As they retook their respective seats, Askar said, “Tell me how her body was mutilated? Tell me all. What was missing? Why? Tell me all. Tell me everything you know.”
They consulted discreetly. Salaado was the first to speak. Hilaal would stay directly behind her and would help, confirming her story if need be, changing it slightly if necessary “We suspect there may have been foul play of a wicked kind,” said she, her voice shaken, like someone regretting he had said more than he intended. A pause. She turned to Hilaal. It was obvious she was seeking his assistance. “Please,” she said, taking his hand.
Hilaal took over. “The heart was missing. For example,” And he unclasped his hand from Salaado’s grip. “We suspect they performed a ritual murder on her body. Perhaps we are wrong. We haven’t the evidence. But the removal of the heart took place before she was tossed into the ocean—already dead. That is, if we’re to take our suspicions very seriously.”
Askar knew that when one of them talked, the other kept an eye on him. His expressions were under scrutiny, his movements, his gestures were being studied for clues as to what he might do. He was all right. He could prove to them that he was. He asked, “What did they say at the mortuary?”
Hilaal said, “For example. In view of the complications involved, not knowing how not to have you go through the traumatic experience of court cases, police interrogations and other related bureaucratic tortures, we decided—in view of the political trapdoors which would open, let you in but keep us locked out or vice versa—in view of all this, we decided not to raise the issue of ritual murder, or a missing heart or a mutilated corpse. But we could not deny that she existed, that she was who she was… er… to you, that she became whom… er… you had suspected her to have become and that you are to us … er… who you’ve been—a son. In view of this, for example, we decided, Salaado and I, that is, as though we believed we had your consent too—we decided, we would not raise these burning questions or ask for an investigation team to be appointed and a case opened—no. It pained our conscience, for instance, but we committed an unforgivable felony.”
Askar asked, “What’s that?”
“We bribed the technicians at the mortuary to silence them,” he said, his tone sad, adding, “You might well ask why we did all this? We did it so that the healing wounds in your soul won’t get festered again. In other words, we did this for the good of all concerned. Considering, as I said before, for example, the bureaucratic, political and other complications. And conscience too.”
Salaado agreed, “Yes,” and looked up as though she were reading the transcript of Hilaal’s aforespoken statement. “We talked about it, yes. It pained our conscience, but that was the best we could do, we thought.”
“That’s right,” said Hilaal, who was in a supporting role, agreeing with Salaado in turn. Askar wondered—had they rehearsed all this before they called on him?
“Do we know who they are?” he asked, speaking soberly.
Salaado said, “Not any more than you know.”
“I don’t,” he said.
“Neither do we,” said Hilaal
And then Askar said to Salaado, following a brief pause, “I don’t recall. Possibly you've told it and I’ve forgotten it. But how did you know that her body was at the mortuary?”
Salaado was overcome by a sense of despair, for there was a gap between what she knew to be true and what she suspected he would think she knew. In other words, she didn’t think he would believe her. “I was in a shop when …” but then she shrugged her shoulders, saying, “What’s the point, you won’t believe a word I say.”
He said, “Why not?”
Like someone turning in his tormented sleep, Salaado uttered an indistinct sound, one between noises made by some people who talk in their sleep and others who speak to their interlocutors in their dreams.
Askar asked, “Are you hiding something from me?”
“No.”
“Well. Tell it then.”
She said, “When I told him, Hilaal didn’t believe my story.”
Askar said, “Who am I? Hilaal?”
And Salaado pulled herself together at once. She appeared sufficiently apologetic and wished he hadn’t pushed her thus far. They both sought Hilaal’s comment—they understood he was determined to stay out of it. She then spoke, slowly, “I was in this so-called supermarket, when I overheard two women, both nurses working at the general hospital known as Digfar, talk about what one of them described as the corpse of a woman, black as dead shark’. At first, I took no interest, save the gentle curiosity which the description stirred in my otherwise indifferent mind, and I half-listened to what she was saying. But the more I heard the more certain I became it was Misra they were discussing. What decided it for me was the mention of a mastectomy operation, a recent one, in which one of the woman’s breasts had been removed. How I gained the few paces separating me from them, I cannot tell. What words I used to talk to the nurses, I cannot remember. I rushed straight to the hospital, found a doctor I knew and went, with him, to the mortuary. It was Misra—a corpse no one claimed. She had been reduced to that.”
He said, “And you claimed her body?”
“I had her removed from the section of ‘unclaimed corpses’ to one in which a daily fee is paid. There’s a difference between the rich and the poor, even when dead. The poor stink,” she said, disgusted at remembering the state of filth and stench the “Unclaimed Corpses Section” had been in. She went on, “I was sick. I couldn’t come home straight, I didn’t want to infect you with the sickness which had come upon me. I was telling the story of my disgust and despair, the story above all of Misra’s death, when the eclipse happened. I joined everyone else in prayer. I’m afraid I couldn’t remember the text of the Faatixa, let alone any other verse of the Koran. I put this down to my mental state—but I wouldn’t be able to remember any even now. Can you believe it? I, Salaado, prayed, together with everyone else. I was true to my name—Salaado, meaning prayer or devotions.”
