The Atlas

SPARE PARTS

The train passed slowly away from flat white-sand-floored towns whose trees spread lushly pubic shadows, and then it whistled and began to accelerate, leaving a squat palm askew, slicing the pale blue sky a thousand times with the glittery slats of its blinds. The horizon was slate-blue like a thunderhead painted with dust. From those sandy towns men in tank tops and shorts stared out, sunglasses covering half their faces, and they absorbed the passing train darkly from behind baseball caps. At Caborca the men who stared wore cowboy hats. They leaned in the narrow strip of shade adjoining the wall (the wall was yellow on top, brown on the bottom). Just past the station, men in cowboy hats lay wearily in the space between offices. The train kept pace with another track, grown stale with wiry grass that writhed and whipped in that hot wind that came from the dry hills. The train passed a wall made of old tires. Then it went away.

There was laundry under a tree in a sunken place. On the far side of the road, which had accompanied the train across dry riverbeds, began a pale-green-grassed desert befogged by trees. Blue and red bush-pocked conehills lay ahead. Once those were reached, the road would end at last, like a wailing lover who'd run alongside as long as she could, until she collapsed breathless in the desperate sands. But for now the road went on, in panting little zigzags which never grazed the train's progress.

The train crossed a slanted plain which ended in gross knobs and knuckles. These were the hands of other dying roads, which went down into the earth; they went nowhere, but their hands refused to be buried; they clutched at distances they could never catch. The train left them all behind.

Inside, the music streamed on as reliably as propaganda. In the evening, when the shadows of the blinds curved around his arm like vertebrae, the songs seemed friendlier, perhaps as a result of simple contrast to the loneliness which existed between him and this woman who slumped in the seat with one leg up, eyes closed. Later, to his intense surprise, she leaned her silent head against his arm. He watched the veins on her tanned hands. Then it was night, and morning.

Years later he'd drive the freeway past the place where she used to live and the sadness of it screamed at him; he wanted to chop down her exit sign. Years later he'd look out his window into the rain (the maple tree was taller than before), and he'd watch the cars go planing by in their troughs of wet grayness, and he knew that no matter how long he looked out the window she'd never again come past the ivy tree to turn in at the streetlamp, slowly crossing his line of sight in her new red car (it must not be new anymore; she probably had another) as he leaped up and ran down the stairs so that he could open the door like thought as her finger approached the bell. He remembered the first day he'd met her when they went walking in wide horse-meadows and he climbed the fence first and then turned to her and she leaped into his arms, so shy and skinny and lovely but not shy after that.

She was still sleeping. Her head had been on his shoulder all night, but now she made a face in her sleep and turned to press her forehead to the window.

Continuing south to loud waltz music in the front and mariachi music in the back, they crossed a yellow-brown plain cut with deep sandy washes where cattle lurked like lost souls and the cement vaults of cemeteries were painted blue and orange. Gradually it became greener. That was probably his fault. Everything else was. There were still chollas and ocotillos, but there were also dark green mushroom-shaped trees.

Past rusty-pale railroad cars, they saw a half-naked brown boy on a bicycle, whitish houses plated with curvy orange tiles. Between the blinds of his window the list of monotonously strange entities went on, retreating down forsaken roads. The time was coming when he'd want to tell her so much because he wasn't with her anymore, but at the moment they continued together, so he had nothing to say. It was not a question of boredom; it was just that they were caught up on all each other's secrets so that the next moment would also die easily, leading to death the moment beyond it like that girl who was taking her little daughter for a walk along the railroad tracks. There was a watde fence, with great trees inside; then laundry drying under an aqueduct, a family bathing in a curvy river, prickly pears, long, whiplike fingers of cactus. . The gray-blue sea kept breaking white and clean against a coast of scrub and thorn and cactus, the cacti like mutilated hands planted at the wrist. They were so far away now. They'd gone almost to the end. Two vultures passed overhead. Long shady combers broke shallowly on the beach, the water getting lighter as the sun got higher.

