Maps

CHAPTER TEN

I

You spent less time in your house now that Misra was also there. You entered it quiet as a trespasser, showered, changed into clean clothes only to get out again, saying, at times, where you would be (“I am at Riyo’s place, we’re studying geography together”—Riyo being a girl your age — a neighbour and classmate), and on occasion, you didn’t bother giving indications as to whether you would return home and have a meal. One thing was obvious — Hilaal and Salaado were in some kind of a moral dilemma. Of course, when it came down to making choices, they would've preferred your presence to Misra’s. Also, they thought it unkind to throw her out. What they did was to pray, together and separately, for a threshold of understanding to be reached. Otherwise, thought Hilaal, they would have to precipitate a mild confrontation between the two of you. With such a prospect in mind, Karin’s name was dropped. Misra picked it up, as though Salaado had flung it in the mud, and dusted it clean with the edge of her newly washed robe. All she said was, “The worst enemy in the world is one who has been your dearest and most intimate friend half your life,” And from then on, no one dared pollute the air by mentioning Karin’s name again. Nor did anybody get the chance to ask her about her uncovered identity, with her name ending with “t” and meaning something like foundation of the earth”. To dissolve the thickness of the tension in the room, somebody teased you. But Misra remained standing outside your acquired freehold territory, feeling she was barred from entering it.

To provoke you (or was this meant to tease you), Salaado, on this particular evening, said: “You don’t seem to us,” and she looked at Hilaal and Misra, this being as wide as the parenthesis could extend, “as though you will leave for a war zone. Such a person gets rid of all extra burdens save a gun, say a belt of ammunition or maybe two, perhaps the odd item such as binoculars, if they can be had and, who knows, a revolver. Why, I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but you appear to me like a young man who has found a new love — Riyo what’s-her-name — who, I hear, you’re intending to take with you to the war front, God knows as what.”

Hilaal called Salaado’s name — they all got his meaning!

“Are you saying, Salaado,” you began your self-defence with a newly acquired confidence, “that I am the proverbial coward who is reported to have told every child and adult in his village that he was preparing for a fight and went into the forest, returning thence, burdened with so many clubs he couldn’t even walk When the villagers asked why he was carrying so many, in contrast to his opponent’s one, the coward said, wish everybody to know that I, who can cut so many trees and carry so many clubs, can floor any number of contestants.’ Are you saying I am like that proverbial coward, Salaado?”

Hilaal appeared pleased with your robust state of mind. He was happy your enthusiasm was again ablaze with the same kind of informed argumentativeness as before and that you were like your old self again. He commented: “I’ve never heard it told so elegantly Or is this not Cigaal Shiidaad’s story?”

By then, Salaado had risen from her seat and switched on the light; by then, Misra had discreetly asked Hilaal if it was true you were intending to travel to the war front with what’s-her-name, Riyo. And when Misra wanted to comment, Hilaal raised his hand—bastal Silence. Salaado took her chair. You got up from yours. Misra half got up from hers, as if she were following you to wherever you were going. And Hilaal watched all of you behave in this nervous way with a certain disquiet.

Salaado, suspecting that you were about to go out of the house, said, “Isn’t it too late to go out for your shooting practice?”

You could hear Hilaal intone, Dio mio, Salaado, don’t you know when to let go, when to stop?” You looked up at the ceiling and your stare met the burning bulb’s. “Too late,” you said.

Again, you looked up at the bulb, like one who expected it to say something. You told yourself there was something upsetting about how Salaado was getting possessively interested in your movements, probing into your affairs, reading your notes and interrogating you whenever there was a chance. She didn’t want you to leave for the war front, that much was apparent. But neither did Hilaal. Silent, you looked at the electric bulb, when, pop! And the bulb fell to the floor within a couple of inches of you, rendering your half of the room dark. You stood where you were for a moment, before you bent down to pick it up. You shook it gently, then a bit harshly, you brought it nearer your ears and listened to it. You certified it dead.

Hilaal said, “Bulbs give so many light hours and then they go pop and are dead.”

Misra looked from him to you, then from you to Salaado and then back at you, for she knew, somehow, that you wouldn’t let that go without a comment. You said, “A man, however, doesn’t have a set number of hours, days, months or years to live. Why do you think that is so?” And you addressed the question to no one in particular.

Hilaal was beyond himself with delight. You were well, your head was working, you were thinking and were not morose, silent, withdrawn. You were fun. As before. “Tell us. Why.”

“Imperfections or perfections … or if you prefer … the absence or presence of… er … imperfections and perfections in the order of things. Man. Woman. God. Eh?”

Hilaal was clearly delighted that you had put the ball back into his side of the court. In his, there was light; in yours, darkness. You knew what he would say — or so you thought. But he didn’t have the slightest idea where you might bounce from next. He said, “Depends.”

“If one believes in God or no?”

He nodded his head. You made as though you would leave.

Salaado said, “Where are you going, Askar?”

Hilaal to Salaado, “Peramordidio, Salaado!”

But she disregarded his comment. She said to Askar, “I’m asking because next door they are having a mingis ceremony tonight and I remember your telling me you wanted to attend it. Would you like to stay for dinner and then go later with whoever is coming?” And she spoke in such a gentle voice you couldn’t bring yourself to refuse.

You nodded your head in the darkened half of the room and were not sure if anyone saw your answer. But it didn’t matter. In an hour or so, you knew the kitchen would receive you all, the tables would seat you, the cutlery would feed you (unless Hilaal ate with his fingers) and Misra would be uneasy, sitting awkwardly at table, her knife every now and then ending in the wrong hand, her fork dropping to the floor. Hilaal would say “All this is nonsense. Eat with your fingers the way I am doing.”

Salaado would say “Chicken is best eaten with one’s fingers,” although she herself might be using a fork and a knife. Something was happening to Salaado. Askar was unhappy about it,

Hilaal said, “Let’s go and cook.”

II

When chopping up onions, Salaado forgot an elementary principle Hilaal had taught her — that she should cut it in two halves and let them soak in water for a couple of minutes. Then she wouldn’t drop tears as big as French onions, sniffing, onion-eyed and complaining, “Oh, what must I do now?”

Hilaal gave her a napkin with which to wipe away the tears. As she was leaving the kitchen, he said, not so much for your benefit as for Misra’s — Misra, who was standing near the sink, staring at the thawing meat—“When two persons have been living together for over a decade, they tend not to listen to each other’s advice. I’ve told her time and again, perhaps a million times.”

But what was he thinking, staring at Misra? Was he thinking ill of her? It wasn’t something he said. It was the way he kept looking at her as she looked furtively at the meat thawing in the kitchen sink. The trouble was, you were wrong. It seemed your prejudice bred monstrous ideas. In fact, he was saying amicably, “And you, Misra? What would you like to do?”

She didn’t know what to say.

“I suggest you season the meat,” he said. “You did it so handsomely well, the other day, it ate superbly” However, he stopped in mid-thought, like a man who discovers a richer diamond deposit than the iron-ore he has been mining all this time. “Why don’t I leave the two of you together? I’ll join Salaado and help her pick the rice clean. Is that all right?”

For a long time, neither you nor she spoke. Then you both filled the emptiness with conversation equally uncontroversial and empty of real substance. She talked of how much she liked the kitchen you were in. She touched the washing-machine which was standing next to the fridge, one switch bright red and on, the other dull and not on. Karin’s name, Qorrax’s, Aw-Adan’s were not mentioned. Nor was any reference made to herself or to the lieutenant whom she had befriended. You were saying something as agreeably pleasant and banal as, “When I see a woman carrying on her head firewood, on her back a child and in front, hugging to her chest, the day’s shopping, my heart bleeds in sympathy for such a martyr.”’

Suddenly, you appeared relieved — like a husband who warmly welcomes an unexpected guest, arriving just at the instant when his wife is about to put an embarrassing question to him — because Cusmaan, your former tutor, had arrived. You introduced them to each other. They displayed the pleasant surprise of each indicating that he/she imagined the other to look not exactly as “I had imagined”.

In a friendly way, Misra said, “Perhaps Askar has misled you.”

“No, no,” said Cusmaan. “I’ve misconstructed images of you which apparently do not match the reality. It is all my fault,” and they shook hands again.

“He’s certainly misinformed me,” said Misra, still in her consistently friendly manner.

“He overpraised me. He always does.”

Misra said, “On the contrary.”

“He underpraised me?”

Misra nodded her head.

Cusmaan remained charmingly polite and exchanged a few more niceties with Misra. Then he gave you a booklet which was to give you the basics of how to repair a car. You opened the book with obvious excitement and saw a highway of technical signs which you didn’t know how to read, and then glanced at the glossary offering explanatory footnotes to the jargon of motor mechanics. “Once you’ve understood what this booklet says, you are on your way to becoming a potential repairer of vehicles appropriated from the enemy.”

You knew things were not as easy as all that. But you were glad he had come. His arrival had injected new blood into everybody and there was a great deal of excited movement. You were all in the kitchen, milling round one another. Hilaal then offered to finish cooking the food whilst you talked to Cusmaan.

By chance, your gaze fell on Misra. She was pressing the inside of her forearm against her chest — a gesture breast-feeding mothers make when they are full of unsucked milk. You guessed, correctly, that her breasts were aching. Also, when she saw Hilaal, Salaado and Cusmaan’s look home in on her too, Misra’s arm ceased moving and there occurred something similar to the transformations caused by a whirlwind turning over dust, earth, etc., only to leave everything, a moment later, in the hands of gravity, trusting it to restore to the elements the balance they had lost. You came closer to her. And you smelled her.

True. She had started her period at the very instant you looked at her.

III

“If you went?” said Salaado; and looked in your direction.

All five of you were at table, all five, including Misra. You thought that either Misra’s body’s habits had undergone surprising changes or you didn’t have your facts right. Although at this moment in time, that wasn’t your main worry. You were attentively listening to a point Cusmaan was making, Cusmaan, who had become an expert at spinning a tapestry of controversies, having learnt the trade from Hilaal. The gist of what he was saying wasn’t vivid even to himself, you could see, but it was touching on a topic which interested you, namely the relationship between “high” literature and “scripts”. He quoted two instances: Amharic, although a written language for centuries, with little or, he said, no “exceptional” literary figures to speak of; Somali, a language that had no orthography until October 1972, with “exceptional” poets, gifted orators and highly talented wordsmiths. The question, he argued, was not a case of one of oral literature against a written one, no. It was a language (i.e. Somali) with phenomenally sophisticated literature, against another (Amharic) served poorly by her poets and prose writers.

Cusmaan’s point became clearer in the brief silence between the moment he stopped talking and the instant Hilaal picked its loose threads, adding a couple of his balls of cotton-threads and weaving out of them a plait of conclusions, with its own web of yarns, warps and wefts.

“No, no, no, you don’t get my point,” argued Cusmaan.

Hilaal said, “I do. I do.”

“You don’t.”

Salaado said, “You are saying the same thing, Cusmaan.”

Hilaal was saying, “But this is a dangerous point Cusmaan is making. You don’t know enough about Ethiopian literature to compare it fairly with Somali literature. For example.”

“Please no for examples. Listen to me.”

The women communicated secretly (Misra was in her seasonal pain and Salaado decided to be with her) and left the men to determine how best to rule the world. In the meantime, Hilaal got caught in the intricacies of his ideas. In his spiral thinking he went up and up the entwining stairway, reaching such great heights as would justify his encroaching on historical as well as literary theories, in and outside the Horn of Africa. At some point, when he got to a landing, he paused. Leaning against a ramshackle railing, his hands open in the shape of brackets, he commented on the political and literary activities of Sayyid Mohamed Abdulle Hassan, the Somali peoples’ greatest warrior-poet to date and Menelik, his contemporary, the architect of the Ethiopian empire. Suddenly, however, Hilaal’s eyes narrowed and he appeared ill at ease, as though the flight of stairs leading up to the summit of his climb would give way if he tried to ascend them. Another pause, this time of a more pedestrian kind. He looked up and saw that Salaado had returned alone. “What is the matter with Misra?”

“She is a woman,” said Salaado.

A briefer pause, and he was moving round his spiral thinking, ascending now, descending now, describing vividly the poetic feud which involved the Sayyid and a number of detractors including one unheard-of English poet who entered the feud with a contribution “veined as the romantic arm extended out to the victim who must be cajoled before he is dealt the final blow. For example.”

