Nuruddin Farah - Maps

“There is a young Ethiopian soldier who’s taken Misra’s fancy. She is said to be living with him. A dashing, handsome young man, the Prince Charming type, whom she’s been wanting to meet all her life,” said Karin.

He wasn’t troubled by what he heard. However, he was wise enough not to shrug his shoulders and say, “So what? A woman has the right to fall in love with a man and I don’t see why his nationality matters. After all, all 'Ethiopians' are not enemies of all 'Somalis.'” It is the cause that matters.” There returned to him a steadiness of the kind a confident person displays. He took a sip of tea (which she didn’t touch), he crossed his legs, settling his body into the cosiness of an unexpected comfort. She said, “But that’s not all”

Second deaths are more painful when you come to think of it, thought Askar. He was numb in soul and body. He knew the rest of the story. She needn’t bother. Misra had fallen in love with a man from the enemy camp and she had betrayed. There were deaths. There was a massacre. Houses were razed to the ground. Wells poisoned. Newborns were bayoneted to death, their mothers raped and then killed, and their bodies savagely hacked to pieces, limb from limb. And children were rounded up, lectured to and then machine-gunned. He said, “You can spare me the detailed horrors. Just give me the figure.”

She thought he was too far ahead of her. “Then it means you’ve heard?” she said. “Let me tell it to you if you haven’t,” she added, and waited to hear his response.

“The trouble is,” and here his voice assumed an inordinate calmness which he had got from being close to Hilaal, “in gruesomeness, massacres are all the same wherever in the world they occur. And at the centre of them all, there is a traitor. So just give me the figures, and spare me the details.”

He decided to watch her face intently for the slightest hesitation in her voice, the slightest tremor in the tone in which she spoke, as she said, “Six hundred and three.”

He didn’t know why, but he believed she was telling the truth as she knew it. Something convinced him she was. But he had a question. “Why three? How does the figure three enter the picture? Why not six hundred and four or eight or nine?”

Again, there was no hesitation in her voice. “Shahrawello’s three sons, massacred later.”

Without being asked, she gave further details, not about the massacre, but about the “dashing, handsome young Ethiopian officer in charge of security”. He was from the same village as Misra and he called her by a different name. “Not Misra, which we all called her, no.”

He was intensely shocked. He mouthed, “What? What’s this?”

“He called her Misrat. Listen to it carefully. Misrat.”

Blood ran visibly up to and into his eyes. He stared at Karin ques-tioningly, focussing on the furrowed wrinkles of her forehead and the bridge of her nose. He saw a “t” written there and remembered he had had difficulties pronouncing or distinguishing the Arabic letter ta from that of tha when he was a pupil at Aw-Adan’s Koranic School, a fact no one else substantiated. “Are you sure that there is a ‘t’ in it now? Because you see, Misra is the Arabic name for ‘Egypt’ and Somalis prefer it to their own corrupted form ‘Massar’, which also gives you the Somali word for ‘headscarf ‘. And when I asked Misra what her name meant in her language, I remember her saying that it meant ‘foundation’, I think ‘the foundation of the earth’ or something. Now what could Misrat mean?” He turned to Karin.

Karin thought he was more disturbed by the changes in Misra’s name than about the massacre of which he had heard. She found this disturbing and was about to ask him about it when he said, “What can that mean, the change in the name?”

“It can only mean one thing: treason.”

He said, “I didn’t mean that,” and she could see he was greatly upset. “Not in that sense, no. Names mean something and to me, as a child, she was the cosmos.” He paused. “Maybe, I shan’t take note of the changes in her name. I am quite certain,” he was now talking to his face in the mirror, “now that I think of it, that somebody who speaks Amharic has confirmed to Uncle Hilaal that ‘Misra’ without a ‘t’ means ‘the foundation of the earth’. Or if you like, ‘the foundation of the universe’. Personally, I prefer rendering it as ‘the foundation of the earth’. But I am not certain. You have to ask someone who speaks that language, I don’t any more.”

He was now at peace with himself. This was what Karin found weird. Also, he didn’t offer her the chance to tell him more, or ask him further questions. He was up on his feet, his height towering above her, extending his hand for her to shake, making gestures that their conversation had come to an end. She prepared to leave and shouted, offering her address care of one of her daughters who, she said, worked in the Central Post Office, the one near Hotel Juba. “You must come and see us,” she went on, as she formalized their parting by taking both his hands in hers. He wished he had the will to tell her that Bevin’s portrait was still with him, and so was his fond memory of her kindness to him. “God bless,’ was apparently all he managed to say. Someone else saw her to the door, he couldn’t say who. He was taken ill immediately he was alone — quick as bushfire. His temperature ran high, his saliva tasted of blood and his body broke with perspiration although he insisted he was feeling very cold.

II

He couldn’t hold a thought in his head for two, three days. He walked in his sleep, a somnambulator roaming the darkened corridors of a past he couldn’t recognize himself in. He behaved as though he were looking in one of the night’s opaque corners for his missing half. No amount of talking would help him or make him lie down quietly and sleep. He was mortally mortified and sad at the thought that Misra was no longer worthy of his trust, his love. For the first time ever, Askar consented to talk at length about Misra’s divining in blood, raw meat and water.

Hilaal said, “In other words, she is a witch, a bitch, a whore and a traitor?”

Askar didn’t say anything. Salaado interjected, “He hasn’t said that.”

Hilaal turned to Salaado, “What did he say?”

Because Salaado wouldn’t speak, Hilaal to Askar: “What exactly did you say, Askar? Because if you say that Misra is a witch, a whore and a traitor, then you’re not making an original statement.”

“Meaning?” asked Salaado.

Hilaal shifted in his chair, “Women as whores, women as witches, women as traitors of their blood, women as lovers of men from the enemy camp — throughout history, men have blamed women for the ill luck they themselves have brought on their heads. Women are blamed for every misfortune which has befallen man from the first day of creation, including his fall from heaven. Woman is said to have betrayed man at the first opportunity. Throughout history, Askar.”

Salaado said, “Let him be, please.”

“No, no, please,” said Askar to Salaado.

Hilaal continued, looking from Askar to Salaado, “You’ve no proof, and you’ve asked for no proof. Men have always done that. They've condemned unjustly and asked for no evidence. What do you say to that?”

Askar sat silently, staring at his lap as though his ruined logic had fallen there. Would he be able to gather his broken pieces into his cupped hands and then respond? It seemed, however, that no sooner had he picked up a shattered piece than he discovered that he could only see a very little of a face (Misra’s), an eye (his own, as though it were a mirror) and nothing else. He floated, poised between the earth and the sky. He dwelled in a no-man’s-land, remaining suspended between numerous undefined states of reality and unreality; sandwiched between not-so-clearly defined selves. Dreaming (was he?), sleeping (was he?) or listening to a taped conversation between himself and Uncle Hilaal.