Maps

CHAPTER ONE

I

You sit, in contemplative posture, your features agonized and your expressions pained; you sit for hours and hours and hours, sleepless, looking into darkness, hearing a small snore coming from the room next to yours. And you conjure a past: a past in which you see a horse drop its rider; a past in which you discern a bird breaking out of its shell so it will fly into the heavens of freedom. Out of the same past emerges a man wrapped in a mantle with unpatched holes, each hole large as a window — and each window large as the secret to which you cling as though it were the only soul you possessed. And you question, you challenge every thought which crosses your mind.

Yes. You are a question to yourself. It is true. You’ve become a question to all those who meet you, those who know you, those who have any dealings with you. You doubt, at times, if you exist outside your own thoughts, outside your own head, or Misra’s. It appears as though you were a creature given birth to by notions formulated in heads, a creature brought into being by ideas; as though you were not a child born with the fortune or misfortune of its stars, a child bearing a name, breathing just like anybody else, a child whose activities were justifiably part of a people’s past and present experience. You exist, you think, the way the heavenly bodies exist, for although one does extend one’s finger and point at the heavens, one knows, yes that’s the word, one knows that that is not the heavens. Unless…unless there are, in a sense, as many heavens as there are thinking beings; unless there are as many heavens as there are pointing fingers.

At times, when your uncle speaks about you, in your presence, referring to you in the third person and, on occasion, even taking the liberty of speaking on your behalf, you wonder if your existence is readily differentiable from creatures of fiction whom habit has taught one to talk of as if they were one’s closest of friends — creatures of fiction with whose manner of speech; reactions to situations; conditions of being; and with whose likes and dislikes one’s folk-tradition has made one familiar. From your limited knowledge of literature, you feel you are a blood relation of some of the names which come to mind, leap to the tongue at the thought of a young boy whose name is Askar and whose prodigious imagination is capable of wealthy signs of precocity — because you are this young boy!

As you sit contemplatively, your mind journeys to a region where there were solid and prominent shadows which lived on behalf of others who had years before ceased to exist as beings. As you sit, your eyes open into themselves, the way blind people’s eyes tend to. Then you become numb of soul: in other words, you are not yourself — not quite yourself anyway The journey takes you through numerous doorways and you are enabled to call back to memory events which occurred long before you were a being yourself. Your travel leads you through forests without any clearing, to stone steps too numerous to count, although when you reach the highest point, your exhaustion disappears the instant you see an old man, grey as his advanced years, negotiate the steps too. You remember now, that in the wake of the old man there was a girl, barely seven, following the old man as a goat follows a butcher, knowing what knives of destiny await it.

And you…!

You! You who had lain in wait, unwashed, you who had lain unattended to at birth. Yes, you lay in wait as though in ambush until a woman who wasn’t expecting that you existed walked into the dark room in which you had been from the second you were born. You were a mess. You were a most terrible sight. The woman who found you described the chill of that dark room as a tomb. To her, the air suggested the dampness of a mortuary You cried at her approaching and wouldn’t be calmed until she dipped you in the bathtub she had filled with warm water. Then she fed you on a draught of goat’s milk Did anyone ever tell you what you looked like when the woman discovered you that dusk some eighteen years or so ago? No?

You wore on your head a hat of blood which made you look like a masked clown. And around your neck there were finger-stains, perhaps your mother’s. (Nobody knows to this day whether she tried to kill you or no.) You displayed a nervous strain and you began to relax only when embraced either by another person or dipped in warm water. When you didn’t cry, you searched, with your hands up in the air, for someone to touch.

When day broke, once the woman had shared the secret of her discovery with a few of the other neighbours, the men took over and they prepared your mother for burial Alone with you, Misra noticed that your eyes were full of mistrust. They focused on her, they stared at her hands suspiciously! Your eyes, she would say years later, journeyed through her, they journeyed beyond her, they travelled to a past of unfulfilled dreams: in short, your stare made her feel inadequate. There was an element of self-consciousness in the small thing I had found, she said. It was so self-conscious it moved its hands as though it would wipe away the mess it had been in; it moved its eyes, when not staring at me, she continued, as though to apologize for its shortcomings. And what eyes! What hands!

It was not long before you tasted in Misra a motherliness which reab-sorbed you, a motherliness in whose tight, warm embrace you felt joyous one second, miserable the following instant. Again, you would try to make contact and when she did her best to return it, you would appear startled and ready to withdraw, you would shun any contact with her completely and move away. She helped you minimize life’s discomforts. She groaned with you when you moaned constipatedly; she helped you relieve yourself by fondling you, touching you and by telling you sweet stories, addressing you, although you were a tiny little mess of a thing, as “my man”, “my darlingest man”, or some such endearments which would make you feel wanted, loved and pampered.

In her company, you were ecstatic — there was no other word for it. Yes, you were visibly ecstatic. And you were noisy. You displayed your pleasures with the pomp and show one associates with the paranoid among kings. But then you could be quiet in her embrace too, reflective and thoughtful — so thoughtful that some of the neighbours couldn’t believe their eyes, watching you pensively quiet, your eyes bright with visions only you could see. It was when she wasn’t there, when you missed her presence, when you couldn’t smell her maternal odour, it was then that you cried and you put your soul into crying. appearing as though possessed, looking satanically agitated and devilishly messy. Upon returning from wherever she had gone, she would dip you wholly in water, scrub you and wash you with the same devotion as she might have used when cleaning the floor of her room. The community of relations decided that Misra, the woman who once was a servant, would “mother” you. One thing ought to be said here — you were the one who made the choice the community of relations had to approve of; you, who were barely a week old. And Misra agrees with this statement. So, begrudgingly, would Uncle Qorrax in Kallafo.

When agitated, you stretched out your hands in front of you like a blind man in search of landmarks and if you touched someone other than Misra, you burst instantly into the wildest and most furious convulsive cry. But if Misra were there, you fell silent, you would touch her and then touch yourself. It seemed to her that you could discover yourself only in her. “By touching me, he knows he is there,” she once confided in a man you were later to refer to as Aw-Adan.

There was something maternal about the cosmos Misra introduced you to from the day it was decided you were her charge, from the moment she could call you, in the privacy of the room allotted to the two of you, whatever endearments she mustered in her language. But to her you were most often “my man” or variations thereof — especially whenever you wet yourself; especially when washing you, touching and squeezing your manhood or wiping, rather roughly, your anus. Occasionally, however, she would gently spank you on the bottom and address you differently. But she always remained maternal, just like the cosmos, giving and giving. “While,” she said to you, “man is the child receiving into himself the cosmos itself, the cosmos grows larger, like a hole, the more she gives.” Admittedly this was something impenetrable to your own comprehension. To you, whether what she said made sense or no, she was the cosmos. She was the one that took you away from “yourself”, as it were, she was the one who took you back into the world-of-the-womb and of innocence, and washed you clean in the water of a new life and a new christening, to produce in you the correct etches of a young self, with no pained memories, replacing your missing parents with her abundant self which she offered generously to you — her newly rediscovered child! And you?

II

To Misra, you existed first and foremost in the weird stare: you were, to her, your eyes, which, once they found her, focused on her guilt — her self! She caught the look you cast in her direction the way a clumsy child grabs a ball and she framed the stare in the memory of her photographic brain. She developed it, printed it in different colours, each of which expressed her mood. She was sure, for instance, that you saw her the way she was: a miserable woman, with no child and no friends; a woman who, that dusk — would you believe it? — menstruated right in front of you, under that most powerful stare of yours. She saw, in that look of yours, her father, whom she saw last when she was barely five.

“Annoy a child and you’ll discover the adult in him,” she would repeat, believing it to be a proverb. “Please an adult with gifts and the child therein re-emerges.” And she annoyed you, she pleased you, and she was sufficiently patient to watch the adult in you come out and display itself. Not only did she see her father in you but also the child in herself: she saw a different terrain of land, and she heard a different language spoken and she watched, on the screen of her past, a number of pictures replayed as though they were real and as painful as yesterday. She sought her childhood in you and she hid her most treasured secrets which she was willing to impart to you and you alone. In you, too, she saw a princess, barely five, a pretty princess surrounded with servants and well-wishers, one who could have anything she pleased and who was loved by her mother, but not so much by her father because she was a girl and wouldn’t inherit his title — wouldn’t continue his line. A princess!

To you, too, although you were too small to understand, she told secrets about your parents no one else was ready to tell you. She told you why your mother had been hiding in the room where she had found the two of you and why she died in a quiet secretive way She also whispered in your ears things about your father, who had died a few months before your birth, in mysterious circumstances, in a prison, for his ideals. Your mother took refuge in a room tucked away in the backyard of a rich man’s house and it was in there that she gave birth to you — in hiding.

Possibly you would have died of the chill you were exposed to, if Misra hadn’t walked in accidentally. Fortunately for you, anyway, Misra had found the room in which you were, a most convenient place to hide from Aw-Adan, who had been pestering her with advances she didn’t wish to return in like manner. The room had been open and she stumbled into it, closing the door immediately behind her. She didn’t realize until later that you and your mother were there: you alive and your mother dead. Hers would have to remain the only evidence one has and one has to take her word for it. She would insist that she didn’t know until later who your father was. Why she waited until she had washed and fed you and mothered you — these are things of which she refuses to speak At any rate, by the time the community of relations had been informed of your existence and your mother’s death, some sixteen or so hours had gone past, and it was during this time that you and Misra had become acquainted and that she made sure no one else set eyes on you. Of course, no one dared challenge her statement. As a matter of fact, it was thought very wise that you were kept an untalked-about secret, considering whose son you were; so no one outside the immediate family knew about you for a long time. It was for this reason that your mother’s corpse was buried in haste and secretly too, your mother who left behind her no trace save yourself— you who were assigned to Misra as a ward, or some said as if you were her child. You were the whisper to be softly spoken. Your name was to become two syllables no one uttered openly, which meant that not only were there no Koranic blessings said in either of your ears to welcome you to this world but your presence here in this universe was not at all celebrated. You did not exist as far as many were concerned; nor did you have any identity as the country’s bureaucracy required. Askar! The letter "s" in your name was gently said so as to arouse no suspicions; whereas the “k” was held in the cosiness of a tongue couched in the unspoken secrets of a sound. As-kar! It was the “r” which rolled like a cow in the hot sand after half-a-day’s grazing. Askar!

The point of you was that, in small and large ways, you determined what Misra’s life would be like the moment you took it over. From the moment you “took her life over”, her personality underwent a considerable change. She became a mother to you. She began walking with a slight stoop and her hip, as though ready to carry you, protruded to the side. She no longer saw as much of Aw-Adan, the priest, as she used to, a priest who used to teach her, on a daily basis, a few suras of the Koran and in whom she was slightly interested. That interest deteriorated with the passage of the days and finally petered out the way light fades when there is no more paraffin in the lamp. The point of you was that. in small and large ways, Misra, now that you were hers, saw her own childhood “as a category cradled in a bed of memories, one of which was nurtured in thoughts which alienated the child in her.” She had had a “fatherless” child herself and the child had died a few months before you were bom. She was sad she had had to feed you on a bottle; she was sad she couldn’t suckle you, offer you her own milk, her soul. Her own child had been eighteen months when he died and she had only just weaned him. Very often, in the secret chambers of her unuttered thoughts, there would cross an idea: that she probably had some milk of motherhood in her. And she would bare her breasts and make you suck them; you would turn away and refuse to be suckled and she would cry and cry and be miserable. Your crying would provide the unsung half of the chorus. She would promise you and promise herself never to try to breast-feed you again. Although she did, again and again. The question nobody is in a privileged enough position to answer, is whether or not your mother suckled you just before she died. You are in no position to confirm that. But Misra is “obsessed” with the thought that you were breast-fed by her. When pressed, she would insist, “I know, I know for sure that she did.”

Your father existed for you in a photograph of him you saw, in which he stands behind an army tank, green as the backdrop in the picture, and you were told that he had “liberated” the tank, while fighting for the Western Somali Liberation Movement, of which he remained an active member until his last second, brave as the stories narrated about him. Your mother existed for you in a suckle you do not even recall and there is nobody to dispute Misra's theory that your mother actually suckled you. One thing is very clear. You did not inherit from her any treasures; if anything, she bequeathed to you only a journal and stories told you in snippets by others. And what did you bequeath to Misra? There is a photograph taken when you were very, very small; there is a hand, most definitely yours, stretched outwards, away from your own body, searching for another hand — most probably hers, a hand to touch, a hand to help and to give assurances. Also, there is one of the pictures which she still has and which has survived all the turmoil of wars and travel and displacements, a picture in which you are alone, in a bathtub, half-standing and playfully splashing in the joy of the water’s soapy foaminess. In the photograph, there is a hand of a woman — Misra’s most likely — a hand reaching out to make contact with yours but which accidentally “hovers”, like a hawk, over your private parts — which the hand doesn’t quite touch! And there is, in the picture, a patch of a stain, dark as blood, a stain which your eyes fall on and which you stare at.

But most important of all, you bequeathed to Misra the look in your eye when she walked in that evening, running away from Aw-Adan’s lusty attentions. At times, she saw you reproduce a look which she associated with what she could remember of her own father; and at others, she saw another which she identified as her son’s — before he was taken ill and died.

It was a great pity, she thought, that there was no maternal milk she could offer to you, her young charge. But there was plenty of her and she gave it: she kept you warm by tucking you between her breasts, she held you close to her body so she could sense your movements, so she might attend to you whenever you stirred: you shared a bed, the two of you, and she smelled of your urine precisely in the same way you smelled of her sweat: upon your body were printed impressions of her fingerprints, the previous night’s moisture: yours and hers.

III

She nourished you, not only on food paid for by a community of relations, but on a body of opinion totally her own. With you, young as you were, needy and self-sufficient as an infant, she could choose to be herself — she could walk about in front of you in the nude if she wanted to, or could invite Aw-Adan to share, with the two of you, the small bed which creaked when they made love, a bed onto whose sagged middle you rolled, sandwiched as you were between them. When awake, and if you were the only person in the room, Misra spoke at you, saying whatever it was that she had intended to, talking about the things which bothered or pleased her. But there was something she did only in your or Aw-Adan’s presence. She spoke Amharic. She cursed people in her language. To her, it didn’t matter whether you understood it or not. What mattered to her was the look in your eyes, the look of surprise or incomprehension; a look which took her back to the first encounter: yours and hers.

Because of her relations with you, and because you were so attached to her, Misra’s status in the community became a controversial topic. To many members of the community, she was but that “maidservant who came from somewhere else, up north” and they treated her despicably, looking down upon her and calling her all sorts of things. It was said that her name wasn’t even Misra. However, no one bothered to check the source of the rumour. No one took the trouble to reach the bottom of the mystery. But who was she really? To you, she was the cosmos and hers was the body of ideas upon which your growing mind nourished. It didn’t matter in the least whether she came from upper Ethiopia or not, neither did it matter in the least if she had been abducted by a warrior from one of the clans north of yours when she was seven. Maidservant or no, she meant the world to you. Also, you believed that no one knew her as well as you did, no one needed her as much as you and nobody studied the changes in her moods as often as you. In short, you missed her immensely when she wasn’t with you. And so, with a self-abandon many began to associate with you, you cried and cried until she was brought to you. With a similar self-surrender, you displayed the pleasure of her company. Which was what made some say that she had bewitched you.

She taught you how best you should make use of your own body. She helped you leam to wash it, she assisted you in watching it grow, like the day’s shadow, from the shortest to the longest purposelessness of an hour; she familiarized you with the limitations of your own body. When it came to your soul, when it came to how to help your brain develop, she said she couldn’t trust herself to deal with that satisfactorily. Not then, anyway. Was this why she went and sought Aw-Adan’s help?

Aw-Adan and you didn’t take to each other right from your first encounter. You didn’t like the way he out-stared you, nor did you like him when Misra paid him all her attention, leaving you more or less to yourself. He commented on the look in your eyes: a look he described as “wicked and satanic”. To defend you, she described the look in your eyes as “adulted”. Aw-Adan did not appear at all convinced. Then she went on to say, “To have met death when not quite a being, perhaps this explains why he exists primarily in the look in his eyes. Perhaps his stars have conferred upon him the fortune of holding simultaneously multiple citizenships of different kingdoms: that of the living and that of the dead; not to mention that of being an infant and an adult at the same time.” Disappointed with her explanation, Aw-Adan went away, promising he would never see her again.

But he came back. He was in love with her — or so she believed. And as usual, he couldn’t resist commenting upon the fact that she had organized her life around you: you were “her time” as he put it; for she awoke, first thing in the morning, not to say her prayers but to attend to your needs. And what was she to you? To you, said Aw-Adan, she was your “space”: you moved about her body in the manner an insect crawls up a wall, even-legged, sure-footed and confident. And he continued, “Allah is the space and time of all Muslims, but not to you, Misra, Askar is.” He didn’t see anything wrong in what he said. But then how could he? He was jealous.

In the unEdenic universe into which you were cast by your stars, you were not content, like any intelligent being, with the small world of darkness you opened your eyes on. You behaved as though you had to find and touch the world outside of yourself, and this you did in order to be reassured of a given continuity. “He behaves,” said Misra to Aw-Adan, her confidant, one night when the three of you were in bed and the priest was not in his foulest of moods, “Askar behaves as if he feels lost unless his outstretched hands bring back to his acute senses the reassuring message that I am touchably there. He cannot imagine a world without my reassuring self.”

“What am I to do then? Suggest something,” said Aw-Adan.

“Be as accommodating to me as I am to him,” she said.

“You are insane,” he said.

“And you jealous,” she said.

“You are never alone,” complained Aw-Adan, who wanted her to himself. “I see you with him all the time, so much so that I see him even when he isn’t there. You smell of his urine and at times I too smell of it and it upsets me gravely. Why can’t we just marry, you and I? He isn’t yours but with God’s help, we can make one of our own, together, you and I. Come to me alone — both of body and of spirit — and let our bodies join, without Askar’s odour and cries.”

“I cannot,” she said. “I am his — in body and spirit too. And no one else’s. I can be yours or somebody else’s only in sin. Yes, only in sin. Imagine — you, a man of God at that!”

And she burst into tears.

And Aw-Adan stirred.

And you woke up and cried.

IV

To make the picture more complete, one must talk about your paternal uncle, namely Uncle Qorrax. The truth is, he too had designs on Misra and you suspected he had his way with her many times. It was no secret that you didn’t like Uncle Qorrax or his numerous wives: numerous because he divorced and married such a number of them that you lost count of how many there were at any given time, and at times you weren’t sure to whom he was married — until one day a woman you nicknamed “Shahrawello” arrived on the scene and she stayed (as Sheherezade of the Thousand and One Nights did). But neither did you like his children.

He was a ruthless man, your uncle was, and you were understandably frightened of him. You often remember him beating one of his wives or one of his children. Naturally, you didn’t take his apparent little kindnesses nor did you accept the gentle hand he invariably extended to you. You shunned any bodily contact with him. It was said you cried a great deal if he so much as touched you, although he never gave you a beating and could hardly have justified himself in scolding you. You were an orphan and you had a “stare” with which to protect yourself. He didn’t want the “stare” focused on him, his wives or his children.

When you were a little older and in Mogadiscio, living in the more enlightened world of Uncle Hilaal and Salaado, you began to reason thus: you didn’t like Uncle Qorrax’s children because they behaved as children always do, no more, no less; they insisted on owning toys if they were boys, or on making dolls and dressing them if they were girls. His sons enjoyed being rough with one another, they took sadistic pleasure in annoying or hurting one another, whereas his daughters busied themselves nursing or breast-feeding dolls or clothing bones, not as though they were women caring for infants with broken hearts but as though they were little girls. In retrospect, you would admit there was a part of you which admired these girls when they jumped ropes, challenged the boys, or took part in daredevil games — not when they chanted childish rhymes which small girls always did at any rate. And you admired the boys, from a distance anyway when they dislodged fatal shots from catapults, cutting short the life of a gecko climbing up a wall or a lizard basking in the sun. It was the life-giving and life-taking aspects of their activities which interested you.

You once said to Misra that if there was anything you shared with adults, it was the visceral dislike of children’s babble or the infantile rattle of their mechanical contrivances and the noise of their demands, “I want this”, “I want that”. You concluded your remarks to the surprise of those listening to you (there was a woman neighbour, married to an invalid, a man who lay on his back all the time, suffering from some spinal complaint you had no name for), by saying, “When will children stop wanting, when will they be, when will they do a job, as Karin’s husband says, when will they accomplish something — not as children but as beings?”

She commented, “But you are an adult.”

Karin agreed, “He is. Surely.”

What you didn’t say, although it crossed your mind, was that you were an adult, and, for whatever it was worth, you believed you were present at your birth. But no one said anything. Perhaps because you knew that when windows of bedrooms closed on the sleeping lids of children’s heads nodding with drowsiness; when their snores filled the empty spaces of the rooms they were in; when their tongues tasted of the staleness of slumber in their mouths; when their parents surrendered themselves to their dreams, pushing out of their way the daylight inhibitions of who enjoyed the company of whom, in bed; when thoughts were unharnessed and allowed to roam freely in the open spaces of the uncensored mind: it was then, you knew, that Misra and you could tell each other stories no one else was listening to. And in the privacy of the late hour, in the secrecy of the night’s darkness, you could afford to allow the adult in you to emerge and express adult thoughts, just as Misra could permit the child in her to express its mind.

And then the two of you would gossip. Like adults, you would exchange secrets each had gathered during the previous day, you would condemn and pass judgements. You would talk about people, talk about Shahrawello whose daily blood-letting of Qorrax was said to have kept him in good check. You also gossiped meanly and unpardonably about a neighbour’s son who ate ten times as much as you and who, at four-and-a-half, didn’t utter a single word save “food”; a boy who weighed “a ton” and whose open mouth had to be stuffed with victuals of one sort or another. You nicknamed him “Monster” following your overhearing his mother say, “Oh Lord, why have you made me give birth to a monster?” Misra would feign interest in hearing you tell the story but suddenly her features would change expression, suggesting you were overdoing it, and she would say, “That’s enough, Askar”, and would immediately change the subject to something less trivial, less controversial; or she would tell you a story until your breathing was slow, then shallow, as if you were wading through a pond where the water was muddy and knee-high. Misra was an expert at handling your moods. And she was different from your uncle’s wives. As mothers, these were generally indulgent for the first two or three years. Then they became ruthlessly rigid with their children, who were expected to behave according to strict codes and norms of behaviour with which they had not been made familiar. You imagined these women to be in season all the time, what with their constant loss of temper with their children and their caning them whenever they didn’t leave the room the moment they were instructed to do so.

Misra would say, “To these women, when in their best moods, children are like passing royalty. Don’t you notice how everything comes to a standstill when they totter past them and how they are admired?” And you asked, “But why do people love children?” “Some because they can afford to lavish a moment’s indulgence on a child that didn’t keep them awake the previous night; some because they see angels in the infants they spy and marvel at God’s generosity; some because they have no children themselves and envy those who are thus blessed. There are as many reasons why adults admire children as there are adults who admire them.”

“And why is it that they don’t like me?” you said. She answered, “Because you are no child. That’s why.” In your mind, the memory door opened and you saw visiting relatives of Uncle Qorrax’s and they were giving his children cash with which to buy sweets or footballs; you also saw that these same relatives caned them if they caught them misbehaving in public. But when it came to you, they asked after your health, although they did so with extreme caution, speaking articulately to Misra in the manner of one who was talking to a foreigner who didn’t understand the nuances of one’s language. And these relations never took liberties with you, no, they didn’t. You wondered if it was “guilt” that made them act the way they did, “guilt” that made them look away when you “stared”. Or were they uneasy because yours was the “stare” of a parentless child?

“I want you to think of it like this,’ said Misra to you one night. “You are a blind man and I am your stick, and it is I who leads you into the centre of human activities. Your appearance makes everyone fall silent, it makes them lower the volume of their chatter. And you too become conscious and you interpret their silence as a ploy to exclude you, and you feel you’re being watched and that you’re being denied entry into their world. From then on, you hold on to the stick, both as guide and protector. Since you cannot sense sympathy in their silences, you think it is hate. You, the blind man, and I, the stick. And together we pierce the sore — that’s their conscience.”

You said, “No wonder they don’t like me!”

Again, Misra changed the subject to less demanding topics, topics that were less burdensome than the notions of “guilt” or “conscience”. And she lulled you to and led you to sleep: gently, slowly, with a voice that changed rhythms and a lullaby sung in a language that wasn’t your own. Some of the tales she told you had plenty of blood in them, there was no denying that. In a couple of these, there were even human-eating types — with Dhegdheer dying not and the heavens raining not! On occasion, she would give, in outline, the moral of the tale before she narrated it to you, and at times she would let you retell it so you had the opportunity of offering your own interpretation. Years later, you discovered (it was Karin who gave you the information) that Misra used to have these tales told to her when you were away from the compound so she could feed your fantasies on them when you returned. Admittedly, this endeared her to you.

Unlike Uncle Qorrax’s children, you never stole things from anyone. You mentioned your needs — and Misra met them. If she couldn’t, she told you why. And she trained you not to value money or possessions. Also, no visiting relation unfolded secretly onto your outstretched palm a coin a parent might not have given you. Uncle Qorrax’s children, you knew, stole from their father. They conspired to do so — one of them would keep an eye on him, say, when he was in the lavatory and the others would rummage his pockets and take away a small sum that he wouldn’t notice and share it among themselves. Often, they timed it so it coincided with the arrival of nomads, who had come to buy provisions from his shop, pitching their tents in their compound, when there was a great deal of movement. They knew he dared not put embarrassing questions to these guest-clients. His sons knew he would never offer them or their mothers anything they could do without. It was his “public” persona that insisted on being generous at times. He could be kind to his children and wives when “others” were there; he could even be generous. When alone with them, he was a miser. So, they stole from him when he wasn’t there,

Misra had a public and a private persona too. She was warmer and kinder when alone with you, calling you all kinds of endearments, sharing with you secrets no other soul knew about. And in any case, you needn’t have stolen anything from Misra or from yourself. It was when she wore the mask of the public persona that you “stole” from her time a few moments of tenderness which you exchanged surreptitiously.

And when Misra was in season and therefore nervous, you were entrusted to Karin, who was equally kind, equally generous — and who treated you, not as a child, but as a grandchild. Because you were two generations apart, Karin indulged you in a way which didn’t meet Misra’s patent of approval. The two women were the best of friends — the one with an ailing husband who had lain on his back for years and who was confined to a mattress on the floor from where he saw, whenever he looked up at the ceiling, a portrait of Ernest Bevin; the other, a woman who, by virtue of her foreignness, felt she had access to the Somali cosmos — if there is anything like that — only through you. Karin baby-minded for her. Likewise, when she was indisposed, Misra looked after the old man. Conveniently for the three of you, Karin and her husband’s compound lay between yours and Uncle Qorrax’s. And so you were content to go from one compound to the other without ever needing to touch the fringes of the third — namely Qorrax’s.

But Qorrax called at yours when he chose, preferably when you began breathing shallowly through your nose, almost asleep. He would wait until your dream had taken you to a watery destinatio — where it was moist, green and all your own — your Eden. Then he would come into bed with Misra.

Oh, how you hated him!

