Karin said, “I’m too old for that, thank God.”
This puzzled Askar. And Karin, with grandmotherly patience, explained: “What Misra has is called Xayl. We women have other ugly names for it. Only women, above or below a certain age, have it—or suffer it. Men don’t. When women are in their fifties or older, they stop having it. I haven’t suffered from it since I was fifty-three. Do you understand?” she said, her bloodshot eyes fixed on him.
Askar needn’t have spoken—she could see from the expression on his face that he didn’t follow her explanations. She wished she could make him grasp her meaning— she, who took delight in talking to him about things she hadn’t dared talk about with her own children. She said, “When you are a little older, you will understand”, in the manner in which a doctor assures an ailing person that all will be well if they take the tablets as prescribed.
“But I won’t bleed?” he asked.
She forgot to repeat that only women suffered it—a fact he either hadn’t registered, or which had escaped him, when she said, “It brings with it lots of pain and suffering.”
“If I had some of it, then Misra will have less of it, yes?”
She wore the pained expression of somebody who felt misunderstood. Her head, as though it weren’t on its neck any more, began to shake, “No, no, no. Misra is a woman,” she said to Askar.
He shrugged his shoulders, “So what?”
Without her speaking, he realized he had misunderstood her. Then he heard her say: “Only women of a certain age have their periods, women between the ages of twelve and let’s say fifty. Not men. And definitely not boys.”
He stared at her in wonderment, in silence. She went on, speaking slowly, articulately, “My husband and my sons do not suffer the monthly pains of menstruation. My daughters, yes. I, yes—when I was younger.”
“Suppose a woman doesn’t have it? Suppose she misses it?”
She wanted something clarified before she answered that: “You mean, when these women are still young enough to be afflicted by them and they’re not as old as I?”
Askar nodded.
Karin was sure. “It means that they are with child.”
He appeared puzzled. Nor did the following explanation which she offered enlighten him, any more than a nomad listening to a news broadcast about the devaluation of the Somali shilling finds the subject comprehensible. She said, “Women who miss their periods are pregnant unless they are unwell.” Rather, this complicated matters.
Was Misra with child once monthly since she was unwell? Misra’s periods used to be accompanied by depressive days and nights, and her breasts ached. She was unwell and she bled a great deal. Her monthly agony flowed for almost a week. Her pain was most acute in the lower abdomen to which she held constantly, and which she pressed as though she were squeezing pus out of an infected wound—so severe was this pain, at times she fainted. When the tension in her body was greater, she doubled up with it—as though she were in labour.
Karin, mixing kneaded dough with ground millet and water to make canjeera for Askar and, if she could eat it, for Misra as well, was saying, “Remember when you’re a grown man—remember the suffering and the pain on her face. Remember how women suffer. And do not, please, do not cause her further pain and suffering.”
He wished he had the will to make the required promise. Also, he wished he could remind Karin that Misra was not always in pain during this period. At times, he could see her sit in a palatial silence, daydreaming. He didn’t know if Misra had ever told Karin of the two men, namely Uncle Qorrax and Aw-Adan, who called after nightfall. With no after-dark visitors, these nights were quieter when Misra stopped moaning with excruciating pain. At any rate, neither of the men visited her when she was in season. He wished she was never in seasonal agonies. He wished the two men did not come after nightfall.
But there was one occasion when Misra didn’t have the monthly, excruciating pain. Karin came and inquired after their health, all right. In fact, she called more often, arousing suspicions in Askar’s mind—and something told him something was amiss. Came a woman whom he had never seen before and the three of them were closeted in the room, speaking in whispers. What were they hiding from him?
Although there was no visible pain—the kind that he had associated with her periods—there was the same kind of pronounced tension in her body and she daydreamed a lot and for long periods of time. She didn’t beat him, however, and had no temper to lose, it seemed. But she was most firm with the two after-dark callers—she wanted to see neither of them. Aw-Adan was very persistent. She didn’t hesitate. She said to him, “Go.” And he went.
There were changes in Misra’s diet. She began chewing clayey lumps which were brought for her from the river bed; she ate a great many sour things; she also brushed her teeth with coal.
One evening, Aw-Adan came and the two of them entered the room and Askar could hear the key turning in the door as they locked it from inside. And Askar went to his favourite spot below the window. Undisturbed, he eavesdropped on their conversation. It was very brief. She wasn’t willing to enter into a long dialogue with him. “No marriage”, he caught the phrase and held it in his mind long enough for him to hear her snap, “In any case who says the child is yours? He isn’t.” And she came out.
There was a great deal of movement that night, with Karin and another woman coming and going. Something was being prepared but he didn’t know what. Then, the following morning, the women made Misra lie on her back and they trampled all over her body As if that wasn’t enough, they made her sit up and be fumigated with cardamom and then improvised for her a suppository of cinnamon with myrrh. After which, they made her take concoctions which, among other things, included the broth of roots and shrubs which were known to have abortifacient powers. And as if this wasn’t sufficient, one of the women inserted a metallic rod into her insides and Misra made a most frightening noise.
