Maps of the Soul

Chapter 2

ONE

It was a terrifying sight: the ground was covered in blood and strewn with beheaded corpses.

Your sixth sense had failed. You could only see and hear one thing: the steps of the executioner as he drew near you, heralding death, your head about to be cut off, like those of your companions who had met the same fate just minutes ago.

They had bound you and your companions by your hands and feet in iron chains that made your wrists and ankles bleed. They pushed you against a wall made of tree trunks held together by hemp rope and strips of monkey hide, which formed a fence around the wide dusty yard, into which the scorching sun beat mercilessly.

There were a number of huts scattered inside the yard, which the Abyssinian fighters had taken over as one of their military bases in the mountain hollow. The tree trunk you had been tied to had a protrusion that pressed hard against your back and its sharp tip thrusted into your back between your shoulder blades. All you could do to prevent it from stabbing unbearably between the vertebrae of your spine was to shift your body slightly, after which the protrusion settled somewhere on your right shoulder causing you merely immense pain. You suffered and cried in silence.

A tall n***o emerged from the nearest of the huts reserved for the guards’ use. His emaciated body seemed hollowed out, as though he were a skeleton. He was naked save for a wrap, which was mottled like a tiger’s skin and concealed his genitals. His teeth shone brilliantly in the sunlight, big, white. There were small spaces between each tooth, making them look like the prongs of a pitchfork.

He stood examining the prisoners with an imbecilic expression on his face, before moving with quick steps, pacing in front of everyone, scrutinizing their faces more closely, one after the other, his eyes narrowing. His grotesque mouth remained gaping in lustful astonishment, as though in disbelief couldn’t that so many enemy soldiers had fallen into his hands so that he might do with them as he pleased.

You were with a group of recruits from the Italian army, although the only Italian among you was the regiment commander, while the rest were Somalis, Eritreans, and Abyssinians, except for two Libyans. The n***o chose to stop in front of a prisoner of his own nationality, whom he seemed to know. Perhaps the prisoner had fought alongside him before he joined the invading army. A hopeful, pleading smile lit up the prisoner’s face as he uttered the name of his old companion in a choked, servile tone, “Sanko”.

The only response Sanko gave, however, was to spit in the beseeching face. The humiliated man was unable to wipe the spit from his face because his hands were bound. After completing his round of inspection, Sanko stood at the head of the line of prisoners and began to laugh hysterically, without any apparent reason, and without any of the prisoners making a sound. The only noise that followed was the buzzing of the big green flies that had settled in swarms on the faces and bodies of the prisoners. No one could shoo them away, because of the chains of steel that bound your hands. The flies relished the absence of cleanliness and hygiene, happily finding enough variety of sordid food to satiate their countless armies.

After exhausting his fit of hysterical laughter, Sanko held his hand out in the air, palm up, fingers straight. His facial features hardened, and the whites of his eyes shone like the whites of the eyes of the dead, while beads of sweat on his black brow and temple shone like fireflies in the dark.

A soldier came forward bearing a knife long as a sword and placed it in Sanko’s outstretched hand. Sanko began feeling the edge of the knife methodically with his fingertips, then he whirled around muttering a few angry words in Amharic, at which one of the guards fetched him a file to sharpen the knife. The screeching of metal set your nerves on end to the point that you began to gnash your teeth and struggled to control your trembling body until the sound stopped.

Everything suggested you were witnessing the preliminary rituals of a m******e where you would be among the victims. This was what all of you had been expecting ever since you had been taken prisoner ten days earlier. As for why the slaughter had been postponed all this time, it must have been spent bargaining with the Italians through the open lines of communication with their army’s leadership, which had now probably refused to comply with the Abyssinians’ demands. This was the opinion held by some of your more seasoned companions. Of the prisoner before him, and slashed his throat. The severed head let out a shriek whose echoes reverberated in the seven heavens, or so it seemed to you as you raised your head dizzily towards the dome of the world where the echo resounded, the death rattle of the decapitated prisoner.

Many prisoners, who like you were backed up against the tree trunks, couldn’t repress their screams of terror, but you managed, even though it swelled in your throat like a serpent. You shut your eyes and recited, ‘“I testify that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah’”, while your fate awaited you. You kept your eyes closed through the hysterical screaming as Sanko fulfilled his role as the King of Death.

