Nomad (27 page)

Yasmin and I were jubilant. I suppose we had both dreamed of
becoming rich. Grandma and Ma used to allude to the possibility for my sister and me. But getting rich to us meant that we would marry wealthy men who would take care of us, as well as provide for Ma and Grandma. Thus becoming rich was connected to luck (you were lucky if a rich man proposed to you) but also to impeccable behavior as a very docile,
baarri
girl and a virgin whose honor and purity would stand above that of all other women.

Now, thanks to Allah, Yasmin and I were rich. We talked about decor, about curtains and carpets and furniture. We said “pretty” and “beautiful” a lot, but never anything specific. The last time I had lived in a decorated house was in Addis Ababa when I was eight. Other than that, my mother’s idea of decor was to unpack our squat
gambar
, which are Somali wooden stools with cowhide seats, and lay thin mattresses on the ground. They were all-purpose: we sat on them and slept on them, and we ate on the floor. (In one house in Kenya we had a dining table and four chairs, but Ma broke them in a fit of anger.) Ma covered windows with sheets or long cloths from the street market.

My family led a nomadic life even when we lived in cities. We moved often, and each time we rented a new house, finding windows was like a revelation. “Windows,” my father would say, pleased with himself. “Lots of windows.
Noor
. Light, lots of light, lots of light.”

My mother would cut him short.
“Daah, daah, daah,”
cover, cover, cover. We would need curtains. My father would grimace. There would be a fight.

“Why do you choose a house with so many windows if you don’t want to pay for the curtains?”

“Why do you want to plunge us into darkness? What do you need curtains for? We have nothing to cover up. We are pure, we are Muslim, we are the children of Magan.”

So curtains had always been an issue.

Yasmin wanted deep burgundy, silk brocade curtains. She wanted lush carpets, sofas with cushions you could sink in so deep, chandeliers. Her wealthy urban grandmother had brought her up in Nairobi—Yasmin was also a Somali exile—and her situation had been the very opposite of my relatives’. She would invest a lot of money, energy, and time in getting the right tint of curtain to match her upholstery.

Brocade. Upholstery. What did I know? These were words from
Jane Austen, and I was already living in the Alice-in-Wonderland world through the looking-glass, with a
bank card
and an
apartment
.

A security guard who worked at the asylum-seekers center offered to drive us to furniture stores after his work hours. He asked us what our budget was, and when we told him he said he would take us to stores that were cheap. But we didn’t want to go there. Yasmin and I held our noses and said, “Oh, no, this is not who we are, we would like something more upscale.”

He tried to reason with us: “You can’t afford it. You’re wasting your time.”

“No, no,” we said. “That’s what we want, please take us to the upscale stores.” I had never been to any kind of furniture store, but I wanted brocade, upholstery, quality—nothing nasty and cheap; that would be
low
.

So this dear man drove us from one store to the next, and at one point we settled on a sample piece of wall-to-wall carpeting that was black, pink, and purple. A salesman informed us that it would cost us 110 guilders per square meter.

We were euphoric. “Yes,” we said in chorus. “This is what we want, this is what we want.”

The expression on the face of our Dutch friend was incredulous. He just stood there, frozen.

Then we fell in love with some wallpaper. It was white, with a pattern on it. There was no real need for it—the walls of our apartment were not falling apart—but I was genuinely fascinated by the idea of wallpaper. It reminded me of covering our textbooks in school. It seemed so grown-up, so
rich
.

The man in the store who took our bank card was happy. He said there had to be someone at home when the carpet was delivered, that they would remove the old floor materials and put the new carpet in. We loaded the rolls of wallpaper into the car. We spent four days with our Dutch friend peeling off the old paper and pasting up the new one in our living room, hallway, and two bedrooms. A week later our new wall-to-wall carpet was installed.

And here is the surprise: we had 400 guilders left from the loan of 5,000. In other words, we had a carpet, wallpaper, and nothing else. No curtains, nothing to sit on, no beds, no chairs, no dishes.

Yasmin and I were at first baffled.

