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falling beam, a failing heart, a spear of bullet-shattered glass? Or sheer exhaustion with living in such horrid circumstances day in and day out?
    Jeebleh cannot tell where they are in relation to the apartment, disoriented by fresh ruins from the latest confrontation between the warlords and the Courts, three months ago. One loses one’s sense of direction in a city that has suffered civil war savageries; one is, at the best of times, in want of the guidance of those who have continued to live in it. Hoping to help Malik get the hang of the city’s layout, he asks, “Where is Cambara’s current home in relation to the apartment?”
    Dajaal explains, “The Green Line marking off the territory between the two warlords is gone. But more roads have fallen into disuse and worse.”
    Malik says to Gumaad, “How do ordinary people with no cars move around? How is the transport here compared to other African cities?”
    “I’ve never been outside Somalia.”
    “How do you move about?”
    “There are ten-, fifteen-seater city hoppers-on. You flag them down and jump on, and pay your fare.”
    “Are they safe to take?”
    “That is how I came to the airport, on a fifteen-seater minibus,” Gumaad says. “I took it from close to where I live in Yaqshid, and then I took another from Makkal-Mukarramah Road to the airport. I had to wait long for the minibus that brought me to the airport, because the driver parked at a strategic spot and waited until there were enough passengers to make it worth his while to come. On the whole, there is peace, imposed through the Courts’ goodwill. And taking the bus is safe.”
    Dajaal says, “The peace imposed needs a government to make it last, a government to provide the city and its one and a half million inhabitants with social services: schools, hospitals, and so on. I doubt the Courts have the experience, the willingness, and the wherewithal to provide us with these.”
    “Given time, the Courts will,” Gumaad says.
    Dajaal says, “With all the infighting, the clan-based rivalry, and the corruption among top cadres, the Courts are in no position to make peace work.”
    Gumaad explains how bad blood between various parties in the country has caused so many deaths and so much havoc. Dajaal and BigBeard, for example, have been enemies going back to when their families were neighbors and the two of them were young. “It’s mutual loathing born out of personal jealousies,” he maintains, then elaborates, “Dajaal here proved to be the more successful one, in every venture, while BigBeard’s efforts usually met with disaster. Dajaal did well professionally, he was a major in the army and raised a loving family and was blessed with a boy and a girl, both of whom had their own children. BigBeard has married five times, no children; and until recently, he was not doing well financially.”
    “Yet he gives himself such airs,” says Jeebleh.
    “A self-assured man wears no airs,” Dajaal says.
    Gumaad goes on, “It is a well-known fact that BigBeard has lately targeted Bile, accusing him of living with Cambara in sin, to some an indictable offense, punishable by public stoning.”
    Cambara had alluded to a religionist who was fixated on her cohabitation with Bile when she and Jeebleh spoke on the phone the previous week; but she gave no name. Now Jeebleh realizes he’s let himself be taken in by the hype about the Courts in general circulation among Somalis in the diaspora, who want to believe that the country has begun to turn a corner. It’s been his folly to invest his trust in them. He reminds himself that the dodgiest words to pass the lips of a politician are his affirmations of faith in God.
    Dajaal slows down and turns left into a parking lot that Jeebleh remembers from earlier days. Dajaal and Gumaad help carry the bags up the stairs and into the flat.

    There is something charming about the mess in the apartment, as if someone, with knowing chutzpah, has scattered books