Maps (32 page)
Authors: Nuruddin Farah
I
n the wake of the greater national loss: a personal one, equally as devastating. He felt terrible and this left a horrible taste in his mouth, something his tongue (i.e. his memory) couldn't give an appropriate name to. He became weak from want of energy he walked about wooden as his soul Again, he wouldn't eat, complaining that he was tasting blood in his saliva. His body united in itself two temperatures: one moment, he said he was feeling very hot, the following instant he was very cold as if he had “ice circulating in my arteries and veins, not warm, living blood'. His eyes were bloodshot from sleeplessness. To the point of obsessiveness, his imagination “heard” loud reports of guns being fired and he saw men, women and children falling, and dying under the fire power. Six hundred and three of them! He mourned for the souls of the betrayed dead. The loss was so great, the tremor in his soul so distressing, that Askar behaved like a man watching a part of him slip away. He had been well when he was given the sad newsâwell, and alive to the detailed horrors which Karin offered. He remembered he had been ill and in bed when the Ogaden, in a
coup de grâce
, was returned to Ethiopian hands by the Soviets. He remembered someone commenting then, that what the British imperialists had put together wouldn't be pulled asunder by Somalisâthe Soviets, themselves imperialists, wouldn't permit that to happen. But what could one say now? Misra, dearest Misra, why did you have to do this?
He was alone with Karin and she told it to him alone. In his room, with its maps and mirrors, radio and other items he had acquired, or was given as presents. Karin was served tea. She had aged slightly, her skin smooth as old leather, her chin sporting a longish Ho Chi Minh “beard”. She gave him the latest news about Qorrax (“He is very chummy with the newly appointed governor, he is often with him. A traitor, no doubt about it. He always was”), about Aw-Adan (“An exceptional man. He is a legendary figure in the town's history. Bare-handed, he took on three of them and killed them. Just like that. As easily as a strong-armed man might behead a hen. They say his faith in the destiny of his peopleâhe wasn't Somali, he was a Qotto, you knew that?âthey say that was his strength, gave him confidence”), about Shahrawello (“She died, poor thing, leaving behind her a pool of blood, no more. She cut her throat. No one knows why. Some thought it was because she felt humiliated by Qorrax's treachery, others because all her sons had been killed in the massacre”), about Misra, what news about Misra?
“Why ask,” she had said, “why bother about her?”
Indeed, why did he wait until the last minute to ask about her, he said to himself. He should've started with her. She was, after all, as close to his own beginnings as anyone is ever likely to be. “Why not?” he said. “What's become of her?”
Karin studied him and thought Askar looked more innocent now than he had been when younger. For one thing, his “stare” had lost its sharpness; for another, the satanic mischievousness which used to light his eyes with lamps more powerful than any wick, this, too, wasn't there. She said, “It means you haven't heard.”
For a moment, there was a flash, lasting barely a secondâan outburst of flames in his look which reminded her of his younger self. It was an ambiguous look, transitory. Karin didn't know what to make of it. “Heard what? Is she dead?”
“No. That she is not.”
He knew there was bad news coming. He didn't speak until after he had steeled himself against it. He hardened his body, he deadened his soulâhe was ready to hear anything. Then, like somebody who derives courage from the certainty of death and who says, “What're you waiting for? Kill me, shoot me, get on with it and quick too,” Askar said, “Go on. Tell me the worst. What're you waiting for?”
“There is a young Ethiopian soldier who's taken Misra's fancy. She is said to be living with him. A dashing, handsome young man, the Prince Charming type, whom she's been wanting to meet all her life,” said Karin.
He wasn't troubled by what he heard. However, he was wise enough not to shrug his shoulders and say, “So what? A woman has the right to fall in love with a man and I don't see why his nationality matters. After all, all 'Ethiopians' are not enemies of all 'Somalis.'” It is the cause that matters.” There returned to him a steadiness of the kind a confident person displays. He took a sip of tea (which she didn't touch), he crossed his legs, settling his body into the cosiness of an unexpected comfort. She said, “But that's not all”
Second deaths are more painful when you come to think of it, thought Askar. He was numb in soul and body. He knew the rest of the story. She needn't bother. Misra had fallen in love with a man from the enemy camp and she had betrayed. There were deaths. There was a massacre. Houses were razed to the ground. Wells poisoned. Newborns were bayoneted to death, their mothers raped and then killed, and their bodies savagely hacked to pieces, limb from limb. And children were rounded up, lectured to and then machine-gunned. He said, “You can spare me the detailed horrors. Just give me the figure.”
She thought he was too far ahead of her. “Then it means you've heard?” she said. “Let me tell it to you if you haven't,” she added, and waited to hear his response.
