Nuruddin Farah - Maps

After a pause, Hilaal asked, “How many of the fighters were rounded up and killed, did you say?”

“The number is estimated to be between five and six hundred dead and about fifty taken alive, tortured and then executed because they wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t betray, wouldn’t give the locations of the other freedom fighters’ camps all over the Ogaden.” She spoke with convincing clarity, having, naturally, given it thought previously

Again after another pause, Salaado asked, “When you were accused of being a traitor, what exactly did they do to you?”

Misra reflected for a long time. To Salaado now, Misra was the infant who had crawled out of an adult’s view into another room, somewhere in the same house, and she wanted so much to know what Misra was thinking, which thoughts she was intending to suppress and which to speak. “They set fire to the part of the house I was living in.”

“But you weren’t in the house then?” said Hilaal.

“I was not.”

“I am sorry — but was that all?” from Salaado.

Her voice failed her. And Salaado and Hilaal were indulgently silent. They had the appearance of conspirators trapping a foe. They were friendly, even in their silence, and they focussed on her, waiting for her to say something, to tell them something.

“I was raped,” she said.

Now that was hard to take. At first, neither knew what to say nor what kind of sigh of horror to utter. Then they looked at each other and communicated their sense of inner torment to one another. Salaado went and knelt beside her in prostrated quietness, saying nothing, doing nothing — but evidently apologetic. Salaado, holding out her hands to Misra, as though she were making an offering of some sort, said, “Who raped you?”

“Someone arranged a dozen young men to rape me,” she said in a matter-of-fact manner. “Two men followed me home one evening. They said Abdul-Ilah, Askar’s uncle on his father’s side, was waiting for me somewhere. I hadn’t seen him for years and was pleased to be joined with him again, for I didn’t know if he had survived the war. When I entered the hut they said he was in, several strong men sprang on me out of the dark and they raped me.”

“I hope you reported the incident to someone of your household,” said Salaado, her hands parted and clearly empty of the gift or offering they might have contained earlier. “Did you?”

It was harder to take when she told them. “The story these young men circulated (and everyone who believed that I was a traitor had no difficulty accepting it) was that I had been raped by baboons. Thank God, they said, they happened to be there, these young men, these gallant youths. Otherwise, I might have been fed on by lions. The baboons, said the poet amongst them (and one of them was a poet), smelt the beast in her and went for it; the baboons smelt her traitor’s identity underneath the human skin and went for it again and again. Thank God, we were there to save her body since, as a traitor, she had ransomed her soul”

Neither Salaado nor Hilaal could think of anything to say. As for her, she was too tired, and admitted she was when asked. Would she like to lie down in the guest-room? “Yes,” she said.

V

Askar was most ruthless. He said, on hearing the tragic stories which had befallen Misra, that he wasn’t at all moved. He accused her of showing to the world the brutal scars of a most ravenous war — that was all. Hadn’t they seen, with their own eyes, men and women with amputated arms or legs? Hadn’t they felt a sense of disgust when a beggar whom one had known for years suddenly appeared at the street-comer and displayed his knee couched in a wooden leg, claiming that he had lost a leg, a wife and a child in the war? He went on, “We’re not asking her to play the heroine in a tragic farce, no, we’re not. We’re asking her, if we’re asking her anything at all, to prove that she didn’t give away an essential secret. Prove.”

“Could you prove that it was she who had done it?” asked Salaado.

He pondered for a moment or two. And his face wore something as improvident as one who submits to being blinded before he is hanged. Clearly, he was in pain. He turned away from Salaado and the plates laid before him and concentrated on the distant corner in which Hilaai had been standing, thickening the gravy with a couple of spoonfuls of cornflour. (Misra felt disoriented when she learnt that Hilaal cooked most meals, spent a great many hours in the house whilst Salaado went out and returned with a bagful of shopping; disoriented because she had never been in a home where the man did the woman’s job and the woman more or less the man’s.)

“You remember I asked you once if a people can be said to be terribly mistaken? We were talking in reference to whether or not Somalis everywhere can be described as ‘terribly wrong’ in view of their nationalist stand. Do you remember what you said?” He addressed his question as much to Salaado as he was addressing it to Hilaal. “Do you?”

“I said, I think, that a people cannot be said to be terribly mistaken; that we can arguably challenge a person’s views or a small community’s rightness or wrongness. Not a nation.”

Because he remained silent, the room resounded with the relic of the wisdom just recalled and the three of them lived, for disparate moments, in separate mansions of memory. Salaado took this to mean that since the township of Kallafo accused Misra of being the traitor, no one was right in challenging their verdict. Hilaal was of a different opinion, although he hadn’t the wish to express it then. Indeed, he belived that a people can be sadly mistaken about themselves, their own position vis-à-vis the ideas which concern them. Not only that, but they may not know how misinformed they are; they may never realize they are wrong. He thought of the American people; thought how uninformed the people of the Soviet Union were. E comé! he said to himself. Askar? He was pleased with what he had achieved and, like a mediocre player of chess, waited for the opponent to make any move. Salaado:

“Now what I cannot understand is how you can allow yourself, intelligent as you are, sensitive as you are, to be so irreverent towards a woman who had once been like a mother to you? Yes, so irreverent and so disrespectful, Askar.”

The blow was stronger than he had anticipated and it floored him. He hadn’t expected she would make such an unforeseen move, one that would force him to look at himself afresh, take note of his own surroundings — and see Misra as a victim, first of his people and then of himself. He felt like one who was dropped into a deep well and whose ears were filled with water and therefore he couldn’t hear anything, not even his own breathing. He was inexcusably silent. Salaado stared at him, as wrestlers stare at their rivals who take refuge in a comer while they catch their breath lost in a previous round. And because he wouldn’t say anything, Salaado said, “Do you know that she is staying with us?”

The shadows of the afternoon sun were drawn on his face, and Hilaal, who had joined them, carrying the gravy and the roast beef in his left hand and the salad in his right, couldn’t determine if Askar was smiling or not. As he put down things on the table-mats, he said to Askar, “We cannot understand how you can be so insensitive, so unkind to the woman who had been once a mother to you, We wondered if you’re likely to disown us the day one of life’s many misfortunes calls onus!”

He sat in shamefaced silence. Salaado:

“She says she dare not join one of the refugee camps. Not only because she fears the reprisals if someone from Kallafo were to recognize her, but also because she entered the country in disguise, bearing someone else’s name and was registered as such at the border-post. It would be taking a great risk to tamper with the papers.”