Across the aisle, a man in a T-shirt slept on his wife's shoulder, his breasts and belly jiggling like his massive brown arms, and the water giggled and slapped in the jug at his feet.

There came another stop, where people fanned themselves at flowerclothed tables and tried to sell the passengers Tropicana, corn and bread. And she was still with him, so he didn't need anything; he had bought a bottle of mescal which he shared with the other men and so they all told him that she was the most beautiful woman on the train. At the time he took it as a matter of course; later, after they'd passed the end, he tried to remember what the other women had looked like but he couldn't. In the train of his memory there were men and there was mescal and the men taught him how to sing sentimental songs like "I am the king but there is no queen" and that must have been true because there were never any women but her. The train had not gone away yet. He gazed down those wide dirt streets defined by low white houses with curvy orange-tiled roofs, fenced and treed, and he was so lonely. The fact that she was with him made no difference even though she loved him, even though they still had time; they'd not yet come to the end of the end. He held her hand tight.

Once the air conditioner was fixed, the train went into the blue mountain-walled highlands welling with cumuli whose white fringes caught the light almost like jewelwork.

The rain came down hard enough to hurt, and then the air was fresh and good with clouds still over the mountains and the smell of licorice.

In the place between cars he pulled her shirt up and held it out the window to soak it in cool fresh rain while she laughed. He loved her so much. Her inverted nipples were raspberries.

The train was rolling faster now to crosscut the breeze, past rusty rails and toilet paper, heading southeast toward the cool mountains; swaying up the canted greenish-brown plain that dim gray train crept, almost empty, through the high mountain tunnels. Ahead, the next car's row of ceiling lights could be seen slowly swaying, and a silhouetted passenger dwindled beneath them. They emerged from the tunnel. It had been raining again, and the sky was still gray, with pale orange streaks of evening. The greenshagged wilds were muted in that light, like distant mountains. Granite and then foliage ghosted by, close enough to touch. The train accomplished a perilous trestle and then a man with a medal was smiling, leaning out the window where the open air came in between cars. They descended the steep green ridge-churned villi'd slopes, rode down to the town past blue mountains, and it was dark. Through the blinds he saw the swing of a flashlight far away along the axis of a fence, flaring warmly between trees in the mountain village where they'd stopped. She said to him that it was still only the middle of the end. In the west the sky remained pale like a piece of manila paper. The train began to move again, passing a wall that was boulder-scaled like an immense crocodile, and a few houses flashed dully like skulls behind the trees and then they were out of the village. There was nothing left but dark mountains.

In Guadalajara they changed to a sleeping car. He thought that he would never forget the station's plain of tiles whose particular brown matched that of a smoked cheese; all the families sitting in the long darkstained pews subdivided into prisons by metal handrails; because he said to himself: the next time I am here she won't be with me. — Then they got on the sleeping car.

The warm orange light of the lefthand lamp, the only one on, was reflected on the khaki-painted walls with the globular texture of sweat, its original rectangular shape degraded almost into an oval as he lay sweating against this silent one who lay reading the guidebook with her knees up, her shadow-head growing hideously when she raised her real head to see the map better, and the train increased velocity so that lights like stars flowed by in stripes between the blinds which they'd closed when they were making love. Her bush sweated between her thighs, a wide brown-black wave at the edge of her flat white belly whose navel held a single drop of sweat, and the rectangular lamp outlined the ridge of her nose in gold, and a sickle-shaped goldness adorned her cheek just below her gilded eyelashes. They lay side by side in the narrow and threadbare bed in this narrow room as sturdy as a submarine, built in the U.S.A., with the original English-language instruction plaques still on the fixtures: CEILING, EMERGENCY. In this he took a curious pride. These trains had long since been abandoned by his countrymen in favor of newer and inferior things. For how many years now had the trains continued across Mexico? No doubt they broke down sometimes, but they got well and struggled on through the fleeing decades.

