A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (27 page)

He sold the shop to a Somali man who owned a string of businesses in Eastern Cape. He got seventy thousand rand; it was a good price. And why should he not get a good price? His was still the only shop in the black township next to Sterkstroom. There was a lot of money to be made. And the new owner would employ a shopkeeper to run it; if someone were again slaughtered it would only be a hired hand.

Aside from the seventy thousand rand, Asad had saved a fair amount of money during his time in Sterkstroom. He and Kaafi had done well. He was flush.

On an afternoon in mid-November, Asad, Khalid, and a heavily pregnant Foosiya left Sterkstroom for Port Elizabeth. Early the following morning, they queued outside Home Affairs. When they finally got to the front of the queue, they asked for “go-home” papers for Foosiya and Khalid.

“Why do you want go-home papers?” they were asked. “Your country is very dangerous. You cannot go there.”

“Here is dangerous,” Asad replied.

Foosiya's and Khalid's applications were refused.

Asad made some calls. Among others, he phoned AbdiNoor, the man who had once been so efficient at getting the papers Asad needed from Home Affairs. He was told that one could not buy go-home papers, but there was a way to acquire them without buying them. He was given a phone number and an address for a refugee-support organization in Johannesburg. These people knew how to get go-home papers, he was told.

They left Port Elizabeth that very afternoon on an intercity bus. In the morning, they checked into a lodge in Mayfair, washed, changed, and headed for the offices of the organization they had been advised to visit.

“They ask Foosiya why she wants to go home,” Asad tells me. “Foosiya says, ‘My grandmother died. I must go for the funeral.' They write a letter. We go to the Home Affairs office in Johannesburg and show them the letter. She is given permission. Khalid is given permission. There is nothing to stop them now.

“From there on, brother, it happens quickly. I find a flight to Nairobi. I buy two tickets. She phones some Isaaq people in Islii. They will meet her. They will make arrangements for her to travel from there to Hargeisa and from Hargeisa to her father's home. From the time we got to Johannesburg to the time she left, it was just a few days.

“When we said good-bye, we said it was not for forever. We would find a way. We would be together in a place that could make us both happy.

“I parked at the airport and walked inside with them. All the time, I was holding Khalid. I stood with them in the queue to check in. I was still holding Khalid. Then it was time for them to walk where I could not walk. I handed Khalid to Foosiya, and I turned around.”

She called him the following morning. She was in Eastleigh. She was safe. Arrangements had been made. She was going home. She would phone again once she had given birth. She would tell Asad whether it was a boy or a girl.

He put down the phone. He was once again a young man in a travelers' lodge in an African city.

He never did find out whether the hearing in Grahamstown was just for bail or a trial proper. He does not know whether Aubrey was ever punished for his crime.

That very afternoon, he got to work. He had a lot of money from the sale of his business. He would not invest in another South African venture. He would use what he had to get to Europe or to America. He had to move fast. Every day in South Africa his savings would diminish. By the end of the year, he wanted to be gone.

There were several options. The first was to go again to Home Affairs to get a refugee card. With a refugee card, he could get a refugee passport. With a refugee passport, he could travel. He knew of a dozen people who had gotten to Europe this way.

He went to the same Home Affairs office that had granted Foosiya her go-home papers. He was told, once again, that there was no record of his ever having applied for a refugee card, and that he would have to do so yet again.

He did not have time to wait. He turned his mind to a second option: the United States.

“You pay a smuggler a lot of money to get you a good passport,” he tells me. “You fly to São Paulo. Next, you must get through Venezuela and Ecuador, en route to Mexico. We had heard that it is not difficult. They give you transit visas. They do not care whether your passport is fake. They know you are on your way elsewhere and they do not care.

“But next is Mexico. For that, you need a visa. You need an illegal transporter to get you into Mexico.

“I had heard of people who had done it. A cousin of mine had done it from Nairobi. I also heard of two others who had done it successfully. They all flew to Brazil; they walked across the border into America. They were arrested there.

“Brother, in America, they do not deport you to Somalia because Somalia is at war. They do not deport you back to Mexico because Mexico does not want you; you were not there legally in the first place. So they lock you away for a long time. One person I heard of spent two years in the cells. Another was in the cells three and a quarter years. Another for only one year.

“While you are in prison, they are finding out who you really are: Are you militia? Have you received military training? Have you been involved in terrorist activity? When they are happy that you are truly a refugee, they give you documentation. You leave prison. You go and live in America.

“Brother, my plan was to spend twenty-four months in jail. Then I would bring my wife and children.”

“Would Foosiya have followed you?” I ask.

“Who knows? Maybe she would have married someone else in the meantime.”

In Mayfair, he got the cell-phone numbers of three smugglers.

