Maps (44 page)

“Could we ask him?”

“We don't know … er … didn't know who the priest was. Someone suggested him. He came, he did his thing and left. We didn't spend any thought on that aspect of the
janaaza
, we're sorry” said Salaado.

“What's all this, Askar?”

He reflected for a moment. Then, “Because I might have suggested a couple of verses. If you had come and shaken me out of my fever.”

Almost indifferent, Hilaal asked, “Like what?”

“Verses fourteen, fifteen and sixteen of Sura Luqmaan.”

No one was in any mood to speak for a while. Salaado and Hilaal apologized to him profusely All three joined hands and they hugged, wrapped in one another's bodies and clothes, half-struggling, like a crowd upon whom a tarpaulin had collapsed.

IV

He was back—in his room, at home. He was back to the warm space between his thoughts—warm as the space between the sheets covering him. He was back to his unread books, back to his unstudied maps on the wall in his room—at home. He was back to his mirrors, also on the walls, mirrors reflecting only the present, but not good enough to travel to a past beyond the tin amalgam plating their backs. He was back to the unplanned future—a future without a Misra; back also to the unfilled, unsubmitted forms from the Western Somalia Liberation Front and that of the National University of Somalia. The empty space of the twenty-one-odd questions stared back at him, preventing his brain from dealing with them, scattering his memory, like dust in a whirlwind, to the seven horizons of the cosmos—a world without a Misra!

He was standing before a mirror. He saw an unhappy face—his. It “wore” like a mask. He thought there was something absurd about a sadness confined only to the face, a sadness which wouldn't spread to the rest of his body; something absurd about a face whose features had become as overwhelming as a spider's abdomen, a spider with virtually no visible shanks and whose large belly spins webs—and fables with morals. So, he asked, who was
Misra?
A woman, or more than just a woman? Did she exist as I remember her? Or have I rolled into a great many other persons, spun from the thread leading back to my own beginnings, incorporating with those taking one back to other beginnings, other lives? Misra? Masra? Misrat? Massar? Now with a “t”, now without!

He now studied the map as reflected faithfully in the mirror before him. So many hundred kilometers to Kallafo, so many to Jigjiga; so many from Jigjiga to Hargeisa; and from Hargeisa to Mogadiscio; so many from Mogadiscio to Marsabet in the Somali-speaking part of Kenya. Maps. Truth. A mind travels across the graded map, and the eye allots the appropriate colours to the different continents. The body takes longer to make the same journey. Decimal grids, according to Arno Peters, are vastly different from Mercator's map, in existence since the middle of the sixteenth century. And there is a big, painful difference, thought Askar, between the Somali situation today and that of the early 1940s when all the Somali-speaking territories, save Djebouti, were under one administration. And so it was again, for a brief period in 1977-8, when the Ogaden was in Somali hands. But the Somalis, government and people, were busy fighting a war on the ground and in the corridors of diplomatic power and no one released an authorized map of the reconquered territory. Truth. Maps.

He heard footsteps approaching but didn't turn to see who it was. Two faces entered the mirror's background—Salaado in Hilaal's jellaba, he in her caftan. They had been having their afternoon siesta but hadn't been away for long.

“Would you like to come with us?” asked Salaado.

“Where are you going?”

Hilaal said, “We'll buy a goat.”

“What for?”

Salaado said, “As an expression of thanks to the gods that protect us. We, too, like all the Mogadiscians, have decided to slaughter a goat as sacrifice.”

Hilaal added, “There are other reasons. For example,”

“Like?”

Salaado said, “Sac-ri-fice. It does cover a large area—the notion of sacrifice, I mean. Hilaal and I have talked it over and he, too, thinks so.”

There was no doubt about it, she had become religious.

