Here again the dream stood between you and Uncle Hilaal and you chose to wrap yourself with it and not share it with anyone else—not even him. He waited, expecting you would answer his question. Indeed, he was surprised when you said that you were thirsty.
He got you a cold glass of water. As you drank, you apologized saying: “I’m thirsty as the earth. I could drink an oceanfiil of water.” He returned with a jugful of cold water. Your thirst was insatiable. Anyway, you were justifiably relieved when, of necessity, the subject had to be changed—from your dream to your thirst.
IV
Uncle Hilaal’s saying that your life was “an answer to a fictive riddle asking a factual puzzle” when you refused to talk to him, take walks with him and Salaado, his wife, or eat anything save bread and water and occasionally a glass of something whilst they weren’t looking—your uncle’s statement set into motion a cavalcade of memories, each of which rode, as if it were a wave, on the bigger crest ahead of it. And, in no time, you managed to discrete the dreamed anecdote from the one really lived and personally experienced, you managed to separate them so they didn’t overlap, so they didn’t go over the same ground, telling the same story with a repetitiveness which bored one. You ran the whole course, without once looking back to see who had dropped and who hadn’t. Misra, too, stayed the course, always within view, always there—motherly, lovely and good. Others were wicked. Not she. She was your “mother”. Hence, she was very good.
And now! A he-dog was copulating with a bitch. Then you saw a little boy come out of a house and, immediately behind him, a woman—most probably his mother—calling him back. The boy was apparently very angry and was desperately throwing pebbles at the copulating dogs. He didn’t stop pelting pebbles at the mating dogs, although none hit his target. The woman finally managed to hold the little boy’s arm suggesting that he restrain himself, asking, “But what’s got into your head?”
“But they shouldn’t copulate,” said the little boy, barely eight. “They shouldn’t copulate, they shouldn’t copulate, they shouldn’t copulate. These two dogs shouldn’t copulate,” he half-shouted.
The woman bent down and wiped away his tears with the edge of her guntiino-robe. Then she noticed the sticky, white after-sleep fluid in his left eye. She wet the cleaner edge of her robe by licking it and she applied her saliva caringly. The boy was calm. She asked, “But why not?” seeing the dogs unlocked and playful.
“Why not? Because the bitch is his own mother,” he answered.
The woman, taking his hand with a view to persuading him to go with her back into the house, said, “I know!”
“You know the bitch is his mother?” he said, in disbelief.
She said, “Yes, I do.”
“And that they shouldn’t copulate?”
He wouldn’t go with her until she answered his challenge. He hid both his hands behind his back, his look defiant, his reason enraged, his body intent on fighting, if need be, for what he understood to be morally wrong.
“It is different with animals,” said the woman.
(Perhaps the woman didn’t know, and neither could you have known then, that the young man had been taught at school that human beings were animals, too—rational beings, endowed with the power of speech—a higher animal, if you like, the teacher had said.)
“Look,” he was saying, pointing his finger at the dogs which were locked in incestuous fornication, “Look at them doing it again, right in front of us, lower animals that they are,” and he went and kicked at them, but they wouldn’t unlock He turned after a while, half in tears, to his mother and appealed, “Mother, do something. Please, Mother, do something. Don’t let them do it.”
The woman received her son’s appeal in a mixture of good humour and serious intent. First, she chased away the dogs, who limped away, still locked in love, then she picked up her son and kissed him, saying: “You are impossible, my dear. You’re impossible,”
And he was saying, “Lower animals, dogs and bitches.”
V
You were young again, you were in Kallafo again, remembering an anecdote involving a man originally from Aden, the Democratic Republic of Southern Yemen, a man on whose lap had been found, when surprised by unannounced visitors, a hen. You didn’t quite comprehend the implications of the scandal. The old Adenese had been one of your favourite old men and he was a neighbour and you were fond of the chocolates he presented you with whenever you happened to have called on him. But you were often told not to go to his house, alone. You were often told not to accept his gifts—ever. You were warned against keeping his company (“A most evil company!” had said Aw-Adan). You were warned against the man’s wicked ways. And yet you went, like many other young boys of your age, and you played in his spacious yard, you plucked lemon and other fruits and ate of his garden what pleased you most. You slept, exhausted, in the shade of his trees. You swam in the pond of his irrigation scheme. You watched him, strong and muscular for a man of his age, start his engine or switch it off; you watched him with great admiration, lean and tense, loving and lovable.
