A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (8 page)

Asad folds his arm behind his head and touches the back of his neck. “I felt his look here. He turned away from me and started talking to the person next to him. ‘Yindy is too concerned with the AliYusuf.' He said it like I could not hear him, just because I was a child. My pressure went very high. I had just met him, and already I hated him. I targeted him. From that day forward, I showed him no respect. He would address me, and I would turn my back.”

I try to tease more memories from Asad. Who were the other members of the family party? What were their names? Were they a nuclear family or members of disparate families joined together by the fact that Yindy had summoned them? Each time Asad tries to answer my questions, his tongue thickens.

“I slept in a room with three other children,” he tells me. “They took their example from the old man and treated me like I was invisible. If I tried to talk to them, they'd shout at me to go away. I would wake up in the morning and eat breakfast with the family, and then I would disappear for the whole day. I would miss lunch. I would return to them only when the sun was setting. I did not want to be with them. I felt like a dog to whom the family throws scraps.”

And so his days were spent around the soccer table on the street, his refuge from his home. Here, he began to learn something of the city in which he now lived.

“There were two main groups in Dire Dawa,” he tells me, “the Oromo and the Somali. Both thought that the city was theirs, and they fought each other for it. This fight would sometimes come to the table soccer. People would be playing together for hours and hours, Oromo alongside Somali, and then there would be a dispute over a goal, and, all of a sudden, it is Oromos on one side, Somalis on the other. The feeling in the air is not nice, and the fight is about much more than table soccer.

“Also, it was not always so nice being young around the soccer table. Sometimes, I would skip breakfast with Yindy's family and go and play as soon as I woke up, early, early. Then, it is only boys playing. But as the sun gets higher, the older ones come to play, and they do not think it is very dignified to wait for young boys, so they throw you out of the queue. And I must wait until they are finished playing. Sometimes it is the whole day, and the sun is already going down by the time I am on the table again.

“The way it worked, you would hold the table until you lose. Sometimes, if I won too many in a row, and the people around became frustrated, they would just push me off the table, and I would try to fight my way back. I would throw stones at the people playing. They would abandon their game and come after me to give me a hiding. I would go home with a bleeding mouth or with the dirt of the street stuck to the side of my head.

“Sometimes, the older ones would play for money, and that's when things became very tense. That is when it would turn into Oromo versus Somali.”

Asad came to see these daily pilgrimages to the soccer table as the circuits in a holding pattern. This was merely an unexpected delay in his journey between Islii and America. For as long as it lasted, he would wake in the morning and make his way to the table; the days would tick away, one after the other, until, finally, word would come that they would be joining Yindy.

Yet if this was the shell of the story Asad wrapped around himself, there was also a stick of doubt tapping away at it, and the echoes of this tapping at times caused him to panic. The family did not once discuss their American plans in front of Asad, nor did it come to his attention that the family had been summoned to an interview with American officials. At times he wondered whether they were going through the process behind his back. He was desperate to speak to Yindy, the only person in this world he was sure had his interests at heart. He knew that her father was in touch with her; every now and again, he would hear the old man speaking to her on the phone. Once, Yindy asked explicitly to talk to Asad. He knows that this was so because he heard the old man quickly swallow the words “Asad is not here” and “No, he is fine” before hastily changing the subject.

At times, Asad woke with a shudder in the night at the prospect that secret plans were being hatched to leave him in this strange city.

Then there was Yindy's mother, Asad's father's own sister, his flesh and blood. Her name was Hawo. Asad would often feel her eyes upon him, turn around, look at her closely, and see that he had been occupying her thoughts. He could see, too, that these thoughts were troubled. He would stare at the flesh on her forearms and at the dry, crusty points of her elbows. He would marvel at the fact that his own father, whose image in his mind was now more and more reduced to a mouthful of teeth, had watched those very same forearms and elbows when they belonged to a small girl. His family was right here in front of him in the form of Hawo, quite literally close enough to touch, and yet it was also as elusive as ever.

“When the AliYusuf at the Hotel Taleh decided it was okay to send me to Ethiopia after all, they said to themselves: Maybe we are not sure about this America thing, maybe it won't happen after all. But we can be sure that we are sending the boy to family. So we know that he will be okay.

“They were wrong about that. The only family I had there was a woman, and females have no rights, no freedom. They are somebody's sister or mother or daughter. They are nothing in themselves. Hawo wanted to help me. She liked me. She worried about me. But she didn't have the power.”

When they were alone, they would talk.

“Where is my dad?” Asad recalls asking her.

“I don't know,” Hawo replied.

“I think maybe he is here in Ethiopia,” Asad said. “All the time I was in Islii, many hostages came from Somalia, and none of them had news about him. I think he left early on for Ethiopia.”

“Ethiopia is a huge country,” Hawo said. “If he came, it would be to a particular place, a place called Qorahay. That is where the Abdullahis are from.”

