It was definitely somebody's spare atlas, even grimier than the one he'd bought in Italy (his then ladylove had wrenched her hand out of his and begun screaming: I think you're crazy buying that goddamn shitty thing! You'll regret it, I tell you! and after that she'd refused to speak to him beneath that milk-white sky; they departed from congealing pillars, walls and fountains lit falsely by lingerie windows, fur-coat windows, bookstore windows, house-beasts and ships of state blind-windowed; and he tried to take her hand but she pulled away with disgust or anger or simple loathing, sitting beside him in the cab, reading her own map). An obsolete Africa, white as a salt island, floated in a turquoise sea; bearing appellations from the Second World War: French West Africa, French Sudan, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, French Equatorial Africa, Military Territory of Chad, Belgian Congo, Tanganyika Territory, Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, Italian East Africa, Italian Somaliland (which was why the Somalis didn't like Italians), British Somaliland. .
Mogadishu was in Italian Somaliland. He positioned his electronic magnifying loupe upon that spare country and gazed down. The fibers of the paper were very white and bright (in the atlas he'd read that Somalia received more than nine hours' worth of mean annual bright sunlight — second only to the northern area encompassing Libya and Algeria; no wonder the page was bleached!) Slowly and carefully he let his eyeball drone like a spy satellite over the flats of Shabellaha Hoose, proceeding eastward to the humid sandy beach, which he tracked northeast to Golweyn, Shalaamboot, Marka, Jilib, Dhanaane, Jasira, Banaadir, and now, experiencing that accustomed white and yellow Adriatic feeling despite the rubble and tanks (he wondered whether Dubrovnik looked like that these days), he approached Muq-disho, which was spare for Mogadishu; he zoomed in upon roads (Stadium Street, Military Street; here was Population Street and he found the place that said SPER PARTS), ruins, military sites (there was the stadium, still sandbagged by Marines, a machine gun mounted up high, pointing out, barbed wire at the gate). Down, down, down. In that country of sand, the most brightly colored things were the women's clothes. Loftily he gazed down upon the tops of those poison-trees called booc. He watched their pale green broad-lobed leaves blow in the hot wind. For a moment he gazed down at the Green Line which divided the city into factions. It was a yellow wall pocked and pimpled and made of lifeless white and yellow rubble on which crowds of chocolate-colored people sat barefoot. Looking up at his giant blinking eye, litde girls in red or yellow garbashars stood and tried to sell him packs of cigarettes. Turbaned men nodded at him, smiling. Then someone shot a gun at him. He watched the golden bullet enlarge itself in the longitude-latitude crosshairs of his loupe, rising toward him like a torpedo; he did not think it could reach him, but as a precaution he zoomed back to lower magnification so that he rose high above the entire continent of Africa with its neatly lettered countries; he could almost see the page number; and now he zoomed back in again because surely the bullet had fallen to earth. He saw people sitting in chairs under a great toothbrush tree for shade; he dialed the infrared setting and watched the steam rising from the tops of their heads; then he switched back to NORMSPECTRUM and watched a lady bent almost double, carrying a can of water. He saw a woman in black and yellow slowly trudging through the sand. He saw a half-naked man squatting in a high barred window (a thief who grimaced at his immense searching eye which hovered overhead like God; the thief said: I am afraid for airplane).
Panning past smoking garbage in the sand at the base of a wall, he spotted her (or the spare her) at the wheel of her red car. She was just now passing the U.S. Embassy, whose sign read: JIB: WARNING AT-4 ANTI-TANK POSITION. THIS WEAPON HAS A 60 METER, 90° BACKBLAST. WHEN IN IMMEDIATE AREA, SEEK COVER DURING ALL CONFRONTATIONS AT FRONT GATE!
In exultation, he rang a wooden camel bell with a wooden clapper.
Farhan rushed to look. — This a woman drive car! he laughed. Very fantastic! You say she is your spare woman, spare wife?
Yes.
The proprieter wanted to look again. — Oooh, I see her naked arms! he giggled. You know, my friend, before the war one could see girls on the beach dressed in European fashion, which is to say in bra and knickers, but these have fled, and now there are only rural girls here.
She's not a rural girl. She's from New York.
Is she jealous?
I really couldn't say, Farhan.
