“I am going to shave,” he said. “Shave my chin, grow a beard, be a man like any other.”
“Shave? What… ?”
He was gone.
II
He cut himself when shaving. He cut his chin and his lower lip bled when he held the razor the wrong way, when he didn’t adjust the disposable blade properly There were shaving things lying about and he knew where to get them. His uncle was away at the war and so were many other men. Now he washed his face in the after-shave lotions, trying to see which one would stop his chin’s blood running. The lotions made him smell good and so he sprayed them on his groin—determined that this would instantly remove the odour of his perspiration—and now, as there was still some of it left in the bottle, he hesitated whether to sprinkle it on his armpits, something he had seen older men do. But no. For this he chose the talcum powder, he decided that would do. He smiled. He breathed hot vapoury air and wrote his name on the mirror’s mist and saw bits of himself, bits of his coagulated or running blood in the “A” or the “S” or the “K” and the “R of his name.
He could not remember which came first—the thought that if he shaved, hair would automatically grow on his chin and his lips—or that he should take note of the hourly changes in his body. He was said to have developed the habit of getting up earlier than Misra so he would see for himself, placing his head against the dot he had marked on the wall the previous day, whether he had grown an inch or two taller in the past twenty-four hours. Very often, he was disappointed that he couldn’t determine if he had, but he never felt as disheartened as when he stood against the tree planted by Misra the same day he was born.
“You must eat and eat and eat if you want to grow fast,” she said, one early morning when he woke her up because he moved about noisily, “The tree lives off the earth and its water, it eats grandly, drinks huge quantities of water and breathes fresh air all the time. You must eat more so you’ll become a man, a fully grown man, tall, broad-shouldered and perhaps bearded too.” And having said so, she went back to sleep.
And the anxiety to become a fully grown man, a man ready for a conscription into the liberation army, ready to die and kill for his mother country, ready to avenge his father, the anxiety made him overindulge himself in matters related to food, it made him eat to excess until he felt so unwell that he vomited a couple of times. He had appropriated Misra’s food since she couldn’t eat anything anyway and stuffed himself full of anything he could lay his hands on. Hardly able to breathe, he would then lift rocks, flex his muscles so as to develop them, climb up the tree for further leg and arm exercises and then swing from it. Exhausted, he would fall asleep.
What distinguished this period’s dreams from any other, what set these dreams apart from the others, was the presence of a huge garden, lush with an enormous variety of tropical fruits. He ate these fruits, he made himself a long list of salad fruits, and swam in the cool stream whose water was warm and whose bed was grown with weeds which were nice to touch and feel and pull and tickle one’s face with—a face which grew sterner, and upon whose chin sprouted hair, silky, smooth, young and tender. Yes, what made the experience unique was that the garden was green with paradisiacal tropicality, it was calm with heavenly quietness. And in the Edenic certitude he found himself in, he discovered he was confident, happy to be where he was, happy to be who he was. There was—almost within reach, wearing a smile, motherly—there was a woman. The woman grew on him. One night, dreaming, he “picked” her up like a fruit and studied her; she, who was small as a fruit, lay under his intense stare. He had never seen that woman before. Of this, he was most certain. And yet he knew her. Where had he met her? He didn’t know. She was calling him “my son” and was talking of the pain of being separated from him—she who had borne him, she who had carried him for months inside of her, she who claimed she “lived” in him who had survived her, she who claimed to be his guide when everyone else failed him. The following morning, he awoke and was confronted with an inexplicable mystery: there was blood on the sheet he had covered himself with, blood under him too. Most specifically, there was blood on his groin. He sought Misra’s response.
“You’ve begun to menstruate,” she said, looking at him with intent seriousness. “The question is: will you have the monthly curse as we women do or will yours be as rare as the male fowl’s egg?”
He said, “But I am a man. How can I menstruate?”
