A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (18 page)

The bus dropped them in the center of the city, and they immediately went to Eastleigh.

“Brother,” Asad says, “you cannot believe the changes. All the places we played in were gone. The lane where we rode bicycles and roller-skated was gone. There were buildings there now,
smart
buildings. There were Internet cafés everywhere with glass fronts and umbrellas. There was a beautiful, big restaurant. Upstairs, there were beautiful cafeterias.

“And there were so many Somalis everywhere. Before, Islii had been just Daaroods. Now Daaroods were a minority. The Hawiye had fled from starvation and war. There were lots of Oromos from Ethiopia.
Everyone
was in Islii. There had been a few dozen school students when I was there; now there were thousands.”

Despite all the strangers, Asad had been in Eastleigh less than an hour when he came across two AliYusuf girls with whom he had lived in the Hotel Taleh. He stared at them, and they stared back at him, the moment of recognition slow in coming. They were eleven or twelve years old when he had last laid eyes on them. Now they were grown women.

“We looked at each other with big eyes, and then we all laughed and couldn't stop laughing,” Asad remembers. “It was like being asleep for eight years and then waking up. They couldn't believe how tall I was. And them: they were both married. Married! Their husbands were Somalis who lived in America. They were men who had walked across the Mexican border into America, had made a lot of money but then could not find wives. Maybe because there were no virgins there. So they came to Addis or Dire Dawa or Nairobi. Before they came they had spies out to spot the beautiful girls. So they would arrive, meet the young woman immediately, and go straight to her family to talk.”

Both of these girls were waiting for green cards. Their new lives were in America. But they had never been to America. They were frustrated with all the waiting. One of the girls took Asad and Khadar to a restaurant for lunch. That evening, Asad slept at her house. They spoke of all the people they had known in Eastleigh in the early 1990s.

“There were very few AliYusuf people left in Islii, brother,” Asad tells me. “Everybody was gone, gone, gone. This one is in America. That one is in Europe. That one is in the refugee camp.”

Asad absorbed properly for the first time the catastrophe his move to Ethiopia had been.

“I had gone from civilization to deep bush, brother. If I had stayed in Islii, I would have gotten to Europe or America. Or even if I had not, the UNHCR was in Nairobi. Many NGOs were in Nairobi. One of them would have done something for me, sent me to a good school, maybe. And even if they had not picked me up, look at all the money that was washing through Islii: the buildings, the lovely shops, all the goods from the East. I would have made a good living. Ethiopia was a prison, brother. There was nothing there. Nothing.”

He did not sleep well. The idea of paths not taken was manageable during the waking hours. He could brush it to the side of his mind, from where it would quietly watch him, out of the way. But as he lay in bed, when thoughts materialize from nowhere, the notion that who he was had turned on the careless decisions of others upended him. His time on the streets of Wardheer, the soccer table in Dire Dawa: that the Asad who had lived these experiences might never have existed—the implications ran too deep. He was watching himself from the ceiling, this inanimate lump of Asad, a puppet waiting for his strings to haul him upright. He felt his anger rise. And almost immediately, he felt it nourishing him, restoring him, making him, once again, into a person. He willed sleep. He needed to be fresh during the day. There was much to accomplish.

Early on his second morning in Nairobi, Asad set out to chart a course to South Africa.

“I met Khadar in the market,” he recalls. “It was still very early, just a few people. Khadar had found family. He had spent the whole night on the phone to America. He thought he had a good plan to get there. It would take a while, though. He would have to settle into Islii to do this work. We ate breakfast, then Khadar went home to get some sleep until night was over in America, and he could phone again.

“I started looking for people going south. By lunchtime, I had spoken to many smugglers. There were Ogadeni smugglers, Hawiye smugglers, any sort of smuggler you could think of. They give you different prices. They offer you different things. Some are making passports with
kibanda.
Others are offering to take you by boat. Others are just offering papers.

“One of the first people I spoke with was offering the whole thing in one package. Everything for seventy thousand shillings: a fake Kenyan passport, a bus journey to Lusaka, to Harare, to Johannesburg. That's a lot of money, brother; it is nearly one thousand dollars. I said no.”

