You were busy eating and could hear the engine of the lorry revving, you could see the exhaust-pipe’s white smoke — and before you knew what was happening, you realized that the lorry was in motion. When you looked back, you saw hands wave and heard shouts of farewell but couldn’t determine which hand was Misra’s, Karin’s or anyone else’s; nor could you distinguish one person’s cry from anybody else’s. You rose to your full height. By then, distance was making Misra smaller, distance was making her shorter than half her size. However, when she finally vanished, together with her the township of Kallafo, Uncle Qorrax, his wife Shahrawello and your cousins — yes, when Kallafo was but a dot in the dusty distance, smaller than the speck of dust it is represented as on the map, it was then that you sensed that your heart had begun beating again and that you had lungs with which to breathe, and you were whole again. And the man to whom you had been entrusted was saying: “It is like sea starting where the earth ends. Because Mogadiscio, or any other town in the Republic, is a road leading to other roads, a road with a purpose that takes one to other possibilities,’
You thought that the conversation must have reached an advanced stage, since you couldn’t recall what had gone on before. You listened intently, and somebody put a question to the man sitting next to you. “Could you tell us, in the simplest language possible, why you are crossing a border which exists no more, to a Mogadiscio to which youVe never been?”
The man took his time. Years later, you would remember his posture as one resembling that of a person from other war-torn areas of conflict, a man residing in the spacious pause of a peace truce in Lebanon or a Ugandan enjoying the quiet following army looting. The man responded: “I am journeying away from graves.”
A number of heads nodded approvingly.
The man continued: “I am travelling, leaving behind me unburied corpses. The tombs are, you might say, those of history. That is to say, these are corpses that should be buried in the tomb of history but that are not; corpses that, at any rate, will be undug every century or so. Somalis come, “Ethiopians” go, every twenty, fifty or a hundred years or so. Waves of atmospheric spirits fill the air of any place where the dead are not buried, ghosts, ferocious as hounds, hunt together, in groups, in the dark and they frighten the inhabitants — it ill-behoves a displaced soul to search for a body in which to take residence,’ Somebody commented: “I dare say!”’ Another asked: “Whose are the unburied corpses?” Then the man smiled. He said: “Our memories, our collective or if you like, our individual pasts. We leave our bodies in order that we may travel light — we are hope personified. After all, we are the dream of a nation.”
You wondered if the man had made sense to the others since you didn’t understand him. You were looking at the other faces for clues when Misra’s image came right before you, placing itself between you and the men you were staring at. You would remember the same image when, years later, at school and in Mogadiscio, you were shown the pictures of Egyptian mummies by one of Salaado’s relations, namely Cusmaan. The image which insisted on imposing itself on your brain was that of a Misra, already dead, but preserved; a Misra whose body, when you touched it, was cold as ice, as though it had spent a night or two in a mortuary But there was an incredible calmness about her corpse, as if she herself had abandoned her life much with the same preparedness as Armadio, Karin’s late husband, had surrended his to the Archangel of Death. There was no struggle, no pain, death came as a welcome guest — and stayed, that was all. Somehow you consoled yourself, remembering that she looked like a corpse when asleep, with her hands neatly clasped together across her mountain of a chest and barely a snort or noise issuing from her nostrils. Did she not playfully act as though she were dead a couple of times? You rationalized that your mind conjured up these ugly images because you felt guilty at parting with her, guilty at leaving without her. Then you told the image to vanish — and it did. And you were staring at the men’s faces, in silence, in the kind of thank-you-God hush which comes after a Muslim has sneezed.
Then one of the men burst into a nationalist song, but his voice failed him. Another man, this time the one to whom you had been entrusted, picked it up, lifting it to that undefined zone between the earth and the sky, which is said to be the angels” abode. The man had a wonderful voice and, what is more, he knew it. He sang one of the fifties songs, of the Qershe and Jawaahira-Luul era and fame. This, together with the speed of the lorry, transported your imagination to the high seas and you thought you were floating, one and all, in the pure silver water of total abandon. Nothing mattered any more. You couldVe all died in a single somersault of the vehicle and your bodies would probably not have felt the slightest pain in parting with life. Beautiful voices that sing beautiful, nationalist songs beautifully are seldom found and you appreciated the man’s exquisite voice for another reason: that it made you re-play in your ears Uncle Qorrax’s voice, which was ugly and short of breath, like an angry half-wit only good to give commands. You would later, of course, reconsider your judgement, once you got to Mogadiscio and heard Uncle Hilaal’s. In any case, it seemed you had bodily gained access to the buffer between reality and dream as you listened to the song and thought if you died, you wouldn’t, in all probability, be woken up from the dead and therefore you might not have known you were alive. One song was followed by another. Others contributed or requested which song the man should sing next and when he didn’t know the words, or couldn’t remember how its rhythm went, they helped him out. But you didn’t contribute any songs, nor did you suggest he sing any for you. Because in you, your soul was rising up, climbing higher and higher up your body, the way breathlessness rises in one, only to be replaced by the delirium one feels when going up a very, very high mountain.
