A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (4 page)

He grabbed these questions gratefully, as if they were gifts of milk and bread. “Abdullahi Hirsi,” he replied. “AliYusuf.” These men would know what to do with such information. Perhaps they would lead him to uncles or other family; perhaps Aabbo himself was here.

Asad and Abdi were assigned places to rest for the night. They bedded down side by side. Many other bodies surrounded them. Asad enters the head of his young self, drifting off to sleep in a strange city on an evening in February 1991, and he thinks he knows what the young Asad saw. He rose up above the mishmash of bodies and found a cord running from each, just where the buttocks meet the back. These cords all raced away in one direction, many dozens of them, toward Mogadishu, where each made its way to the home in which its owner belonged. Asad's cord snaked into the house he had sketched for me and found its way to the parental bedroom where it wrapped itself with hunger around his sleeping mother.

When he woke, it was daylight. People were walking about. It seemed that much time had passed. He turned to his cousin to find that Abdi was not there. He remembers wandering from adult to adult, asking each if he had seen his cousin. And then his memory blanks. He does not recall how he found out that during the night the important men who reminded him of the government buildings had recruited Abdi into a militia, that they were conscripting every boy fifteen years or older to fight.

The stack of names Asad had offered when first asked—his own name, that of his father, his lineage, his clan—entered the great circuit of information that traveled through the ranks of Afmadow's refugees. It was as if Asad's lineage was being poured through a sieve so that the grit of thicker, closer attachments would get caught in the netting.

At some point during this process of sifting, Asad was led by the hand through a market in the very center of the city and deposited into the hands of a woman he did not recognize. He had been told that she was family, close family, and that she would look after him. He remembers well his first sight of her. She sat on a low stool, legs apart, stirring a large pot of tea. Her name was Yindy. As with his siblings, Asad describes her in the first instance by her teeth.

“They were damaged,” he says. “I had never seen teeth like these before. They were black, as if they were bruised. As if somebody had beaten her in the mouth. What I remember is that they were darker than the skin on her face. She was very pale, and also very short.”

It was early evening. Yindy, it appeared, was serving customers. They sat on plastic chairs at the roadside and drank her tea and spoke to one another. Much later, Yindy opened a large black pot and began serving them food. Asad remembers thinking that Yindy resembled her pot: short and squat on legs that barely raised her from the ground.

This drinking of tea and eating and talking seemed to Asad to go on forever. Several times, he drifted off and found himself hurtling through the night toward Mogadishu, only to be startled back to Afmadow by a shout or a laugh. He seemed to have entered a world that did not sleep, where people drank tea through the small hours instead of going home to families.

Eventually, he grew so tired that he crawled under a plastic chair and slept, the voices of Yindy's patrons filtering through his dreams. He was woken, gently, by the morning call to prayer and by the shuffling of many feet. He climbed out from under his chair to discover that the patrons were all gone, their place taken by several middle-aged women who were moving about among the pots and brewing tea. Yindy chatted with them for a while and then led Asad away.

At first, he did not realize that they had arrived at Yindy's home, for it did not seem a private space at all. It was a two-room shelter made of wood and zinc and mud. In front of it stood a small yard that opened onto the street. The room in which Yindy put him to sleep was so close to the people walking by, it felt as if a hand could reach in at any time and snatch him away.

He does not recall whether it was Yindy or someone else who explained it to him, but she was a close relative, the daughter of Asad's father's sister.

“She had walked by herself all the way from Mogadishu,” Asad recalls. “I am not sure what her family situation was, only that she was divorced and that her husband's family was not helping her. She was alone and in trouble. She got by running a cafeteria, cooking, and selling tea. She worked very, very hard and each day had just enough to eat.”

Yindy was not quite alone. Asad had entered a world of women. There were about half a dozen of them, as he recalls, and they shared the cafeteria in shifts. Each day, Yindy would leave her home for work at five or six o'clock in the evening and would begin to make tea and food. She would work through the night. In the morning, at first prayers, other women would take over, and Yindy would go home to rest. She seldom slept in one of her two rooms. Instead, she would make herself a bed in what Somalis call the
balbalo.
Each Somali household has one, some two or three. It is a wall-less shed—four poles holding up a thatched roof—and stands in the family yard. When the temperature reaches a hundred or so degrees it is too hot to be indoors or in the sunlight, and people live in the shade of their
balbalo.