Someone was knocking. He got up and dressed to show the ticket to the conductor. When he was finished she'd turned her head in the other position so that her feet were beside him. She'd turned the righthand light on so that now the khaki paint was much whiter and brighter and there were two reflections in it, one on each side of her magnificent shoulders. She lay on her belly, reading. The hairs between her buttocks made pleasant shadows. They continued eastward, past darkness.

In the morning, the bed back up inside the wall, the two wide red armchairs basked, warming their faded felt in the murky light that also pleased prickly pears, plantations and white horses along the high river. Then they went into a tunnel; and the armchairs and the world were gone. Far away, a cloud-brain brooded atop a broad blue pyramid. That was the end of the end.

He said: I'll never forget.

But she only smiled bitterly and said: If you remember everything, what color was the thirteenth house we saw after Mexicali?

White, he said defiantly. It was white like your underpants. . Then their lives together were over, and they got off the train.

Sunset on the snowy rock-wrinkles haired with pines and spruces trapped him; sunset was as dreary as the evergreens crowded to shade last year's dirty snow. Last year he'd gone this road with her in the morning. They'd left the motel room in Tahoe on a snowy icy dawn whose light spread before them like the rest of their lives; and a man whose wife had left him gave them a ride to the junction. The man could hardly keep his eyes open. He had been driving all night. He was going to drive over the mountains to San Francisco. The lovers were worried about him. They warned him that he might have an accident if he didn't sleep before he went his winding icy road, but they were happy and he was sad so that he could not hear them. When he let them out, they were very glad to be free of him. His sadness had choked them like old snow. (Now the sadness of the one who remembered made him squeeze his fingernails into his palms. Did she ever remember now?) They stood in new snow, kissing. She said that the cold made her legs prickle, so he kissed her legs and then she laughed and said that she was warm. Half an hour later, two ladies who were going on a ski race picked them up and let them ride in the back of the carpeted van among bright clean skis. They let them out at breakfast time where the road made a T, east into California, west into Nevada. The lovers were going to Nevada. They waited for three hours, getting discouraged, and then a boxer came and took them down into the place where the desert day opened up before them like an endless noon.

It was the same time of year as then, but the rivers had not been so swollen that year. He would never see them with her again. This year they were pale and rushing, brown and white-flecked, drowning bushes.

The sun struck peaks with clanging strokes as it sank, dyeing them a lurid orange which made his heart pound with fear and despair.

The mountains of sadness were left behind. He said to someone, he didn't know who: Please don't ever let me see them again.

Then he went down into the green-gray evening desert.

Pharaoh asked Moses news of the former generations, said the teacher, and Moses said: Their names are with my Lord, in a Book. My Lord never errs or forgets.

That book was the atlas. The atlas contained the rain upon her breasts in Mexico. It had cloud maps, kept track of all the water in the world. The atlas contained the browneyed dog in the van, brown-eyed, brownhaired, red, blacklipped, standing with its forelegs on her knees, trying to lick her; and she was laughing and he was laughing and the man who'd picked them up was shaking his head with a smile as they came into the high desert flats just past June Lake with the purple-brown mountains smeared with snow and purple ridges behind where he had kissed her and kissed her, sleet pelting on his camouflage raincoat which he did not wear anymore because it reminded him of her. — The teacher took a stick, dipped it in a pot of thick black ink, and wrote that verse on the long narrow piece of wood which was knobbed at the top like a weird tombstone or a cross-section of a bowling pin. The teacher had the whole Qur'an in his head. For each lesson the little boys would write one day, wash it off the next. Outside the school's walls, brown kids with their long dirty shirt-tails hanging out played games of throwing rocks and running in the shade of roofless buildings past which soldiers' trucks rolled. (Very ancient buildings, a man said. Two hundred years.) Birds flew over the missing roofs. A kid cleaned a dusty piece of canvas with his hands, and a long gray iron-breasted truck with soldiers in it came speeding around the road. Where the road turned away from the sea there was a wall with two bites taken out of it, and then the road dwindled into trees and soldiers slowly trudging across a street-horizon in the direction of the Green Line, the dangerous place. A brown man in white walked steadily down the white sand road, whirling a stick. On a ledge in a white wall, people sat, and water ran slowly from a silver bowl which a boy poured over his hands.

