A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (34 page)

A couple of months after they had settled in Blikkiesdorp, the Blue Waters families were interviewed by the Americans. In a marathon session that lasted an afternoon, Asad told a carefully crafted story about his life. He did not lie; he described faithfully and in great detail the incidents of violence to which he had been subject since coming to South Africa. The power of his memory surprised him; it was as if he had recorded each act of violence and was replaying the very worst of his life in slow motion.

But nor did he really tell the truth. For the fuel that burned inside him and that made him Asad Hirsi Abdullahi was drained from the story he related. He did not, for instance, tell his interviewers that life in Addis had been pretty good when he chose to leave, that what took him to South Africa was a soaring dream. He did not tell of his choice to remain in South Africa when Foosiya left with their toddler and their unborn child. And he certainly did not speak of his false passport or of his air ticket to Brazil. The story he crafted whittled away at the flesh of his being, leaving only a stick figure, a hapless refugee.

That was what was expected, after all. What would an American immigration official do with information about his soul?

A few weeks later, the Blikkiesdorp families began receiving news. Some were informed that their applications to become refugees in the United States had been rejected. Asad was told that he, Sadicya, and Musharaf would be resettled in America.

Six weeks later, three of the Blikkiesdorp families were summoned for medical tests. After that, nobody heard a word for a long time. Six months later, the same three families were told that their medical certificates had expired and that they must be examined again. They waited some more. Then, out of the blue, they received word on a Monday morning that they were leaving for the United States. By the following Thursday evening, they were gone.

Asad waited. He did not ever turn off his cell phone. Who knows? The Americans might phone at three o'clock in the morning. It was unlikely, but it was best to be sure. Would it not be especially cruel, he asked me, were South Africa to kill him now, after all he had survived, on the brink of being whisked away to a safe life, simply because he had turned off his phone?

The race was on, he said. Who would get to him first: the Americans or a South African with a gun in his hand?

In November 2011, more than eighteen months after he had been told that his family would be resettled in the United States, Asad was summoned to an interview “to check that I am not a terrorist,” he said. In February 2012, he and his family were called for medical examinations. They did not have any infections that would prevent them from entering America. They waited.

Just less than six months later, two families who had received their medical examinations on the same day as Asad were summoned to retake theirs. Asad and his family were not called to retake their tests. So he knew that he was somewhere at the back of the queue. He visited the office where he had been interviewed and asked when he might be leaving. He was told that nobody could tell him and that he must not inquire again.

From others he knew that it was possible to wait for as long as three years.

On the first day that I met Asad in Blikkiesdorp there was a visitor in his yard, a young man called Omar. About a year later, Asad and I were driving across the southeastern perimeter of Cape Town when I suddenly thought of Omar; I am not sure why.

“Do you still see him?” I asked.

“He is in America,” Asad replied. “About a month after you met him, he got a call. It was a Thursday afternoon, I think. He left the following Monday night.”

“Have you been in contact with him?”

“He has phoned a few times. He is in a place called Texas. He said that he is living in paradise. He said that you do not realize how much of a prison you are living in South Africa until you are free. He said he looks at himself in the mirror each morning and he is getting lighter every day.”

“Why lighter?”

“Because he is becoming healthier. Healthy skin is light.”

“Do you know where in Texas?” I asked.

“He did not say.”

“Did he tell you whether he is in a city or in the countryside?”

“I did not ask him that. I don't know.”

We drove into Mitchells Plain, parked the car, and walked through the shopping mall across the way from Mitchells Plain Town Centre. It was late afternoon. The mall was very busy. We had to dodge the streams of people walking into us.

I had recently spent two years in New York. I commuted every day to a street in a housing project where a couple of thousand Liberian refugees lived. I knew from intimate experience that to be black and foreign and undereducated in America was very hard. I had seen New York hollow out people's souls.

Asad knew that I had lived in the United States. He knew that I had worked among African refugees. He had never asked me what I had seen there.

I told him, as we walked through the shopping mall, that America was big and varied, and that while some parts may be the heaven Omar had described, others were difficult and violent. It was possible, I told him, that the place to which he was to be relocated would not be suitable. If this was so, he should not despair. He should move. I told him that many of the more successful and well-adjusted refugees I had met in America had chosen to move soon after arriving. It seemed that the very act of choosing to go somewhere else had given them strength.

He stopped and looked at me. A person walking in the opposite direction bumped against his shoulder and quietly cursed him.

“I'm sorry, sister,” Asad called out. Then he walked again.

“I am so very tired of violence, brother,” he said as we left the mall. “There is so much violence for as far back as I can remember. If I am relocated to a violent place, I will definitely move. We have been getting orientation courses from an NGO. They say that we should not move. They say we must make the best of wherever the program settles us. But if it is violent, I will move.”

Then he wiped the subject from his mind. I could see it in his face. His eyes were smiling, and he was pointing at a cell-phone shop we had just passed, and he began telling me a long story about the troubles Somalis had when they bought cell phones. He was babbling compulsively, like a person playing with worry beads. He was babbling away the things I had said about America.

