There was a pause.
“And you won’t go?” he said.
Her hand stopped stirring the water whose temperature she was testing. She was reduced to a stare — speechless. He said to himself, “Maybe this is what death looks like — Misra sitting, speechless and staring, with her hand stuck in a bucket fall of lukewarm water, the dust round her unstirred, the lips of her mouth forming and unforming a roguish smile — maybe this is what death looks like. And not what I saw last night — the back of a woman’s head, a hand flung aside, a nail cut and then discarded.”
She was saying, “Are you sending me away, Askar?”
“Not ahead of myself, no,”
Again she smiled rather mischievously, reminding herself that Askar was not yet eight and that here he was behaving as though he were a man and she a creature of his own invention. She declined to comment on what was going on between them, she declined to go into the same ring as he, she bowed out. However disreputable, she believed she was the one who made him who he was, she was the one who brought him up. She changed the mood of the exchange, changed the subject. Searching for his hand, she said, “Come.”
He stood away, his hands hidden behind him. “Where?”
“Come,” she said, half rising to take grip of his hand. “Let me give your body a good scrubbing which is what it needs most. And then we’ll go for a walk and, if you wish, watch the Ethiopian men send their women and children away to highland safety”
He was rudely noisy, shouting, “Don’t you touch me.”
“Fm sorry,” she said, taken aback.
It was then that the thought that he was now a man and didn’t want to be helped to wash impressed itself upon her mind. She would have to make an auspicious move, one which would make him relax until she poured the first canful of water on his head, and until the water calmed his nerves. His determined voice of defiance resounded through her body — and she had to wait for a long while before she was able to say anything. Then, “Do you want to bathe yourself?” she asked, keeping her distance.
And saw (the thought took a long time to mature) how methodically “dirtied” he had been — as if he played rough with boys of his age and wrestled and somersaulted into and out of challenging hurdles. He didn’t look helplessly dirty — if anything, he was deliberately dirty. This thought descended on her like a revelation. She wondered where he had been — and with whom. She suspected he wouldn’t tell her, but thinking she wouldn’t lose anything anyway, she asked: “Where have you been?”
He wouldn’t tell her.
“Why won’t you tell me where you’ve been?”
He behaved like one who had a secret to withhold.
“You’ll not tell me?”
He shook his head, “No.”
With harrowing clarity, she saw what he was after — to tell her he would go where he pleased, tell her that he would roam in the territory of his pleasure, alone, and at any rate without her help, wash when he decided he wanted. She reasoned: the world is reduced to chaos; there’s a war on; boys, because of this chaotic situation, have suddenly become men and refuse to be mothered.
And then, with frightening suddenness, he said, “Not only can I wash if I choose to, but I can kill; and not only can I kill but I can also defend myself against my enemy.”
The fierceness with which he spoke the words “I can kill” alarmed her. She stiffened, her heart missed a beat, then drummed faster, beating noisily in the caged rib of her seemingly discreet reaction. She appeared uneasy and stood up taller, higher, supporting her weight on the tip of her toes, like one who is looking over the edge of a cliff. “Kill? Kill whom?”
He wouldn’t say, just as he wouldn’t tell her that he was a member of a small body of young men who trained together as guerrillas and who rolled on the dirt as they felled one another with mock blows, issuing, as they dropped to the ground, a most heinous kung-fu cry, or some such like. What mattered, in the end, was you killed your enemy, said these young men to one another. The idea to train with these boys wasn’t his, but the boy who had been raped by the Adenese — who proved to be the toughest, not least because he had something to fight against and he had in him a bitter contempt for everybody in this or any other world. It was he, and not Askar, who made a hole in a thinly mud-plastered wall which enabled the body of boys to take a quieter look at the men (believed to be away at the war front) who trained to kill and, through the hole in the wall, the boys imbibed an ideology embodied in the dream they saw as their own, the dream they envisioned as their common future: warriors of a people fighting to liberate their country from colonial oppression. Nor would he tell her of his friends’ suspicious finger pointing in her direction. Was she not from the Highlands? they said. How could she be trusted? They most insistently repeated their suspicious worries that she might speak, might pass on the information. It bothered him greatly that he couldn’t share with her the joy of his secrets; it pained him that he had to be distrustful of her motives when she probed into his affairs, asking him where he had been and with whom. “It was as if you were born with a deformity that you had to carry with you everywhere you went,” he said to the boy whom the Adenese had raped. Indeed, who better could he say this to, than to another boy who carried on his head another shame of another kind? “Yes, I understand,” said the “disgraced” boy. Askar said to himself now, “I will not allow her to wash the dirt my body has accumulated when training to kill my people’s enemy.”
Whereas she was saying, “There are a number of blind spots the body of a human has. We may not know of them until we are self-conscious; we may not sense how helpless we are until we submit ourselves to other hands. A child’s body’s blind spots are far too many to count — the small of the back, the back of the neck, the dirt in the groin, the filth on either the left or the right of the lower reaches of the bottom. A mother sees them all, she soaps them all and, in the end, washes them clean.” She was going nearer him and he was withdrawing and she was saying, “They are difficult to live with, these blind spots, these blind curves in one’s body, the curtained parts of one’s body, the never-seen, never-visible-unless-with-the-assistance-of-a-mirror parts — and here I am thinking of the skull — or the difficult-to-see parts — and here I am thinking about… I am thinking about…,” and speaking and moving in his direction and he was retreating and was about to stumble backwards into the tree planted the day he himself was born, his blind spot, that is his back, ahead of the rest of his body, when … a bomb fell — and it fell almost between them, although nearer where he was standing — and it separated them.
Panic gripped her throat: and she couldn’t speak or shout but lay on the ground, inert, covered in dust — once the noise died down and the shower of dust began to settle. He? He was — he was there, more or less dusted, and his eyes were two spots of brightness which focused on their surroundings and it seemed as though he mobilized his alert mind to determine where the shelling had come from.
“Are you all right?” she managed to say after a long silence.
He looked at her — she appeared like one who had just risen from the dead.
Still defiant, he said, “Who do you take me for?”
She had gone browner with dust and her headscarf had fallen off, exposing a most unruly head, as ugly as the knotted, uncombed curls. She walked away in a defiant way — defiant and indifferent as to what might happen, impervious to what he thought or did, or whether a shower of shells fell on her head, or anyone else’s head.
“It’s worthwhile your considering giving yourself a good scrubbing. Maybe the water is still lukewarm and you surely need a wash and something that will keep your soul active and alive and your body clean,” he said.