He did not want her back because he could not have her and also the rest of his life which contained matters which had caused her anguish, but of course he wanted her back; he wanted to wake up beside her; he was so lonely for her. In the atlas it said DRAINAGE BASINS and UNPRODUCTIVE AREAS and LOST LOVES and FOREVER LOST LOVES. The principal meteorological factors which impose severe natural limitations on human activity are temperature and aridity. — The boy poured water from the silver bowl.

The boy poured water from the bowl. Beside him lay a long narrow piece of wood which was knobbed at the top like a tombstone. A verse was written upon it in black ink. He looked up at the boy with the wooden slate, and wanted to ask which verse it was, but the boy did not understand. He wanted to ask where the gazetteer was, so that he could locate the rains which had fallen upon her in Mexico, but the boy did not understand. The boy spoke to him, and he did not understand.

No, no, it wasn't that she'd died; no, she hadn't gone down into the rotten arches of darkness that crumbled like cheese. And it wasn't that he couldn't be hers again, contingent upon certain modifications which he could (but would not) readily make in his character. He knew where she was; if he was determined enough he could find her. But he refused to rewrite the inscription on his secret obelisk. She'd told him that in that case he'd chosen to give her up. And it was true. — But, as Husserl says, how fares it with animal realities? He still wanted her. That being so, his deductions then proceeded thus: (i) When your wife dies and you die, you'll meet in Heaven, (ii) When your wife dies, and you marry again, and then you die, you'll meet both your wives in Heaven. The wife and the other wife will both be with you, loving you and each other forever, (iii) Since Heaven and forever are both beyond time, whoever is meant to be in Heaven must already be in Heaven now. (iv) Therefore, everyone you love, living or dead, is already in Heaven waiting for you.

So he descended beneath the Sunday noon of empty streets stretched tight like drumheads (a woman sounded them with her gold-flowered black high heels); so he went into the catacombs. She hadn't died. She wasn't in Mexico. That night he ascended the Spanish Stairs' white smoothness etched black in the texture of a full moon. He bought a pocket atlas in Italian; opening it, he addressed her and said: Since you are also in Heaven there must be two of you. Therefore one of you can be with me. That's reasonable, isn't it? I'm not asking for you. I'm only asking for a spare you.

He confided this into the atlas, which he then closed and tied with black ribbons. Then he left it in a church. He hoped that maybe it would call to her like a signal beacon.

At the Petroleum Market, where they'd steal the eyeglasses right off your face if they could, a lady robed in blue flowers sat on a dais at one of many covered stands whose tables were separated by thick wire mesh. Tins and jugs and bottles of molasses-colored oil stood on the tables beneath the roofs of corrugated metal. Some of the tables were fronted with rusty steel. White dust and buses blew past. A child, grinning with effort, rolled a rusty oil drum in the sand. A lady in yellow and black glided through the dust. These stands ran a long way down Population Street. They sold gasoline and diesel, direct from Mombasa and the United Arab Emirates; they sold Comet and Caltex and Pelo 400 and Ocklube. Oil cost fifty thousand shillings for ten liters.* The air reeked of oil. The lady in the blue garbashar was laughing, swatting flies on a post.

A big red truck with many brown feet and knees high on top drove down Population Street past a rusted Soviet tank. It was bound for Bardera. The passengers had paid thirty thousand shillings each. Suddenly the truck ran out of gas. It stopped, and the driver ran to the lady in blue and bought a bucketful of gasoline from her.

