Crossbones by Nuruddin Farah Read Free Book Online

have been found to be uncomplimentary to the Courts.
    “Is anything else deleted?” Malik wants to know.
    Jeebleh tells him about the photo.
    Malik says nothing. Jeebleh feels the sense of stress spreading, with Malik biting his lower lip, too angry to speak. Jeebleh thinks how stresses produce inexplicable results and he wonders how the stresses they are all under, the strain that is bound to invade them—Malik, Ahl, and himself—will affect them. What will they be like when they crack up? What will Malik be like when the nervous tension makes him go to pieces? He watches with worry as Malik steps away and stands before the mirror on the wall in the living room and takes a good look at his reflection. Jeebleh senses that even to himself Malik must lookolder in a matter of moments, rugged and more wrinkled, his face careworn.
    Dajaal returns alone and gives the computer without further explanation to Malik. Malik handles it with care the way a mother handles a sick child who is asleep. He takes it to the table in his future workroom off the kitchen, without bothering to open it.
    Jeebleh asks, “Where is Gumaad?”
    “He took public transport,” Dajaal replies.
    Jeebleh’s mobile phone rings. It is Cambara, saying, “Where are you all? Bile and I are waiting, and the lunch is getting cold.”
    “We’re coming,” Jeebleh assures her.

AHLULKHAIR, KNOWN TO FAMILY AND CLOSE FRIENDS AS AHL, OLDER brother to Malik and the director of a Minneapolis-based center tasked with researching matters Somali, calls in sick, the first time he has done so in his long career as an educator. The truth is, the growing trend among Somali youths to join the self-declared religionist radical fringe, Shabaab, has thrown him off balance. Taxliil, his stepson, has now been gone more than six months, and is suspected to be somewhere in Somalia. In an earlier rumor, the runaway youth was seen in Kismayo, a coastal city that is in the hands of Shabaab and deemed too dangerous to visit. He was said to be training as a suicide bomber. But more recently they have heard, relayed to Ahl’s wife, Yusur, via her close friend Xalan, whose husband, Warsame, received it from a man in the Puntland Intelligence Service, that Taxliil, along with a couple of Shabaab-trained diehards, is headed for Bosaso. Warsame and Xalan live in Bosaso and have offered to host Ahl when he arrives in the region in a few days, in search of Taxliil. Nobody is sure of the whereabouts of the other twenty or so Somali-American youths who havevanished from their homes (in various parts of the United States, but principally from Minnesota), but the rumor that Taxliil has been dispatched to Puntland, hurriedly promoted to the assignment of liaising with the pirates in a bid to build a bridge between them and Shabaab, is gaining plausibility. Taxliil is said to have served twice as an interpreter to a delegation from the Courts, to help them to communicate with hostages, some of them Muslim, held by Somali pirates.
    Ahl’s whole body has lately been out of kilter, so unbalanced that on occasion he has been incapable of coordinating the simplest physical demands. A month ago, he woke up just before dawn from a deep sleep, and, needing very badly to pee, sat up, ready to do just that. Only he never got to the bathroom; he wet himself, like a baby.
    Malik and Jeebleh vowed to ask around about Taxliil when they reached Somalia, attempting to trace his movements in the country, but Ahl knew he must go to Puntland himself. Of course, there is no guarantee that Taxliil is in Puntland, or that any of them—Ahl, Malik, or Jeebleh—will locate him. Or that even if they do so, the young fellow will be willing to return with them to Minneapolis.
    It is no easy matter preparing for a trip to Somalia these days. The country has been in the throes of unending violence for the past two decades. Moreover, Ahl and Malik, born and raised in Aden, were brought up to think of Somalia as their