Knots by Nuruddin Farah Read Free Book Online Page A

of Somalis in the civil war context. “We’ll learn more about them as we talk to more and more of them,” Cambara promised.
    Then her series of interviews started, and she worked from early until late on some days, seeing less and less of Zaak in the daytime and more and more of him and Ngai, who went with the two of them to restaurants, in the evening. Cambara introduced Zaak as her man to some of the Somalis they met, and the two of them put on an act for their own and Ngai’s benefit. In private, Cambara kept him at a distance, and he didn’t seem to mind that much.
    Because of the topicality of the events unfolding in Somalia, Cambara had a select number of her pieces aired on prime time in Toronto, including some in which she interviewed the staff of the Canadian and British High Commissions as well as the embassies of a handful of Arab and European countries, where the Somalis were headed. The notices in the Toronto papers were favorable, one of them, The Globe and Mail, describing the pieces as “impressive, the job of a pro.” There was a photo of Cambara, big enough to mount on her mother’s bedroom wall as a memento.
    The local media got into the act too, thanks to an anonymous call and a fax received from Ottawa alerting a couple of the editors to how Cambara’s work “done in Kenya” was being received back in Canada. When one of the journalists from the Daily Nation rang for an interview, Cambara interpreted this as being part of Arda’s string-pulling; the idea was to turn Cambara’s visit to Kenya and the interviews she conducted into an article worthy of the front page of Kenya’s high-circulation newspaper. A features editor specializing in writing about women’s affairs in the continent did a piece on her for the paper, pictures and all.
    The Canadian High Commission to Kenya jumped on the bandwagon after the appearance of the piece in the Daily Nation , and its titular deputy of mission, who had until then been of two minds whether to see her and for how long, invited her first to tea, which he later upgraded to lunch, because several of his colleagues at the station wished to join in. The high commissioner, who arrived late, was warm in his praise of her and had dessert and coffee with her as they chatted. When the luncheon formalities were over, she went down to the ground floor, where she met a woman whose name Arda had given her, the woman who would help with the speedy processing of Zaak’s papers. Back home in Toronto, the woman who did not rate inclusion on the guest list of the deputy said that she, Cambara, was the envy of the fraternity of journalists because of her scoop. Herself, she saw her success as a one-off thing, on a par with the one-off she was doing for Arda by assisting Zaak in getting to Canada. She had no intention of becoming a reporter for CBS or a bed-sharing spouse to Zaak.
    Several weeks of living in close proximity with Zaak neither excited nor palled on her. Her mother rang frequently, at one point teasing her that “it is not a bad thing to be a wife, when you think of it, is it? Especially when you are not subject to the tyranny of cooking, washing dishes and clothes, ironing someone else’s pants, mending someone else’s socks, and having babies and caring for them all on your own, without the husband ever lifting a finger.” Three months later, when the news reached her that the papers might be issued any day now, Arda was still wondering how Cambara felt about being “a wife” to Zaak.
    Cambara thought she was seeing the humorous side of things as she answered, “It feels like picking up a threadbare skirt at a flea market.”
    In Nairobi, their living arrangement remained unchanged. She had no room for closeness in private—each stayed in his or her section of the shared space—but when they were in the presence of consular officers, they made frequent use of such