A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (20 page)

Now the seven were on a truck bound for Beitbridge, another fifty of their thinning pile of dollars in the truck driver's pocket. There was nowhere for the passengers but the cabin, and all seven were crammed into it, a space with room for three at most. One of Asad legs began to prickle and then to numb. The sharp end of an elbow stabbed painfully at the back of his upper arm.

An hour or so into the journey, one of the two women in the party lost her composure. With a measure of panic that startled Asad she demanded to get out of the truck. When it was clear that the driver would not stop, she began choking and gasping and lashed out with her fists and feet. There was nowhere to take cover; Asad dug his arms out from the heap of bodies and sheltered his face. It was as if a creature of the wild had been let loose in the cabin. He believed for a moment that if the woman were to suffocate and die, the driver would still not stop. Her corpse flashed momentarily before his eyes, its graying, cooling skin pressed up against him.

To his relief, she began gradually to still, but at that very moment, the other woman in the party announced that her bladder was full and that she was about urinate all over the cabin. All the while, the Somalis pleaded with the driver to stop; each time he shrugged and smiled benignly and drove on. Asad imagined that if all seven of them were to die he would keep shrugging and smiling.

As is his custom, Asad takes my notebook and sketches the Beitbridge border post. But this time it does not help me to understand. I listen closely to his account of the border crossing and check it against the map and ask him to repeat several things, but the journey remains clouded. Back in my office, I play back our interview; the sequence of events he recounts makes little sense.

I wonder if, by now, sleeplessness and anxiety had not robbed him of much of his sentience. Perhaps, too, something else was at play. Beitbridge is the busiest crossing into South Africa, the most coveted destination on the continent. Tens upon tens of thousands of people cross there each year. The border economy has shaped itself around these transients. Almost everyone there who is not an undocumented traveler earns a living by servicing the needs, both real and fictitious, of people on the move.

At Beitbridge, Asad was swept into a pattern of movement designed to bamboozle him. Together with a man in his party of seven, he walked onto the bridge where a taxi driver immediately offered his services. The man directed them to a place, just out of sight of the border post, where the seven were to traverse the river.

“It was easy to cross,” Asad recalls, “and nobody tried to stop us. We were wondering if it was really going to be this simple. A taxi met us on the other side. We drove and drove for a very long time, two hours, maybe. It was hard to tell in what direction we were going, but it seemed somewhere very remote.

“Suddenly, the taxi stopped, in the middle of the bush where these nomadic people were living: just three or four homes in the middle of nowhere. The driver shooed us out of the taxi and said this was it, he was handing us over to the nomads.”

“Why do you say they were nomadic?” I interrupt.

“Because of their homes. You could kick them down with your foot. It would take maybe a day to build new ones.

“One of the nomads spoke to me. He took me inside his house in the bush. He offered us homemade bread and tea. We sat there several hours. Then, at eight p.m., an old man arrived and said, ‘Let's go.' We walked a long, long way, back to the river. It was waist-high. It is midnight. We crossed again.

“Back into Zimbabwe?” I ask.

He shrugs. “It gets even more confusing, brother. A few minutes later, we met the next taxi driver, a very young boy, maybe sixteen at most. He wanted another twenty-five dollars. We grumbled. He argued. We disagreed among ourselves. Eventually we paid him, but not twenty-five dollars, more like fifteen. He said, speaking partly in English, partly in Swahili, that if we see police, the last thing we must do is run. Just lie still.

“I said, in Somali, ‘The Bantu is just trying to scare us.' The taxi driver stopped and turned around, very aggressive, ‘What did you say?' ‘Nothing.' After that, he did not like me. He targeted me. I thought maybe I'd have to fight him.

“He led us to a big fence which had signs on it saying it was electrified. There was a hole in the fence and many, many footprints around it. The taxi man lifted the fence and we started to crawl through. Half of us had made it to the other side, the other half not yet, when two cars drove by—one a police car, the other an immigration police car. We lay very, very still. I thought to myself that this boy who I called a Bantu had given us good advice after all and I felt like a fool. The police kept driving. The boy gathered us around. He said, ‘We are going to walk to the pickup now. Don't sneeze. Don't cough. Don't even blink.'

