She nodded.
Then she walked away, in silence, from the horses. She stood by the bank of a river, a bank cowslipped with fresh excrement. From this I gathered that we were in spring — a season of rebirth, a period of renewal. The flowers were in bloom, the grass moist with tropical rain and the sky was overcast, threatening to pour with rainy vengeance. On the other side of the bank, 1 could see all sorts of animals and even a child or two and these were living together in total harmony I couldn’t, for the life of me, see how a lion could rub manes with horses without being tempted to tear them savagely apart with his teeth; could not imagine how a group of elderly men were in attentive reverence, listening to a speech being delivered by a young boy of eight; couldn’t remember ever seeing (either before or after) how the men of the community paid respectful gallantry to the women upon whose demands and orders they waited. I was visibly delighted.
The girl asked, “Have you ever seen leaves turn?”
1 did not know what answer to give.
“You know,” she said, “you remind me of another boy I once knew, a boy from Kallafo. You look very much alike, you and he. Or rather, you look like him in a number of ways.”
“For example?”
She said, “It appears you never bother yourself about looking into the inside of things — and neither did he ever; and you never bother about studying, in detail, the inside of the statements others make — and neither did he ever; you’re almost always satisfied with the surface of things — a smooth surface being, to you, a mirror in which your features, your looks, may be reflected, and so you see nothing in mirrors save surfaces.”
The girl reminded me of an old man I once saw sporting a young girl’s head. But my tongue, tucked in like a dog’s tail between its frightened legs, failed me, and I couldn’t tell her of whom she reminded me. A girl with nothing but a shadow to claim as her own, a girl standing in a borrowed skin, and I, who am of flesh and blood, with a heart of my own, a lung, legs, head, eyes and shadow of my own, I who am a child of the age’s spirit, I who am, in a sense, a maker of myself, I couldn’t tell the girl anything.
“Anyway, come. Follow me,” she ordered.
I said I was thirsty.
“Follow me then,” she repeated; and I did.
She wore the distant look of a magician, trying to conjure up the images he impresses his audience with — and there was a human skull, old as the years of its previous owner. She shook the skull, emptying it of the sand. She then washed it in the stream, washed it until it was white as a priest’s robes. We used the skull as a cup. The water was sweet as the season’s sweet odour, its taste lingering on the tongue like delightful memories.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Askar Cali-Xamari,” I said.
She was thrilled at hearing my name. “So you are originally from Xamar, which, as you will probably know, is the local name for Somalia’s capital, Mogadiscio?”
“My father lived there in the forties when all of the Somali-speaking territories were united under one colonial flag, all but one, Djebouti,” I said, hesitating whether to show off my knowledge about the background history to the period, mentioning Ernest Bevin’s name and dropping a few others including my source, Armadio. But no. I continued, “When he returned to the Ogaden, married to a woman from thereabouts, they added the Xamar bit to his name in order to distinguish him from all other Calis.”
She took a sip of water.
“Anyway, all will be well with you,” she prophesied.
I had a sip of the water. I asked, “How do you know?”
“You’re going back to yourself” she opined.
I said, “And so?”
I could see that she was unhappy at the question. I didn’t know how to apologize, although I didn’t see why I should. After all, I didn’t do anything to offend her. I spoke my mind, adding, “I…er…, but couldn’t go any further.
“Surface again,” she interrupted. “No depth, just surface.”
IV
I resurfaced from the depths of my sleep and woke to shouts of joy announcing that we were in Xamar, “the pearl of the Indian Ocean”. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and saw, down in the valley, the froth of the sea hug the blue of the sky: magnificent colours, I thought, watching the blue of the heavens and the white of the clouds embrace the blue of the ocean and the white of its foam. I was immensely happy The man to whom I had been entrusted as his charge until we got to Uncle Hilaal’s assured me that he wouldn’t leave me before he made certain I was in the right hands. I thanked him profusely
PART TWO
All is illusion — the words written, the mind at which they are
aimed, the truth they are intended to express, the hands that will
hold the paper, the eyes that will glance at the lines. Every image
floats vaguely in a sea of doubt — and the doubt itself is lost in an
unexplored universe of uncertitude.