The idea of being swindled was intolerable. The banks of anger that had formed inside him during the night had puffed him up; he felt about him an aura of the possible.

“People spoke of a border town called Namanga,” he tells me. “I had been there. It was the town where I went to that Muslim school and kept running away. I decided to go there. I needed to deal directly with the smugglers rather than go through an expensive middleman.”

“Why?” I asked. “You had a thousand dollars. You hand it over, you sit back on a bus, and next thing you are in Johannesburg. Why go for the most dangerous route?”

“There were so many other people also not paying that one thousand dollars,” he replies. “That morning when I started looking for smugglers, within two hours, I found twenty-seven people going to South Africa. Some had come from Mogadishu, others from various parts of Ethiopia. They were all hanging around where the smugglers were, talking, talking, talking. Some wanted to go by sea. Others said no, they have already traveled by sea to Yemen, and it is not nice. We shared ideas. Sea was risky. The boat can overload—fifty-fifty chance. Others said, ‘What Allah wants, nobody can stop. If you go to the border, you may be arrested.'

“Seven of us decided to go to Namanga. I don't like the sea, brother. I have this fear for it.”

The seven who had chosen Namanga hired a private car together. They were all Ogadeni. The car they hired was owned by an Ogadeni. As they left Nairobi, Asad thought that he smelled Wardheer on their clothes and their skins; he smelled Jigjiga. The idea that these were familiar people taking familiar smells into foreign lands stayed with him a moment. He was not sure what to make of it.

In Namanga, the seven travelers went their separate ways. Asad does not recall why. In any event, he did not think that he needed help. He was feeling stronger than he had in a long time. His duffel bag on his back, his Samsonite case in his right hand, he walked alone through the streets of Namanga, looking for a place to spend the night.

The front room of the inn he found was a public space for guests, it seemed: several people were sitting lazily on chairs, drinking, smoking, talking. Behind the reception desk stood a pudgy, middle-aged man wearing a shirt unbuttoned to the top of his stomach. Asad approached him, put down his duffel bag, and asked for a room.

The man opened a ledger and picked up a pen.

“Kibanda?”
he asked.

Asad shook his head.

“Passport?”

Asad shrugged.

The man put down his pen and looked at Asad with great interest. He leaned over the counter and peered at the duffel bag on the floor.

“Where are you from?” he asked quietly.

Asad looked over his shoulder, as if something had suddenly captured his attention.

“Where are you traveling to?” the innkeeper asked.

“Nowhere. Here. Just to Namanga.”

The man nodded. He named the price of a room, and Asad gave him money, and the innkeeper handed Asad a key.

It was enormously hot and the car journey had been sapping. Asad put both bags in his room, locked the door, went to the communal ablution facilities, and stood under a cold shower. He was there a long time, the water washing over his back, then his chest, then the top of his head. He turned off the tap only when he began to worry that other guests may begin to complain. Back in his room, he changed into fresh clothes, put his bags under the bed, locked the door again, then returned to the front room and took a chair.

“It was so hot,” he tells me. “The car journey had given me the sort of thirst it takes a lot of drinking to recover from. I sat there drinking soda, drinking soda, and trying to talk to the people in the room. Nobody would answer me. It was like I was invisible. I drank another soda. I watched. I tried to speak again. Whoever I spoke to would turn his head.”

If Asad was beginning dimly to work out what was happening, he suppressed the revelation. He went outside into the stark sunlight, leaned against the wall, and squinted into the street. Standing there, watching, he felt the innkeeper's presence alongside him. The fat man put an arm around Asad's shoulder. Asad felt the intense heat coming from his body and wanted instinctively to wriggle free.

“Brother,” the innkeeper said, “
everybody
is in that room.”

Asad looked at him blankly.

“Do you follow what I am saying?
Ev-e-ry-bo-dy.
The one in front of you, wearing the safari suit, is CID. Do you know what's CID? He works for Kenyan intelligence. Look at the bulge on his hip. That is his gun. The small one with the pointy beard: he works for customs. The very dark one and the tall one: they are smugglers.”

