The man went in. — She left me in Mexico, he said. I need spare parts.
Allah, Allah! cried the proprieter. My business pays just enough to eat! I don't dabble in those things . . .
(Across the street, two men squatted in a pile of automobile components, sitting side by side, sorting them as slowly and deliberately as if they were moving chess pieces.)
So you can't help me get a spare wife?
Can't help you? I won't help you! You must not ask such things.
The man smiled. — How many wives do you yourself have, Farhan?
I have three, but for me it's no problem; I'm Muslim! And for me there was no pimp such as you wish me to be—why won't you leave me alone, you odious fellow?
And how did you choose them?
Why should I tell you?
I ask you respectfully.
The first wife—ah, she's my real wife. The second is my girlfriend, and the third . . . well, she was a beautiful girl I saw in the market. And, you know, I made a mistake. To marry more than one Somali girl is very difficult, because you must love them more than twice a day; it's impossible sometimes! You think you have problems. And they like to corkscrew their buttocks wildly; they're different from all other girls. I get so tired. So, my friend, I choose only one per night, and you cannot believe the jealousy . . .
Ah, so that's how it is. Well, for me there are two women. They are really the same woman, but one, she has a double in Heaven. I don't want to disturb the one on earth, so—
So you want to kill yourself? That is a great sin, although for guns I do have some spare parts.
No, Farhan, I don't want to do that. Do you have a spare atlas?
You mean an address book. I don't dabble in those things. What you ask is very shameful. If you persist, someone will kill you.
He had a notion that she might know where her double was. He suspected that she might be somewhere within this equatorial duct, bridge or trough. He breathed the hot white wind of dust. — I want an atlas, Farhan.
Oh, well. Not every want can be remedied . . .
A donkey's-load of wood, a month's worth, cost about fifty thousand shillings in those days. He took out a hundred thousand and told the man to find him an atlas—a spare one would do. Then he stood waiting, his mind partaking of the same wide empty flatness as Military Street (which used to be Lenin Street).
It was definitely somebody's spare atlas, even grimier than the one he'd bought in Italy (his then ladylove had wrenched her hand out of his and begun screaming: I think you're crazy buying that goddamn shitty thing! You'll regret it, I tell you! and after that she'd refused to speak to him beneath that milk-white sky; they departed from congealing pillars, walls and fountains lit falsely by lingerie windows, fur-coat windows, bookstore windows, house-beasts and ships of state blind-windowed; and he tried to take her hand but she pulled away with disgust or anger or simple loathing, sitting beside him in the cab, reading her own map). An obsolete Africa, white as a salt island, floated in a turquoise sea; bearing appellations from the Second World War: French West Africa, French Sudan, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, French Equatorial Africa, Military Territory of Chad, Belgian Congo, Tanganyika Territory, Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, Italian East Africa, Italian Somaliland (which was why the Somalis didn't like Italians), British Somaliland . . .