Joseph Conrad
CHAPTER SEVEN
I
Physically, you thought Hilaal was the exact replica of Misra, only he was a man—which, at that point in time, didn’t make much difference to you anyway—and older than she. He was better dressed and, you imagined, a great deal more knowledgeable. He was as large as she; he was as fat as she, although the echo of his voice, when he opened his mouth, resounded in your ears long after he had ceased speaking. You had been shown in by the maid who had answered the door. It was she who had led you down a small corridor to meet him. You didn’t know why she had hesitated—could it be that she didn’t want to disturb him? Or that she suspected he would've shouted at her for allowing you to enter in the first place? She knocked mildly on the door to his study—and you both waited. A minute or so later, he stood in the half-open doorway, as prominent in the landscape of your vision as Misra had been in that of your memory. For a moment, you failed to breathe; for a moment, you didn’t know where you were and why; for a moment your tongue lay inert in your mouth and you stared at him in the half-dark, speechless. Half-dark? Yes, because the curtains in his room were drawn; yes, because he had shut out the daylight glare, and the small light which the table-lamp provided had made a soft space in the darkness and had pushed aside the opaqueness all around. Then he struck a matchstick and lit a cigarette; then he took a sip of the drink he had in his hand; and you could hear the ice shake against his glass, you could hear the dripping of a broken tap somewhere else in the house. Could it be that the alternating elemental presence in the form of water and fire decided you would feel at home in Mogadiscio?
Hilaal said, “Yes?”, looking from you to the maid.
She mumbled something you couldn’t understand. As if to allow you into the room, he stood aside. His head, when moving, blocked. like a smothering hand, more than half the brightness the table-lamp light had given.
“Come,” he said to you, and you followed him.
He pushed open a door. He said, “This is your room. That is the bed, and on it are the sheets, the bedspreads, the pillows—and all you need. The room has a wc too. The maid will make the bed, fix you a meal. You can wash, you can sleep, you can do what you please,’ and, having said that, he walked away and vanished through the corridor, back into his study Half a second later, his head emerged and he was saying, “Welcome, Askar. I will see you later.”
You didn’t know what to make of all this. The maid did—and suggested you didn’t worry about what had happened, adding, “He’s a very warm person really. Today, he is exceptionally busy because he is giving a talk at the university this evening and is understandably tense.”
The room in which the two of you were standing made a claim on your attention. It was spacious, its floor-tiles Italian and therefore attractive, its walls decorated with lifesize pictures of horses and birds and maps of Africa, of the Horn of Africa—and of Somalia. The room was bright with sunshine, and because the windows had been left unclosed, the furniture was dusty. The bed wa
s larger than the one you used to share with Misra. No wonder you asked yourself whether you had crossed the threshold of the great divide—and when? For not only did you find a frightening physical similarity between Misra and Hilaal, but you imagined your destiny in the hands of another maid, this time one whose name you didn’t know and who was herself young and emaciated-looking. Did they have children? And how many? If so where were they? You suspected it was improper, putting questions about these and other matters related to HilaaPs family and life to the maid; the maid who was on her knees, scrubbing the floor clean, dusting the table and chair, making the bed and beating the dust out of the pillowcases before she used them again. Your aimless pacing up and down the room took you to the bathroom, whose tap was dripping. You went to the sink. You placed your open palm under the tap, collecting the water, a little later, in your cupped hand. The water tasted salty.
The maid was saying, “Do you want to eat or shower first?”
You didn’t want to admit to her that you had no clean clothes to change into if you showered, nor did you want her to know that it was the first time you were in a bathroom with showers and sinks and running water and electricity.
“How old are you?” she said.
You lied; you said, “I am nine.”
“And where are your parents—your mother and father, I mean?” she asked.
You didn’t answer her. She understood your silence to mean that they had died in the war and so she didn’t push you any further. She changed subjects twice. She was nervous because she was afraid she might have touched a raw nerve, and she offered to do anything: help you shower, prepare for you something to eat, or even wash the shorts and shirt you were in so they would dry by the time you had had your afternoon siesta. Clearly, this was a world you hadn’t imagined—a world of grown-ups, of siestas, of bathrooms with showers, sinks and running water; a world within which Hilaal created another world, out of which he refused to surface; a world in which you had lost your sense of direction, for you didn’t know your north from your south and couldn’t tell where you were in relation to the sea or in relation to where you came from.
