Nuruddin Farah - Maps

Karin said, “I’m too old for that, thank God.”

This puzzled Askar. And Karin, with grandmotherly patience, explained: “What Misra has is called Xayl. We women have other ugly names for it. Only women, above or below a certain age, have it — or suffer it. Men don’t. When women are in their fifties or older, they stop having it. I haven’t suffered from it since I was fifty-three. Do you understand?” she said, her bloodshot eyes fixed on him.

Askar needn’t have spoken — she could see from the expression on his face that he didn’t follow her explanations. She wished she could make him grasp her meaning— she, who took delight in talking to him about things she hadn’t dared talk about with her own children. She said, “When you are a little older, you will understand”, in the manner in which a doctor assures an ailing person that all will be well if they take the tablets as prescribed.

“But I won’t bleed?” he asked.

She forgot to repeat that only women suffered it — a fact he either hadn’t registered, or which had escaped him, when she said, “It brings with it lots of pain and suffering.”

“If I had some of it, then Misra will have less of it, yes?”

She wore the pained expression of somebody who felt misunderstood. Her head, as though it weren’t on its neck any more, began to shake, “No, no, no. Misra is a woman,” she said to Askar.

He shrugged his shoulders, “So what?”

Without her speaking, he realized he had misunderstood her. Then he heard her say: “Only women of a certain age have their periods, women between the ages of twelve and let’s say fifty. Not men. And definitely not boys.”

He stared at her in wonderment, in silence. She went on, speaking slowly, articulately, “My husband and my sons do not suffer the monthly pains of menstruation. My daughters, yes. I, yes — when I was younger.”

“Suppose a woman doesn’t have it? Suppose she misses it?”

She wanted something clarified before she answered that: “You mean, when these women are still young enough to be afflicted by them and they’re not as old as I?”

Askar nodded.

Karin was sure. “It means that they are with child.”

He appeared puzzled. Nor did the following explanation which she offered enlighten him, any more than a nomad listening to a news broadcast about the devaluation of the Somali shilling finds the subject comprehensible. She said, “Women who miss their periods are pregnant unless they are unwell.” Rather, this complicated matters.

Was Misra with child once monthly since she was unwell? Misra’s periods used to be accompanied by depressive days and nights, and her breasts ached. She was unwell and she bled a great deal. Her monthly agony flowed for almost a week. Her pain was most acute in the lower abdomen to which she held constantly, and which she pressed as though she were squeezing pus out of an infected wound — so severe was this pain, at times she fainted. When the tension in her body was greater, she doubled up with it — as though she were in labour.

Karin, mixing kneaded dough with ground millet and water to make canjeera for Askar and, if she could eat it, for Misra as well, was saying, “Remember when you’re a grown man — remember the suffering and the pain on her face. Remember how women suffer. And do not, please, do not cause her further pain and suffering.”

He wished he had the will to make the required promise. Also, he wished he could remind Karin that Misra was not always in pain during this period. At times, he could see her sit in a palatial silence, daydreaming. He didn’t know if Misra had ever told Karin of the two men, namely Uncle Qorrax and Aw-Adan, who called after nightfall. With no after-dark visitors, these nights were quieter when Misra stopped moaning with excruciating pain. At any rate, neither of the men visited her when she was in season. He wished she was never in seasonal agonies. He wished the two men did not come after nightfall.

But there was one occasion when Misra didn’t have the monthly, excruciating pain. Karin came and inquired after their health, all right. In fact, she called more often, arousing suspicions in Askar’s mind — and something told him something was amiss. Came a woman whom he had never seen before and the three of them were closeted in the room, speaking in whispers. What were they hiding from him?

Although there was no visible pain — the kind that he had associated with her periods — there was the same kind of pronounced tension in her body and she daydreamed a lot and for long periods of time. She didn’t beat him, however, and had no temper to lose, it seemed. But she was most firm with the two after-dark callers — she wanted to see neither of them. Aw-Adan was very persistent. She didn’t hesitate. She said to him, “Go.” And he went.

There were changes in Misra’s diet. She began chewing clayey lumps which were brought for her from the river bed; she ate a great many sour things; she also brushed her teeth with coal.

One evening, Aw-Adan came and the two of them entered the room and Askar could hear the key turning in the door as they locked it from inside. And Askar went to his favourite spot below the window. Undisturbed, he eavesdropped on their conversation. It was very brief. She wasn’t willing to enter into a long dialogue with him. “No marriage”, he caught the phrase and held it in his mind long enough for him to hear her snap, “In any case who says the child is yours? He isn’t.” And she came out.

There was a great deal of movement that night, with Karin and another woman coming and going. Something was being prepared but he didn’t know what. Then, the following morning, the women made Misra lie on her back and they trampled all over her body As if that wasn’t enough, they made her sit up and be fumigated with cardamom and then improvised for her a suppository of cinnamon with myrrh. After which, they made her take concoctions which, among other things, included the broth of roots and shrubs which were known to have abortifacient powers. And as if this wasn’t sufficient, one of the women inserted a metallic rod into her insides and Misra made a most frightening noise.

Misra convalesced for about a week. She was weak. What a kind woman Karin was, he used to think, ploughing the space between a husband who lay on his back from before Askar was born, and Misra whose wounds were fresh and whose memory of the pain therefore most acute. Playful, although he was now old enough to run faster than her, Askar rode on her back as she went back and forth, ecstatic at having found a person as patient, kind and generous as she.

Now. Years later. In Mogadiscio. At Hilaal and Salaado’s.

And he saw a child crawling — and he could see this from a slight distance. Then the child clambered to its feet and walked for a bit, its gait shaky, its legs infirm and wobbly; he walked for half a metre and fell on his bottom but got up instantly and fell again, this time forward; his mouth, when he turned to Askar, was marked with the earth it had struck. But he did not cry. He continued falling and rising, without ever getting tired, without hurting a muscle or breaking a bone. And someone’s voice (he couldn’t see the person — but the voice was a woman’s) said: “Children fall without ever coming to harm because some protecting angels lay themselves between the falling child and the concrete floor, serving as the mattress on to which athletes drop from great heights of record-breaking dreams,” And he remembered his physical instructor at school say to him recently: “Take care when you jump high, Askar. Yours is the age when you must account for every fall, lest you break a bone.”

His mind wandered — he watched with fascination a woman on “fours”, a woman crawling playfully towards the child, and, following lustily in the woman’s wake, there was a man. It didn’t matter to Askar if the child was theirs. This was not his concern. He asked himself a question: was this how Uncle Qorrax and then Aw-Adan first seduced Misra?