Maps

CHAPTER SEVEN

I

Physically, you thought Hilaal was the exact replica of Misra, only he was a man — which, at that point in time, didn’t make much difference to you anyway — and older than she. He was better dressed and, you imagined, a great deal more knowledgeable. He was as large as she; he was as fat as she, although the echo of his voice, when he opened his mouth, resounded in your ears long after he had ceased speaking. You had been shown in by the maid who had answered the door. It was she who had led you down a small corridor to meet him. You didn’t know why she had hesitated — could it be that she didn’t want to disturb him? Or that she suspected he would've shouted at her for allowing you to enter in the first place? She knocked mildly on the door to his study — and you both waited. A minute or so later, he stood in the half-open doorway, as prominent in the landscape of your vision as Misra had been in that of your memory. For a moment, you failed to breathe; for a moment, you didn’t know where you were and why; for a moment your tongue lay inert in your mouth and you stared at him in the half-dark, speechless. Half-dark? Yes, because the curtains in his room were drawn; yes, because he had shut out the daylight glare, and the small light which the table-lamp provided had made a soft space in the darkness and had pushed aside the opaqueness all around. Then he struck a matchstick and lit a cigarette; then he took a sip of the drink he had in his hand; and you could hear the ice shake against his glass, you could hear the dripping of a broken tap somewhere else in the house. Could it be that the alternating elemental presence in the form of water and fire decided you would feel at home in Mogadiscio?

Hilaal said, “Yes?”, looking from you to the maid.

She mumbled something you couldn’t understand. As if to allow you into the room, he stood aside. His head, when moving, blocked. like a smothering hand, more than half the brightness the table-lamp light had given.

“Come,” he said to you, and you followed him.

He pushed open a door. He said, “This is your room. That is the bed, and on it are the sheets, the bedspreads, the pillows — and all you need. The room has a wc too. The maid will make the bed, fix you a meal. You can wash, you can sleep, you can do what you please,’ and, having said that, he walked away and vanished through the corridor, back into his study Half a second later, his head emerged and he was saying, “Welcome, Askar. I will see you later.”

You didn’t know what to make of all this. The maid did — and suggested you didn’t worry about what had happened, adding, “He’s a very warm person really. Today, he is exceptionally busy because he is giving a talk at the university this evening and is understandably tense.”

The room in which the two of you were standing made a claim on your attention. It was spacious, its floor-tiles Italian and therefore attractive, its walls decorated with lifesize pictures of horses and birds and maps of Africa, of the Horn of Africa — and of Somalia. The room was bright with sunshine, and because the windows had been left unclosed, the furniture was dusty. The bed was larger than the one you used to share with Misra. No wonder you asked yourself whether you had crossed the threshold of the great divide — and when? For not only did you find a frightening physical similarity between Misra and Hilaal, but you imagined your destiny in the hands of another maid, this time one whose name you didn’t know and who was herself young and emaciated-looking. Did they have children? And how many? If so where were they? You suspected it was improper, putting questions about these and other matters related to HilaaPs family and life to the maid; the maid who was on her knees, scrubbing the floor clean, dusting the table and chair, making the bed and beating the dust out of the pillowcases before she used them again. Your aimless pacing up and down the room took you to the bathroom, whose tap was dripping. You went to the sink. You placed your open palm under the tap, collecting the water, a little later, in your cupped hand. The water tasted salty.

The maid was saying, “Do you want to eat or shower first?”

You didn’t want to admit to her that you had no clean clothes to change into if you showered, nor did you want her to know that it was the first time you were in a bathroom with showers and sinks and running water and electricity.

“How old are you?” she said.

You lied; you said, “I am nine.”

“And where are your parents — your mother and father, I mean?” she asked.

You didn’t answer her. She understood your silence to mean that they had died in the war and so she didn’t push you any further. She changed subjects twice. She was nervous because she was afraid she might have touched a raw nerve, and she offered to do anything: help you shower, prepare for you something to eat, or even wash the shorts and shirt you were in so they would dry by the time you had had your afternoon siesta. Clearly, this was a world you hadn’t imagined — a world of grown-ups, of siestas, of bathrooms with showers, sinks and running water; a world within which Hilaal created another world, out of which he refused to surface; a world in which you had lost your sense of direction, for you didn’t know your north from your south and couldn’t tell where you were in relation to the sea or in relation to where you came from.

She was very active — the maid. “What do you want me to do?” she asked.

You appeared puzzled, and she said, “I come thrice a week. It is not that I have the whole day and night. Do you wish that I make something for you to eat or that I make the bed or that I wash your clothes? Come on. Tell me. I have another hour before I go to the afternoon school. I am a student.”

You stood there, not speaking. Apparently, you didn’t follow half of what she had just said. Was she a student? And at her age? You remembered one of your paternal uncles, as you left Kallafo, saying that the main purpose of your being sent off to Mogadiscio to your maternal uncle was that you would become a student. You prepared to ask her the age at which people stop studying at school. But she didn’t give you time to put the question to her. Then suddenly, she pulled you by the wrist and was unbuttoning your shirt and shorts and saying that she was going to help you shower, get you into bed, wash your clothes which had been dusty from your long travel and put them out in the sun to dry, etc.

You felt abashed; you felt disconcerted; and you started to stammer something — but she didn’t give heed to what you were stuttering; didn’t bother listening to you. By then your unbuttoned shorts had fallen to your feet; by then you had your arms out of the T-shirt, but you were nearly choked because your head was clumsily caught in the narrowness of its neck. You felt outrageously insulted and you shouted a half-smothered cry of “Don’t do that”, a cry which you repeated, and repeated as loudly as you could, until Hilaal was in the room with you asking, “What’s happening here?”

The maid stammered something.

You covered your nakedness with your cupped hands, as you saw adults do.

Then the three of you looked up and saw, standing in the door, a woman: Salaado.

II

Since we’ve been going backwards and forwards in time, let’s continue doing so. But let us, for a while at any rate, spend some time with you, know how you were when you first came into their lives, arriving — diffident and shy — from a war zone. Your eyes said one thing to them, your silence another. And Hilaal and Salaado decided to wait, placing themselves somewhere between these aspects of yourself (as Hilaal put it), knowing full well that there was another you, which, if appropriately explored and defined, might give them a boy, as intelligent as he was bright, one who was acting, one who was hiding in the safe recesses of silence. They would love him when this emerged, love him as though he were of their own flesh and blood.

Uncle Hilaal pulled at your cheek and teasing you, said, “Askar, where is the third? Where’s the other?”

You looked about yourself, looked here, looked there and then at the two of them, but remained silent. In the quiet of your day-dreams, you asked yourself, The third — who’s that?” One, Hilaal. Two, Salaado. Three? What does the third mean?

You withdrew from company, you preferred sulking in a quiet corner the first few days. You didn’t speak much about Uncle Qorrax, his wives, his children — or how often he beat them; you didn’t talk about the compound, of which he was the undisputed headman; nor of the nomads, many of whom were relations of his, and who came to Kallafo on a shopping spree, nomads whom you didn’t like much (here are Misra’s prejudices) because they tended to bring and leave behind them, as souvenirs, a colony of lice, and your head itched, your body too, if you got anywhere near them. (Is this true, Askar?) Nor did you say much about Misra in those early days following your arrival. You drew a skeletal picture of her. In fact, you offered so thin and so vague a sketch of her that Uncle Hilaal showed little interest in your relationship with her. What was more, you kept your mother’s journal as your unshared secret, “the only one I am left with, the only secret all my own”, you said to yourself.

Do you know to what they attributed your silent withdrawals? Or rather how they explained them to each other at night, as you lay asleep, or perhaps dreaming, in a room all your own, all by yourself? “Such horrors,” had said Hilaal, “such blood-shedding and such terror in the frightened eyes of hunger and famine — part of young Askar is terribly suffering the loss of the world he has known.” Salaado argued, “But his eyes say one thing, his silence another,” her head beside Hilaal’s, hers pillowless, his on a pillow high as a throne. “And please don’t psychoanalyse us,” she had added.

Silent and withdrawn, yes. But your mind was busy, your tongue active. And you put a distance between yourself and the world. Your mind was busy and your tongue active throughout this period, because you read everything out loud, every bit of writing that came your way, you devoured every printed word you encountered. You read everything out loud so you would hear and not forget what you had read. You were excited in the manner of an Arab who has made a new friend. You were under the hypnosis of a newly found friend — the material you happened to be reading. And Salaado chose tales from Khaliila wa Dimna and you read it together, your voice hesitant, hers confident as a trickster’s.

Alone in your bed at night, lonely in your room, the first few nights were disheartening. You wished you were allowed to share their room. You were frightened of the dogs that barked in a house not very far away, you wondered if they might jump over your fence and enter your room. Salaado was sufficiently sensitive to have given it a thought. One night, she smuggled a small radio into your room and you slept to its jabbering. The radio was to stay Did it take Misra’s place — Misra, whose voice regulated your sleeping rhythms? Maybe. Anyway you slept to its jabbering as though it were talking to you and when you awoke in the morning, the large radio was on in the living-room, giving the news bulletin.

They took turns reading to you at night. Uncle Hilaal’s favourite was Al-Macarri’s Letter of a Horse and a Mule; Salaado’s was Khaliila wa Dimna. You couldn’t help comparing them to Misra; you couldn’t help deciding that you adored all three. But you wouldn’t tell them how you missed Misra. In short, you drew a curtain of silence round yourself. The question was, if this was merely a phase you were going through. “What if this is all there is?” said Salaado.

“He’ll speak,” predicted Hilaal. “He’s just like my sister, his mother.”

Then, one day, you gave to Uncle Hilaal your mother’s journal. You never said why you had held it as your unshared secret, why you never mentioned you had it to anyone.

And the curtain dropped — there was sunshine and Salaado and Hilaal saw how much vigour you had in you, how active you were behind the artificial veil; and the noise coming from behind the clouds of your quietness was so deafening they were pleased, but at the same time a little apprehensive. You were, as Salaado put it, “overtures in the human form of friendliness. He is wonderful.” Uncle Hilaal read your mother’s journal, turning the pages with anxiety. You waited to be told what the gist of your mother’s journal was. Instead — a question:

“What was Uncle Qorrax like?” he asked.

You remembered seeing his name occur in the journal a couple of times. Was he important to her? Was he vicious and nasty and wicked to her? You wished someone would tell you. But no one did. “What was he like?”

“Did Uncle Qorrax abuse my mother’s trust?” you asked.

Uncle Hilaal said, “What makes you say that?”

You remembered the goings-on between him and Misra on the one hand, and Aw-Adan and Misra on the other. But you also sensed that Hilaal’s interest in what Qorrax had been like was genuine. “Did he rape my mother?’” you asked. “Did he want to marry her when news about my father’s death came?”

“Go and rest awhile,” suggested Salaado.

“No,” you said and were aggressive.

There was a pause. Then: “Then tell us what he was like,” said HilaaL

And you abandoned yourself. You took a moment’s breath, you paused, every now and then, as though a gag had suddenly been removed. You were a belated outpouring, you were heavy like overdue rain. And you shook as you spoke. But you spoke and spoke and spoke. What was Uncle Qorrax like? He was terrible, ruthless, a brute and he beat his wives and his children from sunup to sundown. You remembered (it was amazing, you thought, you remembered this — and you congratulated yourself, like an actor who had performed well) that you were fond of him only for a very brief period of time — when you loved his shoes. You gave him what was his due. He knew how to choose his shoes. There was no denying that. They delighted your sense of vision, when, as a crawling infant, you came anywhere near them, during that brief shoe-loving phase that all children go through. You loved them so much you wanted to put them into your mouth. However, when you outgrew the shoe-loving phase, you began to hate him all the more. You distrusted him — that was it. You had no faith in him. Right from the very instant — you weren”t even two days old — when, washed and clean, you were shown to him, you cried. Yes, you said to Uncle Hilaal and Salaado, you cried most furiously. You thought for a while, you reasoned, that you were allergic to his odour. But now you knew why you had nothing but a plethora of contempt for him. Apparently, it was atavistic — something you received in your mother”s milk. She hated him.

“How do you know? You haven”t read her journal, have you?” Hilaal asked you.

Uncle Hilaal and Salaado watched you as you sifted your ideas and sorted them out. You appeared desperate, like a man upon whom it has just dawned that a future is not possible without his disowned past. Then the river of your emotions flowed again. And you said (Uncle Hilaal will never forget this. Not only that, but he holds the view that you became another person speaking it, and that, unbeknownst to yourself these were your mother’s precise words), “The man has made others suffer, his children, his dependents, his wives, yes, he has made every one of them suffer when he himself does not know what the word ‘suffer’ means. It is a tragedy.”

Being excitable, he let his emotions speak for him. Hilaal said, “Now I see the third” much in the same manner as you might have said, pointing at Misra, “Here is the earth!” The child in him surfaced and you saw an aspect of him you were to love forever — his kindness. He touched you once, twice, thrice, encouraging you on, like a fan on a cyclist’s road to victory slapping the saddle-seat of his idol, shouting joyously, “Go on. KO!”

You did. You began from the beginning, a second time and a third time. Misra was the heroine of your tale now and you played only a minor supporting role. Which was just as well. You needed to tell “Misra’s story”, obviously. A story has to be about someone else even if it is about the one telling it. You talked about your worries, about your inhibitions with regard to other people who mistrusted Misra. You spoke and your features thickened and you were enveloped in the darkness of moonless nights — and you were in her cuddle, you were her third leg or her third breast, and the two of you rolled upon each other in your sleep and each complained about the other who had kicked or taken the sheet away from the other. You were the stare in your eye. You focused it on her guilt. You were the stopper of fights, the beginner of quarrels, of gossip, and it was about you that conversations with Misra easily started. You were most dependent on her. “She’s bewitched him,” people said. They said she fed you all kinds of herbs, that she had taken possession of your soul. “Look at his eyes,” they said. “They are wide open even when he is asleep.” Nor did you fail to mention the last breakfast, the one you were filling your empty viscera with when you left Kallafo.

