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all, on a flight bound for Toronto, not as a refugee but legally as a spouse. She felt protective toward him, solicitously making sure that he was not vulnerable to harassment at the hands of the Kenyan immigration authorities, who were given to extracting exorbitant corruption money from Somalis relocating to Europe or North America. She did not want him to be apprehended at a midway location between Africa and Canada and returned to Nairobi. Making an already terrible situation worse, Arda, plodding, repeated everything from the beginning for the third or fourth time, as though she, Cambara, were a bit thick: that she would fly out to Kenya on a work-related visit to that country, link up with Zaak, who was waiting for a sponsorship to a third country, and bring him along as her spouse.
    Without honoring any of what she thought of as her mother’s harebrained plans with a reaction, Cambara stared at Arda, as if trying to puzzle out what her mother meant when she spoke of her making “a work-related visit” to Nairobi. What “work” did she have in mind? But she wished to deal with what bothered her most first.
    Cambara said, “Why would I want to become the wife of a man I haven’t thought about in that way or seen for a number of years?”
    â€œThat way, you’ll do me a huge favor.”
    As she sought succor from the long silence, in which she considered the implication of her mother’s statement, Cambara discerned a trace of her mother’s fragrance in the form of uunsi scent, which Somali women traditionally wear to welcome back their husbands after a long absence.
    She said, “Mother, you’re too much to take.”
    â€œYou’ll be a wife only on paper.”
    â€œWhat would that make me in other people’s eyes?”
    â€œYou can act as a wife, can’t you?” Arda says.
    â€œI don’t want to act like a wife to Zaak.”
    â€œIn the amateur theater you’ve been in,” Arda said, “I’ve seen you act as a lowlife, seen you play the role of a wife to a man who is not your husband. Why can’t you pretend to be a wife to Zaak? Pretend. Isn’t acting your dream profession?”
    If you had seen Cambara in her current state, you might have thought that she was strong on the outside and weak on the inside. Could it be that her mother was at last breaking her spirit? Was she about to relinquish all resistance? Admittedly, she had squandered her opportunity to set her mother right; maybe it was much too late to fend her mother off.
    â€œThink of it as a favor to me, as I said.”
    â€œI wish you wouldn’t ask that of me.”
    â€œThere is no else I can ask.”
    â€œIt is unfair.”
    â€œLet’s think of it as your dare.”
    â€œIt’s unlike you to do this to me.”
    â€œA dare to an actor. A wife only on paper. Think.”
    Since they meant the world to each other, and since the word “no” seldom passed the lips of the one of whom the other requested a favor, Arda relied on the art of persuasion, softening the inner core of her daughter’s defiance not with authoritarianism but with pleading. Do me a favor, please, my daughter! Now a species of unequaled sorrow was beginning to take residence in Cambara and was becoming a tenant with full rights. She felt as inanimate as a puppet with broken limbs and no wires to get it moving. Even so, she doubted if acting as a wife to Zaak—pretending and only on paper, as her mother put it—would lend a greater dare to her acting ability or sharpen it. Knowing herself, she might take it on as a challenge, if only to try and turn it into a triumph to revel in. She wished the idea had come from her, then she could have determined the parameters of the relationship and walked out of it when her heart was no longer in it. If the original idea had been hers, then she might have experienced the real thrill from the perspective of