Then the lorry slowed down. For you, the speed meant a lot — it had enabled you to leave below you, as though on the earth, the world-liness that had been your past; it had helped you gain an unreachable height, a territory formed only by the most fertile of imaginations. You paid more attention now that you read signs of worry on the other passengers’ faces. “What’s happening? Why are we slowing down?” someone asked.
Only the passengers in the cabin sitting by the driver knew why. And when one man half-climbed over the side of the lorry to ask why, you learnt that you were nearing the town of Feer-Feer, formerly a border town. And someone was asking: “Does anyone know what flag Feer-Feer is flying today?”
In chorus, the men said: “Of course. The Somali flag.”
And the idea produced poetry in another man who said, “The sky is blue and heavenly and so is the Somali flag; a flag whose colour matches that of God’s abode. It has, right in its middle, a five-pointed star and, for each point, a Somali-speaking territory The former British Somaliland and the former Italian Somalia have been recently joined by the Ogaden.”
Heads nodded. Silence. The question how long the victory would last was in everybody’s mind. But because you were being welcomed by the townspeople and Feer-Feer was in such a festive mood, it seemed inappropriate to worry. The lorry came to a halt. Before you could alight, many of the townspeople joined you in the lorry and together you sang nationalist songs which were composed in the 1940s by the founders of the Somali Youth Club. You sang songs until you reached what could be considered the centre of town. You finally alighted. While food was being prepared for you, some of the men prayed and you and a couple of others went to have a look at the Somali flag, flying in the heavens of your nationalist dreams.
A little later, someone set fire to the Ethiopian colours; after him waved flames of joy as he ran in circles in the clearing made for the purpose. In stunned silence, you watched the red, the yellow and the green of the Ethiopian flag being reduced to charcoal.
II
You stood aside. You didn’t take part in the flag-burning exercise. Not because you thought it was the wrong thing to do. You had other thoughts to attend to. You remembered, earlier on, you had taken possession of the thick envelope U
ncle Qorrax had entrusted to the escort who was to lead you to Uncle Hilaal’s door. The man was far too excited to stay away from the flag-burning exorcism. He threw himself in headlong, like a mayooka, dancing frenziedly round the flames of the burning colours. He hurled himself, now forwards, now backwards and then to the sides — now he grew wings and flew like a firefly; now he was no longer impeded by legs and could jump as high as a leopard; now he roared with joy, surrounding himself with a myth, like a lion. When the man was too busy to look, you opened the envelope.
Briefly, you studied her handwriting, which, in any case, you couldn’t read because it was in Italian, and imagined her to be under a great deal of stress when jotting her notes. Maybe the rush of thoughts had come to her the same moment that she felt your kick in her ribs. Or maybe she was in a hurry to get somewhere. But you saw dates — days of the weeks, months as captions. You could read these. You could also read one name — that of Uncle Qorrax, spelt as Korrab, Something brought back a sad memory — of a calendar on a wall, Misra aborting a foetus, of dates in red and green in accordance with a code of safety. Why was Uncle Qorrax’s name often in your mother’s journal? you asked yourself. You tasted your hate for Qorrax in your saliva, you tasted blood. I could kill him, you thought.
Your escort came and fetched you. He saw that you had opened the envelope and said he didn’t mind your keeping it yourself. When you were putting it into your bag, he noticed two other items — the portrait of Ernest Bevin (you explained who he was to him) and an egg. “What’s that?”
You stammered something.
“I like eggs. Is this one boiled, ready to be eaten?” he asked.
“I am sorry. But I have a question,” you said after a pause. “When an egg goes bad and there isn’t a hen to sit on it, what happens?”
The man at first appeared puzzled. Then, “How do you mean?” he said, but didn’t wait for your answer. He asked you to tell him the “history” of the instead. He found your story amusing, at first, but when he thought about it, he found it enlightening. He said so to you as you joined the circle which had formed round the bus about to depart. Someone was speaking nationalist rhetorics, in which plenty of Somali as well as enemy blood was shed.
Then someone else insisted that passengers be told where the “inexistent” border used to be — inexistent, because Somalis never admitted it, neither did they allow it to enter into their logic. Non-Somalis, because they were total strangers or knew no better, looked at maps, where they found a curvy line, drawn to cut one Somali people from another. Presently, somebody pointed a finger at a row of huts where the Ethiopian sentries used to live, their guns in their tight embrace.
Of the rest of the journey to Belet Weyne, and then eventually Mogadiscio, Askar would remember when the bus was stopped and the men and the women passengers parted, the men going one way, the women and children the other. Of course, he didn’t doubt with whom he would go — the men. He was the only one who did not strip naked to take a dip in the Somali end of the Shebelle River. Because Aw-Adan was the first man he had seen wholly naked, he now wondered where he was and whether alive or dead.