Silence. No questions from Askar, nothing. His back straight, appearing in great discomfort, his Adam’s apple moving up and down, gulping, sending down his throat the taste of blood, the saliva of his guilt. “Are you all right?” from Hilaal.
“I am,” he said.
But he was, and also seemed, very upset.
“What’s wrong, Askar?” and Salaado touched him gently on the knee. A gesture of supplication? Why?
He said, “Do you remember what verse of the Koran, what chapter was read by the Sheikh who presided over the rituals of Misra’s funeral?” addressing it this time to Hilaal.
“What verse, did you say?” he said, half-looking at Salaado as well, with eyes which turned on the axis of the repeated query. “Verse, did you ask, Askar?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Do you remember the verses the priest supervising over Misra’s janaaza read over her corpse?”
“No.”
“Could we ask him?”
“We don’t know … er … didn’t know who the priest was. Someone suggested him. He came, he did his thing and left. We didn’t spend any thought on that aspect of the janaaza, we’re sorry” said Salaado.
“What’s all this, Askar?”
He reflected for a moment. Then, “Because I might have suggested a couple of verses. If you had come and shaken me out of my fever.”
Almost indifferent, Hilaal asked, “Like what?”
“Verses fourteen, fifteen and sixteen of Sura Luqmaan.”
No one was in any mood to speak for a while. Salaado and Hilaal apologized to him profusely All three joined hands and they hugged, wrapped in one another’s bodies and clothes, half-struggling, like a crowd upon whom a tarpaulin had collapsed.
IV
He was back—in his room, at home. He was back to the warm space between his thoughts—warm as the space between the sheets covering him. He was back to his unread books, back to his unstudied maps on the wall in
his room—at home. He was back to his mirrors, also on the walls, mirrors reflecting only the present, but not good enough to travel to a past beyond the tin amalgam plating their backs. He was back to the unplanned future—a future without a Misra; back also to the unfilled, unsubmitted forms from the Western Somalia Liberation Front and that of the National University of Somalia. The empty space of the twenty-one-odd questions stared back at him, preventing his brain from dealing with them, scattering his memory, like dust in a whirlwind, to the seven horizons of the cosmos—a world without a Misra!
He was standing before a mirror. He saw an unhappy face—his. It “wore” like a mask. He thought there was something absurd about a sadness confined only to the face, a sadness which wouldn’t spread to the rest of his body; something absurd about a face whose features had become as overwhelming as a spider’s abdomen, a spider with virtually no visible shanks and whose large belly spins webs—and fables with morals. So, he asked, who was Misra? A woman, or more than just a woman? Did she exist as I remember her? Or have I rolled into a great many other persons, spun from the thread leading back to my own beginnings, incorporating with those taking one back to other beginnings, other lives? Misra? Masra? Misrat? Massar? Now with a “t”, now without!
He now studied the map as reflected faithfully in the mirror before him. So many hundred kilometers to Kallafo, so many to Jigjiga; so many from Jigjiga to Hargeisa; and from Hargeisa to Mogadiscio; so many from Mogadiscio to Marsabet in the Somali-speaking part of Kenya. Maps. Truth. A mind travels across the graded map, and the eye allots the appropriate colours to the different continents. The body takes longer to make the same journey. Decimal grids, according to Arno Peters, are vastly different from Mercator’s map, in existence since the middle of the sixteenth century. And there is a big, painful difference, thought Askar, between the Somali situation today and that of the early 1940s when all the Somali-speaking territories, save Djebouti, were under one administration. And so it was again, for a brief period in 1977-8, when the Ogaden was in Somali hands. But the Somalis, government and people, were busy fighting a war on the ground and in the corridors of diplomatic power and no one released an authorized map of the reconquered territory. Truth. Maps.
He heard footsteps approaching but didn’t turn to see who it was. Two faces entered the mirror’s background—Salaado in Hilaal’s jellaba, he in her caftan. They had been having their afternoon siesta but hadn’t been away for long.
“Would you like to come with us?” asked Salaado.
“Where are you going?”
Hilaal said, “We’ll buy a goat.”
“What for?”
Salaado said, “As an expression of thanks to the gods that protect us. We, too, like all the Mogadiscians, have decided to slaughter a goat as sacrifice.”
Hilaal added, “There are other reasons. For example,”
“Like?”
Salaado said, “Sac-ri-fice. It does cover a large area—the notion of sacrifice, I mean. Hilaal and I have talked it over and he, too, thinks so.”
There was no doubt about it, she had become religious.