“Three of us spoke English. The other four did not. We translated for them. ‘Don't sneeze. Don't cough. Don't blink.' Then we walked to the pickup, and we all piled into the back. The young boy drove us to a town. On the way, we Somalis in the back had a debate among ourselves. ‘Does it really make a noise when you blink?' Someone agreed. Some disagreed.

“Brother, I burst out laughing on the back of that pickup. Stupid Somalis.”

Asad is not sure to which town the young man drove them. It may have been Musina, just a few kilometers from the Beitbridge border post. The youngster took them to his own home, a two-room brick-and-mortar house, and promptly went to bed. The seven Somalis slept on the floor of the other room, huddled under their own jackets, until just before daybreak. When they tried to wake the young man, he would not budge. They left him another hour and tried again, but he remained dead to the world.

“He was not interested to get up, brother. His work was done, and now he was going to sleep. So we just took our bags and walked.”

Dawn had not long broken. The Somalis asked whomever they encountered how to get to Johannesburg. Each person offered a different answer. Some said a bus, others a taxi. Still others said that it was not possible to get to Johannesburg from this town and that they would have first to make their way to somewhere bigger. Eventually, somebody told them that the only way to get to Johannesburg was to hitch.

“What does it mean ‘to hitch'?” Asad asked.

“It means to stand in the street and wave,” one of his companions explained.

The party of Somalis found a piece of a tomato box and borrowed a thick pen from the proprietor of a trading store. On the scrap of box they wrote:
JOXANAZDEG
. They made their way to the main road leading south and flashed their sign whenever a car drove by.

“Nobody stopped, brother. Hour after hour after hour, and nobody stopped. At the time, I thought we were unlucky. Now, when I think of what we wrote on that box, it is a miracle we were not thrown into jail—seven foreign-looking people with big bags, just near the border, with this ridiculous sign. It was a joke.”

The sun was directly above them and the party about to abandon the roadside when a minibus finally pulled onto the side of the highway. Asad strode up to the driver's window to find two white men peering out at him.

“They said they were going to Johannesburg,” Asad recalls. “They had space for us all. Then one of them says, ‘But…,' and he rubs his thumb and finger together. I'd never seen that sign before, but I knew it meant money.

“Out of the one thousand two hundred dollars I took with me I had one hundred and sixty-five left and I was worried because the journey was not over. I gave sixty-five. I hid the rest from the other Somalis. Nobody else knew what I had. Some of the others put in more money, but it still wasn't enough. We agreed that we would give them more when we got to our destination.”

The Somalis sat in the back of the minibus, the two white men in the front. Asad chose the seat directly behind the driver and watched the white men as closely as he could.

He was struck, above all, by their size. They were beefy men, very strong, their forearms thick and red and covered in a layer of soft, light hair. He calculated that they were in their thirties, but the more he thought about it, the less sure he became.

He strained to listen to their conversation. They were switching languages, it seemed, for one moment he could understand their talk perfectly, and the next their tongues were emitting the thick, grinding consonants he would later recognize as Afrikaans.

“As I started hearing what they were saying, I felt fear, brother. The one is saying, These people are illegal. We must take them to the police. The other says: Look at the state they are in; take pity. The first one: Pity is fine, but we are aiding and abetting; we are committing a crime.

“I was getting very suspicious now, brother, so I leaned forward so that I could see more of them. That is when I noticed that one of them had a gun in a holster on his hip.

“Brother, in East Africa, the only people who carry guns are soldiers. So I turned and spoke to the others: ‘These people are military. We are being arrested.'

“The others were very upset. One of the ladies started crying. But two of the others said, Don't worry, it's fine, if they arrest us, they will take us to the border.

“I didn't like that, brother. I had almost no money, no contacts. To be stuck on the border like that: that is how you end up dying. I wanted to get out of the minibus. And as soon as I say that, as soon as I say I want to go my own way, something else starts happening: the other Somalis say, No, if you try to leave, we will fight you. Because, brother, I had money. They couldn't know how much, but they knew that whatever I had they would need. So now I have enemies in the front seat and enemies in the back.”

He had been with the other six ever since the day he lost his Samsonite briefcase in Tanzania. And yet, until this moment, they had barely been shadows in his story. Only now, right at the end, does this shapeless group of six take definite form, and it does so as a foe.