And there came a chorus of complaints. “Wait, wait.”

You heard drumming. You thought of the mingis ceremony. Salaado nodded her head in your direction and said, “She’s resting for a while, but she says she will come with you.”

Cusmaan was saying, “Ethiopia, let me for-example you, Hilaal, has never been colonized. Her national language, although spoken by a minority, has had a script from long before Christ. And yet, how is it that this country that has been independent all through the ages of documented history this Ethiopia whose population is ten times that of Somalia’s; this Ethiopia, with a script from long before Christ — how is it that Ethiopia has not produced one poet, ancient or contemporary relying either on the oral or the written form, one single Ethiopian genius of a poet, who is comparable to Somalia’s hundreds of major poets that Somalis can field?”

“Don’t be ethnocentric. That’s all I say. Of course, being independent for a hundred years didn’t get Liberia into the same bracket as Ethiopia. No one can explain these things. How, for example, does it happen that two-thirds of Somalia’s major poets come from the Ogaden and the Haud?”

Silence. And the voice of the master of mingis ceremony singing, right in the heart of Mogadiscio, in a language definitely not Somali — this fact alone deserved a body of study and research work. The masters or mistresses of these ceremonies chant in the language the spirits understand — and that language is not Somali. It is Boran. Just as voodoo ceremonies in Haiti are conducted in Yoruba and not in the language of the island, Creole.

“Let’s go,” Misra said to you.

IV

You were admitted into a large room and there were many people and there was a great deal of toing and froing, with a stream of men and women entering or leaving. The neighbour’s wife had been ill for some time. According to the shamanistic prescription, the woman would have th influenced for the better, and they would leave her, if a white-tailed sheep was slaughtered; if the blood was smeared all over her body; and if she submitted herself trustfully to the incantantory rite of dancing and singing for three solid days and nights. The neighbour, an Xamari, was very wealthy and he loved his wife, who was his youngest. He didn’t mind the expense. He agreed to pay the priest-doctore spirits in her a handsome fee and would probably buy him an air ticket to and from Mecca. Also, the man refused to analyse or comment on the religious and philosophical contradictions surrounding his activities. He was a colleague of Salaado’s, he was, by anybody’s standards, a knowledgeable man, and was the son of a well-to-do Xamari family

You and Misra, on being invited, went and watched the dance as you might have watched any theatrical performance — no more. But you didn’t understand the language in which they sang, you couldn’t decipher the chant. The language was definitely not Somali, Did Misra understand? You were surprised how much she was able to comprehend. And the woman-patient danced and danced and danced; and the priest-doctor challenged the spirits, asking that they name themselves — at least identify themselves, at least say whether they were human or jinn — and she danced and danced and danced.

“What’s the name of the woman?” asked Misra,

His voice, loud, overpowered the drumming and he said, “Waliima Sheikh,”

Impatient, the priest-doctor beckoned to the drummers to beat softer, slower. And he took the woman’s hand, then held her by the shoulders and he started shaking her and shouting, “Tell us who you are. Are you jinn or human? And what do you want?”

The woman danced and danced and danced.

The priest-doctor asked, “Now, who are you? We haven’t much time nor patience. We’ll deliver you from the diabolical demands of the evil spirits who’ve apparently taken residence in you. So who are you?”

And the woman stopped dancing altogether. The drumming ceased too.

As if exhausted, the woman-patient began to speak, but her voice wasn’t loud enough and nothing save the first part of the sentence could be heard clearly But the “I am… I am”, which evidently was heard by everybody, did generate a great deal of interest and hope in the hearts and minds of the audience. The priest-doctor concentrated intensely on the forehead of his patient as though his powers would drill through to her brain cells and this would help him, in the end, to solve the shamanistic riddle of what jinn or human could be so obstinate as to have withstood his probing for forty-eight hours. Presently, he signalled to the drummers to resume their drumming and they did as instructed. As more dancers encircled the woman-patient, the priest-doctor left the floor for his throne on the left-hand side of what was once the wife’s living-room. But he rose again immediately as if he sat on thorns, and he was moving in the direction of his patient and saying, “I will punish you severely if you don’t tell us who you are,” and was shaking her body as though fruits, small as jinns or large as human eyeballs, would drop to the floor and he would just pick them up and make a gift of them to the patient’s husband who was seated in another comer, on the right-hand side of the room.

You were not sure “who” the priest-doctor was addressing; you were not sure “who” he would punish severely — the woman-as-human or the spirit in the woman. After all, you knew the woman’s name and you hoped the priest-doctor knew her human name too, or even if he didn’t, the husband was there to remind him, or one of the neighbours. But then, what confounded you more was that he was now whipping her and was repeating loudly, again and again, the sentence, “Just tell the congregation your name, address and, if possible, your profession. Are you a man, are you a woman or are you a child? Are you human or jinn?”

She stopped dancing and her head dropped to her chin — the way toys’ heads do when the springs which hold them fail or snap. The drumming stopped. Everybody listened.

“Your name, sex, profession and address?” repeated the priest-doctor.

The woman finally said, “I am Deeqo Amin.”

“And where do you live?” said the priest-doctor.

Silence. Meantime, the congregation repeated, in various manners, the name the patient mentioned. Somebody cursed “Deeqo”, another wished her hell, here and in the hereafter, but many waited before they pronounced their verdict. “Where do you live?”

You remembered the cuudis ceremony in Kallafo, the one in which Karin gave a name different from her real one, and her identity as that of a man. Mingis! Cuudis! And you thought about the Egyptian Zaar and about the Mogadiscian’s Beehe and Booràn. You asked yourself, But who are we? Are we the jinn who dwell inside “us” from time to time? Or are we always the human beings that we claim to be? What proportions of us are human and what jinn? Now the woman was shouting, “I live in the Medina quarter of Xamar,” a statement she repeated thrice.

The priest-doctor waited for that to sink in. Then, “And how many children have you?”

“I have none.” The members of the audience mumbled something to one another.

He repeated the question louder and expected the patient would repeat her answer louder too. “I said, I have no children.” (And someone shouted, “A bad eye.”)

“What’s the name of your husband, the full name please?”

The woman answered, “I am a widow My husband died in the Ogaden war.”

“And you have no children?” repeated the shaman.

The woman-patient said, “That’s right.”

You could tell from his voice that he was pleased his patient spoke somebody’s name; that she claimed to be somebody else with a name and an address; that he had convinced all those present of his expertise. “Please tell the congregation here, why you've chosen to take residence” in Waliima Sheikh? Do you know her? Have you ever met, you and Waliima? Are you envious of her, her children and life style?”

“You might say that I've known Waliima Sheikh from when we played house-and-family together as girls and you would be right if you assumed that I’ve coveted her her marriage, her wealth, her children and her good looks. I married badly, she well; I left school early, she finished at hers and did well by it.”

He put more and more questions to the woman-patient until it became obvious another was speaking through her; another, with a different name and address; another, whose voice interfered with the proceedings, for it emanated from a different other. Could a good person live in an utterly bad one? you ask yourself, your imagination overwhelmed by the thought that this was possible. Could Misra hide in you? Could another dwell in her?

The world of the unknown had greater potentials, you thought, and lost interest in the mundanities of what the priest-doctor was saying or what wicked actions the audience was prescribing as punishment for the woman who, out of jealousy, “took residence” in another;

Do you remember?

V

There was a flood.

And you floated. You floated, heavy as a corpse, asleep to the end of the world. You floated easterly towards the sea. You remember someone saying there would no longer be any more rebirths, or renewals of any sort. Millions of people had lost their lives and property in the flood, but then everyone agreed this didn’t matter, for this was the end of the world and the flood was to mark the end-of-the-world’s beginning. And when a woman who had floated beside you for days asked what you were doing, you responded that you had come to bury yourself in the water. You said you would blow out the light and, in the total darkness surrounding you, you would expire. You prophesied that a heavy downpour of successive floods would fall from the heavens, joining the earth and the sky, obliterating from everybody’s memory all the dreamt dreams, and there would be no past, no present and no future. Then you turned to the woman who had earlier asked you why you were there and you inquired of her why she too was there. She said, “My husband and I are in the business of building tombs on seabeds.” You took a fresher look at the woman. And you put a name to her face.

You were spat by the flood, as though you were an uprooted weed on the bank of a river, green with young foliage — foliage whose chaotic message you couldn’t follow. There, you were met by an old man who, in a big way, reminded you of Aw-Adan, but also, in a small way, looked like your younger tutor, Cusmaan. Suddenly, the heavens darkened and all you could see was the man’s grey hair, bushy and also silvery Then the man put his hand into his pocket and he gave you a knife. You dared not ask the man what you were supposed to do with the knife, but you said, surprising even yourself, “But why the flood?” And the old man with the white head said, “Floods are a product of a common bad.” Now do you remember, or have you chosen, as usual, to remember only the good things, deciding to forget the bad?

Anyway!

You were surrounded by darkness. You were surrounded by multitudinous water. Inside the water, you passed more water, your own water that is, as though you were expected to make a contribution, however small. And there shone in the sky a fairly young moon, beautiful as a maiden’s face. The sea was green as the silver of a mirror and you could see your own shadow on the tinier crests your body’s movements created. You had bloodshot eyes, but you didn’t know because you couldn’t see it yourself. You were alone, but you didn’t think about it and you didn’t feel at all lonely You would dive every now and then, and reach the bottom of the deep, deep sea, and whenever you came out to take another lungful of fresh air, you felt as if you were an entirely different person. Tired from swimming alone, you went to sit by a sand-dune near the sea.

It was light already — dawn had broken.

And there was a young boy, barely ten, who was meditatively busy washing clean a skull. He was performing his task with absolute devotion — you could tell from the way he breathed, you could see the concentration on his face, you could sense, without touching him, the tension in his own body. The skull was that of a human. But you couldn’t determine, even when you held it in your hands, whether it had belonged to a small person or a heavily built man or woman. Yin could decide, without taking undue risk, that it had been there for years. For one thing, plants had begun to sprout in it. For another, the colour had worn off its cheekbone, which had grown a shade browner.

You watched in reverent silence.

The young boy dipped it wholly in the water, removing the grains of sand which had been lodging in there. He shook it a little too roughly, emptying it of life. As he held it away from himself, the young boy watched, with utter amazement (or was it amusement?) as the insects moved, in a fury of fright and frenzy, as they scattered here and there — like a cinema crowd running confusedly down the exit stairway because the safety-curtain had caught fire. When he was satisfied that he had emptied it of life of all forms, he dipped it again in water, soaped it again and again until it was as white as the foams the sea frothed at his feet. From where you stood, you could read the letter “M” tattooed on the skull in blue. And you provided the missing letters ofthat name — just as you had earlier put a name to a face you had seen.

Do you remember any of that?

You don’t? How very weird!

You asked the young boy why he was washing the skull clean. As if in response to you, he dipped it in water and drank from it. You stared at him in total bewilderment.

He said, “There is life in death, there is death in life.”

Not only that he said nothing original, but the fact that you didn’t ask him anything — this, perhaps, made you stare at him in a hostile manner. Then he explained, “This skull belonged to a man who raped his own daughter. He died in old age, a hated man, a man without friends, a man alienated from his own community. For years, he saw dreams in which he wore a young girl’s face. He died in a tempestuous flood,’

At least, admit you remember this.

You don’t?

Your memory, dare I say? is very selective!

VI

You swam through the gate of purgatory and washed clean your doubts in the waters of certainty. You were penurious in your comments, but, once it was suggested by Uncle, you agreed to call at the hospital where Misra had undergone an operation in which she lost a breast. (Her state of mind was such that she couldn’t determine how she “felt”. “Perhaps more like a man,” she said, half-laughing, “now that I have to have the chest bandaged forever.”) She lay in hospital, pained. You called on her, doubtful of your own reactions. You sat by her and held her hand in yours — you hardly knew what to say. Your conversations, needless to say, were replete with empty silences, unfilled spaces, incomplete dots, and inconsistent holding on to, or letting go of, certain consonants, before you pronounced the vowels preceding them clearly and accurately.

