A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (25 page)

On the seventh day, he was standing behind the counter, giving a customer change, when it came to him in a flash that he had just risen above the scene, watched himself from on high, and had seen a widower. He passed the change through the cage and sat down. Such thoughts had been going through his head for days, he now realized. In increments so small that he had not noticed, he was growing numb. Deep inside, beyond conscious thoughts, he was preparing to leave Sterkstroom for long enough to look for a wife. Perhaps he would find one somewhere as close as Queenstown, maybe in Johannesburg, perhaps even in some other country.

On the fourteenth day he answered his phone to hear a man's voice ask whether this was Asad Hirsi Abdullahi, whether he had a wife called Foosiya, whether he was expecting her.

“What has happened?” Asad pleaded.

Then Foosiya was on the line. Her voice sounded both close and startled, and Asad imagined that she had seen terrible things.

Then the strange man's voice was back and he announced who he was and what had happened.

“The smuggler had left Nairobi with sixty people,” Asad tells me. “But he realized on the journey that he had miscalculated, that there were too many of them to cross the border into Tanzania. They must divide into two groups. Foosiya was in the first group. The smuggler left them on the Kenya-Tanzania border in the care of a woman. He paid the woman one week's board and lodging for all of them and went back into Kenya to fetch the second group. But he did not come back. The landlady in the bush was not getting paid. She started robbing the people who the smuggler left with her.

“In these conditions, people began to divide into clans. There were no other Isaaq people. Foosiya was scared. She said she was Ogadeni. The Ogadeni interrogated her. She said she was AliYusuf and Abdullahi. Somebody there knew Abdullahi. They accepted her. They took her and her friend under their wing. That is the one who phoned me. He was an AliYusuf. He said they were stuck, they had all been robbed, none of them had money. They had nowhere to stay.”

Asad asked for the cell-phone number of the smuggler. The man answered at once, and in a cold, even voice Asad threatened to come to Kenya and kill him.

“He was very apologetic. He said it was not his fault. Fourteen of his people had been arrested. He could not leave them in prison. He was trying to get them out. I said I didn't care what his problem was. If he valued his life, he would get my wife to South Africa.”

Four days later, Foosiya was in Maputo, just four hundred kilometers or so from Mayfair. She phoned Asad and told him she needed another four hundred dollars to get her and her companion to Johannesburg. Asad borrowed the money from an AliYusuf family near Queenstown and wired it straight to Maputo. The following day, Foosiya was in Johannesburg.

“I phoned an AliYusuf person in Mayfair. I asked him, ‘Please fetch these ladies. Please keep them safe.'

“She stayed in Johannesburg a week. She said she did not want to rest anymore. She wanted to come to me.”

Asad woke a neighbor before dawn to take him to Queenstown to meet Foosiya's bus. Of the journey, he recalls that the grass plains were gray in the predawn light and that he felt anxious. But he has no memory of Queenstown that morning. He does not recall waiting for the bus or seeing Foosiya get off it. He no longer knows what they said when they laid eyes on each other, whether they touched, or how. Nor does he remember the journey home. He no longer knows, for instance, whether he sat in the passenger seat and Foosiya behind the driver, or whether they sat together in the back, as if in a taxi.

I am guessing freely, for all I have is my imagination. I see him in the front and her in the back, and throughout the half-hour journey they exchange barely a word. To swivel in his seat far enough to face her is a gesture that imparts import, weight. He is not sure that he has anything weighty to say. It is safer to stare straight ahead. He is about to introduce his wife to her future; there will be plenty to talk about soon enough.

What Asad does recall, as vividly as if he has just seen it, is Foosiya's face when she saw Sterkstroom. Her lips began to form a perfect O, but before they could get halfway there, they slammed shut, as if she feared that by seeing into her mouth Asad might see into her soul. And he remembers, too, what he thought: such self-possession, to be able to catch so powerful an emotion so early.

“Brother,” he says, “that look on her face was pure shock. On the phone I had told her that I work, not where I work. She didn't have a picture. She thought I was working in a big city. She had an image of the township in her head, an image of a very tough place.”

“What did she think?” I ask.

“That is a question I did not want to put to her.”

“But what do you think she thought?”

“I don't know. Maybe that she had jumped from Addis into the bush. If she thought that, she did not tell me. On her second day in Sterkstroom, she was already behind the counter working. What choice did she have?”

Of all the moments in his past Asad has described to me, it is this October day in 2004 I wish to have witnessed with my own eyes. A woman waits nine months to join her husband in a new land. They have behind them a briefly shared life. While it is true that each has felt strongly for the other, their coming together was calculated, the nature of the transaction opaque, for both had kept secrets. Now the woman makes a hair-raising journey to join this husband whom she does not quite know. She gets through it by the skin of her teeth. And she arrives to find a place more remote than any she has seen. She is in a house of four Somalis, two of them strangers; beyond it is a tribe of inscrutable people; beyond them, empty blond fields roll into oblivion.