V

On the other hand, you loved Uncle Hilaal and his wife, Salaado, directly you met them. The flow of their warmth was comforting — sweet as spring water. And everything either of them did or said, once you gave it a thought, appeared as necessary as the blood of life. You loved Hilaal and Salaado, you loved the sea and you loved Mogadiscio.

You began writing letters to Misra a few months after your arrival in Mogadiscio. But you never finished writing even one single letter, suspecting, rightly, that she wouldn’t be able to read Somali although she spoke it well enough. You were most distressed when you leamt that there never was a mail service through the official channels between Somalia and Ethiopia. Uncle Hilaal told you that letters had to be sent to other destinations, preferably via a European rechannelling system, like letters between a person living in apartheid South Africa and another in black Africa or a correspondence between one person residing in Syria and the other in Israel. So, apart from the wall of separation the Somali orthography raised between the two of you, there was also the official Ethiopian line of thinking, which was inimical to any communication taking place between Somalis living on either side of the de facto border between Ethiopia and Somalia. There were, indeed, rumours to the effect that a number of people suspected of holding Somali sympathies had been summarily executed, some were said to be still in jails serving sentences a military tribunal passed on them. You couldn’t vouch for the truth of all that you heard, but you heard reports in which a man entered the Ogaden on foot, one day, and was apprehended. In his holdall, they found letters said to have been written by one member of the Western Somali Liberation Front to another. The man was sentenced to death, there being no question In the mind of the tribunal that he was a saboteur.

You began most of your letters with the standard greetings and then penned something like this: “Perhaps you don’t remember me any more and perhaps you do. But I am the Askar who, for years, was strapped to your body, was almost one with it. I am sorry I’ve been beastly and haven’t written … but!” And so on and so forth. In them, you spoke lovingly of Hilaal and Salaado, describing them as kind-hearted, enlightened and highly educated. However, you were sad, you said, because they didn’t have “a festivity of goings-on” as in Uncle Qorrax’s compound, where there were many people, relatives and others, who came, who called and were entertained and where one felt one was a member of a community “Here,” you went on in one of those unposted and unfinished letters, “it appears as though it were a great virtue to be self-sufficient — and Uncle Hilaal and Salaado are. And I am the child they’ve been awaiting all these years. I am a godsend to them, although I am sure this isn’t the right way of putting it since they both strike one, at first, as not being at all religious. They lavish their love on me. And this matters greatly to me.”

And you boasted of your material acquisitions. For example, a watch “that circulates with my blood, one that stops if I don’t wear it somewhere on my person”. And a radio which “is on all day and night, entertaining us with the latest songs”. Not to forget the room “that is all mine and on whose walls I have mirrors and maps, the one to reflect my visage, showing me whether or not I’ve grown a beard after so many disastrous beginnings including, do you remember? my saying that if Karin’s menopausal hair-on-the-chin was ‘manlier’ than mine then it was high time I did something about it; the other, i.e. the maps which give me the distance in scales of kilometrage — the distance that is between you and me. Which is to say that we are a million minutes apart, your ‘anatomy’ and mine”. Again, you boasted of the learning you acquired and spoke commendably of Cusmaan, whom Hilaal and Salaado had engaged as your tutor. You showed off by asking Misra if she knew how far the sun was from the earth.

You were happy. You missed Misra. Evidently. Or, to put it differently, you missed her body’s warmth and the odour of her sweat — which was natural. Salaado was a cosmopolitan woman, she smelt of perfumes and her clothes smelt of mothballs, her nails of varnish, her shoes of polish. It was Hilaal who reminded you of Misra — his was the natural body odour. And he was fatter and liked to make bodily contact, just like Misra!

There was one essential fact which you never mentioned, not even in those unposted, unfinished letters — that Hilaal cooked all the meals, and Salaado drove their only car and everything was in her name, bank accounts, land deeds, literally everything. He drove, yes, but only when necessary And she was a terrible cook. And neither did you translate into Somali one of Uncle Hilaal’s favourite phrases: “Sooner or later, sex”.

They were wonderful: calm when you were caught in a storm of your own making; comforting whenever you were in some form of discomfort; providing space when that was what you needed desperately; trusting of you and of one another and of your need of each other, giving, forgiving and loving all the time. You were your own person and your life was your own and you could do with it what you pleased. And they? They were at your service, they were there to help you if it was their assistance you sought; they were there to let you go if that was what you wished. For example, there was that time in Hargeisa, where Salaado and you were holidaying — you had earned a vacation by doing well in your eighth-grade examination — when Hilaal sent you a letter you've preserved till this day. Here is the body of the letter:

My dearest Askar,

I am indeed disturbed by your behaviour, disturbed and bothered by what Salaado refers to as your most depressive state of mind to date. And what do you mean by saying that you haven't become “a man" so you can sit “in a Mogadiscio of comforts, eat a mountainful of spaghetti while my peers in the Ogaden starve to death or shed their blood in order to liberate it from Ethiopian hands”? Do I also understand that you wish to straighten out "this question about my own birth"?

Now, first point first. A man, indeed. Are you “a man”? One day, I would like you to define what or who is a “man”. Can one describe oneself as a man when one cannot make a viable contribution to the struggle of ones' people; when one is not as educated and as aware of the world's politics as ones enemy is; when one is not yet fifteen; when all the evidence of one's being a man comprises of one's height and a few hairs grown on the chin? Who will you kill, your enemy or yourself? And what's wrong with eating well and not being a refugee, which you might have been if you weren't my sister, Arla's, son and if Salaado and I weren't doing well financially. And pray don't talk ill of the UNHCR people, whether in Geneva, Mogadiscio or here, in this, or any other continent: they're not statisticians obsessed with abstracted numbers and charts of starvation and malnutrition. Of course, they have to ascertain how many refugees there are and how much money they can raise and how many calories an African child can cope with. It is the tone I don’t like, eating “a mountainful of spaghetti”, etc. Indeed! Askar, one must be grateful for the little mercies in life. One must be thankful to the dedicated souls, serving in these camps under very hard conditions (for them), while they wait for a donor to donate the food and medicines — making sure (and this is very, very difficult) that the local mafia doesn’t misappropriate them.

I confess, it pains me to remember the number of times you, Salaado and I have spoken about and analysed the seeds of your sense of “guilt”. Salaado ‘s telegraphic message suggests it to be as bad as the days following the tragic weekend when, overnight and in a coup de grâce, the Ogaden was wrung out of Somali hands and “returned” to Ethiopia’s claw-hammer. Now what’s this that I hear, that you were salvaged from the corpse of your mother? Is there anyone who can substantiate that with some evidence? Your mother lived long enough to have scribbled something in her journal. That means that she died after you were born, especially if we take into account Misra’s statement which agrees with this claim of mine.

To think, at your age, when you’re in Hargeisa for a holidaying trip, that your thoughts are still obsessed with some obscure facts relating to your birth. This disturbs Salaado — it perturbs me. Salaado tells me that you want to return to Kallafo in order to have this question answered once and for all. That is not the same thing as joining the Western Somali Liberation Front, I take it? But Salaado is under the impression that for you, the two are one and the same thing. Now what do you want to do? Of course, you can do both and we have no objection to your deciding to return to the Ogaden as a recruited member of the Front (which we all support) and when there, do your research into your beginnings. You tell us what you want and well give you our opinion.

Forgive me, but I've never held the view — nor has Salaado — that, since there are many able-bodied men and women in the Ogaden who can shoot a gun, kill an “Amxaar” in a scuffle and, if need be, confront the lion in the den, a youngster like you mustn’t go. No. “Somebody” must go. But who is this “somebody”? If every father, mother, relation said, “No, not my son, let someone else join the Front”, then you know where we’ll end up? The view Salaado and I hold, is that since you’ll prove to be excellent material as a researcher, as a writer of articles and as one who can impart enlightened opinion about the cause, why not “eat mountainfuls of spaghetti while others die” and why not, when doing so, complete your education.

Should you insist that you wish to re-enter the Ogaden without touching Mogadiscio, then I am afraid that neither Salaado nor I can do anything about it. All we can suggest that we offer is help. But I plead to you not to depart without at least letting Salaado know. If you inform me by return post that you’re definitely leaving, then I’ll make arrangements for more money to be transferred to Hargeisa, care of a bank.

If we’re to believe that you “stared” at Misra when she found you and Arla, my sister, then you were at least a day old. For sight, my dear Askar, is a door which does not open instantly in the newly born. What I mean is, that it takes longer than a few minutes for a baby just bom to develop the knack to look, let alone “stare". Be that as it is. But the fact that it shrouds your beginnings in mysteries preponderant as the babies born in the epic traditions of Africa, Europe and Asia — this fact does interest me greatly. Did you sprout like a plant out of the earth? Were you born in nine months, in three or seven?

In other words, do you share your temperament with the likes of Sunjata or Mwendo, both being characters in Africa's epic traditions? For example, it is said that Sunjata was an adult when he was three. Mwendo, in the traditions told about him, is said to have chosen to be delivered, not through the womb, but through a middle finger. There are other epic children who took a day to be conceived and born and yet others required a hundred and fifty years to be bom at all Now why did this “epic child” wait for a hundred and fifty years? Because he made the unusual (I almost said, rational) request not to use as his exit (or was it his entrance) the very organ which his mother employed as her urinary passage. Another feature common among epic children is that they are all born bearing arms. And you, Askar, you’re armed by name, aren’t you?

Again, this is nothing unique to epic traditions of peoples. The world's religions produce “miracle” children. Can you imagine an Adam, a grown man, standing naked, with leaves of innocence covering his uff, when God pulls at his ribs and says to him, “I am sorry but it won’t take a second, I assure you, and it won’t give you any pain either. Now look. Here. A woman, an Eve, created from one of your ribs”? I am sure you’ve heard of heroes given birth to by mountains or rivers or fishes or for that matter other animals. It seems to me that these myths make the same point again and again: that the “person” thus born contains within him or her a characteristic peculiar to gods. Well Where do we go from here?

All is doubt.

Are you or are you not an “epic” child of the modern times? Do we know what the weather was like the moment you were born? Yes, we do. Your mother, in her scrawls, tells us that the sky was dark with clouds and that a heavy storm broke on her head as she fainted with the pains of labour and the heavens brightened with those thunderous downpours. But you didn‘t take shorter than a month to be conceived and bom, or seven hundred years. And there was no eclipse of the moon or the sun. I've read and reread your mothe' s journal for clues. I am afraid it appears that you completed your nine months.

Please think things over. And please do not do anything rash. We will miss you greatly if you go — but we understand. Rest assured that we’ll not stand in your way if you wish to return to your beginnings.

Much, much love.

Yours ever,

Uncle Hilaal

CHAPTER TWO

I

Misra never said to me that I existed for her only in my look. What she said was that she could see in my stare an itch of intelligence — that’s all She said she had found it commendable that I could meet death face to face and that I could outstare the Archangel of Death. For, in my stare, there was my survival and in my survival, perhaps “a world’s”—mine and hers. I remember how often she held me close to herself, and how, lamenting or plaintive, she would whisper into my ears, endearments the like of which I am not likely to hear ever again. One of these endearments, I recall, was, “My dearest, my little world”! She would then lapse into Amharic, her mother-tongue, and, showering me with kisses, she would utter more of such endearments I wouldn’t understand. Then she would end them with the one she most often employed when teasing me or giving me a wash, one which, if translated, would mean, “my little man”!

As a child, curious as the questions he puts to the adults, I asked Misra if a dead woman, that is my mother, could've given birth to a living thing like me. “You were born early in the evening,” Misra said, “sharing a moment’s life with a falling star. You were cast into darkness, both of you, although the star dropped into extinction while you existed in the dark. No. You didn’t kill your mother.” She concluded her remarks and again held me closer to herself. “Besides, your mother breast-fed you and that, for me, is the reason why you wouldn’t take to other women’s milk, wet-nurses who offered to help. Your mother, how could she breast-feed you unless she survived giving birth to you — tell me, how?”

And yet, I overheard her, one day, say to Aw-Adan that when she came upon me and encountered my stare, she thought that it appeared to her as though I had made myself, as though I was my own creation. “You should've seen how self-conscious he was. You wouldn’t think a little dirty thing would take self-pride in touching his body admiringly the way he was doing. He was like a sculptor whose hands were caressing a self-portrait, an artist whose eyes lit up with self-adulation. A dirty little thing, a self-conscious little thing, but one for whom there was no world other than the one in his little head. And I said to myself, yes, I said to myself…!

It feels like yesterday, the day I was born; and it feels as if I were there, as though I were my own midwife. Misra’s recounting of what I was like, what I did, coupled with what she was like, what she was doing — these encase me like a womb and I try unsuccessfully to break loose. It is hard to accept or reject when you are told things about yourself as a child. You haven’t the authority to refute them, nor are you easily convinced. Besides, no two persons would agree as to what you looked like or what you did. Does that mean that everybody expresses himself or herself uniquely? Or that everyone is unique and nothing can be expressed correctly?

It is absurd, if you want to know my opinion, absurd because I know of no birth like mine. The hour of my birth, the zodiac’s reading, the place of birth, the position of the stars, my mother’s death after she had given birth to me, my father’s dying a day before I was born — do each of these contribute, in small ways, towards turning the act of my birth into a unique event? And let me not forget Misra — how could I? Misra who eventually tucked me into the oozy warmth between her breasts (she was a very large woman and I, a tiny little thing), so much so I became a third breast; Misra who, on account of my bronchial squeamishness, engulfed me in the same wrapping as her breasts — a wrapping as cosily couched as a brassiere; Misra who, as the night progressed towards daylight, would shed me the way a tree sheds a ripe fruit and who would roll over on her back and away from the wrapping which had covered us both, and I would find myself somewhere between her opened legs this time, as though I was a third leg.

Misra told me, again and again, the details of the day and hour she had found me. And I know what she was wearing that day and with whom she had been. She came into the room I had been in, she elegant-looking and I an ugly mess and nearly dead. I became, immediately she saw me, the centre of her focus. And she picked me up — she, whose hands were life to me. From the instant she lifted me and held me to herself (thus dirtying the brown dress she was wearing), I was a living being and I began to exist. I was dirty, yes; I was nameless, yes; but I existed the second she touched me. Did I stare at her? I do not know. However, my look might have been similar to a blind man’s stare, one whose eyes see nothing other than what is inside them. Can I simply say that she brought me into existence?

No one received news of my existence until a day later. For she chose to keep me as her secret find. She held me close to herself, having washed me clean; she held me to herself, warm as a secret one doesn’t wish to disclose. I remained nameless for a day and no one accounted for me. She then confided in Aw-Adan, He came and whispered a devotion in my ears; he told his beads in secretive whispers to the Almighty. That same day I was “delivered” into the hands of a world, in which a storm stirred and awoke the dead ghosts. My mother was given name and burial, too; for my father, a prayer was spoken and I was named “Askar”. Perhaps that is when I began to mean something else to Misra. Or is that an absurd statement to make? Until I was sent to school — or rather, until I met the larger world which consisted of a large number of children — I called Misra “Mother”.

What survived my real mother was “memory”, not I. People were, in a general sense, kinder and more generous to me, because my parents had died and I was an orphan. People said kind things about my parents, while they gave their counsel, gratis of course, to Misra, telling her how best to take care of me and how best to raise me, so I would be a monument of remembrance to them. Some looked disfavourably upon my calling Misra “Mother” and took the first opportunity to correct that. Others didn’t bother and argued that in time I would know she wasn’t my mother. As I grew older and met more and more of these people, I decided I would refrain from calling Misra anything until we were in the privacy of our room, so she could address me, or I her, however each liked. It was during this period that I asked Misra if she remembered anything about her own childhood. She answered that the only thing she could recall was that she wasn’t allowed any of the things she wanted to do and she longed to grow old enough so she could be herself. I asked, “As a child you weren’t yourself, do you mean?”

She said, “Childhood may best be described as a condition of becoming someone else when with adults, and yourself when alone or with other children; it is difficult getting used to either. I mean, it is difficult getting used to the idea that, although you've been given clothes bought specifically for you, the choice when and why to wear them or whether you would remain without them is not your own.”

I remember, I was six then. And I remember thinking about “nakedness”. In those days, whenever I saw someone naked, I could think of two things — beds and baths. One day I saw Misra and Aw-Adan naked. They were near a bed all right, but they were not in it, nor were they having their baths. I wondered if the choice to remain undressed could be an adult’s, too. A child, this I knew for certain, was allowed to roam about in the house or even in the street, totally unclothed. Although “who” the child was mattered a great deal too. If you were the child of one of those people who couldn’t afford to buy clothes for themselves, let alone for their children — well, one could understand and sympathize, couldn’t one? With this, and many other related and unrelated thoughts in my mind, I formulated a question in my head, a question which, in a roundabout way, had something to do with “nakedness” and which, in so far as I was concerned, directly had to do with my seeing Aw-Adan, the priest, and Misra, naked, although then they weren’t in bed but near it. I asked Misra what their “relationship” was.

To Misra, the question, “What’s this person’s relationship to me?” meant nothing more and nothing less than, “Who is this person?”—which in turn meant, “Is he an uncle or an aunt or a cousin?” To her, the fabric of Somali society was basically incestuous and you had a glimpse into the mind of a Somali if you knew to whom he or she was related by blood or by marriage. Neither she nor Aw-Adan was born Somali and I suspect she knew that I had been aware of that and therefore she must have sensed that no amount of tapestrying her woven story with patterns of her own inventions would have convinced me as the truth might have — life’s most excellent embroidery. She smiled sweetly, silently and looked away as though looking for an answer. She might have been inventing a genealogical tree whose branches and roots supplied a pedigree of the appropriate answers to my question. But I doubted very much if she was the type of woman who could lose herself in the eternity of a search for who she was — for she knew who she was.

When I insisted she respond to my question, she said, simply and plainly, as though she were speaking the words for the first time ever, “Aw-Adan? He is a man.”

For a moment or two, she sought and sat under the cool shade of the generic term “The Tree of Man” — and smiled triumphantly. I was sure she was under the wrong impression that she had dealt with my question satisfactorily. Then I asked, “What about Uncle Qorrax? Is he a man too?”

She was most singularly exposed, like an isolated eucalyptus tree a lightning had struck. She sat motionless, speechless, looking away from me, embarrassed.

II

I didn’t like Uncle Qorrax. It was no secret I didn’t like him. I was barely three days old when I made that abundantly clear to everybody, including himself. The story is told how he arranged to make a formal call on his nephew — that is me — how he had asked that I be washed with a scented soap which he had provided for that very purpose, how he had sent ahead of himself his youngest wife so she would help Misra with the arrangements and be present when he was introduced to me.

He came dressed in his best — a silk sarong he hadn’t worn until that day, a most colourful cimaama to go with it and a Baravaan hat. Also, he wore his patent-leather shoes and his favourite socks. He left his compound predicting that I would like him. He added, “I am determined to make him like me”. He said so to Shahrawello. I doubt it if she told him how ludicrous he looked, calling on his nephew not even three days old, dressed as though he were visiting a king. But what good would her speaking her mind have done her or anyone else? She stood aside, letting him go past her, and chuckled to herself as he took his long strides. After he had gone, I believe there was an improvised gathering and each of them commented on how absurd this all was, some laughed until their ribs ached. Anyway, Shahrawello is reported to have said that a man is not his clothes but that “a child inherits its mother’s hates and loves”. And she bet her life, if anyone was willing to bet a coin of the smallest denomination, that the young one wouldn’t like his uncle.

I was asleep when he entered. He was angry at Misra, accusing her of disobedience, scolding her for not having prepared me for the occasion. And he made unnecessary noises so I would wake up. I wouldn’t. Not until Misra went out of the room to cry outside. I heard her crying and I awoke. I looked this and that way No Misra. And who was this — a man awkwardly dressed with top hat and all, ugly, thin and tall? What’s more, I was lying on my back, helpless, like a beetle on its spine, and my hands, however many times I raised them, returned to me empty — empty of Misra and full of vacant air. Then I heard Uncle’s ugly voice, thin and yet sharp, piercing, cutting me in two halves. And I cried a furious cry, so heinous that he froze where he was, frightened at the thought that I might harm myself. When he came nearer me, I cried louder and with vengeance and no one could silence me until Misra returned. Once she was back in the room, you could sense that my cry wasn’t as fierce as it had been. All she had to do was to lay a finger on any part of my body and I fell quiet. But my body remained nervous and there was something agitated in the atmosphere until Uncle Qorrax was out of the room. I began to relax when I could no longer hear his ugly voice.

That I burst into tears immediately when he walked into the room I had been in— this entered the lore of the traditions told in my uncle’s compound. Obviously, it made him very uneasy. But there was little he could do to me, or about me. His position as a respected member of the community dictated that he treat me with apparent kindness, and that he provide for me, someone else to take my mother’s place. Misra, until then, was not a bona fide member of the compound. It appears she became one, especially, when I chose her — chose her in preference to all the other women who had been tried on me, one after the other, a dozen or so women into whose open arms I was dropped. I cried with vigour whenever Misra wasn’t there. In the end, the community of relations approved of my choice. But not my uncle. Not until a year later.

To reduce the tension, my uncle decided to earmark a fenced mud hut with its separate entrance for our own use. That way, he wouldn’t encounter us when going into or out of his compound, of which he was the unchallenged master. One could tell if he was or wasn’t there — when he was there, we wouldn’t hear anything except his terrible voice, giving instructions to or shouting at somebody. Often, we would also hear the help-help cry of a wife or a child being beaten. When he wasn’t there, the compound and its residents wore an air of festivity and women and children exchanged gossip and wicked jokes about him, or men like him, and neighbours visited and were entertained. But we were excluded from the joys and sadnesses of the compound. We had our life to lead and a compound which was all our own, Misra and I. We lived the way we saw fit. At least, until nightfall And then Uncle came.

He came after nightfall and made his claims on Misra. It was one thing to make a political (that is public) statement by being kind to her and myself, it was another to give something for nothing. He didn’t confound issues — he would hire another woman in her place and dispense with her services unless she offered herself to him. I learnt later that she did. She said it was so she would be allowed to be with me. Misra suffered the humiliation of sleeping with him so she could be with me. I don’t know what I might have said if I had known. Things do look different from this height (now I am a grown-up and a man myself!), from this distance; besides, one tends to indulge oneself until the end of one’s days, talking until daylight, about the possible alternatives and compromises of a complicated situation such as this. But were there other avenues, other alternatives, other possible compromises that she could’ve struck with Uncle Qorrax?

She thought Aw-Adan might have become one healthy alternative — if I had liked him. But I didn’t. Looking back on it now, I think the reasons why I disliked Aw-Adan were different — different in that Misra and he had a world of their own, a language of their own, and so when they lapsed into it or chose to dwell in the secretive universe of its nuances and expressions and gestures, I felt totally excluded. I was afraid they would either take me away from the Somali-speaking world or deny me my Misra, who had been for me the end-all and the cosmos of my affections.

It is hard to admit it, but I suppose I was a vulnerable child, much more vulnerable than anyone suspected. Aw-Adan nicknamed me “Misra’s nightingale”. I didn’t understand his meaning until years later. For a long time, I took him to mean that I sang Misra’s love-names. He didn’t mean that at all. He meant that only Misra was allowed to enter my freehold space, the freehold territory which I had acquired for myself.

It is true that only Misra had access to the freehold kingdom of which I was the undisputed lord. And since I held Uncle Qorrax, his wives and his children in total awe and at bay, it appeared there were only Misra and Karin whose civilized company I kept. Nor did I like playing with the children of the neighbourhood when I grew up a little bigger, because they remained infantile, fighting over the ownership of toys, dolls and balls. I took pride in my being self-sufficient and came to no grief so long as I knew either Misra or Karin was in my view or earshot. At night, dreams kept me busy; during the day, if Misra was otherwise occupied with one of life’s many chores that needed attending to, I sought the companionship of my imagination. It was only when Misra was short-tempered (this happened when she was in season), or when she beat me because she was short-tempered (because she was in season) — it was only then that I knew I was an only child and an orphan. And Misra couldn’t bear the stare-of-the-orphan. And she would dispatch me off for the day to Karin’s compound — Karin who was, to me, like a grandmother: gentle as one, generous as one.

III

I am sure it is appropriate that I address myself to the question: was there ever any time that I remember liking Uncle Qorrax? Was there a period I remember having a soft spot for the man who paid all my expenses, the man who was my father’s brother?

I was fond of adults” shoes, as many children are, when I was an infant, and I recall the pleasant thought of owning such good and colourfully patterned shoes as Uncle Qorrax crossing my mind. It used to give me immense happiness to touch them whenever I crawled near them. It used to make me sad when I was not allowed to put them in my mouth or lick them. But when the phase of loving adults’ shoes was passed, I ceased going to him or being friendly with him.

I think that the patterns of his shoes appealed to my sense of the aesthetic, since their designs reminded me of some of the calligraphic images I had seen painted on doors to the palaces my dreams had taken me to but which I had never entered. After all, The Arabian Nightswere full of such gates with such motifs and such colourful designs. The truth was that I admired them even when I was a little older and loved their bright colours. Although, when he asked me once what my favourite colour was, I surprised him by saying that I preferred earthen to neon — knowing full well what that meant. This decided for him — as a present for the Ciid festivities, he didn’t buy for me a pair of shoes with bright colours and patterns as he had intended — instead, he got me maps. And he called to deliver them in broad daylight. He came dressed as though in mourning. Misra inquired if somebody had died. He was in a foul mood. He said, “Someone will die, somebody will.”

Misra looked unhappy that day and the following. If only she paid attention to my comments that someone always dies, that someone is born when another dies and that we are affected by death or birth if we know, are close to, or love the persons concerned.

“What on earth are you talking about?” she said.

I said, “Of death.”

IV

Death-as-topic-for-discussion was taboo in our house and no one was allowed to speak of it or mention the Archangel’s name in my presence. It was of life we were to talk, the blood and vitality of life that is the essence of one’s being. Even the past, when clothed in garments of death or mourning, was a forbidden subject, for it was feared that this past might eventually lead to the names of my dead parents, to the fact that I knew next to nothing about my mother or my father.

There were epidemics, there was a drought, and the earth lay lifeless, treeless, dead, growing nothing, causing things to decay and metal to rust — and we weren’t allowed to talk about death. Whispers. Conspiracies. With the night falling secretly and Uncle Qorrax crawling into bed with us and making love to Misra — the cycle of life and death, the circle ending where it began — the flow of menstruation, of death ascertained — and we weren’t to talk of death. Not even when Misra was helped to abort, not even when a calendar was brought into the compound and when circles in green were neatly drawn round the safe days and nights. An ovum lives for less than thirty-six hours, sperm for about twenty-four. Yes, only one, maximum two days in each cycle. And we weren’t to talk of death.

Not until I came to Mogadiscio during the 1977 war in the Horn of Africa, not until then was the discretion about death completely disregarded and only then could “death” occur in my vocabulary in the manner it occurs in the thoughts of a spinster who’s been robbed by it. I recall saying to Uncle Hilaal, who helped me loosen up and with whom I could comfortably talk easily that “death” was to me simply a metaphor of “absence”; and God was a “presence”. My uncle’s stare was long but also difficult to interpret. He was silent for a while, then, sighing, he mumbled something which I took to be the syllables of Misra’s name.

