“He rang me soon after you left,” she said.
Jeebleh thought that maybe one of Caloosha’s security operatives who was keeping tabs on him had seen him with Shanta, as they walked away from where the epileptic man had collapsed. When the word got through to Caloosha, he might have called Faahiye and asked that he speak to Jeebleh. It was safe to assume that Faahiye would do what he had been told.
“Did he say anything about Raasta?”
“No.”
Even though it wasn’t in Jeebleh’s nature to see the bright side of things, he felt he needed to be optimistic. The words came to him easily, but he was having difficulty in delivering them convincingly, so he repeated them to himself over and over. Faahiye wouldn’t be making contact unless he had decided to bring the crisis to an agreeable end; he was free to make such a decision on his own, and not at someone else’s suggestion. But Jeebleh couldn’t pass his optimism on to Shanta, as he feared that she would become more aggressive.
And she would not give up. “Why, of all the people in the world, has he chosen to talk only to you, if you haven’t been in touch with him on your own?”
“I have no idea,” Jeebleh said.
“There’s got to be a reason,” she insisted. “I’ve never known him to do anything unless he’s given it a lot of consideration, and studied it from every possible angle.”
Jeebleh said, “Maybe he thinks it’ll be easier to talk to me, because I’m the only one who’s known him for donkey’s years and with whom he hasn’t quarreled?”
“I am Raasta’s mother.”
Jeebleh was on the verge of saying that that was beside the point, but it dawned on him that the opposite was the case: The fact that she was Raasta’s mother was the point. He speculated aloud: “Maybe he looks on me as a neutral person, or an impartial judge, able to listen to the two sides of the argument judiciously?”
“What two sides? There are no two sides! I want my daughter back, and I want her now. He can go where he pleases, something he’s already done. I don’t care. I want my Raasta back.”
“We’re assuming, without knowing it for a fact, that he’s holding Raasta hostage,” he countered.
“Why do you say we’re assuming that?”
“Because we are,” he said.
“Isn’t he?” she asked.
“We haven’t established that.”
Shanta grew more and more tense, and then, exhausted, slumped back lifelessly. He sat forward and, turning slightly, saw a slim book in Italian written by Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, a Somali of Persian origin. He recalled reading the book in New York, and thinking that it was no mean feat for a housewife to write about her life in Mogadiscio, and then her exile in Italy. He was pleased that Somalis were recording their ideas about themselves and their country, sometimes in their own language, sometimes in foreign tongues. These efforts, meager as they might seem, pointed to the gaps in the world’s knowledge about Somalia. Reading the slim volume had been salutary, because unlike many books by authors with clan-sharpened axes to grind, this was not a grievance-driven pamphlet. It was charming, in that you felt that the author was the first to write a book about the civil war from a Somali perspective. He asked Shanta what she thought about the book.
“I hadn’t been aware of the depth of her hurt until I read it,” she said, “just as I hadn’t given much thought, I confess, to the suffering of many Somalis of Tanzanian, Mozambican, or Yemeni descent. The civil war has brought much of that deep hurt to the surface. I hope that one day we’ll all get back together as one big Somali family and talk things through.”
“Who’s to blame for what’s happened?”
“I hate the word ‘blame,’” she said.
“Is Shirin Fazel Persian? Or is she one of us, Somali?”
“She is a deeply hurt Somali, like you and me,” she said. “When you are deeply hurt, you return to the memories you’ve been raised on, to make sense of what’s happening.”
“Do you reinvent your life?” Jeebleh asked.
“It is as if you see yourself through new eyes. And then you reason that you’re different, because you are after all from a different place, with a different ancestral memory.”
“You feel left out when you are hurt?”
“I suppose that is what Shirin Fazel feels. Left out and victimized, because she is of Persian descent.”
“Is Faahiye hurt in a similar manner?” Jeebleh asked.
“Because his family was different from ours?”
“Did he speak about it?”
“That would be uncharacteristic of him.”
“Because he belongs to the old world, in which you don’t speak about what hurt you, is that why? Or is it because he believed that the clan business had nothing to do with his hurt? That it was personal?”
“He belongs to a world,” Shanta explained, “in which he expects that those hurting him will realize their mistake of their own accord and, without being told, stop hurting him any further.”
“What do people do when they’re hurt?” he asked.
“Tell me.”
“Some people go public, and they show the world that they’re hurt. They accuse those who’ve hurt them, they become abusive, vindictive. Some become suicidal. Some withdraw with their hurt into the privacy of their destroyed homes, and sulk, and whine. To someone who’s hurt, nothing is sacred.”
Jeebleh felt oddly comforted by the thought that Shanta, no longer tearful, was attentive. No outbursts of emotion, nor did she behave neurotically when they talked in general terms. He must take care not to spring a question on her, lest she drop into a state of nervous tension.
“Why, why, why, why?” she asked.
He disregarded her question; he should muster the strength and the wit to make her relax until Faahiye called or Bile arrived — Bile would, he thought, show up at Shanta’s sooner or later — whichever came first. Then he became aware of her fixed stare.
“He turned our private quarrel into a public spectacle,” she accused. “He left, so the world would talk about him. And do you know why he did that? He did that to exact vengeance.” She was calm, composed as she spoke, and nothing indicated that she would go weepy on him. “By going public,” she went on, “he brought his hurt out into the open, as though he expected to receive a proper redress. Did he think how I might feel, how Bile might feel? Then Raasta and Makka disappeared.”
Jeebleh realized that she was staring at him, in fact focusing on a dribble of saliva dangling from his lower lip. Embarrassed at his dribbling like a baby, as he was prone to do whenever he concentrated, he sucked it in with a gust of air. He remembered that he had lent her his handkerchief, so he dried his chin with the back of his hand. He was about to excuse himself, when she started to speak.
“A wife is not likely to display her hurt in public the way a husband does. A woman doesn’t go blatantly public until after she has tried other ways of communicating with her spouse. Women keep these things under wraps for much longer than men do. It’s only when a woman can no longer deal with it that she speaks of it, first to her friends, then to her spouse. Only when no solution to the problem is in sight does she speak to others. It takes a very long time before outsiders hear of the marriage problem from a wife. By the time a woman makes it public, we can assume that the marriage is doomed.”
He couldn’t help thinking that this sounded like the crossroads where the Somali people stood. Like Faahiye and Shanta, they were not prepared to talk directly, but only through intermediaries — in the case of Somalia, through foreign adjudicators. Interfamilial disputes had a way of becoming protracted, at times requiring an eternity for the parties in the conflict to sit face to face and talk — alone!