Maps (37 page)

The priest-doctor waited for that to sink in. Then, “And how many children have you?”

“I have none.” The members of the audience mumbled something to one another.

He repeated the question louder and expected the patient would repeat her answer louder too. “I said, I have no children.” (And someone shouted, “A bad eye.”)

“What's the name of your husband, the full name please?”

The woman answered, “I am a widow My husband died in the Ogaden war.”

“And you have no children?” repeated the shaman.

The woman-patient said, “That's right.”

You could tell from his voice that he was pleased his patient spoke somebody's name; that she claimed to be somebody else with a name and an address; that he had convinced all those present of his expertise. “Please tell the congregation here, why you've chosen to take residence” in Waliima Sheikh? Do you know her? Have you ever met, you and Waliima? Are you envious of her, her children and life style?”

“You might say that I've known Waliima Sheikh from when we played house-and-family together as girls and you would be right if you assumed that I've coveted her her marriage, her wealth, her children and her good looks. I married badly, she well; I left school early, she finished at hers and did well by it.”

He put more and more questions to the woman-patient until it became obvious
another
was speaking through her;
another
, with a different name and address; another, whose voice interfered with the proceedings, for it emanated from a different
other
. Could a good person live in an utterly bad one? you ask yourself, your imagination overwhelmed by the thought that this was possible. Could Misra hide in you? Could
another
dwell in her?

The world of the unknown had greater potentials, you thought, and lost interest in the mundanities of what the priest-doctor was saying or what wicked actions the audience was prescribing as punishment for the woman who, out of jealousy, “took residence” in
another
;

Do you remember?

V

There was a flood.

And you floated. You floated, heavy as a corpse, asleep to the end of the world. You floated easterly towards the sea. You remember someone saying there would no longer be any more rebirths, or renewals of any sort. Millions of people had lost their lives and property in the flood, but then everyone agreed this didn't matter, for this was the end of the world and the flood was to mark the end-of-the-world's beginning. And when a woman who had floated beside you for days asked what you were doing, you responded that you had come to bury yourself in the water. You said you would blow out the light and, in the total darkness surrounding you, you would expire. You prophesied that a heavy downpour of successive floods would fall from the heavens, joining the earth and the sky, obliterating from everybody's memory all the dreamt dreams, and there would be no past, no present and no future. Then you turned to the woman who had earlier asked you why you were there and you inquired of her why she too was there. She said, “My husband and I are in the business of building tombs on seabeds.” You took a fresher look at the woman. And you put a name to her face.

You were spat by the flood, as though you were an uprooted weed on the bank of a river, green with young foliage—foliage whose chaotic message you couldn't follow. There, you were met by an old man who, in a big way, reminded you of Aw-Adan, but also, in a small way, looked like your younger tutor, Cusmaan. Suddenly, the heavens darkened and all you could see was the man's grey hair, bushy and also silvery Then the man put his hand into his pocket and he gave you a knife. You dared not ask the man what you were supposed to do with the knife, but you said, surprising even yourself, “But why the flood?” And the old man with the white head said, “Floods are a product of a common bad.” Now do you remember, or have you chosen, as usual, to remember only the good things, deciding to forget the bad?

Anyway!

You were surrounded by darkness. You were surrounded by multitudinous water. Inside the water, you passed more water, your own water that is, as though you were expected to make a contribution, however small. And there shone in the sky a fairly young moon, beautiful as a maiden's face. The sea was green as the silver of a mirror and you could see your own shadow on the tinier crests your body's movements created. You had bloodshot eyes, but you didn't know because you couldn't see it yourself. You were alone, but you didn't think about it and you didn't feel at all lonely You would dive every now and then, and reach the bottom of the deep, deep sea, and whenever you came out to take another lungful of fresh air, you felt as if you were an entirely different person. Tired from swimming alone, you went to sit by a sand-dune near the sea.

It was light already—dawn had broken.

And there was a young boy, barely ten, who was meditatively busy washing clean a skull. He was performing his task with absolute devotion—you could tell from the way he breathed, you could see the concentration on his face, you could sense, without touching him, the tension in his own body. The skull was that of a human. But you couldn't determine, even when you held it in your hands, whether it had belonged to a small person or a heavily built man or woman. Yin could decide, without taking undue risk, that it had been there for years. For one thing, plants had begun to sprout in it. For another, the colour had worn off its cheekbone, which had grown a shade browner.

You watched in reverent silence.

The young boy dipped it wholly in the water, removing the grains of sand which had been lodging in there. He shook it a little too roughly, emptying it of life. As he held it away from himself, the young boy watched, with utter amazement (or was it amusement?) as the insects moved, in a fury of fright and frenzy, as they scattered here and there—like a cinema crowd running confusedly down the exit stairway because the safety-curtain had caught fire. When he was satisfied that he had emptied it of life of all forms, he dipped it again in water, soaped it again and again until it was as white as the foams the sea frothed at his feet. From where you stood, you could read the letter “M” tattooed on the skull in blue. And you provided the missing letters ofthat name—just as you had earlier put a name to a face you had seen.

