Maps

by Nuruddin Farah

  Her voice, teasing and friendly, “And I an old woman…, yes, when I grow older and I have no teeth left and no help forthcoming and you a grown-up man and I a helpless old woman … ! One day, when you are a youth… and I an old emaciated woman, friendless …,” and she was standing a few inches away from him …

  Firmly, “No,” he said, indicating that she had messed up his plans. “No,” he repeated, shaking his head as if saying, “This is not what I meant.”

  “What no? Why not?”

  He was silent. She thought that perhaps she had upset him greatly and so she extended her hand out to him and he took it in silence. They hugged slightly, neither speaking. Then his hands, when he tried to clasp them round her, wouldn’t make a circle, the fingers wouldn’t touch, they wouldn’t reach one another, and he was now saying, half-playful and half-serious, “No, no, no.” She looked at him and saw that the shamma-shawl had slipped away to the ground, trapping his feet, and the face that emerged was that of a half-man, half-child.

  “What no? Why no? What are you telling me, my man?”

  Again his voice sounding grown-up, “When I grow up and I am a man…I am trying to tell you if you care to hear it…Misra dearest…,” and he took a distance and stood out of her arms’ reach.

  “Yes?”

  “I will kill you.”

  She stared at him in silence for a long time. “But why?”

  “To live, I will have to kill you.”

  “Just like you say you killed your mother?”

  “Just like I killed my mother—to live.”

  V

  He asked himself the question whether, to live, he would have to kill her if he saw her in Mogadiscio—now that there were good reasons for him to do so.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I

  You began debating with the egos of which you were compounded, and, detaching itself from the other selves, there stood before you, substantial as a shadow, the self (in you) which did not at all approve of your talking with or touching Misra, lest you were lost in the intensity of her embrace. For a long time, your selves argued with one another, each offering counter arguments to the suggestions already submitted by the others. Undecided, and undeciding, you stood in front of a mirror and you studied those aspects of yourself which could be seen with the naked eye and you concluded that Misra wouldn’t recognize you, even if she saw you in the street that day You wore your age on your face, for instance. And your hand felt a day’s growth on your chin as you wondered if you should shave. An instant later, you were on the mat of your younger stubble, watching Aw-Adan help Misra study her future in the flames of a fire she had made. Oh, if only… !

  If only you and Misra could meet in a room darkened for that very purpose, you told yourself. If only there were no mirror to divulge the secrets of your inner torments; if the two of you could touch each other in the dark; if you could get used to each other while still in the unlit room; if each could claim to be someone else, until you were together long enough to want to know the other; if each could fabricate a story which would go well with the identity you wished to assume (you hadn’t, by then, been told that she had entered the country in disguise!); if only you could speak to each other without recognizing each other, remembering hardly anything which might generate suspicions, anything which might activate emotions within, anything which might stir dormant memories of your life together.

  And if the two of you met in broad daylight, in the presence of other people, when, say Hilaal was here, or one of your friends, one of your acquaintances or one of your neighbours? You were certain your confidence would be so shattered you would break into pieces; at best, your dignity would drop at your feet as though it were a shawl flung by its wearer; possibly your tongue, short as the midday shadow, would curl up and lie exhausted in the sweaty siesta of the moment’s lethargy and you wouldn’t be able to speak

  What you needed to confront her with was an innocence with which to protect yourself, you thought. Alternatively, you could do with the kind of powered stare you were bom with—that unmitigatable, impenetrable, “whole” stare, one which might have caught sight of her guilt and focused on it. Could this be why you felt comfortable standing in the curtained silence of the darkened hour, standing, to be precise, in the confluences of your past and your present; standing your ground, withstanding the wholesome flood of your future! “You behave as though you were a husband to whom a woman has been unfaithful,” commented Uncle Hilaal, “as though you couldn’t bring yourself to touch the body which had betrayed your trust. It is unbelievable that you would avoid any physical contact with the woman who could justifiably say that ‘by touching me, it seems as though he were touching himself!’” You lifted your eyebrows as if in wonder, and no wonder! For there stood before you, upright and as though waiting, another you, younger surely and more confident. You couldn’t think of anything to say—you didn’t speak to your younger self. Instead, you moved away from the mirror and stared ahead of yourself.

  The world was open as the field you could see from the window and…

  II

  You were very old and your skin had started to sag and so you had it altered—that is, you exchanged your old body for another, one which belonged to a young woman. How this had taken place, or why, was something beyond your conjecture. Why, for instance, first wear the mask and features of an old man, only to discard them the following moment in order to don the visage and look of a young woman? Or why, for that matter, resort to a metamorphosis, changing face, visage, age, sex and features too?

  Anyway, the signs of your body’s sagging began to appear first in the hands and fingers which shrank to the size of a small child’s little fingers. The logic behind all this metamorphosis was so dim to your unilluminated perception of things that you couldn’t see anything clearly Your legs had stiffened so you couldn’t get up, walk or rise to your feet—the legs themselves having been reduced to the size of a monkey’s paw. And you were seventy years old.