There is no turning back now. This is her life.

“Was it easy to live with her again?” I ask Asad.

“Yes,” he replies. “I still loved her. The excitement I felt in Addis when I realized that she was a great woman: it came back straightaway.”

“Immediately?”

“I woke up the morning after she arrived. She was still sleeping. I rested my head on my elbow and looked at her for a long time. I was excited. It did not take away my uncle's death. But it brought something new.”

Foosiya seems to have fallen pregnant during her first week in Sterkstroom, for by early December, Asad was noting strange behavior in his wife.

“First, she started oversleeping,” Asad reports. “When she finally got up, she would be angry. I would say something and she would fight. So I was just quiet. Then she would complain that I was not saying anything.

“One day, she started moving produce out of the shop. Kaafi stood and stared at her. He said, ‘What are you doing with our stock?'

“ ‘It stinks,' she said. ‘Either the stock goes or I will vomit.'

“Then I realized. I said, ‘Foosiya, why didn't you tell me? We are going to have a child!'

“She gave me a terrible look, brother.”

His memories of Foosiya's olfactory disturbances bring a spirit of mirth to the inside of my car. The space between us is now alive with something rare: nostalgia.

“I did not know what to expect in the mornings,” he says. “Some days I woke up and she would tell me I stink so bad she was going to vomit. Other days, I would be about to go out for a few hours, and she would ask for my shirt so she could hold it to her nose and smell me while I was gone.”

Now he is laughing out loud. He says he has a story about watermelons.

“We sold them in the shop. They were very popular. One day, she was sitting behind me, dealing with the change; she said she didn't want us to sell watermelon anymore. I asked why not. She said they were making her unhappy. Unhappy? How can a watermelon make you unhappy?

“ ‘You'll never understand,' she said. ‘Just get rid of the watermelons.' ”

He is on a roll now. The memories are pouring out and will not cease.

“She stopped eating food, brother. Stopped altogether. She would only drink milk. I was worried for our baby. I was trying to think of how to get her back to food. So I told her a story about South African milk. In Somaliland, she drank milk fresh from a camel or a goat or a cow. In Sterkstroom, she was drinking long-life milk. I told her it isn't actually milk. It doesn't come from an animal. They make it from plants. She was shocked. She stopped drinking it. But she did not go back to food. She just had nothing at all now. Brother, she was driving me crazy!”

Word reached the Somalis' landlady that Asad's beautiful wife was refusing food. She came around one morning leaning on her stick, flanked by three others. The women pronounced that they had seen this problem more often than they could count. They were going to take Foosiya on an outing. But first, they said, they were going to do her hair.

A chair was brought out, Foosiya was invited to sit, and half a dozen Sterkstroom women hovered around her head for the rest of the morning.

“They liked Foosiya's hair,” Asad says. “They liked its softness. They would insist on doing her hair every so often, and it would take hours.

“Sometimes, though, they asked what was the point of doing her hair so nice when she would only cover it in the Muslim way. She said it was for her husband. They would like that. They would wink at me and tell me that they were making my wife beautiful for me.”

Once her hair was done, the old ladies swept Foosiya into a taxi and she was gone—where to, Asad did not know.

They all returned in the early evening. When Asad asked Foosiya where they had taken her and whether she had eaten, she ignored him. He walked down to his landlady's house and asked her.

“They had taken her to eat potato crisps,” he tells me. “The old woman was looking very satisfied with herself. She said she had never known a pregnant woman who does not eat potato crisps.”

For the duration of Foosiya's pregnancy, Sterkstroom was pretty much the sum of Asad's world. He only ever went to two other places: to Queenstown every third day to buy stock, and to Home Affairs in Port Elizabeth every third month to renew his, and now Foosiya's, asylum-seeker status.

The trips to Home Affairs were dispiriting. He would get a taxi to Port Elizabeth, a tiring six-hour drive, and take his place in that grim, endless queue. When he eventually got to the front, the official he confronted would tell him that his attempt to acquire refugee status had made no progress and that he would have to renew his asylum-seeker papers. He would ask questions, try to ascertain whether there was something he might do to speed up his case. But the officials were rude and harried and disinterested.

These trips cost him a great deal. Each time, he was away from work for two days. He would have to pay for a hotel to spend the night in Port Elizabeth. And, when he finally returned home, he was so tired and frustrated that he took a day to recuperate.

