its abrupt end. “I remember that feeling.”
“I wanted to be touched,” Bile said, “to be held in a human embrace. The desire to touch and be touched was so great that I nearly smothered everyone I met with a hug. I’d have been one of the happiest men on earth, if someone had touched me and I had touched them, innocuously, but lovingly too.”
“How did you satisfy the urge?”
“When I look back on those days, I recall being alive, free — but alas, I lived in a house that wasn’t my house, with a sister I hardly knew, whose husband I didn’t get on with, and I had plenty of money that wasn’t mine. The first few days, I thought about my mother, who wasn’t a physical person, maybe because, as a midwife, she looked on the human body as a shoemaker looks on leather — not intimately. Shanta was a touch-touch person and, when she was young, would cuddle up to you. Caloosha was so cruel he didn’t ‘touch’ you — you know that yourself — he hurt you. Often I remembered with pleasure the women I had loved, especially the women who had touched me where I liked to be touched, and whom I touched where they liked me to touch. I was in a needy, touch-me-please mood when I met Dajaal, soon after I gained my freedom.”
“And he dropped you off at Shanta and Faahiye’s?”
“That’s right. As it happened, I walked in through the front gate and heard a moan, which had some urgency to it. Dajaal had alerted me to Shanta’s condition as soon as I introduced myself to him. I suppose the groan I heard helped make the urge to touch less important, for a while at least. And before long, I was washing my hands and rolling up my sleeves, ready to get down to work.