Mis-ra!

Then I repeated to my uncle the story of how I asked Misra to explain what it is that happens when death visits its victims.

“The heart stops functioning,’ she said.

“Nothing else happens?” I inquired.

“That is death. The heart’s stopping,” she explained.

“And the rest of the body?”

“It rigidifies as a result.”

“Like … like Aw-Adan’s leg? Wooden like Aw-Adan’s leg, is that what happens? Lifeless and unbending… like Aw-Adan’s leg?”

I had never seen Misra as angry as she was on that day. She wouldn’t speak for hours. And in the body of my fantasies there took place something interesting: I remembered how fast the third leg (the wooden leg, that is) was dropped and how fast another between his legs came to raise its head, jerkily, slowly and nervously; and how the whole place drowned in the sighing endearments of Misra who called him… yes him of all people … “my man, my man, my man”!

Then suddenly I remembered something — a question I had meant to put to somebody, any adult, I didn’t care to whom. Misra happened to be angry, yes, but I felt she would answer it if I asked. So I did just that. “And the soul?” I said.

Most definitely, she had forgotten what we were talking about before she fell silent and into a dudgeon dark with rage. “What about the soul?” she said, lost in the zigzaggy mazes of bewilderment. “What about it?”

“What happens to the soul when somebody dies?” I said.

She was silent for a while — silent in a naked way, if I may put it thus, and she took her time gathering her ideas like an elegant robe around her, her hands busy touching and caressing her face, levelling and smoothing the bumps and the roughness her anger with me had brought about, and a thought crossed my mind (my thoughts as usual began to outrun me): what do monkeys pick when they pick at each others head? Lice? Or something else? Or nothing at all? I thought I would wait for the right moment to question her on this.

She cleared her throat. I knew she was ready to speak I sat up, waiting. In the meanwhile, I could see her repeating to herself something in mumbles. 1 was sure she was quoting either the Koran or Aw-Adan. She said, “The soul is the stir in one, for one stirs not when dead,”

I was disappointed. She wondered why. I told her.

“And what do you want me to tell you?” she said, unhappy

I was disappointed her answer was brief and had ended, in a sentence, long before I was aware she had begun. What I wanted her to do was to talk about death in as much detail as was possible for a seven-year-old like myself to understand. I needn’t have reminded her that I had encountered death before, in the look of my mother, in the rigidity of her body. I needn’t have reminded her that, in so far as she was concerned, I had made myself, that 1 was my own creation and that upon me was bestowed, by myself of course, everything other mortals wished for in their dreams.

“So?” I challenged.

She appeared dazed. Could it be because she could not recall telling me herself that when she first encountered my undiluted stare she thought that “I had made myself and had been my own creation!’”? There may have been other reasons. But she stared at me as though the world had shrunk to the ground beneath her weighty body and as though any memory of her would disappear with it too and she would die. Anyway, she was silent for a long, long, time. However, this silence was different from the previous silences in that she appeared frightened, afraid of my stare. And so she pulled at her dress, nervous.

I said, “Death takes many forms in my head. Generally, it is donned all in white, robed in an Archangel’s garment into whose many-pocketed garment is dropped the day’s harvest of souls. I wonder if my mother and father’s souls ended up in the same pocket, just like a beloved wife is buried in the same tomb as her husband or a child its mother if they all die together. I wonder if I would have a soul to speak of had I died at birth — I instead of my mother.”

Flabbergasted, she could only stare at me. And I continued: “I was ready to be born but it appears my mother was ready to die. Maybe I would have died if she hadn’t. And I suspect it wouldn’t be I telling this story, I suspect, as a matter of fact, the story wouldn’t be the same, not the subject matter. My death wouldn’t have earned me an obituary and my life wouldn’t have engaged anybody’s time and energy. You see, death ends all talk. From then on, death rules. Or, if you please, God.”

Again, she stared at me in disbelief. She asked after the appropriate pause: “How old are you, Askar?”

I replied, “I am seven.”

“I might as well ask myself if Satan is older,” she said.

“I am sorry?”

“Oh, never mind,” she said.

Before long, she was herself again, mothering me, requesting that I bow down and subject my clothes for inspection, reminding me at one and the same time that I was very young, capable of “accidents”, unforeseen things, and that put her in control of the situation again and she was saying that I should change my clothes, etc., etc., etc. But: woe to me if she were in season. Then — well, that’s another story.

V

The sight of blood didn’t repel or frighten me. That of water, however small or large its body, attracted me. Water comforted me and I fell silent when in it, as though in reverence to its god. I splashed in it so that its crystals, clear as silver and just as lovely, flew up in the air, winged, like my imagination, until these balls of magic beauty were recalled back to the body from whence they had sprung. I could never determine my relationship with water. Not until I met my mother’s brother, who told me that water had the same sort of satanic fascination for my mother, Aria. She had endangered her own life so many times that in the end, he decided to teach her to swim. She was the only woman who knew how to swim, it being uncommon in Somalia for women to learn. Water, she had explained to him, gave her the mobility and space her fantasies required, and she used to begrudge the water in the ocean its moods of calm or rage, the water in the river the determination to return “home” in vaporous form or end in the bigger ocean,

I asked myself often if this is what I remember of my foetal existence — water. It was total bliss, I said to Uncle Hilaal one day He was happy to hear that. He said — and I am not certain if he was quoting from something he read — that the first water is indubitably the best, it is heavenly bliss. There is no other expression for such a feeling.

So, in depthless water, my beginning. It was water ushered me into where I am, water that made me the human that I am, water that gave me foetal warmth — and a great deal more. Water was my mirror and I watched my reflections in it, reflections at which I smiled and which grew waves — waves dark as shadows — when I dipped my hand in. I was fond of drinking from the very spot across which my shadow fell. The water never tasted as good, in my cupped hands, from any other place.

In depthless water, too, it was I saw my future. I had it read by Misra who was exceptionally gifted in this sort of line — reading one’s future in the waves of water or in the quiver of meat or in a pool of blood. Water in a container or blood in another, the blood of a slaughtered beast, lying untouched where it had fallen and remaining there until it was empty of running, i.e. living, blood. But was it for religious or health sentiments that this was done? Misra didn’t know. Anyway, she knew how to read the future in the quiver of meat. The intestines, the fats, the entrails — every piece or slice of meat was, to her, like a palm to a fortune-teller and she read it. I was certain no other child had as much fun as I. Definitely not any of Uncle Qorrax’s children. They were beaten in the morning, in the afternoon or in the evenings by their tyrannical father, by Aw-Adan who was their (and later became my) teacher, or their mothers or a visiting relation. Not I. I was Misra’s property.

And Misra would bathe me. She oiled my body with care. I crouched in the baafi my eyes half-closed, in concentration and anxiety, waiting for the water to descend from a great height. I would shake, I would shiver, as though the cold water was hot and had burnt me — my arms moving in all directions as though they might take off in flight. A second and a third scooping of the water would ensure that my body was sufficiently wet for her to soap it. At times, when standing, I held on to her shoulders, lest I fell forward. My eyes remained closed, however, until I heard her say that I could open them. It was she who determined when this was to occur. As part of the ritual, she insisted that I blow my nose. For this purpose she would place her open left palm directly under my chin and with her right hand’s index finger and thumb squeezing the nose as I exhaled. Now where was I given these baths? Right inside our mud hut; or in the yard, if it was day, under the tree planted the very day I was born. That she had hers in the privacy of a closed door and all by herself was something I associated with her being an adult. Children had no cawra, whether boys or girls, they could walk about naked, displaying their uff until they became grown up. Anyway, after the bath, another joy.

She would oil my body a second time — tickling me as she did so, touching my friend squeezing it. She made me laugh, made me happy. Then she prepared a meal for the two of us to eat, and when I was good, as a treat, she boiled milk and sugared it for me and I drank it warm. Playfully, I refused to lick away my moustache of milk and she would tease me and we would have great fun, laughing, chasing each other under the bed or behind it. Suddenly, her voice changed. No more drinking of water lest I wet the bed which she and I shared. “What have you in your bladder?” and she would tickle me. “Why does it leak?” And the nipping, as she pinched my uff, would make me laugh.

Water: I associate with joy; blood: not so much with pain as with lost tempers and beatings. But I associate something else with blood — future as read by Misra. Once I even made a pun — my future is in my blood. The funny thing was Uncle Qorrax misunderstood it as meaning that my destiny was the destiny of the family of which he was head. Well, I didn’t correct him. We had a laugh, Misra and I. The poor man did not know that she had read my future in blood.

As for water. Have you ever watched a storm of rain? Imagine this: every drop of rain is escorted by an angel who keeps it company until it touches the earth, the angels who make certain that seasons change for the better when it rains, that people prosper, the dry brown grass turns green, dust into mud — and human beings pray in thankful offerings, slaughtering beasts for their carnivorous tables — and Misra is thus enabled to tell a future — which is past.

For Misra, and therefore for me too, everything had a past, a present, and a future. The earth had its history, the sun its life, the moon its pattern of behaviour. Blood. Sand. Dry leaves, dry twigs. Papers, yellow with age and roaming the open spaces, riding the dust and the wind — everything told of a future. One had to know to read it. Or so said Misra.

And stones had faces, spiders souls, serpents ideas, lizards intelligence. Human beings are not the only living and thinking beings. Rivers have memories, she said. They remember where they’ve come from, they have allegiance to the people in whose country they rise. The wind recalls whom it has met in its journeys across the vast deserts, it exchanges greetings with some, turning an unhearing ear to the salutations reaching it from others. A reed possesses a mind of its own and holds steadfastly to this, even if, at times, the wind makes it go dizzy, lose its head and balance as it somersaults over rocks, sandbanks, etc. The earth draws strength from the sky, the sky from the earth — and the living from the dead. The history of the earth can be read in its eclipses, that of the sun from its being partially or completely obscured by the shadow of another body — the earth or the moon.

I continue, since I have heard her recite the “Ode to Nature” so many times: a child is to its mother what the sun is to the moon; what the heavens are to earth. Yes, Fm quoting her. The mother is what the moon is to the sun; what the earth to the heavens. A mother receiving little, giving a great deal. It makes a mother take delight in the giving and the child (or man) in the receiving. The shock is greater when one learns one must give — not always receive. A shock so great, it is like falling suddenly and unexpectedly from a great height, onto the lap of death. Amen! The living draw strength from the dead, don’t they? And those who are asleep receive sustenance from those who are awake. Amen! And remember — the Prophet has said that men are asleep. It’s only at their death that they are awoken. Amen!

VI

She looked like a corpse when asleep — motionless, with her hands folded together across her chest, her eyes closed and hardly a snort, or even a sound, issuing from her nostrils. But I told myself she needn’t have worried, when all others die, she won’t, I would say to myself. So long as I lived, she would too. Either in me, or she would live a life independent from mine. And I would watch her stir, then rise, as though from the dead, every morning, after I had been awake for hours. She would dust her dress and walk away — as if she had woken from the dead, from her own grave. Every morning, the same thing. At times, she would take a nap in the afternoon. And Aw-Adan would come and he would pull up a chair by her head, and sitting quietly, would read a selection of suras from the Koran, as though she were dead and he were reading a devotion or two over her. If she didn’t look like a corpse, I would turn her into one, I said to her one day

“But why?” she asked, disturbed.

“Or I would kill you. So you would be a corpse like my mother.”

“Kill me? Why? But what have I done?”

I found it extremely difficult to explain myself. Of course, I wasn’t going to “kill her” because I had hated her, far from it, far from it. What I meant was, that only in death could she and I be united — only in death, her death, could she and I be related, only then would I somehow feel as though we were a mother and her son. And then, and only then, would I find myself, alone and existing and real — yes, an individual with needs of his own — no longer an extension of a maternal hand whose touch quietened the childish cry in one.

And then I asked, “Is it possible that death took me for my mother, is it, Misra? Please answer me honestly. For this is something I ask myself often and I don’t know what to think or say.”

She shook her head and said she didn’t think death would mistake one person for another. It was all to do with whether one’s time in this world was up and in any case, she went on, it is only under exceptional circumstances that a person’s lifetime in this world is extended. And she told me the story of the man to whom an angel appeared and said that he, the man, was to die in a year to the day, having had his time which had been extended in view of the good things he had been doing. Although grateful, the man admitted that one year wasn’t probably enough for him to finish all the things he had begun and besides, what is a year but three-hundred-and-sixty-five days and what is life but these incalculable mysteries, mysteries that remain unrevealed to one, mysteries that descend on one like grains of sand from the sky I would've preferred it, said the man to the angel, had you not come to tell me when death would call on me — whether in an hour, a day, say, or even a year. The angel said he had been given instructions to do so and he left the man saying no more. For three-hundred-and-sixty-five days and nights, the man spent every second of his life in this world praying and he spent every cent he had on some charitable cause or other and he did not sin either in thought or deed. A year later to the day, the angel, robed all in white, appeared before the man, and all he said was, “You’ve been dead for a year. If one were to extend your life in this world by another year, one wonders if you will live. Why pray day and night? Why spend every cent you have on charities for the needy? Do you think God created you only to pray? Live. Live, we recommend. Live like a human.” And the angel left the man in similar agony. The man lived for a year. He overate, he gave not a cent to godly causes, but prayed enough so as to placate his own conscience. When next the angel called on him, the man was prepared to receive the news of his death for he was still in pain, burdened with the knowledge that he would die in less than a year. The angel, it came to pass, turned up two years later and his only comment was that the man had the making of a human who sinned and knew he had. That man, or so the stories tell us, lived to be a hundred-and-fifteen years before another angel knocked on his door.

“But what was exceptional in the man’s life?” I said.

“He was like every other human being, I think. And death could Ve mistaken him for another person. He was weak and didn’t know the meaning of life, didn’t know why God created him,” she said. “Like most of us.”

It didn’t make much sense to me and I wondered if Aw-Adan had told her a story whose details she had half-forgotten. I asked her, after a long pause, if this was so.

As usual, she was unwilling to admit there were gaps in the story she had told me. So she changed the subject. She said that we could play hide-and-seek until I fell asleep.

She hid; I sought her out.

VII

Did I, in the act of looking, bring into being a world in which there existed not only Misra but many other persons as well? Did I, as a result of this my stare, bring into existence a life of memories in which I am not the rememberer but the remembered? I — who did surrender myself wholly to Misra and her world; I — who existed in a look I myself couldn’t have seen or known of; I — who had lived in a universe dark as a photographer’s room, a universe developing into identifiable beings, some in duplicate, others in as many copies as one wanted. A look? Or a touch?

For me, life began in her hands and it was in her touch that I began to exist. Not in the savage stare which was so primitive it penetrated to the depth of her guilt, a savage stare which stirred in her soul a selfless desire to give and give and give and therefore be, exist only in the giving. Is this why I touched her whenever the chance presented itself to me? And is this why her physical absence upset me greatly when I was tiny — because I couldn’t reprint, on the screen of my undeveloped memory, my image of her in as many copies as I wanted? Anyway, my life was in her hands and she could do what she wanted with it and she did very well by it. Yes, by all accounts, she satisfied my uncles and aunts and other relations and was able to obtain their approval — although there were secrets between her and myself, secrets to which no other person had access. These secrets comprised things we did together, she and I; they consisted of games we played in our room when darkness fell and the silence of night engulfed all and everything and we went under the bedcovers and she told me stories or taught me things she wasn’t supposed to. These secrets included the fact that I knew everything she did. For example, one of my uncles used to come and knock on the small window of our room after midnight and Misra would get out of bed and wash and prepare and wait for a second knock. At times she would open the door and he would enter and make love to her on the floor or she would follow him to another place. Often, I pretended as if I were asleep. But at times I would cry so violently I would spoil the night for them, she would get back into bed with me and would calm me down, hold me between her breasts and would whisper something in a serious tone — either, “I hope you’ll learn to be on your own like all other children of your age”; or, her eyes misted with tears of anguish, she would say, “I will kill you unless you behave yourself. I’ll strangle you — so as to live my own life.” Then she would place her index and middle fingers on her closed eyes and the fingers would rest there, as though they were the holes of a flute. And she would continue: “I will kill you or I will kill myself.” I would cry more furiously and would wet myself in the enraged frenzy of a pervasive self-expression, and her tears would drip on me. She would lift me up, disregarding the mess of my moisture and the fact that she was dressed in her most elegant dress, and she would rock me to silence. She would place me within her reach, either on the floor or on a stool. If she moved away from me, if her hand didn’t lay on me, she knew I would burst into another convulsive cry and would also vomit or cough or do both. After a long bath, I would sit up and, as though nothing had occurred, would play And she would hide and I would look out for her in the dark or lighted sections of the room. When neighbours or relations who had overheard my tumultuous cries the previous night asked after me the following morning, Misra, generous and loving, would not speak of the inconveniences I had caused her, nor would she speak of the visitor who had called after midnight. We would look at each other and share a grin or a smile, depending on our respective moods. But neither would talk of our common secret. When nervous, she would rise from where she had been sitting and look away. I would smile to myself triumphantly, knowing that I had her whole life in the power of my mouth and I could do what I wanted with it.

I'll admit that many things are confused in my memory. My head, I feel sometimes, will explode with the intensity of the anecdotes I remember — events which in all likelihood didn’t take place, not, at any rate, as I remember them. One thing which I definitely recall, with the clarity of a daylight occurrence, is how “responsible” Misra felt regarding me, my body and my thoughts. She was responsible for me in the same way as the dweller of a certain place takes upon himself or herself most things that happen in it, so much so that water shortages or power-cuts and similar anomalies are explained away as personal shortcomings. If I had a cold, if my stomach ran or if I spoke unduly rudely to anyone, Misra explained — she justified or interceded for me or she would say that she would take the beating on herself. If taken ill, she would explain why my constitution had weakened or why I wasn’t as healthy and strong as I used to be. But when not in public, she would complain to me directly or grumble or mumble, within my hearing, as though she were talking to herself. “It is in your element to be mean,’ she would accuse me. “Why, you know I am a foreigner here and that if you fall ill, your people will say it is because I haven’t taken good care of your food. You also know that, when you do well, the credit is not mine but your people’s, that is your [Somali] nation whose identity I do not share. Why must you make my life a misery?”

But there are many things of which I am not sure. For instance, Fm not sure who said this: “Your look was smooth — like pebbles in a stream”. Misra herself? Will someone tell me what it means — in concrete terms? Please? Will you tell me? will you explain? You who sit in judgment over me. Will somebody? Yes?

CHAPTER THREE

I

And he was running and running, he was breathing hard and running. But he didn’t know why he was running, nor did he know what he was fleeing from. He ran, blind with fright; he ran senselessly. And he couldn’t define the purpose of his running — but neither could he stop. He crossed nearly three-quarters of a large forest and wouldn’t stop even when he saw that he had entered a clearing littered with discarded dolls of which he hardly took any notice. He couldn’t tell how many hours it had taken him to get to where he was or whether he had been running in circles. Dawn was beginning to break.

And something up in the heavens, luminous and small, attracted his attention. He asked himself, could it be possible — Venus at dawn? But he heard a noise and he turned — a woman who was thin and dark was standing in front of him, a woman who resembled Misra and yet who wasn’t Misra for she introduced herself when he approached her not as Misra but Ummat; and he made as if to speak, he started saying “I am…”, but left the sentence unfinished. Misra offered to be his guide. She promised she would answer his questions, all his questions. And it was to be so. Most people they met along the way had their bodies tattooed with their identities: that is name, nationality and address. Some had engraved on their skins the reason why they had become who they were when living and others had printed on their foreheads or backs their national flags or insignia. There was a man on whose chest was tattooed the Somali flag with three points of the star missing and Misra explained to Askar why. They also met a man carrying a placard on which was written the words “a martyr from the Ogaden”. Askar thought he had seen the man before. Then he turned to face her so he could ask if she too had known him. Alas! She was not there anymore, not only was she not there, but she wasn’t in his memory either. She had disappeared completely and he now asked himself, was it possible that his “I am” addressed to Misra was not, after all, incomplete? And he was Misra? In his mind, he removed the dots denoting the incomplete nature of the statement and spoke it again. He heard himself say “I am”, and the echo returned to him a sound which he found to be meaningful

Now he looked up to see if “Venus” too had vanished. Here he wasn’t totally disappointed — but in a peculiar way curiously reflective. He felt awkward, like when you cannot name something you know, when the combination of letters in your mouth will not match the sound your lips are willing to make. It was not “Venus”, he decided in his Edenic impression. It was a species, looking rather like a spider, large and colourful — a spider as huge as the dreamscape he had been treading, a spider which had managed to weave from out of that small belly, out of that tiny body, a web so complex, a trap so long, one would be lost in it. The spider ascended the ladder of lengths of its innards.

Now he moved away, convinced that he had to do just that. And he walked. After half an hour, he came upon a river about to break at the banks. Undisturbed, he sat under a tree and contemplated while waiting. But what was he waiting for? He didn’t know. He sat, waiting; he sat, burdened with a Thomist’s questioning of the self: he told himself he knew what purpose rivers served — to irrigate and help grow food in the form of fruits, vegetables, etc.; but what did man’s existence serve, or whom? To worship God? To study God through nature? Why was he born? For some unforeseeable reason related to the thought that had just crossed his mind, Askar remembered the story of a man who challenged everything, a man who contested that “even mirrors didn’t reflect the true identity of things and persons”. The man was bald — but he chose to refuse to see his baldness, although people confirmed what the mirror reflected, or rather what it saw. People said that he was insane, they argued, how could anyone contend that what people saw and mirrors confirmed wasn’t true? Months later, the man went insane. Would Askar in the end go mad questioning things, challenging received opinions?

Finally, he was standing in front of a huge portal with the letterA boldly printed on it. He remembered that, perhaps in a previous life, he had seen that portal before and he had been turned away from it by a uniformed man. Now he hadn’t the courage to knock on it, nor did he have the curiosity to discover to what secret world the gate would have given him access. He sat on a boulder by the side of the road. To his left, there was a stream whose banks were green with weeds. It appeared as though a fountain had, just at that instant, right in front of him, right in his presence, given birth to an aqueous marvel of a stream in which fishes of all sizes and descriptions chased one another without any sense of inhibition or forbearance.

And he discovered, looking up, that the sky above him was wearing the seven heavenly garments, whose colours matched that of a rainbow he had never seen before — one was of ruby; one of silvery pearls; one gold; another white silver; one of orange hyacinth; and, lastly, one of shining brightness, the likes of which no human, other than a mystic or a prophet, had ever perceived. To his right, when he turned, there was a tree on one of whose branches perched “talking dolls”. He couldn’t understand what the dolls were saying. However, he later wondered if these might possibly have been the product of an exhausted mind’s aberrant way of expressing itself.

Then a voice (was it coming from within himself or without — he couldn’t tell), a voice, alive with urgency, called to him. First, he was frightened and wouldn’t stir at all. Then he heard a silky sound, that is, he heard the hissing sound of a snake approaching from his right, and, not in the least frightened, he moved towards the snake. Meanwhile, his hands, as he went to encounter the snake, gently touched a spot on his thigh where a snake had bitten him when small. He stared at the snake, expecting it would wear an expression of recognition; and yes; he saw the snake’s forked tongue cut the air surgically, its head nodding, its throat throbbing with coded speech. Then all movements, within himself and without, ceased; and he didn’t know where he was or who he was; and he no longer had any identity or name; nor was the snake there either. For a second or so, he was frightened, as if he were a traveller who had misplaced his travelling documents. Was it conceivable, he asked himself, that he had lost whatever knowledge he had gained about himself through the years?

Alone, melancholic, he sat on a boulder, his head between his hands, his expression mournful. He was saddest that there was no one else to whom he could put questions about his own identity; there was no one to answer his nagging, “Who am I?” or “Where am I?” Luckily, however, Askar soon found he had a premonition — that the snake would return wearing a mask And lo and behold the snake did return, its face cast in the image of a man whose photograph Askar had seen before, a photograph identified as “Father”. He couldn’t, then, help remembering a relation telling him not to harm snakes that had called on the family compound years ago because some snakes were the family’s blood relations. He had given this serious thought and requested that someone, preferably an adult, answer his query: “He may be a snake in body and appearance although he is a human relation in all other aspects that are not easily revealed to you or I — is this possible?” Misra had answered, yes.

Suddenly, an overwhelming silence had overcome Askar. And a voice nobody claimed, one which certainly did not emanate from his sub- or unconscious, called him away In other words, a voice lured him on to a field — a field greener with the imaginations’s pasture — and he spotted two horses neighing nervously as he approached them. One of the horses was frighteningly ugly, the other handsome like an Arabian horse of noble breed. The colour of the handsome horse, saddled with the finest material man could make, was jet black, sporting a white forehead, white forelegs and dark eyes, although its upper lips were not as white as its forehead. The other was ugly, but it appeared uglier standing by the handsome horse. It was sweaty and smelly and its teeth were as sharp as a sword. Askar suspected the handsome horse knew who he was, for it came up to him (the ugly one stayed behind, greedily eating its grass), and, head down in reverence, stood by him ready to be ridden. The speed, once he was on its back, was great; the grace, enormous; and the comfort of the ride indescribably refreshing. It galloped across rivers, it jumped any mountainous hurdle and flew in the air, as if winged! A horse, was this really a horse? It wasn’t as big-boned as the horses he had seen before, but was definitely a great deal taller, and of course heftier, than an Arabian horse. It had legs which adjusted themselves to the conditions of the terrain. When going down a hill, for instance, the horse’s front legs would stretch, they would become longer so that he, who had never ridden a horse before and who didn’t know how to, wouldn’t find it embarrassingly difficult to hold on to the saddle.

Without being told to, the horse stopped.

And a man, clothed in coarse garments of wool, appeared before them. The man was so quiet, so still, it seemed Askar and the horse’s breathing disturbed him. The horse went nearer the man, and it bowed its head low, as though in apology for some wrong done. The man patted the horse on the head. And Askar dismounted. The horse, as if dismissed, went away to the bushes behind Askar and the man, hidden from them. Askar saw that the horse did not condescend to eat the grass at all, but waited, its ears pricked, blessed with the foreknowledge that it would be fed on nobler food, on something ambrosial perhaps.

“Greetings,” said the man, his voice golden and sweet and deep. “Greetings, young man, from our land of mysteries, snakes, spiders, and horses and men in coarse garments of wool. Welcome amongst us, traveller. Greetings,’ he repeated.

There was a brief silence which appeared endless to Askar, for it was during this period that he was to cross from the darkened area of a dreamscape to that of light. Uninitiated, it took him longer and the man repeated the greetings formula a couple of times until Askar was ready to hear and understand. The man continued: “We met but briefly, you and I, my son. My vision had just begun to grow mistier and the fog had descended on my soul, and thus I could not see nor comprehend. Greetings.”

Askar stared at him in silence.

The man went on, “And I have a message. Would you like to receive it? And will you promise to deliver it to its rightful recipient, my son?”

Askar nodded his head, but didn’t ask who the rightful recipient of the message was.

“The Prophet has said, may God bless his soul, that men are asleep. It is only at their death that they are awoken. Can you repeat that to me, word for word, my son?”

Askar nodded his head.

“Please repeat it to me, word for word.”