He repeated the word to himself, like a blind man touching the items surrounding him, a man familiarizing the senses of his body with what his mind already knows. And he saw. He saw Misra divine, he saw her stare at the freshly slaughtered goat’s meat, and he saw her tell a future when the meat quivered. The scene changed. Now he saw her open a chicken, he saw her give him an egg which she had salvaged from the dead fowl’s inside and he saw her talk of a future of travels, departures and arrivals. Again the scene changed. And he saw a horse drop its rider, he saw a girl kidnapped, he saw the girl grow into a woman ripe as corn, he saw the hand that had watered the corn pluck it, then eat it—he saw the man of the-watering-hand murdered. Sac-ri-fice! For Misra—a mastectomy; Hilaal—a vasectomy; Salaado—removal of the ovaries; Qorrax—exaction of blood, so many ounces a-bleeding; Karin—a life of sacrifices; Aria and Cali-Xamari—his parents—their lives; the Somali people—their sons, their daughters and the country’s economy. In short, life as sacrifice. In short, life is blood, and the shedding of one’s blood for a cause and for one’s country; in short, life is the drinking of enemy blood and vengeance. Life is love too. Salaado and Hilaal are love. Aria—the earth; Qorrax—the sun in its masculine manifestations; Hilaal—the moon; Salaado—solemnity, prayers, etc.; Misra?—foundation of the earth; Karin—a hill in the east, humps on backs; Cali-Xamari—a return to a beginning; and Riyo—dreams dreaming dreams!
Now he saw faces, now he didn’t see them; now he saw shades—like larvae under a microscope, these moved in the mirror. He started. When he calmed again, he took an unperturbed look. Hilaal and Salaado were in the doorway. They had changed into decent clothes to go out in. “Are you coming with us or aren’t you?” Hilaal asked.
“I have one question to answer before I set foot out of this house,” said Askar. He fell silent and couldn’t help feeling they were studying his movements with some concern.
Salaado said, “What is the question?”
“Who is Askar?”
The question made sense to its audience a minute or so later. No one said or did anything for a long time, as though in deference to the question which had been posed. In any case, there fell the kind of silence a coffin imposes upon those whom it encounters during its journey to the cemetery. And the sun entered the room they were in, in silence, then a slight breeze, smelling of the sea, entered in its wake, whereupon the dust and the rays merged, like ideas, and these were, like faces bright with smiles, reflected in the mirror. Askar was about to break the silence when he noticed that clouds, dark as migrating shadows, swooped down upon the rays of dust in the mirror, like vultures going for a meaty catch. Tagged on to the tail-end of the clouds, travelling at the speed of a vehicle being towed, the moon. Then … !
Then two other shadows fell across and obliterated the clouds and Askar was in no doubt that the men, to whom these belonged, one tall and ugly, the other short and handsome, were in police uniform. It was the tall one who spoke first. He said, “Which of you,” looking from Hilaal to Askar, “answers to the name of Askar?”
There was no time to indulge in metaphysical evasions, no time to consider the rhetorical aspects of one’s answering to a name. Without looking at Hilaal or Salaado, whose lips were already astir with prayers, Askar: “It is I.” And after a pause, “Why?”
It was the short one’s turn to speak. He said, “We are from the police station nearby, Giardino. We have questions to put to you. Please come with us.”
Hilaal moved nearer the short constable. He asked, “What questions? And in what connection, pray?”
The tall one, who was probably senior in rank and age, said, “Do the names Misrat, Aw-Adan, Qorrax and Karin mean anything to Askar? This is the question,” and he went nearer Hilaal. “I suppose you are Hilaal and that is Salaado?”
Everyone was quiet. In the meantime, the short constable bent down (maybe to lace his boots) but Askar felt as if the man was digging out of the earth roots of shadows, short as shrubs. The constable’s body shot up suddenly, his back straightened and the room was awash with sunshine. Hilaal said, his voice thin and tense, “What are we waiting for? Let’s go.”
Giardino was half a kilometre away and they walked, Askar, Hilaal and Salaado ahead, and following them, like jailers prisoners, the two police officers. Above them, an umbrella of clouds, reassuring as haloes, and on their faces, shadows long and crooked like question marks. The tall constable, who took upon himself to lead the last ten metres of the walk, wore an anklet of shadows round his feet, treading on stirred memories of (Askar’s) dust. They entered the station in silence.
A third police constable, sitting behind a typewriter, asked Askar, “What is your name?”
“Askar Cali-Xamari.”
And that was how it began—the story of (Misra/Misrat/Masarat and) Askar. First, he told it plainly and without embellishment, answering the poli
ce officer’s questions; then he told it to men in gowns, men resembling ravens with white skulls. And time grew on Askar’s face, as he told the story yet again, time grew like a tree, with more branches and far more falling leaves than the tree which is on the face of the moon. In the process, he became the defendant. He was, at one and the same time, the plaintiff and the juror. Finally, allowing for his different personae to act as judge, as audience and as witness, Askar told it to himself.
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