“It was salty and stagnant,” you said.
“Do you remember anything else?” he asked.
Here again the dream stood between you and Uncle Hilaal and you chose to wrap yourself with it and not share it with anyone else — not even him. He waited, expecting you would answer his question. Indeed, he was surprised when you said that you were thirsty.
He got you a cold glass of water. As you drank, you apologized saying: “I’m thirsty as the earth. I could drink an oceanfiil of water.” He returned with a jugful of cold water. Your thirst was insatiable. Anyway, you were justifiably relieved when, of necessity, the subject had to be changed — from your dream to your thirst.
IV
Uncle Hilaal’s saying that your life was “an answer to a fictive riddle asking a factual puzzle” when you refused to talk to him, take walks with him and Salaado, his wife, or eat anything save bread and water and occasionally a glass of something whilst they weren’t looking — your uncle’s statement set into motion a cavalcade of memories, each of which rode, as if it were a wave, on the bigger crest ahead of it. And, in no time, you managed to discrete the dreamed anecdote from the one really lived and personally experienced, you managed to separate them so they didn’t overlap, so they didn’t go over the same ground, telling the same story with a repetitiveness which bored one. You ran the whole course, without once looking back to see who had dropped and who hadn’t. Misra, too, stayed the course, always within view, always there — motherly, lovely and good. Others were wicked. Not she. She was your “mother”. Hence, she was very good.
And now! A he-dog was copulating with a bitch. Then you saw a little boy come out of a house and, immediately behind him, a woman — most probably his mother — calling him back. The boy was apparently very angry and was desperately throwing pebbles at the copulating dogs. He didn’t stop pelting pebbles at the mating dogs, although none hit his target. The woman finally managed to hold the little boy’s arm suggesting that he restrain himself, asking, “But what’s got into your head?”
“But they shouldn’t copulate,” said the little boy, barely eight. “They shouldn’t copulate, they shouldn’t copulate, they shouldn’t copulate. These two dogs shouldn’t copulate,” he half-shouted.
The woman bent down and wiped away his tears with the edge of her guntiino-robe. Then she noticed the sticky, white after-sleep fluid in his left eye. She wet the cleaner edge of her robe by licking it and she applied her saliva caringly. The boy was calm. She asked, “But why not?” seeing the dogs unlocked and playful.
“Why not? Because the bitch is his own mother,” he answered.
The woman, taking his hand with a view to persuading him to go with her back into the house, said, “I know!”
“You know the bitch is his mother?” he said, in disbelief.
She said, “Yes, I do.”
“And that they shouldn’t copulate?”
He wouldn’t go with her until she answered his challenge. He hid both his hands behind his back, his look defiant, his reason enraged, his body intent on fighting, if need be, for what he understood to be morally wrong.
“It is different with animals,” said the woman.
(Perhaps the woman didn’t know, and neither could you have known then, that the young man had been taught at school that human beings were animals, too — rational beings, endowed with the power of speech — a higher animal, if you like, the teacher had said.)
“Look,” he was saying, pointing his finger at the dogs which were locked in incestuous fornication, “Look at them doing it again, right in front of us, lower animals that they are,” and he went and kicked at them, but they wouldn’t unlock He turned after a while, half in tears, to his mother and appealed, “Mother, do something. Please, Mother, do something. Don’t let them do it.”
The woman received her son’s appeal in a mixture of good humour and serious intent. First, she chased away the dogs, who limped away, still locked in love, then she picked up her son and kissed him, saying: “You are impossible, my dear. You’re impossible,”
And he was saying, “Lower animals, dogs and bitches.”
V
You were young again, you were in Kallafo again, remembering an anecdote involving a man originally from Aden, the Democratic Republic of Southern Yemen, a man on whose lap had been found, when surprised by unannounced visitors, a hen. You didn’t quite comprehend the implications of the scandal. The old Adenese had been one of your favourite old men and he was a neighbour and you were fond of the chocolates he presented you with whenever you happened to have called on him. But you were often told not to go to his house, alone. You were often told not to accept his gifts — ever. You were warned against keeping his company (“A most evil company!” had said Aw-Adan). You were warned against the man’s wicked ways. And yet you went, like many other young boys of your age, and you played in his spacious yard, you plucked lemon and other fruits and ate of his garden what pleased you most. You slept, exhausted, in the shade of his trees. You swam in the pond of his irrigation scheme. You watched him, strong and muscular for a man of his age, start his engine or switch it off; you watched him with great admiration, lean and tense, loving and lovable.
“But what was he up to,” you asked, “with a hen on his lap, with plucked feathers on his naked thigh? What was he up to? Will somebody kindly tell me?” you appealed.
Misra said, “He was up to no good, that wicked Adenese.” “What foul things was this Adenese up to?” you asked.
Misra was insistent that you were spared this old bachelor’s wicked involvements with young boys: how he used to lure them with chocolate and other gifts; how he used to run an open house to which the urchins of Kallafo as well as other boys from the well-to-do would find their way; and how he would entice one of the small boys into his bedroom every now and then. You were very upset at learning what the Adenese had done, so upset you took ill. You had a temperature. And when Aw-Adan came with a suppository, you suspected him of vicious intentions. You cried and cried and cried and you wished you had never known the Adenese, had never been so sick you would need a suppository. Indeed, you were too shocked to allow one of your selves to stand out from the others, with a view to studying the activities, thoughts of your primary self. You would have nothing whatsoever to do with an Adenese, you said to yourself, never would you befriend any Adenese, you thought to yourself, never would you trust them — ever. And it was only then that remarks made by Misra or Aw-Adan began to make sense, remarks which were to do with “respect for human dignity. You forgot who it was, precisely, that had made the remark following the scandalous Adenese’s copulating with a hen — and therefore didn’t know how to interpret it. You then asked Misra: “Am I to understand that any person who has respect for human dignity does not copulate with a beast? Or am I to understand that any elderly bachelor with respect for human dignity doesn’t rape boys?”
She was on her knees, scrubbing the floor. Her clothes were filthy, her hands soaped, her headscarf unknotted, her knees squarely on the wet floor and her elbows covered with the brown mixture of dirt and sweat. And she looked at you, not yet seven, you, who stood as men do, clean and washed and yet unperturbed by the unclean job which must be done by women; you who stood in the doorway, with your back to the sun which was in her eyes, speaking of “human dignity” as though the phrase meant nothing to you personally. She rose to her feet. Her look went past you, dwelling, for a moment, on the upturned chairs, the dismantled bed and the mattress standing against a wall in the courtyard; then her quizzical look rested, for a while, on you and her lips moved, mumbling something inaudible to you. Maybe she was repeating to herself the phrase “respect for human dignity”, you thought, or maybe the many-stranded views of Misra were taking shape, and, you thought when at last she spoke, you would have a response to your question. But the silence was too painful to bear and the world you and Misra inhabited was not one in which you could merely pay lip service to lofty meaningless phrases like “respect for human dignity”. It was as though her silence was saying that you should take an objective, honourable look at yourself as a man and then at the position of women in your society before using phrases that were loaded with male hypocrisy