She was very active—the maid. “What do you want me to do?” she asked.
You appeared puzzled, and she said, “I come thrice a week. It is not that I have the whole day and night. Do you wish that I make something for you to eat or that I make the bed or that I wash your clothes? Come on. Tell me. I have another hour before I go to the afternoon school. I am a student.”
You stood there, not speaking. Apparently, you didn’t follow half of what she had just said. Was she a student? And at her age? You remembered one of your paternal uncles, as you left Kallafo, saying that the main purpose of your being sent off to Mogadiscio to your maternal uncle was that you would become a student. You prepared to ask her the age at which people stop studying at school. But she didn’t give you time to put the question to her. Then suddenly, she pulled you by the wrist and was unbuttoning your shirt and shorts and saying that she was going to help you shower, get you into bed, wash your clothes which had been dusty from your long travel and put them out in the sun to dry, etc.
You felt abashed; you felt disconcerted; and you started to stammer something—but she didn’t give heed to what you were stuttering; didn’t bother listening to you. By then your unbuttoned shorts had fallen to your feet; by then you had your arms out of the T-shirt, but you were nearly choked because your head was clumsily caught in the narrowness of its neck. You felt outrageously insulted and you shouted a half-smothered cry of “Don’t do that”, a cry which you repeated, and repeated as loudly as you could, until Hilaal was in the room with you asking, “What’s happening here?”
The maid stammered something.
You covered your nakedness with your cupped hands, as you saw adults do.
Then the three of you looked up and saw, standing in the door, a woman: Salaado.
II
Since we’ve been going backwards and forwards in time, let’s continue doing so. But let us, for a while at any rate, spend some time with you, know how you were when you first came into their lives, arriving—diffident and shy—from a war zone. Your eyes said one thing to them, your silence another. And Hilaal and Salaado decided to wait, placing themselves somewhere between these aspects of yourself (as Hilaal put it), knowing full well that there was another you, which, if appropriately explored and defined, might give them a boy, as intelligent as he was bright, one who was acting, one who was hiding in the safe recesses of silence. They would love him when this emerged, love him as though he were of their own flesh and blood.
Uncle Hilaal pulled at your cheek and teasing you, said, “Askar, where is the third? Where’s the other?”
You looked about yourself, looked here, looked there and then at the two of them, but remained silent. In the quiet of your day-dreams, you asked yourself, The third—who’s that?” One, Hilaal. Two, Salaado. Three? What does the third mean?
You withdrew from company, you preferred sulking in a quiet corner the first few days. You didn’t speak much about Uncle Qorrax, his wives, his children—or how often he beat them; you didn’t talk about the compound, of which he was the undisputed headman; nor of the nomads, many of whom were relations of his, and who came to Kallafo on a shopping spree, nomads whom you didn’t like much (here are Misra’s prejudices) because they tended to bring and leave behind them, as souvenirs, a colony of lice, and your head itched, your body too, if you got anywhere near them. (Is this true, Askar?) Nor did you say much about Misra in those early days following your arrival. You drew a skeletal picture of her. In fact, you offered so thin and so vague a sketch of her that Uncle Hilaal showed little interest in your relationship with her. What was more, you kept your mother’s journal as your unshared secret, “the only one I am left with, the only secret all my own”, you said to yourself.
Do you know to what they attributed your silent withdrawals? Or rather how they explained them to each other at night, as you lay asleep, or perhaps dreaming, in a room all your own, all by yourself? “Such horrors,” had said Hilaal, “such blood-shedding and such terror in the frightened eyes of hunger and famine—part of young Askar is terribly suffering the loss of the world he has known.” Salaado argued, “But his eyes say one thing, his silence another,” her head beside Hilaal’s, hers pillowless, his on a pillow high as a throne. “And please don’t psychoanalyse us,” she had added.