“I phone the first one. He asks me where I am. I say Mayfair.

“
‘Ai,'
he says. ‘I am in Pretoria. I will call you when I have time to come to Johannesburg.'

“But he doesn't call. Finally, after I have phoned him three, four times, he says, ‘We meet tonight at eight p.m. at a restaurant called Al Jazeera in Mayfair.'

“We meet. We drink tea. He says he must pay eight thousand rand to the man who brings the fake South African passport. This man will also put a history of visas into the passport; an unused passport is suspicious. Another eight thousand rand go to the officials at the airport who must be bribed. Then another eight thousand for the ticket to São Paulo. Plus another twenty thousand for the smuggler himself. Altogether, it is forty-four thousand. I must pay the whole thing up front.

“I tell him I will think about it.

“The second smuggler I phone offers to meet me immediately. He was too rushed. I did not trust him. He wanted thirty thousand rand up front for everything. It was too simple. He said everything was guaranteed. Nothing could go wrong. I did not like it. I walked away.

“The third smuggler was always too busy to see me. I waited two weeks. Finally, he picks me up, takes me to where he lives in Mayfair, tells me the options available: ‘UK, nonstop flight. But probably they will send you back when you get to Heathrow.'

“America: he can get me as far as Brazil. No guarantee after that. He says, ‘In Brazil, maybe they can catch you and bring you back. Who knows?'

“As for the price: twenty thousand rand, which you pay up front. It gets you the passport and the ticket and the instructions about what to do at the airport. Another twenty thousand for the smuggler. But you only pay once you are safely in Brazil. If you do not get there, the smuggler forfeits his fee.

“I go with this one. I trust him. He is talking straight. I pay him twenty thousand rand. The other twenty thousand I give to an Ogadeni man called Ahmed, a shopkeeper. He is trustworthy. I give him the money in front of the smuggler. I know that if I do not make it, Ahmed will keep the money for me. Or he will use it to get me out of whatever trouble I am in.

“The smuggler comes back with a passport. It has a few visas, visa stamps. He gives me an air ticket. I do not remember for how long I waited for this. A week, maybe? I am not sure.

“I begin spending time with the other people he is smuggling. There are fourteen of us. Eight will go in one shift. The following night, I will go with five others. We agree that all fourteen of us will join together again in Brazil. For once we are in Brazil, we are on our own. It will be difficult there, we know. We are vulnerable. We can be robbed. We can be arrested. Even small things are bothering us. We will have to change our South African rand. Where do you do that in Brazil? Do they take South African rand? And what if I am robbed at the airport? I will have thirty thousand rand in cash with me. That is the money I will need to get from Brazil to America. What if I lose it all on day one and I am in Brazil with no money? We are all asking ourselves this question. We must stick together in São Paulo.

“A couple of days before it is time to leave, the smuggler tells us what is going to happen. On the day of our departure, he will tell us what time we must be at the airport. He will hire us a taxi. While we wait for the taxi, he will speak on the phone to a manager at the airport. He is the one who is being bribed. He will tell the smuggler at the last minute: ‘Your people must go to check-in counter number forty-seven.' The smuggler puts you in the taxi. You never see him again.

“The first batch, the eight, left the night before us. They said they would turn off their phones when they got to the airport. If the phones remained off, they have flown. One guy said to me, ‘If we do not get through, you are the first person I will phone.'

“I got a missed call from him at eleven thirty. I thought this meant that he had passed through. We got another call at twelve thirty, this one from the smuggler. ‘They are in the cells.'

“Actually, six of them were in the cells. Two hid in the toilets. They locked themselves in. They only came out at midday the next day. They had seen the people in front of them being arrested. They had turned and walked.

“The smuggler met with us the next day. People were very angry with him. They were shouting at him. They wanted their money back. I was not one of the people shouting. The smuggler had told us from the start that we were gambling. He had told us that he could not control everything. That is why I went with him. He was honest.

“He tried to talk nicely to the other people. ‘We wait,' he said. ‘We try again. But it will take time.' ”

At first, Asad did not understand that he had aborted his American plans. He thought that he was simply marking time.

“When the smuggler told us that we must be patient, that he would reconnect the line, I thought, Okay, that's fine. But I cannot eat my money while I wait.”

He had blown twenty thousand rand on his attempt to get to America, but he still had fifty thousand change from the sale of his Sterkstroom business.

For twenty-eight thousand rand he bought a pickup truck and spread word that he could deliver stock to
spaza
shops throughout the province of Gauteng.

“My thinking was: I buy the car. I use it to make money. When it is time to go to America, I sell the car and get the twenty-eight thousand back.”