He repeated the word to himself, like a blind man touching the items surrounding him, a man familiarizing the senses of his body with what his mind already knows. And he
saw
. He
saw
Misra divine, he
saw
her stare at the freshly slaughtered goat's meat, and he
saw
her tell a future when the meat quivered. The scene changed. Now he
saw
her open a chicken, he
saw
her give him an egg which she had salvaged from the dead fowl's inside and he
saw
her talk of a future of travels, departures and arrivals. Again the scene changed. And he
saw
a horse drop its rider, he
saw
a girl kidnapped, he
saw
the girl grow into a woman ripe as corn, he
saw
the hand that had watered the corn pluck it, then eat it—he
saw
the man of the-watering-hand murdered. Sac-ri-fice! For Misra—a mastectomy; Hilaal—a vasectomy; Salaado—removal of the ovaries; Qorrax—exaction of blood, so many ounces a-bleeding; Karin—a life of sacrifices; Aria and Cali-Xamari—his parents—their lives; the Somali people—their sons, their daughters and the country's economy. In short, life
as
sacrifice. In short, life
is
blood, and the shedding of one's blood for a cause and for one's country; in short, life is the drinking of enemy blood and vengeance. Life is love too. Salaado and Hilaal are love. Aria—the earth; Qorrax—the sun in its masculine manifestations; Hilaal—the moon; Salaado—solemnity, prayers, etc.; Misra?—foundation of the earth; Karin—a hill in the east, humps on backs; Cali-Xamari—a return to a beginning; and Riyo—dreams dreaming dreams!

Now he saw faces, now he didn't see them; now he saw shades—like larvae under a microscope, these moved in the mirror. He started. When he calmed again, he took an unperturbed look. Hilaal and Salaado were in the doorway. They had changed into decent clothes to go out in. “Are you coming with us or aren't you?” Hilaal asked.

“I have one question to answer before I set foot out of this house,” said Askar. He fell silent and couldn't help feeling they were studying his movements with some concern.

Salaado said, “What is the question?”

“Who is Askar?”

The question made sense to its audience a minute or so later. No one said or did anything for a long time, as though in deference to the question which had been posed. In any case, there fell the kind of silence a coffin imposes upon those whom it encounters during its journey to the cemetery. And the sun entered the room they were in, in silence, then a slight breeze, smelling of the sea, entered in its wake, whereupon the dust and the rays merged, like ideas, and these were, like faces bright with smiles, reflected in the mirror. Askar was about to break the silence when he noticed that clouds, dark as migrating shadows, swooped down upon the rays of dust in the mirror, like vultures going for a meaty catch. Tagged on to the tail-end of the clouds, travelling at the speed of a vehicle being towed, the moon. Then … !

Then two other shadows fell across and obliterated the clouds and Askar was in no doubt that the men, to whom these belonged, one tall and ugly, the other short and handsome, were in police uniform. It was the tall one who spoke first. He said, “Which of you,” looking from Hilaal to Askar, “answers to the name of Askar?”

There was no time to indulge in metaphysical evasions, no time to consider the rhetorical aspects of one's answering to a name. Without looking at Hilaal or Salaado, whose lips were already astir with prayers, Askar: “It is I.” And after a pause, “Why?”

It was the short one's turn to speak. He said, “We are from the police station nearby,
Giardino
. We have questions to put to you. Please come with us.”

Hilaal moved nearer the short constable. He asked, “What questions? And in what connection, pray?”

The tall one, who was probably senior in rank and age, said, “Do the names Misra
t
, Aw-Adan, Qorrax and Karin mean anything to Askar? This is the question,” and he went nearer Hilaal. “I suppose you are Hilaal and that is Salaado?”

Everyone was quiet. In the meantime, the short constable bent down (maybe to lace his boots) but Askar felt as if the man was digging out of the earth roots of shadows, short as shrubs. The constable's body shot up suddenly, his back straightened and the room was awash with sunshine. Hilaal said, his voice thin and tense, “What are we waiting for? Let's go.”

Giardino
was half a kilometre away and they walked, Askar, Hilaal and Salaado ahead, and following them, like jailers prisoners, the two police officers. Above them, an umbrella of clouds, reassuring as haloes, and on their faces, shadows long and crooked like question marks. The tall constable, who took upon himself to lead the last ten metres of the walk, wore an anklet of shadows round his feet, treading on stirred memories of (Askar's) dust. They entered the station in silence.

A third police constable, sitting behind a typewriter, asked Askar, “What is your name?”

“Askar Cali-Xamari.”

And that was how it began—the story of (Misra/Misrat/Masarat and) Askar. First, he told it plainly and without embellishment, answering the police officer's questions; then he told it to men in gowns, men resembling ravens with white skulls. And time grew on Askar's face, as he told the story yet again, time grew like a tree, with more branches and far more falling leaves than the tree which is on the face of the moon. In the process, he became the defendant. He was, at one and the same time, the plaintiff and the juror. Finally, allowing for his different personae to act as judge, as audience and as witness, Askar told it to himself.