You remembered that, in the hospital corridor just before you entered her private ward, you had seen a young boy, aged five, walk into the Ladies’, escorted by his mother. You remembered thinking how, in sex, age mattered greatly. The women in the hospital’s Ladies’, you suspected, didn’t mind having amongst them a Homo sapiens of the male gender so long as he was small and as yet underdeveloped in so far as the male ego was concerned. And neither did Misra bother about you, when you were such a small boy yourself. Now, you could see how self-conscious she was, how prudent in her self-preservation, how cautious in her mannerisms, how womanly aware of the man in you. If you were honest with yourself, you would’ve requested that she showed you how much of the breast the doctor had removed — and you almost did so. Which was how you knew she couldn’t tell whether it was the left or the right the surgeon’s knife had eaten into. Should she make a display of it in the way those returning from the Ogaden war had exhibited the stump of the leg, the grazed forehead or the broken nose-joint? Should she, or should she not blame it on the war as everybody had blamed every misfortune or misdeed that befell him or her?

You said, your hand resting near her kneecap, “And how have things been with you?”

She spoke of what worried her: that she thought the nurse attending to her was related to someone from Kallafo and that she was mortally worried that the nurse might report on her or poison her food or mix wrongly, but deliberately (although it might appear innocently) all her medicines so she would take them and die of the poisonous mixture. But how was she certain that the nurse knew of her background? Because of the way she asked questions about Kallafo “without my ever mentioning the name of that accursed town, without my ever saying that I came from that wretched place”. This was what made her think that a woman with whom the nurse had spoken amicably was related to a male patient in an adjacent ward, a man who had come from the war in the Ogaden “without his manhood, for a bomb had blown off his testicles. And what use can a man make of a penis without testicles?” she asked, underlining, in her voice, the words “penis” and “testicles”.

Should I not tell that the nurse knew she was from Kallafo because Uncle Hilaal was the one who had filled in the form and that he had been told he might, in the end, persuade the hospital authorities to give a deduction on the basis of the patient’s coming from Kallafo? you thought to yourself.

“You believe that I am paranoid?” she asked.

You said, “Of course not.”

Would you help her if she were in terrible need? she inquired of you. Would you keep watch on the movements of people if this became absolutely necessary? Would you spill your own blood to save her? Would you kill those who were plotting to do her in? Of course you would. You wouldn’t take them to court or anything, but you would use the knife they had used to kill her in order to take vengeance? But you caught your breath with a view to slowing down the pace of the conversation and you asked why it mattered whether you would take her murderers to court or kill them yourself with your own hands and with the same weapon as they had used? She reasoned that almost all the courts in Somalia would set the culprits free because they had killed, on suspicion, a woman who was not Somali herself and whose innocence was harder to believe or even to account for.

“Be truthful,” you began to say, deliberately slowly “Be truthful and tell me what I must know if I must take vengeance. Did you or did you not do it? Be truthful.”

She shifted in her bed and you let go her hand. You could sense she had moved into that undefined space between a smile and a cry. She held her head up lest her nose dripped, lest her eyes emptied themselves of the tears welled up in them. She remained motionless but tense, the way one might when one is anticipating one’s system to emit a storm of a sneeze when one is in respectable company without a clean handkerchief.

“To think that you might suspect me of betraying” she said, once she could speak. “I would have thought myself incapable of doing any such wicked thing until somebody said I had done it.”

You didn’t say anything.

“To think that you could even suspect me of betraying…” And then she burst into tears, shaking a little. You held her hand tighter in yours, for you could feel the tremor in her body, you could sense the torment in her pained soul.

After a pause, you said, “Who was it that accused you of being a traitor?”

“That most wretched, most wicked man,” she swore.

“What’s his name?”

You could see how it hurt when she said, “That most sinful man.”

“His name?”

Again, she tilted her head forward so her chest wouldn’t pain her most awfully, you thought. And her body emitted a tremor that was total, like an earthquake’s. You were both in a room, somewhere in Kallafo, and it was you who was taking your body’s pained measurements, your body’s space, as the guide in your dealings with other people, for it was you who had been in pain.

She said, “I had trusted him, how I trusted him.”

“His name?” you said, speaking like one who would kill.

She finally said, “Aw-Adan.”

There was suddenly a power cut. The room became hot and stuffy and you couldn’t think of anything to say. Neither could she.

VII

A week later, when she was still in hospital, you showed Uncle Hilaal and Salaado your first completed drawing, because you thought you were satisfied with it. In it, there is a man of about sixty, with a loincloth for a wrapper, and he has, sitting on his lap, a hen. The man’s features clearly indicate his origin — he’s an Adenese. Behind him, there is a guava orchard and, standing purposelessly about, there are a few young boys, aged between ten and fifteen. It is obvious that the boys are waiting for something. But they are all looking up — some, evidently, at the blue sky, a sky peaceful as it is inviting; others at a hill upon whose most northern point is hoisted a mast flying a white flag.

To the left of the Adenese-looking man with the pointed features, there is a woman, larger than a quarter of the canvas. The woman’s body is divided into four squares and in each square, the artist manages to place an appropriate image. In one, a horseman is dropped to the floor and the horse rides the wind, eastwards; in another, a man in priestly robes is counting money, and re-counting it so he will at least get that right; in a third, there is an infant cradled in innocence and his stare dissolves in tears — but one can see where his stare is focused — at the huge woman; and in the furthest square, that is the fourth, the infant has grown bigger and is lying down on his chest and is learning to shoot a rifle. His eyes are now fixed on the hill above him.

To the east of the woman, the ocean. And at its shores, a festive crowd, shouting slogans of victory. Everybody here is looking at the sky. The day is bright with light but there is a solitary star and it is displaying only three of its five points. Is every member of this festive crowd wondering why all the star’s points aren’t there, why they have been amputated and by whom?

Further east but northerly, there is a young man posed in quiet elegance. He is big now. Slung round his shoulders, a gun. And beside him lies a woman who is in pain. To her left, blood. To her right, a knife, stained with caked blood.

VIII

A few days later, you did something you had never done before. You brought a girl home with you and took her to your room. The girl’s name was Riyo. She was a classmate of yours. Often, you went to her place. But today, you came to yours because her parents’ house was busy with people coming and going, for some event was taking place there and she didn’t have to attend it. Riyo was a year younger than you but you liked her a lot because she hardly ever asked you questions and you were gentle with each other. She helped you with your English, which she spoke almost like a native. She had been bom in Britain, where her father had done his higher education. She was weak in maths and physics and you drew her maps for her when your geography teacher assigned one as your homework.

Riyo was delightfully surprised to see your collection of maps and books. She also envied you the space you had in the house — a room all to yourself. She had known of these before, but confessed she didn’t believe them to be true. She suspected you made them all up just as some other boys she had met at school or elsewhere invented the stories they narrated to city girls who were impressionable. Of course, you were honest with her. As expected, you told her that you were likely to leave for the war front if called up. Her only comment was, “But aren’t wars dangerous? I’ve seen films in which people get killed. You won’t die, will you?” She was sweet and had an innocent look and her face wore a smile, as though forever. There was something worshipful about her eyes when she stared at you, listening to you pontificate on a subject you had discussed with either Hilaal or Salaado. Her face reminded you of a girl you saw in a dream the day you crossed the de facto border at Feer-Feer. She was the kind of girl you could trust, the kind that you could have as a companion and as a wife if you went on a sabotage mission or had a job to do. It was with her that you left your manuals from which you learnt how to dismantle a revolver or start a car without the proper ignition keys. Once, you left in her care a couple of Playboy4ike magazines. She kept them for days without even opening them. And when you showed her your paintings, she confessed she didn’t understand what they were about, but imagined she would love them if she did. She said, “You are indeed talented.” And you were very pleased.

Then you told her about Misra, She said, “Poor thing, I am sorry for her, I really am.”

“She is in hospital,” you said, “and I am going to visit her. Perhaps today” But you didn’t tell her why she was in hospital and neither did she ask And you said, “Would you like to come with me?”

“I don’t like hospitals very much, but if you like, I will come,” she said.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I

I was eating, with great relish, a slice of the sky and it was most delicious. It was blue — as steaks are brown when well done — and it lay in great heaps in front of me, with a star crowning it as though it were some sort of icing, a star already partly eaten. I was unhappy that I couldn’t determine how many points the star had had in the first place and how many it had now I knew I could have had the clouds for my dessert if I chose to. I also knew I was sitting on a water mattress in the shape of a water-bottle, which was why I sat unevenly, swaying every now and then, whenever I changed position or had a mouthful.

I wasn’t alone in the hall. That I could tell from the din of voices which served as background to my silent thinking. For instance, among the voices which I could easily identify were those of Uncle Hilaal, Salaado, Aw-Adan, my tutor Cusmaan — but not Misra’s. Also, there were a number of my own peers and some had grown taller than I, some thinner, some weightier. But their experiences were nothing compared to mine, their mental reach definitely not as wealthy and varied as mine. I didn’t know what to say to them. Their conversations with one another placed them in the geography of infancy whose maps and contours meant very little to them. I noticed there were no soul-searching questions asked, and that their lives centred on material acquisitions and on who owned what and how much this or that item cost. Not I!

The hall was very bright and I could see and identify every face I knew. Naturally, I looked for Misra — if only to ask her how she was; if only to apologize for my not calling on her of late. I thought I had seen her earlier, when not particularly looking for her. Now I went to the same spot. And there was something strange — I felt stupid when I realized that I had been talking to Misra’s dress though she wasn’t there herself. I cannot remember what I said. Now, I stared at the shadow the dress had made and I was more furious with myself. Then I heard the clamour created by a group of teenagers who had just arrived. Because I couldn’t make them stop their annoying chatter, I walked out of the hall myself.

When outside, I thought to myself that things had to be different from this moment on. You cannot eat the sky as you do steaks, have the clouds as your dessert and expect the universe to turn on its axis, lightening the days with its thundery storms, brightening them with its suns, darkening the night with its dusky hours. I discovered that, although there were hundreds of thousands of men and women partaking of the meal in which slices of the heavens were being served as the first course and the clouds as dessert, we had no common language in which to exchange views, or even communicate our suspicions or fears of this new reality — a reality in which God was but absent; one in which somebody might have had him as his meal. How blasphemous, I thought, and ceased thinking altogether. What? I had a slice of the sky as my first meal, did you say? You must be mad, somebody was bound to say. How could you? And you say you had “God Almighty” as your aperitif. You blasphemous fool. Get out of my sight before I lynch you. Surely, I said to myself, somebody was bound to be infuriated by these blasphemous pronouncements.

I stood by the window, which was open. The curtain blew in my face and teased it. Then I felt a drop of water on my forehead. I touched the spot with my dry index finger. Another drop and a third. These tasted of salt water. Did it mean that I was near a great body of water? I walked in the direction from where the smell of the ocean came. I walked through a field of ripe Indian corn. I plucked as I went. I plucked the shapeliest of them; I plucked the overgrown ripe corns and threw them aside. I trampled on anything that was in my path. I went on, treading blindly, my hands outstretched ahead of myself as though gathering, or receiving alms. My mind was bent on reaching the ocean whose smell grew less pungent the nearer I got to it. Finally, I could sense the grains of sand in my sandals. Although I couldn’t tell why I couldn’t smell the ocean in the blowing breeze.

And there it was, my feet in it, my cupped hands bringing its salty water so I might take a sip of it, taste it, feel at home in it. There it was for me to swim in and be received by it — large as a womb, warm as life, comforting as a friend.

And there she was too — Misra, I mean. She stood in the shallows and fishes came to her, playful fishes, going between her legs, the curve of her elbow; small and big fishes, and on occasion even a shark, timid as a lamb. She didn’t see me. She was busy feeding the fishes with her blood, the flow of her period. She was busy tending to the sickly among the fishes, feeding them with motherly care.

I was utterly in love with her.

I couldn’t comprehend how anyone could've accused her of betrayal.

Then I looked up at the sky. I resolved that we couldn’t have eaten it all. All was peaceful. And I wished I were a fish — wouldn’t she feed me? I thought to myself. She had fed me, had cared for me, loved me, brought me up on a body of ideas all her own. How could I bring myself to suspect her of any wrongdoing, how could I?

She was saying, as she attended to a sickly baby fish, “They came to my ward last night and threateningly said they would kill me — those people from Kallafo. And it frightens me.”