Enraged, he strode away from her in a manly way. He wouldn’t give her the pleasure, he shouted, of her making fun of him any more or even of washing his “womanhood” if it came to that. But what did this mean anyway? he asked himself, when he had washed. How come his own body misbehaved, how come he menstruated? Come what may, he said to himself, he wouldn’t allow such thoughts to dissuade him from doing whatever it took to be a man who was ready to be conscripted into the army, a man ready to die and kill for his mother country, a man ready to avenge his father.
III
That day, he rejected the food she gave him. He tossed aside the plate she extended towards him and scolded her for what she had done when he was sleeping—smear his sheet and groin with blood. Why did she do it? She swore that she didn’t go anywhere near him, that she didn’t smear his body or sheet with blood.
“And so where did the blood come from?” he said.
She answered, “I don’t know.”
He reminded her of a conversation they had had a few days ago, one in which he admitted that he envied women their monthly periods. “Could it be that in my dream, I menstruated?”
“There’s a war on, there’s a great deal of tension—and so everything is possible. I wouldn’t know the answer, to be honest with you. I’ve never known of any man who menstruated. Could it be that the tension, the war… ?”
And he interrupted her. “The war, the tension—what nonsense!”
“Do you have an answer then?”
He reflected; then: “Men wet themselves occasionally?”
“When sleeping, yes.”
He sighed. “And the colour of sperm is white?”
“White as silver.”
She heard a whine and waited.
“You know Uncle Hassan, don’t you?”
She nodded her head, “Yes.”
“You remember he urinated blood and was taken to see a doctor?”
She agreed that that was true.
“Perhaps that explains it all.”
She didn’t like his explanation. “It means you prefer being sick to being a woman.”
“Naturally,” he said. “Who wouldn’t?”
She said, “I wouldn’t.”
“That is easily understandable. You are, after all, a woman.”
And he left the room.
IV
“Tell me, why are there trackloads of women and infants leaving Kallafo?” Askar asked Misra when it became obvious that the Ethiopians were sending away their women and children from the war zone. “Why?”
“Where there’s a war,” she began to answer, but continued mixing hot and cold water so she could give Askar a bath, “man sends ahead of himself his wife and children and stays behind to defend his people’s honour, dignity and also property. Perhaps a bomb will cut the women’s and children’s lives short before they get home; perhaps the dozen or so armed soldiers with their primitive rifles will manage to deter a few equally primitively armed Somalis from killing them.”
There was a pause.
“And you won’t go?” he said.
Her hand stopped stirring the water whose temperature she was testing. She was reduced to a stare—speechless. He said to himself, “Maybe this is what death looks like—Misra sitting, speechless and staring, with her hand stuck in a bucket fall of lukewarm water, the dust round her unstirred, the lips of her mouth forming and unforming a roguish smile—maybe this is what death looks like. And not what I saw last night—the back of a woman’s head, a hand flung aside, a nail cut and then discarded.”
&n
bsp; She was saying, “Are you sending me away, Askar?”
“Not ahead of myself, no,”
Again she smiled rather mischievously, reminding herself that Askar was not yet eight and that here he was behaving as though he were a man and she a creature of his own invention. She declined to comment on what was going on between them, she declined to go into the same ring as he, she bowed out. However disreputable, she believed she was the one who made him who he was, she was the one who brought him up. She changed the mood of the exchange, changed the subject. Searching for his hand, she said, “Come.”
He stood away, his hands hidden behind him. “Where?”
“Come,” she said, half rising to take grip of his hand. “Let me give your body a good scrubbing which is what it needs most. And then we’ll go for a walk and, if you wish, watch the Ethiopian men send their women and children away to highland safety”
He was rudely noisy, shouting, “Don’t you touch me.”
“Fm sorry,” she said, taken aback.
It was then that the thought that he was now a man and didn’t want to be helped to wash impressed itself upon her mind. She would have to make an auspicious move, one which would make him relax until she poured the first canful of water on his head, and until the water calmed his nerves. His determined voice of defiance resounded through her body—and she had to wait for a long while before she was able to say anything. Then, “Do you want to bathe yourself?” she asked, keeping her distance.
