A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (7 page)

That Asad spent so long in Eastleigh without ever learning its English name says a great deal, not only about his time there but about Eastleigh itself. Throughout its history, since long before Somalis came to live in its houses, Eastleigh was one of those twilight zones one encounters in great colonial cities. It was set a safe distance from the districts in which white expatriates lived, and white people seldom went there. Yet neither did it house black workers. The people who first settled in Eastleigh were largely Asian. They owned property there, but often had no title deeds, only verbal agreements and shared knowledge. They traded, but much of their trade was off the books. It was a place where business is transacted under the eye of legal officers but is nonetheless not regulated by law, where the rules are unwritten and the nature of commerce is a little opaque.

Somalis began to settle there in small numbers long after the British left, sometime in the 1970s. By then, most of the original Asian occupants had abandoned Eastleigh for more secluded suburbs, and the Somalis' landlords were generally Kikuyu businessmen. It was a natural place for undocumented immigrants to settle, for one could do business and trade or work for another without too many questions asked, a place where one could figure out a modus vivendi with the agents of the law.

When the Somali civil war broke out in 1991, the number of Somalis in Eastleigh soon swelled. The footing they established in Nairobi was precarious. Kenya had accepted Somali refugees with great reluctance. Their legal status was kept ambiguous, partly because of bureaucratic inertia, partly because ambiguity leaves all options open. Somali refugees who lived in camps were legitimate, while those who made their way to places like Eastleigh lived in a zone somewhere between illegality and unofficial acceptance.

Among Asad's most vivid memories of Eastleigh is the role Somali children played in mediating between their parents and the police.

“The children ran around all day,” Asad tells me, “and they would come home with Swahili phrases. They would learn from the talk around the kiosks, from the Kenyan children, from the taxi drivers. The children realized that this was very useful, to speak a language their parents did not, so it became a thing among them that they must know Swahili.”

Somali children learned Swahili in order to keep secrets from their parents. But in the end, their new language was put to other uses, too. Periodically, large groups of police would descend on Eastleigh, move at leisure through the streets, and arrest anyone and everyone they saw.

“You would have these bunches of fifteen chained Somalis out on the streets,” Asad says. “Then the negotiations begin. The police only allowed the children to interpret: if anyone else tried to interpret, they would be arrested. You pay; they let you go. You don't pay; you go to the police cells. To get out of the police cells, you pay much more. Everyone paid at some point. That was the only route out. You pay. You go back to Islii.

“But we children always had this special role. The police arrest someone: people say, ‘Call the kids.' ”

Now much has changed. When Asad passed through Eastleigh in 2004, after an absence of almost a decade, he could barely believe what he saw.

“There was so much money in Islii,” he says, “Somali money. There were paved streets, beautiful new shopping centers, buildings much taller than any that had been there before.”

In this twilight world, with one foot in and the other outside the law, Somalis had established a transnational banking system, a network of global trade links, and a marketplace for all sorts of commerce. Many of its residents remained dirt poor, living off others or on cheap, informal work. But alongside them were Somalis who had grown rich. By 2004, Eastleigh's Somalis were purchasing electronic and white goods and fresh food so much more cheaply than anyone else in Nairobi that they were wholesaling to the rest of the city. Eastleigh had become the center of Nairobi's consumer-goods economy, despite remaining all but invisible in the city's deeds office.

But back then, Somalis were new and barely had a foothold in the city. “The Hotel Taleh was full of people with no work,” Asad recalls. “Most Somalis had no jobs, no businesses, they knew nobody. Everyone would get up every morning and hunt. And there was no school for the children to go to. So we would also get up and hunt. The adults and children of Islii all hunting together.”

How Asad feels about his years at the Hotel Taleh depends on his mood. When he is feeling light, he remembers the joy of being unencumbered.

“It became a free life,” he says. “If something is good, I do it. If something is not good, I don't do it. In the mornings, I would go out with the other kiddies who lived at the hotel. We would visit this one and that one. We would go and fight with the Kenyan kids. There was an old lady who only came out of her house once a day. We would throw stones on her roof to force her to come outside. Sometimes, we would sleep wherever we happened to be when night fell. We'd walk back to the hotel for breakfast the next morning.

