There was a great deal of movement that night, with Karin and another woman coming and going. Something was being prepared but he didn’t know what. Then, the following morning, the women made Misra lie on her back and they trampled all over her body As if that wasn’t enough, they made her sit up and be fumigated with cardamom and then improvised for her a suppository of cinnamon with myrrh. After which, they made her take concoctions which, among other things, included the broth of roots and shrubs which were known to have abortifacient powers. And as if this wasn’t sufficient, one of the women inserted a metallic rod into her insides and Misra made a most frightening noise.
Misra convalesced for about a week. She was weak. What a kind woman Karin was, he used to think, ploughing the space between a husband who lay on his back from before Askar was born, and Misra whose wounds were fresh and whose memory of the pain therefore most acute. Playful, although he was now old enough to run faster than her, Askar rode on her back as she went back and forth, ecstatic at having found a person as patient, kind and generous as she.
Now. Years later. In Mogadiscio. At Hilaal and Salaado’s.
And he saw a child crawling — and he could see this from a slight distance. Then the child clambered to its feet and walked for a bit, its gait shaky, its legs infirm and wobbly; he walked for half a metre and fell on his bottom but got up instantly and fell again, this time forward; his mouth, when he turned to Askar, was marked with the earth it had struck. But he did not cry. He continued falling and rising, without ever getting tired, without hurting a muscle or breaking a bone. And someone’s voice (he couldn’t see the person — but the voice was a woman’s) said: “Children fall without ever coming to harm because some protecting angels lay themselves between the falling child and the concrete floor, serving as the mattress on to which athletes drop from great heights of record-breaking dreams,” And he remembered his physical instructor at school say to him recently: “Take care when you jump high, Askar. Yours is the age when you must account for every fall, lest you break a bone.”
His mind wandered — he watched with fascination a woman on “fours”, a woman crawling playfully towards the child, and, following lustily in the woman’s wake, there was a man. It didn’t matter to Askar if the child was theirs. This was not his concern. He asked himself a question: was this how Uncle Qorrax and then Aw-Adan first seduced Misra?
Imagine: a maid, wet to her elbows in the master’s muck, a maid who is on her fours, whose bottom is high and is spread out in a protruding manner. And the master comes from behind and he takes her. How many films in which maids were raped by their employers had he seen? Or a secretary by her boss? How many stories in which a slave is raped by her south-of-the-Dixon-line master had he watched? Did Aw-Adan make her read the Koran and, while she was busy deciphering the mysteries of the Word, did he insert his in? Many stories of Ethiopian atrocities invaded his thoughts. And not in all of them were the raped women maids, mistresses or whores. In all of them, man was “taker”, the woman the victim. “Why, if she isn’t your mother, your sister or your wife, a woman is a whore,” said a classmate of his. How terribly chauvinistic, thought Askar. Women were victims in all the stories he could think of. Misra. Shahrawello. And even Karin. The soul is a woman — victimized, sinned against, abused.
Karin was such a dedicated soul and he trusted the truth of all that she had told him about Misra, trusted the truth of Misra’s surrendering her body in order to save her soul — giving in ransom the warrior’s faith in her integrity
IV
Why did she incestuously surrender the body he knew better than he knew his own? For weeks, his mind felt numbed at the idea that he had been part of the body which had been given away incestuously “How much of a child’s body or a woman’s for that matter, can be said to be his or her own?” he asked Uncle Hilaal. “Precious little,” had responded Hilaal. But even this did not damp down the fire of disgust burning inside of him. Uncle Hilaal wondered if, in Askar’s opinion, Misra’s betrayal was comparable to a woman who was unfaithful to a husband? No, no. It was more like a mother who brought dishonour upon the head of her child — right in the child’s presence. What is in surrendering a body that is not one’s own? But what soul is there that’s worth saving? The noon was high and the sun climbed the steps of time.
“Possibly, Karin is not telling the truth,” said Salaado.
Askar retorted, “Possibly she is.”
“And maybe you didn’t know Misra that well,” suggested Salaado.
Askar nodded.
“And wars kill friendships in the same way as they bring into being other forms of trust and interdependence, don’t you agree, Hilaal? Don’t you agree, Askar?” said Salaado.
Hilaal, not reacting to what Salaado had said, nodded his head in silence.
“True, they were once the world’s best friends. To each other. And to me, too,” said Askar.
“Well, there you are,” said Salaado.
A question imposed itself on Askar’s mind: how much of a man’s body can be said to be his own? A man is a master, a part of him said, he is a master of his own body
Hilaal then said, “Hadn’t he better ask her to account for her life before he totally condemns her? Hadn’t he? She, who was once his only world?”
In silence, Askar’s mind continued along the same lines as Hilaal’s thoughts — Misra, who was his only world, the content and source of his secrets, the only one whom he trusted and in whom he confided; she whose arm, large as anything he had touched or seen, would extend upwards and with short fingers point at the heavens, naming it; the same fingers which cleaned his face or dried his nostrils and had the agility to point subsequently at the earth on which she sat, her thoughts, like a pendulum, going from the sky (God’s abode?) and the earth (feeder of man?) and then himself or herself. It was she from whom he learnt how to locate and name things and people, she who helped him place himself at the centre of a world — her own!
“Where is the sky?” she would ask him.
He would point at it.
“And the earth, where is the earth?”
And he would point at her.
“The earth, I said, where is the earth?”
Only after a number of attempts would he get it right. Then Mother, where is Mother Misra? And she would point herself out, her short finger placed between her breasts, saying “This is I”. For years, he had had enormous difficulties pronouncing his Somali gutturals correctly, since he learnt these wrongly from her; for years, he mispronounced the first letters of the words in Somali for “sky” and “earth”—just like she did; for years, too, he remembered her favourite phrase: “You are on your own!” She used this when she was fed up with him because he wouldn’t stop crying or wouldn’t sleep and she used this very shibboleth as an avant-courier of unhappy tidings. And the world, because she decided to walk out of it, would disintegrate right in front of him and he would, faithful to the formula, burst into a cry the instant she walked out of his sight, out of his world, and into one he couldn’t get to, a world whose code of conduct he was not familiar with. At times, she would step out and hide behind the first available wall and listen to him express himself via a fit of weeping, his cheeks sooty with tear-stains, his heels painful from pounding them on the paved floor; on occasion, she would return after a long absence when he had tired and fallen asleep; on other occasions, she would come back to him playfully and teasingly, and she would tickle him and kiss him and hold him tightly to herself, speaking to him endearingly, calling him “my man”, addressing him as “my love”.