  A second later, you were watching a young woman’s body being dismantled, right in front of you—each limb, part and organ was first shown to you so you could examine its fitness. Every now and then, you offered your approval or disapproval by nodding or shaking your head. You wondered why the young woman accepted the exchange. You were told that she was disgusted by her young body—a body which was beautiful, smooth and seductive. You were told that her father had raped her, that her elder brother had desired her and that her mother and sisters were envious of her. You were told that she couldn’t walk up or down a street without someone proposing to her, without feeling eyes of lust piercing through her body to the core of her soul. You were told that she felt she was a dartboard and an intrusion of eyes were penetrating through her. And why was she interested in yours? “Yours is a maturer kind of anima,” she said, standing in front of you, half old and half young, half you and the other half herself. Parts of your body mingled well with hers.

  You noticed that her head, hairless and smooth like a peeled onion, lay within your reach. You wished you could stretch out your hand and touch her but apparently your arms hadn’t been screwed on. Also, you didn’t like the ugly sights in front of you now that you could see better, nor did you like eating the food that was on offer, now that your appetite was that of a young person. So why did you accept the exchange? someone asked you. “You must know,” you said. “Only in dreams do such impossible things happen.” And you were silent, thoughtful—and concentrating.

  So far, you and the young woman coped grandly with the exchanges and you were civil to each other. Now, however, there was tension. You both remained hesitant and contemplative, and neither was willing to offer the final approval once it came to the exchange of the mouth and lips. You didn’t know what language she spoke; she didn’t know what syllabic, consonantal or guttural formations would come with your mouth and lips. You were worried what her political views were; she, whether you were conservative or no. You asked yourself what
continent she was born in, whether her family was rich, if she had many friends—and what kind. She wondered to herself if you had a good or a bad conscience, if you were guilt-ridden and whether you had a happy life. These questions, these ideas, so far unhoused, unclaimed and unspoken, roamed about in the air, ideas without flesh, without soul and this made you wish you were whole again, this made you wish you were yourself again, a young man, barely seventeen. How very weird: to dream that you were dreaming? Or were you simply confronting your various selves, which consisted of a septuagenarian and of a young woman, not to forget the self whose identity you assumed when awake?

  You felt there was something unfinished about you, as though you had made yourself in such haste you roughened your features unnecessarily You had the feeling, however, that your face fitted you extraordinarily And the identity ofyour newer self? It was like a dot in the distance which assumed features you could identify, becoming now a man, now a woman—or even an animal, your perceptions of the new self altering with the distance or nearness of the spot of consciousness. Then the mirror vanished from right in front of you and the wall which had been there replaced it. And there on the wall appeared shadows and the shadows were speaking with one another, some laughing, some listening and some holding hands or touching one another.

  “And you—who are you?” one of the shadows asked you.

  You answered, “I am in a foreign body.’”

  “Now what does that mean?”

  You paused. Then, “It means that I am in a foreign country”

  “Yes? Go on.”

  “I was once a young man—but I lost my identity. I metamorphosed into an old man in his seventies, then a young woman. I am a septuagenarian wearing the face, and thinking with the brain, of a young woman, although the rest of my body, my misplaced memory if you like, partly belongs to yet a third person, namely a seventeen-year-old youth.”

  The wall in front of you shook with laughter and all the shadows joined in making fun of you, some mimicking your voice, others mocking the rationale of your complaint. You didn’t know what to do; you felt uneasy and looked from one shadow to another. Finally your eyes singled out a smiling face and it belonged to an old man. He was saying, “And what do you think is the cause of this torment? What have you done?”

  “My mother placed a curse on my head,’ you said.

  The old man’s look took on a most venomous appearance. “What did you do to earn her curse?”

  “I… er… I…,” you started to say but stopped.

  He commented, “Mothers are the beginning of one, they beget one, they give one a beginning. You must have done something unpardonable. You must have. Otherwise, why on earth would she place a curse on your head? Why why why? I imagine she must have suffered gravely: first under your father and then you, her own son. Poor woman, your mother. To have carried you, as a blessing, for months, inside of herself, to have loved you as her child for years and then to have had to curse you. It must have been agonizing to her.”

  You were clearly misunderstood by this old man, you said to yourself. Perhaps, you should tell him that the woman wasn’t actually your mother in the sense in which he took it, that the woman didn’t give birth to you in the way mothers as we know them give birth to their children. In other words, this woman wasn’t where you began in the clotted form of a tiny germ which grew, lived and developed on its own inside the body of another. But you loved her as you might have loved your mother—if she had survived your birth.

  The old man was saying, “I knew of a young man who was cursed by his mother because he refused to carry her on his back when they were crossing a stream lest she drown and because she didn’t know how to swim and he did. The arrogance of youth had gone to the young man’s head, the desire of a woman had lodged itself in his loins and the beating of love’s wings compelled him to run to where the woman of his lust was. He left his mother, an old woman who was lame and aged and decrepit, he left her to her own devices, impervious to her plea, “Just help me cross this stream in which I might drown.” He flew off in a mad rush. No one ever heard of his mother ever again. The beasts made a meal of her. Or perhaps the angels of mercy saved her. But we heard of the youth, and saw him again and again.”