“Inside the hotel, every room was mine. I would sleep with a different family every night. I would eat with a different family every mealtime. I was the orphan AliYusuf boy. Because I belonged to everybody, I belonged to nobody.”

But on days when he is not feeling so good, his memories of this time are taut and anxious.

Early one morning, for instance, before the adults had emerged from their rooms, Asad picked up a stone and hurled it at an unwitting boy. He does not remember now what provoked him, but he does recall the trajectory of the stone. The moment it left his hand, the world around him paused, for he knew that he had thrown too hard and too straight. The stone slammed into the top of the boy's cheekbone, just below the eye, and when the world unfroze, the boy was lying on the ground, and the left side of his face was streaked with blood.

Somebody ran to wake the boy's father, an important AliYusuf man at the Hotel Taleh, and word went around among the children that he would catch Asad and drag him to his room and thrash him.

Asad bolted. Once he was across the street, he looked back at the Hotel Taleh, picked up an assortment of stones, and waited. Then he dropped his stones and ran.

“There is a bus that goes around and around Nairobi's Ring Road,” Asad says. “It is free for children. I jumped on the bus. It was overloaded like you can't believe. I went around and around Nairobi three times before I got off.”

The spot he chose was miles from Eastleigh. He wandered away from the Ring Road, into Nairobi's central business district, and walked and watched for hours.

“It was becoming dark. I heard this loud, pumping music coming closer and closer from behind me. It was a minibus taxi, full of people. They stop. One of them puts his head out of the window and talks to me in Swahili.

“ ‘Small boy, where are you going?'

“ ‘Islii.'

“They all laughed, the whole taxi. ‘We are not going to Islii. We are going the opposite way.'

“But they took me to Islii anyhow. On the journey, questions, questions, questions. ‘Why you wander so far? You want to be a Kenyan? You looking for a nice young Kenyan girl?' They did not charge me. They dropped me far from the hotel, the other end of Islii.”

Asad walked home very slowly. He had half a mind to turn around and bolt again, but he had just come from Nairobi with his tail between his legs, and he did not have the stomach for another defeat, especially now that the sun had set. He thought of taking refuge elsewhere in Eastleigh, but there was no such thing. Everyone knew him as the AliYusuf orphan boy. The whole place was a conveyer belt that would deliver him to the Hotel Taleh.

“When I got to the hotel, there were these guys outside chewing
mira.

“ ‘Asad, why did you hurt that boy?'

“ ‘It was a mistake.'

“ ‘His dad is going to beat you.'

“ ‘No.'

“They hid me in their room, and I slept there that night.”

In the morning, when he braved the hotel corridors, one of the first people he saw was the boy he had hurt.

“His eye was very bad. I said I was sorry. I said I didn't mean it. And his father did not beat me, but after that everyone kept their children away from me.”

“The most senior AliYusuf at the hotel,” Asad tells me, “was a man named Mohamed Sheikh Abdi. He complained that there were no schools good enough for his children in the whole of Nairobi. So he found a Muslim boarding school in a town far away, still in Kenya, but on the border with Tanzania. When he enrolled his children there, he said, ‘Asad is going, too. One day, his father will come, and he will expect to greet a child with an education.' Other AliYusuf men with money also sent their children. My old stepbrother, Galal's child, he went, too, and also one of Galal's brothers. Mohamed Sheikh Abdi took us personally in a hired minibus.”

Asad no longer recalls how many times he escaped from the school and returned to Eastleigh. He thinks three, maybe four.

“In Kenya,” he says, “if you wear a school uniform, you can hitch a lift. Anyone will stop for you. On the journey down, I knew that I would soon be coming back the other way. I did not want to go to school. I think that that first time, I was there maybe a week.” He stops speaking to let out a long giggle. “The adults at the Hotel Taleh think they have gotten ridden of Asad. One morning they wake up and there he is, leading the little ones through the streets.”

I press him on what school was like, on why it was so intolerable. He shrugs.

