Read Online Knots by Nuruddin Farah - Free Book Online Page A

Hargeisa, used to wear to the primary school here in Mogadiscio after an all-night chewing.
    â€œAre you okay?” she asks.
    â€œI’m fine.”
    â€œYou don’t look it,” she says cockily.
    â€œWhat makes you say that?”
    â€œThe unhealthy way you’re sweating,” she comments.
    â€œYou don’t like sauna, à la tropics?” he says.
    â€œThis is no steam bath, and you know it,” she says.
    â€œI like my sauna this way,” he says.
    â€œHow misguided can you be?” she says.
    He is silent—a man alone with his fever.
    She takes a measure of the low depth to which Zaak has descended since their last encounter several years ago in Toronto, when he spent a couple of nights in a police cell for beating his wife and maltreating his children. She raised and paid his bail at Arda’s behest. When you combine his chain-smoking, his frequent chewing of qaat , and his living in unaired rooms stinking as awfully as the armpit of piglets, then you have a recipe for unmitigated dissonance between what is expected from someone you think you’ve known all your life and the unbecoming behavior they come up with when their situation has changed.
    Maybe it all came down to the sad fact that Zaak did not deserve all the help he received from Arda and Cambara, as he could not appreciate their contribution from the time he joined them as a preteen. She was certain that he had been in a state fit to be airlifted from Nairobi and to enter into the contract of the anomalous matrimony soon after he and she ended theirs in an unbecoming acrimony. From the comments attributed to him, you would think that she and Arda had done him a disservice and that they ought to apologize to him, not the other way around. The memory of what he had done cut far deeper than she had imagined, and she hoped that he would be desperate for a sense of self-recovery in the same way she was trying to channel her grief into a positive outlook, which is what prompted her to come to Mogadiscio in the first place.
    Now she holds his gaze steadily in hers until his eyes grow rheumy and he turns away. She does not feel sorry for him, nor does she empathize with him, because she disapproves of his current behavior as well as his unwarranted treatment of his wife and children. A bully goes for the jugulars of the weak, and his wife Xadiitha filled the bill: a young divorcée, barely literate and until then with no papers and no supporting family, who, in less than five years, gave him three girls. Cambara later heard unconfirmed reports that Arda had had a discreet hand in setting him up with Xadiitha. Rumor had it that Arda placed the first phone call to the family, from her and Zaak’s subclan, with whom Xadiitha was staying—they treated her more like a servant than a valued member of their household—and then managed to remain in the background right until the day of the wedding, to which she contributed financially. That her mother had done this did not bother Cambara any more than it upset her when she first learned that Zaak had shown his true colors: that he was a violent man. If a cloak of indifference were drawn over Zaak’s despicable mistreatment of Xadiitha; if it did not trouble Cambara enough either to confront him or to speak about it to Arda; if Arda made judicious interventions by having Xadiitha and the children visit for several weeks, it was because of selfish reasons, both on her part and her mother’s. (Cambara put it to Raxma: “I derive a sense of egotistic relief, knowing that he is no longer a nuisance to me but to Xadiitha.”) She didn’t need to elaborate that not only was Xadiitha dispensable but also she did not warrant Cambara and Arda’s worry. Nor was the poor woman worth a moment’s stress. If anything, Xadiitha was expedient, in that she helped them to rid themselves of Zaak, and there was no better way to achieve their purpose.