Free Crossbones by Nuruddin Farah Page A

left. He has a cap on against the glare and the midday heat. Here the sun is very, very strong and, never weakening, bakes everything in sight, shortening one’s shadow, almost obliterating it. He knows from having lived in Yemen that only after the sun has exhausted its stamina the afternoon shadows emerge.
    Djibouti is a small country caught in the crosshairs of several tendencies—it shares a border with Somalia; is close to Yemen; lies along a stretch of an important waterway, the Bab el Mandeb; and exists cheek by jowl with Ethiopia and Eritrea. The eyes of the Westernworld are trained on it, and NATO has a prominent presence on its soil. It is a miracle that Djibouti continues to exist and fight for its corner in its own wily ways.
    The country, rich in history, replenishes Ahl’s sense of nostalgia, and he walks with the slowness of a hippo after a fight, taking in Djibouti’s polyglot of tongues—Yemeni Arabic, Somali, Amharic, French, and Tigrigna. He’s read somewhere that there is proof of sophisticated agriculture in the area, dating back four thousand years. Important evidence comes from the tomb of a young girl going back to 2000 BC or earlier. Now he is impressed with the city’s cosmopolitanism.
    The noise of children running in every direction attracts his attention: a dog is giving chase to five, six boys, one of whom has apparently run off with its bone, maybe to eat it; his mates are in the running for fun, but the dog wants its bone back. A Somali-speaking Yemeni who is standing in front of an eatery observes that the boys are not so much engaged in mischief as they are in finding something to eat. They won’t let a dog eat its bone in peace.
    Ahl asks the man if he is open for business. He asserts that he is, and they talk. It turns out that the man relocated from Mogadiscio to Djibouti after the eruption of the civil war there. Ahl orders a meal of mutton and injera, Ethiopian pancakes made from teff, the millet-like grain grown exclusively in the highlands of Ethiopia and ground into flour. Ahl loves the spongy feel of the injera, and its sour taste.
    The Yemeni asks him where he is from, and Ahl says he is going to Bosaso.
    “You must be in business, then,” the Yemeni says.
    “Do you know Bosaso at all?”
    The Yemeni sings Bosaso’s praises, describing it as a booming town. He claims to know a couple of people who are making a mint out of shady businesses such as piracy and people smuggling. Pressed, hewon’t give their names, only their broad identities. This is not of much help in a region more varied in hyphenated identities than even the United States. But the man is becoming suspicious, knowing that Djibouti is chockablock with spies from the United States, Ethiopia, and other countries. His conversation comes to a halt, and he goes away and returns with the bill, announcing that it is time for him to close up and join his mates. Ahl isolates the key word
sit
, which in Djibouti, Yemen, and everywhere else Somalis live means to chew
qaat
.
    On the way back to his hotel, the streets are empty; everyone, it seems, is chewing
qaat
. Ahl comes across an abandoned building, with the paint coming off in layers, birds nesting in its gable, and a dog and its litter of pups sheltering in a quiet corner. The lintel is engraved with the Star of David. A huge lock the size of a human head, and an equally large chain, both brown with rust and old age, hang on the door.
    In Mogadiscio, the cathedral was razed to the ground in the general mayhem at the start of the civil war, but here in Djibouti, the synagogue stands as testimony to peace. One of the first victims of the Somali strife was an Italian, Padre Salvatore Colombo, who lived in Mogadiscio for close to thirty years as the head of the Catholic Church–funded orphanage, one of the oldest institutions in the city. More recently, a Shabaab operative desecrated the Italian cemeteries, digging up the bones and scattering them around. To Ahl,