Maps (21 page)

He wouldn't tell her.

“Why won't you tell me where you've been?”

He behaved like one who had a secret to withhold.

“You'll not tell me?”

He shook his head, “No.”

With harrowing clarity, she saw what he was after—to tell her he would go where he pleased, tell her that he would roam in the territory of his pleasure, alone, and at any rate without her help, wash when he decided he wanted. She reasoned: the world is reduced to chaos; there's a war on; boys, because of this chaotic situation, have suddenly become men and refuse to be mothered.

And then, with frightening suddenness, he said, “Not only can I wash if I choose to, but I can kill; and not only can I kill but I can also defend myself against my enemy.”

The fierceness with which he spoke the words “I can kill” alarmed her. She stiffened, her heart missed a beat, then drummed faster, beating noisily in the caged rib of her seemingly discreet reaction. She appeared uneasy and stood up taller, higher, supporting her weight on the tip of her toes, like one who is looking over the edge of a cliff. “Kill? Kill whom?”

He wouldn't say, just as he wouldn't tell her that he was a member of a small body of young men who trained together as guerrillas and who rolled on the dirt as they felled one another with mock blows, issuing, as they dropped to the ground, a most heinous kung-fu cry, or some such like. What mattered, in the end, was you killed your enemy, said these young men to one another. The idea to train with these boys wasn't his, but the boy who had been raped by the Adenese—who proved to be the toughest, not least because he had something to fight against and he had in him a bitter contempt for everybody in this or any other world. It was he, and not Askar, who made a hole in a thinly mud-plastered wall which enabled the body of boys to take a quieter look at the men (believed to be away at the war front) who trained to kill and, through the hole in the wall, the boys imbibed an ideology embodied in the dream they saw as their own, the dream they envisioned as their common future: warriors of a people fighting to liberate their country from colonial oppression. Nor would he tell her of his friends' suspicious finger pointing in her direction. Was she not from the Highlands? they said. How could she be trusted? They most insistently repeated their suspicious worries that she might speak, might pass on the information. It bothered him greatly that he couldn't share with her the joy of his secrets; it pained him that he had to be distrustful of her motives when she probed into his affairs, asking him where he had been and with whom. “It was as if you were born with a deformity that you had to carry with you everywhere you went,” he said to the boy whom the Adenese had raped. Indeed, who better could he say this to, than to another boy who carried on his head another shame of another kind? “Yes, I understand,” said the “disgraced” boy. Askar said to himself now, “I will not allow her to wash the dirt my body has accumulated when training to kill my people's enemy.”

Whereas she was saying, “There are a number of blind spots the body of a human has. We may not know of them until we are self-conscious; we may not sense how helpless we are until we submit ourselves to other hands. A child's body's blind spots are far too many to count—the small of the back, the back of the neck, the dirt in the groin, the filth on either the left or the right of the lower reaches of the bottom. A mother sees them all, she soaps them all and, in the end, washes them clean.” She was going nearer him and he was withdrawing and she was saying, “They are difficult to live with, these blind spots, these blind curves in one's body, the curtained parts of one's body, the never-seen, never-visible-unless-with-the-assistance-of-a-mirror parts—and here I am thinking of the skull—or the difficult-to-see parts—and here I am thinking about… I am thinking about…,” and speaking and moving in his direction and he was retreating and was about to stumble backwards into the tree planted the day he himself was born, his blind spot, that is his back, ahead of the rest of his body, when … a bomb fell—and it fell almost between them, although nearer where he was standing—and it separated them.

Panic gripped her throat: and she couldn't speak or shout but lay on the ground, inert, covered in dust—once the noise died down and the shower of dust began to settle. He? He was—he was there, more or less dusted, and his eyes were two spots of brightness which focused on their surroundings and it seemed as though he mobilized his alert mind to determine where the shelling had come from.

“Are you all right?” she managed to say after a long silence.

He looked at her—she appeared like one who had just risen from the dead.

Still defiant, he said, “Who do you take me for?”

She had gone browner with dust and her headscarf had fallen off, exposing a most unruly head, as ugly as the knotted, uncombed curls. She walked away in a defiant way—defiant and indifferent as to what might happen, impervious to what he thought or did, or whether a shower of shells fell on her head, or anyone else's head.

“It's worthwhile your considering giving yourself a good scrubbing. Maybe the water is still lukewarm and you surely need a wash and something that will keep your soul active and alive and your body clean,” he said.

Then another shell fell—this time nearer where she was standing. And, at the wake of the explosion, when again she had managed to stand to her feet, both of them saw before them a crowd, brown as mud—a crowd of women and children armed with pangas, sticks and machetes, a crowd that was moving in the direction of the hill where the enemy had fired from. A spokeswoman of the crowd promised they would take “Government Hill”. Askar felt he had to join, to give victory an indispensable hand.

