Nuruddin Farah - Maps

Briefly, you studied her handwriting, which, in any case, you couldn’t read because it was in Italian, and imagined her to be under a great deal of stress when jotting her notes. Maybe the rush of thoughts had come to her the same moment that she felt your kick in her ribs. Or maybe she was in a hurry to get somewhere. But you saw dates — days of the weeks, months as captions. You could read these. You could also read one name — that of Uncle Qorrax, spelt as Korrab , Something brought back a sad memory — of a calendar on a wall, Misra aborting a foetus, of dates in red and green in accordance with a code of safety. Why was Uncle Qorrax’s name often in your mother’s journal? you asked yourself. You tasted your hate for Qorrax in your saliva, you tasted blood. I could kill him, you thought.

Your escort came and fetched you. He saw that you had opened the envelope and said he didn’t mind your keeping it yourself. When you were putting it into your bag, he noticed two other items — the portrait of Ernest Bevin (you explained who he was to him) and an egg. “What’s that?”

You stammered something.

“I like eggs. Is this one boiled, ready to be eaten?” he asked.

“I am sorry. But I have a question,” you said after a pause. “When an egg goes bad and there isn’t a hen to sit on it, what happens?”

The man at first appeared puzzled. Then, “How do you mean?” he said, but didn’t wait for your answer. He asked you to tell him the “history” of the instead. He found your story amusing, at first, but when he thought about it, he found it enlightening. He said so to you as you joined the circle which had formed round the bus about to depart. Someone was speaking nationalist rhetorics, in which plenty of Somali as well as enemy blood was shed.

Then someone else insisted that passengers be told where the “inexistent” border used to be — inexistent, because Somalis never admitted it, neither did they allow it to enter into their logic. Non-Somalis, because they were total strangers or knew no better, looked at maps, where they found a curvy line, drawn to cut one Somali people from another. Presently, somebody pointed a finger at a row of huts where the Ethiopian sentries used to live, their guns in their tight embrace.

Of the rest of the journey to Belet Weyne, and then eventually Mogadiscio, Askar would remember when the bus was stopped and the men and the women passengers parted, the men going one way, the women and children the other. Of course, he didn’t doubt with whom he would go — the men. He was the only one who did not strip naked to take a dip in the Somali end of the Shebelle River. Because Aw-Adan was the first man he had seen wholly naked, he now wondered where he was and whether alive or dead.

He betook himself to a spot hidden from the men and the women, who were busy performing their cleansing rituals — a spot under the trees from where he could watch both groups. He was thrilled to be the sole inhabitant of a garden. This garden was green, as was his recent memory of another he had seen in a dream. He saw a footpath and something told him that the footpath might take him to his own beginning — had he the courage to follow it. But the thought of encountering his own starting-point frightened him, it threw him into some distress. He felt so uncomfortable he decided to join the other men. He stripped naked in order that he might indulge in the washing rite, just as the others. Acrimonious in expression, he went into the river. Directly his body came into contact with water, he regained his calm. The water was calf-deep for quite a distance and his body sipped through its pores the right amount, which eventually induced in him a peaceful harmony reminiscent of the day he was born. One of the men backstroked to the deeper end and dived, disappearing for quite a while in the water. And Askar was full of envy

Still naked, he got out of the water and sat by himself. Should he return to the dark garden behind all this sunlit wateriness, he asked himself, and follow the footpath? Why on earth did he feel such an imbalance in his psyche, why was he frightened? Where did he think the road might have led him? To his own beginning or to someone else’s?

Misra was before him again. She was there and he was small and she was washing him, fussing over him, playing with him, addressing him in a language of endearment, calling him “my man”; there she was, real as the border; there she was, talking about how self-conscious he was on the day he was bom, how he wore a mask of dried blood, how he appeared, or rather behaved, as though he had made himself. And she was there, teaching him the rudiments of things, calling each item by its name, “That is the sky”, and “This is the earth; and there he was, pointing at her repeatedly in reply to the question, “Where is the earth? “, although he would point correctly at the sky whenever the question was “Where is the sky?” She would burst out laughing, saying she was “Mother” and not “earth” while his finger that had pointed, and maybe even the hand, was busily taking a bit of the earth to eat. Indubitably, she had done a most commendable job, training him in the nomadic lore of climatic and geographic importance — that it was the earth which received the rains, the sky from whose loins sprang water and therefore life; that the earth was the womb upon whose open fields men and women grew food for themselves and for their animals. And man raised huts and women bore children and the cows grazed on the nearby pastures, the goats likewise; and the boy became a man, the girl a woman and each married to raise a family of his or why not her own and the married couple drew joy out of being together with their offspring — thanks be Allah! (And all this time, Askar was thinking of the inherent contradictions — that she wasn’t his mother, and the country wasn’t hers; that she was teaching him his people’s lore and wisdom, and occasionally some Amharic when night fell; that she wasn’t married and hadn’t a child of her own or a man she called “husband” but was happy for whatever that was worth; that he had no one to bestow the title of “Father” on, but a great many uncles, one of whom was once married to Misra.)

And Aw-Adan was there too. And he was teaching him things about astrology and how to locate the Milky Way; how to answer when the Ciisaanka-yeer calls, or what to do; how to spot the afa-gaallo constellation of stars; plus one scientific truism — that in Islam, Nature — capital N, he insisted — is conceived of as a book, comparable, in a lot of ways, to the Holy Koran: a genus for a sura, a species for a verse and every subspecies shares a twinship with the alif, ba and ta of mother nature — maa shaa Attaahu kaana!

“The bus is ready to leave for Mogadiscio,” somebody shouted.

Askar saw men look for their clothes, men who were holding their members covered with both their hands; he did the same. He shook his shorts so they would be free of the sand which might have lodged itself in the pockets, etc., and stumbled into them in great haste. He put on his T-shirt as well, and the shoes. But his body was sandy as he had no time to wash off this earth’s light coating. The driver waited until all the women and the children were accounted for. He asked if everyone was there. When he received the affirmative, he said, “We shall be in Belet Weyne in less than an hour.”

III

Standing against the morning wall of sunshine, two oblong lines of light, each solid as a hem and clearly visible as the border of a dress. And there were two horses — one of them black, the other white; the black horse led the way, the other followed him immediately after, like white smoke after black before the red flames pursue each other into invisibility.