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“Bile's told me how they behaved, your clansmen,” Seamus said. “What a repulsive lot! Fancy asking you to pay for the repairs of
their
war machine. Do they think you are a warlord? They don't know you as well as some of us think we do. But what cheek!”

“I told them off.”

“Glad you told them to sod off!” Seamus was getting a little excited, and louder. “I know how you feel. I told mine off, whingers the lot of them. I told them to naff off, the moaners. I was a little tyke then, and I haven't lived in Ireland since, because of my family. How I hate whingers. But you want to know what I think? I think you must be careful next time you meet any of them, if there is a next time. They'll stick a knife in your back, easy as taking a toffee from a baby. They're all plunderers, every single one of them. But then, you know that, don't you?”

“I do!” Jeebleh agreed.

“And they bury you fast here,” Seamus said.

“Don't worry. I won't let them.”

“Good for you!”

“I refuse to die. My family wouldn't want me buried here. My wife is an American, you know, and calls this place ‘a jerkwater of a ruin.' I've other responsibilities elsewhere, a loving family to love.”

“Glad to hear it.”

There was a brief pause.

Jeebleh said, “It's lovely to see you.”

“You know what pisses me off?” Seamus said.

“Tell me.”

“What pisses me off no end is how easily they dispense with the formality of a postmortem. They cart you off and away with the enthusiasm of a two-pot screamer heading for the pub, murmuring a few verses. I won't stand for any of that. I've drawn up my will, and Bile has a notarized copy of it in the event of anything unexpected. I don't wish to be planted in the earth fast. In fact, the mere thought of it kills me. I've provided Bile with a pile of cash locked in the safe. I want to be flown out of here, with the leisured slowness of an Irishman, and I want a wake and lots of drinking and feasting. That's what I want!”

Then all at once, he wore an expression that Jeebleh didn't know how to interpret. He remembered Seamus's charming cheekiness, his posturing, his clowning.

“How's your mother?” Jeebleh asked.

Seamus looked sad, and exhausted from jet lag. The color rose in his cheeks, and he said, “She's tough as nails, and obstinately holding on. Thanks for asking.” His eyes dimmed and after a pause he said, “Sorry about yours. Please accept my belated condolences.”

Jeebleh looked steadily at Seamus as he poured coffee from the espresso machine into two cups, then passed one over. “Tell me your latest,” he said, “and then let's work our way back to when we last met.”

“I've just come from Ireland,” Seamus said, obliging, “with a duffel bag of money to top up what Bile and I had between us, so we can keep The Refuge going until we run out of charity money again. As you can see, we're all fine, may God help us, and the fat is not in the fire yet! We're optimistic, despite the disappearance of our dearest, Raasta and Makka.”

“I'm not sure Bile's told me how you got here the first time,” Jeebleh said. “If he has, I don't remember. Anyway, he and I still have to catch up with each other. It is a bit of a blur, all that I've learned. So why Mogadiscio?”

Seamus was so still that Jeebleh thought he had seen a green-eyed fairy. “My life was gathering dust,” he said, “cobwebs forming in the corners, because of my nine-to-five job. The more the dust gathered, the more fits of uglies I had. I traveled a lot, but my travels were always work-related. I would spend a week in New York, two in Bangkok, a couple of days in Melbourne, then a month in New York, and another in Nairobi, always traveling and always working. I was in terrific demand as a simultaneous interpreter, and the pay was top-notch. I couldn't complain about being everyone's favorite, but it was getting to me.”

“What's wrong with pegging away at work?”

“I hated becoming a gun for hire,” Seamus said. “You'll remember I speak seven languages that are understood in areas of the world held apart by the guttural, the tonal, the diphthong, and other tongue-twisting differences. Well, I was on the road for long stretches of time. I made pots of money, but that wasn't good enough, and I was on the verge of freaking out. I was lonely, and my life felt as though it had no purpose.”

Jeebleh said, “What passport do you travel on?”

“British.”

“Your loyalty lies with Britain or Ireland?”

A lightning sense of humor flashed in Seamus's eyes, and he grinned. When Jeebleh looked at him, puzzled, Seamus said, “Funny you should ask that.”