“I doubt it if they will,” I said. “They dare not.”

She said, “If and when that happens and I am dead and no more, please take note of what I say to you now — I have not betrayed. I am innocent of the crime. You are the one person I care about so much that I want you to know the honest truth. The rest may go where they please or believe whatever they will. I don’t care.”

The sea wore its blue gown. The sky had no hiatus. There were clouds in the heavens. And the moon was reflected in the water. And so was our shadow — Misra’s and mine — as we embraced.

No, I do not remember anything else!

I remember no flood!

I recall nothing else either!

II

The following morning, I awoke and there was a taste of blood in my mouth. I found it odd that, although my tongue scoured the area surrounding the palate and the floor of the mouth, I could not account for it. Had I drunk drunk blood when asleep? I brushed my teeth a ramber of times. My saliva was as clear as sperm. I sensed no pain anywhere in my mouth. I confess it caused me some concern. And I couldn’t help recalling the day I “menstruated”. But what could the reason be?

I was torn between sharing the secret with Uncle Hilaal and Salaado and a wish to keep it all to myself, since I didn’t tell it to Misra the first time this happened in Kallafo. I decided to make myself busy so I would occupy my thoughts with grander notions and I began to redraw my map of the Horn of Africa. (In my map, the Ogaden was always an integral part of Somalia.) Anyway, no sooner had I completed the first draft than I heard a knock on the door and I answered, “Please come in. It is open.” Uncle Hilaal entered, holding in his tight grip a teacup he had brought for me.

“Good morning,” he greeted.

I said, “Good morning,” and thanked him for the tea.

My uncle stared at the map for a long, long time, piercing it with his severe concentration. I wondered if he did so because he noticed that my map didn’t have a generic name, but a specific categorization, in that I had scribbled not “The Ogaden” but simply “Western Somalia”, thereby, in a sense, making The Ogaden lose its specific identity, only to gain one of a generic kind. I was surprised that his imagination had taken him to a destination very different from the one I had considered. He said, “Tell me, Askar. Do you find truth in the maps you draw?”

My mind became the blotted paper one had covered worthless writings with, but it took me nowhere, it mapped nothing, indicating no pathway to follow. I repeated the question aloud to myself as if to be sure, “Do I find truth in the maps I draw?” and waited to see if the coarse ink on the blotted brain would dry, and if I would be able to visualize a clearer image, of which I could make better sense myself. All I could see was a beam of dust the sun had stirred nearer the window. I remained silent.

Uncle Hilaal clarified his point more. “Do you carve out of your soul the invented truth of the maps you draw? Or does the daily truth match, for you, the reality you draw and the maps others draw?”

Now, I walked the pathways of my thoughts cautiously. I was an old man negotiating with his feet (he was nearly blind — longsighted as well as shortsighted — you may as well ask, how can that be? but he was!) the hazardous, slippery staircase of a condemned building. ancient as himself. I was sure everything would collapse on my head before long. With the confidence of one who’s regained possession of a mislaid identity: “Sometimes,’ I began to say, “I identify ^2 truth in the maps which I draw. When I identify this truth, I label it as such, pickle it as though I were to share it with you, and Salaado. I hope, as dreamers do, that the dreamt dream will match the dreamt reality — that is, the invented truth of one’s imagination. My maps invent nothing. They copy a given reality, they map out the roads a dreamer has walked, they identify a notional truth.”

Either he was dissatisfied with my reaction to his question or he didn’t understand it. After he had allowed me time to take a sip of the tea he had just brought in for me, he said, “The question is, does truth change?”

“Or do we? Do we, men and women and children, change? Or does truth?”

He said, coming closer, “Better still, who or what is more important: the truth or its finder? You look at a map, of the British colonies in Africa, say, a map whose pinkish portions competed in terms of size and imagination with the green which represented the portions of the continent under the French. Now compare the situation today with its ghostly past and someone may think that a great deal of change has taken place and that names of a number of countries have been altered to accommodate the nationalist wishes of the people of these areas. But has the more basic truth undergone a change? Or have we?”

In the meantime, I picked up an old atlas: Somalia Italiana, British Somaliland, French Somaliland, the Northern Frontier District (which was then a protectorate, administered separately from the rest of Kenya) and a larger Ogaden. And I remembered seeing a map a German cartographer had drawn as his country invaded and conquered more and more of Europe. In my mind, I compared this “temporary truth” of the German’s redrawn map with Somalia’s remapping the Ogaden as an integral part of the Republic when it held it for a few months. I compared them as “truths”, not as analogous points of rationalization. For in my view, there was a substantial difference — the Germans had no “truthful” right to reassign territories, redesign maps just because they overran these lands and subjected the inhabitants to their tyrannical regimentation, but I believed the Somalis had a “truthful” right to the Ogaden and, in a “just” world, wouldn’t have had to reconquer it.

Uncle Hilaal asked if I had heard of the name of Arno Peters? And of Eduard Kremer?

I said I had.

“And did you know that Eduard Kremer, who was the drawer of the 1567 map, introduced numerous distortions, thereby altering our notion of the world and its size, did you? Africa, in Kremer’s map, is smaller than Greenland. These maps, which bear in mind the European’s prejudices, are the maps we used at school when I was young and, I am afraid to say, are still being reprinted year after year and used in schools in Africa. Arno Peters’s map, drawn four hundred years later, gives more accurate proportions of the continents: Europe is smaller, Africa larger.”

He had laid his finger on the map, tracing the African continent’s projections from its Cape Guardafui in the Somali Peninsula down to the raped Cape in the South, up to North Africa, which once formed part of a Mediterranean world of values. The “truth” was, I thought to myself, that Africa had little or no place in the anciently mapped thoughts of a mini-world. And what was he doing? He was staring at the map and then at me. And I saw in his stare an ambivalence of a kind I had difficulty interpreting. His finger, however, lay on the Somali Peninsula — his finger, skeletal, feeble and without energy

Then he spoke at length and gave me a richer background, addressing himself to the Mercator projections of the world map and the image the cartographers imprinted on the imagination of billions of school-going populations anywhere in the world. He added, “There is truth in maps. The Ogaden, as Somali, is truth. To the Ethiopian map-maker, the Ogaden, as Somali, is untruth.”

Silence. My stare presently dwelled on the cup of tea, whose brim was mapped with a whiter, unskimmed milk, which, to both of us, indicated its undrinkability. As he took it away, he stopped, like one who just then remembered why he had come in the first place. He massaged his forehead and finally spoke. “1 meant to ask you if you wanted to come with me because I am calling on Misra. Do you?”

I thought for a minute or two. “Give me five minutes,” I said.

“You have ten,” he said.

III

As though it were an afterbirth, the sky lay in the secundine of the sea’s womb, it having been expelled in the act of parturition. And Uncle and I sat in the car, with the wipers going flik-flaag, one of them fast, the other limply slow and half-broken, and it poured very, very heavily with rain. I couldn’t tell why we were where we were, there was no reason I could give why Uncle Hilaal had decided to go in that direction. Could it be that we were both upset by the news that Misra had disappeared from her hospital bed? Perhaps “disappeared” is not the right word. Perhaps “taken away” is the right expression. But you have to know something in order to express it well, you have to have evidence so that you may describe things well or know what to do, or, for that matter, decide whether to think badly of someone, or a group of persons. Could it be, for instance, that she was kidnapped by the people whom she thought ill of, because she believed that they suspected her of betrayal?

“But what is one to do?” he would say every now and then, when we were both sadly silent for a long time. His look in my direction read like pages of appeal to me and it wasn’t difficult to decipher it. It read, “Since you've known her longest, since you know her a lot better than I, please tell me what to do.” In other words, he wanted me to be his guide in this.

However, it didn’t take long for it to come out that I didn’t know under what name she had entered the country and hadn’t bothered to ask her who her own contacts in Mogadiscio were. It was only then that one began to regret; that one said what should've been done in the first place; how I should Ve been kinder, more sensitive, more understanding; that Uncle should Ve been more inquisitive and, in a sense, tougher in his dealings with her and if need be more bureaucratically minded. And Salaado? Uncle and I appeared lost without her. It oc-curred to me that he was most definitely unhappy because she wasn’t with him to suggest what next course of action to take. We had driven around for quite a while looking for her. We had been to our house at least three times. We had called at the school where she taught and the principal said she had gone shopping. Since we didn’t know what she was buying, we didn’t know what market to go to when searching for her. As a matter of fact, while driving around. Uncle suggested I keep my eyes wide open just in case “she” was also walking amongst other people, in one direction or another. The “she” my eyes were intent on spotting was not “Salaado” but “Misra”. Although I thought things might have been eased a great deal once we saw Salaado. How we needed her, Uncle and I!

At the hospital, they said, three men had come and “taken her away” because “they” argued “she” wanted to go. When asked, Misra gave the response, herself, in the affirmative to the nurse. Did she look threatened, tortured, did she appear at all frightened? had inquired Uncle HilaaL The nurse wondered why she should have. Why should a woman leaving hospital of her own accord appear frightened? the nurse had argued. Of course not. “She was, to me, a woman ready to go for a quick dip in the sea,” said the nurse. “The three men were carrying towels — or something like towels anyway, and they were dressed in casual clothes and were addressing her in a friendly manner, each teasing the other and she, in turn, teasing them too.” (I wished I could've asked the nurse what language Misra and the men had communicated in, but I thought better of it because it might not have made any sense to her.) When did she leave the hospital grounds and how? No one knew in what — maybe a taxi, maybe a private car. The time recorded by the nurse on duty was precise to the second — eight thirty-five in the morning. Before the ward’s doctor made the rounds.

“What are we to do?” Uncle said.

We were still in the car and it was pouring with the heaviest of downpours I had seen in years. I thought he had looked, not in my direction, but at the sea when asking the question and I wondered why!

“Suppose they kidnapped her?” I said.

He was suddenly conscious of one thing — that perhaps there was nothing we could do — and he looked most unhappy “Well, in that case, well have to revise our strategy, won’t we? We must find out how best we can save her life. That is most essential. Save her life.”

“How?” I said.

He was relieved that it began to rain less heavily. He switched off the noisy wipers and sighed loudly. He drummed on the dashboard of the car, staring away from me, in silent concentration. “We could go to the National Security and ask that they intervene. I have some friends. I can tell them the whole truth, tell them it is a matter of life and death. In the meantime, we inquire around, see if we know anyone who might know anyone from Kallafo who might know the kidnappers.”

I was about to say something in disagreement when, suddenly, I tasted blood in my mouth again. I rubbed my tongue against the front of my teeth, down and under them too and tasted my saliva which, in my mind, was white, as spittle generally is. Without giving due thought to the consequences, I placed my cupped hands in front of me and spat into them, only to see that the saliva was actually not affected by the taste in my mouth. My uncle was puzzled. I wouldn’t help him at first. I spat out again. And saw, to my great relief, that it wasn’t red as blood.

“What are you doing?” he finally said, when he realized that I had repeated the process a number of times. “Are you all right?”

I said, “I don’t know.”

My tongue, in the meantime, was busy working the mouth and tasting the saliva, which the rubbing act had produced. “There is the taste of blood in my mouth,” I told him.

“Blood?”

“Yes, blood.”

“In your saliva, there is the taste of blood?” he asked, worried.

He seemed anxious about finding a link between the taste in my mouth and Misra’s disappearance. He reflected for a long time. He had an exuberance of expression, one moment delighted at discovering a link in his head; the following moment, unhappy because he couldn’t pursue the idea any further. He said, “Is this the first time ever?”

And he didn’t let me answer him. He held me by the chin, saying, “Open your mouth and let me see,” and was breathing heavily into my face, making me feel ill at ease. “Move your tongue around,” he said. I did as requested. “But it is white,” he suggested. “Your saliva is white. How can you taste blood in it?” he challenged.