“The trouble is,” and here his voice assumed an inordinate calmness which he had got from being close to Hilaal, “in gruesomeness, massacres are all the same wherever in the world they occur. And at the centre of them all, there is a traitor. So just give me the figures, and spare me the details.”
He decided to watch her face intently for the slightest hesitation in her voice, the slightest tremor in the tone in which she spoke, as she said, “Six hundred and three.”
He didn't know why, but he believed she was telling the truth as she knew it. Something convinced him she was. But he had a question. “Why three? How does the figure three enter the picture? Why not six hundred and four or eight or nine?”
Again, there was no hesitation in her voice. “Shahrawello's three sons, massacred later.”
Without being asked, she gave further details, not about the massacre, but about the “dashing, handsome young Ethiopian officer in charge of security”. He was from the same village as Misra and he called her by a different name. “Not Misra, which we all called her, no.”
He was intensely shocked. He mouthed, “What? What's this?”
“He called her Misrat. Listen to it carefully. Misrat.”
Blood ran visibly up to and into his eyes. He stared at Karin ques-tioningly, focussing on the furrowed wrinkles of her forehead and the bridge of her nose. He saw a “t” written there and remembered he had had difficulties pronouncing or distinguishing the Arabic letter
ta
from that of
tha
when he was a pupil at Aw-Adan's Koranic School, a fact no one else substantiated. “Are you sure that there is a ât' in it now? Because you see, Misra is the Arabic name for âEgypt' and Somalis prefer it to their own corrupted form âMassar', which also gives you the Somali word for âheadscarf â. And when I asked Misra what her name meant in her language, I remember her saying that it meant âfoundation', I think âthe foundation of the earth' or something. Now what could Misrat mean?” He turned to Karin.
Karin thought he was more disturbed by the changes in Misra's name than about the massacre of which he had heard. She found this disturbing and was about to ask him about it when he said, “What can that mean, the change in the name?”
“It can only mean one thing: treason.”
He said, “I didn't mean that,” and she could see he was greatly upset. “Not in that sense, no. Names mean something and to me, as a child, she was the cosmos.” He paused. “Maybe, I shan't take note of the changes in her name. I am quite certain,” he was now talking to his face in the mirror, “now that I think of it, that somebody who speaks Amharic has confirmed to Uncle Hilaal that âMisra' without a ât' means âthe foundation of the earth'. Or if you like, âthe foundation of the universe'. Personally, I prefer rendering it as âthe foundation of the earth'. But I am not certain. You have to ask someone who speaks that language, I don't any more.”
He was now at peace with himself. This was what Karin found weird. Also, he didn't offer her the chance to tell him more, or ask him further questions. He was up on his feet, his height towering above her, extending his hand for her to shake, making gestures that their conversation had come to an end. She prepared to leave and shouted, offering her address care of one of her daughters who, she said, worked in the Central Post Office, the one near Hotel Juba. “You must come and see us,” she went on, as she formalized their parting by taking both his hands in hers. He wished he had the will to tell her that Bevin's portrait was still with him, and so was his fond memory of her kindness to him. “God bless,' was apparently all he managed to say. Someone else saw her to the door, he couldn't say who. He was taken ill immediately he was aloneâquick as bushfire. His temperature ran high, his saliva tasted of blood and his body broke with perspiration although he insisted he was feeling very cold.
II
He couldn't hold a thought in his head for two, three days. He walked in his sleep, a somnambulator roaming the darkened corridors of a past he couldn't recognize himself in. He behaved as though he were looking in one of the night's opaque corners for his missing half. No amount of talking would help him or make him lie down quietly and sleep. He was mortally mortified and sad at the thought that Misra was no longer worthy of his trust, his love. For the first time ever, Askar consented to talk at length about Misra's divining in blood, raw meat and water.
Hilaal said, “In other words, she is a witch, a bitch, a whore and a traitor?”
Askar didn't say anything. Salaado interjected, “He hasn't said that.”
Hilaal turned to Salaado, “What did he say?”
Because Salaado wouldn't speak, Hilaal to Askar: “What exactly did you say, Askar? Because if you say that Misra is a witch, a whore and a traitor, then you're not making an original statement.”
“Meaning?” asked Salaado.
Hilaal shifted in his chair, “Women as whores, women as witches, women as traitors of their blood, women as lovers of men from the enemy campâthroughout history, men have blamed women for the ill luck they themselves have brought on their heads. Women are blamed for every misfortune which has befallen man from the first day of creation, including
his
fall from heaven.
Woman
is said to have betrayed
man
at the first opportunity. Throughout history, Askar.”
Salaado said, “Let him be, please.”
