Maps Read Free Page A

mystery. But who was she really? To you, she was the cosmos and hers was the body of ideas upon which your growing mind nourished. It didn’t matter in the least whether she came from upper Ethiopia or not, neither did it matter in the least if she had been abducted by a warrior from one of the clans north of yours when she was seven. Maidservant or no, she meant the world to you. Also, you believed that no one knew her as well as you did, no one needed her as much as you and nobody studied the changes in her moods as often as you. In short, you missed her immensely when she wasn’t with you. And so, with a self-abandon many began to associate with you, you cried and cried until she was brought to you. With a similar self-surrender, you displayed the pleasure of her company. Which was what made some say that she had bewitched you.
    She taught you how best you should make use of your own body. She helped you leam to wash it, she assisted you in watching it grow, like the day’s shadow, from the shortest to the longest purposelessness of an hour; she familiarized you with the limitations of your own body. When it came to your soul, when it came to how to help your brain develop, she said she couldn’t trust herself to deal with that satisfactorily. Not then, anyway. Was this why she went and sought Aw-Adan’s help?
    Aw-Adan and you didn’t take to each other right from your first encounter. You didn’t like the way he out-stared you, nor did you like him when Misra paid him all her attention, leaving you more or less to yourself. He commented on the look in your eyes: a look he described as “wicked and satanic”. To defend you, she described the look in your eyes as “adulted”. Aw-Adan did not appear at all convinced. Then she went on to say, “To have met death when not quite a being, perhaps this explains why he exists primarily in the look in his eyes. Perhaps his stars have conferred upon him the fortune of holding simultaneously multiple citizenships of different kingdoms: that of the living and that of the dead; not to mention that of being an infant and an adult at the same time.” Disappointed with her explanation, Aw-Adan went away, promising he would never see her again.
    But he came back. He was in love with her—or so she believed. And as usual, he couldn’t resist commenting upon the fact that she had organized her life around you: you were “her time” as he put it; for she awoke, first thing in the morning, not to say her prayers but to attend to your needs. And what was she to you? To you, said Aw-Adan, she was your “space”: you moved about her body in the manner an insect crawls up a wall, even-legged, sure-footed and confident. And he continued, “Allah is the space and time of all Muslims, but not to you, Misra, Askar is.” He didn’t see anything wrong in what he said. But then how could he? He was jealous.
    In the unEdenic universe into which you were cast by your stars, you were not content, like any intelligent being, with the small world of darkness you opened your eyes on. You behaved as though you had to find and
touch
the world outside of yourself, and this you did in order to be reassured of a given continuity. “He behaves,” said Misra to Aw-Adan, her confidant, one night when the three of you were in bed and the priest was not in his foulest of moods, “Askar behaves as if he feels lost unless his outstretched hands bring back to his acute senses the reassuring message that I am
touchably
there. He cannot imagine a world without my reassuring self.”
    â€œWhat am I to do then? Suggest something,” said Aw-Adan.
    â€œBe as accommodating to me as I am to him,” she said.
    â€œYou are insane,” he said.
    â€œAnd you jealous,” she said.
    â€œYou are never alone,” complained Aw-Adan, who wanted her to himself. “I see you with him all the time, so much so that I