I sensed in Uncle’s voice a helplessness, but I remained silent. It made me sad that I couldn’t explain to him the workings of my own body, that I couldn’t give him the reason why this most illogical of occurrences had taken place. Could I claim to know Misra better than anyone else when I didn’t know my own body, when I couldn’t determine what made me taste, in my white saliva, the redness of blood? I was sad that I couldn’t say, “This is I. This is my body. Let me explain how it works, why it behaves the way it does.” Or had I underestimated my body? Was it seceding from me, making its own autonomous decisions, was my body forming its own government, was it working on its own, independent of my brain, of my soul? Did we have to go to an arbitrator, say, a doctor, a psychoanalyst, who would determine why it was I had tasted blood in my saliva that day, in Kallafo, many years ago, at the same time as I jumped up in glee because Misra had seen and foretold a future, my future. Was my future in blood? Would I kill? Would I avenge the martyred warriors of Kallafo and therefore “drink” the blood of the one I kill?

Uncle Hilaal sat back, resigned. He said, “What do we do?”

“Let’s go back to Salaado,” I suggested.

At the mention of her name, he appeared animated with life. He was like one who had found the right road to self-confidence. He started the engine of the car and, clumsily, didn’t coordinate the clutch and gear shifts so the vehicle jumped and the ignition went off. Then the car wouldn’t start because he flooded the carburettor. Finally we got out. “Let’s take a taxi home to Salaado,” he said. “She’ll come and drive the car home herself.”

We walked away from the car in subdued silence. We walked for a long time and were unable to find a taxi. Which was just as well, for we had the opportunity to talk and think.

IV

I said to Uncle Hilaal that instead of thinking about Misra’s disappearance, I started becoming obsessed with “bodies”—human bodies, that is, my body, Misra’s, etc. I admitted that I could find an even subterranean link between bodies and Misra’s disappearance. This gave Hilaal a golden chance and he talked about Freud, Jung, Lévi-Strauss, Marx and Fraser, men, he said, “who’ve divided up the universe of thought amongst themselves, leaving little for us to contribute”. I think he quoted passages from each of these. I think he threw in other twentieth-century figures — poets like Eliot and Neruda, and “body poetesses” like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and “body novelists” like Toni Morrison and Günter Grass. He for-exampled me for what appeared like a long time and then we entered the tunnel leading to my subconscious. I don’t know precisely where, but I abandoned him in a dark corner in “my subconscious”, digging for psychoanalytical evidence. As if this would illumine an obscure section, he mentioned the names of Otto Rank, Wilhelm Reich, William James and Adler too.

At the thought that I had to read and know thoroughly everything these “men” had written about one’s relationship with one’s body, mind, sub- or unconscious, I said, “No, thank you. Millions of people live happily, believing that knowing more will not help them, but will rather stand in the way of enjoying themselves.”

“Nonsense,” he said.

“I understand it is in your material and intellectual interest to promote these names, for you to teach psychology at the university and to teach these thinkers’ findings to your students, yes — but…!”

“For example.”

I don’t remember what he said after this. I only remember my questions — queries which have become part of me in the way wrinkles are an integral part of somebody’s face, inseparable from it. It seems to me, when I look back on this conversation, that Hilaal, as though he were hard of hearing, gave his answers to questions I didn’t put to him. I didn’t let him get away with it, I thought I shouldn’t. I said, among other things, that I am a question to myself— and my body asked the first question. Was it salvaged from the corpse of my mother? What’s a body for? To worship God? To have sex, have children? Has anybody known a man who menstruated? What is it that is in the “mind” of a man’s uffthat makes it “rise” to the naked body of a woman? What’s in the touch of a woman’s breasts or thighs?

“Sooner or later, sex,” said Hilaal. What did he mean by that?

“No story is complete without sex; no story can be considered well told unless sex runs in its veins like blood in a living being. If sex is not present, then its absence indicates inhibitions, unless the symbols, motifs and metaphors that make the tale work, are such they narrate the story in a veiled manner. For example, Al-Macarri’s Letter of a Horse and a Mule. What’s more, no family can be happy without sex. And the sex of a child — a boy or a girl. Sex as honour. Good sex. Bad sex. Sooner or later, everything is sex. Religion organizes sex. That’s why society frowns upon and punishes unauthorized sex. The economics of non-industrial societies consider cattle and women as chatties, as properties that change hands. And sex costs money. To marry, you pay dowry, you give so many heads of cattle in exchange for what? For a hand? No. For sex. I keep asking myself if the Adenese in your story the one who raped hens and small boys, was simply stingy or was he beastly?”

“I don’t understand.”

He said, “Sex between the higher and the lower animals (that is between human beings and beasts) is taboo in all societies. I won’t go into the politics of apartheid in South Africa which essentially denies the humanity of the African. Nevertheless, there is an element of superiority and inferiority relationships in sex. The master has access to his servant/slave — Qorrax and Misra is a case in point — the teacher to his pupil — Aw-Adan and Misra. But when the Adenese copulates with his hen, he does something more than break a taboo. For this is substantially different from the one he breaks when he mates with small, non-consenting boys. The small boys belong to the higher-animal category and society frowns upon sex between two beings belonging to the higher-animal category. Sex between men (who are, in all traditional, i.e. male-dominated, societies, placed higher than women) and women is okay. Sex between Misra and her rapists, who themselves assumed the identity of baboons — is this sex between higher and lower animals?”

He scoured the area, looking for a taxi. None. He went on, “For example. In almost all these relationships, the woman occupies the lower rung. In bed, she is the one below, the one being made love to. Sex, sooner or later. God is male. All the prophets are male. And it is no accident that Prophet Mohammed worked for a woman who, in the end, he married and subdued. It is significant that he was an ummi—the Arabic word suggesting, at one and the same time, that he was illiterate and that he was a man of his mother’s people. You can deduce whatever Freudian conclusions you please. Sooner or later, at any rate, sex.”

Again, he fell into his “for-exampling” euphoria, talking about boys who because their rudimentary nipples grow visibly larger than other boys’, refuse to shower in the company of their peers. These boys are so obsessed with their bodies, they wonder if they are girls underneath the skin. Women who grow beards or moustaches early in their lives tend to worry about this too. But when a girl plays with boys and enjoys (with a certain immodesty, and, it must be said, panache) taking part in one tomfoolery or another, it is the parents who are preoccupied.

Suddenly just when I was about to start wondering why he was talking nervously and continuously he paused. I thought he, too, was anxious about Misra’s disappearance and this was why he was talking non-stop. But he surprised me. I knew, from the twinkle in his eye, that he had thought of something funny or wise. He said, “Do you know why sex bothers me, why I give it much thought?”

I said I didn’t.

He laughed. Then, “Because you come when you are not ready to go,” and he laughed at his own joke. I retraced his steps to before his first laugh. Oh what a fool, I thought to myself, when I got the joke. But I couldn’t laugh to my heart’s content because he had already moved on further afield, picking ripe fruits off trees older than the one planted by Misra the day I was born. How did I know that he had picked tasty fruits? Because he was tasting his “thoughts” like a peasant pouring a quarter of a pound of sugar into a mug of tea, one who is plainly after the sweetness of the hot, brown water, not the nicotine content of the beverage. However, he was speaking slowly, moving relaxedly in the spaciousness of his ideas, although he appeared to be full of mistrust, like a baby bom with its bottom first because it is sure someone will do an untoward thing to its sight.

His concluding remark was, “Truth is body.”

I stared at him questioningly. I didn’t understand him.

“Look at a man who is after a woman,” he said. “For example,”

“Yes?”

“The blood warms up, his thing rises, he loses his head, his concentration on any other aspect of life is nil. Watch him sneak into bed with her, spy on him courting her, listen to him tell lies to the woman, his victim — what have we here? A body that rules the mind — I almost said, the man. Religion forbids that we subordinate the ‘thinking’ faculties to that of lust. Why? Because, when one is making love, one doesn’t think about God, at least I don’t. Take a look at lovers together, look at the way they concentrate on each other’s demands, offering to each other bodies of sacrifice. To them, the world does not exist. God doesn’t. They do.”

A congenial smile. A taxi came into view. He waited. I flagged it down. No luck. It was hot and dusty. We stood in the shade of a tree. We were both thirsty and hungry But he was still talking — afraid of silence, I thought, keeping my mind and his busy with ideas so neither would think about Misra’s disappearance.

“Good sex. Bad sex. Adultery is a complicated science in Islam. To prove it, you must swear that a needle, not a camel, a needle, wouldn’t have found sufficient space between the bodies of the man and the woman and that his member was inside her. It’s not enough that the man and the woman were naked or that they were together, alone, in a room, no. It’s very unlslamic to give a man so many lashes on the strength of suspicions. So?”

This time, he looked at me as though I were a latter-day Ayatollah, giving adulterous men sixty or so lashes and stoning adulteresses. In any case, what did the “So!” ending in the ascending tone mean? Possibly, he was making a point, subtly — that I had no evidence that Misra made love to either Uncle Qorrax or Aw-Adan? And neither did Karin have proof? After allowing him time in which he indulged his vanity, I decided to return to the topic of “bodies”, making certain we kept Misra out of it. I said, “What irritates me about the human body is, you just don’t walk into a shop and say to a salesperson, ‘Look, I don’t like my foot, I want it replaced. What’s the cheapest you’ve got?’ You just don’t do that sort ofthing, you cannot.”

He fell for the trap. He said, “But you can. People in industrialized societies have begun making such demands on science.”

“You mean, replace the limb you don’t like any more with its plastic equivalent?” I asked, egging him on.

“You can have the extra fat in your body reduced, your pot-belly removed, your nose altered, you can have lots of things done. You can change most parts.”

“And the cost?”

“Well, you know!”

“Why, it costs more to replace a part than what one has paid for the whole. A part more expensive than the whole?” I argued.

He laughed. “How much did you pay for your body?”

The whole? The part? Uncle then found the tunnel in whose dark corners he had earlier discovered the pathways leading to my subconscious — and the tunnel led us finally to Misra. Had I not said that a part of me had died when I learnt that Misra had betrayed our trust? At last, we hailed a taxi whose driver recognized Uncle. He gave us a lift home.

Salaado asked, “Where’s the car?”

I told her what happened.

“Useless men,” she said and hopped into the same taxi to bring the car home. “The carburettor is flooded, can you imagine?” she was saying to the taxi driver, “and they just lock it up and walk away Useless men.”

Vapour and dust and smoking piston-rings of the taxi.

V

When Salaado returned, I was in my room, busy drawing (how did she put it) spaee-in-space-out-of-space, but was, at that point in time, in a mood to be interrupted — which she did. She looked me over. I wondered why and learnt, to my pleasant surprise, that Riyo and Salaado had met and that she had brought greetings from her. “And where did you meet?”

“She was going out of our house when I saw her.”

I said, “But why didn’t you ask her to wait?”

“Maybe she didn’t want to disturb you.”

There was a set pattern — I visited her and she came to see me only once. Had she heard about Misra’s disappearance and come to hear what news we had of her? “We talked a little,” volunteered Salaado. “Naturally, about you.”

“Yes?”

“She said, for instance, that she finds something elegant, something … er … how did she put it … gallant about your gaze — gentle, formal, sweet, but gallant.”

I said, “It’s very kind of her.”

She said, “I told her about Misra.”

“What do you mean? Do you know any more than we do?”

She shook her head. “No, I meant how she menstruated the first moment she met your stare when you were God knows how many hours old. And I agreed with her that you make women lose their hold on themselves, you disarm them with your look,” she said, and then stopped suddenly like one who wasn’t sure whether to continue or not.

“Riyo says she feels a small girl making passes at a boy not at all interested in her.”

Quick as a flash, I had to think of something that would make her change the subject, or at least go off it. I said, mimicking Hilaal's voice, “Sex, sooner or later.”

After a pause, she was apologetic. “I am sorry to disturb you,” she said.

Much in the same way a polite guest might insinuate the idea that if no one else is having the portion of meat still left in the serving dish …, I said something polite, “No, you’re not.”

She opened the door as if to go out and the odour of the garlic in the champignon provençale entered the room. The scent of the meal was so powerful, we both went and joined him in the kitchen.

At table, Salaado told the story of a schoolmate of hers who once said, in the presence of at least a dozen of his classmates, that he was going to commit suicide. He gave the precise day, date and minute when he would. The boy was in love with a girl, but she wasn’t in love with him. He said goodbye to each and every one of them and begged that they pray for his soul. “A month and a day later guess what happened?”

“The girl committed suicide?”

Salaado shook her head, no.

“He returned home alive?”

“Precisely.”

Hilaal remained silent. So I said, “A coward.”

