Maps (24 page)

Still naked, he got out of the water and sat by himself. Should he return to the dark garden behind all this sunlit wateriness, he asked himself, and follow the footpath? Why on earth did he feel such an imbalance in his psyche, why was he frightened? Where did he think the road might have led him? To his own beginning or to someone else's?

Misra was before him again. She was there and he was small and she was washing him, fussing over him, playing with him, addressing him in a language of endearment, calling him “my man”; there she was, real as the border; there she was, talking about how self-conscious he was on the day he was bom, how he wore a mask of dried blood, how he appeared, or rather behaved, as though he had made himself. And she was there, teaching him the rudiments of things, calling each item by its name, “That is the sky”, and “This is the earth; and there he was, pointing at her repeatedly in reply to the question, “Where is the earth? “, although he would point correctly at the sky whenever the question was “Where is the sky?” She would burst out laughing, saying she was “Mother” and not “earth” while his finger that had pointed, and maybe even the hand, was busily taking a bit of the earth to eat. Indubitably, she had done a most commendable job, training him in the nomadic lore of climatic and geographic importance — that it was the earth which received the rains, the sky from whose loins sprang water and therefore life; that the earth was the womb upon whose open fields men and women grew food for themselves and for their animals. And man raised huts and women bore children and the cows grazed on the nearby pastures, the goats likewise; and the boy became a man, the girl a woman and each married to raise a family of his or why not her own and the married couple drew joy out of being together with their offspring — thanks be Allah! (And all this time, Askar was thinking of the inherent contradictions — that she wasn't his mother, and the country wasn't hers; that she was teaching him
his
people's lore and wisdom, and occasionally some Amharic when night fell; that she wasn't married and hadn't a child of her own or a man she called “husband” but was happy for whatever that was worth; that he had no one to bestow the title of “Father” on, but a great many uncles, one of whom was once married to Misra.)

And Aw-Adan was there too. And he was teaching him things about astrology and how to locate the Milky Way; how to answer when the
Ciisaanka-yeer
calls, or what to do; how to spot the afa-gaallo constellation of stars; plus one scientific truism — that in Islam, Nature — capital N, he insisted — is conceived of as a book, comparable, in a lot of ways, to the Holy Koran: a genus for a sura, a species for a verse and every subspecies shares a twinship with the
alif, ba
and
ta
of mother nature —
maa shaa Attaahu kaana!

“The bus is ready to leave for Mogadiscio,” somebody shouted.

Askar saw men look for their clothes, men who were holding their members covered with both their hands; he did the same. He shook his shorts so they would be free of the sand which might have lodged itself in the pockets, etc., and stumbled into them in great haste. He put on his T-shirt as well, and the shoes. But his body was sandy as he had no time to wash off this earth's light coating. The driver waited until all the women and the children were accounted for. He asked if everyone was there. When he received the affirmative, he said, “We shall be in Belet Weyne in less than an hour.”

III

Standing against the morning wall of sunshine, two oblong lines of light, each solid as a hem and clearly visible as the border of a dress. And there were two horses — one of them black, the other white; the black horse led the way, the other followed him immediately after, like white smoke after black before the red flames pursue each other into invisibility.

The horses were in a garden rampant with tropicality, a garden wild and virginal as the first day of creation must have been. It had rained heavily and the horses dripped, moistening everyone and everything near them. I admired them from a distance. I picked what fruits I could reach without any effort on my part and bit into them until I sucked out the juice. I discarded the pulp, leaving behind me a trail of formless mass.

A young girl, innocent as her smile, emerged from behind the horses. She looked intimidated — I don't know if my presence frightened her, or even if she saw me. I could detect a streak of fear in her eyes. But the girl fascinated me — especially her eyes. So I gave up looking at the horses altogether and I concentrated on the girl. I couldn't explain what was the cause of this bemused attraction to the girl, why this fascination. I couldn't look anywhere else for a long time.

I asked her what her name was. She said she had no name, that I could give her one if I wanted. I asked her where she came from. She said she had no country she could call her own, that she was a refugee although she didn't know from where, and from whom she was fleeing and to what safe shelter. I asked her if she had any parents. She said she had no parents. In short, she was a young girl, more or less the same age as myself, a girl without a name, without a country, without parents — but a girl and not a boy.

I held my hand out to her.