And saw (the thought took a long time to mature) how methodically “dirtied” he had been—as if he played rough with boys of his age and wrestled and somersaulted into and out of challenging hurdles. He didn’t look helplessly dirty—if anything, he was deliberately dirty. This thought descended on her like a revelation. She wondered where he had been—and with whom. She suspected he wouldn’t tell her, but thinking she wouldn’t lose anything anyway, she asked: “Where have you been?”
He wouldn’t tell her.
“Why won’t you tell me where you’ve been?”
He behaved like one who had a secret to withhold.
“You’ll not tell me?”
He shook his head, “No.”
With harrowing clarity, she saw what he was after—to tell her he would go where he pleased, tell her that he would roam in the territory of his pleasure, alone, and at any rate without her help, wash when he decided he wanted. She reasoned: the world is reduced to chaos; there’s a war on; boys, because of this chaotic situation, have suddenly become men and refuse to be mothered.
And then, with frightening suddenness, he said, “Not only can I wash if I choose to, but I can kill; and not only can I kill but I can also defend myself against my enemy.”
The fierceness with which he spoke the words “I can kill” alarmed her. She stiffened, her heart missed a beat, then drummed faster, beating noisily in the caged rib of her seemingly discreet reaction. She appeared uneasy and stood up taller, higher, supporting her weight on the tip of her toes, like one who is looking over the edge of a cliff. “Kill? Kill whom?”
He wouldn’t say, just as he wouldn’t tell her that he was a member of a small body of young men who trained together as guerrillas and who rolled on the dirt as they felled one another with mock blows, issuing, as they dropped to the ground, a most heinous kung-fu cry, or some such like. What mattered, in the end, was you killed your enemy, said these young men to one another. The idea to train with these boys wasn’t his, but the boy who had been raped by the Adenese—who proved to be the toughest, not least because he had something to fight against and he had in him a bitter contempt for everybody in this or any other world. It was he, and not Askar, who made a hole in a thinly mud-plastered wall which enabled the body of boys to take a quieter look at the men (believed to be away at the war front) who trained to kill and, through the hole in the wall, the boys imbibed an ideology embodied in the dream they saw as their own, the dream they envisioned as their common future: warriors of a people fighting to liberate their country from colonial oppression. Nor would he tell her of his friends’ suspicious finger pointing in her direction. Was she not from the Highlands? they said. How could she be trusted? They most insistently repeated their suspicious worries that she might speak, might pass on the information. It bothered him greatly that he couldn’t share with her the joy of his secrets; it pained him that he had to be distrustful of her motives when she probed into his affairs, asking him where he had been and with whom. “It was as if you were born with a deformity that you had to carry with you everywhere you went,” he said to the boy whom the Adenese had raped. Indeed, who better could he say this to, than to another boy who carried on his head another shame of another kind? “Yes, I understand,” said the “disgraced” boy. Askar said to himself now, “I will not allow her to wash the dirt my body has accumulated when training to kill my people’s enemy.”
Whereas she was saying, “There are a number of blind spots the body of a human has. We may not know of them until we are self-conscious; we may not sense how helpless we are until we submit ourselves to other hands. A child’s body’s blind spots are far too many to count—the small of the back, the back of the neck, the dirt in the groin, the filth on either the left or the right of the lower reaches of the bottom. A mother sees them all, she soaps them all and, in the end, washes them clean.” She was going nearer him and he was withdrawing and she was saying, “They are difficult to live with, these blind spots, these blind curves in one’s body, the curtained parts of one’s body, the never-seen, never-visible-unless-with-the-assistance-of-a-mirror parts—and here I am thinking of the skull—or the difficult-to-see parts—and here I am thinking about… I am thinking about…,” and speaking and moving in his direction and he was retreating and was about to stumble backwards into the tree planted the day he himself was born, his blind spot, that is his back, ahead of the rest of his body, when … a bomb fell—and it fell almost between them, although nearer where he was standing—and it separated them.