“You must hear why he returned home alive.”

Hilaal's only contribution, “Why?”

“The boy said, touching his body all over, that what we saw when we looked at him was 'just body'”. His body was here with us, he said, but not his soul. We used to fall silent whenever he joined our groups. Little by little, however, it became apparent that there was something in what he had said — the boy had undergone very noticeable changes. Not only did he appear pale, bloodless, a man with no spine, a man with no fight in him, but there was external bodily evidence that he had changed. In the end, he wore away like the garments he had on. He wore away from underuse of brain and body as well. He’s still alive, all right. In fact, I saw him today, driving back from the hospital. Do you know what he was doing? He was walking the streets of his madness.”

I moistened my lips and felt anxious. Why did she tell us this story? There must be a reason, I thought, remembering the conversation Hilaal and I had had earlier on in the day Then, just in time, I saw my fork dripping with red juice — the beetroot’s. Salaado took in all that and then said, “You are wondering why I’ve told you this horror of a story?”

I nodded my head; Hilaal, his.

She said, “Expressing regret, Misra told me (I don’t know why she chose to confide in me and not Askar or you, Hilaal, but there we are — perhaps because I am a woman and you’re not — who knows!) anyway …”

Hilaal said, “What did she tell you?” and he was anxious.

“She told me that she had lived with a man, in Kallafo, an ‘Ethiopian’, please do not forget the inverted commas. He was a lieu-tenant, handsome, as Karin had accurately described him. Also, he came from the village that Misra was bom in. The two of them had shared a similar beginning — he was the ‘boy’ the Amhara nobleman had been searching for, the issue of a damoz union between the nobleman and the boy’s mother. As happens, generally in Indian films, they didn’t know of their beginnings until after they had fallen in love and lived together for nearly two years. Misra explained that she had withheld from him her origins and had given him the name of a different village right from the start. He was younger than her by a few years, was an Addis city boy, one who had attended the cosmopolitan city’s best schools — which was why, naturally, he was interested in his starting point. The story is much more complicated…” and she took a break from talking and looked from one to the other.

“Naturally. Incest is complicated and complex,” said Hilaal.

“You see, a number of things began to occur to her following your departure, Askar. One positive thing was that her periods were no longer escorted by excruciating pains as before. Nobody could tell her why. Another was, she had plenty of time, suddenly, and didn’t know what to do with it. That was when she met this young man.”

“The Romeo of Juliet, a dashing, handsome young man,” said Hilaal.

“He was seen entering or leaving her compound. She was seen with him in public. He was known to be a cruel man, insisting that they raze to the ground villages harbouring pro-Somali saboteurs. Defeat had already created disharmony among the Kallafo townspeople. And so, when the massacre took place, Misra said, she became the primary suspect. People said she had led him and his men to the hiding-place of the martyred WSLF warriors. But she swore on Askar’s life that she didn’t.”

Suddenly, the beetroot in my mouth tasted bitter. Not only was its colour red, but it tasted of blood, too. I was worried I might bring it up if I opened my mouth or tried to say something.

Hilaal asked, “Is her version different from Karin’s?”

“Not different in substance but different in their conclusions.’.

Hilaal continued, “She says she wasn’t there when the massacre took place and wasn’t the one who had led her Romeo to the hiding-place of the Liberation Front fighters?”

“Obviously,” said Salaado.

“We won’t know, will we?”

“I am afraid, no.”

There was a long silence. I rushed into the nearest toilet and found a basin. I was sick, but not for long. I lay in bed, flanked by Hilaal and Salaado. He was telling the story of man’s beginning-point — incest.

“If you believe in the Adam-Eve story in the Koran or the Bible, well, then there’s an aspect of it.” And his face darkened in wrinkled concentration. “I don’t know if it is Islamic or Somali, but there is the myth that Eve gave birth only to twins, a boy and a girl in quick succession, in order to populate the earth. Now the twins bom together, it is said, swapped the boys and girls with the sets immediately after them. But the day came when one of the twins, namely Cain, fell in love with his co-twin, whose stars had predicted was to become Abel’s wife. Cain didn’t want to swap. To marry her, he killed, committing the first murder, but not the first incest.”

“And that’s where we all began?” asked Salaado.

“Yes. If you consider Adam ‘giving birth’ to Eve, in a manner of speaking. After all, she was created from his rib, flesh and blood — in him, her beginning. Adam’s beginnings are in the command (i.e. the Word): Be! And he became. He was.”

I yawned. They left the room.

VI

I couldn’t help thinking that Salaado was inwardly happy that Misra had disappeared, although she hoped nothing bad would happen to her. To me, she was indulgently sweet, making no comments or references to my intended departure and no allusions to my romance with Riyo. As a matter of fact, it was Salaado who had the foresight to suggest that we leave our doors open. And she literally meant that — keep all doors wide open, just in case Misra returned when we were asleep. Misra pervaded our thoughts. This reminded me of my infant days — then I was deeply attached to her; then, our doors were left open. Nothing else meant anything: Maps; the Ogaden itself was reduced to a past so far away it occupied no space in my mind. Only Misra! All because she disappeared and because we didn’t know what had happened to her.

It transpired that we didn’t have her particulars. To the bewilderment of Hilaal and Salaado, it became obvious I didn’t know her father’s name. I knew the name of the Jigjigaawi man who raised her, then married her and who, in the end, she murdered. Surely, she couldn’t have used his name as her father’s! Then someone remembered that she had entered the country in disguise, under another name. What name was that? The one I knew her by, spelt as Misra or variations of it? Or the one Karin gave me? Even if we wanted, we had no name to report to the police as a “Missing Person”, nor did we have one to release to the press. Misra? Massar? Masrat? Massarat? What name can we find you under and where?

Sadly, I concluded I didn’t know Misra. I said so.

“No, wait,” Uncle said. But his voice had undergone a frightening change — it was like a person cut in two halves — you would want to look for the missing half. He added, “Let us not despair. Let us think.”

We were clumsy in the views we offered, we were helpless and misguided in our predictions. Salaado, at one time, set the dinner-table for four while Hilaal prepared the meal. We sat and waited, our eyes downcast as though we were saying grace. The wind spoke to us; the wind knocked on our doors which were not even shut, the wind made us go to the windows behind which we stood, our eyes, this time, scouring the space ahead of us, our minds attentive to any changing shadows, expectantly waiting for Misra to turn up and say, “I am sorry, I meant to tell you that I was going to call on a friend.” Each of us prophesied what would happen, but in each, she was alive and was well; in each she complained of a small irritant pain in the legs or the area surrounding the removed breast or her groin. Never did any of us suggest that she had died, or tell a story predicting that she might have been killed.

Suddenly, with a fury I had never associated with her, Salaado said, “We cannot be sitting here and speculating about the poor woman. We must do something.”

“What?” asked Uncle Hilaal/

Salaado was up on her feet and saying, “Well go to the police station.”

“And report Misra”s disappearance?”

Salaado very determinedly said, “Why not!”

“Too early. The police will say it is too early, that well have to wait for a couple of days or more. You can’t report someone as missing until after a reasonable period of time,” Uncle Hilaal said, his voice sounding emaciated.

Salaado wouldn’t be persuaded. The woman, she argued, didn’t know anybody else in Mogadiscio and was our guest. She was not well and couldn”t be said to have decided to go out for a walk or for a rendezvous with someone, she was in no position to do either. Three men, unknown to her, forced their way to her private ward, for which we were paying, and they frog-marched her out of the hospital.

“Two things,” said Uncle Hilaal, raising his fingers in a V-shape.

Salaado said, “One?”

“You don’t know whether she knew the three men, nor whether they frog-marched her out of the hospital. You haven’t enough information to go by,” he said, and waited for her to indicate that she was ready for the second point.

She said, “Two?”

“Will you tell the police the whole story? Will you tell them about her background? Will you talk about the suspicions, however unfounded, that she led the Ethiopian security forces to the WSLF warriors” hiding-place in Kallafo? Will you tell them this and more?” he challenged.

I didn’t know why then, but I found it odd that they both looked at me as if taking note of my presence for the first time. I acknowledged their stare by becoming more self-conscious than ever.

Salaado said, “He'll be the principal witness, won’t he?”

Uncle Hilaal nodded.

She sighed sadly and said, “I wish there was something we could do, short of pointing suspicious fingers at Askar or making life difficult for everyone. I wish she would just turn up, just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “l like her very much. She is a strong woman and Fm sure shell survive this and many more difficulties. Something tells me she will”

“Yes, she was a likeable, strong woman,” said Uncle Hilaal.

The taste of blood in my mouth dominated my mind and I cut myself a slice of bread and chewed it. I took a sip of water to chase it down my dry throat. My thoughts led me to a familiar territory — I was younger again, I was with Misra, and she was my universe, she was the one who determined the circumferences of my cosmos, her body was an extension of mine, my body her third leg as we slept and snored away time, my head her third breast as she rolled away from the sheet which had covered her earlier on. I wished I could find answers to the meaning of the taste of blood in my mouth; I wished I knew what her disappearance meant.

“Do you think the Western Somali Liberation Front has something to do with her disappearance?” I asked, naturally worried about what I might do if it had.

In unison, they both said, “Oh no, no, no.”

For four solid days, we waited to hear news of Misra.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I

Two days later

The eclipse was total — there was nearly eight minutes of primeval darkness. During this brief period, people sought one another’s company or tried to find refuge in the spacious word of the Almighty a word inside whose letters some discovered a shelter, a word in whose womb others obtained the required warmth, blood and love. The mosques began to fill with worshippers; the wealthy among the community of Muslims opened their gates to beggars whom they fed generously; those who were in love but had not yet decided when to marry proposed matrimony immediately their frightened souls were no longer depressed by the hour of trial, the hour of darkness; those who had planned to commit wicked perfidies undid the knots of their conspiracies, repenting the regretful time spent away from their Creator. In short, the streets of Mogadiscio were empty of strollers, the markets of buyers or sellers, and the mosques filled with men, the homes with women. And dogs barked unceasingly, afraid for their canine souls, donkeys brayed in fright whilst horses were seen running, as though mad, in the streets of the virtually empty centre of the city. “The apocalypse, now as always,” said Hilaal, himself falling into a dark of depression, “sooner or later, sex!”

And Askar looked up at the heavens and saw the moon’s shadow obscuring the sun’s light. It was a most unique experience — a darkness gathering like dust, a rim of faint light, the sky dark as the eclipsed pathway, the moon moving, its shadow racing across the earth from one horizon to the other. He was indeed fascinated by all this, which he thought he would never forget, like one doesn’t forget a most distinct personality one has encountered only once. Askar would preserve the memory of this moment, forever, in his head, a thought treasured among his most memorable thoughts, an event amongst the events to be remembered forever and after, like the stare Misra held “preserved” in her vision of him the day she found him, the “stare” which focussed on the centre of her guilt and made her “come” in blood. “Sex, sooner or later.”

However, it pained him immensely to see Uncle Hilaal looking so unwell, silent and depressed. (Salaado had gone out to do the week’s shopping and hadn’t returned as yet.) It seemed as though Hilaal had suddenly aged. He walked about as old people do, looking straight ahead of himself, attentive, as seniles are, to the space surrounding his body, his feet firmly on the ground, his back a little too stooped, his gait shufflingly slow and predictable, his gaze absent-mindedly dwelling on the items of furniture in his peripheral vision. “I am depressed, like a woman in season,” he said. “It’s the eclipse, I'm afraid.”

Depressed, Hilaal’s voice had undergone substantial changes. For one thing, it lost its charm; for another, it had thinned. But why should an eclipse have such an effect on Hilaal’s psychology? Why should it play havoc on his bodily constitution? Why should his migraine be so acute as to create an imbalance in him, upsetting his view of the universe, impairing his sight, imposing a vertiginous viewpoint on every thought he had, distorting his perception of realities, why? He found no analogous cases in his annals with which to compare Hilaal’s state, save his memory of Misra in season. Her body ached, her hands pressed the kernels of her breasts, she sat for one second, only to rise a second later, remaining restless all the time, losing her temper often. Hilaal dropped into a black hole, deep as Misra’s depressions — Hilaal, whom he had never known to be unwell.

