Knots by Nuruddin Farah

with his Canadian mistress. She was angry. And to her, there is a difference between being jealous and being angry, but she was in no mood then to articulate her sentiments. The fool could have gone where he pleased, alone or with someone else; she did not care. He was after all a despicable creature. She was displeased more with herself than she was with him, for having allowed these and many other terrible things to be done to her, or for things to go so badly that she felt hard done by them. Above all, she found it impossible to countenance that her son had drowned in the swimming pool of his legal partner and paramour while they were having it off in the main bedroom, which was in the other extreme of a sprawling house.
    The memory of hitting Wardi now intrudes upon her consciousness. She remembers how she struck him with a passion that contained in it a vengeful rage wrapped in contempt, the consequence of a most terrible upset bottled up for a very long time. Did she train secretly in martial arts for several years in preparation for the day when, their embittered relationship having reached a head, she might administer the knockdown blow at short notice? Of course, she wanted him to know that she was no pushover. And what better way to prove this than to give him back his own bitter medicine, humiliate him because he demeaned their oneness, neglected to attend to his son by keeping an eye on him when in the pool. As she laid into him, the image of burying Dalmar, then running into Wardi’s mistress first at the cemetery and later at her home: these gathered in her mind as storms do, culminating in a riotous spleen that deactivated her brain before it exploded in a total breakdown. Maybe this explains it all: why she became dysfunctional, sanctioning the beast in her to take charge.
    Dissecting with her now sharp mind the detritus of her rage then, she reasons that maybe she paid him back with higher interest than was his due. She might have killed him if she had not changed her mind at the last minute, stopping just in time, well aware that a knife, however small or dull, is a lethal weapon if one places it in the hand of a mother whose only son drowned in the swimming pool of her husband’s lover. She feels that her rage accrued into a motive, justifying the administering of a fatal blow. In the end, she caused him a lot of pain. Wardi lay motionlessly on his back, his body instantly sown with a copse of bruises, some growing as big as grapes, some assuming the hardness of cacti, some becoming as patulous as malignant pustules soon after, and others ending up as knobbly as the fruits of a baobab tree.
    After knocking him down with her karate punches, Cambara was at first overwhelmed with a sense of haplessness, not of regret but of indecision. Then euphoria, the excitement of accomplishing a feat of which she had unconsciously dreamt many a night for a long time. When it came to replacing her feeling of remorse, she reminded herself that she had wanted to knock him unconscious one day. In fact, a part of her now wished that Wardi’s mistress had been with them and had seen her lover on his knees, begging. This filled Cambara with a considerable sense of elation.
    Aware now that their marriage was as good as over, she knew too that there was no possibility of patching things up or salvaging it, no benefit to be gained from displaying kindness to a fool knocked out and wallowing in self-reprimand, no mileage in making rash decisions that would inconvenience her in the end either. Take note: No face-saving ploys, please. The time to dispense with Wardi altogether had come. Only Cambara must do so on a caveat of her own stipulation. What about Zaak? How is she to deal with him? Cambara will have to wait, look at it from many vantage points, and then decide; there is time for that yet, a lot of time.
    In her recall, Wardi’s misshapen face boasts of swollen eyes moist at the edges, like a Styrofoam cup on