Nuruddin Farah - Maps

She cleared her throat. I knew she was ready to speak I sat up, waiting. In the meanwhile, I could see her repeating to herself something in mumbles. 1 was sure she was quoting either the Koran or Aw-Adan. She said, “The soul is the stir in one, for one stirs not when dead,”

I was disappointed. She wondered why. I told her.

“And what do you want me to tell you?” she said, unhappy

I was disappointed her answer was brief and had ended, in a sentence, long before I was aware she had begun. What I wanted her to do was to talk about death in as much detail as was possible for a seven-year-old like myself to understand. I needn’t have reminded her that I had encountered death before, in the look of my mother, in the rigidity of her body. I needn’t have reminded her that, in so far as she was concerned, I had made myself, that 1 was my own creation and that upon me was bestowed, by myself of course, everything other mortals wished for in their dreams.

“So?” I challenged.

She appeared dazed. Could it be because she could not recall telling me herself that when she first encountered my undiluted stare she thought that “I had made myself and had been my own creation!’”? There may have been other reasons. But she stared at me as though the world had shrunk to the ground beneath her weighty body and as though any memory of her would disappear with it too and she would die. Anyway, she was silent for a long, long, time. However, this silence was different from the previous silences in that she appeared frightened, afraid of my stare. And so she pulled at her dress, nervous.

I said, “Death takes many forms in my head. Generally, it is donned all in white, robed in an Archangel’s garment into whose many-pocketed garment is dropped the day’s harvest of souls. I wonder if my mother and father’s souls ended up in the same pocket, just like a beloved wife is buried in the same tomb as her husband or a child its mother if they all die together. I wonder if I would have a soul to speak of had I died at birth — I instead of my mother.”

Flabbergasted, she could only stare at me. And I continued: “I was ready to be born but it appears my mother was ready to die. Maybe I would have died if she hadn’t. And I suspect it wouldn’t be I telling this story, I suspect, as a matter of fact, the story wouldn’t be the same, not the subject matter. My death wouldn’t have earned me an obituary and my life wouldn’t have engaged anybody’s time and energy. You see, death ends all talk. From then on, death rules. Or, if you please, God.”

Again, she stared at me in disbelief. She asked after the appropriate pause: “How old are you, Askar?”

I replied, “I am seven.”

“I might as well ask myself if Satan is older,” she said.

“I am sorry?”

“Oh, never mind,” she said.

Before long, she was herself again, mothering me, requesting that I bow down and subject my clothes for inspection, reminding me at one and the same time that I was very young, capable of “accidents”, unforeseen things, and that put her in control of the situation again and she was saying that I should change my clothes, etc., etc., etc. But: woe to me if she were in season. Then — well, that’s another story.

V

The sight of blood didn’t repel or frighten me. That of water, however small or large its body, attracted me. Water comforted me and I fell silent when in it, as though in reverence to its god. I splashed in it so that its crystals, clear as silver and just as lovely, flew up in the air, winged, like my imagination, until these balls of magic beauty were recalled back to the body from whence they had sprung. I could never determine my relationship with water. Not until I met my mother’s brother, who told me that water had the same sort of satanic fascination for my mother, Aria. She had endangered her own life so many times that in the end, he decided to teach her to swim. She was the only woman who knew how to swim, it being uncommon in Somalia for women to learn. Water, she had explained to him, gave her the mobility and space her fantasies required, and she used to begrudge the water in the ocean its moods of calm or rage, the water in the river the determination to return “home” in vaporous form or end in the bigger ocean,

I asked myself often if this is what I remember of my foetal existence — water. It was total bliss, I said to Uncle Hilaal one day He was happy to hear that. He said — and I am not certain if he was quoting from something he read — that the first water is indubitably the best, it is heavenly bliss. There is no other expression for such a feeling.

So, in depthless water, my beginning. It was water ushered me into where I am, water that made me the human that I am, water that gave me foetal warmth — and a great deal more. Water was my mirror and I watched my reflections in it, reflections at which I smiled and which grew waves — waves dark as shadows — when I dipped my hand in. I was fond of drinking from the very spot across which my shadow fell. The water never tasted as good, in my cupped hands, from any other place.

In depthless water, too, it was I saw my future. I had it read by Misra who was exceptionally gifted in this sort of line — reading one’s future in the waves of water or in the quiver of meat or in a pool of blood. Water in a container or blood in another, the blood of a slaughtered beast, lying untouched where it had fallen and remaining there until it was empty of running, i.e. living, blood. But was it for religious or health sentiments that this was done? Misra didn’t know. Anyway, she knew how to read the future in the quiver of meat. The intestines, the fats, the entrails — every piece or slice of meat was, to her, like a palm to a fortune-teller and she read it. I was certain no other child had as much fun as I. Definitely not any of Uncle Qorrax’s children. They were beaten in the morning, in the afternoon or in the evenings by their tyrannical father, by Aw-Adan who was their (and later became my) teacher, or their mothers or a visiting relation. Not I. I was Misra’s property.

And Misra would bathe me. She oiled my body with care. I crouched in the baafi my eyes half-closed, in concentration and anxiety, waiting for the water to descend from a great height. I would shake, I would shiver, as though the cold water was hot and had burnt me — my arms moving in all directions as though they might take off in flight. A second and a third scooping of the water would ensure that my body was sufficiently wet for her to soap it. At times, when standing, I held on to her shoulders, lest I fell forward. My eyes remained closed, however, until I heard her say that I could open them. It was she who determined when this was to occur. As part of the ritual, she insisted that I blow my nose. For this purpose she would place her open left palm directly under my chin and with her right hand’s index finger and thumb squeezing the nose as I exhaled. Now where was I given these baths? Right inside our mud hut; or in the yard, if it was day, under the tree planted the very day I was born. That she had hers in the privacy of a closed door and all by herself was something I associated with her being an adult. Children had no cawra, whether boys or girls, they could walk about naked, displaying their uff until they became grown up. Anyway, after the bath, another joy.

She would oil my body a second time — tickling me as she did so, touching my friend squeezing it. She made me laugh, made me happy. Then she prepared a meal for the two of us to eat, and when I was good, as a treat, she boiled milk and sugared it for me and I drank it warm. Playfully, I refused to lick away my moustache of milk and she would tease me and we would have great fun, laughing, chasing each other under the bed or behind it. Suddenly, her voice changed. No more drinking of water lest I wet the bed which she and I shared. “What have you in your bladder?” and she would tickle me. “Why does it leak?” And the nipping, as she pinched my uff , would make me laugh.