Presently, Hilaal walked fast past Askar without acknowledging his presence. A moment later, he walked past him a second time, but slowly, like somebody carrying a wobbly weight whose body leans forward on account of the burden. But he didn’t speak to Askar. And when he did, which was later, he pointed at things, he stared blankly at items as though he had forgotten what they were called. For instance, he touched his stomach, then made motions suggesting it was running. A little later, he tapped on his forehead and Askar wasn’t sure if he meant to say his head ached or that he had gone mad.

Askar was not affected by vertigo nor did his stomach run nor did his head ache. He retained his water intake, his body repelled nothing, his bladder expelled no liquid of any colour, unnecessarily. He went back and forth, making himself useful, offering assistance when he could, now a towel, now a glass of water, now a word of consolation, of assurance, now moral support and now physical support as Hilaal walked back from the toilet for the nth time. Askar thought he was as efficient as Karin, remembering how she plied the road between a woman in season and an old husband who lay on his back, disabled, invalid.

When it seemed Hilaal was feeling a little better, towards early afternoon (roughly siesta-time), Askar asked him how he was. Hilaal confirmed he was feeling better. Then, “I wonder how she is,” said Askar, without identifying the person to whom he was referring.

“Who?” said Hilaal, saying the word so fast he spat it out, as though it were hot and bitter at the same time.

Askar (was it deliberate or no, no one could tell) disregarded the question and went on, “And if she is well.”

“Who?” repeated Hilaal forcefully, his voice hoarse, his dry throat making a grating sound — something between a cough and the clearing of a throat. Askar wondered if, together with his intellectual sobriety, Hilaal had misplaced or been deprived of his memory too. Just at the moment Askar was remembering Misra’s depressive seasonals, Hilaal started. It was as if (Askar thought) Hilaal were a woman whose advanced pregnancy had given her a kick in the ribs. No, no, thought Askar. It was as if he was one of those robots which, before speaking, made hiccupping sounds, alerting their audience so they kept themselves ready for their messages. Hilaal said, “Do you mean Salaado?”

For a long time, Askar had been wanting to pass water but he hadn’t the will to. Also, he thought Hilaal might need him for something or other. So instead of saying, “No”, because he was referring to Misra and not to Salaado, he said, “Yes”.

Hilaal was disappointed. Would mentioning code-name “Misra” have lifted Hilaal momentarily out of his depression? Where was Misra anyway? Or how was she? If she were here, who knows, she might have suggested that blood-letting would do Hilaal a lot of good. Askar said, “I hope Misra, too, is all right.”

At the mention of Misra’s name, Hilaal stirred involuntarily. Then, “Yes, where the hell is she?” said Hilaal

Askar rushed to the toilet before he wet himself.

II

He was in a garden which was lush with foliage and plants with memories of their own. And he recognized the tree that had the same birthday as himself, he sat in its shade which was sweet, ate what he could of its ripe fruits. Then, in a revelatory moment such as that which accompanies the unexpected recall of a forgotten name belonging to somebody who had once been one’s most intimate friend, Askar remembered who had planted the tree — Misra. His tongue lay in a mess of blood; his head began to whirl about, giddy, his eyes red like dried blood, a mouthful of which had already turned his mouth bitter — as bitter as guilt! What began as a reunion of rejoicing with a recalled Misra, ended in anomalous bodily behaviour. Where did the mess of blood in his mouth originate? Why this giddiness? Or the cakes of blood which he tasted in his guilt?

Then the scene changed. He was standing at the centre of the garden’s clearing and was giving the appropriate names to the trees and plants just as Adam might have done on the first day of creation. There was no tension in him. No memory of Misra. No bitterness, no taste of blood or guilt in his mouth. If anything, he was happy, He was wrapped in the skin of a goat whose meat he was sure he had eaten. He could not remember the names of the two women who had fed him the goat’s meat. But the skin was mapped with routes which led him back to his past, a map which took him back to his own beginnings, a map showing earth roads, the rivers which rise in the region, a map whose scales followed a logic known only to himself.

And he was being entertained. There was a vulture, gamey, playful, with a vicious look when it displayed its anger, indicating that it wasn’t happy with the fresh alterations in the rules of play, There was a she-dog, one Askar remembered as belonging to a jealous neighbour, and named Bruder. The game consisted of a piece of meat being dropped from a given height. The vulture and the dog would start from the same point, marked on the earth with red chalk; obviously the dog on the ground, the vulture above it. A shot would sound (Askar couldn’t tell where the shot was coming from or who was firing it), the piece of meat would emanate from on high like birds in flight, dropping faeces of fright. Six out of ten, the dog got the meat. The crowd applauded loudly. But what did it all mean? he asked himself.

As if to answer, the Adenese and Uncle Qorrax came into view. The Adenese had a shoe in his mouth and he was biting it hard. There was a heavy man riding his back, and this man gave him a kick in the ribs every time he sensed he was about to let the shoe drop. Walking behind them, as though on a promenade, Uncle Qorrax, who was barefoot. And the sand was hot and it pained him to walk without shoes. Which was why he couldn’t catch up with the Adenese who had a shoe in his mouth. In all probability, he wouldVe accepted the offer of a single shoe if he were given it. After all, his feet were sore and the earth had begun to enter and fill the cuts in his bleeding soles.

Before the procession ended, there appeared — sitting on a throne, majestically, rested-looking, like somebody at the end of all suffering, somebody who can only expect things to improve — Misra. She waved to Askar. He waved back. She alighted. He joined her. She was happy to see him again. They hugged. But her gaze was as distant as the nether heavens. Was she longing to return from whence she came? She was the ruler of this land of games, of maps telling one’s past and future, of vultures fighting a duel against dogs. A man approached. He was an old man and was holding his back, which perhaps pained him. From the small distance separating them, Askar could tell the man was hard of hearing. The man reminded him of another to whom he put a question about time, pointing at his wrist-watch. Obviously, either the man didn’t get the question or he deliberately heard it wrongly. For he began talking about a blood-pressure complaint and said to Askar, “Are you a doctor by any chance?” What did he (Askar) want?

The man spoke toothlessly, saying the same things over and over again. But what on earth was he saying? Apparently, he was Karin’s husband and he recognized Misra and wanted to greet her, and, if others hadn’t said so before him, he wished to thank her on behalf of the community of Kallafo for the good things she had done for young Askar.

And horses neighed in the distance. And dogs barked nervously. And dust stirred. And a horse dropped its rider. And from behind the dust emerged a young girl riding a black horse with white nostrils. And it was night. Then it was day. And ghosts came. And ghosts went. And a host of ghosts replaced one another. At times, said the young girl becoming old, I was one of these ghosts, leaving your doors open, allowing yesterday’s experiences to enter and mingle with today’s, and for the past and the present to encounter in your head — the dreamer. Like the sun’s rays and the season’s dust mixing in a room facing east. Some of the ghosts had large hips and they carried you; some fed you; some told you stories. At times, I knocked on your doors of sleep and woke you up. But now I am dead and you are alive and that’s all I hope to be able to do — knock on your doors of sleep, enter into bed and be with you until your eyes open and the door of sleep is shut.

Misra said, “All that one hopes to remain of one is a memory dwelling in someone’s head. In whose will I reside? Those who brought about my death, or yours?”

“But do these notions, I mean those of death and a memory of me, do these two notions come together in your head like keys come with locks in our thoughts?” he asked.

Alas, no answer. Somebody knocked on his door of sleep — Hilaal.

III

Her body was prepared for burial and Askar was not present. They buried Misra and he was not at the funeral. That night, when he was taken ill suddenly, he resisted being admitted to hospital. Indeed, it came to pass that he and Misra were in the same hospital — he in the men’s ward, she in the sexless ward — the mortuary — but in the very wing he spent the night in, although she was in the basement and he in a private room on the third floor. He was alive and she dead; he, very hot, because of his high temperature, whereas she was in a freezer and therefore ice-cold. He, who had known of her lying in state in the mortuary in the basement, saw her in his dream and she was a queen, on a throne, leading a procession of sorts, an event of a kind. Did Misra see him in her dream? Do the dead dream?

Told about the burial and the funeral, he asked, “Why did you not shake me out of my fever?”

Hilaal said, “We were worried.”

“Worried?” and as he looked up he saw Salaado enter. She, always longer coming, always arrived later, because she had had to find parking-space in the hospital yard, or out of it. She kissed him lightly on the forehead and smelt of smoke, as though she was the MC at a cremation.

“How’s he?” she asked Hilaal, as though he were not present or couldn’t understand Somali or was hard of hearing or was deaf. The conversation, in fact, went on like this for a while.

Gently, Hilaal said, “He’s asking questions.”

“Why he wasn’t told of the burial?”

“And of the funeral too.”

Salaado began, “Well, he wasn’t in a …” and then stopped, realizing he was there, right in front of her, propped up in bed, with a book in hand, using his index finger as a page marker,

Hilaal said, “Speak to him.”

She felt awkward, like somebody gossiping about a person — imagine that person turning up and hearing everything said about him. The lump of embarrassment in her throat didn’t clear for a long time. Then, “We were worried, let’s face it,” and she addressed herself to Hilaal, primarily to Hilaal, who looked away and at Askar. “The slightest tremors shake you. You’re like moist earth at the centre — soft. We were worried what you might do if you saw her mutilated body and what that might do to you for the rest of your life.”

Askar looked at Hilaal. Did he want Uncle to confirm what Salaado had said? Hilaal remained silent, like a husband whose cues have been taken by his wife. “Mutilated? Her body was mutilated?”

Salaado nodded, yes.

“But you said not even sharks touched her?” he said to Salaado. Then to Hilaal, “You were there when she said that. The day of the eclipse. The day she prayed, and you fell ill, and I was well.”

Hilaal reiterated Salaado’s worry. “Yes, we were worried. For example. You were taken ill during the tragic weekend when the Ethiopians, helped by their Cuban, Adenese and Soviet allies, reoccu-pied the Ogaden. The slightest earth tremor shakes you, the slightest gives you the shock of an earthquake, your temperature runs high, your blood pressure goes up, your eyes become bloodshot — and we don’t know what to do.” And he hugged Salaado and when their bodies had the shape of a bracket, one of them took his right hand, the other his left and the three of them formed a circle.

As they retook their respective seats, Askar said, “Tell me how her body was mutilated? Tell me all. What was missing? Why? Tell me all. Tell me everything you know.”

They consulted discreetly. Salaado was the first to speak. Hilaal would stay directly behind her and would help, confirming her story if need be, changing it slightly if necessary “We suspect there may have been foul play of a wicked kind,” said she, her voice shaken, like someone regretting he had said more than he intended. A pause. She turned to Hilaal. It was obvious she was seeking his assistance. “Please,” she said, taking his hand.

Hilaal took over. “The heart was missing. For example,” And he unclasped his hand from Salaado’s grip. “We suspect they performed a ritual murder on her body. Perhaps we are wrong. We haven’t the evidence. But the removal of the heart took place before she was tossed into the ocean — already dead. That is, if we’re to take our suspicions very seriously.”

Askar knew that when one of them talked, the other kept an eye on him. His expressions were under scrutiny, his movements, his gestures were being studied for clues as to what he might do. He was all right. He could prove to them that he was. He asked, “What did they say at the mortuary?”

Hilaal said, “For example. In view of the complications involved, not knowing how not to have you go through the traumatic experience of court cases, police interrogations and other related bureaucratic tortures, we decided — in view of the political trapdoors which would open, let you in but keep us locked out or vice versa — in view of all this, we decided not to raise the issue of ritual murder, or a missing heart or a mutilated corpse. But we could not deny that she existed, that she was who she was… er… to you, that she became whom… er… you had suspected her to have become and that you are to us … er… who you’ve been — a son. In view of this, for example, we decided, Salaado and I, that is, as though we believed we had your consent too — we decided, we would not raise these burning questions or ask for an investigation team to be appointed and a case opened — no. It pained our conscience, for instance, but we committed an unforgivable felony.”

Askar asked, “What’s that?”

“We bribed the technicians at the mortuary to silence them,” he said, his tone sad, adding, “You might well ask why we did all this? We did it so that the healing wounds in your soul won’t get festered again. In other words, we did this for the good of all concerned. Considering, as I said before, for example, the bureaucratic, political and other complications. And conscience too.”