Jeebleh waited patiently. In Padua, Seamus used to describe himself as “a colonial”! And since he was at a loss to find an equivalent word in Italian, he would often just use the English, and explain it to those who had no idea what he was talking about.

Now he said, “My loyalties do not lie with the Union Jack, for sure. Mine's an all-inclusive Irish loyalty, with a good measure of cosmopolitanism. The idea of owing allegiance to a country is foreign to me.”

“You haven't answered, Why Mogadiscio?”

“Because Mogadiscio was
there,
in Africa!”

“What about Mogadiscio? What about Africa?”

“I used to donate a little more than a third of my earnings to charities in Africa, when cobwebs laden with the memories of a spider started to waylay me. Thinking of our friendship and our closeness turned to Africa into a cause. For me, Africa became my cause!”

“You never thought of Ireland that way?”

“No. I ruined Ireland for myself a long time ago, did some things there I couldn't go back and live with.”

“And what might that have been?”

Seamus's eyes dodged, and his conversation followed. “Mogadiscio seemed to be the ideal place for me.”

“Hiding out with warlords and mercenaries?” Jeebleh countered jokingly.

“And Bile too! But yes, you're right.

“I was on the run most of the time anyhow,” Seamus said, after a silence, “spending a week on a curry-and-chow-mein tour, Delhi for a weekend, Hong Kong for a day. This wasn't work, but run, run, and run, a lifestyle with no room for reflection, a life meaninglessly held together by a major absence: love! I'm not speaking of loving a woman or a man, don't misunderstand me, but of a good, plain, old-fashioned, sixties-style personal commitment to love.”

“And what have you found coming here? Love?”

“Will you forgive a cliché?”

“Go ahead.”

“I've run into my self, coming here.”

“Is this good or bad?”

“There's a purpose to my life now: Raasta!”

Then he was back to when he decided to come to Mogadiscio: how he bought the
New York Times
Sunday edition at midnight, in San Francisco; how he read about a UN-funded job in Somalia; how he applied; how he was short-listed; and how he was selected. He packed lightly, convinced that he would hate it. But he didn't. He met Bile—“It was more like running into my self”—and Raasta; he stayed. “Perhaps there's some truth in the wisdom that there is no happiness sweeter than the happiness built on someone else's sorrow. And this city has enough sorrow, with much deeper foundations.”

“That's how Mogadiscio has struck you?”

Seamus replied, “Mogadiscio, because of Raasta, is what a straw dripping with water is to a man dying of thirst. I'm aware of the fact that it's a death trap, and because of this my heart goes out to those who're caught up in the fighting, and those who cannot help losing themselves in its politics. I am here to stay, that's what matters.”

“And the cobwebs?”

“Vamoose!”

Jeebleh wished he could say that about himself. But then, he hadn't come to sweep clean the corners of his life that had grown dustier from neglect. And while eluding death, he would lay his mother's troubled soul to rest. He knew this was a tall order, but worth trying.

“Tell me about yourself,” Seamus said. “Why are you in Mogadiscio?”

“I've come to ennoble my mother's memory.”

Seamus knew that there were occasions when it was best not to say anything, not to even bother with condolences, because there are no words with which to express one's sentiments satisfactorily. He had heard a great deal about the mothers of Jeebleh and Bile, but it was difficult for him to imagine them alive, a lot easier to think of them as dead. He had a vague memory of some controversy to do with Jeebleh's letters, but Seamus wasn't sure if Caloosha had been involved, and in what capacity. He seemed to remember it was Shanta who had spilled the beans on this aspect of the controversy.

“How do you plan to achieve that?” Seamus asked.

“I'm working on it.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Thank you.”

Seamus now had a disheveled expression as he asked, “Have you seen Caloosha, since coming?”

“I've seen him. Have you?”

“I haven't had the desire to meet him ever,” Seamus said. “The things I've heard about him haven't encouraged me to.”

“I met him briefly, that's all.”

“And Shanta?”

“Not yet, but I plan to.”

