A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (15 page)

And it was not just to its own citizens that the government was accountable. Somalis, who could not return home because their country was at war, could get refugee papers in South Africa. Once you had these papers, you were free to move, free to put your children in the country's schools, to go to its hospitals when you fell ill.

Sometime in 2003, a group of Somali travelers stayed over at Asad's place. They were close relatives of Yusuf's, and so the household made a fuss over them and cooked them a fine meal. They had come from South Africa and were heading for Italy.

“There were three of them,” Asad recalls. “They were all young, all in their twenties, and they spoke big about South Africa. One of them said he had been down south only five years, and already he had built himself a double-story house in Somalia. ‘How do you make so much money so quickly?' we asked. He told us that setting up a business was easy. First, everything was so cheap. You could buy a pickup truck for nothing. You could rent premises from a South African. And you were free to move. No soldiers asking where you were going or why. It was a free country.

“ ‘What if you don't have money to set up a business?' we asked. Easy, he replied. You work as a shopkeeper for a Somali. You earn two hundred or three hundred dollars a month. Money goes very far in South Africa. Even with the silver coins, you can buy a meal. You save most of your wage. You use it to buy a business.

“ ‘If it is so good down there,' we asked, ‘why are you traveling the other way?' Because South Africa was still Africa. There was no substitute for Europe.”

The interrogation continued into the small hours of the morning. As the traveler grew tired, so his annoyance at his audience's skepticism increased. He wanted to sleep, but he did not want to end the evening while his hosts thought him a liar. And so he stripped his big suitcase and then his little suitcase and then his jacket, each time emerging with a small pile of one-hundred-dollar bills. By the time he was finished, they lay strewn in front of him on the floor. “Count them,” he invited. Yusuf gathered up the bills into a pile and counted them, then counted them again. He announced that he was holding nearly twenty thousand U.S. dollars in his hand.

It was about two or three in the morning. Half a dozen young men sat in Asad's room chewing
mira.
One of them, Ahmed Afgud, was talking at length about his girlfriend.

“He spoke about the shape of her hips,” Asad recalls, “and what you can see of her thighs when she is sitting and her clothes are tight against her legs. He spoke about her smile. This was typical
mira
talk. Boys would talk about their girlfriends until everyone was so excited, brother, that you would not want to light a match in that room.

“Ahmed Afgud's girlfriend shared a house with five or six other women on the other side of Bole Mikhael. I thought of her sleeping while Ahmed Afgud was talking about her. If his words could travel through the night and find their way to her ears she would be having troubled sleep.

“ ‘Girlfriend' does not mean what it means in South Africa,” Asad points out, not for the first time. “It does not mean they had sex. They were never even in a room alone together. It means that Ahmed Afgud went to her house where he was received by some of the other ladies who lived there. He would ask to see his girlfriend. Ahmed would be told to wait. She would come maybe half an hour later. They would talk. Always, there was somebody else in the room. To show that she was serious, his girlfriend would maybe offer to wash his clothes for him, maybe even cook him a meal.

“Ahmed Afgud was talking and talking and talking about his girlfriend until somebody cut him off. ‘Enough already! Ask her to get married!' He said, ‘Okay, I am going to ask her tomorrow.' And I said, ‘If you are going to ask her tomorrow, I am going to come with you.' ”

And so the two young men visited Ahmed Afgud's girlfriend the following afternoon, and Ahmed Afgud proposed marriage, causing consternation in his girlfriend's house. After a tense week of waiting and interminable discussion in both houses, Ahmed Afgud's girlfriend accepted.

Asad was among the people Ahmed Afgud asked to witness the wedding ceremony. His first thought was that he did not have clothes appropriate for so solemn an occasion. And so he borrowed a jacket from his Ethiopian landlady, which he wore over a T-shirt, for he did not own a collared shirt. He stared at himself in the mirror, wondering whether the combination made him look smarter or just a little silly. He took the jacket off and gave it back to his landlady.

The ceremony was held at a mosque some ten or twelve blocks from Asad's house. Just a handful of guests was invited. The only sign of ostentation was in the transport: the entire wedding party would drive to the venue, rather than walk. They set off in a convoy of three cars, each driver sounding his horn all the way. Some of the other drivers on the road pulled up and stared. Some cheered. Others waved their fists and shouted abuse.

Asad has little memory of the wedding itself, but he remembers every moment of the car journey home. The imam who performed the ceremony was in the passenger seat. Three people were in the back: Asad in one corner, his housemate Abdirashid in the middle, and, in the other corner, Foosiya, a friend of the bride's.

The imam was boisterous and talkative. He was turned in his seat, facing the back, and remarking at length on Foosiya's beauty. He spoke also of the bridewealth he would pay for her—camels, horses, guns.

