Then another shell fell — this time nearer where she was standing. And, at the wake of the explosion, when again she had managed to stand to her feet, both of them saw before them a crowd, brown as mud — a crowd of women and children armed with pangas, sticks and machetes, a crowd that was moving in the direction of the hill where the enemy had fired from. A spokeswoman of the crowd promised they would take “Government Hill”. Askar felt he had to join, to give victory an indispensable hand.
And he ran after the crowd.
V
The following day Noon.
“Misra, where precisely is Somalia?” he asked suddenly
She was pulling at a chicken’s guts, a chicken she had just beheaded. She stopped and stared at him, not knowing what to say Her forehead wrinkled with concentration, like somebody who was trying to remember where he was. Then: “Haven’t you seen it on the map?” she said, holding her bloodstained hands away from her dress.
“A map? What map?”
“Go look it up. You seem happily engrossed in it.”
He surprised her; he admitted in a sad voice: “No one has ever explained how to read maps, you see, and I have difficulty deciphering all the messages.”
She looked away from him and at the decapitated chicken. She wished she could get on with her plucking of the fowl’s feathers (Askar thought of the chicken’s blood as being exceptionally red — not dark red as he expected) and she said: “If you go east, you’ll end up in Somalia.”
Offended, he said, “I know that.”
“What don’t you know then? Why don’t you let me get on with what I am doing? Don’t you realize there is little time left for me to prepare a decent meal?”
He bent down and picked up a feather flying away into the cosmic infinitude. He looked at it, studying it as though under a microscope, one among a hundred other feathers joining the unbound universe. Then he looked at the white meat of the chicken — goose-pimpled, dead and headless, the fowl lay where Misra had dropped it, in a huge bowl. Did it have a soul? Did it have a brain? He remembered testing its motherly instinct when he threatened the lives of its chicks. It attacked, its wings open in combat readiness and its rage clucking in consonants of maternal protectiveness. Askar had run away for his own life. From a hen. He was glad none of the boys saw him run away
From then on, whenever he entered Karin’s compound, he sus-’ pected that the mother hen, or the others, now as tall as they were ever likely to grow, eyed him menacingly, goose-stepping sideways as if only their preparedness for a fall-frontal attack, and together, might save them from his mischievous threats. Poor hen — dead. Dead because it was killed to celebrate a victory — and the fact (this was in the air) that Askar might be leaving for Mogadiscio. After all, Uncle Qorrax said he would come and speak with him.
Then, something attracted his attention. Misra had laid the plucked chicken on its side and was pulling at its guts, when he noticed an egg — whole, as yet unhatched, and, he thought, indifferent to the goings-on outside its own complete universe. An egg — oval-shaped as the universe — with a life of its own and an undiscovered future. “Don’t touch it, Misra,” he ordered.
She looked at him in wonderment. “This?” she said, touching it.
“Don’t hurt it,” he said.
She gave it to him — slowly but delicately. She handed the egg to him with the same care that she might have offered the world to him. And he received it with absolute reverence, with both hands joined together as if in prayer. Something warned him to be careful and not to drop it. It was warm. He believed life quivered within it as he closed his hands on it, not tightly, but gently. Reluctantly, he entered into a dialogue with himself. Was there no similarity between the egg and his own beginnings? In the corpse of a hen, there lay another potential life — just as he lay in his dead mother — but alive. He was glad the egg was salvaged out of the dead hen.
Misra was saying: “I thought you wanted me to tell you where ‘Somalia’ is?”
Askar nodded his head.
“There,’ she said, pointing with her blood-soiled index finger.
He repeated the question, “Where?” apparendy because he had been staring at the index finger, which was dripping with blood, and hadn’t taken note of the direction in which she pointed. “Where?”
Her “There”, this second time, was so suddenly spoken, Askar could Ve sworn “Somalia” was the name of a person, perhaps a friend of hers, somebody who might be invited to partake of the meal she was preparing. “That’s Somalia,” she added. “Easterly.”
He thought he heard someone’s footsteps coming from the easterly direction — he looked, and there was Karin. She had come with an empty bowl. Today, she was in near rags but charming-looking, and smiling too, and talking and friendly, and had the look of somebody who wanted something. She said, “Give us some of God’s charity and you’ll be blessed forever.”
Askar said, “The meat is yours, the egg is mine.”
Karin, puzzled, looked at Misra. “What’s he talking about?”
“Ask him,’ she said.
By the time Karin was ready to ask him a question, he was gone.
Three days later. Another festive occasion. The three of them: Karin, Misra and Askar. Somebody had delivered a large consignment of raw meat, a gift from Uncle Qorrax. Karin was sitting apart and seemed to be having difficulty determining in which direction the wind was blowing. She appeared littler, barely a girl in her teens. This was how she looked to Askar, who saw her go closer to the earth as if she were listening for a secret. He thought of a beetle, which, sensing that an unidentified shadow might strike it dead, waits, and while doing so, curls up, making itself smaller, leaving no part of it exposed other than its wing-cases hard as a turtle’s back — and like a turtle, it is able to remove its head and neck out of danger: that’s it! “What are you doing, Karin?” said Misra.
“Thinking. Thinking of asking you to divine,” she said.
“What with?”
“Meat.”
She thought for a minute. “I've used meat only once. Water, yes, and blood. It’s difficult to divine with meat. Meat is short-lived, there is something temporary about meat in hot climates.”
Misra gently stroked the entrails and he could hear the groan of an intestine, the moan of a bladder. She washed the meat. Then she held a handful of it and stared at it for a long time. She fell into, and dwelled in, a state of suspense. Her posture was that of someone praying, her silence concentrated like a treasure. Then she began speaking words belonging to a language group neither Karin nor Askar had ever heard of before and she repeated and repeated the mantras of her invocation. She uttered a shibboleth, or what must have been a test word, and looked happy like somebody who has found a lost friend. She spoke slowly this time. Her voice — ripples (as of water) in the wake of other ripples, each following waves of more ripples falling upon further ripples. And each of her incantatory phrases was shapely like predictions that would come true. Finally, she put the meat back in the bowl.
And the meat quivered.
And Askar watched her stare at the fatty portion of the meat, as though she were reading the future in a palm — which she probably was. And the future trembled, red like the season’s flower in bloom, living and yet dead: the meat. And the future-in-the-meat, whatever its colour, whatever its own future, beckoned to Misra’s questioning mind — and her palms, from which she was reading the future, were bloody What did that mean? Karin asked: “Tell us what you've seen, Misra. Please.”