Nuruddin Farah - Maps

Now he looked up to see if “Venus” too had vanished. Here he wasn’t totally disappointed — but in a peculiar way curiously reflective. He felt awkward, like when you cannot name something you know, when the combination of letters in your mouth will not match the sound your lips are willing to make. It was not “Venus”, he decided in his Edenic impression. It was a species, looking rather like a spider, large and colourful — a spider as huge as the dreamscape he had been treading, a spider which had managed to weave from out of that small belly, out of that tiny body, a web so complex, a trap so long, one would be lost in it. The spider ascended the ladder of lengths of its innards.

Now he moved away, convinced that he had to do just that. And he walked. After half an hour, he came upon a river about to break at the banks. Undisturbed, he sat under a tree and contemplated while waiting. But what was he waiting for? He didn’t know. He sat, waiting; he sat, burdened with a Thomist’s questioning of the self: he told himself he knew what purpose rivers served — to irrigate and help grow food in the form of fruits, vegetables, etc.; but what did man’s existence serve, or whom? To worship God? To study God through nature? Why was he born? For some unforeseeable reason related to the thought that had just crossed his mind, Askar remembered the story of a man who challenged everything, a man who contested that “even mirrors didn’t reflect the true identity of things and persons”. The man was bald — but he chose to refuse to see his baldness, although people confirmed what the mirror reflected, or rather what it saw. People said that he was insane, they argued, how could anyone contend that what people saw and mirrors confirmed wasn’t true? Months later, the man went insane. Would Askar in the end go mad questioning things, challenging received opinions?

Finally, he was standing in front of a huge portal with the letter A boldly printed on it. He remembered that, perhaps in a previous life, he had seen that portal before and he had been turned away from it by a uniformed man. Now he hadn’t the courage to knock on it, nor did he have the curiosity to discover to what secret world the gate would have given him access. He sat on a boulder by the side of the road. To his left, there was a stream whose banks were green with weeds. It appeared as though a fountain had, just at that instant, right in front of him, right in his presence, given birth to an aqueous marvel of a stream in which fishes of all sizes and descriptions chased one another without any sense of inhibition or forbearance.

And he discovered, looking up, that the sky above him was wearing the seven heavenly garments, whose colours matched that of a rainbow he had never seen before — one was of ruby; one of silvery pearls; one gold; another white silver; one of orange hyacinth; and, lastly, one of shining brightness, the likes of which no human, other than a mystic or a prophet, had ever perceived. To his right, when he turned, there was a tree on one of whose branches perched “talking dolls”. He couldn’t understand what the dolls were saying. However, he later wondered if these might possibly have been the product of an exhausted mind’s aberrant way of expressing itself.

Then a voice (was it coming from within himself or without — he couldn’t tell), a voice, alive with urgency, called to him. First, he was frightened and wouldn’t stir at all. Then he heard a silky sound, that is, he heard the hissing sound of a snake approaching from his right, and, not in the least frightened, he moved towards the snake. Meanwhile, his hands, as he went to encounter the snake, gently touched a spot on his thigh where a snake had bitten him when small. He stared at the snake, expecting it would wear an expression of recognition; and yes; he saw the snake’s forked tongue cut the air surgically, its head nodding, its throat throbbing with coded speech. Then all movements, within himself and without, ceased; and he didn’t know where he was or who he was; and he no longer had any identity or name; nor was the snake there either. For a second or so, he was frightened, as if he were a traveller who had misplaced his travelling documents. Was it conceivable, he asked himself, that he had lost whatever knowledge he had gained about himself through the years?

Alone, melancholic, he sat on a boulder, his head between his hands, his expression mournful. He was saddest that there was no one else to whom he could put questions about his own identity; there was no one to answer his nagging, “Who am I?” or “Where am I?” Luckily, however, Askar soon found he had a premonition — that the snake would return wearing a mask And lo and behold the snake did return, its face cast in the image of a man whose photograph Askar had seen before, a photograph identified as “Father”. He couldn’t, then, help remembering a relation telling him not to harm snakes that had called on the family compound years ago because some snakes were the family’s blood relations. He had given this serious thought and requested that someone, preferably an adult, answer his query: “He may be a snake in body and appearance although he is a human relation in all other aspects that are not easily revealed to you or I — is this possible?” Misra had answered, yes.

Suddenly, an overwhelming silence had overcome Askar. And a voice nobody claimed, one which certainly did not emanate from his sub- or unconscious, called him away In other words, a voice lured him on to a field — a field greener with the imaginations’s pasture — and he spotted two horses neighing nervously as he approached them. One of the horses was frighteningly ugly, the other handsome like an Arabian horse of noble breed. The colour of the handsome horse, saddled with the finest material man could make, was jet black, sporting a white forehead, white forelegs and dark eyes, although its upper lips were not as white as its forehead. The other was ugly, but it appeared uglier standing by the handsome horse. It was sweaty and smelly and its teeth were as sharp as a sword. Askar suspected the handsome horse knew who he was, for it came up to him (the ugly one stayed behind, greedily eating its grass), and, head down in reverence, stood by him ready to be ridden. The speed, once he was on its back, was great; the grace, enormous; and the comfort of the ride indescribably refreshing. It galloped across rivers, it jumped any mountainous hurdle and flew in the air, as if winged! A horse, was this really a horse? It wasn’t as big-boned as the horses he had seen before, but was definitely a great deal taller, and of course heftier, than an Arabian horse. It had legs which adjusted themselves to the conditions of the terrain. When going down a hill, for instance, the horse’s front legs would stretch, they would become longer so that he, who had never ridden a horse before and who didn’t know how to, wouldn’t find it embarrassingly difficult to hold on to the saddle.

Without being told to, the horse stopped.

And a man, clothed in coarse garments of wool, appeared before them. The man was so quiet, so still, it seemed Askar and the horse’s breathing disturbed him. The horse went nearer the man, and it bowed its head low, as though in apology for some wrong done. The man patted the horse on the head. And Askar dismounted. The horse, as if dismissed, went away to the bushes behind Askar and the man, hidden from them. Askar saw that the horse did not condescend to eat the grass at all, but waited, its ears pricked, blessed with the foreknowledge that it would be fed on nobler food, on something ambrosial perhaps.

“Greetings,” said the man, his voice golden and sweet and deep. “Greetings, young man, from our land of mysteries, snakes, spiders, and horses and men in coarse garments of wool. Welcome amongst us, traveller. Greetings,’ he repeated.