For the first time, the extent of his loneliness strikes me. Every alliance he formed on the road, every friendship, was always thin, always circumstan
tial. Each could turn on a dime. It is no wonder that he was so very tired; he needed a cocoon, a place where he could relieve his internal sentinels of their duty and truly rest.

He mulled over his options. They were on a highway, moving very fast. But at some point, the white men would have to slow down. He could fling the door open, roll onto the ground, and run. The Somalis were not so brave as to chase him through the streets of this foreign land.

But he was soon distracted from his getaway plans by the scenes outside the window. The highway had widened and was double-laned on both sides and was full of traffic. The surface of the road itself was as smooth as a varnished table, as if it had been laid yesterday. And the cars on the road were also new, like they had just come off the factory floor. Beyond the roadside were straight rows of houses with deep terra-cotta tiles on their roofs, thick beige paint on their walls, and manicured gardens. They, too, looked as if they had just been built, and Asad imagined a city in a constant state of renewal, each car, each house, each road eternally replenished, a place where nothing is permitted to grow old.

“Johannesb
urg?” he asked.

“Pretoria,” one of the white men replied. “Johannesburg is still nearly an hour away.”

Pretoria? He had never heard of a place called Pretoria. He stared out of the window. A cluster of tall buildings was silhouetted in the distance. Between here and there were uninterrupted concrete and houses and buildings, all of them new. He did not believe that this much wealth had ever before been laid out before him. And they were in a city so inconseque
ntial that Somalis who had been to South Africa had not even mentioned it. He wondered how many such cities this country contained. The stories the northbound travelers had spun about South Africa's riches had been an understate
ment. He looked again at the cluster of tall buildings and at everything in between and wondered at the scale of human endeavor, and at the reserves of wealth, that had put all of these things on the landscape.

The men in the front consulted among themselves in their indecipherable language, and then the one in the passenger seat turned around and announced that they would stop for a while in Pretoria.

“You can't come to your people in Johannesburg dirty and hungry,” he said. “We'll stop at a garage where you can have a shower and a good meal.”

Asad knew immediately that his earlier calculations had been wrong. These were not soldiers. It was not so much what the man had said as the feeling that filled the car when he said it. The feeling was not entirely good—it was a mixture of curiosity and idle kindness; these men, Asad surmised, had found themselves on an adventure to somewhere exotic, and they wanted to see it through.

They stopped in Pretoria and showered and put on clean clothes and ate hot takeaway chicken, and were soon back on the road. The white men wanted to know where in Johannesburg the travelers were going.

“Where the Somalis live,” one of Asad's companions offered.

The two men shook their heads and murmured between themselves. Then the man in the passenger seat turned around and spoke, his voice now clipped with anger. They would drive around the city in a big circle, he said, until the Somalis could tell them where to go. They would not let anyone leave until they had their money.

One of the two women had a cell-phone number for a relative in Johannesburg. He was duly phoned, and word made its way to the white men in the front that the place where Somalis lived was called Mayfair and that there would be money waiting for them there. They were given a street address. The one in the passenger seat consulted a thick road map, and the two men spoke to each other again and seemed happy.

“Brother, we are driving through this very big city and you can see from the way things change that it is a city with many sorts of people. And, then, suddenly, everybody on the street is Somali. The noses and mouths are Somali. The way the teeth are arranged in the mouth is Somali. The clothes people are wearing are Somali. You put your head out of the window and you hear Somalis shout at each other. Not like in Islii, brother, where there are all sorts of people, many of them not Somali. Not like Bole Mikhael, where there are also Ethiopians. Everything and everybody was Somali.

“I do not have the words in English to tell you what happened inside me. I don't think I have the words in Somali. I would have to sit down alone for a long time and write a poem, and, even then, maybe it won't come out right. I felt like I was in Mogadishu. You know when something has been so deep inside you that you did not know it was there? And even once you know it is there, you still are not sure exactly what it is? I remembered something. Walking through a crowded street. Something. I realized that there were parts of Mogadishu that I had forgotten but that were still inside me. I wanted to jump out of the car and run. I knew I would be safe. I knew these people on the streets. And I did not want to have to pay these white men extra money. They had already taken more than enough.”

But the white men were very keen for their payment. They found the woman's relative's house, steered their car off the road and onto the pavement, and parked right in front of the gate, so close that a person would struggle to get in or out.