  “What became of the youth?” you asked.

  “He complained again and again of hearing the noise of a chain-saw inside his head. He heard that noise at night, he heard it by day he heard it in his sleep and heard it when awake. In the end, he went insane. And the woman he loved? you ask. Whatever became of the woman he loved? They were separated by the noise of the chain-saw: she couldn’t bear sharing a bed and her life with a man who always heard something she couldn’t. Besides, she took her distance because she believed that a young man who was so insensitive as to remain indifferent to his mother’s pleas couldn’t or wouldn’t be bothered about her the fortnight following their own honeymoon. And she paid heed to society’s advice and rejected his advances. He was reduced to an ugly sight, this young man. And you could see him roaming the streets of our town, garbed in tatters, looking into the town’s refuse bins as hungry dogs and parentless urchins do. One day, right in the middle of the largest market, he set his tatters on fire. Ablaze, he died, unhelped, and his body lay unburied for days. A mother’s curse is to be taken far more seriously than a father’s. Give heed. A mother’s blessing is far more worthy of God than a father’s. What I do not know and what no one but God knows is whether it was the curse placed on his head by his mother that did it, or the woman’s rejection of his marriage proposal, the woman’s refusal to reciprocate his love. My feeling is it was the curse. Someone else might argue that it was society’s turning its back on him that persuaded the young woman and so on and so forth. Yes, young man. A mother’s curse is by far the heaviest burden a human has carried on his head. Don’t earn it. That is my advice.”

  Silence. Then the wall became just another speck in the huge space surrounding yourself. And in the miraged distance, prominent as an oasis, there was a colt, riderless—but saddled. You sighed—relieved. You knew Misra was back, you knew she hadn’t, as yet, placed a curse on your head.

  III

  Your childhood, excepting activities involving either Misra or your dreams, you once said, is one great oblivion. You couldn’t remember much, you confessed; couldn’t remember what people looked like, although you could recall some names to which, at any rate, you couldn’t put faces; couldn’t remember whether your feet ached as you pushed them into shoes a size too small; whether the papulae on your measle-affected body broke on their own or whether you pressed them playfully yourself. In one sense, you considered yourself a solitary child and spent a great deal of your time alone. Unless you were with Misra, you found all other company “demanding, boring, in short, lifeless’”. You would stand by the tree, bom a day or two after you, and look up at its branches swinging in the wind, a tree much taller than you, and you would water it. Then you would take a handful of the earth surrounding it and you would take a mouthful of its nourishment, making sure Misra wasn’t watching you, believing, of course, that eating earth would do you a world of good, and that you would grow taller and heftier, just like the tree. Alone, again, once you knew how to write your name, you would secretly graft your name, born the same day as the tree, on its bark.

  Dreams separated you. You shared everything else—but not your dreams. She knew every one of your secrets, touched every inch of your body and felt your heartbeat too. You slept on the same bed, under the same cover and partook of the same atmospheric pressures, air and oxygen. But not your dreams. Even at night, asleep, in the dark, it was your respective dreams which separated you; dreams which lay between the two of you; dreams which were (in your case) dressed up in “mantles of water, in jackets of fire, in suits of green wear, in fatigue-uniforms, one day as a woman, another as a man”. The rivers in your dreams flowed away from the streams in hers. Whereas you saw a companion very like yourself walk beside you in an empty street,
Misra saw a man holding her right hand, she saw you hold her left and the three of you walked together towards sunset. Your dreams overflowed like buckets of water; at times, you saw rivers burning; at times, the water in your dreams was on fire; at other times, your volcanic eruptions made you speak in your sleep, and Misra could hear and understand the odd word that she had heard. She asked you to tell her what you saw in your nightmare the following morning. You didn’t. It was as if you were claiming your dreams as your own.

  Nor would you share with her the dream in which you saw a woman drown in a muddy river, a woman who appealed for help, calling out your name. Do you remember what you did? You waded to where the woman was drowning. You extended out your hands as though you were offering help. Your fingers, immediately they came into contact with her body, rolled into a fist and you pushed the head of the woman down and down and down—until she died.

  In its wake, the dream made you shout in your sleep. Uncle Hilaal rushed in and woke you up. You were wet with perspiration. In an effort to persuade him that it wasn’t anything serious, you told him a story you made up on the spot. He said he didn’t believe you had given him the true story. And only then did you speak the truth. He inquired if you recognized the woman’s face. You insisted you didn’t.

  “What did the woman’s voice sound like?” he said.

  You answered, “She spoke as though there was water in her mouth.”

  “This doesn’t say much, does it? After all, the woman was drowning.” He explained himself, unnecessarily. “You said the river was choked with mud, didn’t you? Or was it simply stagnant?”

  “It was salty and stagnant,” you said.

  “Do you remember anything else?” he asked.