Silent and withdrawn, yes. But your mind was busy, your tongue active. And you put a distance between yourself and the world. Your mind was busy and your tongue active throughout this period, because you read everything out loud, every bit of writing that came your way, you devoured every printed word you encountered. You read everything out loud so you would hear and not forget what you had read. You were excited in the manner of an Arab who has made a new friend. You were under the hypnosis of a newly found friend—the material you happened to be reading. And Salaado chose tales from Khaliila wa Dimna and you read it together, your voice hesitant, hers confident as a trickster’s.
Alone in your bed at night, lonely in your room, the first few nights were disheartening. You wished you were allowed to share their room. You were frightened of the dogs that barked in a house not very far away, you wondered if they might jump over your fence and enter your room. Salaado was sufficiently sensitive to have given it a thought. One night, she smuggled a small radio into your room and you slept to its jabbering. The radio was to stay Did it take Misra’s place—Misra, whose voice regulated your sleeping rhythms? Maybe. Anyway you slept to its jabbering as though it were talking to you and when you awoke in the morning, the large radio was on in the living-room, giving the news bulletin.
They took turns reading to you at night. Uncle Hilaal’s favourite was Al-Macarri’s Letter of a Horse and a Mule; Salaado’s was Khaliila wa Dimna. You couldn’t help comparing them to Misra; you couldn’t help deciding that you adored all three. But you wouldn’t tell them how you missed
Misra. In short, you drew a curtain of silence round yourself. The question was, if this was merely a phase you were going through. “What if this is all there is?” said Salaado.
“He’ll speak,” predicted Hilaal. “He’s just like my sister, his mother.”
Then, one day, you gave to Uncle Hilaal your mother’s journal. You never said why you had held it as your unshared secret, why you never mentioned you had it to anyone.
And the curtain dropped—there was sunshine and Salaado and Hilaal saw how much vigour you had in you, how active you were behind the artificial veil; and the noise coming from behind the clouds of your quietness was so deafening they were pleased, but at the same time a little apprehensive. You were, as Salaado put it, “overtures in the human form of friendliness. He is wonderful.” Uncle Hilaal read your mother’s journal, turning the pages with anxiety. You waited to be told what the gist of your mother’s journal was. Instead—a question:
“What was Uncle Qorrax like?” he asked.
You remembered seeing his name occur in the journal a couple of times. Was he important to her? Was he vicious and nasty and wicked to her? You wished someone would tell you. But no one did. “What was he like?”
“Did Uncle Qorrax abuse my mother’s trust?” you asked.
Uncle Hilaal said, “What makes you say that?”
You remembered the goings-on between him and Misra on the one hand, and Aw-Adan and Misra on the other. But you also sensed that Hilaal’s interest in what Qorrax had been like was genuine. “Did he rape my mother?’” you asked. “Did he want to marry her when news about my father’s death came?”
“Go and rest awhile,” suggested Salaado.
“No,” you said and were aggressive.
There was a pause. Then: “Then tell us what he was like,” said HilaaL
And you abandoned yourself. You took a moment’s breath, you paused, every now and then, as though a gag had suddenly been removed. You were a belated outpouring, you were heavy like overdue rain. And you shook as you spoke. But you spoke and spoke and spoke. What was Uncle Qorrax like? He was terrible, ruthless, a brute and he beat his wives and his children from sunup to sundown. You remembered (it was amazing, you thought, you remembered this—and you congratulated yourself, like an actor who had performed well) that you were fond of him only for a very brief period of time—when you loved his shoes. You gave him what was his due. He knew how to choose his shoes. There was no denying that. They delighted your sense of vision, when, as a crawling infant, you came anywhere near them, during that brief shoe-loving phase that all children go through. You loved them so much you wanted to put them into your mouth. However, when you outgrew the shoe-loving phase, you began to hate him all the more. You distrusted him—that was it. You had no faith in him. Right from the very instant—you weren”t even two days old—when, washed and clean, you were shown to him, you cried. Yes, you said to Uncle Hilaal and Salaado, you cried most furiously. You thought for a while, you reasoned, that you were allergic to his odour. But now you knew why you had nothing but a plethora of contempt for him. Apparently, it was atavistic—something you received in your mother”s milk. She hated him.
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