From a Crooked Rib

by Nuruddin Farah

  She straightened her dress, let her hands go over her chest, and went towards her room.

  It dawned upon her that she could call upon Asha, which she did. The latter told her that she had sent for a Sheikh, and, as soon as he came, she would call her.

  27

  Back in her room as she lay on her bed, Ebla meditated at length, opening and closing her eyes as the wind blew upon them.

  Asha had told her that the Sheikh who would read the Koran over her had been sent for. She thought to herself, ‘What is life? There is no difference between town and country, or between Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday: back to where it began. There is no beginning of this world and no end either. It moves on and on, in a circle, or along itself, or round itself, or abreast itself. This world is routine, life is routine. People don’t get surprised (as one might expect) when their beloved sons, daughters or friends disappear into the ground. God has taken them away. They don’t get affected or moved when a new-born baby comes into the world to create disturbance. Instead, they cut the throats of other animals to rejoice on the occasion. What is the use of life? Especially for a person like myself? I am nothing but an object. I am nothing. I did not cost Awill anything: he did not pay me or any relation of mine any dowry. He did not even know who my relations were in case I wanted him to pay my dowry to someone else. Maybe it is because I did not cost him anything that Awill started running after another woman, a white woman, who doesn’t believe in God, a Gentile, a white woman.

  ‘I wonder if it is true that God has said that “a woman’s prophet and second-to-God is her husband”. If this is true, then life is not worth living. Why, Awill runs after another woman (a white woman, worst of all) and then when he has done whatever he wanted with her, he comes back to me and I have to wash his legs, cook his food and seek no other shelter but his abode, and I can consider it mine too only if he wants me.

  ‘I cannot recall when I came here. Neither can I look back without feeling disgusted. Usually I am so confused, but each time that it seems to be improving, something happens which leaves me in the same old situation. Am I cursed? And if so who has done it?’

  Ebla felt that her ribs ached. So she turned over on to her other side. She kept on thinking, rationalising all that had happened to her.

  ‘I am guilty of one thing: my marriage to Tiffo. I should perhaps have waited for a while, but I was bitterly annoyed and I wanted to take revenge upon Awill. But what did that do to me? Whom did it benefit—him or myself? In any case, I was the victim. I went to bed with a man, and although I was doing it deliberately, I could see the consequence. I never met the man to whom my cousin gave my hand, neither did I care for the other fellow, whatever his name was. They were not my husbands, and so they could never be prophets to me. You only obey the orders of prophets when you have embraced their doctrines. But I am a woman, and for a woman there are many limitations. For one thing, Awill could marry another woman and bring her home, and I would not be able to say a word. He could marry three more, if he wanted to. I wish he would do that. Maybe dwelling in hell is preferable to being its neighbour—as long as the heat is no greater. I wonder if I am a prostitute; I wonder how many people think that I am one.’

  She recalled an incident in the country in which a woman who was selling her body had been found out. Her relatives seized the man who was in bed with her, and beat him until every part of his flesh ached. Then they got hold of the woman and burnt her house and all her possessions. She had been stigmatized until one day she left the country and came to Mogadiscio, and took up prostitution as her profession. What good had her relatives done? A person is tempted to do awful things once in a while, but violence doesn’t solve any problem; violence and harsh beating alone could never have made that woman repent for her sin. But was it sin? ‘What is sin? If only I knew.

  ‘I love life. I love it. Everybody loves it, each in his own way. Even death is nothing but the other side of life, and anyone who loves to die naturally loves to live. I love to live for something, but I don’t mind dying for the same thing. I love life. I love all its colours. I love nature. I love rain. I love spring. I love misery and hunger. But I do not love these things because they bring about either happiness or sadness: for me here there is no longer happiness or sadness. I love animals, which are the only part of nature that I know. That is my fate—to be able to communicate with these things which I know.

