Nuruddin Farah - Maps

“Thinking. Thinking of asking you to divine,” she said.

“What with?”

“Meat.”

She thought for a minute. “I've used meat only once. Water, yes, and blood. It’s difficult to divine with meat. Meat is short-lived, there is something temporary about meat in hot climates.”

Misra gently stroked the entrails and he could hear the groan of an intestine, the moan of a bladder. She washed the meat. Then she held a handful of it and stared at it for a long time. She fell into, and dwelled in, a state of suspense. Her posture was that of someone praying, her silence concentrated like a treasure. Then she began speaking words belonging to a language group neither Karin nor Askar had ever heard of before and she repeated and repeated the mantras of her invocation. She uttered a shibboleth, or what must have been a test word, and looked happy like somebody who has found a lost friend. She spoke slowly this time. Her voice — ripples (as of water) in the wake of other ripples, each following waves of more ripples falling upon further ripples. And each of her incantatory phrases was shapely like predictions that would come true. Finally, she put the meat back in the bowl.

And the meat quivered.

And Askar watched her stare at the fatty portion of the meat, as though she were reading the future in a palm — which she probably was. And the future trembled, red like the season’s flower in bloom, living and yet dead: the meat. And the future-in-the-meat, whatever its colour, whatever its own future, beckoned to Misra’s questioning mind — and her palms, from which she was reading the future, were bloody What did that mean? Karin asked: “Tell us what you've seen, Misra. Please.”

Misra’s breathing was deep, Askar’s shallow, Karin's, choked.

“To the traveller,” began Misra, speaking with a voice that was not her own (this reminded Askar of when Karin had assumed an identity different from her own, claiming she was called Abdullahi), and then paused for a while. Then she continued, this time with her eyes closed, “To the traveller, the heat dwells in the distance in the dilute forms of mirages and such-like hopes as may make the fatigued voyager believe in the eternal nature of the state of things.”

She paused. She breathed in and breathed out. Her brassiere came undone, there was a great deal of motion in her heavy chest. Involuntarily, the thought that each of her breasts was ovally shaped — almost like immense eggs — shocked Askar, bringing him back to a reality of sorts — to the present.

Karin said, “Now what, in plain language, does that mean?”

Askar was thinking how, the other day, the air had been thick with falling feathers and how, today, meat was employed to foretell a future fiill of death and blood and journeys.

Misra said, “He will travel,” this time speaking with her own voice.

“Who will?”

“I saw a pearl, as clear as the water of the ocean is blue. Did you ask, who will travel? Askar will travel and will put his feet in the Indian Ocean. And hell be happy as one who’s discovered his beginnings.”

Karin asked: “And you? Will you, too, travel?”

“I will join him eventually, but not immediately. He will first be reunited with his maternal uncle. Arrangements are being made. But I see death and distress and disaster in the offing.”

He asked, “He will travel soon, will he, this rascal, this Askar?” very excited. “Tell us how soon.”

“Shortly”

Then, almost simultaneously as he jumped up in glee, he sensed something weird had taken place — he tasted blood in his mouth. He took hold of himself and noted that, for one thing, he hadn’t bitten his tongue; for another, when he examined the floor or palate of his mouth, he didn’t discover any sores or cuts. Now what in heavens did that mean? He remembered it was happening for the second time in his life, the first, when Aw-Adan caned him unfairly, and with unjustified contempt, on his first day at the Koranic School. He might not have admitted it, but he was frightened. In any case, he decided not to tell them about it.

As more steam rose from the huge pots which were on the fire, and more smoke from the one just built, Askar’s worried look settled on Karin’s chin — the old woman had a faint beard. Some women are known to grow thin hairs on their chins when their bodies enter the age of menopause. Now, who couldVe told him that? he asked himself. From Karin’s chin, his eyes travelled to Misra’s hands, still stained with blood. A future of blood, of death and disasters — and a journey to Mogadiscio for him.

Well!

VI

That night, when sleep came, he moved his bed to the centre of the room he and Misra shared, placing it right under the opening a bomb had made in the roof, so he could keep his eye on the sky; and slept cradled in the warmth of a stick carved in the shape of a rifle — this being a gift from the boy whom the Adenese had raped. And his dream garden was emptied of its greenness — the trees had been disrobed, the branches had gone dry, the leaves had begun to become wiltingly lifeless and what fruits there might have been had dropped to the ground to rot — unpicked, uneaten. From one end of the garden, a fire ate its way, ruthless, tongued, and Askar could hear its crackling noise as each tree, limb, stump, twig or dry leaf was licked dead by its famished rage. The fire was helped by the fast-travelling, angry wind. At times, the wind levelled the ground so the fire would find the job — already half-done, or almost — easier. The earth was thus pillaged of its water. Dry, it wore a dark coating of charcoal.

And he?

He was fixed to the ground — waiting. And he was sure that the fire — which had devoured the wind, emptied the earth of its water, the garden of its greenness — he was certain the tongued flames would finish him. Frightened, he froze. He believed that was the end of him: with a heart already frozen and a body dipped in the red fluidity of fire. The tongued flames stopped at his feet, then, in a moment, like a cobra, gathered into and moved up spirally, climbing his body until the chill disappeared. He felt his body being tickled back into life.

He looked about — no fire, no wind. Did that mean that the fire which had devoured the earth and the sky had found a home inside him? That he would burn, sooner or later, and nothing would extinguish him?

And then it rained.

And the rain cut short his dream.

For the water poured down from the heavens and a few drops fell into his open mouth. From the way he gulped, from the frightened way he gasped, seeking his breath, etc., one wouldVe thought he was drowning. He sat up, preoccupied. His face was wet, his body was soaked in the ablutionary waters of a heavenly downpour and there seeped into his soul a sense of irrelevance. “ What am I doing here sleeping dreamily when my mother country needs my help? He crawled out of bed, his “rifle” in his tight clutch, and he heard bombs fall. The horizon in the distance was lit by tiny fragments of brightnesses, small and fretful, like fireflies in the thickness of a tropical night’s unmitigated darkness. Placing his “rifle” in his bed, he stood motionless, thinking.

A little later, he began moving about, quiet as the smoke of gunpowder, and he lit a paraffin lamp. He strode towards Misra’s bed to wake her up. But he stopped. He then saw that his “rifle”, which lay astraddle his own bed, was pointed at Misra’s head — Misra, who lay on her back, asleep in paradisiacal disorder. (Her knees were up, her legs open and her private parts exposed.) He chose to leave her be . And he went out of the room.

Outside, the night was infernally dark. Not a single star was in the sky The wind was still and nothing stirred. Then he noticed a few women, who emerged out of the now opened doors of sleep. A bomb fell, not very far from where they were standing. This helped unbolt the locked gates of conversation and floods of information came forth. He could gather from the conversation that the “enemy hill” was aflame. Somebody was saying that the Ethiopians had set fire to their houses in an apparent attempt to prevent the Somalis taking their houses, and other belongings, intact. Which was why everybody who was there, save Askar, went towards the fire on the hill with a view to snatching a slice of the fire before it died! He had had his share of fire, he thought, and wished Misra was awake to celebrate the birth of “Somalia” in Kallafo.