But most important of all, you bequeathed to Misra the look in your eye when she walked in that evening, running away from Aw-Adan’s lusty attentions. At times, she saw you reproduce a look which she associated with what she could remember of her own father; and at others, she saw another which she identified as her son’s—before he was taken ill and died.
It was a great pity, she thought, that there was no maternal milk she could offer to you, her young charge. But there was plenty of her and she gave it: she kept you warm by tucking you between her breasts, she held you close to her body so she could sense your movements, so she might attend to you whenever you stirred: you shared a bed, the two of you, and she smelled of your urine precisely in the same way you smelled of her sweat: upon your body were printed impressions of her fingerprints, the previous night’s moisture: yours and hers.
III
She nourished you, not only on food paid for by a community of relations, but on a body of opinion totally her own. With you, young as you were, needy and self-sufficient as an infant, she could choose to be herself—she could walk about in front of you in the nude if she wanted to, or could invite Aw-Adan to share, with the two of you, the small bed which creaked when they made love, a bed onto whose sagged middle you rolled, sandwiched as you were between them. When awake, and if you were the only person in the room, Misra spoke at you, saying whatever it was that she had intended to, talking about the things which bothered or pleased her. But there was something she did only in your or Aw-Adan’s presence. She spoke Amharic. She cursed people in her language. To her, it didn’t matter whether you understood it or not. What mattered to her was the look in your eyes, the look of surprise or incomprehension; a look which took her back to the first encounter: yours and hers.
Because of her relations with you, and because you were so attached to her, Misra’s status in the community became a controversial topic. To many members of the community, she was but that “maidservant who came from somewhere else, up north” and they treated her despicably, looking down upon her and calling her all sorts of things. It was said that her name wasn’t even Misra. However, no one bothered to check the source of the rumour. No one took the trouble to reach the bottom of the mystery. But who was she really? To you, she was the cosmos and hers was the body of ideas upon which your growing mind nourished. It didn’t matter in the least whether she came from upper Ethiopia or not, neither did it matter in the least if she had been abducted by a warrior from one of the clans north of yours when she was seven. Maidservant or no, she meant the world to you. Also, you believed that no one knew her as well as you did, no one needed her as much as you and nobody studied the changes in her moods as often as you. In short, you missed her immensely when she wasn’t with you. And so, with a self-abandon many began to associate with you, you cried and cried until she was brought to you. With a similar self-surrender, you displayed the pleasure of her company. Which was what made some say that she had bewitched you.
She taught you how best you should make use of your own body. She helped you leam to wash it, she assisted you in watching it grow, like the day’s shadow, from the shortest to the longest purposelessness of an hour; she familiarized you with the limitations of your own body. When it came to your soul, when it came to how to help your brain develop, she said she couldn’t trust herself to deal with that satisfactorily. Not then, anyway. Was this why she went and sought Aw-Adan’s help?
Aw-Adan and you didn’t take to each other right from your first encounter. You didn’t like the way he out-stared you, nor did you like him when Misra paid him all her attention, leaving you more or less to yourself. He commented on the look in your eyes: a look he described as “wicked and satanic”. To defend you, she described the look in your eyes as “adulted”. Aw-Adan did not appear at all convinced. Then she went on to say, “To have met death when not quite a being, perhaps this explains why he exists primarily in the look in his eyes. Perhaps his stars have conferred upon him the fortune of holding simultaneously multiple citizenships of different kingdoms: that of the living and that of the dead; not to mention that of being an infant and an adult at the same time.” Disappointed with her explanation, Aw-Adan went away, promising he would never see her again.
But he came back. He was in love with her—or so she believed. And as usual, he couldn’t resist commenting upon the fact that she had organized her life around you: you were “her time” as he put it; for she awoke, first thing in the morning, not to say her prayers but to attend to your needs. And what was she to you? To you, said Aw-Adan, she was your “space”: you moved about her body in the manner an insect crawls up a wall, even-legged, sure-footed and confident. And he continued, “Allah is the space and time of all Muslims, but not to you, Misra, Askar is.” He didn’t see anything wrong in what he said. But then how could he? He was jealous.
In the unEdenic universe into which you were cast by your stars, you were not content, like any intelligent being, with the small world of darkness you opened your eyes on. You behaved as though you had to find and touch the world outside of yourself, and this you did in order to be reassured of a given continuity. “He behaves,” said Misra to Aw-Adan, her confidant, one night when the three of you were in bed and the priest was not in his foulest of moods, “Askar behaves as if he feels lost unless his outstretched hands bring back to his acute senses the reassuring message that I am touchably there. He cannot imagine a world without my reassuring self.”
“What am I to do then? Suggest something,” said Aw-Adan.
“Be as accommodating to me as I am to him,” she said.
“You are insane,” he said.
“And you jealous,” she said.