  ‘I have never done anybody any harm and I have no such intentions. I have never told lies, and I’ve never uprooted generations of people, but who is responsible for my miserable situation? God or myself? Naturally if things turn bad, we always put the blame on someone else, so what is better than putting all the censure on God? But honestly who is responsible? Partly Awill. Why? Because he left me in the lurch. But surely he was sent out of the country to do something, wasn’t he? Then perhaps it is my family who are responsible. But how? Because they never brought me into contact with suitable men? But who is “my family” anyway? My grandfather had died even before my brother came here, and my father’s and mother’s bones had been reduced to dust a long time back. But the other relations, do I have any? I wonder if I do. My inexperience of life was partly responsible. I would probably have made a clean breast of everything and then forgotten about it if I had known what I was doing. It is because of human weakness that one prefers the unattained or the undone or the unknown to what has happened in the past. Well, that is for each person to think out for himself. Now my problem concerns my men, and it is a great pity that they are not in the least bit worried about the situation. I am turning over in this bed, thinking out solutions to these problems. They may be sleeping with other women for all I know—they could be doing anything.

  ‘Divorce. Should I ask for a divorce? Our religion is very strict towards women in this respect. The concessions given to men are far too great: it seems that religion is the only right thing. Oh, my God, I don’t actually mean this. You hear me, God; I repent. I repent to Thee. Nothing is wrong with our religion.

  ‘But will I or won’t I ask for a divorce? How can I ask Awill to divorce me? I will feel lonely, and isolated. My soul has never had a partner and it will never get one, not even in the next world, because I have committed so many errors as it is. I have committed adultery: I have broken God’s law, but God is quite merciful, though when He punishes, He can be cruel. One never knows whether one will be treated with mercy or punished, though.

  ‘I never understand myself,’ Ebla continued thinking. ‘I just never do. The prophets say that everybody’s fate is written on God’s slate. Everything is recorded up there—or is the record made down here? Are there angels who rest on your shoulders and record your doings? On the face of the moon, there is a big tree, and each leaf on that tree represents an individual. One dies when one’s leaf falls off the tree on the moon. The leaf withers when a person has been in bed for a long time. But I respect God and He knows that I do, and I promise that I will say my prayers five times a day as usual if my wish is fulfilled.

  ‘But what do you want? I wish I knew. I am a woman now, a grown-up girl; I am a woman, and because I am in trouble, my womanhood is evident. Men have woman-troubles, but it doesn’t upset them as much as it does us. I am a woman, and because my blood-money is half that of a man, it is apparent that I am an inferior being to him. We cannot say that God has done something wrong. He, the Almighty God, is the one who has fixed the status of human beings. He made me cost half of a man, and He must have had a good reason for doing so, otherwise why did He do this to me? I am a woman, and because I am tempted more than a man, my weakness comes to light faster than it would in the case of a man. I look at a man and I am tempted: if I yield to this temptation, the consequences are so bitter that the taste of it may result in my losing my own existence.

  ‘Oh, my God, if only men knew how women are tempted! We may say no, give a flat refusal, but inwardly we desire the man more than he desires us. A
rrawello, the wisest Somali female who ever lived, gave her fellow-women some advice before she died. She said, “Ye women, say ‘No’ even if afterwards you come to regret it. Be obstinate, and let no man shake your feminine resolve. And be respectful and also decent.” I wonder if she wasn’t wiser than the men who were apparently superior to her.

  ‘But why didn’t I say “No” to Awill? I wonder if he would have insisted on marrying me? But I would have eventually said “yes” anyway.

  ‘If I had not left the country and instead had married the old man my grandfather had given my hand to, maybe I would not have run into all these troubles,’ Ebla thought. ‘I have never regretted doing anything in my life. Why should I? I am weak in the sense that I accept whatever an older person dictates to me. But I don’t mean to harm anybody: I want to make the best of what I have, but at the moment this is everlasting troubles and headaches. My belly turns over whenever I regret. It is not good. It doesn’t help matters. Whatever I do is something in my nature, which I cannot help. The only way, maybe, is to take a knife and cut my throat, but I am a woman and I cannot do that—I lack the courage.

