At the Petroleum Market, where they'd steal the eyeglasses right off your face if they could, a lady robed in blue flowers sat on a dais at one of many covered stands whose tables were separated by thick wire mesh. Tins and jugs and bottles of molasses-colored oil stood on the tables beneath the roofs of corrugated metal. Some of the tables were fronted with rusty steel. White dust and buses blew past. A child, grinning with effort, rolled a rusty oil drum in the sand. A lady in yellow and black glided through the dust. These stands ran a long way down Population Street. They sold gasoline and diesel, direct from Mombasa and the United Arab Emirates; they sold Comet and Caltex and Pelo 400 and Ocklube. Oil cost fifty thousand shillings for ten liters.* The air reeked of oil. The lady in the blue garbashar was laughing, swatting flies on a post.
A big red truck with many brown feet and knees high on top drove down Population Street past a rusted Soviet tank. It was bound for Bardera. The passengers had paid thirty thousand shillings each. Suddenly the truck ran out of gas. It stopped, and the driver ran to the lady in blue and bought a bucketful of gasoline from her.
Another man stopped for fruit. There were both mangoes and oil on Population Street. Next door to the lady in blue, bananas had been strung like washing along a wire in a mango stand roofed by corrugated metal.
There was a man who came walking down the street holding onto his eyeglasses, and he peered into every stand of rusty metal with mangoes and limes and glasses on top, but then he'd walk on, shaking his head. Finally he came to the place that said SPER PARTS.
On the whitewashed facade of the spare parts store was painted a camel, a glass of milk, a yellow fan belt, a blue carburetor, a red and yellow battery, and a blue and black tire, all bursting with speed like cartoon rockets. The spare parts came by ship from Japan to the dusty white beach where the sea swirled green and stinking against a sharp lava-like rock (it smelled as cheap postage stamps do when they're licked) and people with brown skinny legs sat barefoot on blue steps outside a blue door with one panel blown out; the spare parts sailed between the American battleships on the blue horizon; they passed the rusted red and yellow Soviet ship; and they arrived at last, at the seaport where a handcuffed boy rushed by in the back of a jeep and crowds waited and hoped for the job of carrying sacks of rice. The spare parts kept company with a white wall veiled in white dust; then they passed through the curtain of camelbone beads in the cement doorway (a cassette playing loud and scratchy), the doorway over which was written SPER PARTS.
The man went in. — She left me in Mexico, he said. I need spare parts.
Allah, Allah! cried the proprieter. My business pays just enough to eat! I don't dabble in those things. .
(Across the street, two men squatted in a pile of automobile components, sitting side by side, sorting them as slowly and deliberately as if they were moving chess pieces.)
So you can't help me get a spare wife?
Can't help you? I won't help you! You must not ask such things.
The man smiled. — How many wives do you yourself have, Farhan?
I have three, but for me it's no problem; I'm Muslim! And for me there was no pimp such as you wish me to be — why won't you leave me alone, you odious fellow?
And how did you choose them?
Why should I tell you?
I ask you respectfully.
The first wife — ah, she's my real wife. The second is my girlfriend, and the third. . well, she was a beautiful girl I saw in the market. And, you know, I made a mistake. To marry more than one Somali girl is very difficult, because you must love them more than twice a day; it's impossible sometimes! You think you have problems. And they like to corkscrew their buttocks wildly; they're different from all other girls. I get so tired. So, my friend, I choose only one per night, and you cannot believe the jealousy. .
Ah, so that's how it is. Well, for me there are two women. They are really the same woman, but one, she has a double in Heaven. I don't want to disturb the one on earth, so—
So you want to kill yourself? That is a great sin, although for guns I do have some spare parts.
No, Farhan, I don't want to do that. Do you have a spare atlas?
You mean an address book. I don't dabble in those things. What you ask is very shameful. If you persist, someone will kill you.
He had a notion that she might know where her double was. He suspected that she might be somewhere within this equatorial duct, bridge or trough. He breathed the hot white wind of dust. — I want an atlas, Farhan.
Oh, well. Not every want can be remedied. .
A donkey's-load of wood, a month's worth, cost about fifty thousand shillings in those days. He took out a hundred thousand and told the man to find him an atlas — a spare one would do. Then he stood waiting, his mind partaking of the same wide empty flatness as Military Street (which used to be Lenin Street).
