Nuruddin Farah - Maps

Whereas she was saying, “There are a number of blind spots the body of a human has. We may not know of them until we are self-conscious; we may not sense how helpless we are until we submit ourselves to other hands. A child’s body’s blind spots are far too many to count — the small of the back, the back of the neck, the dirt in the groin, the filth on either the left or the right of the lower reaches of the bottom. A mother sees them all, she soaps them all and, in the end, washes them clean.” She was going nearer him and he was withdrawing and she was saying, “They are difficult to live with, these blind spots, these blind curves in one’s body, the curtained parts of one’s body, the never-seen, never-visible-unless-with-the-assistance-of-a-mirror parts — and here I am thinking of the skull — or the difficult-to-see parts — and here I am thinking about… I am thinking about…,” and speaking and moving in his direction and he was retreating and was about to stumble backwards into the tree planted the day he himself was born, his blind spot, that is his back, ahead of the rest of his body, when … a bomb fell — and it fell almost between them, although nearer where he was standing — and it separated them.

Panic gripped her throat: and she couldn’t speak or shout but lay on the ground, inert, covered in dust — once the noise died down and the shower of dust began to settle. He? He was — he was there, more or less dusted, and his eyes were two spots of brightness which focused on their surroundings and it seemed as though he mobilized his alert mind to determine where the shelling had come from.

“Are you all right?” she managed to say after a long silence.

He looked at her — she appeared like one who had just risen from the dead.

Still defiant, he said, “Who do you take me for?”

She had gone browner with dust and her headscarf had fallen off, exposing a most unruly head, as ugly as the knotted, uncombed curls. She walked away in a defiant way — defiant and indifferent as to what might happen, impervious to what he thought or did, or whether a shower of shells fell on her head, or anyone else’s head.

“It’s worthwhile your considering giving yourself a good scrubbing. Maybe the water is still lukewarm and you surely need a wash and something that will keep your soul active and alive and your body clean,” he said.

Then another shell fell — this time nearer where she was standing. And, at the wake of the explosion, when again she had managed to stand to her feet, both of them saw before them a crowd, brown as mud — a crowd of women and children armed with pangas, sticks and machetes, a crowd that was moving in the direction of the hill where the enemy had fired from. A spokeswoman of the crowd promised they would take “Government Hill”. Askar felt he had to join, to give victory an indispensable hand.

And he ran after the crowd.

V

The following day Noon.

“Misra, where precisely is Somalia?” he asked suddenly

She was pulling at a chicken’s guts, a chicken she had just beheaded. She stopped and stared at him, not knowing what to say Her forehead wrinkled with concentration, like somebody who was trying to remember where he was. Then: “Haven’t you seen it on the map?” she said, holding her bloodstained hands away from her dress.

“A map? What map?”

“Go look it up. You seem happily engrossed in it.”

He surprised her; he admitted in a sad voice: “No one has ever explained how to read maps, you see, and I have difficulty deciphering all the messages.”

She looked away from him and at the decapitated chicken. She wished she could get on with her plucking of the fowl’s feathers (Askar thought of the chicken’s blood as being exceptionally red — not dark red as he expected) and she said: “If you go east, you’ll end up in Somalia.”

Offended, he said, “I know that.”

“What don’t you know then? Why don’t you let me get on with what I am doing? Don’t you realize there is little time left for me to prepare a decent meal?”

He bent down and picked up a feather flying away into the cosmic infinitude. He looked at it, studying it as though under a microscope, one among a hundred other feathers joining the unbound universe. Then he looked at the white meat of the chicken — goose-pimpled, dead and headless, the fowl lay where Misra had dropped it, in a huge bowl. Did it have a soul? Did it have a brain? He remembered testing its motherly instinct when he threatened the lives of its chicks. It attacked, its wings open in combat readiness and its rage clucking in consonants of maternal protectiveness. Askar had run away for his own life. From a hen. He was glad none of the boys saw him run away

From then on, whenever he entered Karin’s compound, he sus-’ pected that the mother hen, or the others, now as tall as they were ever likely to grow, eyed him menacingly, goose-stepping sideways as if only their preparedness for a fall-frontal attack, and together, might save them from his mischievous threats. Poor hen — dead. Dead because it was killed to celebrate a victory — and the fact (this was in the air) that Askar might be leaving for Mogadiscio. After all, Uncle Qorrax said he would come and speak with him.

Then, something attracted his attention. Misra had laid the plucked chicken on its side and was pulling at its guts, when he noticed an egg — whole, as yet unhatched, and, he thought, indifferent to the goings-on outside its own complete universe. An egg — oval-shaped as the universe — with a life of its own and an undiscovered future. “Don’t touch it, Misra,” he ordered.

She looked at him in wonderment. “This?” she said, touching it.

“Don’t hurt it,” he said.

She gave it to him — slowly but delicately. She handed the egg to him with the same care that she might have offered the world to him. And he received it with absolute reverence, with both hands joined together as if in prayer. Something warned him to be careful and not to drop it. It was warm. He believed life quivered within it as he closed his hands on it, not tightly, but gently. Reluctantly, he entered into a dialogue with himself. Was there no similarity between the egg and his own beginnings? In the corpse of a hen, there lay another potential life — just as he lay in his dead mother — but alive. He was glad the egg was salvaged out of the dead hen.

Misra was saying: “I thought you wanted me to tell you where ‘Somalia’ is?”

Askar nodded his head.

“There,’ she said, pointing with her blood-soiled index finger.

He repeated the question, “Where?” apparendy because he had been staring at the index finger, which was dripping with blood, and hadn’t taken note of the direction in which she pointed. “Where?”

Her “There”, this second time, was so suddenly spoken, Askar could Ve sworn “Somalia” was the name of a person, perhaps a friend of hers, somebody who might be invited to partake of the meal she was preparing. “That’s Somalia,” she added. “Easterly.”

He thought he heard someone’s footsteps coming from the easterly direction — he looked, and there was Karin. She had come with an empty bowl. Today, she was in near rags but charming-looking, and smiling too, and talking and friendly, and had the look of somebody who wanted something. She said, “Give us some of God’s charity and you’ll be blessed forever.”

Askar said, “The meat is yours, the egg is mine.”

Karin, puzzled, looked at Misra. “What’s he talking about?”

“Ask him,’ she said.

By the time Karin was ready to ask him a question, he was gone.

Three days later. Another festive occasion. The three of them: Karin, Misra and Askar. Somebody had delivered a large consignment of raw meat, a gift from Uncle Qorrax. Karin was sitting apart and seemed to be having difficulty determining in which direction the wind was blowing. She appeared littler, barely a girl in her teens. This was how she looked to Askar, who saw her go closer to the earth as if she were listening for a secret. He thought of a beetle, which, sensing that an unidentified shadow might strike it dead, waits, and while doing so, curls up, making itself smaller, leaving no part of it exposed other than its wing-cases hard as a turtle’s back — and like a turtle, it is able to remove its head and neck out of danger: that’s it! “What are you doing, Karin?” said Misra.