Askar repeated it.

“And there is another message.”

Askar indicated that he was waiting to receive it, even if it were on behalf of someone else.

“Please listen very carefully.”

Askar waited.

The man said, “An eagle builds a nest with its own claws.” There followed a slight pause. And the man waited. Askar repeated, “An eagle builds a nest with its own claws.” Then the man in the coarse garments of wool took Askar by the hand and the horse, without being called, joined them, but kept a distance, awaiting instructions. The man walked to where the horse was and he whispered something into its ear. And the horse nodded. The horse then indicated to Askar that it was ready to be ridden. Askar, as he mounted the horse, wondered to himself if it would grow wings as bright as dawn and fly in the direction of the morning sun. Whereupon, as they bid each other farewell, the man said to Askar, “May you be awoken in peace.”

And Askar awoke.

II

Awake and washed, handsome, shaven and seventeen years old, he now stood behind a window in a house in Mogadiscio — Uncle Hilaal’s house. To his right, a writing desk on which lay, not as yet filled out, a form from the Somali National University Admissions Committee, a form he hadn’t had the peace of mind to look at, because he didn’t know whether he would, after all, choose to go to university although he had passed his school certificate examination with distinction and-was within his rights to say which course or faculty he wanted. There were, besides the unfilled-out form, two other notes — one from Uncle Hilaal, in whose charge he lived, telling him that Misra had been seen in town and that she had been looking for the whereabouts of Askar and was likely to turn up any day at this doorstep; the other from the Western Liberation Front Headquarters, in Mogadiscio, requesting that he appear before the recruitment board for an interview. He stood behind the window, contemplative and very still — resembling a man who has come to a new, alien land. Presently, he left the window and picked up the forms and the notes in turn. He realized that he couldn’t depersonalize his worries as he had believed he might. It occurred to him, as an afterthought, that on reading the note from Uncle Hilaal last night when he got back (he had spent a most pleasant evening out in the company of Riyo, his girlfriend), his soul, out of despair, had shrunk in size while his body became massive and overblown. He wondered why

Misra was here, in Mogadiscio!

Askar was now big, tall, clean as grown-ups generally are, and healthy What would she make of him? he asked himself. He remembered how she used to lavish limitless love on him when sick; how she took care of him with the attentiveness of a child mending a broken toy. She would wash him, she would oil his body twice daily and her fingers would run over his smooth skin, stopping, probing, asking questions when they encountered a small scratch, a badly attended to sore or a black spot. Boils were altogether something else. They never worried her. “Boys have them when and as they grow up,” she said, repeating the old wives’ notion about boils. “They are a result of undischarged sperm.”

But how would she react to him and to his being a grown man, maybe taller than she, who knows; maybe stronger and more muscular than she? Would absurd ideas cross her mind: that she would like to give him a bath? Or would she offer to give him a wash or help him soap his back, or — why not? — sponge those parts of his body his hands can’t reach, would she? Whose look would be earth-bound, his or hers? Would he be able, in other words, to outstare her?

Standing between them, now that he had turned seventeen and she forty-something, were ten years, each year as prominent as a referee stopping a fight — ten years in which he shed his childish skin and grew that of an adult, under the supervision of Uncle Hilaal. He was virtually a different person. Perhaps he wasn’t even a person when she last saw him. He was only a seven-year-old boy and her ward and, sometimes he thought to himself, her toy too. Anyway, the ten years which separated them were crucial in a number of ways.

The world Uncle Hilaal and Salaado had introduced him to, his living in Mogadiscio with them, his schooling there and the world which these had opened up for him, was a universe apart from the one the war in the Ogaden imposed on Misra’s thinking. But how did she fare in war? Why did she become a traitor? For there was a certain consistency in one story — that she had sold her soul in order to save her body — but was this true? Was it true that she had betrayed a trust and set a trap in which a hundred Kallafo warriors lost their lives? Or did she surrender her body in order to save her soul? He then remembered that living with Misra wasn’t always full of exhilaration and happiness, that there were moments of sadness, that it wasn’t always fun. It had its pains, its agonies, its ups and downs, especially when the cavity of her womb overflowed with a tautology flow of blood once every month. When this occurred, she was fierce to look at, she was ugly, her hair uncombed, her spirit low, and she was short-tempered, beating him often, losing her temper with him. She was depressive, suicidal, no, homicidal.

That was how Karin entered his life.

III

Once a month, for five, six, and at times even seven days, Misra looked pale, appeared to be of poor health and depressive, and was of bad temper. And she beat him as regularly as the flow of her cycle. He used to think of her as a Chinese doll which you wound — if you waited long enough, its forehead would fall lifelessly on its chin, when unwound. A makeshift “mother” substituted her. Not one of Uncle Qorrax’s wives, no. The woman’s name was Karin and she was a neighbour, with grownup children who had gone their different ways, and a husband who lay on the floor, on his back, almost all the time, perhaps ailing, perhaps not, Askar couldn’t tell. Karin carried or took Askar wherever she went, as though he were running the same errands as herself. For a long time, he called this woman “Auntie” and never bothered to find out what her name was, wondering if she had any. For all the children in the area, including Uncle Qorrax’s, referred to her as “Auntie”, too. One of Uncle Qorrax’s sons said she was the wife of “the sleeping husband”.

Karin didn’t tell him what the matter with Misra was for a very long time. And when she did, she simply said, “Oh, Misra is bleeding”. This made no sense to Askar. He had not seen any blood (he had once had a nosebleed himself and of course knew what blood looked like) and therefore said he didn’t understand. He reasoned that this must be an adult’s way of hiding something, or Karin’s liking for speaking in parables. He couldn’t forget that it was she he had asked what was wrong with her husband and she replied that he had a backache. On making inquiries still further, this time from Uncle Hilaal, he was given the scientific name of the ailment. Now he asked, “Do you ‘bleed’ too?”

Karin said, “I’m too old for that, thank God.”

This puzzled Askar. And Karin, with grandmotherly patience, explained: “What Misra has is called Xayl. We women have other ugly names for it. Only women, above or below a certain age, have it — or suffer it. Men don’t. When women are in their fifties or older, they stop having it. I haven’t suffered from it since I was fifty-three. Do you understand?” she said, her bloodshot eyes fixed on him.

Askar needn’t have spoken — she could see from the expression on his face that he didn’t follow her explanations. She wished she could make him grasp her meaning— she, who took delight in talking to him about things she hadn’t dared talk about with her own children. She said, “When you are a little older, you will understand”, in the manner in which a doctor assures an ailing person that all will be well if they take the tablets as prescribed.

“But I won’t bleed?” he asked.

She forgot to repeat that only women suffered it — a fact he either hadn’t registered, or which had escaped him, when she said, “It brings with it lots of pain and suffering.”

“If I had some of it, then Misra will have less of it, yes?”

She wore the pained expression of somebody who felt misunderstood. Her head, as though it weren’t on its neck any more, began to shake, “No, no, no. Misra is a woman,” she said to Askar.

He shrugged his shoulders, “So what?”

Without her speaking, he realized he had misunderstood her. Then he heard her say: “Only women of a certain age have their periods, women between the ages of twelve and let’s say fifty. Not men. And definitely not boys.”

He stared at her in wonderment, in silence. She went on, speaking slowly, articulately, “My husband and my sons do not suffer the monthly pains of menstruation. My daughters, yes. I, yes — when I was younger.”

“Suppose a woman doesn’t have it? Suppose she misses it?”

She wanted something clarified before she answered that: “You mean, when these women are still young enough to be afflicted by them and they’re not as old as I?”

Askar nodded.

Karin was sure. “It means that they are with child.”

He appeared puzzled. Nor did the following explanation which she offered enlighten him, any more than a nomad listening to a news broadcast about the devaluation of the Somali shilling finds the subject comprehensible. She said, “Women who miss their periods are pregnant unless they are unwell.” Rather, this complicated matters.

Was Misra with child once monthly since she was unwell? Misra’s periods used to be accompanied by depressive days and nights, and her breasts ached. She was unwell and she bled a great deal. Her monthly agony flowed for almost a week. Her pain was most acute in the lower abdomen to which she held constantly, and which she pressed as though she were squeezing pus out of an infected wound — so severe was this pain, at times she fainted. When the tension in her body was greater, she doubled up with it — as though she were in labour.

Karin, mixing kneaded dough with ground millet and water to make canjeera for Askar and, if she could eat it, for Misra as well, was saying, “Remember when you’re a grown man — remember the suffering and the pain on her face. Remember how women suffer. And do not, please, do not cause her further pain and suffering.”

He wished he had the will to make the required promise. Also, he wished he could remind Karin that Misra was not always in pain during this period. At times, he could see her sit in a palatial silence, daydreaming. He didn’t know if Misra had ever told Karin of the two men, namely Uncle Qorrax and Aw-Adan, who called after nightfall. With no after-dark visitors, these nights were quieter when Misra stopped moaning with excruciating pain. At any rate, neither of the men visited her when she was in season. He wished she was never in seasonal agonies. He wished the two men did not come after nightfall.

But there was one occasion when Misra didn’t have the monthly, excruciating pain. Karin came and inquired after their health, all right. In fact, she called more often, arousing suspicions in Askar’s mind — and something told him something was amiss. Came a woman whom he had never seen before and the three of them were closeted in the room, speaking in whispers. What were they hiding from him?

Although there was no visible pain — the kind that he had associated with her periods — there was the same kind of pronounced tension in her body and she daydreamed a lot and for long periods of time. She didn’t beat him, however, and had no temper to lose, it seemed. But she was most firm with the two after-dark callers — she wanted to see neither of them. Aw-Adan was very persistent. She didn’t hesitate. She said to him, “Go.” And he went.

There were changes in Misra’s diet. She began chewing clayey lumps which were brought for her from the river bed; she ate a great many sour things; she also brushed her teeth with coal.

One evening, Aw-Adan came and the two of them entered the room and Askar could hear the key turning in the door as they locked it from inside. And Askar went to his favourite spot below the window. Undisturbed, he eavesdropped on their conversation. It was very brief. She wasn’t willing to enter into a long dialogue with him. “No marriage”, he caught the phrase and held it in his mind long enough for him to hear her snap, “In any case who says the child is yours? He isn’t.” And she came out.

There was a great deal of movement that night, with Karin and another woman coming and going. Something was being prepared but he didn’t know what. Then, the following morning, the women made Misra lie on her back and they trampled all over her body As if that wasn’t enough, they made her sit up and be fumigated with cardamom and then improvised for her a suppository of cinnamon with myrrh. After which, they made her take concoctions which, among other things, included the broth of roots and shrubs which were known to have abortifacient powers. And as if this wasn’t sufficient, one of the women inserted a metallic rod into her insides and Misra made a most frightening noise.

Misra convalesced for about a week. She was weak. What a kind woman Karin was, he used to think, ploughing the space between a husband who lay on his back from before Askar was born, and Misra whose wounds were fresh and whose memory of the pain therefore most acute. Playful, although he was now old enough to run faster than her, Askar rode on her back as she went back and forth, ecstatic at having found a person as patient, kind and generous as she.

Now. Years later. In Mogadiscio. At Hilaal and Salaado’s.

And he saw a child crawling — and he could see this from a slight distance. Then the child clambered to its feet and walked for a bit, its gait shaky, its legs infirm and wobbly; he walked for half a metre and fell on his bottom but got up instantly and fell again, this time forward; his mouth, when he turned to Askar, was marked with the earth it had struck. But he did not cry. He continued falling and rising, without ever getting tired, without hurting a muscle or breaking a bone. And someone’s voice (he couldn’t see the person — but the voice was a woman’s) said: “Children fall without ever coming to harm because some protecting angels lay themselves between the falling child and the concrete floor, serving as the mattress on to which athletes drop from great heights of record-breaking dreams,” And he remembered his physical instructor at school say to him recently: “Take care when you jump high, Askar. Yours is the age when you must account for every fall, lest you break a bone.”

His mind wandered — he watched with fascination a woman on “fours”, a woman crawling playfully towards the child, and, following lustily in the woman’s wake, there was a man. It didn’t matter to Askar if the child was theirs. This was not his concern. He asked himself a question: was this how Uncle Qorrax and then Aw-Adan first seduced Misra?

Imagine: a maid, wet to her elbows in the master’s muck, a maid who is on her fours, whose bottom is high and is spread out in a protruding manner. And the master comes from behind and he takes her. How many films in which maids were raped by their employers had he seen? Or a secretary by her boss? How many stories in which a slave is raped by her south-of-the-Dixon-line master had he watched? Did Aw-Adan make her read the Koran and, while she was busy deciphering the mysteries of the Word, did he insert his in? Many stories of Ethiopian atrocities invaded his thoughts. And not in all of them were the raped women maids, mistresses or whores. In all of them, man was “taker”, the woman the victim. “Why, if she isn’t your mother, your sister or your wife, a woman is a whore,” said a classmate of his. How terribly chauvinistic, thought Askar. Women were victims in all the stories he could think of. Misra. Shahrawello. And even Karin. The soul is a woman — victimized, sinned against, abused.

Karin was such a dedicated soul and he trusted the truth of all that she had told him about Misra, trusted the truth of Misra’s surrendering her body in order to save her soul — giving in ransom the warrior’s faith in her integrity

IV

Why did she incestuously surrender the body he knew better than he knew his own? For weeks, his mind felt numbed at the idea that he had been part of the body which had been given away incestuously “How much of a child’s body or a woman’s for that matter, can be said to be his or her own?” he asked Uncle Hilaal. “Precious little,” had responded Hilaal. But even this did not damp down the fire of disgust burning inside of him. Uncle Hilaal wondered if, in Askar’s opinion, Misra’s betrayal was comparable to a woman who was unfaithful to a husband? No, no. It was more like a mother who brought dishonour upon the head of her child — right in the child’s presence. What is in surrendering a body that is not one’s own? But what soul is there that’s worth saving? The noon was high and the sun climbed the steps of time.

“Possibly, Karin is not telling the truth,” said Salaado.

Askar retorted, “Possibly she is.”

“And maybe you didn’t know Misra that well,” suggested Salaado.

Askar nodded.

“And wars kill friendships in the same way as they bring into being other forms of trust and interdependence, don’t you agree, Hilaal? Don’t you agree, Askar?” said Salaado.

Hilaal, not reacting to what Salaado had said, nodded his head in silence.

“True, they were once the world’s best friends. To each other. And to me, too,” said Askar.

“Well, there you are,” said Salaado.

A question imposed itself on Askar’s mind: how much of a man’s body can be said to be his own? A man is a master, a part of him said, he is a master of his own body

Hilaal then said, “Hadn’t he better ask her to account for her life before he totally condemns her? Hadn’t he? She, who was once his only world?”

In silence, Askar’s mind continued along the same lines as Hilaal’s thoughts — Misra, who was his only world, the content and source of his secrets, the only one whom he trusted and in whom he confided; she whose arm, large as anything he had touched or seen, would extend upwards and with short fingers point at the heavens, naming it; the same fingers which cleaned his face or dried his nostrils and had the agility to point subsequently at the earth on which she sat, her thoughts, like a pendulum, going from the sky (God’s abode?) and the earth (feeder of man?) and then himself or herself. It was she from whom he learnt how to locate and name things and people, she who helped him place himself at the centre of a world — her own!

“Where is the sky?” she would ask him.

He would point at it.

“And the earth, where is the earth?”

And he would point at her.

“The earth, I said, where is the earth?”

Only after a number of attempts would he get it right. Then Mother, where is Mother Misra? And she would point herself out, her short finger placed between her breasts, saying “This is I”. For years, he had had enormous difficulties pronouncing his Somali gutturals correctly, since he learnt these wrongly from her; for years, he mispronounced the first letters of the words in Somali for “sky” and “earth”—just like she did; for years, too, he remembered her favourite phrase: “You are on your own!” She used this when she was fed up with him because he wouldn’t stop crying or wouldn’t sleep and she used this very shibboleth as an avant-courier of unhappy tidings. And the world, because she decided to walk out of it, would disintegrate right in front of him and he would, faithful to the formula, burst into a cry the instant she walked out of his sight, out of his world, and into one he couldn’t get to, a world whose code of conduct he was not familiar with. At times, she would step out and hide behind the first available wall and listen to him express himself via a fit of weeping, his cheeks sooty with tear-stains, his heels painful from pounding them on the paved floor; on occasion, she would return after a long absence when he had tired and fallen asleep; on other occasions, she would come back to him playfully and teasingly, and she would tickle him and kiss him and hold him tightly to herself, speaking to him endearingly, calling him “my man”, addressing him as “my love”.

Misra is here, in Mogadiscio, he read the note again.

Does that mean that I will have to touch her, kiss her, hug her to myself and hold her in my embrace? he asked himself. He wondered to himself how loathsome any physical contact with someone one doesn’t love any more turns into; when the person to be touched, to be kissed, to be hugged, is now hated. Why is it that we love touching, animallike, the one we adore? Why do we shun contact when this very person becomes the one we hate most? The body speaks, the soul obeys — is that not so? The body refuses to make contact with a love gone senselessly numb — is that not so? But to touch Misra, to kiss her, to hug a woman who has betrayed one’s trust — here in Mogadiscio — when one is to make a decisive decision such as whether or not one should join the Liberation Front or choose a career in the world of academia? Had he not better write to the Front intimating his immense wish to join its ranks? That way he would wash clean his conscience — and live at peace with it. Neither the members of the panel nor Uncle Hilaal would know of the connection, and his going before them would undo the fetters tightening on his conscience. If killed when defending his country, he would die a young man at peace with his soul — and therefore a martyr.

And if he joined the university? It worried him that, at a university, he was likely to indulge his thoughts in higher intellectual pursuits and that he might not think it worth his while to fight until death in order to liberate the semi-arid desert that was the Ogaden. He was sure, in the camaraderie characteristic of the times in which he lived, that there would be a great many people who would dissuade him from dying for a nationalistic cause, such as the Ogaden people’s. Many Somalis, he knew, were inarticulate with rage whenever the argument they put forward was challenged. Wouldn’t a university education equip him with better and more convincing reasons, wouldn’t it provide him with the economic, political and cultural rationalizations, wouldn’t he be in a better position to argue more sophisticatedly? He would, perhaps, write a book on the history of the Ogaden and document his findings with background materials got from the oral traditions of the inhabitants. So would he take the gun? Or would he resort to, and invest his powers in, the pen?

Once in Mogadiscio, Misra was not likely to return to the scene of her treason. Her past, now that it was dishonoured, as was her name, would come before her, naked like a child. But instead of touching and fondling her newly found child, Misra would shun contact with it. She would double up with guilt, he hoped, and would suffer from the cramps of disgrace. The marrow in the cavities of her bones, he hoped, would congeal, due to the chill of exposure. Cursed she would remain, he prayed, and unforgivable too. May the tendons of her neck snap, he prayed to God, as should every traitor’s neck and may her blood, startled, rush to her eyes and blind her. May her mucus dry and may the pain this caused, in the end, bring about her death. May the earth reject her, may the heavens refuse to grant her an audience. If and only if she had betrayed!

It pained him to remember that he had once shared his life with her, it made him feel embarrassed to recall that he had been so close to her once, that he had been proud of her. Once she upheld him, like water — she lifted him up and threw him, as though she were a wave followed by another and another and another. He tasted the salt in her tears, he smelt of her menstruation. He called her “Mother” years ago. Could he undo all the ties which held them together? Could he, like time, sever all their links? Oh, how he wished he could hang “time” on a peg like a wet cloth, and how he wished it wouldn’t stop raining so the cloth would not dry; yes, how he wished he could suspend “time” so he would not grow up to be a man — a man on his own, and to whom Misra would say, “You are on your own!” No. As a child, he never wanted to be on his own, never wanted to be alone, for he couldn’t find himself inside of himself, only in others, preferably adults like Misra and Aw-Adan, who would analyse situations and tell him things he might never have known about himself if not informed by their experience. Misra’s “Your are on your own!” reeked of the same vindictive-ness as a man’s throwing out of the house a pet he kept and fed for years, a pet expected to fend for itself. One morning, when he had wet the bed the previous night, she spoke the formula shibboleth “You are on your own” (this was he when he was a little under five-and-a-half years old) and made as if to go out.

“Wait, wait, Misra,” he said.

The voice sounded grown-up to her and she did as told. Also, she saw that he had wrapped her shamma-shawl round his shoulders, looking very much like a woman; and he started saying: “When I grow up and I become a man…”, purporting, as it were, to speak for a long time, although he suddenly stopped, since he suspected she might not have noticed what he had wrapped round his shoulders.

Her voice, teasing and friendly, “And I an old woman…, yes, when I grow older and I have no teeth left and no help forthcoming and you a grown-up man and I a helpless old woman …! One day, when you are a youth… and I an old emaciated woman, friendless …,” and she was standing a few inches away from him …

Firmly, “No,” he said, indicating that she had messed up his plans. “No,” he repeated, shaking his head as if saying, “This is not what I meant.”

“What no? Why not?”

He was silent. She thought that perhaps she had upset him greatly and so she extended her hand out to him and he took it in silence. They hugged slightly, neither speaking. Then his hands, when he tried to clasp them round her, wouldn’t make a circle, the fingers wouldn’t touch, they wouldn’t reach one another, and he was now saying, half-playful and half-serious, “No, no, no.” She looked at him and saw that the shamma-shawl had slipped away to the ground, trapping his feet, and the face that emerged was that of a half-man, half-child.

“What no? Why no? What are you telling me, my man?”

Again his voice sounding grown-up, “When I grow up and I am a man…I am trying to tell you if you care to hear it…Misra dearest…,” and he took a distance and stood out of her arms’ reach.

“Yes?”

“I will kill you.”

She stared at him in silence for a long time. “But why?”

“To live, I will have to kill you.”

“Just like you say you killed your mother?”

“Just like I killed my mother — to live.”

V

He asked himself the question whether, to live, he would have to kill her if he saw her in Mogadiscio — now that there were good reasons for him to do so.

CHAPTER FOUR

I

You began debating with the egos of which you were compounded, and, detaching itself from the other selves, there stood before you, substantial as a shadow, the self (in you) which did not at all approve of your talking with or touching Misra, lest you were lost in the intensity of her embrace. For a long time, your selves argued with one another, each offering counter arguments to the suggestions already submitted by the others. Undecided, and undeciding, you stood in front of a mirror and you studied those aspects of yourself which could be seen with the naked eye and you concluded that Misra wouldn’t recognize you, even if she saw you in the street that day You wore your age on your face, for instance. And your hand felt a day’s growth on your chin as you wondered if you should shave. An instant later, you were on the mat of your younger stubble, watching Aw-Adan help Misra study her future in the flames of a fire she had made. Oh, if only…!

If only you and Misra could meet in a room darkened for that very purpose, you told yourself. If only there were no mirror to divulge the secrets of your inner torments; if the two of you could touch each other in the dark; if you could get used to each other while still in the unlit room; if each could claim to be someone else, until you were together long enough to want to know the other; if each could fabricate a story which would go well with the identity you wished to assume (you hadn’t, by then, been told that she had entered the country in disguise!); if only you could speak to each other without recognizing each other, remembering hardly anything which might generate suspicions, anything which might activate emotions within, anything which might stir dormant memories of your life together.

And if the two of you met in broad daylight, in the presence of other people, when, say Hilaal was here, or one of your friends, one of your acquaintances or one of your neighbours? You were certain your confidence would be so shattered you would break into pieces; at best, your dignity would drop at your feet as though it were a shawl flung by its wearer; possibly your tongue, short as the midday shadow, would curl up and lie exhausted in the sweaty siesta of the moment’s lethargy and you wouldn’t be able to speak

What you needed to confront her with was an innocence with which to protect yourself, you thought. Alternatively, you could do with the kind of powered stare you were bom with — that unmitigatable, impenetrable, “whole” stare, one which might have caught sight of her guilt and focused on it. Could this be why you felt comfortable standing in the curtained silence of the darkened hour, standing, to be precise, in the confluences of your past and your present; standing your ground, withstanding the wholesome flood of your future! “You behave as though you were a husband to whom a woman has been unfaithful,” commented Uncle Hilaal, “as though you couldn’t bring yourself to touch the body which had betrayed your trust. It is unbelievable that you would avoid any physical contact with the woman who could justifiably say that ‘by touching me, it seems as though he were touching himself!’” You lifted your eyebrows as if in wonder, and no wonder! For there stood before you, upright and as though waiting, another you, younger surely and more confident. You couldn’t think of anything to say — you didn’t speak to your younger self. Instead, you moved away from the mirror and stared ahead of yourself.

The world was open as the field you could see from the window and…

II

You were very old and your skin had started to sag and so you had it altered — that is, you exchanged your old body for another, one which belonged to a young woman. How this had taken place, or why, was something beyond your conjecture. Why, for instance, first wear the mask and features of an old man, only to discard them the following moment in order to don the visage and look of a young woman? Or why, for that matter, resort to a metamorphosis, changing face, visage, age, sex and features too?

Anyway, the signs of your body’s sagging began to appear first in the hands and fingers which shrank to the size of a small child’s little fingers. The logic behind all this metamorphosis was so dim to your unilluminated perception of things that you couldn’t see anything clearly Your legs had stiffened so you couldn’t get up, walk or rise to your feet — the legs themselves having been reduced to the size of a monkey’s paw. And you were seventy years old.

A second later, you were watching a young woman’s body being dismantled, right in front of you — each limb, part and organ was first shown to you so you could examine its fitness. Every now and then, you offered your approval or disapproval by nodding or shaking your head. You wondered why the young woman accepted the exchange. You were told that she was disgusted by her young body — a body which was beautiful, smooth and seductive. You were told that her father had raped her, that her elder brother had desired her and that her mother and sisters were envious of her. You were told that she couldn’t walk up or down a street without someone proposing to her, without feeling eyes of lust piercing through her body to the core of her soul. You were told that she felt she was a dartboard and an intrusion of eyes were penetrating through her. And why was she interested in yours? “Yours is a maturer kind of anima,” she said, standing in front of you, half old and half young, half you and the other half herself. Parts of your body mingled well with hers.

You noticed that her head, hairless and smooth like a peeled onion, lay within your reach. You wished you could stretch out your hand and touch her but apparently your arms hadn’t been screwed on. Also, you didn’t like the ugly sights in front of you now that you could see better, nor did you like eating the food that was on offer, now that your appetite was that of a young person. So why did you accept the exchange? someone asked you. “You must know,” you said. “Only in dreams do such impossible things happen.” And you were silent, thoughtful — and concentrating.

So far, you and the young woman coped grandly with the exchanges and you were civil to each other. Now, however, there was tension. You both remained hesitant and contemplative, and neither was willing to offer the final approval once it came to the exchange of the mouth and lips. You didn’t know what language she spoke; she didn’t know what syllabic, consonantal or guttural formations would come with your mouth and lips. You were worried what her political views were; she, whether you were conservative or no. You asked yourself what continent she was born in, whether her family was rich, if she had many friends — and what kind. She wondered to herself if you had a good or a bad conscience, if you were guilt-ridden and whether you had a happy life. These questions, these ideas, so far unhoused, unclaimed and unspoken, roamed about in the air, ideas without flesh, without soul and this made you wish you were whole again, this made you wish you were yourself again, a young man, barely seventeen. How very weird: to dream that you were dreaming? Or were you simply confronting your various selves, which consisted of a septuagenarian and of a young woman, not to forget the self whose identity you assumed when awake?