  ‘I look as dejected as a camel which has lost its only calf. My only advantage over a camel is that I can try to reason with myself, and speak out. But to whom can I speak? Maybe only to God, to whom I have not addressed any prayers for such a long time that I cannot remember the last time. One by one I am losing my acquaintances, and even my relations. I have lost my only brother’s confidence: he will never come and see me again. It is the same with my cousin and his wife: they would bake me alive. Asha has no more use for my friendship, and I don’t know anybody else in this place. There is no friendship between a husband and a wife; the husband is a man and the wife is a woman, and naturally they are not equal in status. Friends should be equal before they can become friends. If you despise or look down upon somebody, he cannot be your friend, neither can you be his friend.

  ‘First thing in the morning, I will buy myself guavas,’ she decided. ‘The prophet has said that if you eat guavas and die within forty days, your entrance to heaven is guaranteed. I will ask Asha to buy me some, but she must not know the reason why I want them, for she would envy my entrance to heaven and would buy me something else. I wonder what a guava tastes like: it must be bitter, I suppose, or perhaps sour. Despite its taste, I am going to eat it. Do they grow guavas here near the sea? What does the sea look like? Huge blue water they’ve told me. Guavas are probably blue also like the sea. And do they taste like salt? Sea water is salty, Asha said, and anything which grows in the coastal area must be salty. Far away in the country, we suffer because of lack of water, but in the towns they have plenty of it—rivers, seas and lakes. Our beasts in the country die of thirst, but here they don’t have as many beasts as we have, and yet they have this huge surplus of water. That is life: when you need something you don’t get it, and when you don’t need it, there is plenty. I wonder if it is ever possible to have as many things as one wants.’

  Someone whistled a tune Ebla was not familiar with. The sound came from outside although she thought for a second that it was from within the room. Ebla wished she could go and tell the person to stop whistling because at the sound of whistling the genies come in the night, and either the whistler gets whacked in the face or this happens to those around him who should have told him not to whistle. Why should a person whistle? But then again why shouldn’t he?

  Ebla came out to speak to the person concerned, but just as she reached the doorway, and as she was leaning against the wall, feeling a little weak and unbalanced, she saw a meteor falling. In spite of herself, she could not help shouting, ‘Fall. Fall. Fall on those who don’t believe in God the almighty. Fall on them.’

  Then she bit her little finger. She looked around and saw dark figures squatting outside the other rooms. She felt disappointed that they did not wish the same thing. ‘Maybe they don’t hate those who do not believe in God in the way that I do,’ she thought.

  Then she went inside. The whistling had stopped. Ebla stretched herself on the bed again and continued her speculation.

  ‘I am a naturally confused person, but though the Creator is responsible for his creation, I am responsible for my actions. Let me analyse my men: I wonder if I should consider in this case the first one, from whom I escaped. It was because of him that I ran away, and it is really on account of him that everything else has happened to me. God sees all that happens and He knows everything in my mind. Giumaleh was not known to me in the first place. I never saw him, nor did the Sheikh pronounce our engagement. It was only verbally done between him and my grandfather. Dirir is in the same boat: he was not known to me personally and I never set eyes on him. He simply made an arrangement with my cousin.

  ‘But Awill—he was the only husband I married willingly. Maybe I would not have married him if I had not been running away. I would have thought it over. But he took advantage of my situation and an elopement was all right with him. In the beginning, he was rude to me, but in the end, he changed his attitude. We only spent ten days together, but now his affair with that woman in the photo has naturally broken the mirror of my heart. It has split my heart into smaller pieces, and it is impossible for my heart ever to be the same again. Oh, if only he knew this—perhaps he would leave me or perhaps he would come closer to me, do the unexpected and lie near me, and be friends with me again. But supposing he learns about Tiffo? Just suppose he does, what will happen?