“You are never alone,” complained Aw-Adan, who wanted her to himself. “I see you with him all the time, so much so that I see him even when he isn’t there. You smell of his urine and at times I too smell of it and it upsets me gravely. Why can’t we just marry, you and I? He isn’t yours but with God’s help, we can make one of our own, together, you and I. Come to me alone—both of body and of spirit—and let our bodies join, without Askar’s odour and cries.”
“I cannot,” she said. “I am his—in body and spirit too. And no one else’s. I can be yours or somebody else’s only in sin. Yes, only in sin. Imagine—you, a man of God at that!”
And she burst into tears.
And Aw-Adan stirred.
And you woke up and cried.
IV
To make the picture more complete, one must talk about your paternal uncle, namely Uncle Qorrax. The truth is, he too had designs on Misra and you suspected he had his way with her many times. It was no secret that you didn’t like Uncle Qorrax or his numerous wives: numerous because he divorced and married such a number of them that you lost count of how many there were at any given time, and at times you weren’t sure to whom he was married — until one day a woman you nicknamed “Shahrawello” arrived on the scene and she stayed (as Sheherezade of the Thousand and One Nights did). But neither did you like his children.
He was a ruthless man, your uncle was, and you were understandably frightened of him. You often remember him beating one of his wives or one of his children. Naturally, you didn’t take his apparent little kindnesses nor did you accept the gentle hand he invariably extended to you. You shunned any bodily contact with him. It was said you cried a great deal if he so much as touched you, although he never gave you a beating and could hardly have justified himself in scolding you. You were an orphan and you had a “stare” with which to protect yourself. He didn’t want the “stare” focused on him, his wives or his children.
When you were a little older and in Mogadiscio, living in the more enlightened world of Uncle Hilaal and Salaado, you began to reason thus: you didn’t like Uncle Qorrax’s children because they behaved as children always do, no more, no less; they insisted on owning toys if they were boys, or on making dolls and dressing them if they were girls. His sons enjoyed being rough with one another, t
hey took sadistic pleasure in annoying or hurting one another, whereas his daughters busied themselves nursing or breast-feeding dolls or clothing bones, not as though they were women caring for infants with broken hearts but as though they were little girls. In retrospect, you would admit there was a part of you which admired these girls when they jumped ropes, challenged the boys, or took part in daredevil games—not when they chanted childish rhymes which small girls always did at any rate. And you admired the boys, from a distance anyway when they dislodged fatal shots from catapults, cutting short the life of a gecko climbing up a wall or a lizard basking in the sun. It was the life-giving and life-taking aspects of their activities which interested you.
You once said to Misra that if there was anything you shared with adults, it was the visceral dislike of children’s babble or the infantile rattle of their mechanical contrivances and the noise of their demands, “I want this”, “I want that”. You concluded your remarks to the surprise of those listening to you (there was a woman neighbour, married to an invalid, a man who lay on his back all the time, suffering from some spinal complaint you had no name for), by saying, “When will children stop wanting, when will they be, when will they do a job, as Karin’s husband says, when will they accomplish something—not as children but as beings?”
She commented, “But you are an adult.”
Karin agreed, “He is. Surely.”
What you didn’t say, although it crossed your mind, was that you were an adult, and, for whatever it was worth, you believed you were present at your birth. But no one said anything. Perhaps because you knew that when windows of bedrooms closed on the sleeping lids of children’s heads nodding with drowsiness; when their snores filled the empty spaces of the rooms they were in; when their tongues tasted of the staleness of slumber in their mouths; when their parents surrendered themselves to their dreams, pushing out of their way the daylight inhibitions of who enjoyed the company of whom, in bed; when thoughts were unharnessed and allowed to roam freely in the open spaces of the uncensored mind: it was then, you knew, that Misra and you could tell each other stories no one else was listening to. And in the privacy of the late hour, in the secrecy of the night’s darkness, you could afford to allow the adult in you to emerge and express adult thoughts, just as Misra could permit the child in her to express its mind.
And then the two of you would gossip. Like adults, you would exchange secrets each had gathered during the previous day, you would condemn and pass judgements. You would talk about people, talk about Shahrawello whose daily blood-letting of Qorrax was said to have kept him in good check. You also gossiped meanly and unpardonably about a neighbour’s son who ate ten times as much as you and who, at four-and-a-half, didn’t utter a single word save “food”; a boy who weighed “a ton” and whose open mouth had to be stuffed with victuals of one sort or another. You nicknamed him “Monster” following your overhearing his mother say, “Oh Lord, why have you made me give birth to a monster?” Misra would feign interest in hearing you tell the story but suddenly her features would change expression, suggesting you were overdoing it, and she would say, “That’s enough, Askar”, and would immediately change the subject to something less trivial, less controversial; or she would tell you a story until your breathing was slow, then shallow, as if you were wading through a pond where the water was muddy and knee-high. Misra was an expert at handling your moods. And she was different from your uncle’s wives. As mothers, these were generally indulgent for the first two or three years. Then they became ruthlessly rigid with their children, who were expected to behave according to strict codes and norms of behaviour with which they had not been made familiar. You imagined these women to be in season all the time, what with their constant loss of temper with their children and their caning them whenever they didn’t leave the room the moment they were instructed to do so.