Lying there under her thatched roof during the daylight hours, Yindy was practically on the street, her only shield from passersby a large barrel that lay on its side across the width of the
balbalo;
Asad wondered how she managed to sleep. But sleep Yindy did, without stirring, sometimes until as late as two or three o'clock in the afternoon.

Asad was forbidden to leave the yard while Yindy rested. The world outside was deadly, she kept warning. It was no place for a child.

“She was not wrong,” Asad recalls. “Everyone was shooting. Two people would start arguing in the street. One would shoot the other. Ogadeni shooting Ogadeni. Refugee shooting refugee. And there were constant rumors that the Hawiye were going to attack. And so there was this nervousness, this fear, that tomorrow the world is going to fall on everyone's head, so maybe it is better not to care so much about anyone today.”

Yindy's yard became the whole of Asad's world. There were the two rooms, each insufferably hot and dark; there was the yard, barely large enough for him to pace; and there was the sleeping Yindy in her
balbalo.
Sometimes, he would enter the
balbalo
and watch her diaphragm expand and contract until the rhythms hypnotized him and the street outside disintegrated. He would find enormous relief in this movement of her body; he had no idea why.

He was left with his thoughts, and these, recurrently, were of his house in Mogadishu, of his mother, his father, of his life. His memories, he found, took the form of several images—some of his mother, others of siblings, others of the
hindi
tree, some of the madrassa. They would come to him in sequence and reel over and over before his eyes, the order in which they appeared always the same. It was so unreal, the recurring sequence; it struck him that, already, after just a few weeks, he was losing his memory of his life. For these spooling images did not seem to involve him: they were images from another world.

On some evenings, he accompanied Yindy to the cafeteria, where he would sit and listen to the adults talk and thus get some sense of what was happening. It was here that people kept discussing an imminent Hawiye attack and exchanged stories about refugees shooting one another in the streets of Afmadow. They discussed, too, whatever news or rumor they had received from Mogadishu. These discussions fell together into one big stew of talk so that Afmadow and Mogadishu, the past and the present, bubbled and cooked.

In Mogadishu, it seemed, the Daarood people who had not left had been sucked into a hole of butchering and slaughter, and he wondered whether his father had escaped or whether he was among the dead. He heard, too, at the cafeteria, that the Hawiye militias had taken the towns on the Kismayo highway one by one, and as the names spilled off the tongues of Yindy's customers, he recognized each as a town he had passed through. Until, finally, someone among Yindy's customers mentioned the town of Qoryooley, where Asad had been separated from his family. The Daarood in this town and the others, people said, were “hostages.” Although it was not a word he had heard before, he soon knew what it meant, for the people were saying that the hostages were like slaves and that those believed to have worked for the Somali government were being tortured, some of them killed.

How long had he been in Afmadow when it happened? He is not sure. He thinks maybe a month. It was late morning on an especially hot day. Yindy was asleep in the
balbalo.
Asad, a child with no use for shade, even when the sun pelted down, was lying on his stomach on a concrete slab between the house and the
balbalo.
Half awake, half asleep, his ear flat against the slab, he was roused by a thumping and pounding that seemed to emanate from the ground. He raised his head in time to watch a woman hurdle his prostrate body and make for the house. She pulled unsuccessfully at the door; it was locked. Then she jumped over Asad once more and ran to the entrance of the
balbalo,
kicked aside the barrel that served as its door, and went inside.

A man ran into the yard from the street and skidded to a halt. Only once he was past Asad and standing in the mouth of the
balbalo
did Asad notice that in one of his hands was a pistol, its barrel pointing at the ground. The man lifted his gun, turned his face away, and fired twice into the
balbalo.
In that instant, Asad recalls, he was struck by the oddity of the man looking away. Why shoot at all if you do not direct your eyes at your target? What is the point?

From the
balbalo
came a volley of cries. Although he had never heard Yindy cry like that before, Asad nonetheless recognized them as hers. The man turned on his heels and ran. Asad pursued him, primarily to get away from the noise Yindy was making. He recalls sprinting through the crowded streets of Afmadow, screaming, for all he was worth, “You have killed Yindy! You have killed Yindy!”