“Foosiya stayed in the same house as Ahmed's new wife,” Asad tells me. “We were very interested in the comings and goings of that house. We spent hours discussing each woman who lived there. Foosiya stood out among them. First, it was because she was amazingly beautiful. She had a long, powerful face and green eyes. Her eyes were very strong. She carried herself with independence, with confidence. When I watched her I would sometimes think of Nasri in Wardheer: a young woman alone, making her way with no doubts. But Foosiya was older than Nasri had been when I was in Wardheer. Foosiya was maybe twenty-eight, twenty-nine. That made her even more powerful. We discussed her often. Who would she marry? Would she even marry anybody? Who was big enough for her? She was an Isaaq woman from Somaliland, the traditional enemy of the Ogadeni. This made her even more powerful in my eyes.”

And so the imam spoke of the camels and horses and guns he would pay for the gorgeous Foosiya.

“You are too old for me,” she said coolly, and turned her face and stared out of the window.

The imam smiled and pointed at Asad.

“Marry this one, then,” he said.

Foosiya turned to Asad, examined him for a moment or two, as if she was taking him in for the first time, then stared out of the window again.

“He is
kurai,
” she said matter-of-factly. “I cannot marry him either.”

Asad leaves the word untranslated. Literally, it means “small boy.” But its full import has no direct equivalent in English. “Runt” perhaps gets close. This beautiful and haughty woman had settled her gaze just once upon Asad, long enough to flick him away like dirt from under her fingernail.

Everyone in the car fell quiet. Asad stared ahead, avoiding everybody's eyes.

The imam broke the silence; he laughed and slapped his hand against the car seat. “I'm too old, and Asad is
kurai,
” he said, shaking his head in mock disbelief. “Nobody in Addis Ababa is just right for Miss Foosiya. She will have to travel far to find a man.”

Asad felt the heat rising from his body. His clothes sat heavily on him, irritating his skin. He found, to his surprise, that a bead of sweat was rolling down the bridge of his nose. Were he to speak, he would only draw attention to his discomfort. And yet neither would silence restore his dignity. All he could do was to sit out his shame.

When the journey finally ended, he climbed out of the car, put his head down, and walked. He wanted to storm Foosiya; he wanted to grip her by the arms and shake her hard. He imagined her composure collapsing in shouts and protests, perhaps even in tears. But that was a small boy's way of seeking attention. He kept walking.

Over the following days, he felt Foosiya's growing presence under his skin, teasing and agitating him. He believed that her image of him as
kurai
was somehow contagious, that, by now, every woman in her house saw an insignificant child whenever they laid eyes on him. The injustice of it grieved him. After all, he was the one supporting his entire household. What more did he need to do to prove himself?

His feelings confused him. Why was he so upset? He had survived a childhood of hell; he had needed to grow four or five skins to fend off the world. Yet an idle comment uttered by a woman he barely knew had felled him. An old taste settled in the back of his mouth, one he had almost forgotten. It was a taste he had slowly spat out during the two years he spent with Rooda on the truck. What was it? He had no words for it. He remembered it in his mouth as he watched Nasri and Rooda disappear into Nasri's house in Wardheer. They were inside together, and he had felt very alone. He remembered swallowing hard and feeling in his throat the endless miles of desert beyond the boundaries of Wardheer.

A week or so after the wedding, Asad announced to Abdirashid that he was going to propose marriage to Foosiya.

Abdirashid raised his eyebrows. Then he whistled through his teeth.

“You'll never do it,” he said.

“You're advising me not to do it?” Asad asked. “Or are you saying you do not believe that I will do it?”

“I am saying that you don't have the courage.”

Asad stared hard at Abdirashid. He was a good ten years older than Asad. He was wise, self-assured. He knew what he knew.

Abdirashid smiled mischievously. “Like I say, I don't believe you'll do it. But if you do, I will back you. I will come with you. I will help you through it.”

That very afternoon, the two of them called at Foosiya's house. A young woman received them and invited them to sit in the front room. Abdirashid said that they had come to see Foosiya. Asad was silent.

The young woman left and came back a few minutes later. Foosiya would see them, she said, but they must be patient. Foosiya needed to wash, then to pray. Only then would she receive her guests.

They waited almost an hour. Two or three women joined them and asked oblique questions; they were curious why these men wanted to see Foosiya, but they would not ask directly. The young men were nervous and answered the questions posed to them in riddles. The conversation grew more and more awkward.