The money was worth nothing here. Was the whole loan about just a carpet? We quickly decided it was God’s will. There was no need to quarrel: Allah had willed it thus.

The carpet had been cut to fit and glued down. We had no choice but to pay.

The following week, Gerda, a volunteer teacher of Dutch as a second language, came to see us. As soon as she was inside she exclaimed, “Ooooh, you have a nice carpet!” Her expression, however, could not have been more different from her words. She seemed horrified.

We urged her to come in and sit down with us on the floor. We patted our carpet.

“How did you get this … this … carpet?” she asked.

“They brought it,” I said.

“Who is ‘they’?”

“The store.”

“And who picked out the colors?” she asked. “If you want any help from me to return it, all you have to do is say so.”

“But we want to keep it,” I said.

Gerda’s father rang the doorbell. She had brought him so he could help us fill out forms to settle down in Ede; he was retired, she said, and would enjoy it.

“What a cheerful carpet,” he said, when he came in. “Did you find this in the house? If you want, I can take it out. I can get a couple of young men to remove it.”

“Oh no,” I replied. “The carpet is new, it is ours, we want it.”

We showed her father our bookkeeping, which was in envelopes that we kept in a plastic bag. He brought out two huge files and a perforator and proceeded to show us how to make holes with it and how to file our papers. I had been to a Kenyan secretarial college, so although I had very little practical experience of filing, I did understand what he was trying to teach us.

Next he took a look at our receipts. He saw the bill for the carpet and exclaimed, “It is your entire loan, except for four hundred guilders!” He was visibly upset. “This is wrong!” he said. “A scandal. The
salespeople have taken advantage of you. I will write them a letter that this is indecent and should not have happened. We have to reverse this.”

I was speechless. Yasmin thought she would rescue the situation by serving mountains of cookies and tea.

“Uhmmmm,” I stammered. “Uhm uhm uhm, but we like the carpet.”

“But now you don’t have anything else,” he said.

“More tea?” I asked, hoping to change the subject.

Gerda and her father spoke in rapid Dutch. Yasmin and I looked at each other helplessly. Then Gerda saved the day. “Okay,” she said, “if you really like the carpet, then keep it. We will get you some furniture. You need beds, you need chairs, and you need a table, a desk, a TV.”

Within a week she and her father had mobilized their old but incredibly fit retired friends and relatives to help us. They brought furniture, beds, curtains, plates, forks, and knives. Because I spoke English (I did not yet speak Dutch), my role was to answer the phone and open the door. For a couple of weeks, all that came out of my mouth was “Yes, thank you. Of
course
we like it. Thank you very much.”

Kind volunteers walked in carrying more chairs, side tables, little ceramic statuettes, even gnomes, and every time I opened the door I said, “Yes, yes, yes, come in, please, thank you.”

We had four beds, three televisions, two sofa sets, two tables, and more than a dozen chairs; on one of them sat a pile of various sizes of lacy acrylic curtains. Our airy three-room apartment resembled a furniture storage room. I was sneezing from all the dust.

One day Yasmin started crying. She hated living this way. So we took everything we hated down three flights of stairs to the basement. When Gerda or her father came by, they always called in advance, so we would spend a couple of hours bringing everything back upstairs.

We still hadn’t put up curtains. Neither of us knew how, and we didn’t really like any of the ones we’d been given; they looked like nasty cast-offs. One day when I came home from Dutch-language class Yasmin said she’d found a perfect answer to the curtains. She had a large glossy catalogue on her lap with lots of photos in it and a great big
smile on her face. “Ayaan, look, we can throw out all the rubbish!” she cried joyfully. “We can get fresh new curtains, furniture, anything we want!”

In that catalogue were clothes, shoes, gadgets, utensils, everything you could ever wish for. “But how are we going to pay for this?” I asked.

“You don’t have to pay for it!” cried Yasmin. “You buy and you pay later.” She told me about visiting some people she’d met at the asylum center. They had also found an apartment, but, she said, unlike us, they lived in beautiful surroundings—and they didn’t pay.

