Maps (14 page)

A week later, the following:

Late one afternoon, the Archangel of Death called at Karin's place as though he had been invited to tea, just as you were invited to partake of the festive atmosphere, have a cake or two and biscuits too—and his share of the flowing conversation. When the opportunity presented itself, the Archangel whispered something discreetly in Karin's old man's ear, saying (you were told afterwards) that he, the Archangel, would return in precisely seven hours. So, would the old man finish, in elegance, all he had planned to do—wash, pray, say a few devotions, make a number of wishes, give his
dardaaran
to his Karin and, if it pleased him, tell her that time was up? In retrospect, you recall that the old man kept giving furtive glances to a timepiece by his mattress on the floor, rather like somebody who didn't want to miss an important appointment. Together with Misra and Karin, you were making joyful noises and nothing seemed to be amiss. It was the placid look in the old man's eyes that said to you that something was taking place, but you didn't know what. First, Karin looked at you and then Misra and there fell the kind of silence which precedes an event of great significance. Somehow, Misra and you sensed your presence was standing in the way of Karin and her husband's communicating a secret to each other. And so you left, leaving in your wake, you thought, a silence so profound you were sure a change of inestimable importance would occur in your lives.

Before midnight, the old man's leaf fell gently from the tree on the moon. It was a most gentle death. Hush. And the soft falling of the withered leaf didn't even tease the well of Karin's emotions, nor did it puncture the lacrymatory pockets. She didn't cry, didn't announce the departure of the old man's soul to anyone until the following morning. She stayed by him, keeping his death all to herself. She lay by him in reverent silence, he dead, she alive—but you couldn't have told the difference, so quiet was she beside him.

She washed him as she washed him every day of all the years that he had lain on his back. Alone, but not lonely, her hands white with soapy foam, her eyes tearlessly dry, her throat not at all teased with the convulsive wishes of moumfiilness, she moved back and forth and her hands washed and touched and felt a body she had known for years, the body of a man who had “possessed” her, a man who had given her love and children—and who, at times, made her hate herself. She married him when very young. She wasn't even fifteen. You might say she could've been his daughter. She was small and a woman, and he was muscular and shapely as a man, and was popularly nicknamed “Armadio”. He came one morning and made a downpayment for her. He went “somewhere” (he had a job to do, that was all he was willing to tell anyone) and returned, his going as mysterious as his returning. He wasn't a man for formalities, weddings and parental blessings. He shouldered her in the manner porters lift any weight. He spoke little, said little, the night he deflowered her. “I have a job to do,” he said, and she carried his child.

He gave her children. He gave her lots of space and silence and love, when there. But he disappeared every now and then, saying, “I have a job to perform”. One day, he came home to a woman who suspected him of being with other women. He didn't explain himself, didn't scold her when jealousy threw her into tantrums, even when she maliciously described him as “the man with a job to do”.

A month later, he called her into the bedroom before he parted on one of his mysterious missions and he did something he had never done before. He told her he might be away for a long period. He suggested she sell the house in which they were living and that she buy a smaller one, if, yes if, he didn't come home before the rains. He was most tender and he gave her money which he was sure she and the children would need. “But what job is taking you away from us?”

“Death might,” he said.

“Now what do I say to people when they ask me where you are? You are my husband, the father of my children, the man I've lived with and loved all these years. What am I to say?”

“Tell them I had a job to do.”

“I want to know more.”

He said, “Don't worry. I'll not allow death to take me away,” half-smiling, as though Death was the name of a woman with whom he was madly in love. “I'll come back, sooner or later.”

He didn't come home before the rains and not even after them. She received news of him over the wireless. Armadio was apparently a member of a cell of the Somali Youth League which was agitating for the reunification of all the Somali-speaking territories. He was the chairman of the cell under which fell the activities of the movement within the Ethiopia-administered Ogaden. He was caught when doing a job and ended up in one of Haile Selassie's many prisons. When she didn't hear from him, she sold the house and moved into a smaller one and, as told, did her job. It consisted of taking care of the children, sending them to school and making sure they all left for Mogadiscio, where it was safe to be a Somali and be proud of it, and where they would join cells from which to launch spearheads to open the way for a united Somalia. She stayed—and waited. She was sure he would come home. One day, he did. He was seen standing at her door. He looked tired, “like a man who had done a heavy load of a job”, she said. He didn't speak of his ordeals and his years in prison. He was carrying a holdall which was empty save for a portrait of Ernest Bevin.

She said, “Who is this man, Armadio?”

He answered, departing, for once, from his job-to-do formula, “He is the one British friend Somalis have.”

“How so?” she asked.

“He is the one powerful figure in British politics who has advocated the reunification of all the Somali-speaking territories.”

He stuck Bevin's portrait on the dung-plastered wall with the help of a couple of thumbtacks someone gave to him. And he spoke no more of jobs to do or places to go to. He fell unwell. He complained of acute pains in the spine, but whether he had been tortured in the Ethiopian prison, he wouldn't say; nor would he talk of what it was like to be in a dark room year after year, isolated from the rest of humankind, from his Karin and from his children.

