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?”