“But what was he up to,” you asked, “with a hen on his lap, with plucked feathers on his naked thigh? What was he up to? Will somebody kindly tell me?” you appealed.
Misra said, “He was up to no good, that wicked Adenese.” “What foul things was this Adenese up to?” you asked.
Misra was insistent that you were spared this old bachelor’s wicked involvements with young boys: how he used to lure them with chocolate and other gifts; how he used to run an open house to which the urchins of Kallafo as well as other boys from the well-to-do would find their way; and how he would entice one of the small boys into his bedroom every now and then. You were very upset at learning what the Adenese had done, so upset you took ill. You had a temperature. And when Aw-Adan came with a suppository, you suspected him of vicious intentions. You cried and cried and cried and you wished you had never known the Adenese, had never been so sick you would need a suppository. Indeed, you were too shocked to allow one of your selves to stand out from the others, with a view to studying the activities, thoughts of your primary self. You would have nothing whatsoever to do with an Adenese, you said to yourself, never would you befriend any Adenese, you thought to yourself, never would you trust them—ever. And it was only then that remarks made by Misra or Aw-Adan began to make sense, remarks which were to do with “respect for human dignity. You forgot who it was, precisely, that had made the remark following the scandalous Adenese’s copulating with a hen—and therefore didn’t know how to interpret it. You then asked Misra: “Am I to understand that any person who has respect for human dignity does not copulate with a beast? Or am I to understand that any elderly bachelor with respect for human dignity doesn’t rape boys?”
She was on her knees, scrubbing the floor. Her clothes were filthy, her hands soaped, her headscarf unknotted, her knees squarely on the wet floor and her elbows covered with the brown mixture of dirt and sweat. And she looked at you, not yet seven, you, who stood as men do, clean and washed and yet unperturbed by the unclean job which must be done by women; you who stood in the doorway, with your back to the sun which was in her eyes, speaking of “human dignity” as though the phrase meant nothing to you personally. She rose to her feet. Her look went past you, dwelling, for a moment, on the upturned chairs, the dismantled bed and the mattress standing against a wall in the courtyard; then her quizzical look rested, for a while, on you and her lips moved, mumbling something inaudible to you. Maybe she was repeating to herself the phrase “respect for human dignity”, you thought, or maybe the many-stranded views of Misra were taking shape, and, you thought when at last she spoke, you would have a response to your question. But the silence was too painful to bear and the world you and Misra inhabited was not one in which you could merely pay lip service to lofty meaningless phrases like “respect for human dignity”. It was as though her silence was saying that you should take an objective, honourable look at yourself as a ma
n and then at the position of women in your society before using phrases that were loaded with male hypocrisy
She was back on her knees, scrubbing, using as a brush her open hand, and at times her nails, to rub away the sticky filth which wouldn’t be removed easily. She didn’t look up at you at all, pretending that you weren’t there, that you hadn’t asked her anything. She was defiantly quiet. Until you were about to move away Then you heard her sobbing between the noises her scrubbing had made.
“Am I to understand,” you started, but lost interest in what you were going to say when you heard Misra’s chest explode in a convulsive cry, like a child’s. And you fell silent.