And then he was surrounded by adults, and he was crying, and they were leading him back to his house. A crowd had already gathered. Yindy lay in the
balbalo
sweating, delirious, cursing under her breath. She had been shot square in the shin, and the wound was deep and wide and gruesome. Chipped bone and blood and raw flesh: things, Asad thought, the world had no right to see.

Later that day, he learned that the man and woman who had run into Yindy's yard were brother and sister. The woman had just announced that she was pregnant. She was also unmarried. Her brother had picked up a gun and chased her through the streets in pursuit of his family's stolen honor.

Asad scoffs as he tells the story.

“Somali men,” he says. “Shooting an innocent woman in the leg to get back this thing called honor, a thing you cannot even see, let alone eat or drink.”

He will do that again several times: he examines things Somali from a distance and shakes his head in disbelief. At other times, though,
he
is the dishonored man, and he warns that no deterrent is frightening enough to stop him from snapping a South African's neck.

His memory clouds. He no longer distinguishes the hours from the days. What he does recall becomes very abstract. He remembers one network of people fading and another coming into focus. The cafeteria women disappeared. Their alliance was not one designed for emergencies. Their mutual business was survival, and a woman down did not help at all. The network that appeared, as if from nowhere, was kin: Yindy's father's kin. Asad had not seen any of them around when Yindy was well. He did not know that they existed. It was a matter of life and death that drew them. From deep within the lives of the refugees, it seemed, a set of unwritten rules of conduct was rising, rules that nobody had thought out or said aloud but that took shape around each new moment. The prospect of Yindy's death had summoned them from nowhere. They arrived and took control.

There was no doctor to be found, and so the search became one for antibiotics. Some were located, and they were duly fed to Yindy at intervals, but it was not long before she had swallowed them all. And so another search was convened. It was said that in the countryside around Afmadow were nomads. They had never had Western medicine, but they had always had deep wounds, and so they would know what to do.

Some days after Yindy was shot, an old man appeared and took command of the patient. He stank something terrible, a stale, fetid smell that made Asad want to retch. His bag was made from the same cloth as the clothes he was wearing. Such were the ways of the nomads, people who made all their possessions from the same material and who knew nothing of baths and soap.

The old man unfolded his bag until it was a flat square laid out on the ground. It had many different compartments. From one of them he took a knife, from another several sticks. From a third emerged a long piece of rope. He put a flame to the knife and held it there a moment or two. Then he ran it down each side of Yindy's damaged leg, leaving two long stripes of bright red blood.

There were as many as half a dozen people around her body, and all Asad could see of her were her legs. It dawned on him that these people were waiting; they were waiting until Yindy's pain was so great that they would have to press her down. Would it take six people to keep Yindy still? Is that how badly this old man was going to hurt her?

As if on cue, the old man instructed everyone to hold Yindy tight. His voice was high-pitched like a bird's, but nonetheless commanding. He lifted Yindy's leg a little, took her toe in his hand, and pulled it hard. She screamed.

“It was very cruel,” Asad recalls. “He was handling her roughly. He was not treating her like an injured person. I could not see her face, but her cries were terrible, terrible. The old man was trying everything. He massaged her leg. He tapped it with his stick. Eventually, he put a piece of cardboard on either side of her calf, then put a stick up against each piece of cardboard. Then he bound the whole thing together with ropes.”

He instructed that nobody touch the contraption until he returned. He folded up his bag, tucked it under his arm, and walked briskly into the street. He did not say when he would be back. Asad stared at the material that the old man had left on Yindy's leg—the cardboard, the sticks, the rope. In the things that the nomad left behind were traces of his smell. Now Yindy would be stuck with it. Whenever she breathed, she would take into her nose and mouth the memory of this awful man.

The tone of Asad's voice brings into my car the anger his younger self had felt. He was a boy from Mogadishu, an urban boy; between himself and those who lived in the countryside he wanted to draw a bold line. And yet, among the memories he took with him from Mogadishu was a fragment from a family poem. He does not remember it well. It went something like this: “We were tired of wandering, wandering, wandering. And so we settled. We settled in one place to farm. It was a place called Fadhadhi.”

“The poem refers to my grandfather's time,” Asad tells me. “It was my grandfather Abdullahi who settled at this place called Fadhadhi. He was the first member of the family who was not a nomad. He was therefore the beginning, the beginning of what we are now.”