The Old Map

My uncle kept a map of a country that no longer existed. It hung in his workshop between two long shelves of tools, above the little radio he never turned off. The paper was the colour of weak tea, and the borders had been redrawn so many times, in different inks, that they looked less like frontiers and more like scars.

When I was a boy I used to trace the rivers with my finger while he worked. He would name them without looking. The Senegal. The Faleme. The Bafing. He named villages that were no longer villages, roads that had become fields, forests that had become roads.

"The map is wrong," I told him once, feeling clever.