A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (17 page)

“Ah, brother,” he says. “It makes so much sense when you say it here in this car. It was different back then in Addis. I really wanted to go to South Africa more than anything I'd ever wanted before. I couldn't afford to think about the dangerous journey. If I'd done that, I would have been stuck in Addis.”

At the beginning of December 2003, just three or four months after their wedding, Asad proposed to Foosiya that he would leave for South Africa in early January. He took out his wooden box and showed her the contents. It contained twelve hundred dollars to take with him, plus enough to pay for Foosiya's rent and food in Addis for three months.

At first, Foosiya was unsure. She asked Asad many questions about his plans for the journey to South Africa. He had no plans; he had not even imagined the journey. She asked what he'd do to make money when he got to South Africa. He had barely pictured South Africa beyond the fantastical land the tongues of travelers had spun.

She looked at him skeptically. “I will not live in this city alone,” she said. “If I do not hear from you, I am going back to Somaliland.”

“I will send for you within three months,” Asad recalls replying. “If you do not hear from me by then, it means I have been arrested and cannot contact you, and you must wait.”

“I will not wait,” she replied. “If you contact me within three months, I am yours. If you do not, I am not yours anymore.”

There was no question in Asad's mind: he would send for Foosiya. He was only making this move in order to share with her the sort of life he had just begun to imagine. He was hardly fleeing her.

And what of Foosiya? What was she thinking? By now, Asad was referring to her as a “great woman.” He was somewhat in awe of her. But in truth he still knew little of her history and did not yet have the wisdom to divine her motives. Foosiya was from Somaliland. Much of her family lived there. By 2003, Somaliland had been stable and at peace for some time. Foosiya was thus not in any sense a refugee. Why was she living alone in Addis? Why was she marrying an Ogadeni man, with whom her clan, the Isaaq, were on bitter terms? And an orphan Ogadeni barely out of his teens, to boot. And why was she about to follow him all the way to South Africa, a journey that would take her even farther from home?

That she had chosen a clever, hardworking man as a husband, one who seemed to make money easily, made sense. But perhaps she had picked such a young man because she might be able to fashion him into the sort of husband she wanted. And perhaps she chose an Ogadeni precisely because it would be awkward to take him home.

Maybe, for her, South Africa represented fresh ground, far from old constraints, on which a woman might be free to build the sort of life she coveted.

Eight years after he left Nairobi for Addis Ababa, Asad did the journey in reverse. He had walked into Ethiopia carrying a Koran, a thin pile of photographs, and a couple of changes of clothes. Now, he left with the possessions he had gathered in the intervening years.

He divided them into two groups: the expendable and the precious. The first were his daily clothes—T-shirts, jeans, sweaters, a down jacket—which he stuffed into a large duffel bag. The second bundle he carried in a small Samsonite briefcase, not a counterfeit but the real McCoy, which he had bought from a trader in Bole Mikhael. He had selected it with care: it had to be big enough to carry its cargo but sufficiently portable to be always in hand.

Among its contents were Asad's smart clothes: a white ankle-length cotton
thobe;
a tailored suit that he had had made just a week before he traveled; a brand-new pair of jeans. Also, an album filled with photographs of his wedding, of Foosiya, of Yared leaning against his car, of the boys with whom he had shared a room for four years, of his Ethiopian landlady and her grandmother. And, finally, a thick red-covered journal that Asad called his Red Book. Rooda had given it to him in Wardheer—to keep a record of all his travels, he had said—and Asad had been carrying it ever since.

“What did you write in it?” I ask.

He throws a hand up to his ear and scratches it urgently, a sign of annoyance, I think, as if my question is fingering open the book itself.

“Whatever happened that was worth remembering,” he replies cautiously. “And, also, things that were funny.”

“Like?”

He shifts his weight in the passenger seat and glances out of the window. “Like when Zena imitated the
deni
getting so angry and everyone on the back of the truck laughed until their stomachs hurt.”

“What else was worth remembering?” I ask.

“I'm not sure. When I started planning to come to South Africa,” he replies, “I used it to practice my English. I was okay to speak English. But I thought maybe my work would require me to write it.”

I ask him again months later what was in his Red Book and get a different answer.

“It was a record,” he says, “of the very best and the very worst. Like the day Foosiya agreed to marry me. I wrote down the date, the time. And on days when I had nothing and saw no future, I would write down the date on which I had that thought.”