Another man stopped for fruit. There were both mangoes and oil on Population Street. Next door to the lady in blue, bananas had been strung like washing along a wire in a mango stand roofed by corrugated metal.

There was a man who came walking down the street holding onto his eyeglasses, and he peered into every stand of rusty metal with mangoes and limes and glasses on top, but then he'd walk on, shaking his head. Finally he came to the place that said SPER PARTS.

On the whitewashed facade of the spare parts store was painted a camel, a glass of milk, a yellow fan belt, a blue carburetor, a red and yellow battery, and a blue and black tire, all bursting with speed like cartoon rockets. The spare parts came by ship from Japan to the dusty white beach where the sea swirled green and stinking against a sharp lava-like rock (it smelled as cheap postage stamps do when they're licked) and people with brown skinny legs sat barefoot on blue steps outside a blue door with one panel blown out; the spare parts sailed between the American battleships on the blue horizon; they passed the rusted red and yellow Soviet ship; and they arrived at last, at the seaport where a handcuffed boy rushed by in the back of a jeep and crowds waited and hoped for the job of carrying sacks of rice. The spare parts kept company with a white wall veiled in white dust; then they passed through the curtain of camelbone beads in the cement doorway (a cassette playing loud and scratchy), the doorway over which was written SPER PARTS.

The man went in. — She left me in Mexico, he said. I need spare parts.

Allah, Allah! cried the proprieter. My business pays just enough to eat! I don't dabble in those things. .

(Across the street, two men squatted in a pile of automobile components, sitting side by side, sorting them as slowly and deliberately as if they were moving chess pieces.)

So you can't help me get a spare wife?

Can't help you? I won't help you! You must not ask such things.

The man smiled. — How many wives do you yourself have, Farhan?

I have three, but for me it's no problem; I'm Muslim! And for me there was no pimp such as you wish me to be — why won't you leave me alone, you odious fellow?

And how did you choose them?

Why should I tell you?

I ask you respectfully.

The first wife — ah, she's my real wife. The second is my girlfriend, and the third. . well, she was a beautiful girl I saw in the market. And, you know, I made a mistake. To marry more than one Somali girl is very difficult, because you must love them more than twice a day; it's impossible sometimes! You think you have problems. And they like to corkscrew their buttocks wildly; they're different from all other girls. I get so tired. So, my friend, I choose only one per night, and you cannot believe the jealousy. .

Ah, so that's how it is. Well, for me there are two women. They are really the same woman, but one, she has a double in Heaven. I don't want to disturb the one on earth, so—

So you want to kill yourself? That is a great sin, although for guns I do have some spare parts.

No, Farhan, I don't want to do that. Do you have a spare atlas?

You mean an address book. I don't dabble in those things. What you ask is very shameful. If you persist, someone will kill you.

He had a notion that she might know where her double was. He suspected that she might be somewhere within this equatorial duct, bridge or trough. He breathed the hot white wind of dust. — I want an atlas, Farhan.

Oh, well. Not every want can be remedied. .

A donkey's-load of wood, a month's worth, cost about fifty thousand shillings in those days. He took out a hundred thousand and told the man to find him an atlas — a spare one would do. Then he stood waiting, his mind partaking of the same wide empty flatness as Military Street (which used to be Lenin Street).

It was definitely somebody's spare atlas, even grimier than the one he'd bought in Italy (his then ladylove had wrenched her hand out of his and begun screaming: I think you're crazy buying that goddamn shitty thing! You'll regret it, I tell you! and after that she'd refused to speak to him beneath that milk-white sky; they departed from congealing pillars, walls and fountains lit falsely by lingerie windows, fur-coat windows, bookstore windows, house-beasts and ships of state blind-windowed; and he tried to take her hand but she pulled away with disgust or anger or simple loathing, sitting beside him in the cab, reading her own map). An obsolete Africa, white as a salt island, floated in a turquoise sea; bearing appellations from the Second World War: French West Africa, French Sudan, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, French Equatorial Africa, Military Territory of Chad, Belgian Congo, Tanganyika Territory, Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, Italian East Africa, Italian Somaliland (which was why the Somalis didn't like Italians), British Somaliland. .

