Misra is here, in Mogadiscio, he read the note again.
Does that mean that I will have to touch her, kiss her, hug her to myself and hold her in my embrace? he asked himself. He wondered to himself how loathsome any physical contact with someone one doesn’t love any more turns into; when the person to be touched, to be kissed, to be hugged, is now hated. Why is it that we love touching, animallike, the one we adore? Why do we shun contact when this very person becomes the one we hate most? The body speaks, the soul obeys — is that not so? The body refuses to make contact with a love gone senselessly numb — is that not so? But to touch Misra, to kiss her, to hug a woman who has betrayed one’s trust — here in Mogadiscio — when one is to make a decisive decision such as whether or not one should join the Liberation Front or choose a career in the world of academia? Had he not better write to the Front intimating his immense wish to join its ranks? That way he would wash clean his conscience — and live at peace with it. Neither the members of the panel nor Uncle Hilaal would know of the connection, and his going before them would undo the fetters tightening on his conscience. If killed when defending his country, he would die a young man at peace with his soul — and therefore a martyr.
And if he joined the university? It worried him that, at a university, he was likely to indulge his thoughts in higher intellectual pursuits and that he might not think it worth his while to fight until death in order to liberate the semi-arid desert that was the Ogaden. He was sure, in the camaraderie characteristic of the times in which he lived, that there would be a great many people who would dissuade him from dying for a nationalistic cause, such as the Ogaden people’s. Many Somalis, he knew, were inarticulate with rage whenever the argument they put forward was challenged. Wouldn’t a university education equip him with better and more convincing reasons, wouldn’t it provide him with the economic, political and cultural rationalizations, wouldn’t he be in a better position to argue more sophisticatedly? He would, perhaps, write a book on the history of the Ogaden and document his findings with background materials got from the oral traditions of the inhabitants. So would he take the gun? Or would he resort to, and invest his powers in, the pen?
Once in Mogadiscio, Misra was not likely to return to the scene of her treason. Her past, now that it was dishonoured, as was her name, would come before her, naked like a child. But instead of touching and fondling her newly found child, Misra would shun contact with it. She would double up with guilt, he hoped, and would suffer from the cramps of disgrace. The marrow in the cavities of her bones, he hoped, would congeal, due to the chill of exposure. Cursed she would remain, he prayed, and unforgivable too. May the tendons of her neck snap, he prayed to God, as should every traitor’s neck and may her blood, startled, rush to her eyes and blind her. May her mucus dry and may the pain this caused, in the end, bring about her death. May the earth reject her, may the heavens refuse to grant her an audience. If and only if she had betrayed!
It pained him to remember that he had once shared his life with her, it made him feel embarrassed to recall that he had been so close to her once, that he had been proud of her. Once she upheld him, like water — she lifted him up and threw him, as though she were a wave followed by another and another and another. He tasted the salt in her tears, he smelt of her menstruation. He called her “Mother” years ago. Could he undo all the ties which held them together? Could he, like time, sever all their links? Oh, how he wished he could hang “time” on a peg like a wet cloth, and how he wished it wouldn’t stop raining so the cloth would not dry; yes, how he wished he could suspend “time” so he would not grow up to be a man — a man on his own, and to whom Misra would say, “You are on your own!” No. As a child, he never wanted to be on his own, never wanted to be alone, for he couldn’t find himself inside of himself, only in others, preferably adults like Misra and Aw-Adan, who would analyse situations and tell him things he might never have known about himself if not informed by their experience. Misra’s “Your are on your own!” reeked of the same vindictive-ness as a man’s throwing out of the house a pet he kept and fed for years, a pet expected to fend for itself. One morning, when he had wet the bed the previous night, she spoke the formula shibboleth “You are on your own” (this was he when he was a little under five-and-a-half years old) and made as if to go out.
“Wait, wait, Misra,” he said.
The voice sounded grown-up to her and she did as told. Also, she saw that he had wrapped her shamma-shawl round his shoulders, looking very much like a woman; and he started saying: “When I grow up and I become a man…”, purporting, as it were, to speak for a long time, although he suddenly stopped, since he suspected she might not have noticed what he had wrapped round his shoulders.
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…!