Jeebleh looked at his right hand, palm up, and stared at where the heart line veered toward his middle finger. He asked, “Have you met Af-Laawe?”

After some reflection, Seamus said, “Af-Laawe, the Marabou, is sure to discover the whereabouts of the dead, in whatever state they're in. I would seek him out if I hadn't any idea in which of the many cemeteries someone was buried. The man's death instinct contrasts well with Bile's life instinct.”

“What do you think about him?”

“He gives me the shudders.”

As the conversation paused again, Jeebleh remembered their youthful, energetic days, when to pass the time they took turns completing each other's unfinished sentences. When they engaged each other in that kind of banter, fellow students who joined them found it difficult to keep up. Often, even the languages changed—from Italian to English, then perhaps to Arabic. Toward the end of their stay in Padua, Seamus had picked up the basics of Somali.

Jeebleh would have to run a fever of nerves before reintroducing the seesawing games of their younger days in Italy. Most likely, it wouldn't work here, in troubled Somalia. He asked, “Did you come to Mogadiscio before or after the Marines landed?”

“I arrived in Mogadiscio in 1992,” Seamus said. “I was head of an advance team charged with assessing the needs of the United Nations offices. I was to set up the translation units. The UN intervention was estimated to cost more than one hundred million U.S. dollars for that year alone. We put up a guesthouse, which doubled as our office. Because we hadn't the authority to hire any local staff, New York imported Somalis with American passports. And you had old British colonial officers running the show: former BBC staffers, chummy with the former dictator, who served as consultants to the UN. I remember an Englishman who kept yattering at me about clan warfare, and how the combined efforts of the U.S. and the UN would sort out the mess. Sod it, it was utter rubbish. Left to me. I would've committed the lot to a nuttery, the self-serving imbeciles.”

“How did you and Bile meet?”

“I shared a table at the guesthouse with an Italian-American woman who was on an advance mission to open the UNICEF office,” Seamus said. “She mentioned his name in passing. I looked him up. It wasn't difficult to find him.”

“Was he living alone then?”

“He was spending a lot of time at Shanta's, with Raasta, even though he was living in shoddy settings. He had the bare minimum when I first visited him. We talked, and he shared some of his visions with me, visions that took a different form every time we met.” As he spoke, Seamus bit at his fingernails, to the flesh, at times making it difficult for Jeebleh to understand what he was saying.

“Did you recognize each other when you met?”

“He didn't recognize me,” Seamus said.

“Because of the beard?”

“I hadn't grown one then.” He looked into Jeebleh's eyes, as if focusing on some distant horizon, and then sipped his coffee.

“You didn't expect him to recognize you?”

“For one thing, my name would've been the furthest thing from his mind,” Seamus said. “Also, the civil war had had a disorienting effect on him—he was concentrating on minimal survival. But he recognized my voice the moment I spoke a full sentence.

“I went to visit him at The Refuge. He was quieting a toddler who was having a convulsive crying fit. The girl fell silent on seeing me come closer, and from the way she stared at me, you might have thought she knew me from somewhere else. She rose to her full height and wobbled away, past me, up to the new playhouse, where Raasta was playing with blocks.”

“And then?”

“A thousand memories were condensed into a giant singular memory, which dwarfed all others, and I recited a verse from Dante's
Inferno,
in which enslaved Somalia was a home of grief, a ship with no master that was floundering in a windstorm.”

“Then he recognized you?”

“And I stayed to help at The Refuge.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that!”

“What else?” Jeebleh asked.

“I don't know why I thought about olives then—olive fruits, olive trees, and olive wood,” Seamus said. “Or why my mind went quietly about its thoughts in the way bees go contentedly about their motion, each droning note resulting from the previous one. I had no idea if the thought about olives came to me because we had been in Italy when we last met. Or if the fine polish of Bile's smooth skin reminded me of olive leaves, dark green on one side, silvery on the other. It could be that I was comparing our friendship to the olive tree. Because when the top branches die, a fresh trunk with a new lease on life emerges. And the tree bears fruit between the ages of five to ten years, and may not reach full maturity until after twenty!”