Knots Read Online Free PDF Page A

window wide to let in the early-evening sea breeze, which in its own way weakens her resolve to have the cold shower after all. Her chest rises and falls as she fills her lungs with sea air and breathes in nostalgic memories of the city’s salted humidity. The puff of the wind washing over her helps stimulate her powers of recall, and before she knows it, she is in her preteens, mischievously baring her budding breasts in Zaak’s presence and daring him to touch them. Because he hadn’t the nerve, she accused him of being a shirking coward. Naked and in flip-flops, her right hand resting limply on her hip, her admiring gaze falls on her waist, which is too narrow for a woman her age, especially one who has had a child. Cambara wonders how much the exposure to civil war horrors has affected Zaak’s outlook on life and, if so, in what significant ways.
    As if asking now the right profile and now the left one to yield up their cheeky confidences one at a time, she stands slightly to the left of the mirror and then to the right of it. She listens to a faucet dripping, a cistern running, a rusty window shakily creaking on its hinges. Then, when she least expects it, she distinctly picks out the sound of a bird calling to its mate, in mourning. She regards the face looking back at her lengthily from the depth of the looking glass with renewed apprehension. She ascribes her inability to compose herself in the way she likes to the fact that, like the bird, she too is grieving.
    Her eyes bulge with so many unshed tears, and she senses a sudden, almost blinding rush of hot blood flowing to her head, but she catches herself in time before losing her balance and dropping to the wet floor in a dead faint. She stands upright and breathes in deeply, harder and longer, and more frequently until she is sure that the world won’t pull away from under her feet. Now steady, and not likely to founder, she inhales some more sea air, and when she imagines that she has taken in enough, she regains her normal bearing. She first bends down slowly with deliberate willfulness, and then lifts the scoop, which she dips into the bucket filled to the brim with water. Lest she lose her grip, she clutches at the scoop as if making a grab for an item that is, of necessity, an extension of the self. She raises the scoop, preparatory to pouring the water on her head. However, before a globule of liquid has reached any part of her body, her face wears an expectant, tense look, and then ready, set, go. The first drop is insufferable, causing her body to be covered with tiny bumps; the second drop is not so unbearable. By the time she has emptied scoopfuls on her head, she feels she has acclimatized to the inclement temperature, and no part of her body raises a single goose bump. Because she is no longer breaking out in cold spots, she compliments herself for a small achievement, the first since her arrival.
    After she has toweled down and gone back to the privacy of her room, which she bolts from the inside, and has chosen what to wear—a discreet dress, decent and not in any way provocative enough to make Zaak wish they had been lovers—she revisits a scene that is permanently etched on the screen of her memory. In it, she and her mother are on an afternoon walk in a park in the suburb of Ottawa where her parents had relocated a couple of decades before Somalia had collapsed into stateless anarchy and where her father, a diabetic, had had two legs amputated in a matter of six months and had been bedridden for nearly two years. At the time, Cambara was not doing as well as she might have hoped in her dream profession, acting. She was worth no more than cameo parts, nothing big, and even then didn’t have her name in lights. She had not landed any role that might turn her overnight into a household name anywhere. No one showed the TV commercials in which she had had parts, even though they had been commissioned, and none of her other