You came to Aw-Adan. He was your teacher, you explained, and your rival for Misra’s attentions. He invested his hate in his forearm when he caned you. She beat you only when she was in season. Then you became the charge of a kindly woman called Karin. A dream of a woman. “Did you know,” you asked rhetorically, “that when women miss their periods, they’re not always pregnant?” Karin had gone past the age of having them. And when once Misra missed hers, they inserted herbs and things into her — to abort. But you took care not to mention anything about Misra’s divining powers or the materials she used — water, blood or raw meat. You were worried this might impress Hilaal and Salaado wrongly. You wanted them to love her. When you finished, there was a long, long, long silence. Salaado then said, “For you, life has been a war of sorts.”

And Hilaal, hugging you, said, “We’re in each other’s life now. No more wars. We’re a family The three of us.”

That night, they talked it over and decided they would tell you their story, in the honesty and open-heartedness with which you had narrated yours. “It is only fair,” said Salaado.

However, the telling of their story didn’t take place until a month later. In the meantime, they had got a tutor by the name of Cusmaan to help you with your studies, specially your reading of maps. It was Hilaal who told it to you, the two of you alone in the car, he in the passenger’s seat and you in the back. He told it naturally, as one might talk of one of those once-in-a-lifetime diseases one has had ages ago. He said, “We owe you an explanation, Askar.”

It was Friday The car in which you were sitting was parked in front of the Lido Club. Salaado had gone into the club to buy three ice-cream cones. It was late afternoon and you had spent the greater part of the afternoon swimming or sitting by the sea. You were slightly exhausted, your head was full of sea-water, your hair of unwashed sand.

“We owe you an explanation,” he repeated, and in silence the two of you watched birds perform their acrobatics exhibitionistically You envied them their agility. He went on, “For example,” grinningly looking over his left shoulder to talk to you in the back seat of the car. You thought his “For example” had something complete about it. It seemed you didn’t expect him to say anything after that. Then, like parents who’ve adopted children past a certain age, Hilaal’s preliminaries contained such assurances as were needed to ensure that the child understands he is loved as though he were of their own blood and flesh. There was no need for him to say all that — you knew it and it was very obvious to you. Then he said, “I don’t like driving, for example. Salaado loves it. I drive only reluctantly I hope you’ve noticed that.”

“Yes, I have.”

He wound up the window on his side of the car, shutting out the noise of the hawkers selling things or beggars asking for alms or displaying their physical disasters: an amputated arm, a sick baby at a milkless breast. Again, he began talking, but was waylaid by his “For example” like one who has run into a friend who’s asked one to take a drink and chat for a while. Uncle Hilaal shifted about in his seat, he looked ahead of himself in absent-minded concentration, looked at a noisy bunch of boys playing rough football. Then, “I love cooking, for example. Salaado doesn’t. Not only that. But she is a terrible cook. And she burns the bottom of pots, saucepans and the food in them; the water she boils vapours into thin air because she doesn’t remember she has something on the stove. What she does, at times, is to over-indulge her rice with water so you have rice-porridge or something similar. Disaster after disaster. But I love cooking.”

You grew impatient because you didn’t know where his dialogue was leading you, and wound down the window on your side of the car. The place was apparently overflowing with human chatter. You wound it up immediately as beggars and hawkers descended on you. That way you shut out the whole world except Hilaal’s erratic breathing and his “For example”. When you looked in his direction, you felt lost in the open space his crooked elbow had made, an elbow which, when he was gesticulating to make a point, was somehow arrested in mid-movement. Then, “We have no children, Salaado and I,” he said. “Or rather, we didn’t have any before you joined us. That’s right. We’re not bothered by the fact that we didn’t have any of our own. We love each other the way we are. The trouble is, others talk, they say terrible things about a woman who can’t have children. There were complications. And Salaado had to undergo a serious operation in Europe. It was most painful and she suffered greatly. For example.”

You thought, they’ve probably arranged the moment in such a way Salaado will not return until he’s finished saying whatever he is intending to say to me. He went on. Without “for example” this time.

“A most obligatory, painful operation for Salaado. You probably won’t know what ovaries are. That’s what the doctors removed. When our relations on our side learnt that she cannot have children for me, they came and suggested I take another wife. No, I said. But they insisted. Still no, I said. Then I decided to have an operation called vasectomy. It renders men sterile but is not very painful. Anyway, I figured this country is over-populated — why have children?” He paused as though this might lessen the touch of anxiety in his voice. And, “Anyway, she cannot have children, nor can I. Her operation was necessary. Mine was done because I chose to. But we have you now and we have no need for babies of our own flesh and blood. It’s all very simple, no?” He paused, the upper part of his body rising a little higher, as if he were half-lifting his weight off the seat. You thought it was the way he spoke the question which suggested this, in particular the lifting of the final “no”.

When he spoke next, he sounded as if his full weight were firmly on the seat. He said, “It’s not all that simple, to be truthful Society doesn’t approve of a man who loves a woman who doesn’t bear him children, a woman who doesn’t cook his food, mind his home, wash his underthings. A woman who sits behind the wheel of a car driving when the man is a passenger — to our society, this is unpardonable. It is sex, sooner or later. And there are the hierarchies which escort the notion of sex. Now … for example. This is why you don’t see many people coming to, and going away from, our house. My relations have boycotted me on account of my obstinate position. So, whenever you see someone visit us, you can be sure this person is either a good friend of ours or a relation of Salaado’s.”

A cavalcade of ideas raced through your head the moment he fell silent. You wished to say that you actually loved them greatly But Salaado saved the situation — she appeared and stood by your side of the car, holding out to you your cone of vanilla. You drove in bewitched silence.

III

You liked Salaado immensely, directly you saw her. You felt comfortable with the space around her and you followed her to places, your body close to hers. “He is the egret, and Salaado the cattle,” a neighbour had commented. You had your trust in her. Often, you held on to her little finger. You sat at her feet as she told you a story. You touched the hem of her dress and, at times, to the amusement of Uncle Hilaal, you felt its silky smoothness against your cheeks. She became the only teacher you were willing to learn from, hers was the company you preferred to everyone else’s. And she taught you, in a record two days, how to write your name in Somali, how to identify many of the sounds you made and how to write them down. All this time, however, Hilaal remained significantly on the periphery of your life. He cooked the meals, washed up and dried the dishes and put them away in their appropriate places; he pressed his own shirts and trousers, and helped you get used to becoming independent. At first, the reversal of male and female roles upset you a little, but you accepted them, in the end, and were all the happier because you felt as though you were a member of a unique set-up. You didn’t know any two people to contrast them with, didn’t know of any household as outstanding as the one destiny had driven you to, didn’t know how fortunate you had been. You merely sensed they were heads above most men and most women.

She was beautiful. And she dressed well. She was tall and slim and wore no make-up. In you, she raised whirlwinds of a different kind — different from the one Misra used to draw out of you. Salaado made you work harder at being yourself. She would give you a map so you could identify where you were born and would insist that you saw yourself in that context — a young boy from the Ogaden, one whose world was in turmoil. And so, nailed next to the map which indicated where you were born, there was a calendar. There, if you wished, you could follow the progress of the war in the Ogaden. Nailed next to the calendar, there was a mirror. Here, you could register your bodily changes, see how much taller you were or fatter or whether you were losing weight by the day. Salaado was indubitably the most beautiful woman you had ever seen and you wished she were your mother, or that you could think of her or address her as one. In preference to calling her “Aunt”, you chose to refer to her as “Teacher”. Which she was professionally. For she would leave home at about seven in the morning, she would drive herself in the car, parked at night in the car-shelter, and wouldn’t return on most days until after four p.m. While she was away, you were supposed to study what she had assigned so you would not waste an academic year’s worth doing nothing. If you had queries, you would knock at Uncle Hilaal's study, and he would grudgingly give you time and answer your questions. Otherwise, you could go and play with the children next door — although you didn’t like their ideas about games that might entertain one. In the end, it was decided, since you preferred your solitary existence to their “infantile” company, Uncle Hilaal would buy you a bicycle all your own. Again, it was Salaado who taught you how to keep balance while learning to ride it. Wonderful Salaado!

Uncle Hilaal was equally kind, when with you. His was a voice with a long reach — like a hand. You were always amazed at how comforting it was to listen to it; and, like a hand, it patted you on the head or the shoulders; it lifted you out of your dormant spirit when you were that way inclined. At its command, you would get up, eat the food you were about to push away; in short, you would do anything it ordered you to. As a result, his voice was always there, present in the back of your thoughts, a voice reassuring when your spirits were down, a censuring voice when they were wild and out of control; it was a voice from whose depth, as though it were a well, you could draw bucketfuls of sustenance. And you went to bed with its resonance echoing in your ears; you awoke, listening to the rise and fall of its music. When he was not there, the walls of your memory re-echoed its hypnotic quality, so much so that it assumed a life of its own, a life inseparable from your uncle’s.

One day, when she was busy with marking examination papers, you asked Salaado to explain something to you. She was gentle, as usual, but said she was otherwise occupied and suggested you ask Uncle to teach you for that and the following two days.

“It is his voice,” you said.

She didn’t quite understand. “How do you mean? What is it about his voice that you don’t like? Or does he frighten you? Tell me.”

You noted one thing in your brain — the fact that she didn’t address you as Misra used to, didn’t clothe her speeches with endearments, and yet you did not feel distanced from her, ever. Also, for whatever it was worth, you noted something else in your mind — the fact that you took a back seat, allowing others to take life’s seats of prominence. You were not, in other words, the only one who existed, you were not the one around whom the sun, the moon, the stars, in short, the world, revolved.

“Answer me, Askar. What’s it about Hilaal’s voice that bothers you?” she said, holding your hands gently in hers.

You said, “It does not allow me to concentrate on what he is say-ing.”

“I still do not understand,” she said.

You tried to express yourself better, but realized that you hadn’t the courage to speak the thoughts which crossed your mind. It was years later that you told Salaado that, “Just as the beauty of the world fades when compared with yours, all other voices and life’s preoccupations are rendered inexistent when he speaks. His bodied voice appears before me as though it were another person. Looking at him, I find I cannot also concentrate what the other, i.e. the voice, is saying. Are you with me?”

“Yes,” she nodded, her voice almost failing her.

IV

Nowadays, you can afford to laugh at the thought of yourself resisting the temptation to pull at Uncle Hilaal’s nose — pull at it and squeeze it teasingly, as one might a cute baby’s cheeks — since you always believed he had a nose small as an infant’s fist with his fat face, very much like a child’s. You suspected it was his voice which held you at bay, his voice which held you at arm’s distance, his voice which was strong, almost baritone, varying in levels as it did in registers and which you stored away in the depository of your memory so you could make use of it in old age and remember what he said to you, as much as to anyone else — a voice which you could replay as often as you pleased.

Of course, you cannot put dates to events, nor can you recall precisely when Uncle Hilaal said it and to whom. Possibly, it was when the Somalis were still victorious and the “Ethiopians” were in total disarray, fleeing “homewards” and leaving behind them cities which were intact; when her infantry escaped, leaving behind unused cartridges of ammunition. And you think it was then that he said, “The point is, who’s an Ethiopian?”

Now what made you repeat to yourself the rhetorical question, “The point is, who’s an Ethiopian?” Weren’t you repeating it to yourself because in those days it gave you immense pleasure to mimic Uncle Hilaal’s voice? Salaado happened to be standing near by. You know how adults like answering children’s questions? For although your question wasn’t addressed to anybody in particular, Salaado answered it. You weren’t displeased, but you were startled. Politely, you listened to her talk as she pointed out the difference between the country which Menelik named Ethiopia — meaning in Greek “a person with a black face” (Salaado suspected it was a foreigner who named it Ethiopia) — and that which had been his power base until his army’s occupation of the southern territories at the turn of the century. You were attentive and learning a great deal from Salaado when Uncle Hilaal joined you. He listened for a while before making his contribution.

Hilaal said, “Ethiopia is the generic name of an unclassified mass of different peoples, professing different religions, claiming to have descended from different ancestors. Therefore, ‘Ethiopia’ becomes that generic notion, expansive, inclusive. Somali, if we come to it, is specific. That is, you are either a Somali or you aren’t. Not so with ‘Ethiopian’, or for that matter not so with ‘Nigerian’, ‘Kenyan’, ‘Sudanese’ or ‘Zaïroise’. The name ‘Ethiopia’ means the land of the dark race.”

“And Abyssinia?” asked (you think) Salaado.

Uncle Hilaal, disregarding the question, continued, “Did you know that Zaïre is the Portuguese word for river — which was perhaps how a Portuguese traveller named the country he happened to have been in — although there’s nothing ‘authentically national’ about it, as Sesse Seko would have us believe. ‘Nigeria’, did you know, was named such by Lugard’s mistress, again after the river Niger, and Sudan after the Blacks whose country it is. Somalia is unique. It is named after Somalis, who share a common ancestor and who speak the same language — Somali.”

“I said, what about Abyssinia?” asked Salaado with a certain anxiety.

He said, “Abyssinia, too, is a generic name, coming, as it does, from the Arabic word ‘Xabasha’—meaning Negro. Again, the country assumes a generic name — not specific. Before it became an empire, when it was but a small kingdom, it was called Abyssinia; later, when it expanded and became an empire, Ethiopia. Both names have generic qualities about them.”

“Now what are we to learn from these concepts? And what do they mean in terms of the war in the Horn?” she asked.

He thought for a long time. Then: “What is at war are the generic and the specific as concepts — the Soviet Union, the USA, the African countries who are members of the OAU support the generic as opposed to the specific. Obviously, they themselves belong to the generic kind.”

“But the specific is winning the war?” she put in.

He predicted, “Only temporarily.”

“How do you mean?”

Again he thought for a long time.

