“Have you come to court death, then?” Seamus asked.
“It’s no longer clear why I’ve come,” he said.
“Would you be ready to bite the stronger of two dogs on its ear, in anger, as the Somali wisdom has it?”
Jeebleh assured him that he would.
“Are you prepared to kill and to be killed?”
“I could be, depending.”
“On what?”
“What’s at stake.”
Apropos a question not asked, Seamus said, “The violence that’s war, combined with the violence that’s famine, run in my blood and in the veins of my memory, and so I understand where you’re coming from, and where you find yourself.”
Agitated, he took his drawing pad and traced a half-human, half-animal figure, a man of advanced age, supporting himself on a walking stick and begging. Then he drew the figure of a woman à la Matisse, strong lines, prominently Fauvist in their pursuit of self-release. Jeebleh knew that Seamus would continue drawing until he provided the woman with a singularly abundant breast. And if he was in the mood, he would draw a baby, whom the woman would suckle. He would grow calm only when the drawing was done, and once the baby wore the capricious expression of a cynic.
Jeebleh put this down to Seamus’s childhood terrors: a grenade had been thrown into the window of his family’s living room, killing Seamus’s father, his sister, and two brothers — everyone but Seamus and his mother; in frequent childhood nightmares, Seamus would wake from his sleep, shouting, “But why me?” He would talk expansively about the incident, but not about the fact that the man alleged to have thrown the grenade had later died violently himself. At being asked pointed questions about this, Seamus would drop into a depressive silence. After regaining his tongue, he might tell you that although he had been in the area when the man died, he hadn’t been charged, and that the police had cleared his name within a few days, for lack of evidence.
But Jeebleh risked asking about it. He felt he had to hear about it. “If you didn’t have a hand in the man’s death, and I’ll assume that to be the case,” Jeebleh said, “why were you accused of it? How was it that your presence in the area had been noted and you were suspected?”
“Because no one living in a country in which a civil war is raging is deemed to be innocent. Here in Somalia too everyone is potentially guilty, and may be accused unfairly of crimes they’ve committed only by association. If you are a member of the same clan family as a perpetrator of a crime, then you’re guilty, aren’t you?”
“Do you still wake up, shouting ‘Why me’?”
“Not anymore I don’t,” Seamus said.
“That’s a relief!”
“Living in Mogadiscio, seeing so much devastation and death from the civil war, and working at The Refuge have cured me of that.”
Jeebleh had heard the passion in Seamus’s voice when he spoke of Raasta. He obviously adored her, as though she were his own child. His affection seemed to border on obsession. That morning Jeebleh had seen Seamus’s room in the apartment. There were photographs of the girl everywhere, on the walls, on key rings. Two photographs that he had taken hung on either side of his bed. In addition, he had many drawings of Raasta, stacks and stacks of them. Seamus was apparently in the habit of drawing her when he was nervous, which was a great deal of the time, and he drew rather competently, at times almost like a professional. “She gives a purpose to my continued stay in Mogadiscio, despite the risks,” he said now.
“What is she like?”
“A halo of comfort to me,” he said. “An elated sense of peace descends on my head when she is around me. In her presence, I am as happy as a yuppie throwing his first housewarming party.”
It occurred to Jeebleh that Seamus, the polyglot from Northern Ireland, might have some thoughts related to his pronoun obsession. He tried it on him: “What pronoun do you think is appropriate when you refer to the people of Belfast? Not in terms of being Catholic or Protestant, but just people?”
“I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”
“Do you use ‘we’ because you see yourself as part of that community, or ‘they’—a ploy as good as any to distance yourself and to distinguish yourself from the sectarian insanity of which you’re not part?”
After some serious thought, Seamus said, “I don’t know if I’m as conscious of the pronouns as you are. Anyway, what pronouns do you deploy?”
“Myself, I use ‘we’ when I mean Somalis in general, and ‘they’ when I am speaking about clan politics and those who promote it. This came to me when I was refusing to contribute toward the repair of their battlewagon, for I didn’t want to be part of their war effort. I left their side of the green line and relocated in the section of the city where the other clan family is concentrated. It’s as if I’ve written myself out of their lives.”
“Enemies matter to those who create them,” Seamus responded quickly.
“I’m not with you.”
“When you think of them as ‘they’ and therefore create them yourself, then it follows that you become an enemy to them the moment you opt out of their inclusive ‘we.’ As it happens, you are worth a lot more to them dead than alive, assuming of course that they can lay their hands on the wealth you had in your room or on your person.”
Jeebleh nodded in agreement. “Another Somali proverb has it that the shoes of a dead man are more useful than he is.”
“How cynical can a people get.”
“I would say we’re a practical nation.”
“Deceitful too,” Seamus said, and after a pause went on: “I bet Af-Laawe would’ve helped them to effect their clannish claim on your cash and so on. He’d be attending to your corpse in jig time, before anyone else knew you were a goner.”
“Is he as much of a shit as Shanta depicts him to be?” Jeebleh asked. A wayward silence gave him the luxury to recall Af-Laawe’s thoughts on pronouns. But when other memories from other dealings that had passed between him and Af-Laawe called on him, Jeebleh felt his body going numb, as though his limbs had been rendered lifeless. Nor could he shake off the shock of hearing Shanta’s suspicions about the cartel! Shanta was a mother with a missing daughter, and at times she was clutching at straws, but some of her speculations made sense to him. “Tell me about Af-Laawe.”
“The man is in the thick of every wicked deed,” Seamus said. “Unconfirmed rumor places him in the role of go-between, something he’s apparently good at.”
“Where else does rumor place him?”
“I understand he ran an underhand scheme,” Seamus said, “in which four-wheel-drive vehicles were spirited away with the help of Somali drivers and some UN foreign employees. Again, he acted as a go-between, linking the UN insiders and the Somali drivers. But he received the biggest cut, because it was his racket. The Somali drivers would vanish into the city’s no-go areas, and the Lord knows there were many, and some UN bureaucrat would get his commission in cash. And the vehicles would end up in Kenya or Ethiopia! You’ll probably have heard of the four-million-dollar heist, the one that made it into the international press.”