“I have one question to answer before I set foot out of this house,” said Askar. He fell silent and couldn’t help feeling they were studying his movements with some concern.
Salaado said, “What is the question?”
“Who is Askar?”
The question made sense to its audience a minute or so later. No one said or did anything for a long time, as though in deference to the question which had been posed. In any case, there fell the kind of silence a coffin imposes upon those whom it encounters during its journey to the cemetery. And the sun entered the room they were in, in silence, then a slight breeze, smelling of the sea, entered in its wake, whereupon the dust and the rays merged, like ideas, and these were, like faces bright with smiles, reflected in the mirror. Askar was about to break the silence when he noticed that clouds, dark as migrating shadows, swooped down upon the rays of dust in the mirror, like vultures going for a meaty catch. Tagged on to the tail-end of the clouds, travelling at the speed of a vehicle being towed, the moon. Then …!
Then two other shadows fell across and obliterated the clouds and Askar was in no doubt that the men, to whom these belonged, one tall and ugly, the other short and handsome, were in police uniform. It was the tall one who spoke first. He said, “Which of you,” looking from Hilaal to Askar, “answers to the name of Askar?”
There was no time to indulge in metaphysical evasions, no time to consider the rhetorical aspects of one’s answering to a name. Without looking at Hilaal or Salaado, whose lips were already astir with prayers, Askar: “It is I.” And after a pause, “Why?”
It was the short one’s turn to speak. He said, “We are from the police station nearby, Giardino. We have questions to put to you. Please come with us.”
Hilaal moved nearer the short constable. He asked, “What questions? And in what connection, pray?”
The tall one, who was probably senior in rank and age, said, “Do the names Misrat, Aw-Adan, Qorrax and Karin mean anything to Askar? This is the question,” and he went nearer Hilaal. “I suppose you are Hilaal and that is Salaado?”
Everyone was quiet. In the meantime, the short constable bent down (maybe to lace his boots) but Askar felt as if the man was digging out of the earth roots of shadows, short as shrubs. The constable’s body shot up suddenly, his back straightened and the room was awash with sunshine. Hilaal said, his voice thin and tense, “What are we waiting for? Let’s go.”
Giardino was half a kilometre away and they walked, Askar, Hilaal and Salaado ahead, and following them, like jailers prisoners, the two police officers. Above them, an umbrella of clouds, reassuring as haloes, and on their faces, shadows long and crooked like question marks. The tall constable, who took upon himself to lead the last ten metres of the walk, wore an anklet of shadows round his feet, treading on stirred memories of (Askar’s) dust. They entered the station in silence.
A third police constable, sitting behind a typewriter, asked Askar, “What is your name?”
“Askar Cali-Xamari.”
And that was how it began — the story of (Misra/Misrat/Masarat and) Askar. First, he told it plainly and without embellishment, answering the police officer’s questions; then he told it to men in gowns, men resembling ravens with white skulls. And time grew on Askar’s face, as he told the story yet again, time grew like a tree, with more branches and far more falling leaves than the tree which is on the face of the moon. In the process, he became the defendant. He was, at one and the same time, the plaintiff and the juror. Finally, allowing for his different personae to act as judge, as audience and as witness, Askar told it to himself.