You felt there was something unfinished about you, as though you had made yourself in such haste you roughened your features unnecessarily You had the feeling, however, that your face fitted you extraordinarily And the identity ofyour newer self? It was like a dot in the distance which assumed features you could identify, becoming now a man, now a woman — or even an animal, your perceptions of the new self altering with the distance or nearness of the spot of consciousness. Then the mirror vanished from right in front of you and the wall which had been there replaced it. And there on the wall appeared shadows and the shadows were speaking with one another, some laughing, some listening and some holding hands or touching one another.

“And you — who are you?” one of the shadows asked you.

You answered, “I am in a foreign body.’”

“Now what does that mean?”

You paused. Then, “It means that I am in a foreign country”

“Yes? Go on.”

“I was once a young man — but I lost my identity. I metamorphosed into an old man in his seventies, then a young woman. I am a septuagenarian wearing the face, and thinking with the brain, of a young woman, although the rest of my body, my misplaced memory if you like, partly belongs to yet a third person, namely a seventeen-year-old youth.”

The wall in front of you shook with laughter and all the shadows joined in making fun of you, some mimicking your voice, others mocking the rationale of your complaint. You didn’t know what to do; you felt uneasy and looked from one shadow to another. Finally your eyes singled out a smiling face and it belonged to an old man. He was saying, “And what do you think is the cause of this torment? What have you done?”

“My mother placed a curse on my head,’ you said.

The old man’s look took on a most venomous appearance. “What did you do to earn her curse?”

“I… er… I…,” you started to say but stopped.

He commented, “Mothers are the beginning of one, they beget one, they give one a beginning. You must have done something unpardonable. You must have. Otherwise, why on earth would she place a curse on your head? Why why why? I imagine she must have suffered gravely: first under your father and then you, her own son. Poor woman, your mother. To have carried you, as a blessing, for months, inside of herself, to have loved you as her child for years and then to have had to curse you. It must have been agonizing to her.”

You were clearly misunderstood by this old man, you said to yourself. Perhaps, you should tell him that the woman wasn’t actually your mother in the sense in which he took it, that the woman didn’t give birth to you in the way mothers as we know them give birth to their children. In other words, this woman wasn’t where you began in the clotted form of a tiny germ which grew, lived and developed on its own inside the body of another. But you loved her as you might have loved your mother — if she had survived your birth.

The old man was saying, “I knew of a young man who was cursed by his mother because he refused to carry her on his back when they were crossing a stream lest she drown and because she didn’t know how to swim and he did. The arrogance of youth had gone to the young man’s head, the desire of a woman had lodged itself in his loins and the beating of love’s wings compelled him to run to where the woman of his lust was. He left his mother, an old woman who was lame and aged and decrepit, he left her to her own devices, impervious to her plea, “Just help me cross this stream in which I might drown.” He flew off in a mad rush. No one ever heard of his mother ever again. The beasts made a meal of her. Or perhaps the angels of mercy saved her. But we heard of the youth, and saw him again and again.”

“What became of the youth?” you asked.

“He complained again and again of hearing the noise of a chain-saw inside his head. He heard that noise at night, he heard it by day he heard it in his sleep and heard it when awake. In the end, he went insane. And the woman he loved? you ask. Whatever became of the woman he loved? They were separated by the noise of the chain-saw: she couldn’t bear sharing a bed and her life with a man who always heard something she couldn’t. Besides, she took her distance because she believed that a young man who was so insensitive as to remain indifferent to his mother’s pleas couldn’t or wouldn’t be bothered about her the fortnight following their own honeymoon. And she paid heed to society’s advice and rejected his advances. He was reduced to an ugly sight, this young man. And you could see him roaming the streets of our town, garbed in tatters, looking into the town’s refuse bins as hungry dogs and parentless urchins do. One day, right in the middle of the largest market, he set his tatters on fire. Ablaze, he died, unhelped, and his body lay unburied for days. A mother’s curse is to be taken far more seriously than a father’s. Give heed. A mother’s blessing is far more worthy of God than a father’s. What I do not know and what no one but God knows is whether it was the curse placed on his head by his mother that did it, or the woman’s rejection of his marriage proposal, the woman’s refusal to reciprocate his love. My feeling is it was the curse. Someone else might argue that it was society’s turning its back on him that persuaded the young woman and so on and so forth. Yes, young man. A mother’s curse is by far the heaviest burden a human has carried on his head. Don’t earn it. That is my advice.”

Silence. Then the wall became just another speck in the huge space surrounding yourself. And in the miraged distance, prominent as an oasis, there was a colt, riderless — but saddled. You sighed — relieved. You knew Misra was back, you knew she hadn’t, as yet, placed a curse on your head.

III

Your childhood, excepting activities involving either Misra or your dreams, you once said, is one great oblivion. You couldn’t remember much, you confessed; couldn’t remember what people looked like, although you could recall some names to which, at any rate, you couldn’t put faces; couldn’t remember whether your feet ached as you pushed them into shoes a size too small; whether the papulae on your measle-affected body broke on their own or whether you pressed them playfully yourself. In one sense, you considered yourself a solitary child and spent a great deal of your time alone. Unless you were with Misra, you found all other company “demanding, boring, in short, lifeless’”. You would stand by the tree, bom a day or two after you, and look up at its branches swinging in the wind, a tree much taller than you, and you would water it. Then you would take a handful of the earth surrounding it and you would take a mouthful of its nourishment, making sure Misra wasn’t watching you, believing, of course, that eating earth would do you a world of good, and that you would grow taller and heftier, just like the tree. Alone, again, once you knew how to write your name, you would secretly graft your name, born the same day as the tree, on its bark.

Dreams separated you. You shared everything else — but not your dreams. She knew every one of your secrets, touched every inch of your body and felt your heartbeat too. You slept on the same bed, under the same cover and partook of the same atmospheric pressures, air and oxygen. But not your dreams. Even at night, asleep, in the dark, it was your respective dreams which separated you; dreams which lay between the two of you; dreams which were (in your case) dressed up in “mantles of water, in jackets of fire, in suits of green wear, in fatigue-uniforms, one day as a woman, another as a man”. The rivers in your dreams flowed away from the streams in hers. Whereas you saw a companion very like yourself walk beside you in an empty street, Misra saw a man holding her right hand, she saw you hold her left and the three of you walked together towards sunset. Your dreams overflowed like buckets of water; at times, you saw rivers burning; at times, the water in your dreams was on fire; at other times, your volcanic eruptions made you speak in your sleep, and Misra could hear and understand the odd word that she had heard. She asked you to tell her what you saw in your nightmare the following morning. You didn’t. It was as if you were claiming your dreams as your own.

Nor would you share with her the dream in which you saw a woman drown in a muddy river, a woman who appealed for help, calling out your name. Do you remember what you did? You waded to where the woman was drowning. You extended out your hands as though you were offering help. Your fingers, immediately they came into contact with her body, rolled into a fist and you pushed the head of the woman down and down and down — until she died.

In its wake, the dream made you shout in your sleep. Uncle Hilaal rushed in and woke you up. You were wet with perspiration. In an effort to persuade him that it wasn’t anything serious, you told him a story you made up on the spot. He said he didn’t believe you had given him the true story. And only then did you speak the truth. He inquired if you recognized the woman’s face. You insisted you didn’t.

“What did the woman’s voice sound like?” he said.

You answered, “She spoke as though there was water in her mouth.”

“This doesn’t say much, does it? After all, the woman was drowning.” He explained himself, unnecessarily. “You said the river was choked with mud, didn’t you? Or was it simply stagnant?”

“It was salty and stagnant,” you said.

“Do you remember anything else?” he asked.

Here again the dream stood between you and Uncle Hilaal and you chose to wrap yourself with it and not share it with anyone else — not even him. He waited, expecting you would answer his question. Indeed, he was surprised when you said that you were thirsty.

He got you a cold glass of water. As you drank, you apologized saying: “I’m thirsty as the earth. I could drink an oceanfiil of water.” He returned with a jugful of cold water. Your thirst was insatiable. Anyway, you were justifiably relieved when, of necessity, the subject had to be changed — from your dream to your thirst.

IV

Uncle Hilaal’s saying that your life was “an answer to a fictive riddle asking a factual puzzle” when you refused to talk to him, take walks with him and Salaado, his wife, or eat anything save bread and water and occasionally a glass of something whilst they weren’t looking — your uncle’s statement set into motion a cavalcade of memories, each of which rode, as if it were a wave, on the bigger crest ahead of it. And, in no time, you managed to discrete the dreamed anecdote from the one really lived and personally experienced, you managed to separate them so they didn’t overlap, so they didn’t go over the same ground, telling the same story with a repetitiveness which bored one. You ran the whole course, without once looking back to see who had dropped and who hadn’t. Misra, too, stayed the course, always within view, always there — motherly, lovely and good. Others were wicked. Not she. She was your “mother”. Hence, she was very good.

And now! A he-dog was copulating with a bitch. Then you saw a little boy come out of a house and, immediately behind him, a woman — most probably his mother — calling him back. The boy was apparently very angry and was desperately throwing pebbles at the copulating dogs. He didn’t stop pelting pebbles at the mating dogs, although none hit his target. The woman finally managed to hold the little boy’s arm suggesting that he restrain himself, asking, “But what’s got into your head?”

“But they shouldn’t copulate,” said the little boy, barely eight. “They shouldn’t copulate, they shouldn’t copulate, they shouldn’t copulate. These two dogs shouldn’t copulate,” he half-shouted.

The woman bent down and wiped away his tears with the edge of her guntiino-robe. Then she noticed the sticky, white after-sleep fluid in his left eye. She wet the cleaner edge of her robe by licking it and she applied her saliva caringly. The boy was calm. She asked, “But why not?” seeing the dogs unlocked and playful.

“Why not? Because the bitch is his own mother,” he answered.

The woman, taking his hand with a view to persuading him to go with her back into the house, said, “I know!”

“You know the bitch is his mother?” he said, in disbelief.

She said, “Yes, I do.”

“And that they shouldn’t copulate?”

He wouldn’t go with her until she answered his challenge. He hid both his hands behind his back, his look defiant, his reason enraged, his body intent on fighting, if need be, for what he understood to be morally wrong.

“It is different with animals,” said the woman.

(Perhaps the woman didn’t know, and neither could you have known then, that the young man had been taught at school that human beings were animals, too — rational beings, endowed with the power of speech — a higher animal, if you like, the teacher had said.)

“Look,” he was saying, pointing his finger at the dogs which were locked in incestuous fornication, “Look at them doing it again, right in front of us, lower animals that they are,” and he went and kicked at them, but they wouldn’t unlock He turned after a while, half in tears, to his mother and appealed, “Mother, do something. Please, Mother, do something. Don’t let them do it.”

The woman received her son’s appeal in a mixture of good humour and serious intent. First, she chased away the dogs, who limped away, still locked in love, then she picked up her son and kissed him, saying: “You are impossible, my dear. You’re impossible,”

And he was saying, “Lower animals, dogs and bitches.”

V

You were young again, you were in Kallafo again, remembering an anecdote involving a man originally from Aden, the Democratic Republic of Southern Yemen, a man on whose lap had been found, when surprised by unannounced visitors, a hen. You didn’t quite comprehend the implications of the scandal. The old Adenese had been one of your favourite old men and he was a neighbour and you were fond of the chocolates he presented you with whenever you happened to have called on him. But you were often told not to go to his house, alone. You were often told not to accept his gifts — ever. You were warned against keeping his company (“A most evil company!” had said Aw-Adan). You were warned against the man’s wicked ways. And yet you went, like many other young boys of your age, and you played in his spacious yard, you plucked lemon and other fruits and ate of his garden what pleased you most. You slept, exhausted, in the shade of his trees. You swam in the pond of his irrigation scheme. You watched him, strong and muscular for a man of his age, start his engine or switch it off; you watched him with great admiration, lean and tense, loving and lovable.

“But what was he up to,” you asked, “with a hen on his lap, with plucked feathers on his naked thigh? What was he up to? Will somebody kindly tell me?” you appealed.

Misra said, “He was up to no good, that wicked Adenese.” “What foul things was this Adenese up to?” you asked.

Misra was insistent that you were spared this old bachelor’s wicked involvements with young boys: how he used to lure them with chocolate and other gifts; how he used to run an open house to which the urchins of Kallafo as well as other boys from the well-to-do would find their way; and how he would entice one of the small boys into his bedroom every now and then. You were very upset at learning what the Adenese had done, so upset you took ill. You had a temperature. And when Aw-Adan came with a suppository, you suspected him of vicious intentions. You cried and cried and cried and you wished you had never known the Adenese, had never been so sick you would need a suppository. Indeed, you were too shocked to allow one of your selves to stand out from the others, with a view to studying the activities, thoughts of your primary self. You would have nothing whatsoever to do with an Adenese, you said to yourself, never would you befriend any Adenese, you thought to yourself, never would you trust them — ever. And it was only then that remarks made by Misra or Aw-Adan began to make sense, remarks which were to do with “respect for human dignity. You forgot who it was, precisely, that had made the remark following the scandalous Adenese’s copulating with a hen — and therefore didn’t know how to interpret it. You then asked Misra: “Am I to understand that any person who has respect for human dignity does not copulate with a beast? Or am I to understand that any elderly bachelor with respect for human dignity doesn’t rape boys?”

She was on her knees, scrubbing the floor. Her clothes were filthy, her hands soaped, her headscarf unknotted, her knees squarely on the wet floor and her elbows covered with the brown mixture of dirt and sweat. And she looked at you, not yet seven, you, who stood as men do, clean and washed and yet unperturbed by the unclean job which must be done by women; you who stood in the doorway, with your back to the sun which was in her eyes, speaking of “human dignity” as though the phrase meant nothing to you personally. She rose to her feet. Her look went past you, dwelling, for a moment, on the upturned chairs, the dismantled bed and the mattress standing against a wall in the courtyard; then her quizzical look rested, for a while, on you and her lips moved, mumbling something inaudible to you. Maybe she was repeating to herself the phrase “respect for human dignity”, you thought, or maybe the many-stranded views of Misra were taking shape, and, you thought when at last she spoke, you would have a response to your question. But the silence was too painful to bear and the world you and Misra inhabited was not one in which you could merely pay lip service to lofty meaningless phrases like “respect for human dignity”. It was as though her silence was saying that you should take an objective, honourable look at yourself as a man and then at the position of women in your society before using phrases that were loaded with male hypocrisy

She was back on her knees, scrubbing, using as a brush her open hand, and at times her nails, to rub away the sticky filth which wouldn’t be removed easily. She didn’t look up at you at all, pretending that you weren’t there, that you hadn’t asked her anything. She was defiantly quiet. Until you were about to move away Then you heard her sobbing between the noises her scrubbing had made.

“Am I to understand,” you started, but lost interest in what you were going to say when you heard Misra’s chest explode in a convulsive cry, like a child’s. And you fell silent.

VI

That night, cuddled up in each other’s embrace, and in bed, she spoke to you of a raid, so far undocumented in history books. Out of the raid, out of the dust of triumph, emerged a warrior, she told you, a warrior riding a horse, and as he hit his heels against the beast’s ribs, the warrior held tightly to a little girl, barely seven. The girl was his loot now that the enemy had retreated in haste, defeated. Other men returned with gold and similar booties — but not he. The little girl, now a young woman, would remember forever her dog howling with fear and anxiety and hunger, her cheeks shiny with mucus and with streaks of tears running down them; and she cried and cried and cried, seated, as though tied hand and foot to a bedpost, on the horse’s back, a horse whose speed frightened her, as did the fact that he was taking her away from the world she had been familiar with so far. She was very pretty Her hair had been shaven in the style your people shave children’s skulls when suffering from whooping-cough, although the little girl’s tuft on the skull was longer and slightly curlier. When the warrior arrived back in his hamlet, Misra went on telling you her story, his people intimated to him that they were afraid the girl might be traced to them — the soldiers of the Empire would follow the civilian invaders and the punitive expeditions would find many unburied dead. So he rode away, travelling as far south as he could, and the two of them, on a horse’s back, ended up in the vicinity of Jigjiga.

In Jigjiga, the warrior, weary and fatigued from travel and worry, took ill. He stopped at the first house and knocked on the first door and spoke with the first man he met — luckily for him, the owner of the house, a very wealthy man. The warrior and the little girl were both given generous hospitality A day later, the warrior died. And the little girl, who had been taken for his daughter, fell into the caring hands of the wealthy man. He raised her with his own children, making her embrace the Islamic faith, making her undergo the infibulatory rites, just like the other girls of the community. But he raised her with an eye to taking her as his wife when she grew up. And this he did, when she was seventeen. So, the man the little girl thought of and addressed as “Father” for ten years of her life, overnight became a man to her, a man who insisted he make love to her and that she call him “husband. In the end, the conflicting loyalties alienated her, primarily from her self. And she murdered him during an excessive orgy of copulation.

To escape certain persecution, she joined a caravan going south to Kallafo, a caravan in search of grain to buy. She introduced herself as Misra Haji Abdullahi — taking anew the name of the man who became her father and whom she murdered as her “man”.

And you asked, “The girl’s father and mother? Does anybody know whatever became of them? And whether or not they are still alive? Or if one of her parents has remarried or has had another child?’”

You were surprised to learn that the girl was the offspring of a damoz union between an Oromo woman and an Amhara nobleman. She was the female child of the union, one in which her mother agreed, as is the custom, to live with an Amhara nobleman, none of whose other wives gave him a male child. The contract was for a period between a fortnight and six months. The girl was conceived by the “salaried” concubine. Because the issue was a girl, the man lost interest in her, abandoning mother and child to their separate destinies and uncertain fortune. “Yes, yes, but did the girl have a half-brother or a half-sister?”

“No one knew.” That was her answer.

“And then what happened?”

Again, she entered the household of yet another wealthy man. This time, she entered the household as a servant but was, in less than a year, “promoted” to the rank of a mistress and eventually as a wife. By the time she found Askar, the woman had been divorced. She had had two miscarriages and was discovered to be carrying, in secret, a dead child in her.

“A dead child in her, carrying a dead child in her living body?”.

“That’s right.”

“And then? Or rather, but why carry a dead child?”

“Then the living miracle in the form of Askar took the place of the dead child inside of her,” she said, holding you closer to herself, you, who were, at that very instant, dreaming of a horse dropping its rider. But you weren’t alert enough to note a discrepancy in this and Misra’s true story. For she had her own child who died at the age of eighteen months. Nor did you ever ask her why she told you this fictitious version. Or is your own memory untrustworthy?

VII

A week later, the following:

Late one afternoon, the Archangel of Death called at Karin’s place as though he had been invited to tea, just as you were invited to partake of the festive atmosphere, have a cake or two and biscuits too — and his share of the flowing conversation. When the opportunity presented itself, the Archangel whispered something discreetly in Karin’s old man’s ear, saying (you were told afterwards) that he, the Archangel, would return in precisely seven hours. So, would the old man finish, in elegance, all he had planned to do — wash, pray, say a few devotions, make a number of wishes, give his dardaaran to his Karin and, if it pleased him, tell her that time was up? In retrospect, you recall that the old man kept giving furtive glances to a timepiece by his mattress on the floor, rather like somebody who didn’t want to miss an important appointment. Together with Misra and Karin, you were making joyful noises and nothing seemed to be amiss. It was the placid look in the old man’s eyes that said to you that something was taking place, but you didn’t know what. First, Karin looked at you and then Misra and there fell the kind of silence which precedes an event of great significance. Somehow, Misra and you sensed your presence was standing in the way of Karin and her husband’s communicating a secret to each other. And so you left, leaving in your wake, you thought, a silence so profound you were sure a change of inestimable importance would occur in your lives.

Before midnight, the old man’s leaf fell gently from the tree on the moon. It was a most gentle death. Hush. And the soft falling of the withered leaf didn’t even tease the well of Karin’s emotions, nor did it puncture the lacrymatory pockets. She didn’t cry, didn’t announce the departure of the old man’s soul to anyone until the following morning. She stayed by him, keeping his death all to herself. She lay by him in reverent silence, he dead, she alive — but you couldn’t have told the difference, so quiet was she beside him.

She washed him as she washed him every day of all the years that he had lain on his back. Alone, but not lonely, her hands white with soapy foam, her eyes tearlessly dry, her throat not at all teased with the convulsive wishes of moumfiilness, she moved back and forth and her hands washed and touched and felt a body she had known for years, the body of a man who had “possessed” her, a man who had given her love and children — and who, at times, made her hate herself. She married him when very young. She wasn’t even fifteen. You might say she could’ve been his daughter. She was small and a woman, and he was muscular and shapely as a man, and was popularly nicknamed “Armadio”. He came one morning and made a downpayment for her. He went “somewhere” (he had a job to do, that was all he was willing to tell anyone) and returned, his going as mysterious as his returning. He wasn’t a man for formalities, weddings and parental blessings. He shouldered her in the manner porters lift any weight. He spoke little, said little, the night he deflowered her. “I have a job to do,” he said, and she carried his child.

He gave her children. He gave her lots of space and silence and love, when there. But he disappeared every now and then, saying, “I have a job to perform”. One day, he came home to a woman who suspected him of being with other women. He didn’t explain himself, didn’t scold her when jealousy threw her into tantrums, even when she maliciously described him as “the man with a job to do”.

A month later, he called her into the bedroom before he parted on one of his mysterious missions and he did something he had never done before. He told her he might be away for a long period. He suggested she sell the house in which they were living and that she buy a smaller one, if, yes if, he didn’t come home before the rains. He was most tender and he gave her money which he was sure she and the children would need. “But what job is taking you away from us?”

“Death might,” he said.

“Now what do I say to people when they ask me where you are? You are my husband, the father of my children, the man I've lived with and loved all these years. What am I to say?”

“Tell them I had a job to do.”

“I want to know more.”

He said, “Don’t worry. I'll not allow death to take me away,” half-smiling, as though Death was the name of a woman with whom he was madly in love. “I'll come back, sooner or later.”

He didn’t come home before the rains and not even after them. She received news of him over the wireless. Armadio was apparently a member of a cell of the Somali Youth League which was agitating for the reunification of all the Somali-speaking territories. He was the chairman of the cell under which fell the activities of the movement within the Ethiopia-administered Ogaden. He was caught when doing a job and ended up in one of Haile Selassie’s many prisons. When she didn’t hear from him, she sold the house and moved into a smaller one and, as told, did her job. It consisted of taking care of the children, sending them to school and making sure they all left for Mogadiscio, where it was safe to be a Somali and be proud of it, and where they would join cells from which to launch spearheads to open the way for a united Somalia. She stayed — and waited. She was sure he would come home. One day, he did. He was seen standing at her door. He looked tired, “like a man who had done a heavy load of a job”, she said. He didn’t speak of his ordeals and his years in prison. He was carrying a holdall which was empty save for a portrait of Ernest Bevin.

She said, “Who is this man, Armadio?”

He answered, departing, for once, from his job-to-do formula, “He is the one British friend Somalis have.”

“How so?” she asked.

“He is the one powerful figure in British politics who has advocated the reunification of all the Somali-speaking territories.”

He stuck Bevin’s portrait on the dung-plastered wall with the help of a couple of thumbtacks someone gave to him. And he spoke no more of jobs to do or places to go to. He fell unwell. He complained of acute pains in the spine, but whether he had been tortured in the Ethiopian prison, he wouldn’t say; nor would he talk of what it was like to be in a dark room year after year, isolated from the rest of humankind, from his Karin and from his children.

One morning, he didn’t get up to say his subx-prayers. “My back” he said. And from that moment on, he lay on his back, on a mattress on the floor. His wife washed him once daily — no, washed is not the right word. What she did was to wet a cloth a little bigger than a face towel in soapy water and run it all over his body, rubbing harder where it was hairier. For ablutionary purposes, it was he who performed it, whispering the right traditions and verses as she dipped the cloth in cleaner water, massaging the proper places himself. He prayed, lying on his back. He didn’t go through the body-motions of sujuuds and rukuucs. To the suggestion that they consult a doctor, cost what it might, his response had been, “I have no more jobs to do.”

Bevin’s portrait was transferred from the dung-plastered wall to a spot in the ceiling directly above his bed. Karin spoon-fed him, holding him by his nape with her left hand and wiping away whatever mess his mouth made with her right. She treated him as she might have treated a child — if she were blessed with a sickly one at her age — with knowing kindness. And when someone asked Armadio why he was still holding on to life, he said, “Unless I know there is a job for me to do, is there any point my going there? In the meantime. I'll wait for a word from Him.”

The word came. His last words, “No mourning for one who has done little for his country, his wife and his children. Promise, Karin. No mourning.”

She noticed there was a stain of blood on his mouth. She was trying to discover the cause, when he breathed his last. She promised, she, the living, promised to the dead, “No mourning”. But she couldn’t find out the cause of the bloodstain on his mouth, and in the end gave it up.

And there was no mourning.

The old man lay, just as he had always lain in the room, on his back, on the floor. The only difference (and you noticed this) was that now he lay in state and would be buried. Also (since you and Misra were allowed to take a look at him before others came), you saw that there were bloodstains on his lips. You were assured that he had died a gentle death and that his soul parted with its user for so many decades — peacefully. As the mourners came from far and near, as the kettles sang a rosary of teas and blessings of the appropriate suras, you asked Misra, why the bloodstain on his mouth? She did not know.

The subject of death enabled you to return to your own beginnings, to the day when Misra found you with a mask of blood for a head — and a stare. You stole in on Armadio’s corpse. Is this what Mother looked like when dead? Perhaps not. Death here was clean, you thought. An angel had prepared him for the moment. You had this thought, not in Karin’s but in your compound, with your shadow falling across the one cast by the tree planted the same day as you were born.

“It wasn’t clean, was it?” you wondered, springing upon Misra a question she wasn’t in the least ready for. “It was blood and pain and struggle all the way to the end for the old man, wasn’t it?”

“On the contrary,” she said.

“And my mother’s death?”

“Come, come with me,” she said, and you obeyed.

And she walked the ground of her memory over again, with you beside her, repeating all she had told you before, word for word, telling you all she knew about your mother’s death.

“My father, what do you know about him?”

“He died for a struggle, he died for a national cause.”

“My father had a job to do, did he?”

“That’s correct.”

“And he died doing it?”

“That’s correct.”

And when night fell and most of the mourners had gone, the two of you were joined by Karin. “Here is a gift from the old man,” said she, giving you the portrait of Ernest Bevin.

You accepted it with a great reverence that befits the memory of the old man you loved, and the British political figure for whom the old man held high admiration. “Do you know who this man is?” said Misra, pointing a finger at the portrait.

You said, “Ernest Bevin was a dream of a man for well-informed Somalis.”

CHAPTER FIVE

I

There was nothing like sharing the robe the woman carrying you was wrapped in, nothing as warm, with the bodies, yours and hers, touching, oozing and sweating together — I naked and she not — and the rubbing together of the bodies producing itchy irritations, scratchy rashes and crotchy eruptions of skin. Then the quiet of the night would crawl in like an insect up one’s back — ticklish and laughter-producing. The darkness of dusk would take over one’s imagined sense of being: this time, like an insect bite so scratchy that you cannot think of anything else. And so, for years, I contemplated the world from the safe throne carved out of Misra’s back, sleeping when I pleased, swinging from her back as a fruit the thorn which is its twin, making water when I had to and getting scolded for it; for years I viewed the world from a height slightly above that of a pigmy’s head.