  ‘About Tiffo, there is not much to say. He is a man of money, the richest man I have met in my life. But I have not met many, have I? Maybe if I were after money and riches, I could stay back in the country and marry the man to whom my grandfather had given my hand for marriage: he was as old as Tiffo and probably as fat.

  ‘I am responsible for the death of my grandfather,’ she thought. This was the end of her talk to herself.

  ‘With tomorrow’s sun maybe happiness will come to me,’ she said aloud. And then she slept without eating her supper.

  28

  Ebla woke up the next morning more pre-occupied than ever. She had had a bad dream the night before. The morning sun was bright, and she imagined that nature had become bolder, exposing its brilliance and brightness like this in its simplest form. She thought that she had walked out on nature and that now it would give her slaps across the face, stab her from behind with a poisonous dagger or make her lag behind the children of nature. Nature would always make her lag behind others, she felt. She thought to herself that one lived a parody of existence if one did not get the essential and basic satisfaction of life. Life was like a dress (what an analogy!) and one’s change of status was like a change of dress. It would be monotonous to have the same dress on for ever. ‘Life is simpler than we think,’ she decided, smiling peevishly into the face of life, which was represented by the room she was in. ‘It is only we who don’t understand life, or rather we tend to misunderstand it,’ she said aloud.

  With her hand she felt down her body, naked under the sheet; she scratched her sex, then chuckled. ‘This is my treasure, my only treasure, my bank, my money, my existence.’ She let her hand lie upon it for a while, and wondered if she had not got tired of playing uninteresting games with foolish men on beds. The area of her sex was slightly damp. Then she let her hand go up towards the belly: it was soft and uneven. Then she touched her navel and picked out some dirt. She looked at the dirt hanging on her nails, then threw it under the bed. She covered herself from the tip of her toes to the top of her head with the sheet. She looked into herself and found something new about herself. She looked into herself literally—a thing which she had never done before. She had never bothered about her bodily make-up, thinking that this was more the business of the man who was interested in her. Now she realized that the changes she had undergone were amazing. Stretching her legs and raising her head a little bit, she discovered that she was getting older. Her flesh was soft and fluffy, and she looked like a woman of thirty. Her lips had cr
acks, as though they had been kissed by unknown devils. Her tongue had broken reddish spots in the middle under the palate. Her breasts were as soft as butter: they hung from her chest, not forming an integrated part of her body, as if they had never been a part of her at all. She thought she had lost the game: she had become a prostitute without realizing that she had become one. She then uncovered her body down to the belly. She did not reposition her head, and thus could not see anything beyond the two hills of her breasts. She touched her left breast, and, as if she thought that the other one would get jealous of being overlooked or something, she hurried to give it a touch, a cajoling touch, patting it on the nipple. She squeezed both of them like you squeeze a lemon with no juice in it. The corns inside the breasts were smaller in size. She pressed hard and it hurt. She closed her eyes, wandering into nothingness and creating in her mind something which had never existed before, and which would never exist.

  Suddenly there was a knock on the door, followed by a pause.

  ‘Open the door,’ said a woman’s voice and Ebla knew that it was Asha. ‘Open the door and come out. The Sheikhs have come. Hurry up. Wake up.’ Ebla made her voice sound as if she had just woken up and said that she would come out very soon.

  Just in front of Asha’s room, two men sat cross-legged on the straw mat laid on the ground. They both had white robes on and Ebla could see that they were anxious to get through with the whole thing quickly. From inside her room, she could notice their movements.

  The morning was young, and Ebla felt empty inside. Her brain was hollow and she knew that she would walk tensely. It was an effort on her part to walk the hundred paces that divided them, for her legs were tired and her head was exceptionally heavy, as the daylight shone upon her. Ebla pulled herself together and came towards the Sheikhs who were silent—determined; but only God knew what about.