Maps (28 page)

“Eight.”

He now had the look of one who had let go a whole universe's worth and more. He gathered his notes and let the pile lie under his hand as he thought what his next move was going to be. He opened a drawer and brought out a matchbox.

“Do you want to come with me to the garden?” he said to you.

“What are we going to do there?” you said.

He picked up the pile of papers he had gathered, saying, “We're going to make a fire. You like fires, don't you?”

“I do,” you confessed.

He said, “Well, let's make one then. What're you waiting for?”

And he burnt all his research papers and later said to Salaado that talking to you had made him unmistakably aware that he had been moving in the wrong direction all along. “Wars,” he said, “are rivers that burn.”

VI

Who is to say whether you remembered hearing someone else speak the same words, “Wars are rivers that burn” before?; who is to say if you registered the hesitation and dismay on Uncle Hilaal's face that day as he burnt a year's work?; that it was he who dwelled in a territory of pain, lying vertical, saying something peculiarly irrational: “As long as I lie in bed, I don't think, can't think any thoughts, can't be bothered with thoughts any more”? Who is to say if you made the right inferences from various things which took place following the revelations?; who is to say if you
now
remember any of the stories told about your mother—Hilaal's younger sister? At no time were you aware of births and deaths as much as you became then. Possibly, it was then (or as a result of it?) that Uncle Hilaal told you why Salaado and he didn't have any children.

“To think that the one you love most will suffer pain after interminable pain in order to have a dead child! This was why we had to do something. Every time she would carry it for seven months or so, then the most painful labours and then she would emit a dead child, half in blood, a flood of blood really. It happened a number of times and we hoped, every time, not for death but birth and prayed and prayed and prayed; and sought out the best doctors. Finally it had to occur. One of her ovaries had to be removed. That did it for me. My beautiful wife had suffered, I said. I too must. So I took myself off to the hospital. And had a vasectomy done. If she couldn't—well, so I too couldn't. But we love each other.”

Perhaps this was said much later—when you were already grown up, when you didn't have to look up the word “vasectomy” in the dictionary, since you would agree there is no Somali word for that kind of operation. No? You will doubtless remember that Misra had had a breast removed—or rather that Uncle Hilaal said he had been told so. Maybe it was then that you made a most regrettable remark—something to do with Misra and Salaado's swapping bodies—and if only this were possible, you were supposed to have said, then a child would have had a living mother with no organ partly mutilated or half removed! You don't remember any of this exchange either? No? What do you remember then?

It is understandable that you confuse dates, and that you cannot say precisely when the conversation centred on maimed bodies, amputated hands or removed organs. There was a great deal of talk in the press about these and related subjects in order to point accusatory fingers at the enemy who was a “cannibal and most inhumane”. The newspapers carried photographs of maimed bodies; the same newspapers carried articles about an Islamic leader whose adherence to Islamic justice resulted in his insisting they cut off the arms of a man who had stolen a small item from a supermarket; the same newspapers carried pieces on ritual murder taking place in Nigeria where they were said to remove certain organs on a medicine-man's recommendation, if one wanted to win a seat at the Federal Assembly You knew in person, and saw with your eyes, people who had lost a leg in the war; or an eye; or a son; or a daughter. Things that had been remote were brought nearer when talked about again and again until you could bring yourself to feeling, with the tip of your fingers, the dead nerve that had been cut in order to save a hand. No wonder, then, that you couldn't be certain when exactly your uncle spoke of his or Salaado's respective losses of parts of their bodies.

You listened to stories told of men who survived the fire of the enemy, by heroically walking, without blinking an eyelash, to get to where they wanted—the men who liberated towns like Jigjiga. You listened to others showing off about the medals of bullets which went through their shins, narrowly missing the bone, through their foreheads (you couldn't imagine anyone would live after that—but some did) or breaking the nose-bridge. You listened to stories about the penis of one dead soldier being stuck between the teeth of his living comrade who was to be shot (if both sides were so barbaric was there any point in telling the stories at all?). You heard stories of raped women; of pregnant women emptied of their as-yet-unborn issues. You wondered, as all these stories were being told, if the men had the necessary time to say a small prayer or two before the bullet struck them; or if they washed—that is, if they performed their ablutions before death hit them. Didn't Salaado always insist that you put on your cleanest underwear if you were being taken to see the doctor about something which made it a must that you undressed? In other words, did these men encounter death and then God, their creator, cleaner than the day they were born? Every one of these men, you were told, was a martyr whose soul would forever sit in the company of saints, prophets and Allah; every one of these raped women would avenge themselves in whichever way they liked; and every one of these children would be re-born all the wiser, happier—re-born to live longer.

Stories with fragmented bodies!

Bodies which told fragmented stories!

Tales about broken hearts and fractured souls!

In the end, who is to say, but you, what you wish to relegate to an unremembered past?; who is to say if a couple of paintings by naïve artists Hilaal introduced you to, when you showed interest in drawing, tug at the nerves of your memories?; who is to say if Picasso's
Guernica
, again shown to you by Hilaal, did the expected thing—remind you that wars are rivers that burn, rivers whose waters, rough as crags, distort reality? Yes, who is to say, but you, if you can actually be as precise as a compass's needle pointing its forehead in a northerly direction towards the pivot of repeatable exactnesses? Who but you?