VI
That night, cuddled up in each other’s embrace, and in bed, she spoke to you of a raid, so far undocumented in history books. Out of the raid, out of the dust of triumph, emerged a warrior, she told you, a warrior riding a horse, and as he hit his heels against the beast’s ribs, the warrior held tightly to a little girl, barely seven. The girl was his loot now that the enemy had retreated in haste, defeated. Other men returned with gold and similar booties—but not he. The little girl, now a young woman, would remember forever her dog howling with fear and anxiety and hunger, her cheeks shiny with mucus and with streaks of tears running down them; and she cried and cried and cried, seated, as though tied hand and foot to a bedpost, on the horse’s back, a horse whose speed frightened her, as did the fact that he was taking her away from the world she had been familiar with so far. She was very pretty Her hair had been shaven in the style your people shave children’s skulls when suffering from whooping-cough, although the little girl’s tuft on the skull was longer and slightly curlier. When the warrior arrived back in his hamlet, Misra went on telling you her story, his people intimated to him that they were afraid the girl might be traced to them—the soldiers of the Empire would follow the civilian invaders and the punitive expeditions would find many unburied dead. So he rode away, travelling as far south as he could, and the two of them, on a horse’s back, ended up in the vicinity of Jigjiga.
In Jigjiga, the warrior, weary and fatigued from travel and worry, took ill. He stopped at the first house and knocked on the first door and spoke with the first man he met—luckily for him, the owner of the house, a very wealthy man. The warrior and the little girl were both given generous hospitality A day later, the warrior died. And the little girl, who had been taken for his daughter, fell into the caring hands of the wealthy man. He raised her with his own children, making her embrace the Islamic faith, making her undergo the infibulatory rites, just like the other girls of the community. But he raised her with an eye to taking her as his wife when she grew up. And this he did, when she was seventeen. So, the man the little girl thought of and addressed as “Father” for ten years of her life, overnight became a man to her, a man who insisted he make love to her and that she call him “husband. In the end, the conflicting loyalties alienated her, primarily from her self. And she murdered him during an excessive orgy of copulation.
To escape certain persecution, she joined a caravan going south to Kallafo, a caravan in search of grain to buy. She introduced herself as Misra Haji Abdullahi—taking anew the name of the man who became her father and whom she murdered as her “man”.
And you asked, “The girl’s father and mother? Does anybody know whatever became of them? And whether or not they are still alive? Or if one of her parents has remarried or has had another child?’”
You were surprised to learn that the girl was the offspring of a damoz union between an Oromo woman and an Amhara nobleman. She was the female child of the union, one in which her mother agreed, as is the custom, to live with an Amhara nobleman, none of whose other wives gave him a male child. The contract was for a period between a fortnight and six months. The girl was conceived by the “salaried” concubine. Because the issue was a girl, the man lost interest in her, abandoning mother and child to their separate destinies and uncertain fortune. “Yes, yes, but did the girl have a half-brother or a half-sister?”
“No one knew.” That was her answer.
“And then what happened?”
Again, she entered the household of yet another wealthy man. This time, she entered the household as a servant but was, in less than a year, “promoted” to the rank of a mistress and eventually as a wife. By the time she found Askar, the woman had been divorced. She had had two miscarriages and was discovered to be carrying, in secret, a dead child in her.
“A dead child in her, carrying a dead child in her living body?”.
“That’s right.”
“And then? Or rather, but why carry a dead child?”
“Then the living miracle in the form of Askar took the place of the dead child inside of her,” she said, holding you closer to herself, you, who were, at that very instant, dreaming of a horse dropping its rider. But you weren’t alert enough to note a discrepancy in this and Misra’s true story. For she had her own child who died at the age of eighteen months. Nor did you ever ask her why she told you this fictitious version. Or is your own memory untrustworthy?