One morning, he didn't get up to say his
subx-
prayers. “My back” he said. And from that moment on, he lay on his back, on a mattress on the floor. His wife washed him once daily—no, washed is not the right word. What she did was to wet a cloth a little bigger than a face towel in soapy water and run it all over his body, rubbing harder where it was hairier. For ablutionary purposes, it was he who performed it, whispering the right traditions and verses as she dipped the cloth in cleaner water, massaging the proper places himself. He prayed, lying on his back. He didn't go through the body-motions of
sujuuds
and
rukuucs
. To the suggestion that they consult a doctor, cost what it might, his response had been, “I have no more jobs to do.”

Bevin's portrait was transferred from the dung-plastered wall to a spot in the ceiling directly above his bed. Karin spoon-fed him, holding him by his nape with her left hand and wiping away whatever mess his mouth made with her right. She treated him as she might have treated a child—if she were blessed with a sickly one at her age—with knowing kindness. And when someone asked Armadio why he was still holding on to life, he said, “Unless I know there is a job for me to do, is there any point my going
there?
In the meantime. I'll wait for a word from Him.”

The word came. His last words, “No mourning for one who has done little for his country, his wife and his children. Promise, Karin. No mourning.”

She noticed there was a stain of blood on his mouth. She was trying to discover the cause, when he breathed his last. She promised, she, the living, promised to the dead, “No mourning”. But she couldn't find out the cause of the bloodstain on his mouth, and in the end gave it up.

And there was no mourning.

The old man lay, just as he had always lain in the room, on his back, on the floor. The only difference (and you noticed this) was that now he lay in state and would be buried. Also (since you and Misra were allowed to take a look at him before others came), you saw that there were bloodstains on his lips. You were assured that he had died a gentle death and that his soul parted with its user for so many decades—peacefully. As the mourners came from far and near, as the kettles sang a rosary of teas and blessings of the appropriate suras, you asked Misra, why the bloodstain on his mouth? She did not know.

The subject of death enabled you to return to your own beginnings, to the day when Misra found you with a mask of blood for a head—and a stare. You stole in on Armadio's corpse. Is this what Mother looked like when dead? Perhaps not. Death here was clean, you thought. An angel had prepared him for the moment. You had this thought, not in Karin's but in your compound, with your shadow falling across the one cast by the tree planted the same day as you were born.

“It wasn't clean, was it?” you wondered, springing upon Misra a question she wasn't in the least ready for. “It was blood and pain and struggle all the way to the end for the old man, wasn't it?”

“On the contrary,” she said.

“And my mother's death?”

“Come, come with me,” she said, and you obeyed.

And she walked the ground of her memory over again, with you beside her, repeating all she had told you before, word for word, telling you all she knew about your mother's death.

“My father, what do you know about him?”

“He died for a struggle, he died for a national cause.”

“My father had a job to do, did he?”

“That's correct.”

“And he died doing it?”

“That's correct.”

And when night fell and most of the mourners had gone, the two of you were joined by Karin. “Here is a gift from the old man,” said she, giving you the portrait of Ernest Bevin.

You accepted it with a great reverence that befits the memory of the old man you loved, and the British political figure for whom the old man held high admiration. “Do you know who this man is?” said Misra, pointing a finger at the portrait.

You said, “Ernest Bevin was a dream of a man for well-informed Somalis.”

I

T
here was nothing like sharing the robe the woman carrying you was wrapped in, nothing as warm, with the bodies, yours and hers, touching, oozing and sweating together—I naked and she not—and the rubbing together of the bodies producing itchy irritations, scratchy rashes and crotchy eruptions of skin. Then the quiet of the night would crawl in like an insect up one's back—ticklish and laughter-producing. The darkness of dusk would take over one's imagined sense of being: this time, like an insect bite so scratchy that you cannot think of anything else. And so, for years, I contemplated the world from the safe throne carved out of Misra's back, sleeping when I pleased, swinging from her back as a fruit the thorn which is its twin, making water when I had to and getting scolded for it; for years I viewed the world from a height slightly above that of a pigmy's head.

I seem to have remained a mere extension of Misra's body for years—you saw me when you set your eyes on her. I was part of the shadow she cast—in a sense, I was her extended self. I was, you might even say, the space surrounding the geography of her body. And she took me wherever she went. As a result of which, I became the invited guest to every meal she was offered, partaking of every generosity she was given. I was the overhearer and eavesdropper of every conversation she had—the first to know if she was in pain or no; the first to notice if she had her period. Which I could tell from the odour her body emitted, from the way she shuffled about, from the constant washing she undertook and from the fact that I would get spanked for the slightest noise and she would shout at me more often. Yes, I was the time Misra kept—she woke when I awoke, clocking the same number of sleeping hours as I had done, feeling unwell when I was taken ill. Now, if I were circumcised, I thought to myself, and I became a man, yes, if… ! What would become of our bodies' relationship? Surely I wouldn't remain an obvious extension of Misra's physicality? Surely, I could no longer be her third breast or her third leg? Perhaps she would put me down on the dusty ground to fend for myself, play by myself, and the relationship which the years had forged between our bodies would cease to exist. If seen alone by a neighbour, she wouldn't be asked to explain where I was. I wouldn't be the clothes she wore to a wedding party; I wouldn't be the bringer-about of conversations, of friendships, and because I wasn't with her, wouldn't be seen with her, no man would make advances to her using my presence as a safe ploy, saying something like, “Oh, what a good-looking boy”, pinching my cheeks, asking me my name, how old I was and so on and so forth, until he and Misra spoke to each other and exchanged addresses and agreed to meet again—but without me. In other words, I wouldn't remain the subject of conversations, when she was really the object of someone else's real interest.