“The generification of Africa is a concept which the Ethiopian and other African governments whose peoples belong to different ethnic groupings and sources use, whenever it is challenged by secessionists and ethnic minorities living in their expansionist and inclusive boundaries. Only in logical propriety do Somalis win their case — the Somali, as a people, divided into two British Somalilands (one of them independent and now forming part of the Republic, the other at present known as Kenyan Somaliland); French Somaliland; Italian Somaliland (forming part of the present-day Republic — democratic or not!) and former French Somaliland (now the Republic of Djebouti). The Somali-speaking peoples have a case in wanting to form a state of their own nation … but…!” and, shrugging his shoulders, he fell silent.

“But what?” she wanted to know.

He smiled. “That’s it precisely.”

Tense, she said, “But what?”

“It is the ‘but’ which introduces an element of the uniqueness of the Somali case, as well as the generally accepted fear that if Somalis were allowed to get what they are after, then the Biafrans will want to try it again, the Masai will want their own republic, and the people of southern Sudan their own ‘generic’ state. What escapes detractors of the great national dream is that Somalis have fought and will fight for the realization of their nationalist goals, but that the Masai haven’t and aren’t likely to; and that Somalis aren’t the only ethnic minority in Ethiopia who are displeased with their low status in the Amharic-speak-ing people’s Empire; or that the Somalis in Kenya, in the only British-held referendum, voted phenomenally highly, as a people deciding to be part, not of Kenya, but of the Republic. It is the ‘but’ which stands in the way of the Somali.”

Naturally, you cannot imagine yourself pulling at the nose of someone whose life was an embodiment of ideas; whose voice was immensely larger than any mansion you had ever seen; and who lived in the contradictory roles of “Mother” to you and Salaado. Didn’t you both rest your heads drowsily on his chest? Misra, in her limited way, taught you to separate the body from the soul; Salaado, the person from the personable; and Uncle Hilaal helped you home in on the other.

Now, do you remember when you asked, “But what do you do. Uncle, locked up in your study, day in day out?” Do you remember what answer you got — and if you were at all satisfied with it?

V

Your uncle’s study faced east and, in the mornings, when you looked out of the window, the sun’s brightness blinded you, and when you looked inside, you saw nothing but books, some heavy, some light to carry, some with pictures and some without. At any given time, there were a number of them open and he consulted them with concentration. You learnt, much later, that he had been researching into the psychological disturbances the war had caused in the lives of children and women. He never appeared keen on asking you questions. He knew you would speak, sooner or later; that you would tell him the dreams which had left impressions on your growing self; that you would, eventually, if given the chance to express yourself, enable him to put together his findings into the appropriate research categories he had been working on. Very patiently, he listened to you talk about Misra, hardly interrupting you, at times taking notes and at times not.

One day, together in his study, when he was explaining to you something about the deliberate distortion of the sizes of the continents (a distortion which made an essential difference to the size of Europe and Africa), you surprised him, and yourself too, by shouting, “Look, look!”

Uncle Hilaal saw a woman, visibly pregnant, chewing at something.

“She’s eating earth,” you said. “Just like I used to.”

He failed to make you see the difference between the “earth” you used to eat mouthfuls of, and the cakes of clay which pregnant women nibble on. You turned on him and, with a suddenness which made him half laugh, you said, “The reason why the continent of Africa is smaller is because the adult, as well as the small among us, eat its earth — which obviously makes it shrink in size. Could that be it?”

Again, with the patience worthy of a scholar addressing a potentially very intelligent pupil, Uncle Hilaal explained the reasons to you, giving you the political implications as well as the imperialist intentions of the cartographers. He was still on the subject when the tumult of excitement took you over and you were bubbling with enthralment. Apparently, there was another revelation you wished to make. And he let you.

“Uncle, do you know what I did once?” you asked, pulling at his chin.

He said, “Tell me.”

“I menstruated.”

He was crestfallen.

“I menstruated one night when I was asleep. Just like women do. Just like Misra used to. I could put the difference between my menstruation and a woman’s to the fact that I felt no pain whatsoever before or after; and that it happened to me only once.”

In total disbelief, “Only once?”

“Although, now and again, I have a strange feeling that there is another in me, one older than I — a woman. I have the conscious feeling of being spoken through, if you know what I mean. I feel as if I have allowed a woman older than I to live inside of me, and I speak not my words, my ideas, but hers. And during the time Fm spoken through, as it were, I am she — not I. And it pains to part with someone youVe allowed to dwell inside of you, because they have no life of their own, because they died young or some unforeseen disaster has cut their life short. In a way, there is a faint sense of unease in that I feel as if my mother’s death was my birth, or, if you prefer, her death gave birth to me.

Your uncle got up from his chair and silently stood behind the window. Something claimed his attention and he moved away from you, disregarding all your attempts at reaching him. Until you started saying, “Fve never seen the woman of whom I speak thus, except once, and even then, I saw the back of her neck and no more. Although that has a striking similarity to the half-profiled photograph of the woman you say was my mother.”

He moved nervously about the room. “How old are you?” he asked.

“Eight.”

He now had the look of one who had let go a whole universe’s worth and more. He gathered his notes and let the pile lie under his hand as he thought what his next move was going to be. He opened a drawer and brought out a matchbox.

“Do you want to come with me to the garden?” he said to you.

“What are we going to do there?” you said.

He picked up the pile of papers he had gathered, saying, “We’re going to make a fire. You like fires, don’t you?”

“I do,” you confessed.

He said, “Well, let’s make one then. What’re you waiting for?”

And he burnt all his research papers and later said to Salaado that talking to you had made him unmistakably aware that he had been moving in the wrong direction all along. “Wars,” he said, “are rivers that burn.”

VI

Who is to say whether you remembered hearing someone else speak the same words, “Wars are rivers that burn” before?; who is to say if you registered the hesitation and dismay on Uncle Hilaal’s face that day as he burnt a year’s work?; that it was he who dwelled in a territory of pain, lying vertical, saying something peculiarly irrational: “As long as I lie in bed, I don’t think, can’t think any thoughts, can’t be bothered with thoughts any more”? Who is to say if you made the right inferences from various things which took place following the revelations?; who is to say if you now remember any of the stories told about your mother — Hilaal’s younger sister? At no time were you aware of births and deaths as much as you became then. Possibly, it was then (or as a result of it?) that Uncle Hilaal told you why Salaado and he didn’t have any children.

“To think that the one you love most will suffer pain after interminable pain in order to have a dead child! This was why we had to do something. Every time she would carry it for seven months or so, then the most painful labours and then she would emit a dead child, half in blood, a flood of blood really. It happened a number of times and we hoped, every time, not for death but birth and prayed and prayed and prayed; and sought out the best doctors. Finally it had to occur. One of her ovaries had to be removed. That did it for me. My beautiful wife had suffered, I said. I too must. So I took myself off to the hospital. And had a vasectomy done. If she couldn’t — well, so I too couldn’t. But we love each other.”

Perhaps this was said much later — when you were already grown up, when you didn’t have to look up the word “vasectomy” in the dictionary, since you would agree there is no Somali word for that kind of operation. No? You will doubtless remember that Misra had had a breast removed — or rather that Uncle Hilaal said he had been told so. Maybe it was then that you made a most regrettable remark — something to do with Misra and Salaado’s swapping bodies — and if only this were possible, you were supposed to have said, then a child would have had a living mother with no organ partly mutilated or half removed! You don’t remember any of this exchange either? No? What do you remember then?

It is understandable that you confuse dates, and that you cannot say precisely when the conversation centred on maimed bodies, amputated hands or removed organs. There was a great deal of talk in the press about these and related subjects in order to point accusatory fingers at the enemy who was a “cannibal and most inhumane”. The newspapers carried photographs of maimed bodies; the same newspapers carried articles about an Islamic leader whose adherence to Islamic justice resulted in his insisting they cut off the arms of a man who had stolen a small item from a supermarket; the same newspapers carried pieces on ritual murder taking place in Nigeria where they were said to remove certain organs on a medicine-man’s recommendation, if one wanted to win a seat at the Federal Assembly You knew in person, and saw with your eyes, people who had lost a leg in the war; or an eye; or a son; or a daughter. Things that had been remote were brought nearer when talked about again and again until you could bring yourself to feeling, with the tip of your fingers, the dead nerve that had been cut in order to save a hand. No wonder, then, that you couldn’t be certain when exactly your uncle spoke of his or Salaado’s respective losses of parts of their bodies.

You listened to stories told of men who survived the fire of the enemy, by heroically walking, without blinking an eyelash, to get to where they wanted — the men who liberated towns like Jigjiga. You listened to others showing off about the medals of bullets which went through their shins, narrowly missing the bone, through their foreheads (you couldn’t imagine anyone would live after that — but some did) or breaking the nose-bridge. You listened to stories about the penis of one dead soldier being stuck between the teeth of his living comrade who was to be shot (if both sides were so barbaric was there any point in telling the stories at all?). You heard stories of raped women; of pregnant women emptied of their as-yet-unborn issues. You wondered, as all these stories were being told, if the men had the necessary time to say a small prayer or two before the bullet struck them; or if they washed — that is, if they performed their ablutions before death hit them. Didn’t Salaado always insist that you put on your cleanest underwear if you were being taken to see the doctor about something which made it a must that you undressed? In other words, did these men encounter death and then God, their creator, cleaner than the day they were born? Every one of these men, you were told, was a martyr whose soul would forever sit in the company of saints, prophets and Allah; every one of these raped women would avenge themselves in whichever way they liked; and every one of these children would be re-born all the wiser, happier — re-born to live longer.

Stories with fragmented bodies!

Bodies which told fragmented stories!

Tales about broken hearts and fractured souls!

In the end, who is to say, but you, what you wish to relegate to an unremembered past?; who is to say if a couple of paintings by naïve artists Hilaal introduced you to, when you showed interest in drawing, tug at the nerves of your memories?; who is to say if Picasso’s Guernica, again shown to you by Hilaal, did the expected thing — remind you that wars are rivers that burn, rivers whose waters, rough as crags, distort reality? Yes, who is to say, but you, if you can actually be as precise as a compass’s needle pointing its forehead in a northerly direction towards the pivot of repeatable exactnesses? Who but you?

CHAPTER EIGHT

I

Misra was in my thoughts a lot of the time during the early months. The war had been on then and the Somalis were winning it on the ground at least and I started talking of visiting Kallafo — meaning I was going to visit Misra. I even began writing letters to her, letters in which I told her of my intended visit. I doubted if she could’ve read them because she didn’t read Somali orthography. Perhaps somebody wouldVe helped her to. I never finished writing these letters. We spent a great deal of the time by the radio, listening to the latest news from the war front, listening to the conflicting reports coming from the Battle for Harar and Dire Dawa. We were proud and happy the Somalis were pushing on.

Then, one Wednesday, I came home with high fever. By Thursday morning, I was taken to see a doctor. On Friday, the doctor’s diagnosis — malaria. I was dizzy most of the time, unable to raise my head. I resided in a land of dolorous mist, my body-temperature extraordinarily high, my lips dry as wood, my mouth red as though it were a fresh wound. I didn’t know night from day, couldn’t tell who was there and who wasn’t and couldn’t be bothered to eat. Every time I was helped to walk to the lavatory, I felt the earth tremble, I sensed my legs wobble. In point of fact, I could’ve sworn the earth had been shaking under my feet and wondered why no one else commented on it.

Anyway, that weekend entered the annals of Somali history as The Tragic Weekend. In it, the Soviet, Cuban and Adenese generals (with a little help from the Ethiopians) masterminded the decisive blow which returned the destiny of the Ogaden and its people to Ethiopian hands. And imagine, I was ill and in bed when this happened. While the nation mourned, I lay unconscious in a swamp of my own fever, my own rubble, my own stubble. Transported across mirages by the burning heat of my own blood, I discovered sheets were too hot to come anywhere near me, the mattress not level enough to keep my aching body in firm position. I asked for impossible things, I demanded that miracles be performed. These included studying the possibility of replacing my skin, because it was too hot, with another — cooler. When the nation mourned the loss of the Ogaden, I was preoccupied with the state of my health, my body, my skin. I will never forget that.

I was the last to hear of the loss. By then, there was no point in crying over spilt milk. “One has to be strong enough to accept defeat. But well return in maybe ten, maybe twenty years and put back the Ogaden where it belongs — in Somali hands.” I said this as I fed my then undernourished, frail body with the food Uncle Hilaal had prepared for me. Propped up against the wall supporting my back, with a spoon in my hand, my knees trembling under the sheets, I asked, “What next? What do you think will happen now?”

He predicted, “An influx of refugees. That’s what defeat will mean.”

My expression told him that I didn’t follow his argument. Whereupon, he remarked that if the Somalis had won the war, there wouldn’t have been “Somali” refugees, but Ethiopian refugees. In any case, he went on, for-exampling his way to the nerve of the matter, since Ethiopia had only military garrisons and no civilian population in the Ogaden (in Kallafo, there may have been a couple of hundred women who provided one service or another to the military garrison on the hill — and many never crossed the bridge separating the Ethiopians’ side of the river from the civilian Somali population), yes, if the Ethiopians had lost the war, the men who fell into Somali hands would have become prisoners-of-war and not refugees.

“And if I hadn’t come as early as I had done, if I hadn’t come until after the Ogaden was reconquered by the generals from the Soviet, Cuban and Adenese armies — what then?”

“Every ethnic Somali is entitled to live in the Somali Republic. They may belong to any Somali-speaking territory, be it Kenyan, Ethiopian or even Djebouti. Every Somali has the constitutional birthright to reside anywhere in the Republic. The status of who is a refugee, however, points two fingers at two parallel issues — political and economic. If a Somali in Ethiopia or Kenya or Djebouti fears for his life, that Somali has the status of a political refugee, but doesn’t need to declare himself as such unless he is in no position to look for and obtain a job and live practising his profession. If, however, the Somali from outside the Republic is not economically self-sufficient, or if his relations aren’t well-off enough to support him, then they might declare themselves as ‘refugees’. It is estimated that more than a third of the registered population in the Republic came over from the Ogaden or Djebouti long before the 1977 war. Many have joined the army. They form a large percentage of the soldiery as well as the officer corps. Many have joined schools and the university here, or the civil service or the government in one capacity or another, some holding very highly placed jobs as ministers, director-generals or else they have been recruited into the diplomatic corps.”

