Free Links by Nuruddin Farah Page B

negative, his friend was bound to say, “But what’s wrong with you?”
    Wrapped in a fever of shivers, Bile took the coffee tray with him into his study and sat in a swivel chair by the window, whose curtains were open. He placed the tray precariously on the side of the crowded desk, because there were far too many books on the coffee table. There were books everywhere, on the desk, on the floor by his favorite rocking chair, on the windowsill, many of them open, some with bookmarks, others lying facedown. One book was splayed on its side, as though it had been knocked over recently. Bile knew the man who had written it, a fellow doctor famous more for his silly infatuation with the politics of his clansman StrongmanSouth than for his professionalism. Bile stared at a spot in the distant heavens, in the manner of someone abruptly stripped of memories, and balked at his own reaction to Jeebleh’s unexpected arrival.
    When he heard the muezzin calling all Muslims to their dawn prayer, he pushed his enraged emotions aside and got up, intending to find a prayer rug for the first time in many years. He had no idea why, but a few minutes later he was standing before the blackboard on the wall, a piece of chalk in his hand, adding “Clean towels, sheets for Jeebleh’s bed, etc.” to the day’s to-do list. No sooner had he replaced the chalk and dusted his hands clean than he was appalled that he hadn’t said his prayers—and on top of this he was dismayed at reading what he had just written, for he had assigned Raasta’s room to Jeebleh without giving the matter any serious thought. He leaned against the wall, worried that he might sink into a delirium. With the sun’s early rays falling on his face, he might have been a rabbit caught in a mighty floodlight, its warren of possible escapes blocked off. When he went into the bathroom, he felt as closed in as a rabbit seeing its frightened expression in a mirror. Studying his reflection, he felt that he was staring at someone else’s face, remembering and reliving someone else’s history, listening to the thought processes of someone alien to him.
    Bile was fifty-eight, tall, with a back straight as a ramrod. There wasn’t a single ounce of extra fat on his body. His mud-brown eyes were restless, and his lips were forever astir, in the active manner of a mystic endlessly reciting his devotions. His hair was cut short, in the style of a get-up-and-go man who hasn’t the time to comb it. He typically wore either jeans or trousers that didn’t need to be ironed.
    Shaving, he cut his chin, and his forefinger came into contact with a trickle of blood. He dabbed the cut with toilet paper, and grew steadily calmer, until he remembered who and where he was. He dabbed the cut again, to see how much blood he was losing.
    In these unsettling times, everyone’s fate, actions, dreams, hates, and aspirations were seen, understood, and interpreted in stark political contexts; distrust was the order of the day, and everyone was suspicious of everybody else. If Jeebleh were to express dissatisfaction with Bile’s way of doing things, Bile would contrast it to his friend’s lex talionis, affirming that he, Bile, did not feel indentured to an Old Testament law of retaliation. There was no doubt in his mind that the dark side of wrong would not be allowed to triumph. Now this: Raasta kidnapped; her father, Faahiye, missing. Rumor had it that Faahiye had last been seen heading for a refugee camp in Mombasa.
    Bile’s fears and sense of despair came close to depression, as he thought of a western he had seen once in which the good characters were caught in deadly quarrels among themselves, while the bad, who posed a greater threat to the fabric of society, were all dealt winning hands in the first part of the film. He knew from personal experience how often people, like Faahiye and his wife, Shanta, eager to change the