He was up earlier than usual. He had been asleep barely an hour when he sensed hands the size of a child’s tugging at the sheets with which he had covered himself. He thought he knew those hands: small, strong, determined—and beautiful too. He had prepared something to say as he sat up, a word of welcome, something friendly, a frivolous comment, say, about fingernails being long like a dead person’s, anything by way of greeting (this person and he had not met for almost a year now). But when he opened his eyes, there was nobody there. Once awake, however, he felt there was no point trying to get back to sleep although he had closed his eyes less than an hour before.

His watch advised him that it was time to say a small prayer or two. One prayer led to another. One prostration suggested a second and a third. “O my Lord, great Thou art without a doubt, the greatest and most merciful and most compassionate; welcome us, o Lord, allow us into the enclosure Thou art in, permit us to enter Thy dwelling in tranquil peace. For thou art a celebration and we, with every breath we receive or emit, are mere manifestations of Thy existence. And Thou art our closest neighbour, our protector; Thou art the provider of our needs and Thou art our need, our principal need; Thou art the guide of our shaky visions, the honey-guide of our dreams.” And then he told his beads in peaceful communication with divine secrets.

But he stayed in bed, propped up by a pillow against the wall and reasonably comfortable. A quarter of an hour later, he heard the muezzin’s call and answered it with a salvo of Allahu-akbars and Alxamdulillaahs. A little stiff, he slowly gathered himself as though he were a scatter of independent joints the years had put asunder and through the miraculous murmuring of a small prayer felt he was put together, one painful joint screwed into another, one dry bone fitted on to another, and he got up, issuing further thanks to Him who had created him some sixty-nine years earlier out of clots of blood. He looked for and finally found what his feet were groping for: his sandals. He bent double, murmuring a series of sanative phrases, breathed with lungs of gratitude and meant for the ears of his Creator.

His toes in place, his back erect, his destination clear to him: he moved in the direction of the lavatory which was on the same floor. He said Acuudu-billaahi as he entered the toilet which he thought of as Satan’s dwelling-place, and when he came out, having taken his ablution, said Alxamdulillah. Then another prayer, this time of only two prostrations—the morning’s Salaatus subx! The beads again. A litany of Koranic verses. As he counted and re-counted the ninety-nine names of Allah, as he multiplied and subtracted the number of times he had said them, he realized that the world had begun to wake up: he squinted catarrhally at the greyness outside, his ears cocked, for he thought he heard Khaliif’s call and cursory noises. From where he sat he could see Cigaal’s house, Cigaal whom he had always described as an “unneighbourly neighbour.”

More beads. He decided he wouldn’t think of neighbours and mundanities of betrayals and conspiracies; of congeries of alms paid to a traitor; of silencing fees; and of little rascals and wicked families. Nor would he think of his good friend Rooble and Elmi-Tiir; of his wife whom he loved till the day death parted them; of his daughter Zeinab and her two lovely children; of his son Mursal, Natasha his wife and their wonderful son Samawade; of Waris; of Mahad, Rooble’s nephew; Yakuub, Rooble’s son. He decided he wouldn’t think of a madman who was not mad; of sane persons who were, in one way or another, mad; nor would he think of public justice; of vengeance, and whether this was a private matter or of public concern. He would think of God; of prayers; of the divine will which held out a hand to him whenever he felt base and inhumane; of the vision and power which enabled him to identify the enemy within and helped him get rid of it.

And then he prayed: “O Allah who art just, give us true peace, bless us with the inner tranquility that Thou art, make us apprehend the enemy within us, deliver us, help us, o Allah, descend from the greater heights of selfishness, help us reach and be content with what we have or who we are: weak and helpless without thy guidance. The sea spits out what she cannot bury, throws up the refuse for which she has no place. Help us, o Allah, help us find peace in ourselves, in our friends, in our families and in our neighbours.”

He held out his hands, rubbed then together, brought them closer to his face and spat a salivaless emission of breath and (with the prayerbeads still in the grip of the index and middle fingers) rinsed his face in his dry but blessed open palms. Then he recited a mumbled Faatixa. With all this done, his features cast in worshipful mould, silent, reverent, he got up, caught the prayer rug by the corner and hung it on the nail on the wall above his bed. He went and stood behind one of the windows. A little later, he pulled up a chair and sat on it crossing and recrossing his legs.

He watched dawn’s metallic greyness prepare to dissolve into the morning’s dust. The smile on his lips at times became a slight wince: he seemed afraid of an oncoming attack, of the paroxysms which he so hated. His asthmatic condition had made it necessary for him to be moved into this house which was equipped with the most modern system of communication: a telephone on which to call a doctor or somebody with a car if a bad attack came while Mursal and Natasha were both out. When his wife was still alive, the family had a house to which visitors of all sorts could come, callers whose main or only claim to be there was their belonging to the same clan as himself—men and women who recognized him as the Sultan of the clan. When she died, and the attacks became more frequent, he was moved to his daughter’s home. His house was put on the market, despite his objections. “Now I am an old man,” he said to his good friend Rooble, “an old man like yourself, dependent upon the whims of my offspring.”

He was not unhappy. But he often spoke about his dependent state, about his hesitation to ask his friends over. It was not that his daughter Zeinab would have objected, no. She would have entertained anyone whom he pleased to invite; she would have slaughtered a cow to feast them or spent hours in the kitchen cooking for them. But she did not have the time. Also, through a process of elimination, through a pattered scheme of that-is-not-good-for-you and this-is-what-you-need, his children, Deeriye realized, had altered his life-style and imposed upon him a number of gentle restrictions, impressed upon him the necessity to do his exercises in the morning, go for walks in the afternoon and take his medicine regularly. And when he was finally used to it all and had become very fond of Sheherezade and Cantar, when he had finally made friends with some of the neighbours who called, Zeinab decided to demolish half of her house and live in the untouched half. The place was in no time reduced to dust and disorder. Again he was moved—this time to his son Mursal’s house.

Copyright 1983, 1992 by Nuruddin Farah. All rights reserved.