If it seemed strange to him that his forebears hailed from Ethiopia, rather than from somewhere in Somalia, he did not dwell upon it for long.

“How far is Qorahay from here?” he recalls asking.

“It is not so far, maybe three hundred kilometers.”

As he sat next to Hawo, his mind raced. He imagined waking at dawn the next morning, hurrying to the soccer table, holding the game for long enough to win money for a bus ticket, making his way to the central bus station, and going to Qorahay. Could it really be so hard? When he and Haliimo arrived here in Dire Dawa they knew nothing but the clan names of the people they sought. Why could he not do the same in this place called Qorahay? He imagined himself getting off the bus and shaking at the sleeve of the first respectable-looking person he found. “I am looking for my father,” he would tell them. “His name is Hirsi. His father's name was Abdullahi. His lineage is AliYusuf of the subclan of the Mohammed Zubeyr.”

There on the street in Qorahay, the people would scratch their beards and murmur among themselves and instruct young children to fetch this one and that one, and eventually—who knows?—Asad's father would appear in the distance, walking slowly, perhaps even shuffling (maybe he sustained injuries after the attack on Mogadishu?), but nonetheless moving palpably closer to the Qorahay bus station.

As the weeks passed, the vision grew fainter. What remained was the name, Qorahay, chiseled into his memory, along with the many, many other names—Qory
ooley, Afmadow, Liboi, Islii—that Asad had acquired since his flight from Mogadishu more than five years earlier.

Sometime in 1996—probably August or September—Asad was told that he and the family would leave Dire Dawa for good in four days' time. Nobody told him why they were leaving, or whether the move had anything to do with their American plans. And, but for its name—Wardheer in Somali, Werder in Amharic—they told him nothing of the place they were going. He did not even know in which direction one went to get to Wardheer.

The family and its possessions were loaded onto the back of a truck before dawn one morning. By the time the sun rose, they were driving through a desert landscape. It stayed precisely the same, just dry sand and scrawny bush and rock, for mile upon mile upon mile, until the sun went down and the truck stopped in a small village and they slept. They rose early the following morning and drove through more desert, arriving at their destination at around noon.

Everybody in this place called Wardheer was Ogadeni; the town was in Ethiopia, but it was really Somali. Even the currency people used was Somali in the center of the town, Ethiopian on the outskirts, and Asad wondered how one knew where the Somali currency zone ended and the Ethiopian zone began. There were many money changers, and they were always calculating and recalculating the rate of exchange; it was changing all the time, every hour, sometimes even more often.

He now knew for certain that something was horribly wrong. There were no American officials here to quiz them on whether Yindy was their relative. There was no airport from which a flight might take off and fly to America. They were deep in the desert. This place was full of
reer baadiye,
nomadic people who walked in from the bush, stinking and ignorant. It was the opposite of America.

There was a new, starker quality to his estrangement from the family. The moment they left Dire Dawa, in fact, he had felt a fresh coldness emanating from them. Even Hawo, who still looked at him fondly and with worry, stiffened when he tried to speak with her about the future. It was clear that she had been instructed to say nothing.

Asad now spent even more time away from the family than he had in Dire Dawa. He would leave at sunrise, carrying his breakfast in his hand, and return late at night to find that a plate of food had been left out for him. He was a ghost now; the boldest sign of his presence in the household was the food in his stomach.

To show me how he spent his days and evenings away from Yindy's family, he takes my notebook from my hands once again and begins to sketch Wardheer.

“It is a beautiful town,” he says, as he draws, “but there is too much sand. It is thick and soft. When you walk, you get tired after just a moment or two. So nobody walks. Everyone sits for a long, long time.

“The town center is shaped in a circle,” he says, tapping his sketch with his fingernail. “There is an inner circle in the middle surrounded by tall, beautiful trees. And in the very center there is one tree, much bigger than all the rest. It is called the
tala'ada.

“Then there is the outer circle. Between it and the inner circle, the sand is very, very thick. You think it looks easy to walk on. You learn soon that it isn't. At the edge of the outer circle are all the cafeterias. That is where the whole town comes to drink tea and coffee and to eat and to discuss. And because it is shaped like a circle, everyone can see everyone. So the people sit there drinking their tea and they watch.

“Beyond the circle are the houses where the people live. And all the people live in their lineages, so one section is one lineage, another section is a second lineage, and so on. Even from this drawing,” he says, patting the page, “you can see that it is beautiful. All these people sitting around the edge of a huge circle drinking and eating and talking; and, in the circle, all these trees.”

I could not visit Wardheer on my trip to East Africa, for the Ethiopian military does not permit a foreigner to wander that far into the Somali region. I look for photographs on the Internet. The only ones there, it seems, are taken from satellites. This is the one that best describes Asad's circle:

In the time before Yindy's family left, Asad would spend most evenings in the town circle, watching. What he noticed, above all, was that this place was very poor, far poorer than anything he had seen since his days in the refugee camp at Liboi.

