There were night shadows and foreboding silences in the bedroom. He thought he had heard noises after midnight, and he wondered whether Bile had sneaked out of the apartment, like a man embarking on a dangerous mission, or a lover honoring a late appointment with a partner. He had exchanged good-night greetings with Bile soon after their conversation, ready to drop into the comforting well of a deep sleep.
The day before, he had called home and given his wife and daughters his doctored version of the truth, notable for its omissions. His wife, who knew him better, queried his decision to move south.
“I couldn’t stand staying in that hotel.”
“But you’ve often spoken of the excessive violence in the south of Mogadiscio,” his wife said. “Does it make sense for you to move there?”
Jeebleh replied with a formidable sangfroid: “I’ve moved in with Bile, that’s how I see it. What’s more important now, anyway, is that I feel safer in his company and in the setup here.”
He exchanged a few words with his daughters, to whom he offered more of the same waffle. He interpreted his action as the acceptable behavior of someone being protective toward his family. There was no reason to make them worry unnecessarily.
Jeebleh thought that he may have been woken by a ringing telephone, but he wasn’t sure. He looked at the clock — about three in the morning — and decided to get some water from the kitchen. On his way, he noticed the door to Bile’s room was wide open, and the bed empty. He thought of attaching the door chain for security, but he wasn’t sure if, or when, Bile might return. He stayed awake for quite a while, reading, then fell asleep to the sounds of the displaced families lodging in the improvised spaces below the apartment. Much later he heard a key turning as the door was gently locked from the inside, and chains and bolts being put on. He lay obstinately asleep, like a schoolchild at wake-up time. His unconscious got to work, and he had a dream in which peahens played their part in a young woman’s self-arousal. How intriguing!
At eight in the morning or thereabouts, a gentle knock on the apartment door woke him. When he came out of his room, he saw several pieces of luggage in the corridor. Probably Seamus’s, he deduced from the fact that the door to Seamus’s room was closed. So who could be knocking? When he asked who it was, Bile responded, “The breakfast man is here!”
To let Bile in, Jeebleh removed the chains, of which there were at least three, then slid back the bolts, of which there were two. He wasn’t convinced that these impediments would stop a determined man, armed and ready to shoot his way in. All the same, it took him an inordinately long time to get the hang of undoing the chains and bolts, and Bile had to instruct him what to do when he got stuck. Finally, he unlocked a padlock on which he set eyes for the first time, a lock in a class of its own, an Italian-made affair as big as a full-grown gorilla’s jaws. When he had pulled the door open and faced Bile, Jeebleh confessed that he had had no idea there was so much hardware on the door. “I doubt there is anyone in the world who’s as clumsy with bolts and chains as I am!”
“I know several people who won’t even have locks,” Bile told him, as he walked in, carrying a professionally packed takeout breakfast. “Since arriving in Mogadiscio, Seamus has developed a fad for bolts, heavy-duty locks, and chains. Being from Belfast, he’ll tell you that he knows what guns do to people, and that he’s seen it all. Which is why he refuses to keep or own guns.”
“How many bolts, how many chains, my God!”
Bile said, “When you share an apartment in a violent city, you accommodate each other’s sense of paranoia. We bolt it up, chain and lock it, because it eases Seamus’s paranoia. He refers to this”—he touched the Italian padlock, heavier than a gorilla’s head—“as the ‘humor-me padlock,’ and you can see him holding it in his lap and caressing it, as though it were a cat or a baby!”
“The choices one makes!” Jeebleh said.
“Seamus has developed another obsession.”
“What can that be?”
“He loves the sound of chains against chains, loves what he refers to as the handsome feel and sexy sight of heavy-duty padlocks. These turn him on. One of his lovers in Milan gave him the contraption as a present. When he got back to Mogadiscio, he brought it out and spoke of it in the most glowing terms. He might have been a herdsman talking of his favorite she-camel, praising her.”
“Would you say Seamus is a fetishist?”
“What do you mean?” asked Bile.
“Of chains, locks, and bolts.”
“He is.”
“What’s your take on lock, bolt, and chains?”
“When we’re together, he locks up,” Bile said, “I open up.”
Since there was a logic built into the relationship between these two bachelors, Jeebleh wondered what his job was going to be in a threesome flat share. Bile went toward the kitchen with the breakfast package, avoiding the seven pieces of luggage in the corridor.
“When did he get here?” Jeebleh asked when Bile returned.
“He rang at an ungodly hour,” Bile said, “and told me that his flight from Nairobi had landed just before dark at an airstrip in Merka, he had no idea why. He managed to get a lift from the airstrip, which is about a hundred kilometers from where we are, to a guesthouse in the north of the city. But the manager of the guesthouse had no place for him. It is a house for European Union officials visiting on short missions in Somalia. I was at a friend’s house, but Seamus managed to get me on my mobile, and I arranged for Dajaal to bring him to the house where I was. It was in the dead of a dangerous hour in Mogadiscio, close to three in the morning. Then I drove him here.”
Good breeding kept Jeebleh from asking Bile where he had spent the night, or with whom. In the old days, it was Seamus who always told you everything about his one-night stands, provided you with their first names or aliases, gave you the size of their brassieres, informed you what they liked and didn’t, how they kissed, or whether they were sloppy in bed or not. Details of Jeebleh’s own infrequent forays came out sooner or later at Seamus’s badgering. Bile, however, was unfailingly discreet; he wouldn’t tell you a thing.
Jeebleh said, “I bet Seamus won’t stir until midday.”
“Always dead to the world in the mornings, our Seamus.”
After a pause Bile asked, “Would you like an espresso?”
“If it’s homemade and by your good hands, I would. A double!”
JEEBLEH TOOK A BITE OF HIS BRIOCHE. THE HONEY RUNNING DOWN HIS chin reminded him how much he used to enjoy these delicacies. It was comforting that life had plotted to bring the three of them together again, all this time after their days in Italy, and he couldn’t help praying that they would still live in the country of their friendship.
The espresso was majestic; there was no other word to describe it. Full of vigor, stronger than the kick of a young horse. It was dark, grainy, and concentrated like a Gauloise. It reminded him of their days in Padua, and he was tempted to ask for a cigarette even though he had abandoned the habit two decades earlier. Life was young in those smoke-filled days, days full of promise, all three friends eager to make their marks on the societies they had come from. Dreaming together, the three inseparable friends, and the two women whose presence became de rigueur for Seamus and Jeebleh, smoked their lungs away, and consumed great quantities of espresso.
In those long-ago days, you would see Seamus going off lonely and alone into the darkened moments of memory, as he recalled what had happened to his family in Belfast, blown up in their own apartment, a grenade thrown through an open window from a passing car. He had lived with constant worry about sudden death. He would talk like a man deciding to forget, but not forgive. And he would remind you time and again that two brothers, a sister, and his father had died in the massacre; only he and his mother had survived, because they happened to be out. Mother Protestant, father Catholic, he had been brought up to live as inclusive a life as he could, in which sectarian differences were never privileged. And then the massacre. He was hard-pressed to know what to do. There was something in the way Seamus told the story that made Jeebleh think that he had exacted revenge. And on several occasions he had heard Seamus screaming in his sleep, “The bloody dogs are done!”