“And what will happen to those who do not flee the Ogaden?”

“For example, the Ethiopians poison their wells, rape their women and conscript their children into the Ethiopian army or the police force. They compel them to learn Amharic, force them to adopt the ‘Amharic’ culture and dispossess them of their land.”

There was a pause. I took mouthfuls of the minestrone Uncle had dished out for me, having added salt, pepper and lime. He sat on the edge of the bed, his back unsupported, and I suspected the strain was affecting his lumbago. He touched his spine as though it were cold and he were rubbing blood into its circulatory system.

I asked, “Are there any parallel situations you can think of anywhere?”

“How do you mean?” he said.

“Can you think of any other country where a person bom in another may assume its nationality on the strength of ethnic origin?” I asked.

“Yes. An ethnic German is, by right, a national of the Federal Republic of Germany Anyone bom in East Germany after its creation is also a bona fide national of West Germany”

He looked exhausted — and talked tiredly too — becoming long-winded as he spoke. I wondered if it was pain in his back causing strain on his nerves. I suggested he sit on a proper chair. He did. I? I felt weak — almost as weak as Misra when she aborted. I remembered her lying in bed for days. The loss of the Ogaden was greater, of course. But I could only view it as a personal loss so as to understand its dimensions. It was as if my whole blood had been drained out of me — that was how weak I felt. To me, that was how tremendous the loss had been.

“But they’re not coming here, are they?” I said.

“They? They who?”

“The Ethiopians? They’re not coming to Mogadiscio?” I said.

Uncle Hilaal reflected for a while, then, “Menelik, the Emperor that gave the country its name, once claimed the boundaries of his country to include the whole of Somalia, parts of present-day Tanzania, a greater part of Kenya and Uganda including Lake Victoria and parts of the Sudan up to and including Khartoum because he was wanting to claim the Nile. He was after a littoral territory for a landlocked Abyssinia. Emperor Haile Selassie made similar access-to-the-sea claims as recently as 1953. In the end, Haile Selassie gave up his claim because Eritrea, which has access to the sea, was given him by the United Nations to administer. He annexed Eritrea.”

I said, “We won’t allow it. Mogadiscio is ours.”

“We won’t,” he said. “Now eat.”

After a pause, I said, “I like Mogadiscio a lot.”

I accepted Mogadiscio as a provisional measure, loving its sandy beaches, swimming in its sea, disliking its mid-day heat but liking its enormous spaces and its reddish-brown earth in which my ideas flowered. It was understood that, come one day, I would leave it but perhaps to love it more. I had a job to do, as Armadio used to say I had a home to return to and re-liberate, a mother to be reunited with. “But before you leave …,” I can hear Uncle Hilaal say; “But before you leave us,” I can hear Salaado begin — I know! I knew I would’ve had to study harder, put in more hours of study, read more than the boys or the girls who didn’t have the same sort of responsibilities as I, who didn’t have a job to do, as 1.1 would sit with Hilaal or Salaado and things would be explained to me in great illustrated detail. Maps were shown to me; the psychology of warfare; why the Cubans dared not enter directly into war with the South African army in Angola; why they withdrew whenever the army of apartheid made belligerent incursions into the country in which twenty thousand of their soldiers were stationed. In the company of Salaado and Hilaal, the universe altered perspective, it shrunk into a tiny chessboard where the Africans weren’t the kings. the queens, the bishops and not even the pawns — where we were part of the reserve; our land was nothing but a playfield; our wars were turned into weekend affairs, during which the Russians borrowed a West-German-manufactured tank code-named Leopard and sold it to Libya. The idea was to test if this sophisticated article of German warfare would stand the conditions and climate of the Ogaden. After the weekend job, Leopard was flown to Odessa and dismantled, according to western intelligence reports quoted by Reuters and other agencies. A rat race faster than the arms race — and we’re starving!

Mogadiscio — whose sand was white as the smoke of a fire just built. Mogadiscio — the most ancient city south of the Sahara, a city bombed by the Portuguese, looted by the Arabs, colonized by the Ottoman Turks, subdued by the Italians and bought, at the turn of the century, by a Zanzibar! who paid for it a little more than Bombay had cost Britain or Manhattan the Dutch. The Sultan of Zanzibar sublet the territory to the Italians. I love its centre which sports a multiracial, multicultural heritage. I love it because it doesn’t make me feel small looking up at very tall skyscrapers.

Mogadiscio — a place with dry laundry. This was how I saw it when I first entered it. I saw flags of clean clothes on washing-lines outside people’s homes and in their courtyards. I saw flags of them waving welcoming messages to a frightened boy, me. And the first two things I noticed when I entered what became “home”—shoes on a rack in the corridor and mirrors, many mirrors on the walls. It was explained to me later that Uncle Hilaal has to own many pairs because he walks a lot and his feet wear them out faster than anyone anybody has seen. His shoelaces break, the heels come off, he discards most pairs in a month, maximum two, Salaado had said. I noticed they were not of the best quality — not half as good as Uncle Qorrax’s, I decided.

What else did I notice when I first got here? That it takes longer to become a grown-up person. It takes years before one is readily convinced that one is to acquire a wife if you are a man, or a husband if you are a woman. I remembered many girls getting married before their fifteenth birthday, and many boys before they were twenty. Not so in Mogadiscio. And girls and boys didn’t look forward to getting married and having children, no. They dreamt of going abroad. Was it the smell of the sea that put this into their heads? Or the aromas of foreign foods in the air, foods suggesting other worlds, other cultures — Indian, Persian, Arab, Italian, Egyptian. In Mogadiscio, I thought I could read in people’s faces the wish of remaining young and beautiful and slim forever, and middle-aged men and middle-aged women behaved as though they were in their early twenties.

No river rises in Mogadiscio, the sea does. It begins here, the sea. It feels as if it does. Blue as it is on the map in front of me, the sea is veined with noble waves, as alive as they are deadly; it is veined with tides which give one the time of day or night, tides which tell one if it is fall moon or half moon. The sea has its drifts, moods and deceits; it gives gifts, it robs one of life, shows one where one’s weaknesses are and the body where its pores are. The sea is the skirt the ships-with-goods wear, it is the necklace the gold lovers put on, it is the untaxed merchandise the smuggler brings into the land. The sea is a map: it tells those who are literate in its language where they are, it reveals, to those who are able to uncover secrets, where the treasures are. Haven’t all the daters employed it, as they employed their intelligence and their map-reading facilities, their writing capabilities — haven’t they crossed it to conquer, to subjugate, to colonize? “Somalia’s misfortune,” Uncle Hilaal once suggested, “is that the ‘two colonizing powers’—I use this inadequate phrase for lack of a better one — who stand in the way of the Ogaden, join the Republic. Yes, these two ‘nations’ are themselves non-European and neither has crossed oceans. Both are Somalia’s neighbours. In other words, it is easier ridding yourself of a colonialist from beyond the seas than it is to oust an African one. Western Sahara is finding it tough going; Eritrea, in a very similar position, finds itself isolated and often friendless. Namibia is different. Whether we like it or not, the question of colour plays a significant role in today’s politics — and Namibia has the advantage of being colonized, if that’s the right word, by a ‘power’ from beyond the seas.”

Mogadiscio! Salaado once asked Hilaal, “What’s it about Mogadiscio that seduces the visitor? Why, no one leaves it once they come.”

Uncle Hilaal explained the nature of neo-colonial governments and how these develop a couple of cities, leaving the hinterland to its own disastrous destiny.

“Yes, yes, but why?”

“Cities with obscure histories have no charming qualities about them. Mogadiscio’s history is illumined like a manuscript. There are historical monuments that date from the ninth century; there are mosques, tombs which mark with bones the histories they illustrate. Maybe these keep them here?.”

Mogadiscio — for me, you are a temporary haven. I will leave you but will always love you.

As predicted, Mogadiscio’s seams broke with the influx of refugees a few months later. You couldn’t go anywhere without seeing them in the streets, dusty and famished-looking as the earth they left behind. Those who had relations wealthy enough to put them up and feed them did so discreetly. But many had no one to go to. Or had relations who themselves couldn’t manage on the little they had, considering the inflationary prices the war had brought about, for it was a very expensive war, claiming lots of lives and properties. After the war, the Somali shilling had to be devalued. Everything, except hunger, corruption and poverty, became scarce. People began to be unkind to one another and kindness became one of those rare commodities. Generosity met the same fate and was fed on by suspicion everyone harboured for everyone else. We, too, had numerous relations who came to stay for a while. Uncle Hilaal and Salaado filled their bellies with food and their fists with travel money and hoped they went on their own journeys of exploration. Some of these eventually added their names and histories to the statistics and headaches of UN-run relief agencies.

Then two things happened, more or less simultaneously. I cannot remember which took place first. Uncle Hilaal reported that his friend at the Anagrafo del Municipio—where every Somali national who is at school, seeking employ or wishes to join the civil service is registered — said the Mayor had signed my papers. These papers identified me as a dependant of Uncle Hilaal and Salaado. Also, I think it was during the same week, or maybe a couple of days earlier or later, that Salaado brought home the news that she had found Cusmaan. I am not sure about the dates. Cusmaan was a relation of hers and was a student at the National University of Somalia in an area related to sociolinguistics. If I remember correctly, his long essay was titled something like, “The Mispronouncing of Non-native Speakers of Somali”. Although the title might or could've been “The Misgendering of Non-native Speakers”. For non-native speakers of Somali have difficulties similar to those most foreign learners face when they learn German.

They were enjoying themselves, Hilaal and Salaado, I could see, although I didn’t quite know why Cusmaan’s tutor was himself apparently a “Misgenderer”: a term indicating where the genders are confounded, the masculine third-person singular wrongly replaced or displaced by the female third-person singular. “Cusmaan’s is an ideal situation, having as his tutor someone who is one’s best subject for study,” said Salaado.

They didn’t like Cusmaan’s tutor, apparently He was a Somali from somewhere in East Africa, maybe Tanzania. He had a way of attaching himself to you, linking arms with you as though you were his female companion. I saw him from close quarters, I watched him when he came to our house once and helped himself to whatever was in the fridge without asking if he might, oblivious of the existence of others. He was said to be a traitor, he was said to have betrayed his friends and many people spoke ill of him. But he was respected greatly by foreigners. When this man lapsed into Somali, he reminded me of the Ethiopian soldiers whom I heard speaking Somali at the marketplace, confounding their sexes, addressing the men as “she”, and the women as “he”.

“For example,” said Uncle Hilaal in a voice which suggested two things — that the subject had been slightly changed, and that he was intending to make an original statement. “In Wolof,” he said, “did you know there is hardly any indicator of gender. A man who otherwise speaks faultless French might, when speaking about his wife who is right in front of you, and whom you can see display all her gender’s paraphernalia, refer to her as ‘he’. Likewise, the wife might refer to her husband as ‘she’.”

Unbelieving, I asked, “Is that true, Uncle?”

“Ask any Wolof speaker,” he said.

Salaado said, “How shocking!”

Her voice said that we had exhausted the subject and perhaps it was time we moved on to other areas of common interest. Somehow, we couldn’t help returning to the question of my identity papers. When would I get them? What psychological effect might they have on me? Would I consider settling in the Republic permanently? What were my chances of returning to the Ogaden or joining the Liberation Movement? In short, what did all this mean? And then I surprised even myself, asking: “Is there any room for Misra in my identity papers?”

Hilaal said, his voice anaemic, so to speak, “How do you mean?”

“You remember you've shown me yours,” I said — and then I saw how unhappy he looked and I thought I knew why, but I continued speaking nonetheless, this time with my look averted—“and I see that in identity papers there is space allotted to biological parents and to guardians but none to somebody like Misra, who is neither a biological parent nor a guardian at present.”

All he said was, “Of course,” but I bet he didn’t know what he was talking about.

I was about to add that Misra meant a lot more to me than anyone else when Salaado excused herself and left the living-room altogether. We looked away from each other, Uncle Hilaal and I, and each waited for the other to say something. I sensed each knew what thought buzzed in the other’s head, thoughts which were imprisoned in our heads like bees caught inside a bottle out of which they know not how to emerge. I had never seen him looking so sad, nor have I ever seen him appear so dejected, save on the other occasion, when there was an eclipse of the sun, but we’ll come to that later. Suffice it to say, I resolved right there and then that I would never raise the subject again; that I wouldn’t make references to my parents, to Misra and to Uncle Hilaal and Salaado in the same breath. Naturally, I remembered how evasive he had been when I asked him once to give me the salient points in my mother’s journal. In those days, ugly thoughts often crossed my mind: that Uncle Qorrax had raped my mother and I was his son. From then on, my mother’s journal didn’t exist, except in so far as one entry proved that she died after I was bom, an entry contradicting the view held by Misra — or am I confusing things? After a long, long silence, I said, “The truth of the matter is, Misra, being Oromo as you’ve explained to me once, belongs to a peripheral people. Nor would anyone believe that the Oromo form over sixty per cent of Ethiopia’s population, despite their occupying only a marginal position. And as such, the Oromo have either to assume Somali or Amhara identity Thank God, my ethnic origin matches the papers with which I shall be issued,” I concluded.

I forget what he said, or whether he said anything. I remember him looking sort of relieved that we had come to the end of that round. So please keep this in mind if, during the course of this narrative, I make no overt or indirect references to my mother’s journal or related topics.

III

A couple of days after this discussion, Uncle Hilaal entered the living-room where Salaado was helping me practise my writing. He walked in exalted, like a man who has discovered a most coveted treasure all by himself. Somehow, I didn’t think it had anything to do with me, or that I might even get an unexpected gift. I sat where I was and let Salaado talk to him, let her find out what had so pleased him.

