The Atlas полностью

You know, my good friend, they tell a certain story that one Somali man had four wives, who were all jealous. So he said to them: Turn around, close your eyes and I will tell the one I love the best. — Then he tapped each one on her buttocks in turn and sent them all away happy. But me, I don't know if it's true. Maybe it's true. I don't dare try it, because my wives might only pretend to close their eyes. I think your woman is jealous, yes? Because she has a jealous face.

You must have better eyes than I do. Even at maximum magnification I can't see whether she's jealous or not.

But she left you?

Yes.

Why?

I had someone else I wouldn't give up. That's why she left me.

Listen, my friend. Somali girls don't attach conditions. If they see you with another girl, they either say nothing or they ask for a divorce, but they never say: If you want to stay with me you must have only me.

He bent down and looked into the loupe again. Now he could see. She was driving toward the Green Line.

The internal combustion engine was one of the West's many presents to Somalia, and I would have to call it an a-a-mmah, which is to say a bequest for evil purpose (the example given in a treatise on inheritance law being money left by a Muslim to build a Christian church); but nonetheless her little red car looked sporty.

That was when he saw the other red car.

On the enemy side of the Green Line, just past the former police station, rose another camp on the dung-hued sands of the former technical institute, one of whose walls bore the scrawl: CAMP OFFISH. Refugees, their faces wide and brown, were standing at the base of the barbed-wire-topped wall, among weird mounds topped with green plastic; those were their houses. The women wore deriis and garbashars. They carried babies in sacks against their stomachs. They smoothed their garments down while the first grade of the SOS Children's Village counted one to a hundred in a deafening scream and the schoolteacher conducted with a twig. There was a little child not much more than a brown skull on skinny legs, his toy a plastic bag on the end of a string; he stood touching the shiny red car, the spare car in wonder. Now through the loupe the watcher's eyeball saw many little girls with dark brown faces. One in a white dress who had big black eyes ran inside a cave roofed with green plastic; a moment later she came out, holding a white woman's hand. The white woman was the spare of the double. He looked down from the sky and wanted to lick her bare shoulder and arm.

Sliding the loupe back along the page to his side of the Green Line, he saw the first double pass two cars with UN flags. Farhan was saying something but he didn't listen.

He thought about the way that Somali men who are friends walk so happily with their arms around one another's waists. He wondered if the doubles would do that. And he wondered if there would be room for him.

On Population Street it was getting dark, the evening sky like a crude oil painting, with solid white and gray cotton-blotches of cloud unrolling in its pale blueness; and so people were getting afraid of bandits and the petroleum market was closed; but Farhan's lantern flickered brightly down upon the atlas so that the two red cars approached each other bathed in afternoonness.

Farhan was still going on. He said that in olden times a Somali girl's dowry was one hundred camels, one horse and one rifle. Then it became five camels, and now it was only one camel, which could cost anywhere from one to five million, depending on the kind of camel.