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

Admittedly, it surprised her that her mother had never credited him with being a wife-beater and a sadist to his offspring. The shame of it: Officials from the social welfare department intervened to move his children out of harm’s way and provide them with protection. Looking back on it from that perspective, she did count herself lucky. Why, it might have been her lot too if the two of them had become man and woman.
    She asks, “Did you say something about dinner?”
    He looks at her in a wicked way, winking, and says, “My ambrosia is here, and therefore I’m not in the mood to eat anything else.”
    â€œMaybe because qaat has dulled your taste buds?”
    She thinks how little we know people when they change and their circumstances alter, especially when the two changes occur concomitantly. Like it or not, she has no choice but to adapt to her new situation. It is no easy matter to be in a city with which she is no longer familiar, what with the civil war still unfolding after more than a decade and her long absence from the metropolis. She cannot be sure that Zaak will take up the cudgel in safeguarding support of her if the city’s adolescent boys loyal to the warlord occupying the family property turn lethal. He is less likely to offer no help if the warlord refuses to vacate it. Maybe it is the norm for the likes of Zaak to behave abnormally in atypical circumstances.
    She says, “You were never friends with food, unless someone else tamed it. I remember you either making do with the same diet every single day or running to the nearest restaurant at the sight of unpeeled onions. I felt you fled from uncooked meat the way some of us might flee a lion.”
    â€œI’ve survived, as you can well see.”
    â€œIn what condition?”
    â€œI am not complaining.”
    When she can no longer focus her mind on these thoughts, she asks, “Where is the dinner that I must eat alone?”
    â€œIt is by the fridge,” he says.
    â€œNot in the fridge?”
    â€œThe electricity grid has been off since before midnight yesterday,” he explains, “and the fridge is off. No point in keeping it switched on and no point in putting the food in it either.”
    Cambara looks up at the bulb overhead, burning.
    Zaak follows her eyes, nods several times, and then offers an explanation. “The supply of electricity for this—the second phase—originates from a small two-star hotel which generates its own power. The manager has a little ice-making factory. We tap into it.”
    â€œHow do you do that?”
    â€œI make underhand payments to his workers,” he says, pleased with his graft. “The water heater, my bedroom, and this section of the living room are connected to this supplier. I pay five dollars a month for tapping into the system.”
    â€œAnd to cook?”
    â€œI don’t cook,” he says, as if proud of it.
    Taken slightly aback because of the fierceness of his assertion, she makes as if to flatter him. She says, “Surely you’ve prepared the dinner you’re offering me? If offered, I would eat your Bolognese, I am so ravenous.”
    â€œMy dear, I couldn’t bear the pressure you place on anyone who deigns to present you with the food they have cooked for you,” he says. “You once described the sauce I prepared as looking like bird turd and tasting like chop suitable for a dog.”
    She does not remember saying that to his face, but this sounds like something she might have said to her mother over the phone, and he might have been eavesdropping on her long-distance conversation with her. It would be very like him to have done that. No matter, his remarks do not produce the result he may have expected, even though they are acerbic, and he delivers them coolly, as though he has rehearsed them with the intention of hurting her; the keenness of his observation seems to dull against her skin, which feels