Misra convalesced for about a week. She was weak. What a kind woman Karin was, he used to think, ploughing the space between a husband who lay on his back from before Askar was born, and Misra whose wounds were fresh and whose memory of the pain therefore most acute. Playful, although he was now old enough to run faster than her, Askar rode on her back as she went back and forth, ecstatic at having found a person as patient, kind and generous as she.
Now. Years later. In Mogadiscio. At Hilaal and Salaado’s.
And he saw a child crawling—and he could see this from a slight distance. Then the child clambered to its feet and walked for a bit, its gait shaky, its legs infirm and wobbly; he walked for half a metre and fell on his bottom but got up instantly and fell again, this time forward; his mouth, when he turned to Askar, was marked with the earth it had struck. But he did not cry. He continued falling and rising, without ever getting tired, without hurting a muscle or breaking a bone. And someone’s voice (he couldn’t see the person—but the voice was a woman’s) said: “Children fall without ever coming to harm because some protecting angels lay themselves between the falling child and the concrete floor, serving as the mattress on to which athletes drop from great heights of record-breaking dreams,” And he remembered his physical instructor at school say to him recently: “Take care when you jump high, Askar. Yours is the age when you must account for every fall, lest you break a bone.”
His mind wandered—he watched with fascination a woman on “fours”, a woman crawling playfully towards the child, and, following lustily in the woman’s wake, there was a man. It didn’t matter to Askar if the child was theirs. This was not his concern. He asked himself a question: was this how Uncle Qorrax and then Aw-Adan first seduced Misra?
Imagine: a maid, wet to her elbows in the master’s muck, a maid who is on her fours, whose bottom is high and is spread out in a protruding manner. And the master comes from behind and he takes her. How many films in which maids were raped by their employers had he seen? Or a secretary by her boss? How many stories in which a slave is raped by her sout
h-of-the-Dixon-line master had he watched? Did Aw-Adan make her read the Koran and, while she was busy deciphering the mysteries of the Word, did he insert his in? Many stories of Ethiopian atrocities invaded his thoughts. And not in all of them were the raped women maids, mistresses or whores. In all of them, man was “taker”, the woman the victim. “Why, if she isn’t your mother, your sister or your wife, a woman is a whore,” said a classmate of his. How terribly chauvinistic, thought Askar. Women were victims in all the stories he could think of. Misra. Shahrawello. And even Karin. The soul is a woman—victimized, sinned against, abused.
Karin was such a dedicated soul and he trusted the truth of all that she had told him about Misra, trusted the truth of Misra’s surrendering her body in order to save her soul—giving in ransom the warrior’s faith in her integrity
IV
Why did she incestuously surrender the body he knew better than he knew his own? For weeks, his mind felt numbed at the idea that he had been part of the body which had been given away incestuously “How much of a child’s body or a woman’s for that matter, can be said to be his or her own?” he asked Uncle Hilaal. “Precious little,” had responded Hilaal. But even this did not damp down the fire of disgust burning inside of him. Uncle Hilaal wondered if, in Askar’s opinion, Misra’s betrayal was comparable to a woman who was unfaithful to a husband? No, no. It was more like a mother who brought dishonour upon the head of her child—right in the child’s presence. What is in surrendering a body that is not one’s own? But what soul is there that’s worth saving? The noon was high and the sun climbed the steps of time.
“Possibly, Karin is not telling the truth,” said Salaado.
Askar retorted, “Possibly she is.”
“And maybe you didn’t know Misra that well,” suggested Salaado.
Askar nodded.
“And wars kill friendships in the same way as they bring into being other forms of trust and interdependence, don’t you agree, Hilaal? Don’t you agree, Askar?” said Salaado.
Hilaal, not reacting to what Salaado had said, nodded his head in silence.
“True, they were once the world’s best friends. To each other. And to me, too,” said Askar.
“Well, there you are,” said Salaado.
A question imposed itself on Askar’s mind: how much of a man’s body can be said to be his own? A man is a master, a part of him said, he is a master of his own body
Hilaal then said, “Hadn’t he better ask her to account for her life before he totally condemns her? Hadn’t he? She, who was once his only world?”
In silence, Askar’s mind continued along the same lines as Hilaal’s thoughts—Misra, who was his only world, the content and source of his secrets, the only one whom he trusted and in whom he confided; she whose arm, large as anything he had touched or seen, would extend upwards and with short fingers point at the heavens, naming it; the same fingers which cleaned his face or dried his nostrils and had the agility to point subsequently at the earth on which she sat, her thoughts, like a pendulum, going from the sky (God’s abode?) and the earth (feeder of man?) and then himself or herself. It was she from whom he learnt how to locate and name things and people, she who helped him place himself at the centre of a world—her own!
“Where is the sky?” she would ask him.
He would point at it.
“And the earth, where is the earth?”
And he would point at her.
“The earth, I said, where is the earth?”