Misra would say, “To these women, when in their best moods, children are like passing royalty. Don’t you notice how everything comes to a standstill when they totter past them and how they are admired?” And you asked, “But why do people love children?” “Some because they can afford to lavish a moment’s indulgence on a child that didn’t keep them awake the previous night; some because they see angels in the infants they spy and marvel at God’s generosity; some because they have no children themselves and envy those who are thus blessed. There are as many reasons why adults admire children as there are adults who admire them.”
“And why is it that they don’t like me?” you said. She answered, “Because you are no child. That’s why.” In your mind, the memory door opened and you saw visiting relatives of Uncle Qorrax’s and they were giving his children cash with which to buy sweets or footballs; you also saw that these same relatives caned them if they caught them misbehaving in public. But when it came to you, they asked after your health, although they did so with extreme caution, speaking articulately to Misra in the manner of one who was talking to a foreigner who didn’t understand the nuances of one’s language. And these relations never took liberties with you, no, they didn’t. You wondered if it was “guilt” that made them act the way they did, “guilt” that made them look away when you “stared”. Or were they uneasy because yours was the “stare” of a parentless child?
“I want you to think of it like this,’ said Misra to you one night. “You are a blind man and I am your stick, and it is I who leads you into the centre of human activities. Your appearance makes everyone fall silent, it makes them lower the volume of their chatter. And you too become conscious and you interpret their silence as a ploy to exclude you, and you feel you’re being watched and that you’re being denied entry into their world. From then on, you hold on to the stick, both as guide and protector. Since you cannot sense sympathy in their silences, you think it is hate. You, the blind man, and I, the stick. And together we pierce the sore—that’s their conscience.”
You said, “No wonder they don’t like me!”
Again, Misra changed the subject to less demanding topics, topics that were less burdensome than the notions of “guilt” or “conscience”. And she lulled you to and led you to sleep: gently, slowly, with a voice that changed rhythms and a lullaby sung in a language that wasn’t your own. Some of the tales she told you had plenty of blood in them, there was no denying that. In a couple of these, there were even human-eating types—with Dhegdheer dying not and the heavens raining not! On occasion, she would give, in outline, the moral of the tale before she narrated it to you, and at times she would let you retell it so you had the opportunity of offering your own interpretation. Years later, you discovered (it was Karin who gave you the information) that Misra used to have these tales told to her when you were away from the compound so she could feed your fantasies on them when you returned. Admittedly, this endeared her to you.
Unlike Uncle Qorrax’s children, you never stole things from anyone. You mentioned your needs—and Misra met them. If she couldn’t, she told you why. And she trained you not to value money or possessions. Also, no visiting relation unfolded secretly onto your outstretched palm a coin a parent might not have given you. Uncle Qorrax’s children, you knew, stole from their father. They conspired to do so — one of them would keep an eye on him, say, when he was in the lavatory and the others would rummage his pockets and take away a small sum that he wouldn’t notice and share it among themselves. Often, they timed it so it coincided with the arrival of nomads, who had come to buy provisions from his shop, pitching their tents in their compound, when there was a great deal of movement. They knew he dared not put embarrassing questions to these guest-clients. His sons knew he would never offer them or their mothers anything they could do without. It was his “public” persona that insisted on being generous at times. He could be kind to his children and wives when “others” were there; he could even be generous. When alone with them, he was a miser. So, they stole from him when he wasn’t there,
Misra had a public and a private persona too. She was warme
r and kinder when alone with you, calling you all kinds of endearments, sharing with you secrets no other soul knew about. And in any case, you needn’t have stolen anything from Misra or from yourself. It was when she wore the mask of the public persona that you “stole” from her time a few moments of tenderness which you exchanged surreptitiously.
And when Misra was in season and therefore nervous, you were entrusted to Karin, who was equally kind, equally generous—and who treated you, not as a child, but as a grandchild. Because you were two generations apart, Karin indulged you in a way which didn’t meet Misra’s patent of approval. The two women were the best of friends—the one with an ailing husband who had lain on his back for years and who was confined to a mattress on the floor from where he saw, whenever he looked up at the ceiling, a portrait of Ernest Bevin; the other, a woman who, by virtue of her foreignness, felt she had access to the Somali cosmos—if there is anything like that—only through you. Karin baby-minded for her. Likewise, when she was indisposed, Misra looked after the old man. Conveniently for the three of you, Karin and her husband’s compound lay between yours and Uncle Qorrax’s. And so you were content to go from one compound to the other without ever needing to touch the fringes of the third—namely Qorrax’s.
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