Besides, there was something about the experience that haunted him. All these people from the four corners of the continent waiting lamely in that long line, then filing into the great building like sausages into a butcher's machine, the officials inside so callous, so utterly indifferent. It struck him again, as it had when he first stood in that queue with Abdicuur, that South Africa was immensely powerful in ways he did not understand.

He knew little about refugee law. Snippets of information circulated in South Africa's Somali community, but they were entangled in rumor and opinion, and he could not say for certain what was right or wrong. But it seemed clear that without refugee status, he was not free to travel outside South Africa. To cross a border one needed a refugee identity-document book. To get a refugee document, one needed refugee papers.

“Eventually,” he tells me, “I went to a Somali smuggler. His name was AbdiNoor. He lived in Port Elizabeth. He specialized in smuggling between Somalis and Home Affairs. He asked for fifteen hundred rand. I said it was too much. I could give him one thousand. He took out his notebook. He wrote down my name and age. I gave him one thousand and my asylum seeker's permit number.”

Asad waited all day at AbdiNoor's place, and the smuggler returned in the evening with refugee papers for Asad. It was as simple as that; Home Affairs worked very well if you greased the right palms.

The very next day, he took his new papers to the Home Affairs office and applied for a refugee identity document. He was given a receipt and told to return in three months. He did: he stood once again in that queue, and when he got to the front the official told him that his receipt meant nothing and that there was no record of him ever having applied for a refugee document. He applied again and put the second receipt in his wallet.

He returned home troubled. It is true that Sterkstroom was treating him and Kaafi well. Business was good; shortly after Foosiya arrived, the Somalis opened a second shop, this one in the RDP settlement on the hill, and it was making almost as much money as the first. And the people of Sterkstroom had accepted them and were kind.

But the idea that he was stuck in this country, that he could not show his identity document at the border and walk out, made him immensely uncomfortable.

“You didn't plan to stay for long?” I ask.

“No. I wanted to work hard and to save and then to move on.”

“Move on to where?”

He sighs deeply. “How do I answer that question? I didn't have an exact plan. I was always on the lookout for peace. Not necessarily Europe or America. I wanted to travel, I just wasn't sure where to.”

Foosiya went into labor in the afternoon of July 28, 2005. Asad was at the shop in the RDP settlement when he heard the news. He worked until shortly after seven o'clock that evening, closed the shop, and went to the hospital in the town of Molteno, a twenty-minute drive from Sterkstroom.

He arrived to find the nursing staff in the maternity section ruffled and indignant.

“You need to speak to your wife,” one of them said to him sharply.

When she had been admitted, a nurse had invited Foosiya to lie down. She had refused.

“In Somalia,” he explains, “when a woman is giving birth she stands and holds on to something. Here they say: Lie down and stay there. But she couldn't do that; nobody has given birth like that in Somalia. You couldn't.”

“We cannot deliver the baby if the mother is standing on her feet,” a nurse had reportedly told Foosiya. “How do you expect us to get down there? Stop being silly now.”

She had smiled benignly at Foosiya and laid her hand gently on her shoulder. Foosiya had ducked from it as if a snake had just dropped onto her. The nurse stared at her openmouthed. Then she stormed Foosiya, gripping her shoulders with her hands. Foosiya had fought back.

“I saw the nurse who had fought with Foosiya,” Asad says. “She was little. Foosiya is a fierce woman. She is very strong.”

Asad went to talk to his wife. “ ‘Listen,' I said. ‘We are in a foreign country. They have their own training. They do not know how to help you unless you are lying down.' ”

“Fuck that,” Foosiya said in English.

Asad stared at her in amazement. To his knowledge, these were the first two English words to pass her lips. Where did she learn them?

Asad was then told to leave. He does not know whether Foosiya gave birth standing or lying down. When he asked her some months later, she stared at him a long time and, by way of reply, invited him to give birth to their next child.

In any event, Foosiya was in labor all night. Their son, Khalid, was born the next morning. That afternoon, they went home.

When I ask Asad about his first experiences of fatherhood, he says that he has no words to explain.

“My excitement was too deep, brother. It was beyond words. It was beyond me. It was something very big.”

Here and now, during the time of our daily interviews, I am watching him father a subsequent infant, this one a girl. And so I take what I am seeing and transport it to Sterkstroom in August 2005.

Asad and his daughter are in love. When I follow him into his shack, after we have spent hours sitting in my car, he takes the little one from whoever has been holding her, cradles her head in the crook of his arm, and finds her eyes with his own. They stare at each other without blinking, as if each is daring the other to look away first. Asad is usually the one to blink. As he does so, he bursts into laughter. His attention is locked on her face, his absorption uncompromi
sing. As I look upon this, I think of the way he is in my car, a piece of him always detached and watching the street for signs of trouble.