Mogadishu was in Italian Somaliland. He positioned his electronic magnifying loupe upon that spare country and gazed down. The fibers of the paper were very white and bright (in the atlas he'd read that Somalia received more than nine hours' worth of mean annual bright sunlight — second only to the northern area encompassing Libya and Algeria; no wonder the page was bleached!) Slowly and carefully he let his eyeball drone like a spy satellite over the flats of Shabellaha Hoose, proceeding eastward to the humid sandy beach, which he tracked northeast to Golweyn, Shalaamboot, Marka, Jilib, Dhanaane, Jasira, Banaadir, and now, experiencing that accustomed white and yellow Adriatic feeling despite the rubble and tanks (he wondered whether Dubrovnik looked like that these days), he approached Muq-disho, which was spare for Mogadishu; he zoomed in upon roads (Stadium Street, Military Street; here was Population Street and he found the place that said SPER PARTS), ruins, military sites (there was the stadium, still sandbagged by Marines, a machine gun mounted up high, pointing out, barbed wire at the gate). Down, down, down. In that country of sand, the most brightly colored things were the women's clothes. Loftily he gazed down upon the tops of those poison-trees called booc. He watched their pale green broad-lobed leaves blow in the hot wind. For a moment he gazed down at the Green Line which divided the city into factions. It was a yellow wall pocked and pimpled and made of lifeless white and yellow rubble on which crowds of chocolate-colored people sat barefoot. Looking up at his giant blinking eye, litde girls in red or yellow garbashars stood and tried to sell him packs of cigarettes. Turbaned men nodded at him, smiling. Then someone shot a gun at him. He watched the golden bullet enlarge itself in the longitude-latitude crosshairs of his loupe, rising toward him like a torpedo; he did not think it could reach him, but as a precaution he zoomed back to lower magnification so that he rose high above the entire continent of Africa with its neatly lettered countries; he could almost see the page number; and now he zoomed back in again because surely the bullet had fallen to earth. He saw people sitting in chairs under a great toothbrush tree for shade; he dialed the infrared setting and watched the steam rising from the tops of their heads; then he switched back to NORMSPECTRUM and watched a lady bent almost double, carrying a can of water. He saw a woman in black and yellow slowly trudging through the sand. He saw a half-naked man squatting in a high barred window (a thief who grimaced at his immense searching eye which hovered overhead like God; the thief said: I am afraid for airplane).

Panning past smoking garbage in the sand at the base of a wall, he spotted her (or the spare her) at the wheel of her red car. She was just now passing the U.S. Embassy, whose sign read: JIB: WARNING AT-4 ANTI-TANK POSITION. THIS WEAPON HAS A 60 METER, 90° BACKBLAST. WHEN IN IMMEDIATE AREA, SEEK COVER DURING ALL CONFRONTATIONS AT FRONT GATE!

In exultation, he rang a wooden camel bell with a wooden clapper.

Farhan rushed to look. — This a woman drive car! he laughed. Very fantastic! You say she is your spare woman, spare wife?

Yes.

The proprieter wanted to look again. — Oooh, I see her naked arms! he giggled. You know, my friend, before the war one could see girls on the beach dressed in European fashion, which is to say in bra and knickers, but these have fled, and now there are only rural girls here.

She's not a rural girl. She's from New York.

Is she jealous?

I really couldn't say, Farhan.