Mogadishu was in Italian Somaliland. He positioned his electronic magnifying loupe upon that spare country and gazed down. The fibers of the paper were very white and bright (in the atlas he'd read that Somalia received more than nine hours' worth of mean annual bright sunlight—second only to the northern area encompassing Libya and Algeria; no wonder the page was bleached!) Slowly and carefully he let his eyeball drone like a spy satellite over the flats of Shabellaha Hoose, proceeding eastward to the humid sandy beach, which he tracked northeast to Golweyn, Shalaamboot, Marka, Jilib, Dhanaane, Jasira, Banaadir, and now, experiencing that accustomed white and yellow Adriatic feeling despite the rubble and tanks (he wondered whether Dubrovnik looked like that these days), he approached Muq-disho, which was spare for Mogadishu; he zoomed in upon roads (Stadium Street, Military Street; here was Population Street and he found the place that said SPER PARTS), ruins, military sites (there was the stadium, still sandbagged by Marines, a machine gun mounted up high, pointing out, barbed wire at the gate). Down, down, down. In that country of sand, the most brightly colored things were the women's clothes. Loftily he gazed down upon the tops of those poison-trees called booc. He watched their pale green broad-lobed leaves blow in the hot wind. For a moment he gazed down at the Green Line which divided the city into factions. It was a yellow wall pocked and pimpled and made of lifeless white and yellow rubble on which crowds of chocolate-colored people sat barefoot. Looking up at his giant blinking eye, litde girls in red or yellow garbashars stood and tried to sell him packs of cigarettes. Turbaned men nodded at him, smiling. Then someone shot a gun at him. He watched the golden bullet enlarge itself in the longitude-latitude crosshairs of his loupe, rising toward him like a torpedo; he did not think it could reach him, but as a precaution he zoomed back to lower magnification so that he rose high above the entire continent of Africa with its neatly lettered countries; he could almost see the page number; and now he zoomed back in again because surely the bullet had fallen to earth. He saw people sitting in chairs under a great toothbrush tree for shade; he dialed the infrared setting and watched the steam rising from the tops of their heads; then he switched back to NORMSPECTRUM and watched a lady bent almost double, carrying a can of water. He saw a woman in black and yellow slowly trudging through the sand. He saw a half-naked man squatting in a high barred window (a thief who grimaced at his immense searching eye which hovered overhead like God; the thief said: I am afraid for airplane).
Panning past smoking garbage in the sand at the base of a wall, he spotted her (or the spare her) at the wheel of her red car. She was just now passing the U.S. Embassy, whose sign read: JIB: WARNING AT-4 ANTI-TANK POSITION. THIS WEAPON HAS A 60 METER, 90° BACKBLAST. WHEN IN IMMEDIATE AREA, SEEK COVER DURING ALL CONFRONTATIONS AT FRONT GATE!
In exultation, he rang a wooden camel bell with a wooden clapper.
Farhan rushed to look. — This a woman drive car! he laughed. Very fantastic! You say she is your spare woman, spare wife?
Yes.
The proprieter wanted to look again. — Oooh, I see her naked arms! he giggled. You know, my friend, before the war one could see girls on the beach dressed in European fashion, which is to say in bra and knickers, but these have fled, and now there are only rural girls here.
She's not a rural girl. She's from New York.
Is she jealous?
I really couldn't say, Farhan.
You know, my good friend, they tell a certain story that one Somali man had four wives, who were all jealous. So he said to them: Turn around, close your eyes and I will tell the one I love the best. — Then he tapped each one on her buttocks in turn and sent them all away happy. But me, I don't know if it's true. Maybe it's true. I don't dare try it, because my wives might only pretend to close their eyes. I think your woman is jealous, yes? Because she has a jealous face.
You must have better eyes than I do. Even at maximum magnification I can't see whether she's jealous or not.
But she left you?
Yes.
Why?
I had someone else I wouldn't give up. That's why she left me.
Listen, my friend. Somali girls don't attach conditions. If they see you with another girl, they either say nothing or they ask for a divorce, but they never say: If you want to stay with me you must have only me.
He bent down and looked into the loupe again. Now he could see. She was driving toward the Green Line.
The internal combustion engine was one of the West's many presents to Somalia, and I would have to call it an a-a-mmah, which is to say a bequest for evil purpose (the example given in a treatise on inheritance law being money left by a Muslim to build a Christian
church); but nonetheless her little red car looked sporty.
That was when he saw the other red car.
