He called New York, telling his wife and daughters in an edited fashion what had happened. He touched only briefly on Caloosha’s death and his burial, and did not even mention Af-Laawe. He would explain things better once he was back in the safety of home. He concentrated instead on the commemoration of his mother — the construction of the sepulcher, the symbolic reburial, and the upcoming alla-bari feast. He told his wife that he was changing his return date, and would let her know about it. Feeling guilty about not offering a complete and true version of things, he laid it on thick when he stressed how much he had missed them all, and how eager he was to return to the bosom of his loving family.
At last Bile came out of his room, where the light was now on. Jeebleh took the slight grimace on his face as a smile, but Bile remained silent. He seemed, however, to be in a cheerier mood than Jeebleh had expected. Perhaps the antidepressants, if that is what they were, had helped him emerge.
As for Faahiye, the poor fellow kept performing a ritual of his own invention, putting his index fingers in his ears and turning them around and around, as if his ears were filled to bursting with wax. Choosing not to raise the devil, because she knew no one would tolerate it, Shanta went to him and spoke solicitously. There was an opaqueness at the center of Faahiye’s insanity, as perhaps there was at the heart of Bile’s.
Shanta was the one to break the silence, to tell Raasta and Makka that they would be going home early, for they had a busy day ahead of them. As they left, Faahiye leaned against Shanta for support; Makka leaned on Raasta, as though for affirmation. It was a most humbling lesson in compassion.
Where was Seamus? Jeebleh had no idea, nor did anyone else. But this didn’t bother him, convinced as he was that Seamus was engaged in an activity worthy of a reliable friend.
WHEN SEAMUS RETURNED LATER THAT NIGHT, SILENT AND EXPLAINING nothing, Jeebleh shuttled between The Refuge — now turned over to several imams chanting the Koran — and the apartment, where his secular friends were camped, barely speaking to each other.
The imams were reciting the entire Holy Scripture, each with his own assigned chapters. At one point, Jeebleh listened to the head imam interpreting a verse for the benefit of his younger colleagues. The imam alluded to a remark ascribed to the prophet Mohammed, about sedition. And perhaps in order to throw more light on the situation in Somalia, the learned scholar paraphrased the Prophet’s words: “Cursed with the hearts of the devil in their bodies, some of the ‘leaders’ will inevitably veer from the virtuous path into iniquity.”
Feeling sufficiently instructed, Jeebleh walked out into the starry night to take a closer look at the cow that would be slaughtered the next day. Humbled by the sight, he stood before the heifer as though meaning to communicate with her. Jeebleh thought again about his belated attempt to make peace with his mother in the act of reclaiming her. How he wished he could send her a message and have the sacrificial beast before which he was standing deliver it. In subdued sorrow, unable to give flesh to his idea, he returned to the apartment.
On his way there, it struck him that madness was a country to which many people he knew in Mogadiscio had paid visits. He prayed that neither he nor any one of his friends would suffer permanent damage.
The apartment was quieter than when he had left it. Seamus’s door was open, but his room was empty of him. Bile’s door was open too, and he was there. Jeebleh wondered where Seamus might have gone, but said nothing to Bile, having no wish to bother him. Then he stretched out on his bed, fully dressed, thinking about what remained to be done. No, he was not ready to abandon himself to sleep.
JEEBLEH WAS UP AND ON HIS FEET SHORTLY, STANDING SHAKILY ON THE wrong side of forty winks, still so exhausted his knees were about to buckle under him. The morning hadn’t yet dawned, and he had on the same clothes as yesterday.
He was a changed man. He wasn’t quite on cloud nine yet, but he was on his way — aiming at it, hoping for the chance. He had opened a parenthesis with his decision to visit Mogadiscio on a whim, to elude death at the same time that he reclaimed his mother, whom he had neglected into an early grave. Now the parenthesis seemed to be closing, but he felt that it wouldn’t have served his purpose for that to happen just yet. After all, he was not prepared to dwell in pronominal confusion, which was where he had been headed. He had to find which pronoun might bring his story to a profitable end.
It was too early to assess the changes that the visit had wrought on his character. Presumably his general personality would be unaltered. No doubt, something in him had given here and there, the way fabric stretches. But the basics remained, gathered at the corners, perhaps sagging or giving at the seams, where the stitching might be faulty. Fancy living in an open parenthesis for as long as Jeebleh had lived in his.
His eyes were no longer drooping with bags of insomnia. Nor was he as harried as he had been the day before, when he went back and forth between the apartment and The Refuge. Granted, it would’ve been easy for him to kill, just as it would’ve been easy to die at someone else’s hands, in a city where death was treated like an acquaintance. He remembered his exchanges with Seamus on the related topic of burial. How Seamus lamented that in Mogadiscio they buried you quickly; how he found the idea of being buried, no questions asked and no postmortem, so troublesome; how it irked him that no one inquired what someone had died of, and that, at the mention of a name now forever linked to death, people sought refuge in the phrase “the will of Allah,” as if this were the alias of the deceased. Seamus would probably want people to have the facts, to know how Caloosha had died, at whose hands, and why. Because he did not wish to play a part in a cover-up, Jeebleh thought it wise to leave before he was tempted to speak of what bothered him.
Soon after his arrival, someone had said to him: “Our people are poor in their hearts. Our people are restless nomads in search of city-based fulfillment.” Jeebleh would be well advised to stay out of the people’s way, “as soon as the torch of ambition, backed by greed, begins to burn in their eyes.” He was damned if he could remember who had said this. It might’ve been Af-Laawe; it could equally have been Caloosha. That you could receive good wisdom from the mouths of bad men, never mind the names by which they were known or their main purpose in life, surprised him. He wished that he had shot back with a witty remark of his own, that whoever lets his dogs loose should prepare to feed them when they come back hungry. And he would add this for good measure: Take your cynical remarks and sprinkle them on your carbonara like the best Parmesan!
The muezzin called at dawn, and Jeebleh went to the hall where the imams were. He found them ready for a well-earned break. The head imam presented the prayers to Jeebleh, the official “owner of the corpse.” He received the blessings, his hands cupped, palms up, in the gesture of a devotee humbling himself before a deity. He handed over basketfuls of money to the head imam, relieved that the scholar had forgotten an earlier condition that he would arrange rides for each of them. When the imams left, Jeebleh returned to the apartment with the express aim of getting some sleep. And even though there was still no sign of Seamus, again he did not ask Bile if he knew where he might have gone. Bile was busy praying, and Jeebleh didn’t want to disturb him. Instead, Jeebleh went to sleep.