A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (19 page)

Asad followed the Masai into the night. The man's footfalls made hardly any noise, while Asad's shoes banged and creaked whenever they hit the ground, and he wondered whether the nomad was barefoot. The Masai was perhaps ten paces ahead, his head to the ground.

Asad wanted to know for how long they were going to be walking. He called out in Swahili. The Masai stopped, half turned, put his finger in his ear, and then shrugged—he didn't understand. Asad spoke in English. This time, the Masai didn't even bother to signal that he had heard.

It was very dark, and Asad soon lost track of where they were going. It occurred to him that perhaps they were tracing wide circles around the CID man's house. He stared at the back of the Masai's head, as if doing so for long enough might allow him to peer inside. He still had more than seven hundred dollars on him. The Masai might turn around and stab him and share his money with the CID man. Perhaps the two of them had killed a dozen Somalis over time. Perhaps it was with the money of dead Somalis that the CID man had built his house.

Asad cast his eyes to the ground and strained to see what was there. He was looking for a weapon. But it was very dark, and to find anything he would have to slow down, which would arouse the Masai's suspicions. Eventually, he kicked something accidentally and reached down and picked it up. He was holding a stick, about four feet long. He examined it briefly, tapped it, then stopped and broke it in half over his knee. He kept walking and felt the break with his fingers. It was as he wanted: he had created two sharp ends. He clutched his two makeshift knives, one in each hand, and walked.

He thinks that it took the better part of three hours, but eventually they crossed the border. It was easy. There was a large hole in the fence. He wriggled into Tanzania, flat on his stomach, his two sticks abandoned in Kenya.

On the Tanzanian side, they walked only a short way before Asad saw passing headlights in the distance and heard the sound of an engine, perhaps fifty or so meters away. The Masai directed Asad to a clump of tall trees and motioned for him to wait there. Then he headed for the road. Asad watched. He thought he could make out the man's silhouette crouching a short distance from the highway. Then he blinked and could no longer see him and wondered whether he was trying too hard.

While he waited, he tried to work out the route on which the Masai had taken him. On the Kenyan side, they had given the border post a wide berth. The Kenya-Tanzania highway had in the meantime twisted to the right and followed them. Clever, Asad thought to himself. The Masai and the CID man must have worked this out long ago. They had probably been doing this for years.

He did not hear the Masai return; the little man was suddenly a few paces from him, gesturing for him to come. He turned and walked toward the road, and Asad followed. A taxi was parked on the shoulder, its headlights on, its engine running. The sliding door on the side was open, and the Masai gestured for Asad to get aboard. Asad hesitated. For the first time, the Masai showed irritation, a sharp click, his tongue hitting his palate.

Asad climbed into the taxi. Lying next to him on the seat was his duffel bag.

The lodge in Arusha to which the taxi driver took Asad was run by an Ogadeni, but if he felt any kinship with Asad, the feeling was faint. Once his eyes had taken in the duffel bag and the briefcase, once he had learned that his visitor had no papers, he scanned Asad's body without shame, searching for the telltale bulges of U.S. dollars.

“He told me that the neighborhood was swarming with police, that if I took even two steps I would get arrested. He said I must buy safe passage from him. For two hundred and fifty dollars, he could arrange to get me from his front door right to the other side of the border with Zambia. I told him I'd think about it, paid him only for the room, and went to bed.”

Asad decided to leave very early the next morning, hoping that the innkeeper would still be asleep. But the moment he stepped out into the passageway with his duffel bag, the man was upon him.

“You won't last two minutes,” he shouted. “The police will arrest you and interrogate you and you will tell them you slept here and they will come and make trouble for me.”

For the first time since leaving Addis, Asad considered the prospect of using his fists. He strode past the innkeeper, and his duffel bag, which was slung over his right shoulder, nudged the man against the wall. He heard the scuffing of the innkeeper's shoes as he struggled to keep his footing. Asad kept going, his body tensed, waiting for the man to come after him. And then he was out on the streets, walking, the innkeeper now a problem of the past, the danger of police filling up the present.

As he made his way through a strange city, unsure where he was going, a feeling of great unhappiness descended upon him. His bags and his long Somali face and its expression of uncertainty were like a town crier announcing that he was primed for fleecing. He stared at his feet taking one step after another, and he imagined himself walking through Bole Mikhael, through Islii, through the town circle at Wardheer, through all the places in which he had once felt sure of himself. He allowed the reverie to continue for just one more moment, knowing that he must snap it shut. It was too much like dreaming, like the moments before sleep when the mind drifts. Were he to slip into such a state, the vultures would tear the flesh off him.

He found his way to an intercity bus terminal and began negotiating. The touters picked up at once that he had no papers, and each wanted hundreds and hundreds of dollars. He said no to them all, then wandered around the vicinity of the terminal until he found a taxi driver who would drive him to the Zambian border for no more than forty dollars. As he climbed into the taxi, he knew as well as he had ever known anything that the journey would not go as planned.

At this point, the stability of the story Asad is telling me begins to give way. From Arusha, things went badly, and his memories of the next few days come in the form of flashes and scenes and spectacles, the connections between them not entirely clear.

He was not in the taxi for long. He soon ran into a group of traveling Somalis who persuaded him that undocumented travelers who used taxis were always arrested and that he should join them. They were on a bus, and it was cheap.