“I was too wild for the other children. I was either hurting them or upsetting them. This was a very proper school, a strict boarding school for Muslim Kenyan children to learn Arabic. The teachers did not tolerate my wildness. I felt bored. The teachers shouted too much. I would come up to other children to ask them questions in the middle of a class, when you are meant to be quietly listening to the teacher. I would take other children away to skip class with me. Mohamed Sheikh Abdi kept sending me back, but I never lasted. I think the longest was maybe three weeks.”

There was one Eastleigh ritual that did turn the crazy orphan boy into a solemn child. Every now and again, a Ogadeni would arrive in Eastleigh having escaped from a part of southern Somalia controlled by enemies. News of each arrival would crisscross the neighborhood in minutes. The following morning, after the newcomer had been given a chance to eat and rest, people would begin queueing at the door where he or she was staying. Everyone had been cut off from family. Everyone was hungry for information.

Each time, Asad would go and listen. And each time he would convince himself that he was about to hear news of his father. He did learn about other people. His uncle, for instance, in whose care he had fled Mogadishu, had been captured by enemy forces in the town of Qoryooley, taken back to Mogadishu, and tortured. It was said that he had lost an eye while in enemy hands but had escaped and was safe now, somewhere in Ethiopia. And Asad's cousin Abdi, into whose arms he had just been transferred when the mortar exploded, had been killed in battle.

About his father, he heard nothing.

In his mind, always, he believed that he was living in an unfortunate interval from which he would soon be delivered. Either his father would appear and sweep him away. Or Yindy would call for him.

Yindy did call for him, but not in the manner he had imagined. The way he saw it in his mind, an air ticket would appear; he did not know from where. In the Hotel Taleh, it would pass from one AliYusuf hand to the next, each person who touched it imagining in his own private way the land to which this thin piece of cardboard was to take Asad. Then Mohamed Sheikh Abdi would hire a minibus to take him to the airport and fill it with well-wishers, adults and children alike. They would wave and cheer and take photographs as he walked away from Kenya and into the tube of an airplane. Of the journey itself he had no notion at all; he knew only that Yindy would be waiting on the other side to lead him into a new life.

It was not that simple. Yindy's proposal was an awkward one. She was able to
responsa
a dozen people to join her in America. Among them were her mother—who was also Asad's father's sister—her father, and several of their relatives. They were all in Dire Dawa, a town in Ethiopia many hundreds of miles from Nairobi, waiting for their applications to be processed. Asad must go to them, Yindy said. It was only from there that he could get the documents to go to America.

The AliYusuf elders held long discussions about these people waiting in Dire Dawa. Who were they, precisely? There were close blood family among them, to be sure: Asad's paternal aunt. But she was part of her husband's family now, and while he was Ogadeni, he was not AliYusuf; the ties were thus thin. And so the question arose: Do we send this lone AliYusuf boy far away into the care of a man we don't know? What if Asad's father should come to Islii to collect him? He must stay with his people.

In the beginning, that was the majority opinion. But as the discussions with Yindy continued, perspectives changed. What if his father never arrives? What if he is an orphan? Can we deny him the opportunity of a life in America for the sake of a father who is quite possibly dead? Life is for the living; one does not wait for ghosts.

Once, Asad himself spoke to Yindy on the phone. Her voice sounded surprisingly close, as if she might walk into the Hotel Taleh at any moment. But her manner was stiff and nervous: Your uncles are thinking, she said. You must do whatever they decide.

As the weeks passed, Asad grew increasingly certain that the elders would tell him that he was going to Ethiopia. And as his certainty grew, so his relation to the world around him began to change.

“Something funny happened with me. I became quiet. I didn't drift far from Islii. I stopped leading the other kiddies to trouble.”

He was, he now realizes, preserving himself for America, for he was no longer merely a lost boy but an asset, a person in whom much was to be invested.

“I had this picture in my mind of Yindy waiting at the airport. But there is no Asad on the airplane. He is buried back in Kenya. This wonderful future with a university education and everything never happens because Asad is no longer there.”

When the AliYusuf elders finally told him that he was going to Ethiopia, Asad had long known it in his bones. The moment was nonetheless enormous. He walked out of the hotel, and the people in the streets appeared to be moving much slower than usual. The sun itself seemed to have frozen in the middle of the sky. He traced a long circuit around the Hotel Taleh, his path taking him right to the other side of Islii, and, although it seemed that hours had passed, when he returned it remained early afternoon.