The way he remembers it now, his new business was successful from the start. Mayfair is a hub connecting every Somali throughout the north of the country; from there, it does not take much time for word to spread. And within an hour's drive, there were literally hundreds of Somali shop owners without their own transport.

His phone started ringing the day after he took possession of the pickup. Within a week, he was declining work. The rent at his lodge in Mayfair was six hundred rand a month. He calculated that if business remained good he would be making that in ten days; the rest of each month's takings would be profit. In his daily prayers, he found himself both thanking and berating his God. “You make things so easy for me now,” he muttered. “While my family was still here, nothing was possible.”

He understood now that Somalis in South Africa lived in two zones. There was Mayfair in Johannesburg, Marabastad in Pretoria, the town center of Uitenhage: each of the country's urban centers had a Somali space. These pockets of the world were safe. There would be no guns pointed at one's head here, no worrying about the private thoughts of one's neighbors.

But unless one was already rich or well connected or lucky enough to find a good job, living in these spaces kept one poor. To make money one had to venture into the townships or the shacklands or to rural hamlets like Sterkstroom and take one's chances among black South Africans. With hard work, their money would find its way to your pockets. But in exchange for your riches, you lived in fear. Anyone could kill you, not just strangers who come with gun in hand, but also your neighbor, the quiet man whose car you took the trouble to repair. He, too, could come and slaughter you, and the people you thought you had come to know would look away.

Asad was reaping the benefits of both worlds. He bedded down each night in the security of Mayfair. But he was also making a little money. Yes, he spent his days outside the Somali bubble, driving from
spaza
shop to wholesale store. But the very fact that he was on the move kept him safe. He would come to a shop, help carry the stock from his pickup into the store, and then leave. There were no Madodas in his life now. No sitting behind cash registers worrying about the money above one's knees. No listening to the noise of the corrugated-iron roof in the night.

He slept well in Mayfair. South Africa was not going to take his life. Less than a month after she left, Foosiya sent word that she had given birth to a son. There were now three people in the world who made him what he was: a father and a husband.

Several of Asad's new customers owned shops in the townships around Pretoria—M
abopane, Soshanguve, Mamelodi, Atteridgev
ille. Once or twice a week, when his last delivery of the day was in one of these places, he would drive to the Somali section of Marabastad, Pretoria's equivalent of Mayfair, and spend the night in a Somali lodge.

That is where he met an AliYusuf store owner called AbdiKadir.

Abdi was a man of ritual. When the sun set each day, he would turn his store in Mabopane over to his shopkeeper, drive to Marabastad, and eat his dinner in the Somali restaurant across the street from the Home Affairs office. Asad would take his dinner in the same restaurant. It did not take long before the two AliYusuf men were eating together.

On the third or fourth evening of their acquaintance, Abdi tossed a proposal into Asad's lap. His business was thriving, Abdi said, but he had no car, and the costs of hiring transport irked him. If Asad were to bring his car into the business, Abdi said, he would get 50 percent equity in return.

Owning another shop had not figured in Asad's plans. He was happy with his mobile life. And he had it in his mind that one day soon he would up and leave. A car could be sold in a day. Half of a business was another story.

It was too tempting an offer to turn down flat. He chewed on it for a day or two and tried to absorb what it might mean to put down roots again. He told himself that he would put aside time to go and see Abdi's business. But he was always busy, and work did not take him to Mabopane; the idea soon drifted from his mind.

Two or three weeks later, his cell phone rang, and it was Abdi, asking if Asad had thought about the offer. Asad was in a Pretoria township when he took the call, less than half an hour away. He hung up and drove straight to Mabopane.

Abdi was a man of easy laughter and light spirit; his rapport with his customers seemed comfortable. His shop was ordered, his stock clearly tailored to a customer base he knew well. There seemed to be a serenity about the place.

Asad visited two or three more times before offering Abdi a proposition of his own.

“I told him I liked the deal,” Asad recalls, “but that I did not want ever to sleep in the shop. I did not want ever to spend more than an hour or two in the shop. He said fine, but I must be reasonable. If there are times when there is nobody available to manage the shop, I must help out.”

In January 2007, the two men went into business. Asad moved his base from Mayfair to a lodge in Marabastad. He was happy there; it was a small version of Mayfair, a pure Somali world. When one slept, one could close the eyes in the back of one's head.

The shop was even more successful than Asad had calculated. By the end of March, his share of the profit was more than twenty thousand rand. The business partners hired a young man to drive Asad's pickup, and Asad used his profits to buy a sedan and start a taxi business, ferrying Somalis between Pretoria and Johannesburg. He charged some 15 percent less than the minibus taxis that traded on the same route and took grim pleasure in the fact that, whatever business he entered, undercutting South Africans' prices was easy.