He betook himself to a spot hidden from the men and the women, who were busy performing their cleansing rituals — a spot under the trees from where he could watch both groups. He was thrilled to be the sole inhabitant of a garden. This garden was green, as was his recent memory of another he had seen in a dream. He saw a footpath and something told him that the footpath might take him to his own beginning — had he the courage to follow it. But the thought of encountering his own starting-point frightened him, it threw him into some distress. He felt so uncomfortable he decided to join the other men. He stripped naked in order that he might indulge in the washing rite, just as the others. Acrimonious in expression, he went into the river. Directly his body came into contact with water, he regained his calm. The water was calf-deep for quite a distance and his body sipped through its pores the right amount, which eventually induced in him a peaceful harmony reminiscent of the day he was born. One of the men backstroked to the deeper end and dived, disappearing for quite a while in the water. And Askar was full of envy
Still naked, he got out of the water and sat by himself. Should he return to the dark garden behind all this sunlit wateriness, he asked himself, and follow the footpath? Why on earth did he feel such an imbalance in his psyche, why was he frightened? Where did he think the road might have led him? To his own beginning or to someone else’s?
Misra was before him again. She was there and he was small and she was washing him, fussing over him, playing with him, addressing him in a language of endearment, calling him “my man”; there she was, real as the border; there she was, talking about how self-conscious he was on the day he was bom, how he wore a mask of dried blood, how he appeared, or rather behaved, as though he had made himself. And she was there, teaching him the rudiments of things, calling each item by its name, “That is the sky”, and “This is the earth; and there he was, pointing at her repeatedly in reply to the question, “Where is the earth? “, although he would point correctly at the sky whenever the question was “Where is the sky?” She would burst out laughing, saying she was “Mother” and not “earth” while his finger that had pointed, and maybe even the hand, was busily taking a bit of the earth to eat. Indubitably, she had done a most commendable job, training him in the nomadic lore of climatic and geographic importance — that it was the earth which received the rains, the sky from whose loins sprang water and therefore life; that the earth was the womb upon whose open fields men and women grew food for themselves and for their animals. And man raised huts and women bore children and the cows grazed on the nearby pastures, the goats likewise; and the boy became a man, the girl a woman and each married to raise a family of his or why not her own and the married couple drew joy out of being together with their offspring — thanks be Allah! (And all this time, Askar was thinking of the inherent contradictions — that she wasn’t his mother, and the country wasn’t hers; that she was teaching him his people’s lore and wisdom, and occasionally some Amharic when night fell; that she wasn’t married and hadn’t a child of her own or a man she called “husband” but was happy for whatever that was worth; that he had no one to bestow the title of “Father” on, but a great many uncles, one of whom was once married to Misra.)
And Aw-Adan was there too. And he was teaching him things about astrology and how to locate the Milky Way; how to answer when the Ciisaanka-yeer calls, or what to do; how to spot the afa-gaallo constellation of stars; plus one scientific truism — that in Islam, Nature — capital N, he insisted — is conceived of as a book, comparable, in a lot of ways, to the Holy Koran: a genus for a sura, a species for a verse and every subspecies shares a twinship with the alif, ba and ta of mother nature — maa shaa Attaahu kaana!
“The bus is ready to leave for Mogadiscio,” somebody shouted.
Askar saw men look for their clothes, men who were holding their members covered with both their hands; he did the same. He shook his shorts so they would be free of the sand which might have lodged itself in the pockets, etc., and stumbled into them in great haste. He put on his T-shirt as well, and the shoes. But his body was sandy as he had no time to wash off this earth’s light coating. The driver waited until all the women and the children were accounted for. He asked if everyone was there. When he received the affirmative, he said, “We shall be in Belet Weyne in less than an hour.”
III
Standing against the morning wall of sunshine, two oblong lines of light, each solid as a hem and clearly visible as the border of a dress. And there were two horses — one of them black, the other white; the black horse led the way, the other followed him immediately after, like white smoke after black before the red flames pursue each other into invisibility.
The horses were in a garden rampant with tropicality, a garden wild and virginal as the first day of creation must have been. It had rained heavily and the horses dripped, moistening e
veryone and everything near them. I admired them from a distance. I picked what fruits I could reach without any effort on my part and bit into them until I sucked out the juice. I discarded the pulp, leaving behind me a trail of formless mass.
A young girl, innocent as her smile, emerged from behind the horses. She looked intimidated — I don’t know if my presence frightened her, or even if she saw me. I could detect a streak of fear in her eyes. But the girl fascinated me — especially her eyes. So I gave up looking at the horses altogether and I concentrated on the girl. I couldn’t explain what was the cause of this bemused attraction to the girl, why this fascination. I couldn’t look anywhere else for a long time.
I asked her what her name was. She said she had no name, that I could give her one if I wanted. I asked her where she came from. She said she had no country she could call her own, that she was a refugee although she didn’t know from where, and from whom she was fleeing and to what safe shelter. I asked her if she had any parents. She said she had no parents. In short, she was a young girl, more or less the same age as myself, a girl without a name, without a country, without parents — but a girl and not a boy.
I held my hand out to her.
She said, “Do not touch me.”
I asked why
“Because I am standing in a skin I’ve borrowed,’ she said.
I asked what else had she borrowed?
“The tongue I’m speaking with isn’t mine either,’ she said.
1 inquired if there was anything she could claim as her own?
“At times,” she said, “all I own, the only thing that I can hold on to for as long as I want, the one and only thing no one has come for so far, is, would you believe it, a shadow?” and she smiled.
“A shadow?” I repeated, in disbelief.
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