Salaado agreed, “Yes,” and looked up as though she were reading the transcript of Hilaal’s aforespoken statement. “We talked about it, yes. It pained our conscience, but that was the best we could do, we thought.”

“That’s right,” said Hilaal, who was in a supporting role, agreeing with Salaado in turn. Askar wondered — had they rehearsed all this before they called on him?

“Do we know who they are?” he asked, speaking soberly.

Salaado said, “Not any more than you know.”

“I don’t,” he said.

“Neither do we,” said Hilaal

And then Askar said to Salaado, following a brief pause, “I don’t recall. Possibly you've told it and I’ve forgotten it. But how did you know that her body was at the mortuary?”

Salaado was overcome by a sense of despair, for there was a gap between what she knew to be true and what she suspected he would think she knew. In other words, she didn’t think he would believe her. “I was in a shop when …” but then she shrugged her shoulders, saying, “What’s the point, you won’t believe a word I say.”

He said, “Why not?”

Like someone turning in his tormented sleep, Salaado uttered an indistinct sound, one between noises made by some people who talk in their sleep and others who speak to their interlocutors in their dreams.

Askar asked, “Are you hiding something from me?”

“No.”

“Well. Tell it then.”

She said, “When I told him, Hilaal didn’t believe my story.”

Askar said, “Who am I? Hilaal?”

And Salaado pulled herself together at once. She appeared sufficiently apologetic and wished he hadn’t pushed her thus far. They both sought Hilaal’s comment — they understood he was determined to stay out of it. She then spoke, slowly, “I was in this so-called supermarket, when I overheard two women, both nurses working at the general hospital known as Digfar, talk about what one of them described as the corpse of a woman, black as dead shark’. At first, I took no interest, save the gentle curiosity which the description stirred in my otherwise indifferent mind, and I half-listened to what she was saying. But the more I heard the more certain I became it was Misra they were discussing. What decided it for me was the mention of a mastectomy operation, a recent one, in which one of the woman’s breasts had been removed. How I gained the few paces separating me from them, I cannot tell. What words I used to talk to the nurses, I cannot remember. I rushed straight to the hospital, found a doctor I knew and went, with him, to the mortuary. It was Misra — a corpse no one claimed. She had been reduced to that.”

He said, “And you claimed her body?”

“I had her removed from the section of ‘unclaimed corpses’ to one in which a daily fee is paid. There’s a difference between the rich and the poor, even when dead. The poor stink,” she said, disgusted at remembering the state of filth and stench the “Unclaimed Corpses Section” had been in. She went on, “I was sick. I couldn’t come home straight, I didn’t want to infect you with the sickness which had come upon me. I was telling the story of my disgust and despair, the story above all of Misra’s death, when the eclipse happened. I joined everyone else in prayer. I’m afraid I couldn’t remember the text of the Faatixa, let alone any other verse of the Koran. I put this down to my mental state — but I wouldn’t be able to remember any even now. Can you believe it? I, Salaado, prayed, together with everyone else. I was true to my name — Salaado, meaning prayer or devotions.”

Silence. No questions from Askar, nothing. His back straight, appearing in great discomfort, his Adam’s apple moving up and down, gulping, sending down his throat the taste of blood, the saliva of his guilt. “Are you all right?” from Hilaal.

“I am,” he said.

But he was, and also seemed, very upset.

“What’s wrong, Askar?” and Salaado touched him gently on the knee. A gesture of supplication? Why?

He said, “Do you remember what verse of the Koran, what chapter was read by the Sheikh who presided over the rituals of Misra’s funeral?” addressing it this time to Hilaal.

“What verse, did you say?” he said, half-looking at Salaado as well, with eyes which turned on the axis of the repeated query. “Verse, did you ask, Askar?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Do you remember the verses the priest supervising over Misra’s janaaza read over her corpse?”

“No.”

“Could we ask him?”

“We don’t know … er … didn’t know who the priest was. Someone suggested him. He came, he did his thing and left. We didn’t spend any thought on that aspect of the janaaza, we’re sorry” said Salaado.

“What’s all this, Askar?”

He reflected for a moment. Then, “Because I might have suggested a couple of verses. If you had come and shaken me out of my fever.”

Almost indifferent, Hilaal asked, “Like what?”

“Verses fourteen, fifteen and sixteen of Sura Luqmaan.”

No one was in any mood to speak for a while. Salaado and Hilaal apologized to him profusely All three joined hands and they hugged, wrapped in one another’s bodies and clothes, half-struggling, like a crowd upon whom a tarpaulin had collapsed.

IV

He was back — in his room, at home. He was back to the warm space between his thoughts — warm as the space between the sheets covering him. He was back to his unread books, back to his unstudied maps on the wall in his room — at home. He was back to his mirrors, also on the walls, mirrors reflecting only the present, but not good enough to travel to a past beyond the tin amalgam plating their backs. He was back to the unplanned future — a future without a Misra; back also to the unfilled, unsubmitted forms from the Western Somalia Liberation Front and that of the National University of Somalia. The empty space of the twenty-one-odd questions stared back at him, preventing his brain from dealing with them, scattering his memory, like dust in a whirlwind, to the seven horizons of the cosmos — a world without a Misra!

He was standing before a mirror. He saw an unhappy face — his. It “wore” like a mask. He thought there was something absurd about a sadness confined only to the face, a sadness which wouldn’t spread to the rest of his body; something absurd about a face whose features had become as overwhelming as a spider’s abdomen, a spider with virtually no visible shanks and whose large belly spins webs — and fables with morals. So, he asked, who was Misra? A woman, or more than just a woman? Did she exist as I remember her? Or have I rolled into a great many other persons, spun from the thread leading back to my own beginnings, incorporating with those taking one back to other beginnings, other lives? Misra? Masra? Misrat? Massar? Now with a “t”, now without!

He now studied the map as reflected faithfully in the mirror before him. So many hundred kilometers to Kallafo, so many to Jigjiga; so many from Jigjiga to Hargeisa; and from Hargeisa to Mogadiscio; so many from Mogadiscio to Marsabet in the Somali-speaking part of Kenya. Maps. Truth. A mind travels across the graded map, and the eye allots the appropriate colours to the different continents. The body takes longer to make the same journey. Decimal grids, according to Arno Peters, are vastly different from Mercator’s map, in existence since the middle of the sixteenth century. And there is a big, painful difference, thought Askar, between the Somali situation today and that of the early 1940s when all the Somali-speaking territories, save Djebouti, were under one administration. And so it was again, for a brief period in 1977-8, when the Ogaden was in Somali hands. But the Somalis, government and people, were busy fighting a war on the ground and in the corridors of diplomatic power and no one released an authorized map of the reconquered territory. Truth. Maps.

He heard footsteps approaching but didn’t turn to see who it was. Two faces entered the mirror’s background — Salaado in Hilaal’s jellaba, he in her caftan. They had been having their afternoon siesta but hadn’t been away for long.

“Would you like to come with us?” asked Salaado.

“Where are you going?”

Hilaal said, “We’ll buy a goat.”

“What for?”

Salaado said, “As an expression of thanks to the gods that protect us. We, too, like all the Mogadiscians, have decided to slaughter a goat as sacrifice.”

Hilaal added, “There are other reasons. For example,”

“Like?”

Salaado said, “Sac-ri-fice. It does cover a large area — the notion of sacrifice, I mean. Hilaal and I have talked it over and he, too, thinks so.”

There was no doubt about it, she had become religious.

He repeated the word to himself, like a blind man touching the items surrounding him, a man familiarizing the senses of his body with what his mind already knows. And he saw. He saw Misra divine, he saw her stare at the freshly slaughtered goat’s meat, and he saw her tell a future when the meat quivered. The scene changed. Now he saw her open a chicken, he saw her give him an egg which she had salvaged from the dead fowl’s inside and he saw her talk of a future of travels, departures and arrivals. Again the scene changed. And he saw a horse drop its rider, he saw a girl kidnapped, he saw the girl grow into a woman ripe as corn, he saw the hand that had watered the corn pluck it, then eat it — he saw the man of the-watering-hand murdered. Sac-ri-fice! For Misra — a mastectomy; Hilaal — a vasectomy; Salaado — removal of the ovaries; Qorrax — exaction of blood, so many ounces a-bleeding; Karin — a life of sacrifices; Aria and Cali-Xamari — his parents — their lives; the Somali people — their sons, their daughters and the country’s economy. In short, life as sacrifice. In short, life is blood, and the shedding of one’s blood for a cause and for one’s country; in short, life is the drinking of enemy blood and vengeance. Life is love too. Salaado and Hilaal are love. Aria — the earth; Qorrax — the sun in its masculine manifestations; Hilaal — the moon; Salaado — solemnity, prayers, etc.; Misra? — foundation of the earth; Karin — a hill in the east, humps on backs; Cali-Xamari — a return to a beginning; and Riyo — dreams dreaming dreams!

Now he saw faces, now he didn’t see them; now he saw shades — like larvae under a microscope, these moved in the mirror. He started. When he calmed again, he took an unperturbed look. Hilaal and Salaado were in the doorway. They had changed into decent clothes to go out in. “Are you coming with us or aren’t you?” Hilaal asked.

“I have one question to answer before I set foot out of this house,” said Askar. He fell silent and couldn’t help feeling they were studying his movements with some concern.

Salaado said, “What is the question?”

“Who is Askar?”

The question made sense to its audience a minute or so later. No one said or did anything for a long time, as though in deference to the question which had been posed. In any case, there fell the kind of silence a coffin imposes upon those whom it encounters during its journey to the cemetery. And the sun entered the room they were in, in silence, then a slight breeze, smelling of the sea, entered in its wake, whereupon the dust and the rays merged, like ideas, and these were, like faces bright with smiles, reflected in the mirror. Askar was about to break the silence when he noticed that clouds, dark as migrating shadows, swooped down upon the rays of dust in the mirror, like vultures going for a meaty catch. Tagged on to the tail-end of the clouds, travelling at the speed of a vehicle being towed, the moon. Then …!

Then two other shadows fell across and obliterated the clouds and Askar was in no doubt that the men, to whom these belonged, one tall and ugly, the other short and handsome, were in police uniform. It was the tall one who spoke first. He said, “Which of you,” looking from Hilaal to Askar, “answers to the name of Askar?”

There was no time to indulge in metaphysical evasions, no time to consider the rhetorical aspects of one’s answering to a name. Without looking at Hilaal or Salaado, whose lips were already astir with prayers, Askar: “It is I.” And after a pause, “Why?”

It was the short one’s turn to speak. He said, “We are from the police station nearby, Giardino. We have questions to put to you. Please come with us.”

Hilaal moved nearer the short constable. He asked, “What questions? And in what connection, pray?”

The tall one, who was probably senior in rank and age, said, “Do the names Misrat, Aw-Adan, Qorrax and Karin mean anything to Askar? This is the question,” and he went nearer Hilaal. “I suppose you are Hilaal and that is Salaado?”

Everyone was quiet. In the meantime, the short constable bent down (maybe to lace his boots) but Askar felt as if the man was digging out of the earth roots of shadows, short as shrubs. The constable’s body shot up suddenly, his back straightened and the room was awash with sunshine. Hilaal said, his voice thin and tense, “What are we waiting for? Let’s go.”

Giardino was half a kilometre away and they walked, Askar, Hilaal and Salaado ahead, and following them, like jailers prisoners, the two police officers. Above them, an umbrella of clouds, reassuring as haloes, and on their faces, shadows long and crooked like question marks. The tall constable, who took upon himself to lead the last ten metres of the walk, wore an anklet of shadows round his feet, treading on stirred memories of (Askar’s) dust. They entered the station in silence.

A third police constable, sitting behind a typewriter, asked Askar, “What is your name?”

“Askar Cali-Xamari.”

And that was how it began — the story of (Misra/Misrat/Masarat and) Askar. First, he told it plainly and without embellishment, answering the police officer’s questions; then he told it to men in gowns, men resembling ravens with white skulls. And time grew on Askar’s face, as he told the story yet again, time grew like a tree, with more branches and far more falling leaves than the tree which is on the face of the moon. In the process, he became the defendant. He was, at one and the same time, the plaintiff and the juror. Finally, allowing for his different personae to act as judge, as audience and as witness, Askar told it to himself.