I

M
isra was in my thoughts a lot of the time during the early months. The war had been on then and the Somalis were winning it on the ground at least and I started talking of visiting Kallafo—meaning I was going to visit Misra. I even began writing letters to her, letters in which I told her of my intended visit. I doubted if she could've read them because she didn't read Somali orthography. Perhaps somebody wouldVe helped her to. I never finished writing these letters. We spent a great deal of the time by the radio, listening to the latest news from the war front, listening to the conflicting reports coming from the Battle for Harar and Dire Dawa. We were proud and happy the Somalis were pushing on.

Then, one Wednesday, I came home with high fever. By Thursday morning, I was taken to see a doctor. On Friday, the doctor's diagnosis—malaria. I was dizzy most of the time, unable to raise my head. I resided in a land of dolorous mist, my body-temperature extraordinarily high, my lips dry as wood, my mouth red as though it were a fresh wound. I didn't know night from day, couldn't tell who was there and who wasn't and couldn't be bothered to eat. Every time I was helped to walk to the lavatory, I felt the earth tremble, I sensed my legs wobble. In point of fact, I could've sworn the earth had been shaking under my feet and wondered why no one else commented on it.

Anyway, that weekend entered the annals of Somali history as The Tragic Weekend. In it, the Soviet, Cuban and Adenese generals (with a little help from the Ethiopians) masterminded the decisive blow which returned the destiny of the Ogaden and its people to Ethiopian hands. And imagine, I was ill and in bed when this happened. While the nation mourned, I lay unconscious in a swamp of my own fever, my own rubble, my own stubble. Transported across mirages by the burning heat of my own blood, I discovered sheets were too hot to come anywhere near me, the mattress not level enough to keep my aching body in firm position. I asked for impossible things, I demanded that miracles be performed. These included studying the possibility of replacing my skin, because it was too hot, with another—cooler. When the nation mourned the loss of the Ogaden, I was preoccupied with the state of my health, my body, my skin. I will never forget that.

I was the last to hear of the loss. By then, there was no point in crying over spilt milk. “One has to be strong enough to accept defeat. But well return in maybe ten, maybe twenty years and put back the Ogaden where it belongs—in Somali hands.” I said this as I fed my then undernourished, frail body with the food Uncle Hilaal had prepared for me. Propped up against the wall supporting my back, with a spoon in my hand, my knees trembling under the sheets, I asked, “What next? What do you think will happen now?”

He predicted, “An influx of refugees. That's what defeat will mean.”

My expression told him that I didn't follow his argument. Whereupon, he remarked that if the Somalis had won the war, there wouldn't have been “Somali” refugees, but Ethiopian refugees. In any case, he went on, for-exampling his way to the nerve of the matter, since Ethiopia had only military garrisons and no civilian population in the Ogaden (in Kallafo, there may have been a couple of hundred women who provided one service or another to the military garrison on the hill—and many never crossed the bridge separating the Ethiopians' side of the river from the civilian Somali population), yes, if the Ethiopians had lost the war, the men who fell into Somali hands would have become prisoners-of-war and not refugees.

“And if I hadn't come as early as I had done, if I hadn't come until after the Ogaden was reconquered by the generals from the Soviet, Cuban and Adenese armies—what then?”

“Every ethnic Somali is entitled to live in the Somali Republic. They may belong to any Somali-speaking territory, be it Kenyan, Ethiopian or even Djebouti. Every Somali has the constitutional birthright to reside anywhere in the Republic. The status of who
is
a refugee, however, points two fingers at two parallel issues—political and economic. If a Somali in Ethiopia or Kenya or Djebouti fears for his life, that Somali has the status of a political refugee, but doesn't need to declare himself as such unless he is in no position to look for and obtain a job and live practising his profession. If, however, the Somali from outside the Republic is not economically self-sufficient, or if his relations aren't well-off enough to support him, then they might declare themselves as ‘refugees'. It is estimated that more than a third of the registered population in the Republic came over from the Ogaden or Djebouti long before the 1977 war. Many have joined the army. They form a large percentage of the soldiery as well as the officer corps. Many have joined schools and the university here, or the civil service or the government in one capacity or another, some holding very highly placed jobs as ministers, director-generals or else they have been recruited into the diplomatic corps.”

“And what will happen to those who do not flee the Ogaden?”

“For example, the Ethiopians poison their wells, rape their women and conscript their children into the Ethiopian army or the police force. They compel them to learn Amharic, force them to adopt the ‘Amharic' culture and dispossess them of their land.”

There was a pause. I took mouthfuls of the minestrone Uncle had dished out for me, having added salt, pepper and lime. He sat on the edge of the bed, his back unsupported, and I suspected the strain was affecting his lumbago. He touched his spine as though it were cold and he were rubbing blood into its circulatory system.