Salaado asked, “What is it?”

He said, in a matter-of-fact way, “Here it is.”

And he pulled out of his pocket a paper whose green, I thought, had faded a little, a paper with some writing on it, a paper folded up and, from what I could gather, cheaply printed, produced inexpensively and rather hurriedly, with my own photograph pasted on its top right-hand side and its spine bent unevenly.

He said, “I said, take it,” and it was only then that I saw, as though for the first time, that he was looking at me. The thought that it was I and not somebody else that he was addressing and to whom he would give something did cross my mind, but I didn’t speak it. I got to my feet in awe and extended out both my hands to receive it.

“It is your carta d'identitá” he declared.

From the way he gave it to me, you would've thought he was entrusting to me a brand-new “life”. Here you are, he seemed to say, with another life all your own, one that you must take good care of, since it is of paper, produced by the hand of man, according to the laws of man. I held it tenderly but also firmly, the way you hold a sickly infant. While I was looking at it, Uncle Hilaal engaged Salaado in a solemn conversation, as if she were to be a witness at my being wed to myself.

“Open it,” he said. “Come on. It won’t break.”

I did as told.

“Read it,” he said.

I chose to read it to myself. I held it open before me as one would a book, and felt its uneven spine as one would a person with a hurt disc in the vertebral column. The paper gave my particulars — name, father’s name and grandfather’s, as well as mother’s. There was a hyphen, I noticed, conveniently placed between my father’s actual name and the nickname he had acquired by going to the Ogaden from a Xamar base. I was to commit to memory the number of the identity card and was not to lose it. Otherwise, the school wouldn’t accept me. After all, I was not a refugee! Didn’t Salaado say that I would need the card to be with them? Anyway, looking at the photograph and, under it, like a caption, my name, I began to see myself in images carved out of the letters which my name comprised. It meant that I had a foglio famiglia and that I wasn’t just a refugee from the Ogaden. It is unfair, I thought to myself, that Misra wasn’t even given a mention on my identity card. Now I discarded my earlier belief that this was because she was Oromo and I, Somali. Perhaps, I concluded, it was because our relationship dates back to before my coming to Mogadiscio and before — goes back to before I myself acquired the Somali identity in written form. I reminded myself that Misra belonged to my “non-literate” past — by which I mean that she belonged to a past in which I spoke, but did not write or read in, Somali.

Then hurriedly, my thoughts moved to less controversial topics. And I remembered the day the photograph was taken; I remembered how much fuss was made about my clothes; I remembered being forced to change the shirt and trousers that had been my favourites, then — thinking it wasn’t /who wore them but that they wore me. (Very often, I associate certain items of clothes with one person or the other. For instance, Salaado’s necklace has an “S” dangling down from it, so not only do I associate the letter with her but it is, for me, the same letter with which the notion of “Somalia” comes.) And I wondered if it made any sense believing that passport-size photographs would help anyone identify a person? Are we merely faces? I mean are faces the keys to our identity? What of a man, like Aw-Adan, with a wooden leg — would you know it from the photograph? What of a baby just bom, a baby abandoned in a waste-bin, a baby, violent with betrayal — would you be able to tell who it was by wiping away the tear-stains and the mucus, would you know its begetter, would you trace it to its mother or father?

Alone, I studied the details of my new identity with the care with which one does such things — a tender care. I learnt how tall I was, how much I weighed, how my grandfather’s name was spelt in a Somali script new to me. With nostalgia, I read the name of the town in the Ogaden in which I was born — Kallafo — and was happy to know that, professionally, I was a student. Then two questions came to my mind simultaneously: one, would Misra be given a Somali identity card if she came? If not, why not?

I confess, I did think that I was expected, from that moment onwards, to perceive myself in the identity created for me. Although there were other sorts of difficulties which I encountered head-on when a young man, unemployed and a relation of Salaado's, was hired to become my tutor. His name was Cusmaan. Now this young man insisted that he remind me who I was. “Do you know who you are?” he would say. “You are a refugee. You've fled from the war in the Ogaden and, whether the Somalis have lost this war or no, you will have to remember who you are and, when you grow up, you must return to the Ogaden as a fighter, as a liberator.” Salaado and Uncle Hilaal, however, took a different position — that of allowing me to live my life — of course, promising and trying as hard as they could to make living easier. As far as Cusmaan was concerned, I should be trained as a soldier. Not sent to the school as any normal Somali child, no. He argued if the Azanians had not been given the comforts of citizenship or refugee status, as they had in the front-line states, maybe they would've wielded their strong spirit into a greater force that the apartheid regime wouldn't be able to cope with. I confess that I had difficulty perceiving myself in Cusmaan’s concepts, although I realized later that he made some sense. Salaado, however, told him, more than once, to stop preaching to me. “No politics,” she said one day. “Just teach him writing and reading.” Uncle Hilaal spoke at length, saying how writing and reading were as political as casting your vote, if you happen to live in a country where elections are held. “Think of the Arabs imposing on our African language their alien thought; think of the staunch Somali nationalists giving us a script which was uneconomical and difficult to read. So what is more political than writing? Or, for that matter, reading?” he said, turning to Salaado who had remained silent, apparently because she realised he had misunderstood her.

As I remembered all this, I gave the identity paper further scrutiny and it assumed a greater importance than what either Cusmaan, my tutor, or Uncle Hilaal had said. For I could decidedly see that, in front of the space of “Nationality”, there was, neatly typed in capital letters, the word “Somali”. Did that mean that I was not to consider myself a refugee any more?

I put the question to Uncle Hilaal.

And while he was finding the right things to say on this particular occasion, I began to study with appropriate seriousness the linguistic map of the continent as updated by researchers at the AIA, London.

III

“A Somali,” said Uncle Hilaal, “is a man, woman or child whose mother tongue is Somali. Here, mother tongue is important, very important. Not what one looks like. That is, features have nothing to do with a Somali’s Somaliness or no. True, Somalis are easily distinguishable from other people, but one might meet with foreseeable difficulty in telling an Eritrean, an Ethiopian or a northern Sudanese apart from a Somali, unless one were to consider the cultural difference. The Somali are a homogeneous people; they are homogeneous culturally speaking and speak the same language wherever they may be found. Now this is not true of the people who call themselves ‘Ethiopians’, or ‘Sudanese’ or ‘Eritreans’, or Nigerians or Senegalese.”

A river of ideas, winding as were the Shebelle and the Juba in the map in front of me, poured into my brain. I felt calmed by his voice; I felt calm listening to the rise and fall of his beautiful rendering of his own ideas.

“Somali identity,” he went on, “is one shared by all Somalis, no matter how many borders divide them, no matter what flag flies in the skies above them or what the bureaucratic language of the country is. Which is why one might say that the soul of a Somali is a meteor, shooting towards that commonly held national identity.”

I had a question. “Yes?” he asked.

“If Misra were to apply, would she be entitled to be issued the nationality papers which would make her legally and forever a Somali?” I said, and waited anxiously because I knew I had laboured the point.

“If her Somali is as good as yours, then I doubt if any bureaucratic clown would dare stand in her way or dare deny her what is hers by right. Remember this, Askar. For all we know, there is no ethnic difference which sets apart the Somali from the Ethiopian — the latter in inverted commas. What she might need is a couple of male witnesses to take an oath that they’ve known her all her life and that she is a Somali, etc., etc.; no more. And all they have to do is sign an affidavit, that is all.”

I had another question. “What’s it this time?’” Uncle Hilaal said.

“How would you describe the differences which have been made to exist between the Somali in the Somali Republic and the Somali in either Kenya or in the Ethiopian-administered Ogaden?” I said, again feeling that I had expressed myself poorly.

He answered, “The Somali in the Ogaden, the Somali in Kenya both, because they lack what makes the self strong and whole, are unpersons”

Silence. Something made me not ask, “But what is an unperson, Uncle?” Now, years later, I wish I had told him I didn’t understand the concept. Years later, I find it appropriate to ask, “Is Misra a Somali?” “Am I a refugee?” “Am I an unperson?” “Is or will Misra be an unperson — if she comes to Mogadiscio?”

IV

My tutor, Cusmaan, behaved as though he were the self-avowed conscience of the Somali nation. He came to the house daily, taking upon himself to remind me that unless people like myself returned to the Ogaden to fight for its liberation, the province would remain colonially subjected to foreign rule. I resolved not to report him to Salaado who, I was sure, would probably have told him to leave. One reason was because I liked him. The second reason was because he was willing to share with me the pornographic magazines he used to borrow from friends of his who had just come from Italy. I don’t know if he was aware of the inherent contradictions in what he was doing — but I didn’t mind. I thought it was fun to build a secret subway tunnel between my tutor and me, a tunnel to whose wide or narrow passage only he and I had access. Somehow, this secret knowledge enabled me to exert on him whatever pressures I chose. Whenever I didn’t do my homework, whenever I was too lazy to study, I said so and we found a way of occupying ourselves. Then he would say, “You must take your studies seriously so that, when you are a grown-up man, you will use your knowledge to liberate your people from the chains of colonialism.”

“And is that why I should learn to read and write Somali and also English?” I would ask

“Yes.”

I remember, a couple of days or so later, putting the same or similar questions about written and oral traditions to Uncle Hilaal. And he explained that “History has proven that whoever is supported by the written metaphysics of a tradition wins, in the long ran, the fight to power,’ And he went on speaking of a God — with capital G — backed by technology however unadvanced the stage, and gods — with small g — who were not, “That is, the Amharic-speaMng people, because they had a written tradition, could spread their power over peoples of the oral tradition such as Somalis, the Arusas and even the Oromos, who form the largest single ethnic community in Ethiopia. The Amharic-speaMng people were themselves conquered, at an earlier period of their history, by the Tigregna-speaMng people — apparently a people with a script, namely Gaez.”

This made sense. It made sense to me the way a mothers encouraging a child to eat the soup laid before him, so he would grow up to be a strong man, might make sense to the child in question. And every letter became a sword — by pronouncing it, I sharpened it; by drawing it, I gave it a life of its own; all I had to do was to say “Cut” and it would cut the enemy’s head. Mind you, I knew that this was a highly personal interpretation of things, but it freed my imagination from any constraints. And that, I found, was not something to take lightly

Nevertheless, my life was taMng a different turn from what I had presumed. My tutor, balancing the dignified and the undignified ethos, would have the centrefold of Playboy in view and would also have our textbook open at the appropriate page. That was how I learnt my first English sentence. I can hear it today, I can feel my tongue wrestle with its sounds, I can sense my questioning the logic of why the first sentence of Book One Oxford English had to be “This is a pen”, and the second sentence, “This is a book”.

I repeated these two sentences again and again until I was hypnotized by the sounds each word made and my head wove a tapestry from which I deciphered a divine design. From that emerged the first words the Archangel Gabriel dictated to the then illiterate Mohammed, thereafter Prophet — may his name be honoured! That is, I remembered the Koranic verse “Read, read in the name of Allah who created you out of clots of blood, read!” I also had the calm of mind, and the composure, to remember another verse from the Sura, The Pen, a verse which goes: “By the pen and what it writes, you are not mad!” Then my imagination cast its net further afield and I was younger and was in Kallafo with Misra.

And under a thatch roof, in Kallafo, I found a much smaller boy also named Askar, a boy in a woman’s embrace, and the woman was asking this young boy to repeat after her — (she wasn’t decently covered and his recently bathed body was in direct contact with hers) — she was telling him to repeat after her the sentences “That is the sky” and “This is the earth”.

A question to Uncle Hilaal, years later.

“What was I to make of all this? I wonder if the pastoralist nature of the Somali sees an inborn link between the child and its cosmology by having it learn the words ‘sky’ and ‘earth’? First, the child is taught to identify its mother, then its father and there are a chorus of questions like ‘Who is this?’ and, naturally, ‘Who is that? ‘ or ‘What is this or that? ‘ I suspect that the cosmology of the nomads comprehends, at a deeper psychical level, the metaphoric contents of the statements ‘This is the earth’ and ‘That is the sky’. Can this be interpreted to mean ‘God and the grave’? Or do you prefer ‘Rain and food’? In the latter, you identify or locate the source of life, as it were.”

Uncle Hilaal was silent, making no further observation. And I was hearing in my mind the child’s answer “This is the earth”, although not pointing at the earth but touching Misra’s bosomy chest, and she laughing and teasing him, pardon, me. By then — or after a little while — I was back with Hilaal who was saying, “Now what about ‘This is a pen’ and ‘That is a book’, which are the first sentences that open the English world to a Somali or an East-African child?”

I wasn’t sure if he expected me to answer, but he didn’t, apparently. So I simply said, “What about it?”

“An exploratory question. Let’s start with one.”

I waited.

He said, “Are we, in any manner, to see a link between ‘This is a book’ and the Koranic command ‘Read in the name of God’, addressed to a people who were, until that day, an illiterate people? In other words, what are the ideas behind ‘pen’ and ‘book’? It is my feeling that, plainly speaking, both suggest the notion of ‘power’. The Arabs legitimized their empire by imposing ‘the word that was read’ on those whom they conquered; the European God of technology was supported, to a great extent, by the power of the written word, be it man’s or God’s.”

He was silent again. I thought 1 had to make an intelligent contribution. So I said, “That is why the Muslims refer to the Christians and the Jews as the ‘People of the Book’, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

And he sat there, friendly, lovable — and fat. I thought that he was two balls screwed together: the top, his head, was round like a globe and it turned on its axis and travelled, returning every time it made a circle, to the point of reference upon which he pontificated; the middle, his chest, was the seat of his emotion — his paunch breathed like bellows when he laughed and his voice had a fiery fervour about it, setting ablaze, inside my head, a great many fires whose thought-flames burned the ground separating me from him.

“You might take pens and books,” he was saying when I turned to him, “as metaphors of material and spiritual power. And the most powerful among us is the one who will insist that pens write his thoughts in the form of a letter of glory to posterity and that books record his good deeds.”