“Okay,” I said, “let’s order curtains.” So we ordered thick, beautiful curtains, gold and brown with a satin-like surface and a thick cotton lining. They arrived twenty-four hours after Yasmin ordered them, in boxes that were delivered right to the door of our apartment. That was another magical thing about the buy-now-pay-later stores: instant gratification.

Yasmin seemed to know exactly what to do, and began fitting little pieces of bent metal into pockets in the curtains. It took us half a day to hang them all up. But when we were done they were much too long, leaving a lot of textile curled up on the floor along the wall. Yasmin said that if we had chosen the shorter measurement that was available in the catalogue the curtains would have been too short. So we left them too long, again thanking Allah and agreeing that it was his wish.

A week later a letter informed me that I was now another 4,000 guilders in debt. Four months later, Yasmin disappeared. A short time later I received a bill from the telephone company: she had run up 2,500 guilders in phone calls.

A number of helpful Dutch people assisted me in applying for various long-term payback plans. In the following months my friend Johanna, a lovely woman who had offered to teach me Dutch, showed me how to shop in large, cheap supermarkets and tried to teach me how to budget. In 1995, as my Dutch-language skills improved, I got a job as a translator and interpreter. I made more money this way than through other odd jobs.

I began to avoid friendships with my fellow Somalis in Ede, although many of them would invite me over so that I could translate for them into Dutch. They continued to buy from various mailorder catalogues that gave you the option to pay in the distant future. Others borrowed money from banks and the social services, which they then sent to their relatives in Somalia or in the Somali diasporas of Africa. I translated for several people who had taken out the same 5,000-guilder loan that I had, and who had sent it all to relatives so that they could pay the entire sum to someone who would smuggle them into Europe.

To pay back these loans, some Somalis took on occasional jobs, but they usually neglected to tell the social services that they were employed. This meant they could continue to receive an unemployment allowance as well as their salary. But it was considered fraud, a felony that could get you in a great deal of trouble. If you were discovered you had to pay back the excess money you had received, plus a fine. This meant more loans, and sank you ever deeper into debt. You might also lose your job because you now had a criminal record, so you had to go back to welfare. In such cases, the authorities would retain part of your unemployment allowance to cover your debts, paying out only enough to cover essential monthly expenses, such as rent and utilities. Many people neglected to pay those bills and became locked into insurmountable debts. I heard of several people who absconded to England or Scandinavia to try to avoid paying back the debts they owed to various banks and agencies in Holland.

Practically everyone I knew had built up overwhelming debts. They applied for credit cards, magical pieces of plastic that meant you could just sign a tiny piece of paper and walk out of any shop with whatever you wanted. They received endless stipends from the social services—for unemployment, for child support, for various medical benefits—and yet in almost every conversation they would lament the miserly amount of money they had to live on, wholly oblivious to the sacrifice of the society that was paying for it all.

They had no idea, in other words, of the obligations of a citizen, let alone the complexities of the welfare state.

*    *    *

As an interpreter for the Immigration and Naturalization Services, I translated for men and women who pleaded desperately to be allowed to live in the Netherlands. The civil servants who interviewed them asked them the same questions that I was asked when I applied for asylum: Had they been persecuted? How did they get to Europe? Had they resided in any country other than Somalia before reaching Holland? Had they ever committed any criminal act?

All these questions were about the past. None of the applicants was asked what he or she expected once admitted into the country. Their skills were not tested. They were not questioned about their values, customs, practices, or their knowledge of Dutch customs and laws.

Like me, some of these applicants were granted residency. But none of us had been
citizens
before, in the modern sense of citizenship. We had never felt a participatory loyalty to any government. We remained loyal to our bloodline.

In a tribal culture everyone is required to share his earnings with family members and extended family, who take happily. The obligation is also emphasized in the Quran. A poor member of the family who wants help from a well-off member will cite verses from the Quran and sayings from the Prophet to induce his relative to give him money. The tribal code of honor and shame does the rest.