She said, “Do not touch me.”

I asked why

“Because I am standing in a skin I've borrowed,' she said.

I asked what else had she borrowed?

“The tongue I'm speaking with isn't mine either,' she said.

1 inquired if there was anything she could claim as her own?

“At times,” she said, “all I own, the only thing that I can hold on to for as long as I want, the one and only thing no one has come for so far, is, would you believe it, a shadow?” and she smiled.

“A shadow?” I repeated, in disbelief.

She nodded.

Then she walked away, in silence, from the horses. She stood by the bank of a river, a bank cowslipped with fresh excrement. From this I gathered that we were in spring — a season of rebirth, a period of renewal. The flowers were in bloom, the grass moist with tropical rain and the sky was overcast, threatening to pour with rainy vengeance. On the other side of the bank, 1 could see all sorts of animals and even a child or two and these were living together in total harmony I couldn't, for the life of me, see how a lion could rub manes with horses without being tempted to tear them savagely apart with his teeth; could not imagine how a group of elderly men were in attentive reverence, listening to a speech being delivered by a young boy of eight; couldn't remember ever seeing (either before or after) how the men of the community paid respectful gallantry to the women upon whose demands and orders they waited. I was visibly delighted.

The girl asked, “Have you ever seen leaves turn?”

1 did not know what answer to give.

“You know,” she said, “you remind me of another boy I once knew, a boy from Kallafo. You look very much alike, you and he. Or rather, you look like him in a number of ways.”

“For example?”

She said, “It appears you never bother yourself about looking into the inside of things — and neither did he ever; and you never bother about studying, in detail, the inside of the statements others make — and neither did he ever; you're almost always satisfied with the surface of things — a smooth surface being, to you, a mirror in which your features, your looks, may be reflected, and so you see nothing in mirrors save surfaces.”

The girl reminded me of an old man I once saw sporting a young girl's head. But my tongue, tucked in like a dog's tail between its frightened legs, failed me, and I couldn't tell her of whom she reminded me. A girl with nothing but a shadow to claim as her own, a girl standing in a borrowed skin, and I, who am of flesh and blood, with a heart of my own, a lung, legs, head, eyes and shadow of my own, I who am a child of the age's spirit, I who am, in a sense, a maker of myself, I couldn't tell the girl anything.

“Anyway, come. Follow me,” she ordered.

I said I was thirsty.

“Follow me then,” she repeated; and I did.

She wore the distant look of a magician, trying to conjure up the images he impresses his audience with — and there was a human skull, old as the years of its previous owner. She shook the skull, emptying it of the sand. She then washed it in the stream, washed it until it was white as a priest's robes. We used the skull as a cup. The water was sweet as the season's sweet odour, its taste lingering on the tongue like delightful memories.

“What's your name?” she asked.

“Askar Cali-Xamari,” I said.

She was thrilled at hearing my name. “So you are originally from Xamar, which, as you will probably know, is the local name for Somalia's capital, Mogadiscio?”

“My father lived there in the forties when all of the Somali-speaking territories were united under one colonial flag, all but one, Djebouti,” I said, hesitating whether to show off my knowledge about the background history to the period, mentioning Ernest Bevin's name and dropping a few others including my source, Armadio. But no. I continued, “When he returned to the Ogaden, married to a woman from thereabouts, they added the Xamar bit to his name in order to distinguish him from all other Calis.”

She took a sip of water.

“Anyway, all will be well with you,” she prophesied.

I had a sip of the water. I asked, “How do you know?”

“You're going back to
yourself”
she opined.

I said, “And so?”

I could see that she was unhappy at the question. I didn't know how to apologize, although I didn't see why I should. After all, I didn't do anything to offend her. I spoke my mind, adding, “I…er…, but couldn't go any further.

“Surface again,” she interrupted. “No depth, just surface.”

IV

I resurfaced from the depths of my sleep and woke to shouts of joy announcing that we were in Xamar, “the pearl of the Indian Ocean”. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and saw, down in the valley, the froth of the sea hug the blue of the sky: magnificent colours, I thought, watching the blue of the heavens and the white of the clouds embrace the blue of the ocean and the white of its foam. I was immensely happy The man to whom I had been entrusted as his charge until we got to Uncle Hilaal's assured me that he wouldn't leave me before he made certain I was in the right hands. I thanked him profusely

I

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