William Vollmann - The Atlas

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.