Sanko was carrying out his work methodically. He would slay a prisoner, then step over to the second prisoner beside him only to spare him and fall upon the third prisoner with his long knife. You didn’t understand why he chose such an arbitrary way of murdering his victims. Perhaps he relished the amusement of leaving some alive in order to return to them later with a renewed lust for c*****e. Or perhaps he spared them for use in bartering with the Italians in one of the prisoner exchanges that happened frequently between the two sides.

Your sole concern at the time was to know the number of prisoners that stood in the terrifying gap between you and the murderous n***o, so that you could work out whether you were to be among the living or the dead. Sanko didn’t differentiate between Libyans, Somalis and Abyssinians. His only consideration was to kill the prisoner before him and spare the next. Your panic increased when you saw that you would be amongst the dead. Perhaps you had counted wrong, you said to yourself, trying to cling to hope. So you counted them a second time, then a third, then a fourth, but no promise of redemption or salvation was forthcoming. Your death was inevitable.

He would spare this African to your right, and the African to your left, and then kill you. He slit the throats of men as though he were slaughtering sheep rather than human beings. He moved closer, until there were only two prisoners standing between you. He would slay the first, skip the second, then move on to you. Shaking, you started to recite the Surat Yasin, which you had often recited for the souls of the dead and is full of verses pleading for mercy and forgiveness.

You felt ashamed at being overcome by fear and by the sweat that you couldn’t stop from flowing down your forehead and into your eyes and your mouth. Why did you care about fending off fear when your end was nigh, when you knew that once the electricity that provided you with energy and life was cut off, perpetual darkness would follow?

The herald of death drew closer until you could see him carrying out his barbaric ritual for one last time. There was only one victim left standing between you. That prisoner looked as though he were already dead. He was a fellow countryman named Abdullah from Tripoli, who had come with you to Abyssinia. ` You had befriended him on board the ship that brought you to this land. You knew that he suffered from the sort of chronic headaches that even red hot scythes, the only remedy in his village, could put an end to, though they had left many scars on his neck and temples. Here he was, this poor man, this wretched creature, about to find at last a permanent cure for the pains in his head. His eyes bulged, and his mouth, covered with spittle, hung open as though lightning had electrocuted him and frozen him stiff.

Your distress made you forget any compassion you might have felt for him. You had been educated in the traditions of war, whose first lesson to you was that when the head of a companion fighting beside you goes flying, you touch your own head and thank the heavens that it was someone else’s. This time, however, the situation was different, both your head and his head would go.

Sanko reached out and grabbed Abdullah’s scalp with one hand, leaving the other free to slit Abdullah’s throat. Your slaughtered friend let out a gurgle like a lowing cow, and jets of blood burst from his neck, splattering your head and face. You bumped your head hard against the tree trunk. You shook it fiercely, trying to get the blood from your eyes. Through the drops of blood hanging on your eyelashes, you saw the killer wipe his knife on the slain man’s clothes; then you watched him move, leaving the African behind to stand before you. It was the moment of reckoning. He looked you squarely in the eyes. You mustered all your courage and tried to return his look with a stronger one, focusing, trying to hide your weakness and your fear.

As often happened in times of danger, your thoughts turned to one of the pious men of your village for aid, namely Sidi Abdelsalam al-Asmar, who lay resting in his mausoleum in the town of Zlitin, may God be pleased with him. You said his name three times. Thousands of miles of desert, forests, rivers, mountains, and seas lay between you, but no distance could prevent your plea from reaching him, and no obstacle could thwart him from answering if he so desired.