I regretted having raised it. I cannot prepare him for life there. It is not my business.

When I first walked into Asad's shack I took in the cloth that covered the walls and the muted colors of the duvet under which the family slept and the pots and pans sticking out from under the bed. And then I saw with a start that a woman was sitting on a stool in the dim light in the corner of the room.

It was Sadicya's will that I not see her. She would respond curtly to my greetings whenever I visited, her words short and clipped. She would turn her face away as she spoke, showing me the side of her head shawl. Many months passed before she met my eyes.

Negotiating with South Africa and South Africans, it seems, was Asad's business. I wondered how she had survived a year in this country before she met him. She had been without friends among Somalis and without a language to talk to South Africans.

Once, several months after I had started coming regularly to Blikkiesdorp, I arrived to find only Sadicya and Musharaf at home. I phoned Asad, but his cell phone went to voice mail; I smiled to myself and hoped that this would not be the morning on which the Americans called.

Sadicya greeted me as stiffly as usual. She carried a chair out into the yard, put it down in the shade, and gestured for me to sit. I thanked her. Then she gathered Musharaf and left, bolting the door to her yard behind her, locking me inside.

I made some calls. I took out a book and read. An hour passed. I phoned Asad but got his voice mail again. I read some more. Then I dragged my chair to the edge of the yard and stood on it. On tiptoes, my arms stretched above my head, the top of the wall was still out of reach. I would have to jump from the chair and scramble over. I acknowledged defeat, retreated into the shade and read some more.

Sitting, waiting, I grew annoyed with poor Sadicya. Propelled by my irritation, my thoughts began to wander. Was the urgency with which Asad had married her circumstan
tial? The violence had awoken his child self, injured and rejected and tossed around; he had needed to look after this child and had found a repository for it in Sadicya.

Is that still what he needed now? Had their relationship in the meantime evolved into something else, something less tied to that desperate moment? How much did he dwell upon Foosiya? As I asked myself these questions, I knew that I could not put them to Asad. He would be unlikely to respond with candor, at any rate.

Some three hours later, he finally answered his phone. I told him that I was locked in his yard alone and had already missed a meeting in town. He called Sadicya and a few minutes later I heard her keys clink and the bolt unlock.

She stood in the doorway and pointed at me sitting on my chair and threw her head back and laughed. It was a full, unguarded laugh, on the edge of raucous. She cupped her chin in her hand and chuckled and shook her head, then dropped her arms and laughed more loudly than ever, her shoulders heaving. I looked at her, astonished, and an image formed in my mind: I saw her in front of a television set, watching a cartoon in which a creature keeps running into walls and getting shot to bits and falling down cliff faces.

“I forget you,” she said. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. I forget you.”

From that day forth, she was unvaryingly warm. Each time I came to her home she greeted me and looked into my eyes, and her own eyes smiled. When I had been traveling, she said that she was pleased that I had returned safely. She would ask after my family. The idea of me sitting all those hours in her yard had made me human.

I considered asking her whether she would think about the prospect of talking to me about her past. I would have to use Asad as an interpreter. But it was a foolish idea and I abandoned it. Asad had studiously left many questions about Sadicya unasked. He did not want to know everything that had happened to her. Such silences, it seemed to me, were among the foundation stones of their marriage.

I could perhaps ask somebody else to interpret for me, and maybe Sadicya would tell me something of substance about her experiences. But then Asad would read on the page what he did not want to know. And so I left it.

I was away when Sadicya gave birth to a baby girl. When I first laid eyes on the child she was in her father's arms. He stared down at her with an intensity I had not seen on his face before. She was six weeks old now, and she had been ill for five of them.

To be born in winter and go home from the hospital to a shack in Cape Town, Asad complained, what chances does a child have?

“When I wake up in the mornings,” he said, “there is dew on the rafters above me. My lungs are developed. Hers are still tiny. They cannot handle all this wet.”

They struggled to get the child adequate medical attention. The nurses at the local clinic at Delft said that there was nothing wrong with her and sent her away. Asad took her to Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital, where he was told that she could only be admitted if she was referred by a clinic. He refused to leave. He sat with his baby in a waiting room for more than twelve hours before she was admitted.

She was diagnosed with pneumonia, prescribed antibiotics, and discharged after four days. Asad was told that once the course of medication was complete she would be fine. But she was not. She kept coughing from somewhere deep inside her. He took her back to the clinic and was once again told that there was nothing wrong. And so he returned to Red Cross Hospital and again refused to leave until she was admitted.

She was three months old before she was seen by a doctor who cared enough to examine her thoroughly. The doctor explained to Asad that his daughter had coughed so much in her first weeks that her stomach had been damaged and she could not properly digest her food. He told Asad that with proper attention she would be fine, that Asad must bring her back once a week without fail. At four months old, she stopped coughing. She began digesting all her food. The visits to the hospital ceased.