What were his thoughts about Foosiya and his children at this time? I frame it as a question because I'm not sure that he is able truly to reinhabit this moment in his life. Given all that has happened since, too much is at stake.

The first time I ask, he tells me that for each second of each day he was thinking of Foosiya and the children and of the future. But when I ask him again several weeks later, his answer is different.

“I forgot the other thing,” he says.

“What other thing?”

“I forgot the plan to go to Brazil and kept working.”

Months later, when I remind him of his words, he shows a flash of impatience.

“I was thinking of the future every fucking day,” he snaps.

In the moment of his rebuke, I feel duly chastised. I sit with pen in hand, looking out over the Blikkiesdorp street, and avoid his eyes. Who on earth am I to second-guess a man's feelings about the woman and children he has just lost? How can I presume to see that far into a person's inner world?

But in the afternoon, sitting alone in my office, the heat of that moment now cooled, I know that it is himself he is rebuking, not me. I have brought to the surface a feeling of discomfort with which it isn't easy to live.

He had more than enough money to head north. He could have rejoined Foosiya anytime. And if the idea of living among the Isaaq in Somaliland was unbearable, he might have twisted her arm into settling elsewhere in East Africa, perhaps in Addis again.

I drew his ire, I think, because I had asked what it was he wanted, and the answer lay beyond any words he might wish to utter. He desired more than anything to be a husband and a father, but not in the world he knew. He would have to burst through a wall and into another world. Only there, on the other side, could he build a family. His planned trip to São Paulo had failed. He did not know how else to burst through that wall. Perhaps if he began making money again, another way would come.

Soon after he bought into the Mabopane business, Foosiya phoned him with an ultimatum.

“I left South Africa on November 18, 2006,” she said, her voice icily formal. “If you have not joined me by November 18, 2007, we will be divorced and I will look for another man and he will be father to my children.”

It was February 2007. He had nine months. He resolved that he would be with Foosiya by then. Whether he believed his resolution, neither of us knows.

He spent more time at the shop in Mabopane than he would have liked. It is hard to judge what is going to happen in a business day by day. A family member of Abdi's falls ill, and he must take her to the hospital, and the shop ought not stand empty. Or the shopkeeper they have hired part-time has urgent business in Johannesburg. There were always reasons for Asad to be called.

He soon became familiar with some of the regulars. As in Sterkstroom, and in Kirkwood before that, he took comfort in old people. He enjoyed their slowness, their evenness of temper. They smiled with their eyes, not just their mouths. They took time to greet.

Two people in particular warmed his heart. One was a woman called Evelyn. When he looks back now, he recalls that she was not especially old—fifty, perhaps—but at the time he thought of her as a woman of seventy. She was alone and she was poor; perhaps that is what made him think of her as a pensioner. There were days when she lingered at the storefront without buying, and Asad knew that she had no money. He would slip her a loaf of bread and make sure not to make eye contact, saving her the shame of acknowledging his charity.

Then there was an old man named Bra Sam. He was positively ancient, in his late eighties at least. From Asad's place behind the counter, he had a clear line of vision to Bra Sam's front door, some fifty yards down the street. He would watch the old man's progress from home to shop, his stick stretched out before him like an antenna, feeling the gravel surface for the stone or ditch that might trip him. Upon his arrival, Bra Sam's eyes would flash with triumph. He, too, would get a free loaf of bread, Asad's acknowledgment of the feat of the journey.

In the feelings he harbored for these old people, I wonder whether he was not searching for a bond, one strong enough to keep him in South Africa. Way below consciousness, I suspect he knew that he was to stay a long while.

On the afternoon of April 21, 2007, Asad and his driver went to Pretoria to buy stock. They returned to Mabopane in the twilight and parked at the rear of the shop. Asad lifted a box from the back of the pickup, walked into the shop, and greeted Abdi.

From outside the back door, he heard a scream. It was not the scream of somebody who had dropped a heavy load on his foot or stepped into a ditch and sprained his ankle. It was a yawning, existential scream. Yindy came instantly to his mind—the terrible sounds she emitted when she was shot in the leg under the shade of her
balbalo.
He put the box down and made for the door.

The moment Asad appeared in the doorway, one of the three men surrounding Asad's driver lifted his gun, pointed it at Asad, and fired. Above his head, the wooden doorframe shattered, and a shower of splinters hit the back of his neck. As he turned to take cover inside, he heard another shot. His sweater tugged against him, as if some fleeting demon had tried briefly to tear it off. Later, when it was all over, he would find a neat round bullet hole in his sweater's hood.

A single thought filled his mind: he must save his precious pickup; he must hide the keys. To his irritation, he could not recall where he had put them down.