A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (14 page)

Asad giggles. “And then,” he says, “there is the problem of the curfew. There was a citywide curfew in Addis when I lived there. First, it was seven thirty p.m., then nine p.m. Somalis did not obey the curfew; if you wanted to chew
mira
with your friends, you would go and chew. You did not look at your watch to see if the Ethiopian government would allow you to go and chew. It made the landlords so upset when their tenants violated the curfew. But even the prime minister of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi, knew that you could not get Somalis to obey it. When he put the curfew back to nine p.m., he went on television to announce it. He said that this was not a slackening of rules; enforcement of the new time would be very, very strict. ‘Let me warn you,' he said. ‘After nine p.m., only dogs and Somalis will move.' ”

When Asad started earning money, he rented a room in the house of an Ethiopian family in Bole Mikhael for himself and Yusuf. They were soon joined by two other young Somali men, Moled and Khadarmahad. Asad no longer recalls how he and Yusuf met the other two. They were all hanging out in the streets of Bole Mikhael. They spent time together. They chewed
mira
together. Before they had thought about it much, they were sharing a room.

There was a fifth person in their group, Abduraham, whom they called Hoolo, which means “animal.” He was bringing up a child as a single parent and rented his own room for himself and his baby daughter. His wife was in Canada and sent him money each month. He was waiting to get Canadian immigration papers. In Addis, he had little to do. He had finished school but could not get a place at university and had thus reached a dead end.

The others—Yusuf, Moled, and Khadarmaha
d—were at various stages in the stop-start journey of acquiring an education. As literate boys, they refused manual labor. They wanted jobs in the civil service. But the Ethiopian bureaucracy, which a generation or so earlier had been large enough to absorb most who aspired to join its ranks, had been rapidly shrinking since the early 1990s. Government-sponsored places in the universities became scarcer with each passing year. Young people like Yusuf would travel far from home and live off the smell of an oily rag to finish high school, only to find that graduating did not help them. The more they imagined and spoke of their careers, the more mercurial these careers became. They would probably be imagining their futures deep into adulthood.

It was Asad, without an education, scarcely able to conjure the sort of adult he might become, who went to work every morning, paid the rent, and provided food.

“I was happy to support the other boys with my money,” Asad tells me. “I remembered my own bad times. In Dire Dawa, it was I who had nothing.

“The others would contribute when they could. One of them would suddenly get a big sum of money, maybe three hundred dollars. And then they would also be generous. There were no cell phones in Ethiopia in 2000, so they could not tell you the news. You would get home and there would be new trousers, shoes, shoe boxes, trouser tickets. You would know that somebody got a money order.”

That Asad was earning enough money to feed and clothe a whole roomful of young men meant a great deal to him.

“When I first started renting,” he recalls, “I could not believe that I would be able to keep paying. We just moved in and hoped for the best. The first night, the mattresses were full of grass. After two or three days, we would buy a new one, then another, then another. It took maybe a month before it really sunk in: I was earning a living; all of this was working because of me. It was 2000, maybe 2001. I was sixteen, seventeen years old. I felt like a serious person.”

“My work was always during the day,” Asad tells me. “I would be home by five o'clock, often earlier. Sometimes, the others would only be waking up then. They had been chewing
mira
until four in the morning, five in the morning, and they would sleep for most of the day.

“When they were washed and dressed, we would sometimes sit and eat, and at other times we would go out. We went everywhere in the Somali parts of town. If we are not at home when we are ready to sleep, then we just sleep where we are. We wake up the next day, maybe then we go home, but maybe there is somewhere better to go. Sometimes, we were not together. Yusuf goes off; you don't know where he is for a while. Other times, we are all together for weeks.

“Except for Abduraham, we lived in one room. Sometimes there were four or five of us, sometimes eight in one room. Maybe four or five come to visit. We cut
mira.
It gets late, they say, No, we are not going home tonight. Two people would climb into your bed with you. Move over! Nudge you with their elbows. If you do that in South Africa, they think you are homosexual. With us, it is nothing.

“There are no people better in the world than young Somalis,” he says. “They do not ask you questions. They do not want to know who you are or where you are from. You just move with them. You see somebody day in and day out. You share everything with him. Later in life, when you have not seen him in years, you think: What is his clan? Where did he grow up? Where was his family? You don't know these things. You would never have asked. You were together. That was all.”

For the first year or so, everyone but Asad chewed
mira.
In retrospect, he is not sure why he abstained for so long. It was in part because he was the only one among them who worked, and he did not have the luxury of chewing until four in the morning and sleeping until the following afternoon. It was also the place
mira
had in the lives of his friends that made him uneasy. They would chew into the early hours, and, as they did so, they would dream and talk and plan, always about the grand things that would fill their futures. And yet the daily rhythm of
mira
chewing suggested that there was no future, only a constant present: you talk, you chew until late, the
mira
makes your mind race so that you cannot sleep, you spend the daylight hours trying to drain it from your system so that you can rest, and then night falls and you start chewing again. How can you even begin to make a future if you live like that?