Her name was Rahma.

“Do you remember that name?” Asad asked me.

“Yes. It is the name of one of your sisters.”

He nodded. “My other sister was Khadra. But I did not know her as well. Khadra was taken by my aunt before we left Mogadishu. It was Rahma I was with when we fled with my uncle. It was Rahma who was beside my uncle when the truck drove off with me on it. I called my daughter Rahma after the sister I knew better.”

That evening, I returned to the notes I had taken about his flight from Mogadishu. They recorded all sorts of observations about his uncle, about the people around them, about fear. But there was just one passing reference to his sister. It occurred to me, once again, that if I had spoken to him about that time on another morning, a morning on which different thoughts were passing through his mind, a morning after a night during which he had dreamed different dreams, he would have told me another version of the story of his flight from Mogadishu, a version connected to the one he did tell me, but different; a version that included his sister Rahma and what her presence alongside him in the days after his flight meant to him now.

If I began to interview him again from scratch, I thought, this book would be very different. It would be connected to the book I have written here, but it would not be the same book at all.

It came to me that I ought not finish writing about Asad before talking to Foosiya. I wanted to ask her about insulting Asad in the car after the wedding, about marrying him and having to manage his wild friends, about her journey to South Africa, about Sterkstroom.

It would not be difficult. Were Asad to give me the name of her subclan and her lineage, and the nicknames of her father and her grandfather, I could find them in Somaliland. After all, I had found members of Asad's family in this way. I could fly to Addis and from Addis to Hargeisa. I could be with her in less than a week.

I was in the United Kingdom when this desire descended upon me. I would not come to Cape Town again for at least three months. And so I talked to Asad about my plans on the phone. I asked him to think about it over the next few days and then to let me know whether it was okay.

He e-mailed three days later. He said it was fine. I wrote back thanking him and asking for the details of Foosiya's family. He did not reply.

I called him a week later. He said that the idea of my going to see Foosiya had been sitting with him for days and that he did not like it.

“Why not?” I asked.

“At first it was because I worried that you would be in danger in Somaliland,” he said. “But then I realized that was not it. It is just sitting badly in my gut. I do not want you to look for her.”

I abandoned the idea and moved on. We had never discussed the rules I ought to obey as I went about my research. But to rummage through his intimate history when he had forbidden me to go there was clearly unthinkable.

Months later, we met one morning in Bellville. He was tired. For a fee he had driven a carload of people to Swellendam and back the previous night. He had had only two or three hours' sleep.

We sat in my car outside the Bellville police station and talked. There was so much to say. This was the first time I had seen him since discovering that his parents were refugees from the Ogaden. Today, I had to let him know that when he moved through Qorahay he was in the place where his parents had grown up and were married.

Blow by blow, I told him of my journey to his relations in London and of everything they had said. I gave him names and phone numbers. I told him that these London Abdullahis had kept track of some of his siblings; they would tell him where some of them were.

He listened. He said that the story of his parents made him sad. To think that they, like him, were refugees, that they also had to run from place to place, knowing no home—such thoughts were very sad.

We went for a long walk through Bellville, then returned to my car to talk some more. I asked him why he did not want me to meet Foosiya.

“My first thought was your safety,” he replied. “I worried that in Somaliland you would get hurt or even killed. But then I sat with that and I realized that was not the reason. I was having a second thought. It had not been clear at the beginning.

“If you do this before I go to America I could have a big problem. What if you find that my children are in trouble and I am not in a position to help them? Brother, that is not something that can happen. I must wait until I am settled in America. I must wait until I am established. If I succeed there, the first thing I will do is contact them.

“I don't hate Foosiya. I am in fact still in love with Foosiya. I thought that she was standing in the wrong position. But I realized later that she was actually standing in the right position. She was so stubborn. But she was right. We were being slaughtered in this country. She was right to leave.

“We abuse the women. We do not take their ideas, even when they are right.”

It is the strangest moment. Listening to these words, I have glimpsed, for the first time, an imaginary Asad lodged deep inside him. It is the Asad that preserves his dignity and his pride, the Asad that allows the flesh-and-blood Asad to rise each morning.

The words with which one might describe this Asad are so deceptively simple. He is a breadwinner, a head of a family, a provider for his children. He is shepherding his kids into lives profoundly different from his own.

This Asad has a wife. She is beautiful and willful and also unknowable; he cannot anticipate what she will decide next.

I try to imagine when this Asad is at his most alive. I guess that it is early in the morning, when the real Asad is not quite awake but no longer asleep. In this transitional moment, while the censors are distracted and the real day has yet to take hold, the fantasy is free to grow.

Were I to see his actual children in Somaliland, and were they to need something from him, the imaginary Asad would shatter. For he knows very well that it is the flesh-and-blood Asad who will be asked to provide and that he is not in a position to do so. The imaginary Asad and the corporeal Asad will become one and the same in America, this place about which he will hear nothing but good.