You raised your eyes to the open sky above the yard, as if casting about for the path your soul would follow to the world of eternal silence, seeing what awaited you beyond the black screen of death. Soon, the suspense of waiting to learn the answer to that ultimate question would be over. Mere seconds remained before that unknown world, and all its secrets and cryptic mysteries would reveal themselves to you. The sun’s rays streamed down in columns, hurting your skyward eyes. The n***o of Death reached out his hand, to deal with you as he had dealt with your friend Abdullah when he had grabbed him by his scalp. You wanted to save him the effort, and save yourself the ordeal of having your head thrown back, so you lifted your head and arched it back as far as the tiny distance between you and the wall would allow. You stretched your neck as far back as you could, tautening your bare throat, giving the knife a chance to carry out its work easily, without requiring the killer to grab you by the hair. You could taste the bitter acridity of fear as you took your final constrained breaths. You shut your eyes, trying to flee from the horror before you. Time and space slowed and stopped, the air fell still, movement ceased, and the hands of every clock in the world froze at the final second of your life.

The world turned in your head, spinning rapidly, linking the day you had come into the world – a day you knew only through the stories of the older women in your family – with these final moments, when the time had come for you to leave this world. No one had celebrated your birth with happy songs as it had coincided with the Italian army’s invasion of your village, Awlad Al Sheikh. Their arrival had been violent, accompanied by vengeful raid operations into the houses of resistance fighters. Aptly, perhaps your treacherous life would now also come to an end amidst bloody violence and suffering.

But as this final vertiginous and ecstatic reverie peaked and faded, you realized that something had kept Sanko from delivering the fatal swipe. Why had that split second between raising the knife and swinging it down to your throat dragged on for ages? You noticed your fellow prisoner was smiling because he had been skipped over by the n***o of Death – in fact he was almost laughing from the great joy he felt at being saved. You were thus stunned to hear a terrifying, eerie scream come from him. You opened your eyes to behold what had happened. The murderous n***o had for the first time changed the system he had started with, leaving you alone for no logical reason, and turning upon the African who had been laughing just a moment ago. He had grabbed his scalp instead of yours, and the man, for the first time, emitted a terrifying shriek when he saw the blade of the knife, which glittered in the sunlight before descending onto his throat. A bloody curtain burst across your vision, obscuring the disc of the sun, as if you had fallen into a blood-red swoon. Had you been saved? As Sanko the butcher passed you by and continued applying his long knife to the necks of other victims, it appeared that you had been saved by the whimsy of a murderous madman. Was that happiness you felt? Indeed it was, selfish and blissful happiness, and not an iota of sadness for your deceased neighbour.

An absurd situation resulted. Yet you remained watching the slaughter unfold, a m******e by all measures, but you realized that the good fortune had stayed the butcher’s knife and saved you. As you began to gag nauseously at the human blood on your face and in your mouth, which was attracting more flies than you thought possible, you realized that Sidi Abdelsalam, whose intervention you had sought, had delivered you from this m******e. The sun was now directly overhead and seemed to pierce your body and soul with the force of a personal divine interrogation.

You saw what had happened to you as a preliminary drill for some other life that awaited you in the heart of hell. With shattered nerves, you followed the scene progressing in the yard as Sanko the killer moved from prisoner to prisoner until he had completed his task. He cast the bloodied knife on the ground and let out the chilling war cry of Abyssinian warriors, which you had previously heard on the battlefield. The rest of the guards took up the cry, then other soldiers both inside and outside the fence joined in. Your mind folded into itself in a stupor, as your body collapsed in its shackles.

But the day had come to an end and you hadn’t died, didn’tor become another piece of that congealed block of blood that mixed with the dirt in the yard. Neither had you learned why that man, with all the appearance of a human skeleton coated in black tar, spared you at the last second from putting his knife to your jugular. The answer would remain forever a mystery, a symbol of the absurdity of fate that permeated your existence.

The blood bath was over and for today, you and the others were no longer prisoners that needed to be rescued. However, the effect of that day’s events scarred your heart and mind, leaving a black, indelible stain on your memory. You were like who had come back to life after having traveled to the land of the dead.

That day, the taste of blood in your mouth forever spoiled your appetite. That moment changed your views on a variety of subjects, becoming a dividing line between two eras and two different lives. You felt as though you had grown decades in a single second, and your way of thinking changed accordingly. Your vision of the meaning of life broadened, just as your understanding of hope and salvation, failure and success, good and evil, happiness and misery, pain and pleasure – even life and death – shifted. In that pivotal moment, all of these concepts assumed a single meaning, futility.