Nuruddin Farah - Maps

Salaado would say “Chicken is best eaten with one’s fingers,” although she herself might be using a fork and a knife. Something was happening to Salaado. Askar was unhappy about it,

Hilaal said, “Let’s go and cook.”

II

When chopping up onions, Salaado forgot an elementary principle Hilaal had taught her — that she should cut it in two halves and let them soak in water for a couple of minutes. Then she wouldn’t drop tears as big as French onions, sniffing, onion-eyed and complaining, “Oh, what must I do now?”

Hilaal gave her a napkin with which to wipe away the tears. As she was leaving the kitchen, he said, not so much for your benefit as for Misra’s — Misra, who was standing near the sink, staring at the thawing meat—“When two persons have been living together for over a decade, they tend not to listen to each other’s advice. I’ve told her time and again, perhaps a million times.”

But what was he thinking, staring at Misra? Was he thinking ill of her? It wasn’t something he said. It was the way he kept looking at her as she looked furtively at the meat thawing in the kitchen sink. The trouble was, you were wrong. It seemed your prejudice bred monstrous ideas. In fact, he was saying amicably, “And you, Misra? What would you like to do?”

She didn’t know what to say.

“I suggest you season the meat,” he said. “You did it so handsomely well, the other day, it ate superbly” However, he stopped in mid-thought, like a man who discovers a richer diamond deposit than the iron-ore he has been mining all this time. “Why don’t I leave the two of you together? I’ll join Salaado and help her pick the rice clean. Is that all right?”

For a long time, neither you nor she spoke. Then you both filled the emptiness with conversation equally uncontroversial and empty of real substance. She talked of how much she liked the kitchen you were in. She touched the washing-machine which was standing next to the fridge, one switch bright red and on, the other dull and not on. Karin’s name, Qorrax’s, Aw-Adan’s were not mentioned. Nor was any reference made to herself or to the lieutenant whom she had befriended. You were saying something as agreeably pleasant and banal as, “When I see a woman carrying on her head firewood, on her back a child and in front, hugging to her chest, the day’s shopping, my heart bleeds in sympathy for such a martyr.”’

Suddenly, you appeared relieved — like a husband who warmly welcomes an unexpected guest, arriving just at the instant when his wife is about to put an embarrassing question to him — because Cusmaan, your former tutor, had arrived. You introduced them to each other. They displayed the pleasant surprise of each indicating that he/she imagined the other to look not exactly as “I had imagined”.

In a friendly way, Misra said, “Perhaps Askar has misled you.”

“No, no,” said Cusmaan. “I’ve misconstructed images of you which apparently do not match the reality. It is all my fault,” and they shook hands again.

“He’s certainly misinformed me,” said Misra, still in her consistently friendly manner.

“He overpraised me. He always does.”

Misra said, “On the contrary.”

“He underpraised me?”

Misra nodded her head.

Cusmaan remained charmingly polite and exchanged a few more niceties with Misra. Then he gave you a booklet which was to give you the basics of how to repair a car. You opened the book with obvious excitement and saw a highway of technical signs which you didn’t know how to read, and then glanced at the glossary offering explanatory footnotes to the jargon of motor mechanics. “Once you’ve understood what this booklet says, you are on your way to becoming a potential repairer of vehicles appropriated from the enemy.”

You knew things were not as easy as all that. But you were glad he had come. His arrival had injected new blood into everybody and there was a great deal of excited movement. You were all in the kitchen, milling round one another. Hilaal then offered to finish cooking the food whilst you talked to Cusmaan.

By chance, your gaze fell on Misra. She was pressing the inside of her forearm against her chest — a gesture breast-feeding mothers make when they are full of unsucked milk. You guessed, correctly, that her breasts were aching. Also, when she saw Hilaal, Salaado and Cusmaan’s look home in on her too, Misra’s arm ceased moving and there occurred something similar to the transformations caused by a whirlwind turning over dust, earth, etc., only to leave everything, a moment later, in the hands of gravity, trusting it to restore to the elements the balance they had lost. You came closer to her. And you smelled her.

True. She had started her period at the very instant you looked at her.

III

“If you went?” said Salaado; and looked in your direction.

All five of you were at table, all five, including Misra. You thought that either Misra’s body’s habits had undergone surprising changes or you didn’t have your facts right. Although at this moment in time, that wasn’t your main worry. You were attentively listening to a point Cusmaan was making, Cusmaan, who had become an expert at spinning a tapestry of controversies, having learnt the trade from Hilaal. The gist of what he was saying wasn’t vivid even to himself, you could see, but it was touching on a topic which interested you, namely the relationship between “high” literature and “scripts”. He quoted two instances: Amharic, although a written language for centuries, with little or, he said, no “exceptional” literary figures to speak of; Somali, a language that had no orthography until October 1972, with “exceptional” poets, gifted orators and highly talented wordsmiths. The question, he argued, was not a case of one of oral literature against a written one, no. It was a language (i.e. Somali) with phenomenally sophisticated literature, against another (Amharic) served poorly by her poets and prose writers.

Cusmaan’s point became clearer in the brief silence between the moment he stopped talking and the instant Hilaal picked its loose threads, adding a couple of his balls of cotton-threads and weaving out of them a plait of conclusions, with its own web of yarns, warps and wefts.

“No, no, no, you don’t get my point,” argued Cusmaan.

Hilaal said, “I do. I do.”

“You don’t.”

Salaado said, “You are saying the same thing, Cusmaan.”

Hilaal was saying, “But this is a dangerous point Cusmaan is making. You don’t know enough about Ethiopian literature to compare it fairly with Somali literature. For example.”

“Please no for examples. Listen to me.”

The women communicated secretly (Misra was in her seasonal pain and Salaado decided to be with her) and left the men to determine how best to rule the world. In the meantime, Hilaal got caught in the intricacies of his ideas. In his spiral thinking he went up and up the entwining stairway, reaching such great heights as would justify his encroaching on historical as well as literary theories, in and outside the Horn of Africa. At some point, when he got to a landing, he paused. Leaning against a ramshackle railing, his hands open in the shape of brackets, he commented on the political and literary activities of Sayyid Mohamed Abdulle Hassan, the Somali peoples’ greatest warrior-poet to date and Menelik, his contemporary, the architect of the Ethiopian empire. Suddenly, however, Hilaal’s eyes narrowed and he appeared ill at ease, as though the flight of stairs leading up to the summit of his climb would give way if he tried to ascend them. Another pause, this time of a more pedestrian kind. He looked up and saw that Salaado had returned alone. “What is the matter with Misra?”