“There were two sorts of people,” Asad tells me, “the ones who would sit in the cafeterias drinking and eating, and the ones who would sit a short distance away and watch. Nobody would openly beg. That was too disgraceful. But there was an indirect way of begging. At the call to prayer, the people eating and drinking would get up and go to the mosque to pray. After they had finished praying, the poor ones would enter the mosque. The cafeteria customers will have left some coins for them.”

How did Asad come to know that Yindy's family would move from Wardheer without him? He is not sure. Perhaps it was simply implicit. Several months had passed since their arrival in Wardheer, maybe as many as six, and the family began to pack their belongings. Nothing was said to Asad. He simply knew that he was not going along. That's how he thinks it happened; he is not sure.

He recalls helping them carry their belongings out of the house. He understood that the moment they left he would lose his home, for the place was rented, and new tenants were moving in. His only visible expression of protest, he recalls, was to refuse to help them carry their possessions from outside the house to the truck. He remained indoors, staring into space, wondering what on earth he was going to do.

When the area around the front of the house fell silent, he took it that they had collected the last of their possessions and were gone. He left the house and walked in the direction of where the truck had stood. The sand through which he walked was very hot; the heat coursed through his legs and up his torso and into his head. He was on fire with anger, with sheer rage. He was also deeply afraid.

Sitting in my car, all these years later, he still marvels at what happened to him.

“They just left me in Wardheer. I had nowhere to stay, no one to look after me. I was twelve or thirteen years old. They thought that in Islii I had been a wild boy who could sleep anywhere. But it is not true. I was in a known place. Other kids could give me money. The Hotel Taleh was a roof over my head. Here I was truly alone. I was full of worry. What will happen to me? The only people I knew were in Islii. How can a twelve-year-old get himself from Wardheer to Islii? It was not possible.”

In the time before the family left, Asad began to notice a group of three boys at the town circle. They were always there, day in and day out, and he found the sight of them funny, for the first was tall and thin, the second short and fat, and the third kind of in between. Something else about them struck him: although they seemed unconnected to any adults, they carried themselves with confidence, as if they knew where they belonged. But where did they belong? Toward the end of the evening, as the circle was emptying, they would vanish; where to, Asad was not sure.

Now, on his first evening alone, he approached the tall, scrawny one.

“Where do you go to at night?” he asked.

The thin one looked him up and down. The way Asad remembers it, the boy had a stick lodged in the side of his mouth, and he chewed on it thoughtfully while Asad spoke.

“My people have left Wardheer,” Asad continued. “The house in which I have always slept now belongs to other people.”

The thin boy looked over Asad's shoulder, somewhere in the distance; Asad thought that he was about to walk away.

“Wait for us to finish working,” he said, “and we will show you.”

Asad waited a long time. It was not until the cafeteria workers were packing away their plastic chairs that the tall boy went to the other two and the three of them whispered and looked at Asad. Then one of them signaled for him to come. They led him around the back of a cafeteria. Tucked into a corner, under an awning, were three long pieces of cardboard.

“These are our beds,” the tall one said. “Find yourself something to sleep on.”

“That was my first night without Yindy's family,” Asad tells me. “The second night, we slept on a street corner a little way back from the circle. On the third night, we slept in a mosque. That is how it goes. You sleep in a cafeteria for a few nights, until the owner chases you away, and then you find somewhere else to sleep.”

During the day, the boys worked. There were two ways of earning money. The first was to scour the town for plastic bags and, once one had a few, to take them to the market beyond the edge of the circle where men buy
mira
to chew. You watch a man buy his
mira
and then offer to sell him a plastic bag so that he can carry his purchase home.

The second was more lucrative, but far more difficult. Each cafeteria on the town circle kept its water in a four-hundred-liter barrel. Wardheer was very hot, Asad says, the hottest place he has ever lived, and the restaurant owners would bury these huge barrels in the ground, just the top half sticking out, for water stored in direct sunlight would be too hot to drink. On a busy day, a cafeteria would have to replenish its container several times.

That is how the three boys earned a living. The town had but one source of water, a well at the edge of the circle, just off the main road leading into Wardheer.

“The soft sand makes water very hard to transport,” Asad says. “You cannot use a wheelbarrow, for instance. And so, when a cafeteria needs water, the waiter gives you a sixty-liter drum. You carry it to the well. There is always a very long queue. You wait your turn, fill the drum, and then you close the cap very tight. The drum is much too heavy to carry. You kick it back to the cafeteria. You call the waiter, and he picks up the drum and empties it into the barrel; he is much stronger than you are. Then he brings you another empty drum. While you are bringing back the second drum, they have already finished the water from the first. The restaurants paid one hundred Somali shillings a barrel. That is enough to buy a cup of tea or a glass of milk. What was more important was the leftover food the cook would give you when you brought water for him. Sometimes, he didn't want to give it to you. Then you had spent half the day kicking a barrel for nothing.”