I thought — but didn’t say — that the one who teaches one either the written or the oral word remains, for oneself, the most powerful among us. Hence the influence of Misra, Salaado, Cusmaan, Aw-Adan and finally Uncle Hilaal, on me. And suddenly, I had a most ingenious thought, “What happens when a people with no written tradition invades a people with such a long history of it?”

I waited anxiously. I wondered if he would use the only example of such a conqueror I could think of. For an instant, I was trapped in the fear that I was off the mark.

“The Goths, a Teutonic people who were illiterate in the sense that they had no written culture, pillaged Rome and Southern Gaul as well as Spain. I am certain there are many others, such as the Mongol warriors.”

“And the view of history? How does history view such conquests?” I asked.

He said, “History treats rather badly emperors who hail from a scattered nomadic warrior people — I’m thinking of Genghis Khan — and who reach the walls of such seats of scientific learning as Peking or Iran’s Tabriz. Genghis Khan — the name means universal emperor — may have been at the head of a cavalry of master horsemen, but history portrays him as ‘barbaric and accuses him of pillaging cities of learning and setting fire to libraries of tremendous worth.”

I was about to ask him another question when I acknowledged Salaado’s entry into the living-room where we were. She said something about lunch being ready and could we both join her at the table and eat so that she could go back to the school where there was a meeting. I said to Uncle Hilaal, “We know what conquerors with written traditions who occupy a land belonging to a people of the oral tradition do. We know they impose upon them a law which makes it unlawful to think of themselves as human. The European colonialists have done so. Can you think of a conquering people, whether nomadic or no, who didn’t impose alien learning, language and culture upon those whom they conquered?”

He got to his feet and reflected.

I readied to follow him should he decide to sit at the dinner-table.

“I can think of one special case.”

I asked, “Who?”

“The Fulanis.”

I said, coming closer, “Who?”

He was silent until we reached the table, until we each picked up a paper serviette. He tucked his under his fat chin (I snickered every time he did that!) and I unfolded mine and laid it on my lap (thinking of the writings I used to scribble on my thighs and on every part of my body, when younger; thinking of Misra, who taught me Amharic in secret).

“The Fulanis of West Africa are the only conquering people I know of who adopted as their own language and culture the one of the people whom they conquered. I’ve never learnt why.”

Plates were passed to and fro. And I grieved at the thought that millions of us were conquered, and would remain forever conquered; millions of us who would remain a traditional people and an oral people at that. And I saw, abandoned, burning cities the Goths had set ablaze (I didn’t know who the Goths were, but promised myself that I would find out). I saw, in my mind, the Mongol Emperor, and he was riding a horse and kicking his heels against the beast’s ribs and setting fire to all the letters of the alphabet and more. I also saw abandoned dead bodies — those of men and women and children dead from napalm spray — and cursed the Russians and the Cubans and the Adenese. (I think this must have been after the Russians, the Cubans, the Adenese and the Ethiopian soldiers defeated the unaided Somali army) And I saw history books open at the page beginning with the encyclopaedic definition of the concept “Civilization”.

The written metaphysics of a people is their “civilization”.

So read, read in the name of “civilization”,1 thought to myself. And write, write down your history in the name of the same “civilization”. “This is a pen.” “This is a nib.” “That is a book.” Power!

Once, long ago, I said to myself, Misra was my cosmos. She was good, she was kind, she was motherly and I loved her warmly, I cared about her tenderly. Now that cosmos has been made to disintegrate, and Misra has betrayed. What am I to do? I, who still love her!

V

“Wars disorient one,” said Uncle Hilaal the day we learnt that Misra would definitely call the following day “Wars make one do the unpardonable. And in any case, we don”t know if she was the one who betrayed. I mean, we don’t know for certain if she was the person who informed on the freedom fighters, we have no evidence.”

I hid my inner torment behind the silence I stood in — my hands behind my back, my body upright, my mind alert, my thoughts stirring within me echoes of conversations I had with Misra years ago, with Cusmaan who was my tutor some nine or so years ago, with Salaado — and with myself. Somehow, I felt I knew I had to betray one of them. I had to betray either Misra, who had been like a mother to me, or my mother country. However, part of me was worried — worried that a curse would be placed on my head by either. And I couldn’t help remembering dreams in which I saw an old man with a girl’s face and features, or another in which the dreamer, a young man who imagined he had envied a woman’s menstruation, menstruated.

Many years have gone past since I last saw Misra; many months since she was accused of betraying a freedom fighters’ camp in which six hundred men lost their lives — or were said to have done so; many since I was preached to and shown pornographic magazines by Cusmaan, my tutor, and I have, since then, for whatever it is worth, made my own friends — one of them a young woman, my age. And I know now what Misra and Aw-Adan were up to at night, in the dark I also appreciate what grand sacrifices Uncle Hilaal has made and what a great “receiver” Salaado has been. And here I stand at the crossroads. Shall I leave Salaado and Uncle Hilaal for a freedom fighters' camp in the Ogaden? Shall I register as a student at the university? And what must we do about Misra when she calls tomorrow?

Nothing was clear in my head. One moment, I was young and with Misra; the next moment, I was allowing a country to be borninside of my thoughts; then, I was being trusted with a new life by Uncle Hilaal, and Salaado was looking on as a witness to my being wed to “myself”; and finally, I was being told about Misra”s betraying secrets to the enemy I was at a loss. I was very sad. Oh, Karin, my dear Karin — is it true?

I was unwell that day

CHAPTER NINE

I

In the wake of the greater national loss: a personal one, equally as devastating. He felt terrible and this left a horrible taste in his mouth, something his tongue (i.e. his memory) couldn’t give an appropriate name to. He became weak from want of energy he walked about wooden as his soul Again, he wouldn’t eat, complaining that he was tasting blood in his saliva. His body united in itself two temperatures: one moment, he said he was feeling very hot, the following instant he was very cold as if he had “ice circulating in my arteries and veins, not warm, living blood’. His eyes were bloodshot from sleeplessness. To the point of obsessiveness, his imagination “heard” loud reports of guns being fired and he saw men, women and children falling, and dying under the fire power. Six hundred and three of them! He mourned for the souls of the betrayed dead. The loss was so great, the tremor in his soul so distressing, that Askar behaved like a man watching a part of him slip away. He had been well when he was given the sad news — well, and alive to the detailed horrors which Karin offered. He remembered he had been ill and in bed when the Ogaden, in a coup de grâce, was returned to Ethiopian hands by the Soviets. He remembered someone commenting then, that what the British imperialists had put together wouldn’t be pulled asunder by Somalis — the Soviets, themselves imperialists, wouldn’t permit that to happen. But what could one say now? Misra, dearest Misra, why did you have to do this?

He was alone with Karin and she told it to him alone. In his room, with its maps and mirrors, radio and other items he had acquired, or was given as presents. Karin was served tea. She had aged slightly, her skin smooth as old leather, her chin sporting a longish Ho Chi Minh “beard”. She gave him the latest news about Qorrax (“He is very chummy with the newly appointed governor, he is often with him. A traitor, no doubt about it. He always was”), about Aw-Adan (“An exceptional man. He is a legendary figure in the town’s history. Bare-handed, he took on three of them and killed them. Just like that. As easily as a strong-armed man might behead a hen. They say his faith in the destiny of his people — he wasn’t Somali, he was a Qotto, you knew that? — they say that was his strength, gave him confidence”), about Shahrawello (“She died, poor thing, leaving behind her a pool of blood, no more. She cut her throat. No one knows why. Some thought it was because she felt humiliated by Qorrax’s treachery, others because all her sons had been killed in the massacre”), about Misra, what news about Misra?

“Why ask,” she had said, “why bother about her?”

Indeed, why did he wait until the last minute to ask about her, he said to himself. He should’ve started with her. She was, after all, as close to his own beginnings as anyone is ever likely to be. “Why not?” he said. “What’s become of her?”

Karin studied him and thought Askar looked more innocent now than he had been when younger. For one thing, his “stare” had lost its sharpness; for another, the satanic mischievousness which used to light his eyes with lamps more powerful than any wick, this, too, wasn’t there. She said, “It means you haven’t heard.”

For a moment, there was a flash, lasting barely a second — an outburst of flames in his look which reminded her of his younger self. It was an ambiguous look, transitory. Karin didn’t know what to make of it. “Heard what? Is she dead?”

“No. That she is not.”

He knew there was bad news coming. He didn’t speak until after he had steeled himself against it. He hardened his body, he deadened his soul — he was ready to hear anything. Then, like somebody who derives courage from the certainty of death and who says, “What’re you waiting for? Kill me, shoot me, get on with it and quick too,” Askar said, “Go on. Tell me the worst. What’re you waiting for?”

“There is a young Ethiopian soldier who’s taken Misra’s fancy. She is said to be living with him. A dashing, handsome young man, the Prince Charming type, whom she’s been wanting to meet all her life,” said Karin.

He wasn’t troubled by what he heard. However, he was wise enough not to shrug his shoulders and say, “So what? A woman has the right to fall in love with a man and I don’t see why his nationality matters. After all, all 'Ethiopians' are not enemies of all 'Somalis.'” It is the cause that matters.” There returned to him a steadiness of the kind a confident person displays. He took a sip of tea (which she didn’t touch), he crossed his legs, settling his body into the cosiness of an unexpected comfort. She said, “But that’s not all”

Second deaths are more painful when you come to think of it, thought Askar. He was numb in soul and body. He knew the rest of the story. She needn’t bother. Misra had fallen in love with a man from the enemy camp and she had betrayed. There were deaths. There was a massacre. Houses were razed to the ground. Wells poisoned. Newborns were bayoneted to death, their mothers raped and then killed, and their bodies savagely hacked to pieces, limb from limb. And children were rounded up, lectured to and then machine-gunned. He said, “You can spare me the detailed horrors. Just give me the figure.”

She thought he was too far ahead of her. “Then it means you’ve heard?” she said. “Let me tell it to you if you haven’t,” she added, and waited to hear his response.

“The trouble is,” and here his voice assumed an inordinate calmness which he had got from being close to Hilaal, “in gruesomeness, massacres are all the same wherever in the world they occur. And at the centre of them all, there is a traitor. So just give me the figures, and spare me the details.”

He decided to watch her face intently for the slightest hesitation in her voice, the slightest tremor in the tone in which she spoke, as she said, “Six hundred and three.”

He didn’t know why, but he believed she was telling the truth as she knew it. Something convinced him she was. But he had a question. “Why three? How does the figure three enter the picture? Why not six hundred and four or eight or nine?”

Again, there was no hesitation in her voice. “Shahrawello’s three sons, massacred later.”

Without being asked, she gave further details, not about the massacre, but about the “dashing, handsome young Ethiopian officer in charge of security”. He was from the same village as Misra and he called her by a different name. “Not Misra, which we all called her, no.”

He was intensely shocked. He mouthed, “What? What’s this?”

“He called her Misrat. Listen to it carefully. Misrat.”

Blood ran visibly up to and into his eyes. He stared at Karin ques-tioningly, focussing on the furrowed wrinkles of her forehead and the bridge of her nose. He saw a “t” written there and remembered he had had difficulties pronouncing or distinguishing the Arabic letter ta from that of tha when he was a pupil at Aw-Adan’s Koranic School, a fact no one else substantiated. “Are you sure that there is a ‘t’ in it now? Because you see, Misra is the Arabic name for ‘Egypt’ and Somalis prefer it to their own corrupted form ‘Massar’, which also gives you the Somali word for ‘headscarf ‘. And when I asked Misra what her name meant in her language, I remember her saying that it meant ‘foundation’, I think ‘the foundation of the earth’ or something. Now what could Misrat mean?” He turned to Karin.

Karin thought he was more disturbed by the changes in Misra’s name than about the massacre of which he had heard. She found this disturbing and was about to ask him about it when he said, “What can that mean, the change in the name?”

“It can only mean one thing: treason.”

He said, “I didn’t mean that,” and she could see he was greatly upset. “Not in that sense, no. Names mean something and to me, as a child, she was the cosmos.” He paused. “Maybe, I shan’t take note of the changes in her name. I am quite certain,” he was now talking to his face in the mirror, “now that I think of it, that somebody who speaks Amharic has confirmed to Uncle Hilaal that ‘Misra’ without a ‘t’ means ‘the foundation of the earth’. Or if you like, ‘the foundation of the universe’. Personally, I prefer rendering it as ‘the foundation of the earth’. But I am not certain. You have to ask someone who speaks that language, I don’t any more.”

He was now at peace with himself. This was what Karin found weird. Also, he didn’t offer her the chance to tell him more, or ask him further questions. He was up on his feet, his height towering above her, extending his hand for her to shake, making gestures that their conversation had come to an end. She prepared to leave and shouted, offering her address care of one of her daughters who, she said, worked in the Central Post Office, the one near Hotel Juba. “You must come and see us,” she went on, as she formalized their parting by taking both his hands in hers. He wished he had the will to tell her that Bevin’s portrait was still with him, and so was his fond memory of her kindness to him. “God bless,’ was apparently all he managed to say. Someone else saw her to the door, he couldn’t say who. He was taken ill immediately he was alone — quick as bushfire. His temperature ran high, his saliva tasted of blood and his body broke with perspiration although he insisted he was feeling very cold.

II

He couldn’t hold a thought in his head for two, three days. He walked in his sleep, a somnambulator roaming the darkened corridors of a past he couldn’t recognize himself in. He behaved as though he were looking in one of the night’s opaque corners for his missing half. No amount of talking would help him or make him lie down quietly and sleep. He was mortally mortified and sad at the thought that Misra was no longer worthy of his trust, his love. For the first time ever, Askar consented to talk at length about Misra’s divining in blood, raw meat and water.

Hilaal said, “In other words, she is a witch, a bitch, a whore and a traitor?”

Askar didn’t say anything. Salaado interjected, “He hasn’t said that.”

