Nuruddin Farah - Maps

“What about cuudis?”

He said, “No, thank you.”

He had watched it done. Karin was the patient. Poor woman, he thought. They forced her to tell lies, heaps of lies. Otherwise, how could she give as her name the name of a man? How could Karin say, looking straight at her “confessor”, “My name is Abdullahi”, giving as her own an identity which didn’t match her real identity. Maybe, it was because they “fumigated” her by placing a towel above her head, making her sweat, making her swelter under the suffocating smoke and she coughed and coughed. The woman who had been hired to dispel the bad eye out of Karin’s system spoke to Karin in a language which definitely was not Somali. A couple of other women beat Karin on the chest as though she were a tin drum, they beat her on the back of the neck like one who’s choked on a large piece of meat but won’t vomit it out voluntarily. Askar wondered if Karin might have swallowed the “bad eye”. No? Although it didn’t make any sense, he wasn’t averse to the idea.

“The Koran, then?”

No, no. He knew the Koran from back to front. He didn’t want it read over his body astraddle a bed — not by Aw-Adan. Who knows, argued Askar, the man might have weird ideas. What if he read the wrong passages of the Koran, passages, say, which could make him turn into an epileptic? He had heard of such a story. As a matter of fact, he knew the brother of the boy to whom a similar experience had happened. A “priest” had chosen the wrong passages of the Koran deliberately, mischievously, and read it over the little boy whom he didn’t like. Did Misra know what became of the boy? “He now has extra fluid flowing into his skull. They tell me his brain is over-flooded like a river with burst banks.”

Misra was worried. “Who is this boy? Does he really exist?”

“His head is larger than the rest of his body; his sight has begun to fail, his hearing too. And all this because a wicked ‘priest’ has read the wrong passages of the Sacred Book over the body of an innocent boy.”

“That’s criminal,” said Misra.

“I agree with you,” he said.

They were silent for a few minutes. “So what do we do?” she said.

His eyes lit with mischief. He pretended to be thinking. “What?” she asked. “What is it, Askar?”

“Go and call Aw-Adan,” he suggested.

“And I ask him to bring along a copy of the Koran?”

“No.”

“What then?”

And he became the great actor she had known, and his stare was illumined with the kind of satanic naughtiness his eyes brightened with when he was being mischievous. “What then?” she repeated.

“Tell him to bring along his cane. I prefer his caning me with my eyes wide open to his reading the Koran over my body astraddle a sick bed when they are closed and trusting.”

In a moment, he was up and about. He was changing into a clean pair of shorts and looking for a T-shirt to match it. He was all right, she told herself. He was thinking . However, she saw him rummage in a cupboard. “But what are you looking for?” she said.

“I am going to shave,” he said. “Shave my chin, grow a beard, be a man like any other.”

“Shave? What…?”

He was gone.

II

He cut himself when shaving. He cut his chin and his lower lip bled when he held the razor the wrong way, when he didn’t adjust the disposable blade properly There were shaving things lying about and he knew where to get them. His uncle was away at the war and so were many other men. Now he washed his face in the after-shave lotions, trying to see which one would stop his chin’s blood running. The lotions made him smell good and so he sprayed them on his groin — determined that this would instantly remove the odour of his perspiration — and now, as there was still some of it left in the bottle, he hesitated whether to sprinkle it on his armpits, something he had seen older men do. But no. For this he chose the talcum powder, he decided that would do. He smiled. He breathed hot vapoury air and wrote his name on the mirror’s mist and saw bits of himself, bits of his coagulated or running blood in the “A” or the “S” or the “K” and the “R of his name.

He could not remember which came first — the thought that if he shaved, hair would automatically grow on his chin and his lips — or that he should take note of the hourly changes in his body. He was said to have developed the habit of getting up earlier than Misra so he would see for himself, placing his head against the dot he had marked on the wall the previous day, whether he had grown an inch or two taller in the past twenty-four hours. Very often, he was disappointed that he couldn’t determine if he had, but he never felt as disheartened as when he stood against the tree planted by Misra the same day he was born.

“You must eat and eat and eat if you want to grow fast,” she said, one early morning when he woke her up because he moved about noisily, “The tree lives off the earth and its water, it eats grandly, drinks huge quantities of water and breathes fresh air all the time. You must eat more so you’ll become a man, a fully grown man, tall, broad-shouldered and perhaps bearded too.” And having said so, she went back to sleep.

And the anxiety to become a fully grown man, a man ready for a conscription into the liberation army, ready to die and kill for his mother country, ready to avenge his father, the anxiety made him overindulge himself in matters related to food, it made him eat to excess until he felt so unwell that he vomited a couple of times. He had appropriated Misra’s food since she couldn’t eat anything anyway and stuffed himself full of anything he could lay his hands on. Hardly able to breathe, he would then lift rocks, flex his muscles so as to develop them, climb up the tree for further leg and arm exercises and then swing from it. Exhausted, he would fall asleep.

What distinguished this period’s dreams from any other, what set these dreams apart from the others, was the presence of a huge garden, lush with an enormous variety of tropical fruits. He ate these fruits, he made himself a long list of salad fruits, and swam in the cool stream whose water was warm and whose bed was grown with weeds which were nice to touch and feel and pull and tickle one’s face with — a face which grew sterner, and upon whose chin sprouted hair, silky, smooth, young and tender. Yes, what made the experience unique was that the garden was green with paradisiacal tropicality, it was calm with heavenly quietness. And in the Edenic certitude he found himself in, he discovered he was confident, happy to be where he was, happy to be who he was. There was — almost within reach, wearing a smile, motherly — there was a woman. The woman grew on him. One night, dreaming, he “picked” her up like a fruit and studied her; she, who was small as a fruit, lay under his intense stare. He had never seen that woman before. Of this, he was most certain. And yet he knew her. Where had he met her? He didn’t know. She was calling him “my son” and was talking of the pain of being separated from him — she who had borne him, she who had carried him for months inside of her, she who claimed she “lived” in him who had survived her, she who claimed to be his guide when everyone else failed him. The following morning, he awoke and was confronted with an inexplicable mystery: there was blood on the sheet he had covered himself with, blood under him too. Most specifically, there was blood on his groin. He sought Misra’s response.

“You’ve begun to menstruate,” she said, looking at him with intent seriousness. “The question is: will you have the monthly curse as we women do or will yours be as rare as the male fowl’s egg?”