Only after a number of attempts would he get it right. Then Mother, where is Mother Misra? And she would point herself out, her short finger placed between her breasts, saying “This is I”. For years, he had had enormous difficulties pronouncing his Somali gutturals correctly, since he learnt these wrongly from her; for years, he mispronounced the first letters of the words in Somali for “sky” and “earth”—just like she did; for years, too, he remembered her favourite phrase: “You are on your own!” She used this when she was fed up with him because he wouldn’t stop crying or wouldn’t sleep and she used this very shibboleth as an avant-courier of unhappy tidings. And the world, because she decided to walk out of it, would disintegrate right in front of him and he would, faithful to the formula, burst into a cry the instant she walked out of his sight, out of his world, and into one he couldn’t get to, a world whose code of conduct he was not familiar with. At times, she would step out and hide behind the first available wall and listen to him express himself via a fit of weeping, his cheeks sooty with tear-stains, his heels painful from pounding them on the paved floor; on occasion, she would return after a long absence when he had tired and fallen asleep; on other occasions, she would come back to him playfully and teasingly, and she would tickle him and kiss him and hold him tightly to herself, speaking to him endearingly, calling him “my man”, addressing him as “my love”.
Misra is here, in Mogadiscio, he read the note again.
Does that mean that I will have to touch her, kiss her, hug her to myself and hold her in my embrace? he asked himself. He wondered to himself how loathsome any physical contact with someone one doesn’t love any more turns into; when the person to be touched, to be kissed, to be hugged, is now hated. Why is it that we love touching, animallike, the one we adore? Why do we shun contact when this very person becomes the one we hate most? The body speaks, the soul obeys—is that not so? The body refuses to make contact with a love gone senselessly numb—is that not so? But to touch Misra, to kiss her, to hug a woman who has betrayed one’s trust—here in Mogadiscio—when one is to make a decisive decision such as whether or not one should join the Liberation Front or choose a career in the world of academia? Had he not better write to the Front intimating his immense wish to join its ranks? That way he would wash clean his conscience—and live at peace with it. Neither the members of the panel nor Uncle Hilaal would know of the connection, and his going before them would undo the fetters tightening on his conscience. If killed when defending his country, he would die a young man at peace with his soul—and therefore a martyr.
And if he joined the university? It worried him that, at a university, he was likely to indulge his thoughts in higher intellectual pursuits and that he might not think it worth his while to fight until death in order to liberate the semi-arid desert that was the Ogaden. He was sure, in the camaraderie characteristic of the times in which he lived, that there would be a great many people who would dissuade him from dying for a nationalistic cause, such as the Ogaden people’s. Many Somalis, he knew, were inarticulate with rage whenever the argument they put forward was challenged. Wouldn’t a university education equip him with better and more convincing reasons, wouldn’t it provide him with the economic, political and cultural rationalizations, wouldn’t he be in a better position to argue more sophisticatedly? He would, perhaps, write a book on the history of the Ogaden and document his findings with background materials got from the oral traditions of the inhabitants. So would he take the gun? Or would he resort to, and invest his powers in, the pen?
Once in Mogadiscio, Misra was not likely to return to the scene of her treason. Her past, now that it was dishonoured, as was her name, would come before her, naked like a child. But instead of touching and fondling her newly found child, Misra would shun contact with it. She would double up with guilt, he hoped, and would suffer from the cramps of disgrace. The marrow in the cavities of her bones, he hoped, would congeal, due to the chill of exposure. Cursed she would remain, he prayed, and unforgivable too. May the tendons of her neck snap, he prayed to God, as should every traitor’s neck and may her blood, startled, rush to her eyes and blind her. May her mucus dry and may the pain this caused, in the end, bring about her death. May the earth reject her, may the heavens refuse to grant her an audience. If and only if she had betrayed!
It pained him to remember that he had once shared his life with her, it made him feel embarrassed to recall that he had been so close to her once, that he had been proud of her. Once she upheld
him, like water—she lifted him up and threw him, as though she were a wave followed by another and another and another. He tasted the salt in her tears, he smelt of her menstruation. He called her “Mother” years ago. Could he undo all the ties which held them together? Could he, like time, sever all their links? Oh, how he wished he could hang “time” on a peg like a wet cloth, and how he wished it wouldn’t stop raining so the cloth would not dry; yes, how he wished he could suspend “time” so he would not grow up to be a man—a man on his own, and to whom Misra would say, “You are on your own!” No. As a child, he never wanted to be on his own, never wanted to be alone, for he couldn’t find himself inside of himself, only in others, preferably adults like Misra and Aw-Adan, who would analyse situations and tell him things he might never have known about himself if not informed by their experience. Misra’s “Your are on your own!” reeked of the same vindictive-ness as a man’s throwing out of the house a pet he kept and fed for years, a pet expected to fend for itself. One morning, when he had wet the bed the previous night, she spoke the formula shibboleth “You are on your own” (this was he when he was a little under five-and-a-half years old) and made as if to go out.
“Wait, wait, Misra,” he said.
The voice sounded grown-up to her and she did as told. Also, she saw that he had wrapped her shamma-shawl round his shoulders, looking very much like a woman; and he started saying: “When I grow up and I become a man…”, purporting, as it were, to speak for a long time, although he suddenly stopped, since he suspected she might not have noticed what he had wrapped round his shoulders.
Maps Page 7