Panic gripped her throat: and she couldn’t speak or shout but lay on the ground, inert, covered in dust—once the noise died down and the shower of dust began to settle. He? He was—he was there, more or less dusted, and his eyes were two spots of brightness which focused on their surroundings and it seemed as though he mobilized his alert mind to determine where the shelling had come from.
“Are you all right?” she managed to say after a long silence.
He looked at her—she appeared like one who had just risen from the dead.
Still defiant, he said, “Who do you take me for?”
She had gone browner with dust and her headscarf had fallen off, exposing a most unruly head, as ugly as the knotted, uncombed curls. She walked away in a defiant way—defiant and indifferent as to what might happen, impervious to what he thought or did, or whether a shower of shells fell on her head, or anyone else’s head.
“It’s worthwhile your considering giving yourself a good scrubbing. Maybe the water is still lukewarm and you surely need a wash and something that will keep your soul active and alive and your body clean,” he said.
Then another shell fell—this time nearer where she was standing. And, at the wake of the explosion, when again she had managed to stand to her feet, both of them saw before them a crowd, brown as mud—a crowd of women and children armed with pangas, sticks and machetes, a crowd that was moving in the direction of the hill where the enemy had fired from. A spokeswoman of the crowd promised they would take “Government Hill”. Askar felt he had to join, to give victory an indispensable hand.
And he ran after the crowd.
V
The following day Noon.
“Misra, where precisely is Somalia?” he asked suddenly
She was pulling at a chicken’s guts, a chicken she had just beheaded. She stopped and stared at him, not knowing what to say Her forehead wrinkled with concentration, like somebody who was trying to remember where he was. Then: “Haven’t you seen it on the ma
p?” she said, holding her bloodstained hands away from her dress.
“A map? What map?”
“Go look it up. You seem happily engrossed in it.”
He surprised her; he admitted in a sad voice: “No one has ever explained how to read maps, you see, and I have difficulty deciphering all the messages.”
She looked away from him and at the decapitated chicken. She wished she could get on with her plucking of the fowl’s feathers (Askar thought of the chicken’s blood as being exceptionally red—not dark red as he expected) and she said: “If you go east, you’ll end up in Somalia.”
Offended, he said, “I know that.”
“What don’t you know then? Why don’t you let me get on with what I am doing? Don’t you realize there is little time left for me to prepare a decent meal?”
He bent down and picked up a feather flying away into the cosmic infinitude. He looked at it, studying it as though under a microscope, one among a hundred other feathers joining the unbound universe. Then he looked at the white meat of the chicken—goose-pimpled, dead and headless, the fowl lay where Misra had dropped it, in a huge bowl. Did it have a soul? Did it have a brain? He remembered testing its motherly instinct when he threatened the lives of its chicks. It attacked, its wings open in combat readiness and its rage clucking in consonants of maternal protectiveness. Askar had run away for his own life. From a hen. He was glad none of the boys saw him run away
From then on, whenever he entered Karin’s compound, he sus-’ pected that the mother hen, or the others, now as tall as they were ever likely to grow, eyed him menacingly, goose-stepping sideways as if only their preparedness for a fall-frontal attack, and together, might save them from his mischievous threats. Poor hen—dead. Dead because it was killed to celebrate a victory—and the fact (this was in the air) that Askar might be leaving for Mogadiscio. After all, Uncle Qorrax said he would come and speak with him.
Then, something attracted his attention. Misra had laid the plucked chicken on its side and was pulling at its guts, when he noticed an egg—whole, as yet unhatched, and, he thought, indifferent to the goings-on outside its own complete universe. An egg—oval-shaped as the universe—with a life of its own and an undiscovered future. “Don’t touch it, Misra,” he ordered.
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