On the enemy side of the Green Line, just past the former police station, rose another camp on the dung-hued sands of the former technical institute, one of whose walls bore the scrawl: CAMP OFFISH. Refugees, their faces wide and brown, were standing at the base of the barbed-wire-topped wall, among weird mounds topped with green plastic; those were their houses. The women wore deriis and garbashars. They carried babies in sacks against their stomachs. They smoothed their garments down while the first grade of the SOS Children's Village counted one to a hundred in a deafening scream and the schoolteacher conducted with a twig. There was a little child not much more than a brown skull on skinny legs, his toy a plastic bag on the end of a string; he stood touching the shiny red car, the spare car in wonder. Now through the loupe the watcher's eyeball saw many little girls with dark brown faces. One in a white dress who had big black eyes ran inside a cave roofed with green plastic; a moment later she came out, holding a white woman's hand. The white woman was the spare of the double. He looked down from the sky and wanted to lick her bare shoulder and arm.
Sliding the loupe back along the page to his side of the Green Line, he saw the first double pass two cars with UN flags. Farhan was saying something but he didn't listen.
He thought about the way that Somali men who are friends walk so happily with their arms around one another's waists. He wondered if the doubles would do that. And he wondered if there would be room for him.
On Population Street it was getting dark, the evening sky like a crude oil painting, with solid white and gray cotton-blotches of cloud unrolling in its pale blueness; and so people were getting afraid of bandits and the petroleum market was closed; but Farhan's lantern flickered brightly down upon the atlas so that the two red cars approached each other bathed in afternoonness.
Farhan was still going on. He said that in olden times a Somali girl's dowry was one hundred camels, one horse and one rifle. Then it became five camels, and now it was only one camel, which could cost anywhere from one to five million, depending on the kind of camel.
Farhan gasped. Coming down Population Street were dozens of red cars, and a boy whose legs he could almost have circled between thumb and forefinger came running out and threw a stone through the windshield of one spare car, and the spare woman inside pulled over and jumped out cursing with that thin shrill anger he suddenly remembered very well, and then somebody shot her from the shadows. The other red cars continued on past. They appeared to be heading for the Green Line. Looking desperately through his loupe, he now saw the army of red cars approaching from the other side. He saw that all the doubles looked very angry, and they all carried guns. They were getting close enough to each other now that he could see where exactly along the Green Line they would meet. He could not bear to watch anymore. Moving the loupe away from the Green Line, he saw white soldiers patting black boys down for qat. He saw a spare Farhan going with his brother to pray in the mosque. He saw a lady in a yellow garbashar. The lady knocked on a green metal door. Inside was a sandy courtyard with one donkey and many smoldering fires. A skinny child came and let the lady in. When the metal door had closed behind her, and nobody in the street could see, she threw off her veil and looked upward at him with the deadly dark glide and glitter of a tiger snake. She was one of the doubles. This time he was mesmerized by the approaching bullet.
*U.S. $15.
AT THE BRIDGE
Coral Harbour, Southhampton Island, Northwest Territories, Canada (1993)
Coral Harbour, Southhampton Island, Northwest Territories, Canada (1993)
Coral Harbour, Southhampton Island, Northwest Territories, Canada (1993)
Coral Harbour, Southhampton Island, Northwest Territories, Canada (1993)
* * *
Coral Harbour, Southhampton Island,
Northwest Territories, Canada (1993)
I came to the bridge and there was no one there. It was ten-o'-clock on a sunny night that echoed with seal-hunters' rifle-claps, and I needed water. That was why I'd turned my back on my tent beside the lake of howling dogs and set out for the noise of water. The river was very close. Children swam in it every day, although they allowed that it was not as warm as Fossil Creek where I had camped on the night that the wind blew my tent almost to pieces. The town had a swimming pool, but that year it was closed for repairs and so they swam by the bridge.
As I went I kept to the socket of high ground around the water (the rest would have engulfed me above the rubber of my tundra boots). That night the mosquitoes were so thick that I could literally snatch them out of the air, and the sun left double orange-egged reflections in two ponds. I scrambled onto the raised gravel dike they called a road, passed a pond of rich green grass as delicate as vermicelli, for all the world like a Cambodian ricefield, then turned off the road at the river, which sucked itself down from a glowing violet lake of eerie shallowness before it slithered toward an orange-painted bridge that said I LOVE YOU and NAKOOLAK and other things. The water shimmered orange with an indistinct reflection, a slightly pale water-color of the sun-trail, and then went under the bridge, around low rocks, and out to its mouth of ice.
