Nuruddin Farah - Maps

He said, “But I am a man. How can I menstruate?”

Enraged, he strode away from her in a manly way. He wouldn’t give her the pleasure, he shouted, of her making fun of him any more or even of washing his “womanhood” if it came to that. But what did this mean anyway? he asked himself, when he had washed. How come his own body misbehaved, how come he menstruated? Come what may, he said to himself, he wouldn’t allow such thoughts to dissuade him from doing whatever it took to be a man who was ready to be conscripted into the army, a man ready to die and kill for his mother country, a man ready to avenge his father.

III

That day, he rejected the food she gave him. He tossed aside the plate she extended towards him and scolded her for what she had done when he was sleeping — smear his sheet and groin with blood. Why did she do it? She swore that she didn’t go anywhere near him, that she didn’t smear his body or sheet with blood.

“And so where did the blood come from?” he said.

She answered, “I don’t know.”

He reminded her of a conversation they had had a few days ago, one in which he admitted that he envied women their monthly periods. “Could it be that in my dream, I menstruated?”

“There’s a war on, there’s a great deal of tension — and so everything is possible. I wouldn’t know the answer, to be honest with you. I’ve never known of any man who menstruated. Could it be that the tension, the war…?”

And he interrupted her. “The war, the tension — what nonsense!”

“Do you have an answer then?”

He reflected; then: “Men wet themselves occasionally?”

“When sleeping, yes.”

He sighed. “And the colour of sperm is white?”

“White as silver.”

She heard a whine and waited.

“You know Uncle Hassan, don’t you?”

She nodded her head, “Yes.”

“You remember he urinated blood and was taken to see a doctor?”

She agreed that that was true.

“Perhaps that explains it all.”

She didn’t like his explanation. “It means you prefer being sick to being a woman.”

“Naturally,” he said. “Who wouldn’t?”

She said, “ I wouldn’t.”

“That is easily understandable. You are, after all, a woman.”

And he left the room.

IV

“Tell me, why are there trackloads of women and infants leaving Kallafo?” Askar asked Misra when it became obvious that the Ethiopians were sending away their women and children from the war zone. “Why?”

“Where there’s a war,” she began to answer, but continued mixing hot and cold water so she could give Askar a bath, “man sends ahead of himself his wife and children and stays behind to defend his people’s honour, dignity and also property. Perhaps a bomb will cut the women’s and children’s lives short before they get home; perhaps the dozen or so armed soldiers with their primitive rifles will manage to deter a few equally primitively armed Somalis from killing them.”

There was a pause.

“And you won’t go?” he said.

Her hand stopped stirring the water whose temperature she was testing. She was reduced to a stare — speechless. He said to himself, “Maybe this is what death looks like — Misra sitting, speechless and staring, with her hand stuck in a bucket fall of lukewarm water, the dust round her unstirred, the lips of her mouth forming and unforming a roguish smile — maybe this is what death looks like. And not what I saw last night — the back of a woman’s head, a hand flung aside, a nail cut and then discarded.”

She was saying, “Are you sending me away, Askar?”

“Not ahead of myself, no,”

Again she smiled rather mischievously, reminding herself that Askar was not yet eight and that here he was behaving as though he were a man and she a creature of his own invention. She declined to comment on what was going on between them, she declined to go into the same ring as he, she bowed out. However disreputable, she believed she was the one who made him who he was, she was the one who brought him up. She changed the mood of the exchange, changed the subject. Searching for his hand, she said, “Come.”

He stood away, his hands hidden behind him. “Where?”

“Come,” she said, half rising to take grip of his hand. “Let me give your body a good scrubbing which is what it needs most. And then we’ll go for a walk and, if you wish, watch the Ethiopian men send their women and children away to highland safety”

He was rudely noisy, shouting, “Don’t you touch me.”

“Fm sorry,” she said, taken aback.

It was then that the thought that he was now a man and didn’t want to be helped to wash impressed itself upon her mind. She would have to make an auspicious move, one which would make him relax until she poured the first canful of water on his head, and until the water calmed his nerves. His determined voice of defiance resounded through her body — and she had to wait for a long while before she was able to say anything. Then, “Do you want to bathe yourself?” she asked, keeping her distance.

And saw (the thought took a long time to mature) how methodically “dirtied” he had been — as if he played rough with boys of his age and wrestled and somersaulted into and out of challenging hurdles. He didn’t look helplessly dirty — if anything, he was deliberately dirty. This thought descended on her like a revelation. She wondered where he had been — and with whom. She suspected he wouldn’t tell her, but thinking she wouldn’t lose anything anyway, she asked: “Where have you been?”

He wouldn’t tell her.

“Why won’t you tell me where you’ve been?”

He behaved like one who had a secret to withhold.

“You’ll not tell me?”

He shook his head, “No.”

With harrowing clarity, she saw what he was after — to tell her he would go where he pleased, tell her that he would roam in the territory of his pleasure, alone, and at any rate without her help, wash when he decided he wanted. She reasoned: the world is reduced to chaos; there’s a war on; boys, because of this chaotic situation, have suddenly become men and refuse to be mothered.

And then, with frightening suddenness, he said, “Not only can I wash if I choose to, but I can kill; and not only can I kill but I can also defend myself against my enemy.”

The fierceness with which he spoke the words “I can kill” alarmed her. She stiffened, her heart missed a beat, then drummed faster, beating noisily in the caged rib of her seemingly discreet reaction. She appeared uneasy and stood up taller, higher, supporting her weight on the tip of her toes, like one who is looking over the edge of a cliff. “Kill? Kill whom?”

He wouldn’t say, just as he wouldn’t tell her that he was a member of a small body of young men who trained together as guerrillas and who rolled on the dirt as they felled one another with mock blows, issuing, as they dropped to the ground, a most heinous kung-fu cry, or some such like. What mattered, in the end, was you killed your enemy, said these young men to one another. The idea to train with these boys wasn’t his, but the boy who had been raped by the Adenese — who proved to be the toughest, not least because he had something to fight against and he had in him a bitter contempt for everybody in this or any other world. It was he, and not Askar, who made a hole in a thinly mud-plastered wall which enabled the body of boys to take a quieter look at the men (believed to be away at the war front) who trained to kill and, through the hole in the wall, the boys imbibed an ideology embodied in the dream they saw as their own, the dream they envisioned as their common future: warriors of a people fighting to liberate their country from colonial oppression. Nor would he tell her of his friends’ suspicious finger pointing in her direction. Was she not from the Highlands? they said. How could she be trusted? They most insistently repeated their suspicious worries that she might speak, might pass on the information. It bothered him greatly that he couldn’t share with her the joy of his secrets; it pained him that he had to be distrustful of her motives when she probed into his affairs, asking him where he had been and with whom. “It was as if you were born with a deformity that you had to carry with you everywhere you went,” he said to the boy whom the Adenese had raped. Indeed, who better could he say this to, than to another boy who carried on his head another shame of another kind? “Yes, I understand,” said the “disgraced” boy. Askar said to himself now, “I will not allow her to wash the dirt my body has accumulated when training to kill my people’s enemy.”