VII
A week later, the following:
Late one afternoon, the Archangel of Death called at Karin’s place as though he had been invited to tea, just as you were invited to partake of the festive atmosphere, have a cake or two and biscuits too—and his share of the flowing conversation. When the opportunity presented itself, the Archangel whispered something discreetly in Karin’s old man’s ear, saying (you were told afterwards) that he, the Archangel, would return in precisely seven hours. So, would the old man finish, in elegance, all he had planned to do—wash, pray, say a few devotions, make a number of wishes, give his dardaaran to his Karin and, if it pleased him, tell her that time was up? In retrospect, you recall that the old man kept giving furtive glances to a timepiece by his mattress on the floor, rather like somebody who didn’t want to miss an important appointment. Together with Misra and Karin, you were making joyful noises and nothing seemed to be amiss. It was the placid look in the old man’s eyes that said to you that something was taking place, but you didn’t know what. First, Karin looked at you and then Misra and there fell the kind of silence which precedes an event of great significance. Somehow, Misra and you sensed your presence was standing in the way of Karin and her husband’s communicating a secret to each other. And so you left, leaving in your wake, you thought, a silence so profound you were sure a change of inestimable importance would occur in your lives.
Before midnight, the old man’s leaf fell gently from the tree on the moon. It was a most gentle death. Hush. And the soft falling of the withered leaf didn’t even tease the well of Karin’s emotions, nor did it puncture the lacrymatory pockets. She didn’t cry, didn’t announce the departure of the old man’s soul to anyone until the following morning. She stayed by him, keeping his death all to herself. She lay by him in reverent silence, he dead, she alive—but you couldn’t have told the difference, so quiet was she beside him.
She washed him as she washed him every day of all the years that he had lain on his back. Alone, but not lonely, her hands white with soapy foam, her eyes tearlessly dry, her throat not at all teased with the convulsive wishes of moumfiilness, she moved back and forth and her hands washed and touched and felt a body she had known for years, the body of a man who had “possessed” her, a man who had given her love and children—and who, at times, made her hate herself. She married him when very young. She wasn’t even fifteen. You might say she could’ve been his daughter. She was small and a woman, and he was muscular and shapely as a man, and was popularly nicknamed “Armadio”. He came one morning and made a downpayment for her. He went “somewhere” (he had a job to do, that was all he was willing to tell anyone) and returned, his going as mysterious as his returning. He wasn’t a man for formalities, weddings and parental blessings. He shouldered her in the manner porters lift any weight. He spoke little, said little, the night he deflowered her. “I have a job to do,” he said, and she c
arried his child.
He gave her children. He gave her lots of space and silence and love, when there. But he disappeared every now and then, saying, “I have a job to perform”. One day, he came home to a woman who suspected him of being with other women. He didn’t explain himself, didn’t scold her when jealousy threw her into tantrums, even when she maliciously described him as “the man with a job to do”.
A month later, he called her into the bedroom before he parted on one of his mysterious missions and he did something he had never done before. He told her he might be away for a long period. He suggested she sell the house in which they were living and that she buy a smaller one, if, yes if, he didn’t come home before the rains. He was most tender and he gave her money which he was sure she and the children would need. “But what job is taking you away from us?”
“Death might,” he said.
“Now what do I say to people when they ask me where you are? You are my husband, the father of my children, the man I've lived with and loved all these years. What am I to say?”
“Tell them I had a job to do.”
“I want to know more.”
He said, “Don’t worry. I'll not allow death to take me away,” half-smiling, as though Death was the name of a woman with whom he was madly in love. “I'll come back, sooner or later.”
He didn’t come home before the rains and not even after them. She received news of him over the wireless. Armadio was apparently a member of a cell of the Somali Youth League which was agitating for the reunification of all the Somali-speaking territories. He was the chairman of the cell under which fell the activities of the movement within the Ethiopia-administered Ogaden. He was caught when doing a job and ended up in one of Haile Selassie’s many prisons. When she didn’t hear from him, she sold the house and moved into a smaller one and, as told, did her job. It consisted of taking care of the children, sending them to school and making sure they all left for Mogadiscio, where it was safe to be a Somali and be proud of it, and where they would join cells from which to launch spearheads to open the way for a united Somalia. She stayed—and waited. She was sure he would come home. One day, he did. He was seen standing at her door. He looked tired, “like a man who had done a heavy load of a job”, she said. He didn’t speak of his ordeals and his years in prison. He was carrying a holdall which was empty save for a portrait of Ernest Bevin.
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