In the period that followed, the movement of time seemed almost to cease. “I couldn't believe how long it took for a day to pass,” Asad recalls. “Something that happened just yesterday seemed like it happened last year. When it was a week left to go, I didn't think I could last that long.”

Asad left Nairobi one scorching afternoon on the back of a truck. He believes that it was November 1995 and that he was eleven or twelve years old, but he cannot be sure. He had with him a small bag containing three or four changes of clothes, a Koran, and a dozen or so snapshots taken in various parts of Nairobi. I have three of them with me now; when I met Asad, they were the last of his photographs that remained in his possession.

His minder was a kindly woman named Haliimo. He does not recall now who she was or why she was making the journey. He remembers that she had a round, padded face and that she spoke to him softly and with care; she was someone who knew how to be with children.

The lorry took them to Mandera, a city wedged into the northeastern corner of Kenya, the Ethiopian border directly to the north, the Somali border to the east. In Mandera, they transferred to a donkey cart, which for many miles tracked the southern bank of a brown river. Finally, they crossed the water in a boat.

There were men in uniform on the other side who spoke a language Asad had never heard before. When Haliimo told them that neither she nor Asad had documents, they demanded the two travelers' bags and emptied them onto the riverbank. Instinctively, Asad got to his knees, picked his Koran out of the mud, and clutched it to his chest. The soldiers wanted to see it; they pointed at it and spoke about it, and then one of them made to prize open Asad's arms. He turned his back and clutched his book tighter.

“Koran! Koran!” Asad heard somebody explain to the soldiers. From behind his back came quiet murmuring, then a brief chuckle. Then the voices of the soldiers receded. Haliimo took Asad's Koran from him and tucked it back into his bag. Then she took his hand and led him into Ethiopia.

They stayed for two days in a small town just a few kilometers from the border, and on their third evening climbed onto another lorry. It drove through the night and into the dawn, and by noon it was chuntering up a mountain pass that appeared to Asad to take them into a different world. Mist and cloud formed around them, and the air was wet, sometimes with drizzle, sometimes just with fog. In the midst of this new world, a town appeared. The people neither walked nor drove cars; everyone moved about on horseback. They spoke several languages; one resembled the sounds he had heard from the tongues of the border soldiers; the others were unlike anything he had heard before.

They were delayed there for a week—Asad has no idea why—and throughout those seven days, the rain did not cease, and Asad did not see the sun. Finally, they were moving again, this time on a bus. It took them to Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia.

The moment Asad begins describing Addis, the pitch of his voice changes. He speaks with urgency, with surprise; he has brushed aside subsequent experience, it seems, and is reinhabiting first impressions.

“This was an interesting place, brother,” he tells me. “It was very, very interesting. It was cool, not just in the weather, but in the feeling it left inside you. The doors were all closed. The streets were empty. There was no noise. No hurry. No exhaustion. A city full of people, but all of them behind walls. This was a very different place. From way, way back they did things very differently from us.”

Haliimo and Asad were there less than a week. Their hosts were family of Haliimo's, Somalis who had lived in Addis many years. The block on which they stayed was inhabited entirely by Somalis, but from the end of the block onward, the city was a foreign place. Asad had strict instructions not to wander. Each day, he would walk to the end of the little island of Somali life and watch the silent streets beyond, where the scarcity of people and the quietness of those few who did pass never ceased to amaze him. On his fourth or fifth day it came to him as an epiphany: the streets here felt so different because they were used differently; they were a means of getting from one place to another, and that was all. He marveled at his discovery. He contrasted it with Islii, where everyone lived their lives in public spaces. And he wondered what it was that caused some people to live one way and others another.

His last memory of the streets of Addis Ababa was of a long bag-laden walk, right through the center of the city, to the bus that would take him and Haliimo the final five hundred kilometers of their journey to Dire Dawa. He, too, now, was using the streets only to get from A to B, and he allowed himself an idle fantasy, imagining himself to be an Ethiopian boy.

