Nuruddin Farah - Maps

Water: I associate with joy; blood: not so much with pain as with lost tempers and beatings. But I associate something else with blood — future as read by Misra. Once I even made a pun — my future is in my blood. The funny thing was Uncle Qorrax misunderstood it as meaning that my destiny was the destiny of the family of which he was head. Well, I didn’t correct him. We had a laugh, Misra and I. The poor man did not know that she had read my future in blood.

As for water. Have you ever watched a storm of rain? Imagine this: every drop of rain is escorted by an angel who keeps it company until it touches the earth, the angels who make certain that seasons change for the better when it rains, that people prosper, the dry brown grass turns green, dust into mud — and human beings pray in thankful offerings, slaughtering beasts for their carnivorous tables — and Misra is thus enabled to tell a future — which is past.

For Misra, and therefore for me too, everything had a past, a present, and a future. The earth had its history, the sun its life, the moon its pattern of behaviour. Blood. Sand. Dry leaves, dry twigs. Papers, yellow with age and roaming the open spaces, riding the dust and the wind — everything told of a future. One had to know to read it. Or so said Misra.

And stones had faces, spiders souls, serpents ideas, lizards intelligence. Human beings are not the only living and thinking beings. Rivers have memories, she said. They remember where they’ve come from, they have allegiance to the people in whose country they rise. The wind recalls whom it has met in its journeys across the vast deserts, it exchanges greetings with some, turning an unhearing ear to the salutations reaching it from others. A reed possesses a mind of its own and holds steadfastly to this, even if, at times, the wind makes it go dizzy, lose its head and balance as it somersaults over rocks, sandbanks, etc. The earth draws strength from the sky, the sky from the earth — and the living from the dead. The history of the earth can be read in its eclipses, that of the sun from its being partially or completely obscured by the shadow of another body — the earth or the moon.

I continue, since I have heard her recite the “Ode to Nature” so many times: a child is to its mother what the sun is to the moon; what the heavens are to earth. Yes, Fm quoting her. The mother is what the moon is to the sun; what the earth to the heavens. A mother receiving little, giving a great deal. It makes a mother take delight in the giving and the child (or man) in the receiving. The shock is greater when one learns one must give — not always receive. A shock so great, it is like falling suddenly and unexpectedly from a great height, onto the lap of death. Amen! The living draw strength from the dead, don’t they? And those who are asleep receive sustenance from those who are awake. Amen! And remember — the Prophet has said that men are asleep. It’s only at their death that they are awoken. Amen!

VI

She looked like a corpse when asleep — motionless, with her hands folded together across her chest, her eyes closed and hardly a snort, or even a sound, issuing from her nostrils. But I told myself she needn’t have worried, when all others die, she won’t, I would say to myself. So long as I lived, she would too. Either in me, or she would live a life independent from mine. And I would watch her stir, then rise, as though from the dead, every morning, after I had been awake for hours. She would dust her dress and walk away — as if she had woken from the dead, from her own grave. Every morning, the same thing. At times, she would take a nap in the afternoon. And Aw-Adan would come and he would pull up a chair by her head, and sitting quietly, would read a selection of suras from the Koran, as though she were dead and he were reading a devotion or two over her. If she didn’t look like a corpse, I would turn her into one, I said to her one day

“But why?” she asked, disturbed.

“Or I would kill you. So you would be a corpse like my mother.”

“Kill me? Why? But what have I done?”

I found it extremely difficult to explain myself. Of course, I wasn’t going to “kill her” because I had hated her, far from it, far from it. What I meant was, that only in death could she and I be united — only in death, her death, could she and I be related, only then would I somehow feel as though we were a mother and her son. And then, and only then, would I find myself, alone and existing and real — yes, an individual with needs of his own — no longer an extension of a maternal hand whose touch quietened the childish cry in one.

And then I asked, “Is it possible that death took me for my mother, is it, Misra? Please answer me honestly. For this is something I ask myself often and I don’t know what to think or say.”

She shook her head and said she didn’t think death would mistake one person for another. It was all to do with whether one’s time in this world was up and in any case, she went on, it is only under exceptional circumstances that a person’s lifetime in this world is extended. And she told me the story of the man to whom an angel appeared and said that he, the man, was to die in a year to the day, having had his time which had been extended in view of the good things he had been doing. Although grateful, the man admitted that one year wasn’t probably enough for him to finish all the things he had begun and besides, what is a year but three-hundred-and-sixty-five days and what is life but these incalculable mysteries, mysteries that remain unrevealed to one, mysteries that descend on one like grains of sand from the sky I would've preferred it, said the man to the angel, had you not come to tell me when death would call on me — whether in an hour, a day, say, or even a year. The angel said he had been given instructions to do so and he left the man saying no more. For three-hundred-and-sixty-five days and nights, the man spent every second of his life in this world praying and he spent every cent he had on some charitable cause or other and he did not sin either in thought or deed. A year later to the day, the angel, robed all in white, appeared before the man, and all he said was, “You’ve been dead for a year. If one were to extend your life in this world by another year, one wonders if you will live. Why pray day and night? Why spend every cent you have on charities for the needy? Do you think God created you only to pray? Live. Live, we recommend. Live like a human.” And the angel left the man in similar agony. The man lived for a year. He overate, he gave not a cent to godly causes, but prayed enough so as to placate his own conscience. When next the angel called on him, the man was prepared to receive the news of his death for he was still in pain, burdened with the knowledge that he would die in less than a year. The angel, it came to pass, turned up two years later and his only comment was that the man had the making of a human who sinned and knew he had. That man, or so the stories tell us, lived to be a hundred-and-fifteen years before another angel knocked on his door.

“But what was exceptional in the man’s life?” I said.

“He was like every other human being, I think. And death could Ve mistaken him for another person. He was weak and didn’t know the meaning of life, didn’t know why God created him,” she said. “Like most of us.”

It didn’t make much sense to me and I wondered if Aw-Adan had told her a story whose details she had half-forgotten. I asked her, after a long pause, if this was so.

As usual, she was unwilling to admit there were gaps in the story she had told me. So she changed the subject. She said that we could play hide-and-seek until I fell asleep.