Seated next to him on the bus out of Addis Ababa was Khadar, one of the boys who had shared his room in Bole Mikhael. They would journey together as far as Nairobi, where each would make separate plans. Khadar had no interest in South Africa; he was determined to get to America.

Half an hour out of Addis, the flicker of headlights from a passing vehicle warned of an army checkpoint ahead. The bus stopped, the undocumented passengers got out—there were seven or eight of them, as Asad recalls—and walked through the bush, giving the checkpoint a wide berth. They returned to the road several hundred meters beyond the soldiers, where the bus was waiting for them. An hour later, the same thing happened again, and then again, and again once more.

The bus journey ended in the town of Dolo in the far south of the Ogaden, right up against the Kenyan border. They found a cafeteria in which to eat. That they were illegal travelers was obvious, and by the time their food arrived they had paid a man to give them information.

The stranger advised them to go the following morning to a town called Suufka, where they would find the border post to Kenya. The smugglers on the Ethiopian side of the border worked with the smugglers on the other side, he said. “You leave your bags with the Ethiopians, you walk across the border empty-handed so that the officials believe that you are going only for the day, and then you collect your bags from the Kenyans on the other side.”

Asad kept his thoughts to himself, but his incredulity must have been written across his face, for the stranger smiled.

“You need to learn whom to trust,” he said.

And then the man reeled off a list of smugglers, and each time a new name crossed his lips, Asad and Khadar wanted to know more. What is his tribe? How old is he? How long has he been in the business? Do you know people he has helped cross the border?

The seventh or eighth name was that of a woman, and both Asad and Khadar pricked up their ears. Who was she, they asked. An Ogadeni, he replied. Very strong. Very reliable.

“We chose her,” Asad says. “We feared other smugglers. They might have us arrested and then want more money to get us out of jail. We thought that a woman would not do that. A female would not have such plans.”

They got a lift to Suufka the following morning to find that the woman smuggler was waiting for them. “She was very black and very thin. She did not look at all like an Ogadeni to me. We greeted her. We listened closely to her accent. She took us to a Somali cafeteria where we drank tea.

“She asked us our names, how we got to hear of her, our tribe. She asked what money we had, but we would not tell her that. She said she would arrange to have our bags put on a donkey cart that would cross the river. She also said we must separate and cross the checkpoint alone and say that we are going to Mandera only for the day.

“She wanted us to give her all our money to keep. We were an easy target, she said: anyone could look at us and know we were traveling far and had lots of money. I said no. We each gave her fifty dollars to exchange for Kenyan money.

“We slept in a lodge and woke while it was still dark, washed, prayed in the mosque, and drank tea in the cafeteria. The smuggler did not come for a long time. It crossed both of our minds that she had run away with our things, but we said nothing to each other. Then suddenly she appeared. She sat with us. She was relaxed, cheerful. She said she was hungry. It was like we were just meeting to be social. Not to cross a border. We ate
anchera
—flour pancakes. We were sitting and sitting and sitting, and the sun was getting high, and I was wondering whether maybe I was going mad and that we would maybe have to remind this woman that we had just paid her a lot of money.

“Then suddenly she said, ‘Now is the time; your stuff is crossing the river as we speak.' How did she know? Did she have a third ear that we did not have? We had no choice. We had to do what she said.”

The two men parted and crossed the border separately.

“The rule at the border post—if you are going to sleep on the other side, you need an ID. If you are coming back the same day, they just search you. The smuggler had told me to say I am going to Mandera to visit people. I stood there, and the soldiers were asking me questions in Amharic, and at the last second, I changed my mind. I didn't want to say what the smuggler told me to say.

“ ‘I am just going to Mandera to look,' I said. ‘I have never been.'

“That was good enough. I walked. Next came the Kenyan soldiers. They asked me nothing. They did not even search me.

“When I was sure that they wouldn't stop me, I slowed down so that Khadar could reach me. We looked back, Ethiopia was gone, we felt no fear; it had been easy.”

The Ogadeni smuggler had said that a middle-aged woman would be waiting to meet them just beyond the border post. All sorts of people were standing and watching the travelers stream in from Ethiopia. Some were men, some women, some middle-aged, others young.

A woman in the crowd raised her hand briefly and looked Asad in the eye. She turned and walked away, and Asad and Khadar followed.

“She greeted us and said that we must walk with her to Mandera. It was a long, long way. It took a couple of hours. And it was very hot, and she was very quiet. Once or twice, we asked her a question, but she said nothing, as if she hadn't heard us. All the time, we were wondering: Where are our bags? Is she taking us to our bags?”

