Links by Nuruddin Farah Page B

curled up in an awful cramp. While he was stretching his legs and retraining his feet to walk, two youths, presumably bellboys, not in uniforms but in sarongs, grabbed hold of his bags, and went ahead inside.
    He bid the driver farewell and, even though he didn’t think he would ever get around to calling him, wrote down his telephone number and thanked him profusely. Then he followed the youths, into an enclosed area where there were tables and chairs. He could not be absolutely certain, but it was possible that he took leave of his senses for a few exhausted seconds, during which he may not have known who he was, where he was, or what on earth he was doing there.
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    COMING TO, HE CAST ABOUT FOR A SOLID ANCHOR AND SOON SPOTTED A rather rotund man, with a cuddly look about him, struggling to heave himself out of a threadbare chair. He was tempted to offer the man a hand, but thought better of it when he saw him extricating himself from the deep chair and straightening up, then coming forward, his right hand outstretched. He was not the handsomest of men: his mouth protruded, boasting teeth that might have been molded out of soapstone, and his lower lip curved in the unlikely shape of a kilt of clouds covering the southern half of a full moon. The man introduced himself as the manager. Jeebleh was comforted when he shook the man’s fleshy palm. “Welcome,” the manager said. “I hope everything has been smooth and comfortable since your arrival.”
    The accumulated horrors of the scene at the airport, the stress of meeting so many strangers in a city virtually alien, and now the necessity of staying in a hotel—these were taking their toll on Jeebleh, unnerving him, and making him lose his general equilibrium. Lest he should speak impulsively and say whatever came into his mind, he remained silent.
    â€œWelcome home, our bitter home!” said the man, reading into Jeebleh’s silence. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his baggy trousers, in which you could hear the jingle of colliding coins. (Jeebleh wondered what manner of coins these might be, and assumed they were not Somali, considering the high rate of inflation: a dollar was exchanging nowadays for thousands of shillings; when he had left for the United States, it had been worth six.) “I am Ali!”
    Ali offered a belated smile, as if now remembering that he had been trained to please his customers. “In an earlier life, in long-ago peacetime Somalia, I used to be the favorite of gossip columnists and the envy of other hotel managers,” he told Jeebleh. “I was appreciably more adept than any other hotel manager at getting the best of jobs. In my day, I played host to several kings of the petrodollar variety, not to mention a handful of African presidents on visits to Mogadiscio, and the secretaries-general of the UN, the Organization of African Unity and the Arab League too. And even though I am suitably qualified to run hotels anywhere in the world, having taken a degree in hotel management in England, I’ve chosen to stay. We are the sons of the land, to which we belong, you and I. I feel no regrets, though, none whatsoever.”
    Jeebleh suspected he knew what Ali meant when he said, “We are the sons of the land.” He understood the manager’s “we” to be inclusive: Jeebleh, Ali, and many other known but unnamed clansmen of theirs, united in blood. But was he right to interpret it this way?
    â€œWhy have you chosen to stay?” he asked.
    â€œI have a bedridden mother to look after.”
    And here he was, Jeebleh, come to pacify his mother’s troubled spirits. Yet he couldn’t and wouldn’t be able to say, No regrets, none whatsoever.
    â€œAnyway,” the manager continued, “we’ve been alerted to your coming, and we are at your service, to offer you our best.”
    â€œWho alerted you to my coming?”
    â€œA good friend of