And no one was there.
The children had finished swimming for the moment—no reason; they sometimes swam at midnight. But even had they been there it would still have proved too late for me, because I could not be a child anymore, although I passed well enough for children to like me; and even if I'd become one I would not have been able to kill birds in flight with a single stone; and so it was too late. As for the fullgrown ones, I was not of their kind, either. That afternoon I'd seen two beauties swimming. One had a boyfriend and one didn't. The one who was alone had smiled at me, and that was too late, too. Another true or false love would only make my soul more sadly vicious. Then there were the young men, to whom women and everything came easy. — You wanna catch a polar bear? they'd say. No problem. All you gotta do is get your gun and shoot. — So their company was also salveless to me, my jealousy being a ptarmigan always half-seen, half-buried in my mossy hopes. In short, it must have been only because I was a selfish spoiler that I stood lonely on the gravel below that empty bridge, watching the mosquitoes attack my knees, listening to the river flow out into Hudson Bay, where it was almost too late for ice.
I felt that I had to make something of my condition. Like the glowing gold outlines of grassheads, I was bordered by a trick of light—oh, a real border too, but nothing with the power to detain me in such brilliant monotony.
The people in the four-wheelers on the road above, their parkas open to the breeze they made, sometimes smiled and waved at me. But I was alone.
That was my difficulty. My circumstances were no different from anyone else's. A boy had come to my tent and I'd asked him what he would do that night. — Go to the bridge and watch people swimming, he said. He was happy, more or less.
They came back, two boys and two girls, and called my name. I was more lonely than before. I stood at the bridge and watched them playing. They were walking from shadow to sun, and they reached the rocks and then the water. They were wading, the girls carrying their shoes, the boys not. They'd gone to the mossy island. They were in the violet water, bending their knees and calling out in Inuk-titut as they picked their way between sharp stones.
Two more boys came running up the road.
Hi, called the girls. You gonna swim? You gonna swim?
I was watching them to see what it was that I had lost. They seemed to make no motion without a purpose, and to do nothing that they did not want to. They did nothing to fill time because they swam time and breathed it. They flapped their arms against sodden shirts, stood still, put bathing suits on, all with the quick confidence that doing these things was right and that afterward there would be other good things to do.
A truck went by and drenched me in white dust.
I knelt down to fill my water bottl
e from that stream well spiced with stones, that stream which curved around the curvy horizon. I felt the cold touch of a mosquito against my face. When my bottle had surrendered its last bubble of emptiness, I climbed back up to the road again. The bottle was very chilly and heavy in my hand. I stood at the bridge, and two couples I'd seen in church came on their four-wheelers and greeted me. They asked the children if the water was warm. With them it was different. They weighed possibilities, with easy indulgence. They could take or leave anything. But, just like the younger people, they owned their lives.
I was at the bridge and everyone was there. And I was alone.
Coral Harbour, Southhampton Island,
Northwest Territories, Canada (1993)
All this changed on the first day that I went swimming. The coolness, the novelty, the loveliness, all these things engrossed me so that I was like them, learning the blue and green and brown lives of water, speaking with shouts and stone-splashes to the kids wrapped in towels like Arabs. Water ran from our lips. Happily straining reddish-orange faces swam around me and teased me. Little kids were riding me, clinging to me, calling my name in the water. A small girl braced her skinny brown knees against the current and crossed back and forth, dancing from stone to stone. We were always throwing stones at pop cans which we floated down the current, or trying to wing birds, though I made sure never to hit a living thing because I was not a hunter; my friends were quite good at striking a mark. They taught me about the strange current on the south side, right by the bridge where the little birds lived, so strong that you could not cross the creek without angling upstream. I let it catch me, and was caught up in life.
The Atlas Page 17