“Dire Dawa is a very beautiful city, brother,” Asad tells me. “We lived in a neighborhood called Hafad. There are trees everywhere, and they throw their shadows from one side of the street to the other, so you are always walking in the shade. And on each street, under the biggest tree, there is table soccer. I lived there from the end of 1995 until somewhere near the end of 1996; I think that I played table soccer every day. And when I say every day, brother, I mean
all day
every day.”

More than sixteen years later, in the first week of April 2012, I arrive in Dire Dawa, my aim to find whatever traces remain of the footprint Asad has left there. I check into my Dire Dawa hotel and walk into the street clutching a map. Unable to make head or tail of it, I slip it into my pocket and decide to get utterly lost.

I find myself on a long, straight road lined with trees I do not recognize. There are cobbles underfoot, and the trees cast shade from one side of the street to the other, just as Asad has described. I will only discover the next day that, quite by chance, the neighborhood through which I am wandering is Hafad, the very place Asad had lived. I am quite literally walking in his footsteps.

It is no wonder that Asad was so struck by the appearance of Hafad. The people who designed it had in mind a neighborhood in Toulouse or Marseille. Dire Dawa was born in 1902 as a railway town linking southern and eastern Ethiopia to the port of Djibouti in the north, and the French company that won the concession to build the railway was also given a ninety-nine-year lease on half the town. It put down a grid of wide avenues, some of them bisected by ornamented pedestrian walkways. In the middle of the larger intersections were traffic circles filled with landscaped flowerbeds. But the town's French population of engineers and other personnel was never large enough to occupy all the land the company had leased, and so many of these lovely streets stood empty for years.

Three or four blocks into my stroll, under the shade of a hefty tree, a group of boys is playing table soccer. I watch them from a discreet distance until one of them comes to me and offers to shake my hand. He tells me that his name is David and invites me to play. I smile at him broadly, considering whether to explain that he is, to my eyes, an incarnation of a boy who once lived here, and whom I have brought with me in my thoughts.

I wonder whether Asad chooses to begin the story of his time in Dire Dawa with the streets and the trees and the table soccer because the most obvious beginning, his arrival, is so rude an introduction.

His first taste of the city was not the placid streets of Hafad but the central bus station, a place whose order and design were beyond his grasp. People moved fast, with purpose and in great numbers. They wore strange clothes, their jabber was unintellig
ible, and their facial expressions told you little about what was inside them. From her hesitation, it was plain to Asad that Haliimo, too, was out of her depth. The first two people she approached ignored her, just walked on in their distracted busyness, as if acknowledging this lost and confused woman could only bring bother. But the third took a great interest. He was tall and very thin and wore wire-framed spectacles, and he bent low to hear what Haliimo was saying and nodded and pointed a long finger into the distance. He led them through the crowds and onto a busy street, and the next thing Asad knew he and Haliimo were on the back of a donkey cart.

At the intersection where they stopped, everyone was Somali. There were restaurants and loud music. For the first time since Islii, Asad was on a street that smelled and sounded like home, his mother tongue bouncing from one mouth to the next, the world a hive of shouting and laughing. And yet, when Haliimo hailed a stranger and told him the name of the family they were looking for, the man frowned in confusion. And so did the next stranger, and the next. There were many, many Somalis in this city, it seemed. Soon, a congregation had assembled at the roadside to tackle the matter of Haliimo's family. Young children were sent to summon people from the other end of the city. The summoned ones came hours later, but they, too, shook their heads in puzzlement and offered advice of their own. Haliimo and Asad spent the night under the stars, covered by a thin blanket, in the yard of a Somali family that had taken pity on them. It was only on the afternoon of his second day in Dire Dawa that Asad was finally led to Yindy's family's house in Hafad—his home for the better part of the next year.

His memory narrows. The streets and their sounds disappear from his story, making way for just one face and one voice—that of Yindy's father.

“He was standing at the front door,” Asad recalls, “watching our taxi approach his house. He was holding himself straight and stiff, with his hands at his sides, like a soldier. He watched us get out of the car, watched us take our bags. As I walked toward him, he stared at me with a scowl on his face, like I was a piece of shit about to come into his house and make it smelly. I felt cold when he looked at me.”