And he ran after the crowd.

V

The following day Noon.

“Misra, where precisely is Somalia?” he asked suddenly

She was pulling at a chicken's guts, a chicken she had just beheaded. She stopped and stared at him, not knowing what to say Her forehead wrinkled with concentration, like somebody who was trying to remember where he was. Then: “Haven't you seen it on the map?” she said, holding her bloodstained hands away from her dress.

“A map? What map?”

“Go look it up. You seem happily engrossed in it.”

He surprised her; he admitted in a sad voice: “No one has ever explained how to read maps, you see, and I have difficulty deciphering all the messages.”

She looked away from him and at the decapitated chicken. She wished she could get on with her plucking of the fowl's feathers (Askar thought of the chicken's blood as being exceptionally red—not dark red as he expected) and she said: “If you go east, you'll end up in Somalia.”

Offended, he said, “I know that.”

“What don't you know then? Why don't you let me get on with what I am doing? Don't you realize there is little time left for me to prepare a decent meal?”

He bent down and picked up a feather flying away into the cosmic infinitude. He looked at it, studying it as though under a microscope, one among a hundred other feathers joining the unbound universe. Then he looked at the white meat of the chicken—goose-pimpled, dead and headless, the fowl lay where Misra had dropped it, in a huge bowl. Did it have a soul? Did it have a brain? He remembered testing its motherly instinct when he threatened the lives of its chicks. It attacked, its wings open in combat readiness and its rage clucking in consonants of maternal protectiveness. Askar had run away for his own life. From a hen. He was glad none of the boys saw him run away

From then on, whenever he entered Karin's compound, he sus-' pected that the mother hen, or the others, now as tall as they were ever likely to grow, eyed him menacingly, goose-stepping sideways as if only their preparedness for a fall-frontal attack, and together, might save them from his mischievous threats. Poor hen—dead. Dead because it was killed to celebrate a victory—and the fact (this was in the air) that Askar might be leaving for Mogadiscio. After all, Uncle Qorrax said he would come and speak with him.

Then, something attracted his attention. Misra had laid the plucked chicken on its side and was pulling at its guts, when he noticed an egg—whole, as yet unhatched, and, he thought, indifferent to the goings-on outside its own complete universe. An egg—oval-shaped as the universe—with a life of its own and an undiscovered future. “Don't touch it, Misra,” he ordered.

She looked at him in wonderment. “This?” she said, touching it.

“Don't hurt it,” he said.

She gave it to him—slowly but delicately. She handed the
egg
to him with the same care that she might have offered the world to him. And he received it with absolute reverence, with both hands joined together as if in prayer. Something warned him to be careful and not to drop it. It was warm. He believed life quivered within it as he closed his hands on it, not tightly, but gently. Reluctantly, he entered into a dialogue with himself. Was there no similarity between the egg and his own beginnings? In the corpse of a hen, there lay another potential life—just as he lay in his dead mother—but alive. He was glad the egg was salvaged out of the dead hen.

Misra was saying: “I thought you wanted me to tell you where ‘Somalia' is?”

Askar nodded his head.

“There,' she said, pointing with her blood-soiled index finger.

He repeated the question, “Where?” apparendy because he had been staring at the index finger, which was dripping with blood, and hadn't taken note of the direction in which she pointed. “Where?”

Her “There”, this second time, was so suddenly spoken, Askar could Ve sworn “Somalia” was the name of a person, perhaps a friend of hers, somebody who might be invited to partake of the meal she was preparing. “That's Somalia,” she added. “Easterly.”

He thought he heard someone's footsteps coming from the easterly direction—he looked, and there was Karin. She had come with an empty bowl. Today, she was in near rags but charming-looking, and smiling too, and talking and friendly, and had the look of somebody who wanted something. She said, “Give us some of God's charity and you'll be blessed forever.”

Askar said, “The meat is yours, the egg is mine.”

Karin, puzzled, looked at Misra. “What's he talking about?”

“Ask him,' she said.

By the time Karin was ready to ask him a question, he was gone.

Three days later. Another festive occasion. The three of them: Karin, Misra and Askar. Somebody had delivered a large consignment of raw meat, a gift from Uncle Qorrax. Karin was sitting apart and seemed to be having difficulty determining in which direction the wind was blowing. She appeared littler, barely a girl in her teens. This was how she looked to Askar, who saw her go closer to the earth as if she were listening for a secret. He thought of a beetle, which, sensing that an unidentified shadow might strike it dead, waits, and while doing so, curls up, making itself smaller, leaving no part of it exposed other than its wing-cases hard as a turtle's back—and like a turtle, it is able to remove its head and neck out of danger: that's it! “What are you doing, Karin?” said Misra.

“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.”