Maps (34 page)

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

“I was raped,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He sat in shamefaced silence. Salaado:

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

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

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

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

And before anyone spoke to him, he was gone.

VI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you all right?” he said.

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

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

“Yes,” she said.

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

She nodded.

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