In Mandera, the woman walked the two travelers to the back of the market and settled them under a
balbalo.
Having barely said a word the entire journey, she now burst into life.

“ ‘Kenya is different,' she said. ‘Soldiers ask to see IDs. Everyone is hunting illegal people. If they catch you, you are stuck here. They put you in a cell and take your money. Or they take you elsewhere and torture you and take your money. Or they ask for a lot of money and send you to a refugee camp.'

“She said she would arrange tickets and all we needed, and that our bags were safe and would be with us soon.

“She said, ‘If you want
mira
or anything else, ask now, because later I will be busy.'

“We gave her money; she went to a
mira
kiosk and came back with a lady who showed us an assortment of
mira
from which we chose. We could not calculate the prices. We did not know the money. But while we were choosing, our bags arrived, and we were so relieved that we did not care how much the
mira
cost. I think that we spent a lot of money.”

They left for Nairobi that same night. The woman who had led them to Mandera and to their bags told them that the bus ticket would cost them seven hundred shillings, that they must pay another seven hundred to soldiers at checkpoints, and another seven hundred for the conductor's fee. They never found out precisely what that amounted to in dollars, but it was a lot. The fifty dollars they had changed in Suufka weren't nearly enough, and they each changed two hundred dollars more.

The passengers were separated into those who had and did not have a
kibanda,
the Kenyan national identity document. There were fifty-nine of the former, Asad tells me, and twenty-eight of the latter; why he recalls this detail I do not know. He remembers that the conductor gave each of the undocumented ones a false
kibanda.
The one handed to Asad sported a photograph of a woman. He examined it skeptically and put it in his shirt pocket.

The charade began at the first checkpoint. Soldiers boarded the bus, and everyone showed their
kibanda,
and the soldiers could tell immediately which were fake. They got off the bus and negotiated for a long time with the conductor, and then they reboarded and the bus drove off. The same happened at the next checkpoint and the next and the next.

They spent a night in a lodge in the town of Garissa, and the following morning, everything started anew. Another bus, another fee for the ticket, another for the soldiers, for the conductor. Only forty-eight hours had passed since they had left Addis Ababa, and Asad's wad of dollars was shrinking at a pace that made him uneasy.

This time, there were just eight passengers without documents, but they were not given a fake
kibanda,
and Asad remembers wondering whether there could possibly be any difference between traveling with an obviously fake
kibanda
and none at all.

There clearly was, for at the first checkpoint of the day the eight were thrown off the bus by a group of flamboyantly irate soldiers and herded into a cafeteria. From where they were sitting, they had a clear view of the bus, and they watched as the soldiers searched it from top to bottom, unloading every bag, unzipping every zipper, pulling out shirts and underwear and then tossing them onto the ground in disgust. Every now and again, one of them would scream vehemently at the conductor.

Asad thinks that about six hours had passed when the soldiers suddenly walked from the bus, and it drove off. The undocumented ones downed their coffee and began to chase after the bus, but the soldiers began remonstrating all over again and pointed their guns and shepherded the travelers back into the cafeteria. Ten minutes later, the soldiers returned and shooed the travelers onto the road in the direction in which the bus had driven off.

As they began walking, Asad felt light-headed. The road was long and straight, and the sky was clear; one could see a far way. There were houses on the horizon that appeared to be hovering some distance above the ground.

They caught up with the bus after about an hour of walking. Asad settled into his seat and stared out of the window; the landscape appeared to tilt and then slowly to spin. He closed his eyes, hoping that if he could not see the world, it might stand still. As the bus began to move, a thought so odd crossed his mind that he heard himself laughing. He was no different from his duffel bag, for he was as powerless as it was, as uncomprehe
nding about the rules of this journey. He would sleep, he thought. For what was the point of sharpening one's wits when one was powerless? He would let the conductors and the soldiers work it out among themselves. What would be would be.

He made a pillow for himself against the window and shut his eyes once more. The motion of the bus sent gentle messages up and down his shins, and he felt his mental armor sliding away. The sheer leisure of not being on the defensive felt utterly glorious. He willed himself into the deepest sleep.

He has no memory of the remainder of the journey. Although he knows it is impossible, what he recalls is that he slept the rest of the way. He remembers being nudged and pushed and coming back to consciousness and realizing, in that split second before waking, that he had been very far away, somewhere beyond dreams. Then he heard Khadar's voice telling him that they were approaching Nairobi.