I seem to have remained a mere extension of Misra’s body for years — you saw me when you set your eyes on her. I was part of the shadow she cast — in a sense, I was her extended self. I was, you might even say, the space surrounding the geography of her body. And she took me wherever she went. As a result of which, I became the invited guest to every meal she was offered, partaking of every generosity she was given. I was the overhearer and eavesdropper of every conversation she had — the first to know if she was in pain or no; the first to notice if she had her period. Which I could tell from the odour her body emitted, from the way she shuffled about, from the constant washing she undertook and from the fact that I would get spanked for the slightest noise and she would shout at me more often. Yes, I was the time Misra kept — she woke when I awoke, clocking the same number of sleeping hours as I had done, feeling unwell when I was taken ill. Now, if I were circumcised, I thought to myself, and I became a man, yes, if…! What would become of our bodies' relationship? Surely I wouldn’t remain an obvious extension of Misra’s physicality? Surely, I could no longer be her third breast or her third leg? Perhaps she would put me down on the dusty ground to fend for myself, play by myself, and the relationship which the years had forged between our bodies would cease to exist. If seen alone by a neighbour, she wouldn’t be asked to explain where I was. I wouldn’t be the clothes she wore to a wedding party; I wouldn’t be the bringer-about of conversations, of friendships, and because I wasn’t with her, wouldn’t be seen with her, no man would make advances to her using my presence as a safe ploy, saying something like, “Oh, what a good-looking boy”, pinching my cheeks, asking me my name, how old I was and so on and so forth, until he and Misra spoke to each other and exchanged addresses and agreed to meet again — but without me. In other words, I wouldn’t remain the subject of conversations, when she was really the object of someone else’s real interest.

Her body (or should I speak of her bodies: one of knowledge, another of immortality; one I knew and touched and felt, the other for others such as Aw-Adan and Uncle Qorrax) anticipated my body’s needs (because I was a child, I had only one body, with hardly a shadow to speak of, this shadow being the size of a bird’s dropping whenever I looked for and found it) only to satisfy them. If I couldn’t pluck a fruit off a tree, Misra’s hand reached out and got it for me, and when I couldn’t soap the small of my back, her palm was there to scrub it. Likewise, when I couldn’t move my obstinate bowels, it was her applying massaging or kneading techniques which helped me do so.

Then I remembered the first painful separation: when I was sent to the Koranic School run by Aw-Adan. I was very, very unhappy For some inexplicable reason, it felt as if, between my feet and the rest of my body, there existed an unfillable space. It was only much, much later that I rationalized that perhaps this was the unused space (previously Misra’s) which had surrounded me for years but wasn’t there any more. My body had gone numb, my hands disobedient and unable to hold the reed with which I was supposed to trace the alif, ba and ta of God’s words in the flesh of His wisdom. And I was beaten by Aw-Adan, the teacher who ran the Koranic School, beaten until I made a pool of pee in which I sat, something which allowed the other children to make fun of me. Wet and miserable, I returned home to a Misra who didn’t show as much sympathy as I had looked forward to. Nevertheless, she scrubbed me clean, fed me and insisted that I learn to copy the emaciated Aleph which she wrote on my slate; that I leam to do properly the under-weighed Ba and the Ta as well But I couldn’t make the letters take shape — my Ba appeared sagged, my Aleph short and squat and very much unlike what either Aw-Adan or Misra had written; whereas my Ta was inundated with the messiness of the two dots above it, each big as the tears I shed. However, the sounds I made as I chanted were so beautiful, Misra admitted she sensed their charm pierce through her flesh. Each sound came out marvellously pronounced, shapely, smooth, with all the outer roughnesses removed, all the redundancies discarded. And together we moved forward. I repeated the letters after her, trembling with joy, shaking with delight, as I said what had been, to me, the joyful names of God. Deliberately, I would mispronounce a letter so she would correct me. With Misra, God became fun. To me, He was the letters I couldn’t draw, He was Misra’s thigh which I hit playfully as I chanted the alphabets of rejoice. In a week, I knew how to write my name, Misra’s as well as God’s. And when, three months later, I could recite the Faatixa, my uncle was invited to hear me perform. As I recited, each word was hot as a brand impressing upon my listeners the intensity of my feelings.

But I hated Aw-Adan, my Koranic teacher. I hated him more when he caned me, because I thought that each stroke struck a blow, rending a hole in the wall of my being. When with him, when at his school that is, I uttered every sound so it was inlaid with the contemptuous flames meant for him. Which was why I shouted loudest, hoping he would burn in the noises — ablaze with hate. In any case, once I got home, Misra studied my body as I did the slate upon which I had scrawled verses of the Koran, she studied it for sores and cuts as I re-read the suras to her.

One day, when taking the Juzz Camma examination, Aw-Adan interrupted me, and he beat me too. I didn’t see the reason why. I hadn’t done anything wrong and so I said what I always thought of him, speaking in the full presence of a crowd of youngsters who hadn’t known or heard what I had to say. And he caned me again and again. The haemorrhage of hate had run profusely to my head first, and then to the rest of my body: this meant that by the time I regained consciousness, I came to, shouting: “I am going to kill Aw-Adan; I am going to kill Aw-Adan; I am going to kill Aw-Adan.” I had a temperature the following day. Misra and I stayed in bed. Together, we recited Koranic verses; together, we re-created our bond of bodies, hers and mine. Then I repeated with the premeditated sanity of a murderer determined to kill an opponent, “Do you know I am going to kill Aw-Adan?”

After a long pause. “Tell me. Why are you so vindictive?”

“I vindictive?” I asked.

“To avenge, you’re the kind that would drink his enemy’s blood.”

I remembered the pain on her face when the metallic rod was inserted, along with abortifacient herbs and root concoctions, into her vagina; I remembered the agonies he had caused her; I remembered her inability to avenge herself — was I really vindictive? I thought she was unfair to me. I could enumerate for her the terrible things he had done to me and to her.

“To begin with,” I said. “This calendar …!”

She was shaking her head, recalling a previous argument we had had the night before.

“What’s in a calendar?” she said. “Yes, my Askar, my man, what’s in a calendar?”

II

What is in a calendar? What is in a table giving you the days of the week, the months and the year, be it a Year-of-a-Monday, a Year-of-a-Tuesday or one beginning with another day of the week, a year belonging to signs of the zodiac which are based neither on the Gregorian system nor on the Julian but whose calendary makes overt reference to the cyclical and menstrual ordeals of a woman — Misra! She had apparently aborted a child. That was what the metallic rod with the bandaged head appeared to have done — it killed a foetus. And Misra bled a lot. Had she become pregnant because she had miscounted? Here was a calendar that would help her count properly, “provided”, I overheard him say, she put a red circle round the unsafe days with green circles for the good ones.

On the “green” days, the room smelt of musk and other cuudis of such sweetness I recall commenting on how much I hated these perfumes and any who wore them. Whenever I was in a bad mood, she went out herself, out, I think, to meet Aw-Adan or Uncle Qorrax, I couldn’t tell. She tiptoed out of the room once I was deep in sleep. Sometimes, she returned before daybreak.

She woke me on one such day, before dawn. The baaf was ready, the water lukewarm and I was to shower, she said. From her voice I sensed that a decision had been taken about me when I was asleep. Neither did the fact that she was in the same dress as the night before escape my vigilant eyes. She didn’t smell of sweet perfumes and freshly prepared cuuds. She smelt, if anything, of dried sweat, and her skin, when I touched it, was ugly, I thought.

“Where are we going?” I asked, when bathed.

She said, “You just wait.”

And so we did — together. She unburied the live coals she had preserved in the brazier, by pushing to the sides the top layer of the ashes, using the handle of a fan. Then she drove gentle air upon the exposed coals with the strawed end of the same implement. Although I was dying to comment on the suspicions circulating like the fan’s agitated air inside my head, I am afraid I didn’t dare question if Misra didn’t think she had lapsed from virtue — the virtue of being “my mother”; the virtue of my knowing what was to happen to me. But the idea of discussing questions of moral virtues disgusted me.

We had our breakfast in silence. We had difficulty choosing a pair of shorts which wasn’t either too tight for my waist or too short. This gave me the opportunity to make sarcastic remarks about adults who never stopped keeping under lock and key clothes for a growing boy. I said, “Blessed is the intelligence of adults.”

She didn’t open her mouth to say anything. But I was dressed now and it took me quite a while before I was sufficiently aware of anything or anyone outside of me. And she was rummaging among her clothes for something for herself, something decent for her to get out in, “Where are we going?” I said.

“You’ll know in a moment,” she promised.

“But why won’t you tell me?” I demanded.

She was dressed to kill, I thought. I wondered if it was Aw-Adan she had spent the night with, or was she with Uncle Qorrax? But did this matter to me? I heard Misra say, “Let’s go.”

Before long, I knew where we were going: to Uncle Qorrax’s compound. As always, the compound was feverish with activity. Today, it appeared more so than ever. There were at least a dozen camels, many heads of cattle, twenty or so goats and naturally the nomads that owned these. As was expected, there were some of Uncle Qorrax’s children and their chatter, which I thought of as their other selves. Misra and I walked into the compound looking a little frightened by all the noise. She gave me her hand the very moment I offered mine for her to take. Having made contact, we sat in what served as Uncle Qorrax’s anteroom — waiting. Half-shouting, perhaps because I was nervous, I said, “Do you know if Uncle is in?”

As though to answer my question, I saw the body of a woman push through a curtain to Uncle’s door. And there she was — a woman I hadn’t known he married. I thought of him as a magician, making one of his wives disappear between dusk and dawn, only for another to replace the vanished concubine. I cannot tell how many he married and divorced in the short period I began to take note of these cruel happenings. In fact, many of his children, for purposes of identification, carried not only his name but that of the maternal-bah line to which they belonged. “He’s coming,” the woman said to us and walked past us, out of the ante-room in which we had been.

Tall, handsomely dressed, his shoes elegant and shiningly polished and towering above Misra and myself— Uncle Qorrax. I was frightened of him, afraid I might earn his rage, worried that he might knock my ears deaf and my head insane. Especially now that he was staring angrily at me, I thought. Poor me, what have I done? I must say I was relieved to learn he was mortally offended with Misra. He said, “Where on earth were you returning from early this morning, Misra?”

Unperturbed, she mumbled something, as wives do when their husbands put indiscreet questions to them in public. Perhaps she suggested they postpone their argument until later. Anyway, he didn’t pursue the matter. Addressing me, because he wanted to change the subject to something less personal, he asked me how I was. The lump of fear in my throat allowed little beyond a grumble. It was just as well, I thought, for I might have spoken long-windedly and mentioned that Misra had been with Aw-Adan until daybreak. He said, “Let’s go.”

In awe, I looked from one to the other. Misra unclasped my hand from hers and, so to speak, pushed me towards Uncle Qorrax. I didn’t know where I was being taken to and was worried I was to go alone with Uncle. He said, “You and I will go together.”

I said Misra’s name and hung it on a peg for both of them to see.

“No. Alone. You and I,” he said, and took my hand.

Like a bewildered African nation posing questions to its inefficient leadership, I kept asking, “Where are we going? Where are you taking me to?” My thoughts crossed my mind. The most pressing one was addressed to myself: will I be able to cope with this separation from Misra?

I cannot vouch for the accuracy of my memory here. Possibly I’ve invented one or two things, perhaps I have intentionally deviated from the true course of events. Although I tend to think that I am remembering in precise detail how things happened and what was said. I admit the abrupt removal from Misra’s reassuring presence was similar to being weaned — despite the fact that I don’t know what “weaning” means (I was bottle-fed or “cup-fed”. However, there was something formal, something ritualistic about the encounter which took place between Uncle Qorrax and Aw-Adan, an encounter which occurred on the periphery of the latter’s kingdom.

I was tense. I stood away from them, timid-looking, avoiding any eye-contact with Uncle Qorrax’s children, one of whom was putting out his tongue (at me) in a gesture of derision. The pupils fell silent directly they saw us. The two assistant teachers held their canes in their tight grips but grinned noddingly at Uncle Qorrax. Aw-Adan came forward. He and Uncle exchanged greetings. They both then looked at me and then at themselves. Then I was no longer afraid, because I knew that I knew something about both of them — things that neither knew about the other. This fresh sense of elation gripped me unawares and my imagination flew away with me, which is why I cannot remember if Uncle Qorrax said the following to Aw-Adan as he formally handed me over as the latter’s newest pupil at the Koranic School of which he, Aw-Adan, was head:

“I bring to you, this blessed morning, this here my brother’s only son, whose name is Askar. The young man is ready to be introduced, by no less than yourself, to the Word of God as dictated by Him to Archangel Jibriil, and finally as heard by Prophet Mohammed in the trueness of the version; the Archangel was authorized by His Almighty Young Askar is nearly five years and, although he is younger than most of your other pupils, I bring him to you nevertheless. For there is no man in the compound in which he lives and one must take boys away from the bad influence of women. Will you accept him as a pupil of yours — in this and in any other life? he said, giving him my wrist in the way a seller at an abattoir offers to a buyer the front leg of a goat that’s been paid for.

Aw-Adan said, “I accept.”

“Like all human beings given life by the Almighty,’ continued Uncle Qorrax, “Askar is part bone and part flesh. The flesh is yours and you may punish it to the extent of it letting or losing a bit of blood. Teach- him the Word, punish him if he is disobedient, show him the light which you Ve seen when he is still young. The bones are, however, ours, by which I mean the family’s — and you may not harm them unnecessarily, or hurt them or break them. The flesh on the head and the hair thereon is yours, but the fluid in the brain may become yours only in so far as you've put in it the right amount of illumined knowledge. But you may not split his head with an axe.”

Aw-Adan nodded in silence.

“Do you accept Askar as your pupil as you accepted before him my own sons of my own body and blood?’” he said to Aw-Adan.

“I do.”

“The same conditions, the same monthly pay?” he asked.

Aw-Adan said, “I do.”

My uncle then formalized the deal by shaking Aw-Adan’s hand. This done, it seemed to me, at first, that he was ready to depart. No. Instead, he went over to and looked at the slates his children had scribbled on. Satisfied and appearing impressed, Uncle Qorrax left without so much as saying anything to me.

Scarcely had I taken my bearings than I was caned by Aw-Adan. You might want to know what I did to deserve such a sound beating. “That satanic stare of yours,” he said, when I asked why he was caning me, “dim it.” Could I? Even if I wanted to?

And you say that I am vindictive?

The letter alif, because I was hit by Aw-Adan and I bit my tongue, became balif; and ba when struck again sounded like fa; whereas the letter ta, now that my mouth was a pool of blood, was turned by my tongue into sha. (I can’t explain why, but for a brief period that nobody except me remembers, I had difficulty pronouncing the letter ta, which is the third letter of the Arabic and Somali alphabets. I guessed this was rather odd, given the fact that I could accurately pronounce the letter tha, as in the English word “thorough”, and also fa. Mind you, it wasn’t because my upper, front teeth were missing or anything, no. It was as if the sound t was altogether absent from the repertoire of sounds I could make. Years later, Karin came to Mogadiscio, Karin who had fallen out with Misra. And Karin gave me a startling bit of gossipy news: that Misra’s given non-Somali name had a t in it, a t with which it ended but which she got rid of so that her name wouldn’t raise eyebrows or provoke monstrous suspicions in the heads of the Somalis amongst whom she lived. But she restored the t when she fell in love with the Ethiopian security officer. Now how about that, I had thought. A t ending Misra’s name would make it Misrat, no?) Anyway, when beaten by Aw-Adan, I could only produce an ABC of confusion. Now I had enough evidence that he hated me. I was convinced he hit me whenever he had the opportunity to, caning me ruthlessly, hitting me as one vindictive adult hits another. He was far from being a responsible teacher disciplining an errant pupil. I could see hate in his eyes, I could hear contempt in his shallow breathing as he lifted his arm as high as he could in order to strike me. I could sense that he invested ail his power and muscle into the hit. I don’t know how long it was before I made the resolution that I had reached the point of human evolution where I could seriously plan to murder. Then something became obvious to me — or rather something was revealed to me — that I could kill, at least in thought. That was how I willed Uncle Qorrax and Aw-Adan out of my way and, for whatever this is worth, declared them dead. And it was the first, but definitely not the last, time that I tasted hate in my saliva — which is to say that I tasted blood in my mouth, which is another manner of saying that I tasted someone else’s death inside of me.

There were bloodstains on my back; and lots of sores which have left memories of scars, a dozen or so of them, some as straight-backed as the letter alif in Arabic calligraphy, others with a curve as that of the letter ba, and yet others with three dots above the letter of tha. Misra applied the proper medicaments. Her position was that no child could deal with the intricacies of the Sacred Word until his body was subjected to, and made to undergo, physical punishments beyond his own imagination. No sooner had I begun cursing Aw-Adan than she put her hand on my mouth, beseeching that I unsay all the wicked things I had spoken. “Please unsay these things,” she pleaded. Of course, I did not.

How the sores ached! And I had a temperature too. My hot blood had poured into my head. I became dizzy and was certain I would fall were I to get up and walk. My eyes fell on the calendar on the wall. I counted in my head, counted over three-hundred-and-sixty-five reasons why I hated and wanted to murder Aw-Adan. I worked out in my thoughts some three-hundred-and-sixty-five ways of killing Uncle Qorrax; I named the three-hundred-and-sixty-five days in a future in which I would make this possible. I, who had murdered my mother, I said to myself. Why should it not be possible to murder a hated Aw-Adan? And why should killing Uncle Qorrax pose any difficulties?

“Now, Askar. Why can’t you collaborate?” she said, in my opinion putting the blame squarely on me. “Why don’t you simply acknowledge the fact that I taught you to read and write? Why don”t you admit that you know the alphabet backwards and forwards?”

I cried, “Ouch,” when she touched a sore. “It hurts,” I said.

She dabbed another sore and I shouted louder. She said: “This is no lay education. This is sacred education. And children are beaten if they don”t pay their full attention to the Sacred Word. No sympathies. Learn to read the Koran, leam to copy the verses well — and you may go far. One day, who knows, you may be in a position to pray for my displaced soul.”

My saliva was tasteless and I was tongue-tied, and it was a relief because I didn’t want to say something I couldn”t unsay. But the pain, what pain! I thought, God, why did you have to create such pain? To test the man in me?

When the sores began to heal, I was escorted back to the Koranic School. I might not have gone back if Uncle Qorrax hadn”t taken me there himself. “Discipline,” he said to Aw-Adan, “is the mother of learning. Here,” he handed me over to him again, “teach him to read and write.”

And someone says: why are you so vindictive?

In a 1956 speech to the Somalis of the Ogaden, Emperor Haile Selassie said: “Go to schools, my people. For there, you will have a good chance to learn to read and write Amharic. Only then will you be able to take over the various positions in the central government administration. And remember this: lack of knowledge of Amharic, which is the national language of Ethiopia, will prove a great barrier to economic improvement and individual and communal betterment. Learn to read and write Amharic. It’ll do you a lot of good,’

Nomadic camps were rounded up and their children taken away to schools in Upper Ethiopia — boys and girls who were barely six years old. They were sent to different schools in the non-Somali-speaking regions of the country, so they would lose contact with other Somalis and with one another. Amharic — the language of a minority imposed upon a majority. Arabic — an alien language with its alien concepts and thoughts imposed forcefully upon the mind of a child. One is not beaten as harshly when one is learning in one’s mother-tongue, surely? Does learning come naturally? Do things flow smoothly, then? The brutal force of the written tradition imposed upon the thinking of one belonging to a non-written tradition? The brutal force of adults imposed upon a child? I am not sure why I kept the cutting giving the full text of the famous 1956 speech which Emperor Haile Selassie delivered to the people of the Ogaden. On its margin, I can read Uncle Hilaal’s scrawling hand: “It is revolutionary, isn’t it, that we vindicate our people’s language, culture and justice?”

To vindicate. To be vindictive?

Following the confrontations between Aw-Adan and myself, one day, Misra said: “It worries me to think what you will do when you grow up. You’re not yet six years old but the hate in your eyes frightens me. As though you really mean it when you say you will kill Aw-Adan, or kill Uncle Qorrax or, for that matter, me.”

“True,” I admitted. “I am vindictive.”

“But why?” she said.

I wouldn’t tell her. She looked miserably worried and frightened. I began to recite a Koranic verse which she repeated after me. My hand rested under her ribs and I could feel her heartbeat, I could sense the tremor of her caged emotions.

“I’m sorry I cannot help myself being who I really am.”

“Of course, you can,” she said. “You’re very young, almost a baby.”

We made peace.

I behaved as though I were convinced that being caned by Aw-Adan was part of the ritual of growing up, that in a way, it was for my own good — didn’t learning the Koran form a part of the ritual of growing up spiritually? It was also a trade. After all, I could teach it if I landed with no other profession. Also, she reminded me of something Uncle Qorrax had said: that the flesh was the teacher’s and he could treat it as he wished. And if, for purposes of teaching this young boy the Word of God, you were to discolour his body with bruises or injure it slightly, so be it. Uncle had said it was to train my spirit so it would dispel Satan.

Yes, Misra and I made peace. We forged a union of our bodies. After all, she was a woman and she could be beaten or taken at will. I was a child and the same tyrannical persons could beat me or maltreat me.

“You promise that you will not see either of them?” I said.

She promised. Then she said: “You promise that you’ll learn the Koran and will behave well.”

I promised.

There was a very long pause. Then she said: “What we must do one of these days, so you can be a man, is to have you circumcised, have you purified.” And she looked at me.

My head moved, as though of its own accord, away from the body to which it didn’t feel at all connected. I shunned contact with her, I wouldn’t permit her to touch me. I scrambled over to the other side of the bed and sat on the edge, my feet danglingly touching the floor. It was such a plague to think that I would finally be separated from Misra and the thought gripped my heart and played tricks with its beating rhythm. I would live in a territory of pain for a fortnight or a month following the circumcision and then in a land of loneliness — forever separated from Misra. Maybe I would be given a bed of my own and I would have to sleep by myself after that.

III

I would sleep with the loox-slate between my legs. This not only enabled me to keep her from coming anywhere near me but it also gave me the warmth, the security and continuity I most deservedly needed: that of reading the slate night and day; and that of seeking nobody’s company save that of the Holy Word. I slept with the Sacred Word sweet on my tongue and awoke chewing it in place of Misra’s profane name. In secret, I would drink the writings which I had washed off the slate, believing it would help retain the Word’s wisdom, a day, a week or a month longer. During the long silences between myself and Misra, my thumb would busily trace and retrace, with the help of the index finger, a Koranic verse or a tradition of the Prophet’s; at times, I would copy, using my body instead of the slate, a short verse which I had committed to memory; I would copy the verse again and again and again until my veins flowed, like ink, with the blood of the Word. The Word became my companion, the slate the needed extension of my body and I chanted selected verses of the Koran whenever Aw-Adan called on Misra, as he was accustomed to doing after dusk, verses which promised heaven for the pious and a hellish reward for the adulterous and the wicked.

“Do you know that Askar will be circumcised the day after tomorrow?” she said to him one evening, speaking loud enough for me to hear it. “Hell become a man from then on, you’ll see,” she predicted.

A stray dog howled in the distance and, right there and then, I choked on the Word and my speech flew in fright, like a bird at the approaching of boots crushing under their heels a mound of gravel. Above all, my ears were filled with a din associated with that of fear. I held the slate tightly in my grip until the blood that had rushed to my heart began to circulate normally again. When I resurfaced, I was back where I had begun — I was motherless, I was fatherless, I was an orphan and had to give birth to myself. Yes, I was to re-create myself in a worldly image, I thought to myself, now that the Word had deserted me, now that I couldn’t depend on its keeping me company. The Word, I said to myself, was not a womb; the Word, I convinced myself, wouldn’t receive me as might a mother, a woman, a Misra. And so I waited for Aw-Adan to leave and, just as Misra returned, she saw me standing in the doorway, suggesting that we embraced — opening my arms like a bird opens its wings when about to fly off. We embraced warmly, we embraced tightly, then she laughed, laughed in such a way that I could sense mockery in it. Offended, I let go. Once apart, I saw why Apparently, the slate had become an impediment disallowing her to hug me comfortably, since its sharpened edge embarrassingly pressed itself against her pelvis.

“You naughty little boy,” she said, teasing me.

I said, “I'm sorry.”

Again teasing me, she said, “I’m not sure if you are sorry.” And while laughing, she bent double, half-leaning against me, while supporting her great weight on her knees which were on the floor. A spatter of her saliva had begun to descend on the slate which was lying flat on the floor, nearer me. And I noticed the letters of a verse I had written on my bare thigh run into one another, with the letter “o” closing its eyes in misted tears as of remorse. The other letters were reduced to tawdry shapes and a straggle of formless figurines.

“You naughty thing,” I said, teasing her.

She stopped laughing to say, “I am sorry,” only to continue laughing away.

“I am not sure if you are sorry,” I said, teasing her as before.

In silence, we listened to the crickets call to one another. A little later, Misra was moving about, preparing a bath for me. I knew what she would do — she would dip her finger in the water to feel how warm it was, for she knew, more than anyone else, what my body could or couldn’t take. Now she mixed hot and cold water and took a long time deciding whether the temperature was right. I asked myself if it was possible that she might have forgotten what she had known about my body in the few days she and I were separated by the slate or what had been written on it. Before I could answer the question myself, Misra was dragging me to the open courtyard: and under the starry night, we stood in the baaf. She was fully dressed and I, naked. And with a tin which had originally contained tomato-purée, or some such manufactured item, she scooped the lukewarm water and washed me. I felt her calloused palms on my young, smooth skin, and felt ticklish and laughed and laughed and laughed and was very, very happy as only children can be. She was playfully rough and rubbed the soap in my hair but said “I am sorry” when she realized that soaped water had entered my eyes. Then she kissed my soaped forehead and looked into my eyes, which I opened as she splashed water on my face. The moon was up and bright, the stars too, but I couldn’t see the colour of the water which I imagined to be as blue as a bruise. I jumped up and down in glee, oblivious of the fact that the Koranic writings had ended up in the same baaf as the dirt between my toes. I decided I wouldn’t hold the slate between my legs that night, and the following night too. Misra and I slept in each other’s embrace and the slate was left in a comer until after I was made a man.

IV

The man who was brought to circumcise me, when my turn came, made me sit alone, insisting that I read a few Koranic verses of my choice — and that I wait for him as he honed the knife he was going to use against a sharp stone he had come along with. I was overcome by fear — fear of pain, fear of being lonely, fear of being separated forever from Misra. (She wasn’t there anyway; she wasn’t allowed to come. In her place, there came a man, one of my many uncles.) The sticky saliva in my mouth, the drumming of fright beating in my ears, the numbness of my body wherever I touched, felt: my legs, my hands, my thighs, my sex, what pain!