“Some days,” Asad said, “I worked very, very hard, taking families all over the city. I get home, I want to eat and sleep. The others are chewing
mira.
I don't want to be rude. I just quietly sleep in a corner while they chew and talk.

“When I wake the next morning to go to work, they haven't gone to bed yet. They are desperate to sleep, but the
mira
will not let them. Their eyes are glazed. Their skin is rough. They have not shaved. I say to them: ‘Last night you were telling funny stories. Today you look like shit.' They ignore me. They slowly get up, wash, go to town, get more
mira,
come home, and chew.”

Asad thinks that he had been living in Addis more than a year the first time he chewed.

“It was a disappoint
ment,” he recalls. “I ate nonstop for two, three hours, and I felt nothing. I thought: The whole thing is in their heads. They think that
mira
is strong, and so it becomes strong.

“Second night, also, I chew, I feel nothing. But then, late in the night, I get up to pee; fifteen minutes later, I am getting up to pee again, and then again. It is the first sign that it is working;
mira
makes you drink too much water. The other boys get excited. ‘Look at Asad. Look at his face. It is working.' I say, ‘Rubbish, I feel nothing.' But, actually, I am feeling nauseous, and I go outside and vomit. I come back and try to go to sleep, but my heart is beating very fast, and the blood is pounding in my head. I lie there. It is very uncomfortable. Time starts going very, very slowly. I cannot get rid of the nausea. It is stopping me from sleeping. By the time I feel myself going to sleep, it is almost light.

“It is not nice sleep. It is troubled. I'm not sure where I have been while sleeping, but it is somewhere that has upset me. I get out of bed to chase away my dreams. I go outside. The sunlight hits me deep in the eyes and makes me stumble. I cannot tolerate it. I am feeling like shit. I go back to bed and wait for evening.

“When I wake up, they are all there, eating
mira
again. ‘Come, eat,' they say. ‘No, I cannot.' ‘Eat!' And so I eat. And now it is normal. I do not pee. I do not vomit. I just sit there, and my thoughts begin to speed up. I am thinking of all different things at the same time. I step away from myself and watch this Asad thinking all these thoughts at once. I am thinking much too much. I want to slow down, to take just one thought, pull it out, look at it. But the thoughts keep coming in. I am thinking about the near future and about the far future. I am thinking about tomorrow, about next year, and about ten years' time. You are thinking who you will be when you are an old man and who you will be tomorrow, both at the same time.”

“What were some of your thoughts?” I ask.

He pauses a long time. “I don't know,” he finally replies. “I don't remember what I think when I am chewing
mira.
I just remember what the thoughts feel like. You are planning, but you are not planning for this world. You forget the hard things in life. You start planning for a life in which something can happen just because you have thought it.”

In early 2003, a little less than three years after moving to Addis, Asad bought a small, wooden box. He resolved that he would put at least one hundred dollars in it every month, a lot more, if possible. It was his exit ticket from Addis Ababa.

His restlessness grew from his rapid success. He had landed on the streets of a foreign city and within months had found a way of earning a good living. Bole Mikhael was full of Somali travelers, people passing through from here and from there, telling tales of riches and prosperity. As he listened, he placed himself in their shoes, and his view of himself grew increasingly romantic.

“After what I was able to do in Addis,” Asad tells me, “I thought that whatever a Somali can accomplish anywhere in the world I can also do.”

The question was where to go.

Bole Mikhael was full of Somalis on the brink of leaving and of news from Somalis who had just left. Asad had lost count of the times he had been asked to join a group on its passage north through Sudan. He had always declined, not because the idea of settling in Europe wasn't enticing but because the journey there seemed unreasonably perilous.

“If you have travel documents, it is one thing,” Asad tells me. “But if you have none, trying to get to Europe can kill you. They would leave as a big group and travel in a bus toward the Sudanese border. Just before the checkpoints, they would break up into three or four groups. Each must find smugglers to get them across. On the other side, they wait for everyone in the group to arrive. Then they break again and come together in Khartoum. Then they break again. After Khartoum, it is the Sahara Desert for a long, long way, and that is where the people die.”

“How do you know?” I ask.

“The survivors spread the news,” he replies. “There are websites for just this purpose. You go online, and you see who has died: the name, the clan, the nickname. And if it was somebody from Bole Mikhael, their name will be printed off the Internet and stuck on a wall on the main street. So you were always reminded of the risk: last month you were chewing
mira
with so-and-so; now he is a name you see on the wall.”

Many people in Bole Mikhael had uncles and aunts and cousins and siblings in America, in Britain, in Italy, in Scandinavia, and they all received regular wire transfers or wads of cash from
hawala
agents. So, clearly, there was a good life to be had in Europe. But who, precisely, got to live this good life was never clear, for the flesh-and-blood people one knew in Bole Mikhael who went to Europe seldom communicated much. What exactly happened to them on the other side? It was hard to form a picture.

The world to the south was even more mysterious. Asad knew South Africa only as Nelson Mandela's country, where black and white had reconciled and people were at peace. It had a constitution that made the government accountable for what it did and for what it failed to do. It was not free to lock a person in jail and throw away the key. People did not just disappear in South Africa.