Knots by Nuruddin Farah Read Free Book Online Page B

endearments that are de rigueur for a couple just married. If she were not a born actor, she thought, these on again/off again intimacies might have been difficult. It took a lot of nerve to get used to the juices of fresh love flowing, only for them to be turned off. This was clearly playing havoc on him. Arda explained, “Because women have more control over their bodies than men have over theirs.”
    Zaak’s carefree lifestyle—never keeping his side of the bargain, never helping in cleaning the toilets or making the beds, cooking or shopping for food—filled her with anger, and on such occasions, she hated their life of pretense. In Toronto, she knew the stakes would be higher; it was her territory, and she had very many friends from whom she held no secrets. The question was, how would she cope?
    She was delighted to prove that she could excel in anything at which she worked and was pleased that the TV documentaries had huge political and cultural relevance to all Canadians, more specifically the Somali-Canadians. The idea of having kick-started a belief, until then not prevalent among Somalis, that they could make a success of their presence in Canada was ascribed to her, but she still felt unfulfilled. She wanted to make it at best as an actor or alternatively as the producer of a puppet play, having been interested in puppetry ever since she took a summer course in the art.
    As if to highlight her importance, a two-man TV crew from CBS turned up at the airport to interview Cambara. Beaming a smile the size of the cosmos, Arda, wearing a garland, carried a bouquet of flowers in one hand and in the other a placard with two V’s traced in black felt pen, the words “Congratulations: Two Accomplishments” as large as the mysteries not yet revealed. That evening’s prime-time news alluded to her marriage without mentioning the spouse by name, for neither mother nor daughter would divulge it to friends or relatives until “the lucky man” arrived.

    As she combs her hair, which is an impenetrable tangle of kinks and a jungle of curls as dry as Somalia is arid, and as she struggles to persuade them to unknot, loosen up, Cambara remembers how on Zaak’s arrival in Toronto, hush met hush. Only one person was there to fetch him from the airport, Cambara, and she was judiciously dressed, her face swaddled in a shawl. She waited in a corner, away from the placard-carrying taxi and airport limousine drivers picking up strangers, or the others meeting their friends and relatives. No journalists. Not even Arda was there. At her mother’s suggestion, she condescended to give him a hug, following it with a brief kiss on the cheeks, just in case someone was spying on them, you never know.
    She showed him to his room in the apartment, and just as she had said when in Nairobi, he too said, “I’ll be okay.”
    But she asked, “What do you mean?”
    â€œI’ll pull my weight,” he explained.
    She thought of telling him “You are on your own,” and then walking out and letting him figure out what she meant, or of challenging him on the practicability of his intentions. In the event she said, “You don’t have to pull anyone’s weight other than your own.”
    She expected him to come back with a smart quip. Instead, he surprised her. He said, “You won’t have reason to complain.”
    In her head, she heard his statement differently, the refusenik part of her imagining a conversation between a wife-beater and his victim, the wife-beater vowing never to lay a finger on her and then giving her a worse thrashing the following day. However, the more accommodating part of her mind cast her thought in the generous spirit of a hopeless optimist, knowing full well that he would fail her.
    â€œSame conditions as in Nairobi apply,” she informed him. “What is different here is that I have a job to go to and a lot of friends. So be