“No, no, please,” said Askar to Salaado.
Hilaal continued, looking from Askar to Salaado, “You've no proof, and you've asked for no proof. Men have always done that. They've condemned unjustly and asked for no evidence. What do you say to that?”
Askar sat silently, staring at his lap as though his ruined logic had fallen there. Would he be able to gather his broken pieces into his cupped hands and then respond? It seemed, however, that no sooner had he picked up a shattered piece than he discovered that he could only see a very little of a face (Misra's), an eye (his own, as though it were a mirror) and nothing else. He floated, poised between the earth and the sky. He dwelled in a no-man's-land, remaining suspended between numerous undefined states of reality and unreality; sandwiched between not-so-clearly defined selves. Dreaming (was he?), sleeping (was he?) or listening to a taped conversation between himself and Uncle Hilaal.
There was a silence akin to that which obtains when a radio is switched off suddenly. Hilaal was there, yes; Salaado was there as well; and the large radio in the living room wasn't on. Well?
A voice (most probably Hilaal's) telling a story:
A man. A woman. And a dog. The neighbours don't like the man, who doesn't like them either. They suspect, but they have no evidence, that he is a jealous husband. The woman is very beautiful, but quiet in an unassuming way, simple in her tastes, and loves her plainness. The dog? The dog is a German shepherd, large, handsome, costing the master a lot of money to feed, although the master doesn't seem to mind the expense. The dog is given liver for breakfast, meat for lunch and dinner. The gate, however, is locked day and night and is opened when someone is entering or leaving. On most days, it is opened only twice: when the husband is leaving in the morning and when he re-enters in the evening. One day, a stranger arrives. Yes, into these convolutions walks, one noon, a man. The dog barks, bares its teeth, growls, but the man walks past it without so much as hesitating or pausing for a moment. For hands, the man has stumpsâhis hands, or so people say, having been amputated in Iran, because, again people say (and where they got their news only God knows) he had stolen money from a minor Ayatollah. The man, when he returns in the evening, stays indoors and so does the stranger, so do the wife and the dog. The stranger, the wife and the dog remain inside. The man, as usual, leaves in the morning and, as usual, doesn't return until evening. Now what does the man do? Nobody knows. Does he work for the government, is he self-employed? Nobody knows. But people don't say they don't. They make up their stories when they don't know what's what.
Who's the stranger? He is the younger brother of the man. People say he used to be a wicked man, who broke into houses, robbed banks. People also say that the house in which the man and his wife live is in his name, for he bought it from monies acquired through felonious methods. But nowadays, the stranger is as saintly as a
mixraab
. You won't see him without his rosary (he holds one end of the rosary between his toes and the other hangs, like a wrist-watch, on the healed scar of the stump), nor will you catch his lips idle.
For example, Askar. In this story just told, there are truths and half-truths. The husband is a very jealous manâthat is true. But the wife is saintly and has never reciprocated the advances made by any man. She loves her lawful husband.
It is also true, for example, that the dog is a German shepherd, large as the largest among the breed and handsome too. But it is not at all fierce. It bares its teeth, all right, and growls, and thus appears aggressive but it is very timid, very shy. Its eyes are gentle, its anger wore out at the edges when the intruder smiled, calling it “Brader”, German, meaning brother. Why was it given such a name? Nobody knows. But people say that her Somali master inherited it from a Polish gendeman who gave her the name. But surely, a Polish UN expert would know enough German to know that brader was brother, and wouldn't call a female dog that?
The stranger? He is a relation of the man, that is true. In fact, he is the first and only son. Not a younger brother. It would be too much to expect two “brothers” in the same story, wouldn't it? Two “brothers” who are not brothers themselves but who also are non-brothers. And where did he get his hands amputated? In Iran. That much is true. But not because he stole from a minor Ayatollah, no. He was working in a factory and a moment of carelessness chopped off his hands. Yes, he is the one in whose name the house is. Again, not because he bought it. The man registered the house in his name, that's all.
No one visits these people. They have a dog who is fierce, a man who is very jealous, a wife who is unfaithful, a stranger whose hands have been amputated in Iran. Would they listen to you if you tried to enlighten them? Would they hear you out if you tried to challenge their prejudices? Of course not. Note, please, that the prejudice of the western press feeds the acquired prejudices of the colonial and neo-colonial peoples, as much as it misinforms the underinformed in Europe or North America. And note also, that because the new Somali master didn't know the meaning of the German word “Bruder”, the question why such a name was given to a she-German shepherd never crossed his or other people's minds. Was the Polish gendeman playing a Freudian game with his own or the dog's unconscious, giving it “Bruder” as a name?