Then the man asked me to look up at the heavens and to concentrate on anything my eyes fell on. There was an aperture in the clouds and there was a bird which I spotted, a bird flying high and in haste towards the opening in the heavens. I concentrated on the bird’s movements, concentrated on it until it became a dot in the heavenly distance. To mask my fear, I invested all my energy in the look and the bird’s flight reminded me of similar flights of my own fantasies. When I looked again, I couldn’t see the bird. I could only see a tapestry of clouds which was woven in order to provide the bird with a hiding-place. The world, I told myself, was in my eyes and the bird had flown away with it, carrying it in its beak, light as a straw, small as an atom. Now that I had lost sight of the bird (I wasn’t sure if it was an eagle or if it wasn’t!), there was nothing but sunlight for a long while, and the sun was in my eye and it blinded me to the rest of the cosmos. Until the bird re-emerged out of the sun’s brightness, beautiful, feminine, playful, and it became again the centre of my world and I was inside of it, in flight, light as are children’s fantasies, impervious to the realities surrounding me — and then, sudden as bushfire, ZAK!

It is such a horrid territory, the territory of pain. And I crossed it alone — no thought of Misra, no amount of consolatory remarks made by the uncle who had come with me and no verse of the Koran could've reduced the pain or even eliminated it altogether. Do I remember when the pain lodged in my body which it lived in for almost a month thereafter? It entered my groin first. Or rather, that is what I seem to remember. I recall thinking that I had seen the bird’s apparition and that the rest of the world had been small as a speck in the sky — then the man pulled at the foreskin of my manhood, producing, first in my groin, then in the remaining parts of my body a pain so acute my ears were set ablaze with dolorous flames. These flames spread gradually — then my feet felt frozen, my eyes warm with tears, my cheeks moist with crying and my throat dry as the desert. It was only then that I looked and I saw blood — a pool of blood in whose waters I swam and which helped me cross to the other side so I would be a man — once and for all.

I saw the man break an egg. I couldn’t tell why he did so. Perhaps the idea was to reduce the pain or help stop my losing any more blood. I thought that the white and yellow of the egg mixed well with my own blood and the colours which I saw, the beauty of what I saw, took the pain away, for at least a few decisive seconds. My bare thighs were spotted with cold sprouts of pained hair and I rubbed them, smoothing the hair-erections so the blood would return. I was helped to stand, I don’t remember by whom, and was led away from the spot I had been sitting on. Possibly, the eggshell was the hat my manhood wore, possibly not; possibly, once the skin was pushed back, I was bandaged with cotton or other similar material, although I cannot remember anything save the pain, which made me faint. I awoke. Alone. On a bed.

Pain, per se, I discovered, was no problem. I could cope with it, I could dwell in its territory. But there was the problem of space. For pain not only defined my state of mind but my movements as well. I couldn’t come into bodily contact with anybody, not even Misra. I became the bed’s sole occupant. People kept their distance. I was like a man with an arm in plaster. And people were careful not to come unnecessarily near me, surrendering up the space surrounding them to me — how generous of them, I thought, how kind! Misra slept on a mat on the floor. Because I was sore, I was given the bed to myself. Traditionally, it is taboo for women to stay near newly circumcised boys, and so Misra was sent away. But I created such an uproar Uncle Qorrax allowed me to have my own way, yet again. I didn’t care much for traditional taboos, especially when they severed me from somebody who wasn’t herself Somali and whose psyche they wouldn’t affect. When she was allowed to return to me, I didn’t think “How kind of Uncle to allow her to come and stay by me in this hour of need”. No, I thought of how clever I had been in making her return possible. I had my own sheet to cover myself with, one that I had had to hold at a certain distance from the wound — again, a question of space, a question of the geographic dictates of pain. And once Misra was offered a bed of her own which was brought into our room, I began to claim our bed as mine — and I was delighted. One other item had had to go too — the slate which I had kept between my legs. I discovered I needed space for myself, that I couldn’t tolerate anyone or anything standing in the space between myself and where I had intended to move. In short, the dimensions of my body occupied the centre of my world of pain, my preoccupations, and I took in the body’s measurements, as it were, and followed the guidelines suggested by its dolorous perimeters. I moved or lay on the bed accordingly.

When asked how I was, I lied. I said I was well and that the pain had more or less confined itself to the de facto boundaries of the wound. The truth I didn’t tell anyone was that I had, in effect, become two persons — one belonging to a vague past of which Misra was part, of which painlessness was a part, a vague past in which I shared wrappers with Misra, shared a bed with her. Yes, a vague past in which I felt so attached to Misra I couldn’t imagine life without her. The other person, or if you prefer, the other half, was represented by the pain which inhabited the groin. I held the citizenship of the land of pain, I was issued with its passport and I couldn’t envisage when it would expire or what would replace it or where the urge of travel away from it would eventually take me to, nor at what shores this would abandon me. In the territory of pain, there is a certain uncertainty, I thought, of a future outside of it.

On the fourth day, Uncle called on me. Misra placed herself between him and the bed which I lay on. And she explained what I had done, she talked about me in a way I thought recalled to me a history of her concern and worries; one in which she was the guide. She told Uncle how many times I got up to make water, how many spoonfuls of soup I had eaten, what I did and what I didn’t do. She spoke about my condition as if I were a monument with a background worthy of delving into. Uncle, because he wanted to see the wound for himself, told Misra to leave us alone. It was only then that the thought that she hadn’t seen it crossed my mind and I remembered her saying that society believed it to be bad for a woman to see a boy’s wound of circumcision lest it fester and never heal. Anyway, she left us alone. Uncle, gentle and playful, took a peek at it and was visibly satisfied all was well. He called Misra to return, which she did. He asked her what gifts I might like.

She looked at me considerately, silently. Uncle looked from her to me and then back at her. Was she saying that I was now a man and I could decide for myself? Maybe. Uncle asked: “Is there anything you’d like brought to you as you lie in bed?”

I had already worked it all out in my head. I said, “A pen.”

“A pen?” he asked in disbelief.

I said, “A pen and a sheet of paper.”

Again, he looked at Misra, whose head nodded approvingly, and then at me. He was obviously pleased with the choice I made, especially when I added, “I would like to practise copying and recopying the verses of the Koran which I’ve already committed to memory. Otherwise, I might forget them.”

He was thoughtful for a second or so. Then, “Anything else?”

I was silent for a long time. To Misra, “Can you think of anything?”

I watched them exchange smiles. I knew they used to meet occasionally in the dark. I wondered if I was in their way; I wondered, did they need the bed on which I lay?

And again back to me: “Askar?”

If I could I would’ve said that I wanted Misra taken away from me, sent away somewhere else, away from me anyway for a week, a month or two. If she were away, I said to myself, perhaps the act of weaning would occur less painfully and I would be able to bear the loss well. I would, in time, be able to replace the loss with a gain, I thought, looking up at Uncle who was still awaiting a request from me.

“I can’t think of anything else,” I said.

But Misra spoke and we both turned to her. (In the meantime, I realized that, while thinking thoughts and listening with attention to Uncle and Misra, I had taken temporary residence in a land-of-no-pain.) She said, “I can think of something he’s always wanted.”

“Yes?”

“A globe,”’ she said. “Or an atlas. He loves the blue of the sea. And a picture-book of horses and birds. Please get him a globe and a map of the seas and the oceans,” she appealed.

I was as surprised as my uncle. I didn’t know I loved the blue of the sea — not then anyway — nor the world of the oceans, or picture-book horses and birds. But I was grateful to Misra — grateful that she chose to introduce me to a world in which I have felt happiest since then.

V

During my brief sojourn in the land of pain, two things occurred: one, I lost myself in it (I wondered, was this why Misra suggested I was given a map of the globe and of the oceans?); two, I took hold of a different “self”, one that had no room and no space for Misra and no longer cared for her. I let go of Misra and, with self-abandon, roamed about in the newly discovered land, thinking not of her, but of pain. It rained a lot and the rain levelled the terrain which wiped out the readable maps, the recognizable landmarks and milestones. And there I met the children of sooterkin and I shook hands with them. I was introduced to my future, my destiny — indeed, somebody pointed it out to me, and there was no Misra. Or was I in the land of dreams?

The waters of the rain washed the slate on which I had written my prayers and the thunder drowned my chanting of the verses which praised the traditions of Islam. The world, crowded like Noah”s ark, lay under my feet. Lying on my back, contemplating the ceiling, I roamed in a state of stupor; I roamed in the darkness of a rainy night, my body soaked in pain; I roamed — spreading myself as though I were water; I roamed inside of my body, which was ablaze with the flames of an untold future. Then I heard a voice, I heard, loud and clear, a voice, peculiarly like my own. I heard, not the blabber of a child whose tongue stumbled on Misra's name, but that of a man, saying what, in essence, could be translated as “I am I!” And I was calmed by what Uncle Hilaal was later to call my “existential certainty”.

And I was asleep and alone.

And I was suddenly a bird in ascent, a bird, holding, in the clutch of its beak, the foreskin of a boy's circumcision; a bird, inside of which was folded up, like a map, the entire experience of the cosmos; a bird that had walked out of my human body and been metamorphosed into a dream-animal, free to fly as it pleased. I surveyed the world of which Misra had been an integral part from a reasonable height, after a dreamy flight that nearly took the breath out of me. And I noticed that her hand had been severed from the rest of her body and her head, not in the least plaintive, shouted, “Askar, what’s the meaning of all this?”

It rained non-stop for hours and the darkness of the night was thick-bodied. I made sure I held a tighter grip on myself. Then I saw a figure in the distance, a figure standing tall as an obelisk. I walked in the direction of the figure, above whose head, clear as a halo, there now was a lantern. The nearer I moved to the figure, the further we got from each other. Wet, exhausted, my body ached and I walked and walked and walked, and it rained and rained and rained. I walked, holding my sarong at the edges, my body alert, my every step careful. Finally, I reached where the figure and the lantern had been: there was no figure, no statue, no lantern — only the remnants of a corpse, blown up in an explosion of some kind. I went here and there, collecting the unnamable parts of the blown-up person’s body, until I got to where the head had dropped — and I screamed with fright.

I don’t know what curses I shouted or uttered. All I can tell you is that I woke up, my body wet with sweat, my throat aching from crying and saying again and again and again, “Who am I? Who am I? Where am I? Where am I? Who am I?”

Misra was not there. I was alone.

And no one told me where I was, no one told me who I was.

VI

By the time I started to limp my way to places (although there was a slight pain between my legs) I noticed there was a halo of silence above many a person’s head — an ominous silence, a silence punctuated by prayers and sacrificial offerings. I had never seen as many beasts sacrificed as I saw in the following few days, beasts whose meat was offered, with blessings, to the sheikhs who were invited to pray for the safe conduct of those whom Kallafo, our town, sent to the war front.

I asked Misra, “A war? And whom are we fighting?” In those days, everything and everybody was throbbing with inexplicable activity in so far as I was concerned and a number of people were said to be getting ready to marry Once married, the men went off, leaving behind them the dust of victory, the women whom they had just wed, their old parents and the very young. Not until weeks later did we see the full-blooded men in our midst and no strong men returned for long periods unless they were wounded and in need of medical attention. That was how I learnt where Aw-Adan had gone — to the war front. People sat next to the radio and names like Jigjiga, Harar, limey and Dire Dawa occurred frequently in their exchanges — which was when the atlases Uncle had given me became very useful to own. Most of the women were illiterate and had never seen or owned a map. And our room was turned into something like a war-room. We spread the maps on the tables and calculated how long it would take the Somali army to capture a given town and how far this was from us or from Mogadiscio or, for that matter, Addis Abeba.

It was only gradually, however, that it dawned on me that Misra’s heart wasn’t in it as much as mine or the other people’s were. She was excited, of course, whenever any town or village fell to the Somalis, but she was exaggeratedly cautious, saying something like “How long will this victory last?”, or “Where will it take us to?”, or “What will the Russians do?” Somebody called her a “spoil-sport” once or twice and I heard many more wicked things said behind her back. Then, a few days later, I felt that the mood which prevailed was one of hostility towards her. I could sense that more and more people were coming less and less to our war-room. I remembered that she was different from us — that she wasn’t a Somali like me and the others; I remembered how often people teased her about her pronunciation of Somali gutturals; I remembered about the warrior of whom she had spoken and of the saddled horse which had dropped its rider. And I, too, saw her in a different light. She wore a grim appearance and was ugly. I recalled a dream I had seen previously, a dream in which the finger of collective guilt was pointed at the Somaliness in me and the others. I asked: hasn’t Misra chosen to be one of us? Hasn’t she chosen to share with us our pain and pleasure? Now she was undecided whether to leave us or share our bitter destiny with us. She spoke of this too, although I do not think I understood it at the time. “I am an Ethiopian,” she said. But how was I to know what species an “Ethiopian” is? I asked the appropriate questions and got the appropriate answers. The image which has remained with me, is that of a country made up of patchworks — like a poor man’s mantle. She wasn’t decided whether to go back to the Highlands or stay she repeated. Although she no longer spoke or understood the language of the area of Ethiopia in which she was born.

I said, “I’ll come with you.”

She greatly belied her pleasure by saying, after a long, long silence, during which she wiped away the tears which had stained her cheeks, “I will not want you to come with me.”

“Why not?” I asked.

She turned towards me, her eyes aflame with hot tears. “Because it’s not safe for you. They will kill you, my people will, without asking questions, without wanting to know your name or what our relationship is.”

I asked, “Your people, my people — what or who are these?”

“One day,” she said, speaking of a future in which we would meet, “one day, you will understand the distinction, you’ll know who your people are and who mine are. One day,” she prophesied, speaking into that void of a future in which she hoped we would meet again, — “you will identify yourself with your people and identify me out of your community Who knows, you might even kill me to make your people’s dream become a tangible reality.”

“Kill?” I asked.

“Yes. Kill. Murder. Loot. Rape. In the name of your people. Kill.”

I said, “One day, I might kill you?”

“Maybe,” she said, and walked out of the room.

CHAPTER SIX

I

In a month or so, especially now that his manhood was ringed with a healed circle, the orgies of self-questioning, which were his wont, gave way to a state in which he identified himself with the community at large. And he partook of the ecstasy of madness that struck the town of Kallafo, an ecstasy that expressed itself in a total self-abandon never known, never experienced in the history of the Somalis of the area. The war was on. At first, the war was mentioned in whispers and was spoken about as one talks of a certain calamity But what mattered to Askar was that it presaged, for him, a future maturer than he had awaited, that it predicted a future in which he would be provided with ample opportunities to prove that he was a man. In his mind, he didn’t exclude that some day he might even be recruited as a member of the Western Somali Liberation Front, the front fighting for the liberation of the Ogaden from Ethiopian domination. Who knows, he thought, he could become, at such a tender age, the movement’s flag-bearer; who knows, the Ethiopians might forcefully conscript him if the Somalis lost the war; who knows!

What mattered, he told himself, was that now he was at last a man, that he was totally detached from his mother-figure Misra, and weaned. In the process of looking for a substitute, he had found another — Somalia, his mother country It was as though something which began with the pain of a rite had ended in the joy of a greater self-discovery, one in which he held on to the milky breast of a common mother that belonged to him as much as anyone else. A generous mother, a many-breasted mother, a many-nippled mother, a mother who gave plenty of herself and demanded loyalty of one, loyalty to an ideal, allegiance to an idea, the notion of a nationhood — no more, and no less. And his tormented spirit was calmed the instant he walked down the same steps as everyone else, to encounter this common mother, to be embraced by her in joyful reunion, to be breast-fed and helped to rediscover in himself the need for a mother of a general kind.

In those days, Misra sat alone, immured and inert, right in the quiet anxiety of one who had just been transferred to a country alien to herself, a territory of whose earth one didn’t eat mouthfuls when one was an infant, when one was but a mouth perpetually open, a mouth famished to the point that it would cry unless it was stuffed with anything — a handful of dirt, a piece of metal one’s groping hand got hold of, anything and everything. Anyway, she sat, waiting (Askar didn’t know for what or whom!); she sat mantled in her mourning garments; she sat friendless, now that Aw-Adan had gone, now that the men who used to lavish their lusty interest on her were away at the war front, fighting the Somali people’s common enemy (she was not herself Somali and Askar by then knew what that meant); men who came home, who touched base every now and then, maybe for a day or two, and who, in haste, contracted matrimonies so they would leave behind themselves widows whose memories they hoped to inhabit, and children onto the end of whose given names theirs would be attached. In such an agitated air, the schools had to be closed and many families changed houses and a great many left for Mogadiscio, the capital of Somalia. And yes, there was much talk about “Somalia”, a country that was referred to as “Mother” in a tone suggesting a getting together of her and the Ogaden/child separated from hen To mark the progress each had made, Askar noted the mother and the child’s efforts on the map Uncle had presented him with, just as he traced, on another mental chart, the uncoverable distance between Misra and himself. She began to lose weight; he, to grow it. She sat in a corner, sulking; he, as prominent as the map he read to the illiterates surrounding him, spoke knowl-edgeably, enthusiastically about the liberation war which his people were waging against Misra’s people.

He was adrift (and so was the Somali nation everywhere) on a tide of total abandon. At least, he kept thinking to himself, staring at the map on the wall, there would be changes in the cartographer’s view of the Horn of Africa. And so, with his felt pen, using his own body, he redrew the map of the Somali-speaking territories, copied it curve by curve, depression by depression. Which reminded him of his father’s nickname: Xamari At last, he would be reunited with the city of Xamar from whence came his father’s nickname.

“Why are some countries referred to as ‘Motherland and others as Fatherland’?” Askar asked Misra one day when both were in a mood to talk “What is the logic behind it?”

She didn’t know, she said.

“I wonder if it indicates a people’s mind, I mean if their choice indicates what kind of people they are. People of the heart, people of the head, if you know what I mean.”

She was silent for a long time.

“You know, of course, that Somalia is seen by her poets as a woman — one who has made it her habit to betray her man, the Somali, don’t you?” she said.

He nodded, “Yes.”

“You know the poem in which the poet sees Somalia as a beautiful woman dressed in silk, perfumed with the most exotic scents, and this woman accepts all the advances made by the other men — to be precise, the five men who propose to her. She goes, sleeps with them, bears each a child named after its progenitor and has a number of miscarriages,” she said, stopped — and wouldn’t look at him, as though she were apologetic.

He asked, “How do Ethiopian poets see the country?”

“I don’t know,” she said and was very sad.

What could he say that would make her interested in the flow of their conversation? First, he pulled a sheet over his bared thighs on which he had redrawn the map of the land so far reconquered by the Somalis, then he gave himself time to study her expressions, her movements — deciding that she was, in all probability, having her period. It was something he envied her: the fact that she had periods whose monthly occurrences, he thought, had cleansing aspects about them. “You get rid of the bad blood,” she told him once, jokingly, “and you do the same a month later and so on and so forth until you reach old age. Men don’t have it,” Karin had explained. “Why not?” he had inquired. He couldn’t now remember for the life of him what explanation Misra had given, but could remember thinking about her periods whenever he stood by the tree in their compound and saw its life flow into waste and he tasted the sap and was coincidentally sick the following day believing that the tree, born the same day as he, although taller and shadier than he, was poisonous. Was life a poisonous potion which, if taken in the right doses, offers sustenance, but if not kills?

She was saying, “Do you know that Somalis are fond of talking about their country, in their poetry at any rate, as though she were a camel — the basis of this being that a camel is, after all, ‘the Mother of Men’, do you?”

“Camel, the Mother of Men?” he repeated.

Silence. Then, suddenly, there was an explosion, and after a small pause, another, then a third and after that a fourth. Had the war come to Kallafo? Almost. For there was an ochlocratic roar every now and again. Curious, Askar came out, wanting to know what might have caused it. Whereupon he saw a group of young boys running in the direction of the “Hill of Government”, and at the head of the group was a boy a year or two older than Askar and this boy was the group’s flag-bearer. The five-starred flag of Somalia fluttered in the vainglory of victory.

And Askar became the child he was — he abandoned thinking philosophically, he gave up the thought whether or no Misra too needed a mother in the same way he did and ran and joined the boys and girls of his age. For them, it was fun to be on the winning side, it was fun to disarm the disheartened, already defeated Ethiopian soldiery — for them, war was fun. It was fun to be strong, fun to be the toughest, fun to lead.

Askar proved to be the toughest when it came to receiving Aw-Adan’s humiliating lashes. He didn’t flinch if caned. He found his first fans among the other pupils. He was also the most brilliant, needing no time at all in order to commit any verse to memory: he heard a verse once and he gave it back in the form he was given it. Aw-Adan nicknamed him “little devil”, his peers “little hero”.

He was naughty, pulling loose the girls’ plaits or skirts, calling them names or challenging older boys to wrestling duels. He was very active, he was a busybody, arranging football matches to happen, organizing running events and other physical challenges to take place. Boys liked to gather round him. Before he was six, Askar became the undisputed leader. Besides, he had one advantage over all the other boys. Misra appeared to be more tolerant than most other parents. She didn’t mind how many of them he brought home with him to share his lunch, didn’t mind his going away as long as he showed up for his meals, didn’t mind if he omitted his siesta in the afternoon. At times, however, he would invite her to go and watch him — she being the only adult member in the audience.

Misra discovered, to her pleasure, that the children’s inventiveness never ceased to surprise hen And she watched them, with admiration, as they built an effigy resembling one day this historical figure, the following day another, whose portrait they had seen — and they took shots at Aw-Adan’s effigy one morning and in the evening, they burnt Haile Selassie’s. They sculptured the Emperor’s image out of tins, bits of wood and metal scraps, but you could see the likeness of the constructed effigy to the small-bodied man who ruled the Ethiopian Empire for nearly five decades. But did they know that Haile Selassie had died? Of course, Askar did. And so why were they burning the image of a man who had fallen out of popular favour? “Do you think,” Askar said, “that contemporary Ethiopia can be seen in an image other than the one created by Haile Selassie or Menelik?”

She agreed with him. She became a member of his fan club. Why, he was capable of drawing a dividing line between personalities that were in the public memory and those that were not. Why, Askar never contributed a scrap towards the construction of an effigy in the likeness of Uncle Qorrax. It was not that Qorrax’s children would have minded. They wouldVe been the first to rally round their leader, their cousin. His awareness of the thin line separating the personal from the political was such that he brought the play to an abrupt halt the moment he suspected it had crossed into the forbidden territory.

Askar and his friends had, themselves, a large repertoire of pieces which they often enacted. His was the largest stock. His body, it appeared, was an instrument where different parts produced different sounds and different bird noises. He made the weird twang of a boy born with a cleft palate, for instance. Then, immediately thereafter, turned outwards his upper eyelid as though he were showing it to an eye doctor. But he didn’t stop there. Now, he acted as if struck with paralysis and foamed at the mouth; now, he was a child bom with a weak mind. And before the enthralled crowd recovered its breath, Askar would move away slightly, then turn round and look at everybody with crossed eyes. Then he became a hunchback or a child with rickety legs.

One day, he and his group of playmates sneaked into the orchard belonging to the Adenese and they let the camel loose. Before they untied the beast, Askar took off the blindfold. You can imagine — a beast that for decades, day in and day out, turned round and round, now hauling a cart, now helping in the mill, now pulling bucketfiils of water from a well — a beast that had remained blindfolded day and night for years, never seeing natural or artificial light — and not only did they let it loose, but they removed its blindfold. The beast cried a most hideous cry: and died. When questioned, each denied he was present when this occurred. But they all mentioned Askar’s name. Not that he had done it, no. It was possible, they insinuated, that he might know who had been responsible.

They could not go unpunished. Uncle Qorrax suggested that he should be made very busy. And a school in which to discipline these unruly boys was started with Aw-Adan appointed as its headmaster. Arithmetic. Geography. History. Arabic. The school’s name was Kallafo Public School, since it was funded and founded by the community, and since the Ethiopian government didn’t provide any schooling facilities for the Somalis in the Ogaden. So, for the first week or so, Askar returned home exhausted. Naturally, the morning’s Koranic School plus the afternoon’s arithmetic, etc., took their toll and by the time he staggered home, he wasn’t willing to spend his energy on inventing a new set of rules for games to be thoroughly enjoyed by an improvised audience.

A fortnight later, he thought of new games, which attracted larger audiences. Misra heard that the young man in her charge had been up to no good. And there was no way she could’ve held him in the house. What was the point of beating him? At times, he removed his shirt from his back, brought a cane himself and asked her to “go on, punish me, go on”.

She only pleaded, “Please, do not attract eyes to yourself. People can be bad, envious, wicked. People’s eyes can make you fall ill. They are terrible when they are bad, people’s eyes.

He paid her pleas no heed.

He was taken ill.

He looked bloodless — too weak “How do you feel?” she asked.

He shook his head. He had no temperature, thank God. Neither did he vomit. He ate as normally as he used to. And yet he was “sick”. The “sickness” showed in his look, which appeared startled. What could be the matter? His head between his hands, he said, “I don’t know.” It was a weird kind of illness. “Bad eyes are wicked!” Karin had commented.

“Is there any part of you that is in pain? Your head, your stomach, your heart? Tell me.” Misra touched him all over. “Which part of your body does pain reside in?”

“I cannot think” he said. “It’s that kind of sickness!”

“What do you mean, you cannot think?”

He said, “It’s odd, but it feels as if my brain has ceased thinking, as if I will never have new thoughts. It’s a strange sensation but that’s what I feel. No fresh ideas. And my eyes — look at them. Pale as white meat.”

Misra thought, it is the bad eye. All that night, she prayed and prayed and prayed. Oh Lord, protect my little man from the rash of measles; from diarrheal diseases and complications; from conjunctival sightlessness; from tubercular and whooping coughs. Protect him, oh Lordj from droplet-bone infections and from migratory parasites — and such diseases for which we have no names. Oh Lord, restore to him his thinking faculties. Amen!

A day later, she consulted Qorrax and Aw-Adan. Interestingly enough, each suggested two remedies. Aw-Adan offered to read selected verses of the Koran over Askar’s body “astraddle the bed in satanic pain”; alternatively, he said, someone ought to belt the jinn out of the little devil. Uncle Qorrax suggested he sent his wife, “Shahrawello”, over — she was an expert at blood-letting. Otherwise, he went on, he would pay for the cuudis: “Blood-letting works when the blood of the patient is bad; fumigating if there is suspicion that somebody’s covetous, evil eye needs to be appeased,” said Uncle Qorrax.

Askar retorted, “Blood-letting? For whom? For me? No, thank you.”

Half-serious, Misra said: “Maybe that’s what you need.”

“I’ve seen it done, no, thank you.”

He remembered someone saying that Shahrawello prescribed blood-letting for Uncle Qorrax if he wasn’t happy with his performance in bed, if he wasn’t content with his respiratory system or if he was believed to be suffering from bronchitis. Hours later, she would show him the blood that had rushed to the surface and which she managed to capture in the cup, a cup full of darkened blood which she held before him as evidence. Uncle Qorrax would stare at the dark blood and, nodding with approval, would say, “You see, I told you. I am not well.” Some people were of the opinion that Qorrax was healthy until Shahrawello decided it was time his pride was punctured. To humiliate him, people said, she made him lie on a mat on the floor, helpless and submissive. Flames, tumblers, used razor-blades — she gave him the works. Lethargic, and drained of blood, he would remain on his back, at the same spot for hours. From then on, he beat his wives less often. From then on, he bullied his children less frequently. And this was the amazing thing — Qorrax acknowledged his unlimited gratitude to Shahrawello who, he said, kept him fit and on good form.