You know, my good friend, they tell a certain story that one Somali man had four wives, who were all jealous. So he said to them: Turn around, close your eyes and I will tell the one I love the best. — Then he tapped each one on her buttocks in turn and sent them all away happy. But me, I don't know if it's true. Maybe it's true. I don't dare try it, because my wives might only pretend to close their eyes. I think your woman is jealous, yes? Because she has a jealous face.

You must have better eyes than I do. Even at maximum magnification I can't see whether she's jealous or not.

But she left you?

Yes.

Why?

I had someone else I wouldn't give up. That's why she left me.

Listen, my friend. Somali girls don't attach conditions. If they see you with another girl, they either say nothing or they ask for a divorce, but they never say: If you want to stay with me you must have only me.

He bent down and looked into the loupe again. Now he could see. She was driving toward the Green Line.

The internal combustion engine was one of the West's many presents to Somalia, and I would have to call it an a-a-mmah, which is to say a bequest for evil purpose (the example given in a treatise on inheritance law being money left by a Muslim to build a Christian church); but nonetheless her little red car looked sporty.

That was when he saw the other red car.

On the enemy side of the Green Line, just past the former police station, rose another camp on the dung-hued sands of the former technical institute, one of whose walls bore the scrawl: CAMP OFFISH. Refugees, their faces wide and brown, were standing at the base of the barbed-wire-topped wall, among weird mounds topped with green plastic; those were their houses. The women wore deriis and garbashars. They carried babies in sacks against their stomachs. They smoothed their garments down while the first grade of the SOS Children's Village counted one to a hundred in a deafening scream and the schoolteacher conducted with a twig. There was a little child not much more than a brown skull on skinny legs, his toy a plastic bag on the end of a string; he stood touching the shiny red car, the spare car in wonder. Now through the loupe the watcher's eyeball saw many little girls with dark brown faces. One in a white dress who had big black eyes ran inside a cave roofed with green plastic; a moment later she came out, holding a white woman's hand. The white woman was the spare of the double. He looked down from the sky and wanted to lick her bare shoulder and arm.

Sliding the loupe back along the page to his side of the Green Line, he saw the first double pass two cars with UN flags. Farhan was saying something but he didn't listen.

He thought about the way that Somali men who are friends walk so happily with their arms around one another's waists. He wondered if the doubles would do that. And he wondered if there would be room for him.

On Population Street it was getting dark, the evening sky like a crude oil painting, with solid white and gray cotton-blotches of cloud unrolling in its pale blueness; and so people were getting afraid of bandits and the petroleum market was closed; but Farhan's lantern flickered brightly down upon the atlas so that the two red cars approached each other bathed in afternoonness.

Farhan was still going on. He said that in olden times a Somali girl's dowry was one hundred camels, one horse and one rifle. Then it became five camels, and now it was only one camel, which could cost anywhere from one to five million, depending on the kind of camel.

Farhan gasped. Coming down Population Street were dozens of red cars, and a boy whose legs he could almost have circled between thumb and forefinger came running out and threw a stone through the windshield of one spare car, and the spare woman inside pulled over and jumped out cursing with that thin shrill anger he suddenly remembered very well, and then somebody shot her from the shadows. The other red cars continued on past. They appeared to be heading for the Green Line. Looking desperately through his loupe, he now saw the army of red cars approaching from the other side. He saw that all the doubles looked very angry, and they all carried guns. They were getting close enough to each other now that he could see where exactly along the Green Line they would meet. He could not bear to watch anymore. Moving the loupe away from the Green Line, he saw white soldiers patting black boys down for qat. He saw a spare Farhan going with his brother to pray in the mosque. He saw a lady in a yellow garbashar. The lady knocked on a green metal door. Inside was a sandy courtyard with one donkey and many smoldering fires. A skinny child came and let the lady in. When the metal door had closed behind her, and nobody in the street could see, she threw off her veil and looked upward at him with the deadly dark glide and glitter of a tiger snake. She was one of the doubles. This time he was mesmerized by the approaching bullet.

*U.S. $15.