When Foosiya finally entered the room, she nodded a polite greeting to both men and sat down without saying a word. Abdirashid took command. After a few pleasantries, he told Foosiya that he was there merely as an adviser, that the visit was Asad's, that Asad was interested in seeing her again. She nodded and looked at her fingernails, then took a long glance around the room, before finally settling her eyes on Asad. The sun was shining directly at her through the window, and her green eyes looked quite translucent. Asad returned her gaze without flinching. The imperious expression she had worn when she had looked him up and down in the car was gone. Her face was quite inscrutable. It seemed to Asad that perhaps she was curious, inquiring, but he could not be sure. In any event, she said that if Asad were to come again, alone, she would see him.

Sitting in my car outside his shack in Blikkiesdorp, Asad is bracingly candid about his intentions. He wanted to marry Foosiya, certainly, but he did not like her, and he did not want to spend his life with her. The way he saw it, the marriage would last a few weeks. He would win her and fuck her and divorce her. She had humiliated him. One of her eyes for one of his.

Asad's memories of his courtship of Foosiya are strangely ethereal. When I ask him what they spoke about, he says that he deliberately did not prepare anything to say. He looked at her across the room and said whatever was in his head.

“What was in your head?” I ask.

“Rubbish. Nothing. Whatever came, I said. Sometimes a conversation came from it. Sometimes not.”

He did not know how to broach the subject on his mind. A couple of times, he was on the brink of telling her that he wanted to marry her, but the very idea that the words might spring from his head into the room seemed impossible, and he swallowed them back down his throat.

He believes it was at their third or fourth encounter that he proposed marriage. From the start, the meeting was flat and without energy. After barely fifteen minutes, conversation was running dry. It came to him that his extemporizing had lost whatever value it once had, that he had nothing to offer now, that this meeting might well be their last.

“I want to marry you,” he said.

She smiled at him. “You are how old?” she asked. “Nineteen, twenty?”

“One of the two,” he replied.

“You are a boy. You are not ready for the responsibility of marriage.”

“How can you say I am not ready? There are five boys living in my room. I pay the rent. I buy food for dinner every night. They all chew
mira
into the early hours of the morning, and I am the one who provides money for the
mira.
To marry you would make me richer. I would be supporting one other person instead of five. You say I am too young, but what you are saying just makes no sense.”

He remembers her crossing her legs and resting her chin on the ball of her hand. She was silent for a moment, and then she began asking one question after another. She wanted to know what time he went to sleep and when he got up in the morning; how often he prayed and whether he was scrupulous about washing before praying. She combed through the minutiae of his work; she wanted to know how he earned every birr. Then she wanted also to know how he spent every birr, how much he saved. When he told her that almost half of what he earned was spent on
mira,
she shook her head and mumbled under her breath. Her questions seemed like tests: “If you were to spend less on
mira
and save more,” she asked, “what would you be saving for? How would you eventually spend the money?”

They met again a few days later. Foosiya sat upright and alert, her legs crossed, her back ramrod straight. Once more, she pinned Asad to his chair with a volley of questions. These were more freewheeling than her last inquiries. How did he come to live in Addis?

Asad was thrown by these questions. It was understood in Bole Mikhael that everyone's past was off-limits; people lived together in the present and kept their histories behind closed doors. Asad stared out of the window and felt that the world outside was familiar; the world here in this room with Foosiya was deeply strange.

The inequality of the exchange unnerved him. He thought of how he might formulate a few questions about her.

“Why are you in Addis?” he asked. “Alone, with no family. What made you leave your family and come here?”

In my car outside his shack, Asad shrugs in frustration and laughs.

“Some things are hard to translate,” he says. “What she said was that she needed a change. We Somalis do not go on holiday like you do. We do not knock off at Christmastime and go and see relatives like South Africans. We live in the same place day in and day out. So, sometimes, someone will just decide to go and live in another place for a few months and say, ‘I needed a change.' That is what Foosiya said.

“But then, later, when I knew her much better, I asked again, and she said she went to Addis because she was hoping to get to Europe or America. And I said, ‘So which was it: a change or a new life?' She busied herself with other things, like she had not heard me.”

They met again the next day. Asad had barely sat down when Foosiya announced that she would marry him. It was just a question now of Asad making contact with her father in Somaliland and formally asking for permission. Asad nodded and smiled and found that he had nothing to say. He left almost immediately. Outside, the sunlight seemed much too bright. He stumbled home, barely conscious of where he was going. He was nineteen or twenty years old. If all went well, he would be sharing a bed with a woman who had humiliated him, who had angered him, whom he wanted to hurt and upset, and whom he did not begin to understand. He knew, also, that his impending marriage would prove nothing less than a scandal. Everybody wanted to marry Foosiya. Everyone had undressed her with his tongue or, at the very least, with his thoughts. And she had chosen this
kurai,
this young Ogadeni boy barely off the street. What was she doing? What were her motives?