“No blood-letting for me. No, thank you,” said Askar now.

“What about cuudis?”

He said, “No, thank you.”

He had watched it done. Karin was the patient. Poor woman, he thought. They forced her to tell lies, heaps of lies. Otherwise, how could she give as her name the name of a man? How could Karin say, looking straight at her “confessor”, “My name is Abdullahi”, giving as her own an identity which didn’t match her real identity. Maybe, it was because they “fumigated” her by placing a towel above her head, making her sweat, making her swelter under the suffocating smoke and she coughed and coughed. The woman who had been hired to dispel the bad eye out of Karin’s system spoke to Karin in a language which definitely was not Somali. A couple of other women beat Karin on the chest as though she were a tin drum, they beat her on the back of the neck like one who’s choked on a large piece of meat but won’t vomit it out voluntarily. Askar wondered if Karin might have swallowed the “bad eye”. No? Although it didn’t make any sense, he wasn’t averse to the idea.

“The Koran, then?”

No, no. He knew the Koran from back to front. He didn’t want it read over his body astraddle a bed — not by Aw-Adan. Who knows, argued Askar, the man might have weird ideas. What if he read the wrong passages of the Koran, passages, say, which could make him turn into an epileptic? He had heard of such a story. As a matter of fact, he knew the brother of the boy to whom a similar experience had happened. A “priest” had chosen the wrong passages of the Koran deliberately, mischievously, and read it over the little boy whom he didn’t like. Did Misra know what became of the boy? “He now has extra fluid flowing into his skull. They tell me his brain is over-flooded like a river with burst banks.”

Misra was worried. “Who is this boy? Does he really exist?”

“His head is larger than the rest of his body; his sight has begun to fail, his hearing too. And all this because a wicked ‘priest’ has read the wrong passages of the Sacred Book over the body of an innocent boy.”

“That’s criminal,” said Misra.

“I agree with you,” he said.

They were silent for a few minutes. “So what do we do?” she said.

His eyes lit with mischief. He pretended to be thinking. “What?” she asked. “What is it, Askar?”

“Go and call Aw-Adan,” he suggested.

“And I ask him to bring along a copy of the Koran?”

“No.”

“What then?”

And he became the great actor she had known, and his stare was illumined with the kind of satanic naughtiness his eyes brightened with when he was being mischievous. “What then?” she repeated.

“Tell him to bring along his cane. I prefer his caning me with my eyes wide open to his reading the Koran over my body astraddle a sick bed when they are closed and trusting.”

In a moment, he was up and about. He was changing into a clean pair of shorts and looking for a T-shirt to match it. He was all right, she told herself. He was thinking. However, she saw him rummage in a cupboard. “But what are you looking for?” she said.

“I am going to shave,” he said. “Shave my chin, grow a beard, be a man like any other.”

“Shave? What…?”

He was gone.

II

He cut himself when shaving. He cut his chin and his lower lip bled when he held the razor the wrong way, when he didn’t adjust the disposable blade properly There were shaving things lying about and he knew where to get them. His uncle was away at the war and so were many other men. Now he washed his face in the after-shave lotions, trying to see which one would stop his chin’s blood running. The lotions made him smell good and so he sprayed them on his groin — determined that this would instantly remove the odour of his perspiration — and now, as there was still some of it left in the bottle, he hesitated whether to sprinkle it on his armpits, something he had seen older men do. But no. For this he chose the talcum powder, he decided that would do. He smiled. He breathed hot vapoury air and wrote his name on the mirror’s mist and saw bits of himself, bits of his coagulated or running blood in the “A” or the “S” or the “K” and the “R of his name.

He could not remember which came first — the thought that if he shaved, hair would automatically grow on his chin and his lips — or that he should take note of the hourly changes in his body. He was said to have developed the habit of getting up earlier than Misra so he would see for himself, placing his head against the dot he had marked on the wall the previous day, whether he had grown an inch or two taller in the past twenty-four hours. Very often, he was disappointed that he couldn’t determine if he had, but he never felt as disheartened as when he stood against the tree planted by Misra the same day he was born.

“You must eat and eat and eat if you want to grow fast,” she said, one early morning when he woke her up because he moved about noisily, “The tree lives off the earth and its water, it eats grandly, drinks huge quantities of water and breathes fresh air all the time. You must eat more so you’ll become a man, a fully grown man, tall, broad-shouldered and perhaps bearded too.” And having said so, she went back to sleep.

And the anxiety to become a fully grown man, a man ready for a conscription into the liberation army, ready to die and kill for his mother country, ready to avenge his father, the anxiety made him overindulge himself in matters related to food, it made him eat to excess until he felt so unwell that he vomited a couple of times. He had appropriated Misra’s food since she couldn’t eat anything anyway and stuffed himself full of anything he could lay his hands on. Hardly able to breathe, he would then lift rocks, flex his muscles so as to develop them, climb up the tree for further leg and arm exercises and then swing from it. Exhausted, he would fall asleep.

What distinguished this period’s dreams from any other, what set these dreams apart from the others, was the presence of a huge garden, lush with an enormous variety of tropical fruits. He ate these fruits, he made himself a long list of salad fruits, and swam in the cool stream whose water was warm and whose bed was grown with weeds which were nice to touch and feel and pull and tickle one’s face with — a face which grew sterner, and upon whose chin sprouted hair, silky, smooth, young and tender. Yes, what made the experience unique was that the garden was green with paradisiacal tropicality, it was calm with heavenly quietness. And in the Edenic certitude he found himself in, he discovered he was confident, happy to be where he was, happy to be who he was. There was — almost within reach, wearing a smile, motherly — there was a woman. The woman grew on him. One night, dreaming, he “picked” her up like a fruit and studied her; she, who was small as a fruit, lay under his intense stare. He had never seen that woman before. Of this, he was most certain. And yet he knew her. Where had he met her? He didn’t know. She was calling him “my son” and was talking of the pain of being separated from him — she who had borne him, she who had carried him for months inside of her, she who claimed she “lived” in him who had survived her, she who claimed to be his guide when everyone else failed him. The following morning, he awoke and was confronted with an inexplicable mystery: there was blood on the sheet he had covered himself with, blood under him too. Most specifically, there was blood on his groin. He sought Misra’s response.

“You’ve begun to menstruate,” she said, looking at him with intent seriousness. “The question is: will you have the monthly curse as we women do or will yours be as rare as the male fowl’s egg?”

He said, “But I am a man. How can I menstruate?”

Enraged, he strode away from her in a manly way. He wouldn’t give her the pleasure, he shouted, of her making fun of him any more or even of washing his “womanhood” if it came to that. But what did this mean anyway? he asked himself, when he had washed. How come his own body misbehaved, how come he menstruated? Come what may, he said to himself, he wouldn’t allow such thoughts to dissuade him from doing whatever it took to be a man who was ready to be conscripted into the army, a man ready to die and kill for his mother country, a man ready to avenge his father.

III

That day, he rejected the food she gave him. He tossed aside the plate she extended towards him and scolded her for what she had done when he was sleeping — smear his sheet and groin with blood. Why did she do it? She swore that she didn’t go anywhere near him, that she didn’t smear his body or sheet with blood.

“And so where did the blood come from?” he said.

She answered, “I don’t know.”

He reminded her of a conversation they had had a few days ago, one in which he admitted that he envied women their monthly periods. “Could it be that in my dream, I menstruated?”

“There’s a war on, there’s a great deal of tension — and so everything is possible. I wouldn’t know the answer, to be honest with you. I’ve never known of any man who menstruated. Could it be that the tension, the war…?”

And he interrupted her. “The war, the tension — what nonsense!”

“Do you have an answer then?”

He reflected; then: “Men wet themselves occasionally?”

“When sleeping, yes.”

He sighed. “And the colour of sperm is white?”

“White as silver.”

She heard a whine and waited.

“You know Uncle Hassan, don’t you?”

She nodded her head, “Yes.”

“You remember he urinated blood and was taken to see a doctor?”

She agreed that that was true.

“Perhaps that explains it all.”

She didn’t like his explanation. “It means you prefer being sick to being a woman.”

“Naturally,” he said. “Who wouldn’t?”

She said, “I wouldn’t.”

“That is easily understandable. You are, after all, a woman.”

And he left the room.

IV

“Tell me, why are there trackloads of women and infants leaving Kallafo?” Askar asked Misra when it became obvious that the Ethiopians were sending away their women and children from the war zone. “Why?”

“Where there’s a war,” she began to answer, but continued mixing hot and cold water so she could give Askar a bath, “man sends ahead of himself his wife and children and stays behind to defend his people’s honour, dignity and also property. Perhaps a bomb will cut the women’s and children’s lives short before they get home; perhaps the dozen or so armed soldiers with their primitive rifles will manage to deter a few equally primitively armed Somalis from killing them.”

There was a pause.

“And you won’t go?” he said.

Her hand stopped stirring the water whose temperature she was testing. She was reduced to a stare — speechless. He said to himself, “Maybe this is what death looks like — Misra sitting, speechless and staring, with her hand stuck in a bucket fall of lukewarm water, the dust round her unstirred, the lips of her mouth forming and unforming a roguish smile — maybe this is what death looks like. And not what I saw last night — the back of a woman’s head, a hand flung aside, a nail cut and then discarded.”

She was saying, “Are you sending me away, Askar?”

“Not ahead of myself, no,”

Again she smiled rather mischievously, reminding herself that Askar was not yet eight and that here he was behaving as though he were a man and she a creature of his own invention. She declined to comment on what was going on between them, she declined to go into the same ring as he, she bowed out. However disreputable, she believed she was the one who made him who he was, she was the one who brought him up. She changed the mood of the exchange, changed the subject. Searching for his hand, she said, “Come.”

He stood away, his hands hidden behind him. “Where?”

“Come,” she said, half rising to take grip of his hand. “Let me give your body a good scrubbing which is what it needs most. And then we’ll go for a walk and, if you wish, watch the Ethiopian men send their women and children away to highland safety”

He was rudely noisy, shouting, “Don’t you touch me.”

“Fm sorry,” she said, taken aback.

It was then that the thought that he was now a man and didn’t want to be helped to wash impressed itself upon her mind. She would have to make an auspicious move, one which would make him relax until she poured the first canful of water on his head, and until the water calmed his nerves. His determined voice of defiance resounded through her body — and she had to wait for a long while before she was able to say anything. Then, “Do you want to bathe yourself?” she asked, keeping her distance.

And saw (the thought took a long time to mature) how methodically “dirtied” he had been — as if he played rough with boys of his age and wrestled and somersaulted into and out of challenging hurdles. He didn’t look helplessly dirty — if anything, he was deliberately dirty. This thought descended on her like a revelation. She wondered where he had been — and with whom. She suspected he wouldn’t tell her, but thinking she wouldn’t lose anything anyway, she asked: “Where have you been?”

He wouldn’t tell her.

“Why won’t you tell me where you’ve been?”

He behaved like one who had a secret to withhold.

“You’ll not tell me?”

He shook his head, “No.”

With harrowing clarity, she saw what he was after — to tell her he would go where he pleased, tell her that he would roam in the territory of his pleasure, alone, and at any rate without her help, wash when he decided he wanted. She reasoned: the world is reduced to chaos; there’s a war on; boys, because of this chaotic situation, have suddenly become men and refuse to be mothered.

And then, with frightening suddenness, he said, “Not only can I wash if I choose to, but I can kill; and not only can I kill but I can also defend myself against my enemy.”

The fierceness with which he spoke the words “I can kill” alarmed her. She stiffened, her heart missed a beat, then drummed faster, beating noisily in the caged rib of her seemingly discreet reaction. She appeared uneasy and stood up taller, higher, supporting her weight on the tip of her toes, like one who is looking over the edge of a cliff. “Kill? Kill whom?”

He wouldn’t say, just as he wouldn’t tell her that he was a member of a small body of young men who trained together as guerrillas and who rolled on the dirt as they felled one another with mock blows, issuing, as they dropped to the ground, a most heinous kung-fu cry, or some such like. What mattered, in the end, was you killed your enemy, said these young men to one another. The idea to train with these boys wasn’t his, but the boy who had been raped by the Adenese — who proved to be the toughest, not least because he had something to fight against and he had in him a bitter contempt for everybody in this or any other world. It was he, and not Askar, who made a hole in a thinly mud-plastered wall which enabled the body of boys to take a quieter look at the men (believed to be away at the war front) who trained to kill and, through the hole in the wall, the boys imbibed an ideology embodied in the dream they saw as their own, the dream they envisioned as their common future: warriors of a people fighting to liberate their country from colonial oppression. Nor would he tell her of his friends’ suspicious finger pointing in her direction. Was she not from the Highlands? they said. How could she be trusted? They most insistently repeated their suspicious worries that she might speak, might pass on the information. It bothered him greatly that he couldn’t share with her the joy of his secrets; it pained him that he had to be distrustful of her motives when she probed into his affairs, asking him where he had been and with whom. “It was as if you were born with a deformity that you had to carry with you everywhere you went,” he said to the boy whom the Adenese had raped. Indeed, who better could he say this to, than to another boy who carried on his head another shame of another kind? “Yes, I understand,” said the “disgraced” boy. Askar said to himself now, “I will not allow her to wash the dirt my body has accumulated when training to kill my people’s enemy.”

Whereas she was saying, “There are a number of blind spots the body of a human has. We may not know of them until we are self-conscious; we may not sense how helpless we are until we submit ourselves to other hands. A child’s body’s blind spots are far too many to count — the small of the back, the back of the neck, the dirt in the groin, the filth on either the left or the right of the lower reaches of the bottom. A mother sees them all, she soaps them all and, in the end, washes them clean.” She was going nearer him and he was withdrawing and she was saying, “They are difficult to live with, these blind spots, these blind curves in one’s body, the curtained parts of one’s body, the never-seen, never-visible-unless-with-the-assistance-of-a-mirror parts — and here I am thinking of the skull — or the difficult-to-see parts — and here I am thinking about… I am thinking about…,” and speaking and moving in his direction and he was retreating and was about to stumble backwards into the tree planted the day he himself was born, his blind spot, that is his back, ahead of the rest of his body, when … a bomb fell — and it fell almost between them, although nearer where he was standing — and it separated them.

Panic gripped her throat: and she couldn’t speak or shout but lay on the ground, inert, covered in dust — once the noise died down and the shower of dust began to settle. He? He was — he was there, more or less dusted, and his eyes were two spots of brightness which focused on their surroundings and it seemed as though he mobilized his alert mind to determine where the shelling had come from.

“Are you all right?” she managed to say after a long silence.

He looked at her — she appeared like one who had just risen from the dead.

Still defiant, he said, “Who do you take me for?”

She had gone browner with dust and her headscarf had fallen off, exposing a most unruly head, as ugly as the knotted, uncombed curls. She walked away in a defiant way — defiant and indifferent as to what might happen, impervious to what he thought or did, or whether a shower of shells fell on her head, or anyone else’s head.

“It’s worthwhile your considering giving yourself a good scrubbing. Maybe the water is still lukewarm and you surely need a wash and something that will keep your soul active and alive and your body clean,” he said.

Then another shell fell — this time nearer where she was standing. And, at the wake of the explosion, when again she had managed to stand to her feet, both of them saw before them a crowd, brown as mud — a crowd of women and children armed with pangas, sticks and machetes, a crowd that was moving in the direction of the hill where the enemy had fired from. A spokeswoman of the crowd promised they would take “Government Hill”. Askar felt he had to join, to give victory an indispensable hand.

And he ran after the crowd.

V

The following day Noon.

“Misra, where precisely is Somalia?” he asked suddenly

She was pulling at a chicken’s guts, a chicken she had just beheaded. She stopped and stared at him, not knowing what to say Her forehead wrinkled with concentration, like somebody who was trying to remember where he was. Then: “Haven’t you seen it on the map?” she said, holding her bloodstained hands away from her dress.

“A map? What map?”

“Go look it up. You seem happily engrossed in it.”

He surprised her; he admitted in a sad voice: “No one has ever explained how to read maps, you see, and I have difficulty deciphering all the messages.”

She looked away from him and at the decapitated chicken. She wished she could get on with her plucking of the fowl’s feathers (Askar thought of the chicken’s blood as being exceptionally red — not dark red as he expected) and she said: “If you go east, you’ll end up in Somalia.”

Offended, he said, “I know that.”

“What don’t you know then? Why don’t you let me get on with what I am doing? Don’t you realize there is little time left for me to prepare a decent meal?”

He bent down and picked up a feather flying away into the cosmic infinitude. He looked at it, studying it as though under a microscope, one among a hundred other feathers joining the unbound universe. Then he looked at the white meat of the chicken — goose-pimpled, dead and headless, the fowl lay where Misra had dropped it, in a huge bowl. Did it have a soul? Did it have a brain? He remembered testing its motherly instinct when he threatened the lives of its chicks. It attacked, its wings open in combat readiness and its rage clucking in consonants of maternal protectiveness. Askar had run away for his own life. From a hen. He was glad none of the boys saw him run away

From then on, whenever he entered Karin’s compound, he sus-’ pected that the mother hen, or the others, now as tall as they were ever likely to grow, eyed him menacingly, goose-stepping sideways as if only their preparedness for a fall-frontal attack, and together, might save them from his mischievous threats. Poor hen — dead. Dead because it was killed to celebrate a victory — and the fact (this was in the air) that Askar might be leaving for Mogadiscio. After all, Uncle Qorrax said he would come and speak with him.

Then, something attracted his attention. Misra had laid the plucked chicken on its side and was pulling at its guts, when he noticed an egg — whole, as yet unhatched, and, he thought, indifferent to the goings-on outside its own complete universe. An egg — oval-shaped as the universe — with a life of its own and an undiscovered future. “Don’t touch it, Misra,” he ordered.

She looked at him in wonderment. “This?” she said, touching it.

“Don’t hurt it,” he said.

She gave it to him — slowly but delicately. She handed the egg to him with the same care that she might have offered the world to him. And he received it with absolute reverence, with both hands joined together as if in prayer. Something warned him to be careful and not to drop it. It was warm. He believed life quivered within it as he closed his hands on it, not tightly, but gently. Reluctantly, he entered into a dialogue with himself. Was there no similarity between the egg and his own beginnings? In the corpse of a hen, there lay another potential life — just as he lay in his dead mother — but alive. He was glad the egg was salvaged out of the dead hen.

Misra was saying: “I thought you wanted me to tell you where ‘Somalia’ is?”

Askar nodded his head.

“There,’ she said, pointing with her blood-soiled index finger.

He repeated the question, “Where?” apparendy because he had been staring at the index finger, which was dripping with blood, and hadn’t taken note of the direction in which she pointed. “Where?”

Her “There”, this second time, was so suddenly spoken, Askar could Ve sworn “Somalia” was the name of a person, perhaps a friend of hers, somebody who might be invited to partake of the meal she was preparing. “That’s Somalia,” she added. “Easterly.”

He thought he heard someone’s footsteps coming from the easterly direction — he looked, and there was Karin. She had come with an empty bowl. Today, she was in near rags but charming-looking, and smiling too, and talking and friendly, and had the look of somebody who wanted something. She said, “Give us some of God’s charity and you’ll be blessed forever.”

Askar said, “The meat is yours, the egg is mine.”

Karin, puzzled, looked at Misra. “What’s he talking about?”

“Ask him,’ she said.

By the time Karin was ready to ask him a question, he was gone.

Three days later. Another festive occasion. The three of them: Karin, Misra and Askar. Somebody had delivered a large consignment of raw meat, a gift from Uncle Qorrax. Karin was sitting apart and seemed to be having difficulty determining in which direction the wind was blowing. She appeared littler, barely a girl in her teens. This was how she looked to Askar, who saw her go closer to the earth as if she were listening for a secret. He thought of a beetle, which, sensing that an unidentified shadow might strike it dead, waits, and while doing so, curls up, making itself smaller, leaving no part of it exposed other than its wing-cases hard as a turtle’s back — and like a turtle, it is able to remove its head and neck out of danger: that’s it! “What are you doing, Karin?” said Misra.

“Thinking. Thinking of asking you to divine,” she said.

“What with?”

“Meat.”

She thought for a minute. “I've used meat only once. Water, yes, and blood. It’s difficult to divine with meat. Meat is short-lived, there is something temporary about meat in hot climates.”

Misra gently stroked the entrails and he could hear the groan of an intestine, the moan of a bladder. She washed the meat. Then she held a handful of it and stared at it for a long time. She fell into, and dwelled in, a state of suspense. Her posture was that of someone praying, her silence concentrated like a treasure. Then she began speaking words belonging to a language group neither Karin nor Askar had ever heard of before and she repeated and repeated the mantras of her invocation. She uttered a shibboleth, or what must have been a test word, and looked happy like somebody who has found a lost friend. She spoke slowly this time. Her voice — ripples (as of water) in the wake of other ripples, each following waves of more ripples falling upon further ripples. And each of her incantatory phrases was shapely like predictions that would come true. Finally, she put the meat back in the bowl.

And the meat quivered.

And Askar watched her stare at the fatty portion of the meat, as though she were reading the future in a palm — which she probably was. And the future trembled, red like the season’s flower in bloom, living and yet dead: the meat. And the future-in-the-meat, whatever its colour, whatever its own future, beckoned to Misra’s questioning mind — and her palms, from which she was reading the future, were bloody What did that mean? Karin asked: “Tell us what you've seen, Misra. Please.”

Misra’s breathing was deep, Askar’s shallow, Karin's, choked.

“To the traveller,” began Misra, speaking with a voice that was not her own (this reminded Askar of when Karin had assumed an identity different from her own, claiming she was called Abdullahi), and then paused for a while. Then she continued, this time with her eyes closed, “To the traveller, the heat dwells in the distance in the dilute forms of mirages and such-like hopes as may make the fatigued voyager believe in the eternal nature of the state of things.”

She paused. She breathed in and breathed out. Her brassiere came undone, there was a great deal of motion in her heavy chest. Involuntarily, the thought that each of her breasts was ovally shaped — almost like immense eggs — shocked Askar, bringing him back to a reality of sorts — to the present.

Karin said, “Now what, in plain language, does that mean?”

Askar was thinking how, the other day, the air had been thick with falling feathers and how, today, meat was employed to foretell a future fiill of death and blood and journeys.

Misra said, “He will travel,” this time speaking with her own voice.

“Who will?”

“I saw a pearl, as clear as the water of the ocean is blue. Did you ask, who will travel? Askar will travel and will put his feet in the Indian Ocean. And hell be happy as one who’s discovered his beginnings.”

Karin asked: “And you? Will you, too, travel?”

“I will join him eventually, but not immediately. He will first be reunited with his maternal uncle. Arrangements are being made. But I see death and distress and disaster in the offing.”

He asked, “He will travel soon, will he, this rascal, this Askar?” very excited. “Tell us how soon.”

“Shortly”

Then, almost simultaneously as he jumped up in glee, he sensed something weird had taken place — he tasted blood in his mouth. He took hold of himself and noted that, for one thing, he hadn’t bitten his tongue; for another, when he examined the floor or palate of his mouth, he didn’t discover any sores or cuts. Now what in heavens did that mean? He remembered it was happening for the second time in his life, the first, when Aw-Adan caned him unfairly, and with unjustified contempt, on his first day at the Koranic School. He might not have admitted it, but he was frightened. In any case, he decided not to tell them about it.

As more steam rose from the huge pots which were on the fire, and more smoke from the one just built, Askar’s worried look settled on Karin’s chin — the old woman had a faint beard. Some women are known to grow thin hairs on their chins when their bodies enter the age of menopause. Now, who couldVe told him that? he asked himself. From Karin’s chin, his eyes travelled to Misra’s hands, still stained with blood. A future of blood, of death and disasters — and a journey to Mogadiscio for him.

Well!

VI

That night, when sleep came, he moved his bed to the centre of the room he and Misra shared, placing it right under the opening a bomb had made in the roof, so he could keep his eye on the sky; and slept cradled in the warmth of a stick carved in the shape of a rifle — this being a gift from the boy whom the Adenese had raped. And his dream garden was emptied of its greenness — the trees had been disrobed, the branches had gone dry, the leaves had begun to become wiltingly lifeless and what fruits there might have been had dropped to the ground to rot — unpicked, uneaten. From one end of the garden, a fire ate its way, ruthless, tongued, and Askar could hear its crackling noise as each tree, limb, stump, twig or dry leaf was licked dead by its famished rage. The fire was helped by the fast-travelling, angry wind. At times, the wind levelled the ground so the fire would find the job — already half-done, or almost — easier. The earth was thus pillaged of its water. Dry, it wore a dark coating of charcoal.

And he?

He was fixed to the ground — waiting. And he was sure that the fire — which had devoured the wind, emptied the earth of its water, the garden of its greenness — he was certain the tongued flames would finish him. Frightened, he froze. He believed that was the end of him: with a heart already frozen and a body dipped in the red fluidity of fire. The tongued flames stopped at his feet, then, in a moment, like a cobra, gathered into and moved up spirally, climbing his body until the chill disappeared. He felt his body being tickled back into life.

He looked about — no fire, no wind. Did that mean that the fire which had devoured the earth and the sky had found a home inside him? That he would burn, sooner or later, and nothing would extinguish him?

And then it rained.

And the rain cut short his dream.

For the water poured down from the heavens and a few drops fell into his open mouth. From the way he gulped, from the frightened way he gasped, seeking his breath, etc., one wouldVe thought he was drowning. He sat up, preoccupied. His face was wet, his body was soaked in the ablutionary waters of a heavenly downpour and there seeped into his soul a sense of irrelevance. “ What am I doing here sleeping dreamily when my mother country needs my help? He crawled out of bed, his “rifle” in his tight clutch, and he heard bombs fall. The horizon in the distance was lit by tiny fragments of brightnesses, small and fretful, like fireflies in the thickness of a tropical night’s unmitigated darkness. Placing his “rifle” in his bed, he stood motionless, thinking.

A little later, he began moving about, quiet as the smoke of gunpowder, and he lit a paraffin lamp. He strode towards Misra’s bed to wake her up. But he stopped. He then saw that his “rifle”, which lay astraddle his own bed, was pointed at Misra’s head — Misra, who lay on her back, asleep in paradisiacal disorder. (Her knees were up, her legs open and her private parts exposed.) He chose to leave her be. And he went out of the room.

Outside, the night was infernally dark. Not a single star was in the sky The wind was still and nothing stirred. Then he noticed a few women, who emerged out of the now opened doors of sleep. A bomb fell, not very far from where they were standing. This helped unbolt the locked gates of conversation and floods of information came forth. He could gather from the conversation that the “enemy hill” was aflame. Somebody was saying that the Ethiopians had set fire to their houses in an apparent attempt to prevent the Somalis taking their houses, and other belongings, intact. Which was why everybody who was there, save Askar, went towards the fire on the hill with a view to snatching a slice of the fire before it died! He had had his share of fire, he thought, and wished Misra was awake to celebrate the birth of “Somalia” in Kallafo.

He was very sad. For her.