Hilaal turned to Salaado, “What did he say?”

Because Salaado wouldn’t speak, Hilaal to Askar: “What exactly did you say, Askar? Because if you say that Misra is a witch, a whore and a traitor, then you’re not making an original statement.”

“Meaning?” asked Salaado.

Hilaal shifted in his chair, “Women as whores, women as witches, women as traitors of their blood, women as lovers of men from the enemy camp — throughout history, men have blamed women for the ill luck they themselves have brought on their heads. Women are blamed for every misfortune which has befallen man from the first day of creation, including his fall from heaven. Woman is said to have betrayed man at the first opportunity. Throughout history, Askar.”

Salaado said, “Let him be, please.”

“No, no, please,” said Askar to Salaado.

Hilaal continued, looking from Askar to Salaado, “You’ve no proof, and you’ve asked for no proof. Men have always done that. They've condemned unjustly and asked for no evidence. What do you say to that?”

Askar sat silently, staring at his lap as though his ruined logic had fallen there. Would he be able to gather his broken pieces into his cupped hands and then respond? It seemed, however, that no sooner had he picked up a shattered piece than he discovered that he could only see a very little of a face (Misra’s), an eye (his own, as though it were a mirror) and nothing else. He floated, poised between the earth and the sky. He dwelled in a no-man’s-land, remaining suspended between numerous undefined states of reality and unreality; sandwiched between not-so-clearly defined selves. Dreaming (was he?), sleeping (was he?) or listening to a taped conversation between himself and Uncle Hilaal.

There was a silence akin to that which obtains when a radio is switched off suddenly. Hilaal was there, yes; Salaado was there as well; and the large radio in the living room wasn’t on. Well?

A voice (most probably Hilaal’s) telling a story:

A man. A woman. And a dog. The neighbours don’t like the man, who doesn’t like them either. They suspect, but they have no evidence, that he is a jealous husband. The woman is very beautiful, but quiet in an unassuming way, simple in her tastes, and loves her plainness. The dog? The dog is a German shepherd, large, handsome, costing the master a lot of money to feed, although the master doesn’t seem to mind the expense. The dog is given liver for breakfast, meat for lunch and dinner. The gate, however, is locked day and night and is opened when someone is entering or leaving. On most days, it is opened only twice: when the husband is leaving in the morning and when he re-enters in the evening. One day, a stranger arrives. Yes, into these convolutions walks, one noon, a man. The dog barks, bares its teeth, growls, but the man walks past it without so much as hesitating or pausing for a moment. For hands, the man has stumps — his hands, or so people say, having been amputated in Iran, because, again people say (and where they got their news only God knows) he had stolen money from a minor Ayatollah. The man, when he returns in the evening, stays indoors and so does the stranger, so do the wife and the dog. The stranger, the wife and the dog remain inside. The man, as usual, leaves in the morning and, as usual, doesn’t return until evening. Now what does the man do? Nobody knows. Does he work for the government, is he self-employed? Nobody knows. But people don’t say they don’t. They make up their stories when they don’t know what’s what.

Who’s the stranger? He is the younger brother of the man. People say he used to be a wicked man, who broke into houses, robbed banks. People also say that the house in which the man and his wife live is in his name, for he bought it from monies acquired through felonious methods. But nowadays, the stranger is as saintly as a mixraab. You won’t see him without his rosary (he holds one end of the rosary between his toes and the other hangs, like a wrist-watch, on the healed scar of the stump), nor will you catch his lips idle.

For example, Askar. In this story just told, there are truths and half-truths. The husband is a very jealous man — that is true. But the wife is saintly and has never reciprocated the advances made by any man. She loves her lawful husband.

It is also true, for example, that the dog is a German shepherd, large as the largest among the breed and handsome too. But it is not at all fierce. It bares its teeth, all right, and growls, and thus appears aggressive but it is very timid, very shy. Its eyes are gentle, its anger wore out at the edges when the intruder smiled, calling it “Brader”, German, meaning brother. Why was it given such a name? Nobody knows. But people say that her Somali master inherited it from a Polish gendeman who gave her the name. But surely, a Polish UN expert would know enough German to know that brader was brother, and wouldn’t call a female dog that?

The stranger? He is a relation of the man, that is true. In fact, he is the first and only son. Not a younger brother. It would be too much to expect two “brothers” in the same story, wouldn’t it? Two “brothers” who are not brothers themselves but who also are non-brothers. And where did he get his hands amputated? In Iran. That much is true. But not because he stole from a minor Ayatollah, no. He was working in a factory and a moment of carelessness chopped off his hands. Yes, he is the one in whose name the house is. Again, not because he bought it. The man registered the house in his name, that’s all.

No one visits these people. They have a dog who is fierce, a man who is very jealous, a wife who is unfaithful, a stranger whose hands have been amputated in Iran. Would they listen to you if you tried to enlighten them? Would they hear you out if you tried to challenge their prejudices? Of course not. Note, please, that the prejudice of the western press feeds the acquired prejudices of the colonial and neo-colonial peoples, as much as it misinforms the underinformed in Europe or North America. And note also, that because the new Somali master didn’t know the meaning of the German word “Bruder”, the question why such a name was given to a she-German shepherd never crossed his or other people’s minds. Was the Polish gendeman playing a Freudian game with his own or the dog’s unconscious, giving it “Bruder” as a name?

Now, for example. An unremoved bullet might cause a man’s death. But you need more than undealt-with tetanus and the rigidification of the muscles of the jaws for death to happen. Doctors, like the societies to which they belong, diagnose their patients, drawing conclusions based on their (I grant you here “learned”) prejudices. What I am trying to say, inarticulately, all this time, is you need more than scientific evidence for you to disown the woman who, for the first few years of your life, you called “Mother”. Think, Askar.

Now he could hear the voice, now he couldn’t And his breathing was slow and shallow and he lay tucked in bed, thinking and thinking and thinking, remembering, unremembering and remembering. The result of his silent reflections, his quiet meditations, his discursive consultations with Hilaal and Salaado, the result: he decided that Misra’s wraith in Askar had died a spiritual death. What good would it do if he asked her point-blank, did you betray? Are you a traitor? And, pray, what is your true name?

And the voice was in his ears, repeating to him Salaado and Hilaal’s coalition of views. And someone was saying that Misra had been seen in Mogadiscio, that she was already here, looking for him — looking for Askar, “my Askar, my son”.

“What will you do if you meet her?” someone asked.

Askar's answer, “I don’t know.”

The sun’s light in the room was breaking into tiny particles the size of atoms and while he thought of what he would do if he were to meet her again, Askar studied the phenomenon in thoughtful silence. The sun’s rays of atoms, his own shattered, fragmented selves.

“Misra, why did you have to do this to me? Why? Why?”

And he heard the voices of dawn and he felt cold, he felt hot, and curled into a foetal position, seeing himself young again, in Kallafo again. Then, suddenly, all this vanished and he was in Mogadiscio, in bed and Salaado was calling his name.

III

Misra grew smaller as she aged, he realized; he, bigger as he grew up. He told himself that her voice had thinned, the brightness in her eyes had faded a little too. And yet he couldn’t stop wondering if her other half was hiding inside her and would somehow re-emerge and take over eventually, the way voices of one person speak in another’s body, when under the powers of an exorcist. She was an actress without her props; she was a clown without paint. He saw her start — it was sudden as a hiccup, fast. He didn’t know why He moved about, measured of step, economical of gestures — he took his distance from her. It was enough that they had embraced, that was as far as he was willing to go. He had felt something run through his body as they hugged. That Uncle Hilaal and Salaado were there didn’t help matters either. If anything, their presence made things worse for him. He might have been franker with her if they were alone, in a room, in Mogadiscio, after God knows how many years of not meeting or being together; he might have told her openly why their physical contact gave him a sense of repugnance. And once they hugged, did he say anything? Or did she? What did he say? Did he welcome her? He looked from Salaado to Uncle Hilaal and then to Misra, and she was ugly as guilt, small and distant. He decided he would ask Salaado what things were said between them as they touched — maybe there was something he could learn about himself in this manner.

“How long have you been here?” he said to Misra.

She rearranged her tatters which were dust free, although she had come a long way, although the roads between Mogadiscio and Kallafo breathed the dust of travel all the way. He looked around for signs which, he hoped, would indicate if she had brought her baggage with her. Wouldn’t her belongings be here, in the living-room, if she had brought them?

Her voice was thinner than he remembered. “Where? Here?”

He stole a quiet glance in the direction of Uncle Hilaal. Askar told himself that he had been sadly mistaken in thinking that Uncle could have reminded him of Misra in the first place. In the second, there was a world’s difference between their voices — one was rich and comforting, the other thin as though dressed in the cheapest of rags.

“Yes,” he said at last.

He waited to see if her “missing half would make itself useful somehow. Why, she was reduced to half her original size and he was certain there was something uncanny about it all. For a second or so, he couldn’t trust his own memory, wondering if the woman in his uncle and Salaado’s living-room was an imposter. He couldn’t have known what she thought about him and the cold welcome offered her, but her pride in him was in her eyes and no matter how she tried, she couldn’t help displaying it to all and sundry.

There was a long pause.

And he remembered a dream in which he was inside a woman who remained nameless in the dream and he was trying his best to give birth to himself. Ejected, he was in a pool of blood and he swam in it, washed in it and the blood blinded him; and his face wore a mask of blood; and the place crawled with insects and serpents. Like a blind man, he had his hands ahead of himself, his legs splayed, his palms open, feeling and touching things upon which he bestowed names as he encountered them in the dark, pushing some of these items out of the way because he couldn’t give them names. And all this time, he was moving upwards, inside another woman, and he was travelling northerly, bearing slightly to the east, that is towards the sun, towards the ocean; and he cut corners, took short cuts, as he crawled towards the cavity from which emanated a voice, a human voice — his own! And he groaned, straggling against becoming his own coffin. Then the wish to be born whole, the wish to burst forth and be—this wish took on a life of its own and, for a while, lived its own separate existence. And he was shouting and screaming and kicking against the ribs of the woman who had caged him inside of her. And it was then that he heard the voice of yet another woman call him by name, a woman who was saying, “Askar, wake up. Misra is here.” And he wouldn’t wake because he believed his dream was dreaming a dream. And the woman repeated, “Askar, where are you? Wake up, Askar. Misra is here.” The woman who had called his name — Salaado (he saw this directly he opened his eyes, in fact even before he did so, he recognized her voice, etc.); the woman who had called and who was probably in the living-room — Misra! Was this the reason why everything inspired uneasiness, why there was, in the air, something he considered wicked and uncanny?

Now Misra was saying, “I’ve been in Xamar for three days.”

“And how did you get here?” he asked.

He noticed that neither Hilaal nor Salaado said anything. Indeed, they were uncomfortable and might have preferred to leave them alone together if they’d been sure he didn’t mind. And Misra? She was explaining that somebody who knew someone knew a relation of Hilaal's — and that was how she finally traced them.

“You’ve been here for a couple of hours, have you?”

She nodded. With hindsight, he resolved that her being there during the time he was dreaming would explain his discomfort and sense of awe. Apparently, she wasn’t in high spirits either. He would talk to her alone and find out. If she were in need of help, he was certain Salaado and Uncle Hilaal would offer her just that.

“And where are you putting up? Or rather with whom?” he said.

He resisted looking in the direction of Uncle Hilaal. But when he did, he discovered his face weary with concern. It wouldn’t be long, thought Askar, before he was ready to take over the conversation and Salaado, he was sure, would come to his aid. The two of them would talk to her, ask her any questions they pleased. Misra, because she had never known them before, would feel at ease with them. At any rate, he didn’t know how to put embarrassing questions to a woman who had once been like a mother to him.

Askar withdrew the instant he sensed Uncle Hilaal and Salaado were prepared to relieve him — that is, to replace him. He made a lame excuse to her. Saying to her, “Welcome, Misra,” he took leave of them.

IV

That her voice had lost its “weight” whereas his had broken into a man’s; that she had grown smaller, thinner and been reduced to half her original size, whereas he had grown taller, bigger and handsomer; that he had prepared to leave Uncle Hilaal and Salaado’s solidly built home in order that he might fight for the liberation of the Ogaden whereas she had left the Ogaden, disguised as another, and come to a Mogadiscio with whose coastal winds she wasn’t at all familiar, a Mogadiscio in which she was a refugee but feared to declare herself as one, “because I am sure”, she explained to Hilaal and Salaado when Askar wasn’t even there, “somebody from Kallafo is bound to recognize me. And I am afraid of what might happen to me.”

She spoke to them with disarming honesty.

Barren of voice, small of stature, she wept every time she mentioned the word “traitor”—for she was thus described. She was not a traitor. She had not betrayed anyone, had sold no secrets, contacted no enemy. True, she spoke the enemy’s language; true, she had spoken to a soldier. But they exchanged no such vital information. The two had talked about whether or not someone she knew would sell milk to the soldiers. She admitted to going round and buying milk for them. She said she reasoned it this way: the civilian populace in the Ogaden had need of money, not of milk which some had plenty of. In so far as she was concerned, she was doing something for “her people”.

She stopped, appearing dismayed by her story, her destiny.

“The problem is, who are ‘my people’?” she said. “For me, my people are Askar’s people; my people are my former husband’s people, the people I am most attached to. Those who were looking for a traitor and found one in me, rationalize that because I wasn’t born one of them, I must be the one who betrayed. Besides, it is easier to suspect the foreigner amongst a community than one’s own cousin or brother. But I swear upon Askar’s life that I did not inform on the freedom fighters’ movements or on their camp of sojourn.”

Salaado thought (and said later to Askar) that Misra had cut a tragic figure and she — Salaado — wept for her in her own heart. Hilaal thought (and said so later to Askar) that Misra was like a tree-stump you see in the far distance and which you mistake for a person. You had your own thoughts but chose not to share them with anybody.