In my car, outside his shack in Blikkiesdorp, the scene now safely in the past, Asad begins to giggle.

“You know a fishing net, brother?” he asks. “They all go fishing there in that lodge. They go and cast their net. I'm carrying luggage. I have no documents. Everyone immediately knows what I am doing. It's obvious.”

The first thing that came into Asad's head was his money. It was in his room. One of these men was going to cart him away, and when he returned, his money would be long gone. He went back into the inn, tucked his head deep into his chest, and lurched toward the passageway.

For a heavyset man, the one in the safari suit was impressively swift. He was out of his chair in a flash, his hand pressed firmly against Asad's chest.

“Where are you from?” he asked. His voice was surprisingly high-pitched for a big man. His Swahili was delivered with an accent Asad couldn't place.

Asad shrugged, and in broken Swahili said that he didn't understand.

“We will get a translator,” the CID man replied. “What language?”

“English.”

The CID man looked at Asad skeptically. “We do not have an English translator here,” he said in English. “Let's go.”

He bunched his fingers around Asad's bicep and pulled.

Asad tried to grab on to the reception desk. “I need to speak to the innkeeper before we go,” he said.

“This is not the innkeeper's business,” the CID man snapped.

At that very moment, the innkeeper appeared with Asad's duffel bag over his shoulder and his Samsonite case in his hand. Asad smiled at him with the deepest gratitude. The bags were loaded into the CID man's trunk, Asad was ordered into the passenger seat, and they drove off.

“You will never guess, brother, but the moment we left, the two smugglers, the very dark one and the tall one, jumped into their own car and followed ours. I was a fish, brother, and all the sharks were circling, circling, circling.

“The CID man sees the two smugglers in his rearview mirror.

“ ‘You know them?' he asks.

“Brother, I did not know
anybody.
I had never felt so alone in my life. And this CID man is driving me to I don't know where. To prison? To a police station? To his office somewhere in the city?

“He drives me to his
house.
He personally takes my bags out of his car and he leaves them on the ground, and I carry them into the man's
house.
His wife is in the kitchen cooking dinner. He shows me to a room and closes the door when he leaves. Brother, I had been kidnapped.”

He lay down on a single bed and listened to himself breathing. Soon, the sounds of the world outside came to him. He heard roosters in the yard and, somewhere down the road, the shouts of children playing. Husband and wife talked quietly to each other, in Kikuyu, Asad thinks, somewhere in the house. He lay and listened, and the domesticity soothed him. The feeling that he had been captured slowly seeped away. Perhaps, he now felt, he was somewhere sane.

An hour or two later, the CID man let Asad out of his room and invited him to sit and talk.

“I started to relax,” Asad says. “Observing this man in his own home made him…How can I say? I thought, I can deal with this man.

“So I decide it's best to get straight to business. I tell him I want to walk over the border tonight.

“ ‘How much?' he says.

“ ‘Fifty dollars.'

“Brother, he looked at me like he was about to spit in my face.

“ ‘Then we'd better take you to prison right now,' he says.

“We bargain. It takes maybe half an hour. We settle on one hundred dollars.

“He tells me how it is going to work. He is calling this Masai tracker guy, this nomad, to come in a taxi. The Masai is a genius at walking at night, he says. The Masai can see in the dark. I am going to walk with the Masai for a long, long time, far around the border post. He stops talking, gets up, and brings my bags through. He looks at them carefully. ‘You can keep the small one with you,' he says. ‘The big one I will get across the border. The Masai will take you to a taxi. Your bag will be in the taxi.'

“I look at this man, and I am thinking to myself, Why should he take the trouble to get my bag over the border? I will have paid him. He will never see me again. But what else could I do? I put myself in his hands.

“The Masai came in a taxi. He was a little guy, wearing clothes of the bush. He and the CID man spoke together in Masai. I couldn't understand a word they were saying. It made me nervous. I looked closely into the Masai's face to see if I could understand what the CID man was saying he must do with me. The Masai's face was completely blank, brother, completely blank.”