Do you remember any of that?

You don't? How very weird!

You asked the young boy why he was washing the skull clean. As if in response to you, he dipped it in water and drank from it. You stared at him in total bewilderment.

He said, “There is life in death, there is death in life.”

Not only that he said nothing original, but the fact that you didn't ask him anything—this, perhaps, made you stare at him in a hostile manner. Then he explained, “This skull belonged to a man who raped his own daughter. He died in old age, a hated man, a man without friends, a man alienated from his own community. For years, he saw dreams in which he wore a young girl's face. He died in a tempestuous flood,'

At least, admit you remember this.

You don't?

Your memory, dare I say? is very selective!

VI

You swam through the gate of purgatory and washed clean your doubts in the waters of certainty. You were penurious in your comments, but, once it was suggested by Uncle, you agreed to call at the hospital where Misra had undergone an operation in which she lost a breast. (Her state of mind was such that she couldn't determine how she “felt”. “Perhaps more like a man,” she said, half-laughing, “now that I have to have the chest bandaged forever.”) She lay in hospital, pained. You called on her, doubtful of your own reactions. You sat by her and held her hand in yours—you hardly knew what to say. Your conversations, needless to say, were replete with empty silences, unfilled spaces, incomplete dots, and inconsistent holding on to, or letting go of, certain consonants, before you pronounced the vowels preceding them clearly and accurately.

You remembered that, in the hospital corridor just before you entered her private ward, you had seen a young boy, aged five, walk into the Ladies', escorted by his mother. You remembered thinking how, in sex, age mattered greatly. The women in the hospital's Ladies', you suspected, didn't mind having amongst them a
Homo sapiens
of the male gender so long as he was small and as yet underdeveloped in so far as the male ego was concerned. And neither did Misra bother about you, when you were such a small boy yourself. Now, you could see how self-conscious she was, how prudent in her self-preservation, how cautious in her mannerisms, how womanly aware of the man in you. If you were honest with yourself, you would've requested that she showed you how much of the breast the doctor had removed—and you almost did so. Which was how you knew she couldn't tell whether it was the left or the right the surgeon's knife had eaten into. Should she make a display of it in the way those returning from the Ogaden war had exhibited the stump of the leg, the grazed forehead or the broken nose-joint? Should she, or should she not blame it on the war as everybody had blamed every misfortune or misdeed that befell him or her?

You said, your hand resting near her kneecap, “And how have things been with you?”

She spoke of what worried her: that she thought the nurse attending to her was related to someone from Kallafo and that she was mortally worried that the nurse might report on her or poison her food or mix wrongly, but deliberately (although it might appear innocently) all her medicines so she would take them and die of the poisonous mixture. But how was she certain that the nurse knew of her background? Because of the way she asked questions about Kallafo “without my ever mentioning the name of that accursed town, without my ever saying that I came from that wretched place”. This was what made her think that a woman with whom the nurse had spoken amicably was related to a male patient in an adjacent ward, a man who had come from the war in the Ogaden “without his manhood, for a bomb had blown off his testicles. And what use can a man make of a penis without testicles?” she asked, underlining, in her voice, the words “penis” and “testicles”.

Should I not tell that the nurse knew she was from Kallafo because Uncle Hilaal was the one who had filled in the form and that he had been told he might, in the end, persuade the hospital authorities to give a deduction on the basis of the patient's coming from Kallafo? you thought to yourself.

“You believe that I am paranoid?” she asked.

You said, “Of course not.”

Would you help her if she were in terrible need? she inquired of you. Would you keep watch on the movements of people if this became absolutely necessary? Would you spill your own blood to save her? Would you kill those who were plotting to do her in? Of course you would. You wouldn't take them to court or anything, but you would use the knife they had used to kill her in order to take vengeance? But you caught your breath with a view to slowing down the pace of the conversation and you asked why it mattered whether you would take her murderers to court or kill them yourself with your own hands and with the same weapon as they had used? She reasoned that almost all the courts in Somalia would set the culprits free because they had killed, on suspicion, a woman who was not Somali herself and whose innocence was harder to believe or even to account for.

“Be truthful,” you began to say, deliberately slowly “Be truthful and tell me what I must know if I must take vengeance. Did you or did you not do it? Be truthful.”

She shifted in her bed and you let go her hand. You could sense she had moved into that undefined space between a smile and a cry. She held her head up lest her nose dripped, lest her eyes emptied themselves of the tears welled up in them. She remained motionless but tense, the way one might when one is anticipating one's system to emit a storm of a sneeze when one is in respectable company without a clean handkerchief.

“To think that you might suspect me of betraying” she said, once she could speak. “I would have thought myself incapable of doing any such wicked thing until somebody said I had done it.”