“You see, Askar left when the Somalis were overrunning the Ogaden and the Ethiopian army of occupation in the Ogaden was in total disarray. Inside a year, however, the Russians had entered the war and reversed the situation, turning the Ethiopians into a victorious army literally overnight. Now this was hard to take. I mean, when you’ve been triumphant for over a year, you don’t expect that a weekend’s job deprives you of all that you’ve gained. And as a result of this, there was a great bitterness among Somalis everywhere. Many, I believe, were ready to do anything so that they might survive. One of these, I am sure, sold the information to the Ethiopians,” she said sadly, shaking her head.

After a pause, Hilaal asked, “How many of the fighters were rounded up and killed, did you say?”

“The number is estimated to be between five and six hundred dead and about fifty taken alive, tortured and then executed because they wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t betray, wouldn’t give the locations of the other freedom fighters’ camps all over the Ogaden.” She spoke with convincing clarity, having, naturally, given it thought previously

Again after another pause, Salaado asked, “When you were accused of being a traitor, what exactly did they do to you?”

Misra reflected for a long time. To Salaado now, Misra was the infant who had crawled out of an adult’s view into another room, somewhere in the same house, and she wanted so much to know what Misra was thinking, which thoughts she was intending to suppress and which to speak. “They set fire to the part of the house I was living in.”

“But you weren’t in the house then?” said Hilaal.

“I was not.”

“I am sorry — but was that all?” from Salaado.

Her voice failed her. And Salaado and Hilaal were indulgently silent. They had the appearance of conspirators trapping a foe. They were friendly, even in their silence, and they focussed on her, waiting for her to say something, to tell them something.

“I was raped,” she said.

Now that was hard to take. At first, neither knew what to say nor what kind of sigh of horror to utter. Then they looked at each other and communicated their sense of inner torment to one another. Salaado went and knelt beside her in prostrated quietness, saying nothing, doing nothing — but evidently apologetic. Salaado, holding out her hands to Misra, as though she were making an offering of some sort, said, “Who raped you?”

“Someone arranged a dozen young men to rape me,” she said in a matter-of-fact manner. “Two men followed me home one evening. They said Abdul-Ilah, Askar’s uncle on his father’s side, was waiting for me somewhere. I hadn’t seen him for years and was pleased to be joined with him again, for I didn’t know if he had survived the war. When I entered the hut they said he was in, several strong men sprang on me out of the dark and they raped me.”

“I hope you reported the incident to someone of your household,” said Salaado, her hands parted and clearly empty of the gift or offering they might have contained earlier. “Did you?”

It was harder to take when she told them. “The story these young men circulated (and everyone who believed that I was a traitor had no difficulty accepting it) was that I had been raped by baboons. Thank God, they said, they happened to be there, these young men, these gallant youths. Otherwise, I might have been fed on by lions. The baboons, said the poet amongst them (and one of them was a poet), smelt the beast in her and went for it; the baboons smelt her traitor’s identity underneath the human skin and went for it again and again. Thank God, we were there to save her body since, as a traitor, she had ransomed her soul”

Neither Salaado nor Hilaal could think of anything to say. As for her, she was too tired, and admitted she was when asked. Would she like to lie down in the guest-room? “Yes,” she said.

V

Askar was most ruthless. He said, on hearing the tragic stories which had befallen Misra, that he wasn’t at all moved. He accused her of showing to the world the brutal scars of a most ravenous war — that was all. Hadn’t they seen, with their own eyes, men and women with amputated arms or legs? Hadn’t they felt a sense of disgust when a beggar whom one had known for years suddenly appeared at the street-comer and displayed his knee couched in a wooden leg, claiming that he had lost a leg, a wife and a child in the war? He went on, “We’re not asking her to play the heroine in a tragic farce, no, we’re not. We’re asking her, if we’re asking her anything at all, to prove that she didn’t give away an essential secret. Prove.”

“Could you prove that it was she who had done it?” asked Salaado.

He pondered for a moment or two. And his face wore something as improvident as one who submits to being blinded before he is hanged. Clearly, he was in pain. He turned away from Salaado and the plates laid before him and concentrated on the distant corner in which Hilaai had been standing, thickening the gravy with a couple of spoonfuls of cornflour. (Misra felt disoriented when she learnt that Hilaal cooked most meals, spent a great many hours in the house whilst Salaado went out and returned with a bagful of shopping; disoriented because she had never been in a home where the man did the woman’s job and the woman more or less the man’s.)

“You remember I asked you once if a people can be said to be terribly mistaken? We were talking in reference to whether or not Somalis everywhere can be described as ‘terribly wrong’ in view of their nationalist stand. Do you remember what you said?” He addressed his question as much to Salaado as he was addressing it to Hilaal. “Do you?”

“I said, I think, that a people cannot be said to be terribly mistaken; that we can arguably challenge a person’s views or a small community’s rightness or wrongness. Not a nation.”

Because he remained silent, the room resounded with the relic of the wisdom just recalled and the three of them lived, for disparate moments, in separate mansions of memory. Salaado took this to mean that since the township of Kallafo accused Misra of being the traitor, no one was right in challenging their verdict. Hilaal was of a different opinion, although he hadn’t the wish to express it then. Indeed, he belived that a people can be sadly mistaken about themselves, their own position vis-à-vis the ideas which concern them. Not only that, but they may not know how misinformed they are; they may never realize they are wrong. He thought of the American people; thought how uninformed the people of the Soviet Union were. E comé! he said to himself. Askar? He was pleased with what he had achieved and, like a mediocre player of chess, waited for the opponent to make any move. Salaado:

“Now what I cannot understand is how you can allow yourself, intelligent as you are, sensitive as you are, to be so irreverent towards a woman who had once been like a mother to you? Yes, so irreverent and so disrespectful, Askar.”

The blow was stronger than he had anticipated and it floored him. He hadn’t expected she would make such an unforeseen move, one that would force him to look at himself afresh, take note of his own surroundings — and see Misra as a victim, first of his people and then of himself. He felt like one who was dropped into a deep well and whose ears were filled with water and therefore he couldn’t hear anything, not even his own breathing. He was inexcusably silent. Salaado stared at him, as wrestlers stare at their rivals who take refuge in a comer while they catch their breath lost in a previous round. And because he wouldn’t say anything, Salaado said, “Do you know that she is staying with us?”

The shadows of the afternoon sun were drawn on his face, and Hilaal, who had joined them, carrying the gravy and the roast beef in his left hand and the salad in his right, couldn’t determine if Askar was smiling or not. As he put down things on the table-mats, he said to Askar, “We cannot understand how you can be so insensitive, so unkind to the woman who had been once a mother to you, We wondered if you’re likely to disown us the day one of life’s many misfortunes calls onus!”

He sat in shamefaced silence. Salaado:

“She says she dare not join one of the refugee camps. Not only because she fears the reprisals if someone from Kallafo were to recognize her, but also because she entered the country in disguise, bearing someone else’s name and was registered as such at the border-post. It would be taking a great risk to tamper with the papers.”

Hilaal served Salaado and handed her plate over to her. He was serving Askar his portions when, exploiting the silent moment, he said, “I've offered to register her as my dependent. In fact, I’ll register her in our foglio famiglia as a relation. That means she will stay with us, be one of us, a member of our family.”

Salaado continued as the salad bowls were being passed around, “She believes she is very sick and predicts she will die soon. Now that doesn’t worry us. We think that, given the loving care she needs, she will recover. We’ll take her to one of my cousins who’s one of the best surgeons of this country and he will take care of her complaint. All her complaints. Today, before she went to sleep, she appeared distressed on account of a pain in her left breast.”

Askar’s stare became so severe, it disturbed both Hilaal and Salaado and when they followed it, they could understand it. Apparently, Misra, quiet as an insect, had crept in on them. They fell silent for a second. Then Hilaal and Salaado’s voices clashed clumsily, each giving up their seat, forgetting there was an untaken chair next to Askar. As she walked further in, looking a little rested, Hilaal and Salaado each offered her a portion of their meat. Askar pushed his towards the empty chair and said, “You can have my share, since I don’t want any of it, anyway”

And before anyone spoke to him, he was gone.

VI

The doctor said he could determine what ailed her only after she had undergone a thorough medical examination. But to Salaado and Hilaal he said he suspected the tumour in Misra’s left breast was malignant and that the breast would have to be removed.

No one told her this. Which was why there was, in the air, a sense of uneasiness as soon as they returned to the house. Salaado’s confiding the newly revealed secret to Askar (she spoke to him in Italian so Misra couldn’t follow) complicated matters further. He sounded as though he were indifferent to the sad news. And this greatly upset both Salaado and Hilaal. To ease the tension, Salaado asked Misra, “Is there anything you've always had a passion to see in, say, Mogadiscio? Something you've always had a wish to see before you … er… die as we all must when our day comes? Is there anything, Misra?”

Salaado registered Hilaal’s hard stare, which wouldn’t dissolve despite her quiet appeal. And Askar wasn’t impervious to what was occurring after all. For it was he who intervened when, maybe preoccupied with the theme of death and the worries pertaining to it, Misra couldn’t speak of any passion other than the one lodged in the centre of her heart — the passion to live! Maybe also Askar remembered the rule of their house in Kallafo — that no one should speak of death. He could forgive Salaado for doing so — but he had to set things right and quickly too. And: “You’ve always had a passion to see the sea, no?” he addressed Misra, surprising himself not so much as he pleased Salaado and Hilaal. “You’ve always had a passion to see the ocean.”

A little resigned, she said, “That’s true.”

“Then we shall go, all four of us, to Jezira, shall we?” Salaado said to Askar, meaning that she was sure she, Hilaal and Misra would definitely go, but would he?

And before he said, “Let’s”, the necessary preparations were under way — Hilaal had entered the kitchen to slice bread and cheese for a possible picnic and Salaado had disappeared into their bedroom to bring out towels, swimming-trunks, etc. She returned after a while, reminding Askar he should bring his and two towels, one for himself and another for Misra. “But she doesn’t know how to swim,” he said, half-shouting.

She hushed him. “Never mind,” she said, after a brief pause. “Get something for her, it doesn’t really matter. And let us get going so we can be at Jezira and return before it is dark.”

They went their separate ways and converged in the living-room, Hilaal had a carrier-bag in his hand and they knew what it contained. And Misra? She was standing against the furthest wall as though she were part of it, or as though she were a carpet, rolled up and standing against the wall. And she saw them as a threesome, she saw herself apart from them: she was sick, they were not; she wasn’t a Somali and they were. Only after Askar went to her did she move away from the comer where she had been.

“Are you all right?” he said.

She nodded. Her eyes, Askar could see, were on his hands. Of what was she afraid? Of what was she suspicious? he thought to himself. He was much taller, much heftier — he was her cosmos, he said to himself. Just the way she used to be his when he was a great deal younger. He extended a friendly hand out to her. At first, she wouldn’t take it. He looked over his right shoulder and saw Hilaal and Salaado nervously watching them, neither saying anything lest they disturbed them. “Come on,” he said, this time extending to her only his little finger, as if to a child. And she took it.

They walked level for several paces. She was the child, he the adult. “You do want to come to the ocean, don’t you?” he asked, aware that he was addressing her like a child; aware there was a streak of condescension in his voice.

“Yes,” she said.

He said, “I will teach you to swim if you wish.”

She nodded.

Again, he was addressing her like a child, “Is there anything you wish passionately to see when we are at the sea? Anything else you’ve always wished to see?”

They were standing in front of Hilaal and Salaado. And they became conscious of how each spoke, how each responded. Now they were playing to an audience, they had to be careful Consequently there seeped into their voices an awareness of the outside world, of Salaado and Hilaal, an awareness of their own past together, an awareness of the other in each of them.

“I would very much like to see a shark,’ she said,

Hilaal thought, what an impossible request to make. I wish I could make it happen. I wish I could take her to an aquarium — if only there were one in Mogadiscio. But why a shark? And Salaado thought, I like this woman’s imagination, it is wide, it is encompassing, it is inclusive, it is larger than the world of which she isn’t an integral part. Why a shark? Because she is dissatisfied with the little she’s been offered and wants more, feels she is entitled to be given more and will do the best she can to acquire more. What an imagination! As for Askar, his thoughts led him away from the territory of reason to one in which he was a small child asking if it was possible for a boy to menstruate? Or if it was possible to meet “death” face to face and survive? He saw in her request a yearning, a passion for a past long gone.

After a long pause, Salaado said, “It is not every day one sees sharks in these parts. But we can go to behind the Xamar Slaughter House, the newly built one, and there we’re likely to see a shark. In fact, the story goes that a woman swam while menstruating heavily and thus attracted a shark’s passionate attentions and he made of her a morsel — that was all”

Silence. When Askar looked at Misra, he found her quietly standing in another comer, sulking. She was like a rolled carpet tied with a rope at both ends, leaning against the wall She stared ahead of herself, trembling a little, perhaps at the thought that she would be fed, as the menstruating woman (or rather as a sacrificial beast?) to the famished sharks behind the Xamar Slaughter House? She didn’t say anything. She took the little finger offered her by Askar, whom she found to be friendly

“Shall we go?” he said, his finger secure in Misra’s grip.

“Let’s,” said Hilaal.

And they were in a car in less than two minutes. Askar thought, I will teach Misra how to swim. Hilaal thought, I am glad she’s beginning to trust Askar again and am glad Askar is lavishing on her his affectionate warmth, in which she will rediscover their old selves so they will be happy again together. Salaado thought, as you travel further from your home-base, the cosmos shrinks proportionately in size. Does Misra expect her seeing a shark will remind her of a larger cosmos, a much more aggressive universe, one in which blood is not a life-force but that of death and self-destruction?

Salaado drove the car. Hilaal sat beside her. Misra and Askar were in the back together, their bodies very close, their fingers entwined. In the rear mirror, Salaado saw, they were so engrossed in each other they didn’t need to acknowledge the existence of the outside world. When alone, and at the beach, she reported what she suspected she saw to Hilaal. And he was happy.