He did just that. No more than an hour or so into the journey, the bus was stopped at a roadblock, its occupants ordered onto the street, and he and his new Somali friends arrested. The hold at the rear of the bus was opened, and Asad was allowed to take his duffel bag, but when he protested that he had another bag in the cabin he was clipped on the back of the head and told to keep moving. And so Asad was driven to a police station while his Samsonite briefcase disappeared forever into the inhospitality of Tanzania.

There were times in the following weeks when he wondered who might be wearing his
thobe,
how many times it had changed hands, in how many street markets it may have been displayed. He wondered, too, about his photographs and his Red Book. But the moment he contemplated the fate of the Red Book, he felt from deep inside him a determined voice shooing its memory away; such indulgences were not healthy for a man on the move, and he focused on the present instead.

Asad was among a group of seven Somalis taken off the bus. After a night in police holding cells they were driven to a court, their stomachs empty, their throats dry, and locked in a room, waiting for their hearing to begin. A hat was passed around, and they offered their guard a bribe. In return, each of the seven Somalis was given a thick official-looking piece of paper stamped with a coat of arms. They were summarily released. Not surreptiti
ously. Not through a back entrance. Right out of the front of the court building.

As they walked into the sunlight, Asad scrutinized his paper.

“I was the only one among us seven who could read English,” he recalls. “The others, they just take the paper, put it somewhere safe, give it to the soldiers at the Zambian border post. Brother, the paper was bullshit. It said we were in Tanzania illegally and that we had forty-eight hours to cross the border back into Kenya. We hand that paper to the soldiers at the Zambian border, they laugh in our faces and put handcuffs on our wrists.”

Asad's memory dissolves, or, at any rate, his will to recall fades, and now he is talking about being in the border town of Tunduma. The seven Somalis had thrown away their worthless papers and negotiated their way onto a bus.

Tunduma lies right on the border. Zambia was quite literally in sight. But how to get there with dwindling money and no documents?

They scouted Tunduma and asked questions and were soon guided to a border control office. The officials there already knew that they would be coming and were kind enough to offer them seats. Then the negotiations began. The talks twisted and became opaque and confusing, and then they became nasty. There was a lot of shouting and many threats of immediate arrest. Sitting in my car, Asad is struck, not so much by the negotiations themselves as by the document each of the travelers purchased from the border officials once the shouting was through.

“It was very beautiful. It was like money because it had a stamp or a picture that was inside the paper. Not on the one side or on the other, but somewhere inside. It also had a place for my picture. I had a photograph taken and bought glue and stuck it in its place. It was some sort of regional travel document, I'm not sure for what. Southern African Development Community, maybe, I don't know. It said I was Tanzanian; it gave me a Tanzanian name. The border officials explained that it could get us from any country in SADC to another.”

“Did you believe them?” I ask.

“I don't remember. I liked the document very much. It looked like it was going to work.”

The impressive new document was not tested just yet, for, in the end, they were smuggled across the Zambian border to a waiting bus that drove them through the night to Lusaka. Asad was utterly exhausted. His last decent sleep, he believes, was on the bus somewhere between Garissa and Nairobi. In Lusaka, another bus, another handing over of dollars.

Asad's narrative is racing, desperate to leave this time of transit behind. Next, the seven Somalis were on the Zimbabwean border, and Asad was now very nervous. A long, narrow pedestrian pathway led to the border post; it was fenced on both sides. He felt the fence close around him, as if he had suddenly been tunneled, all choices slammed shut. He stared at the beautiful document he had bought in Tunduma, and its beauty was now beguiling and ominous. The watermark seemed to be mocking him, taunting him, telling him that it was too late to run.

“What was the watermark?” I ask. “What was the picture of?”

He thinks awhile. “I don't remember,” he says. “I remember only that it was beautiful.”

On the bridge, the Zambian and Zimbabwean soldiers mingled, doing their work side by side. This frightened Asad all the more; at no previous border post had the two sides been so friendly, so at ease with each other.

His paper was taken from him. He was questioned in English. What is your name? What is your occupation? Why are you traveling? Where are you going?

“Namibia,” he replied.

To this day, he is not sure why the word came from his mouth. Perhaps because all Somalis were going to South Africa; perhaps because to say that one was going to South Africa was to surrender one's entire story. But Namibia? He had never heard of anybody wanting to go to Namibia.

The seven travelers were told to wait at the side of the border post. Hushed word was soon sent to them that they must attempt to enter Zimbabwe again. This time, they were to clip thirty dollars in notes to their watermarked documents. They pooled money, made sure that everyone had thirty dollars, and approached the border post again. Their documents were stamped, the dollar notes removed. Within minutes, they were through the border post and back on their Harare-bound bus.

Sitting there, waiting for the bus to start moving, Asad examined the new stamp on his watermarked travel document. He glared at it resentfully and restrained himself from tearing it to shreds. It occurred to him that the document itself had probably been invented for the purpose of fleecing people without documents. It was something for which you paid one set of officials dearly; and when you presented it to another set, many hundreds of miles away, it announced that you were up for more fleecing. Not for the first time in the last few days he felt a fool, a person whose purpose on this planet was to be duped.

Strange things began happening on the bus. First, bread and sodas were distributed to all passengers free of charge, as if they were children on some outing. When Asad asked why, he was told that the journey to Harare would take thirty hours and that the bus would at no point stop for long enough for passengers to buy a meal. The idea of so long a journey dispirited him. He prayed that he would be able to rest. He did in fact drift off and was soon sleeping the sleep of the very tired, only to be awoken by an unpleasant, synthetic smell in his nostrils and a strange, hissing sound. When he opened his eyes, they began to burn. He rubbed them and looked around. A uniformed official was walking up and down the aisle spraying a can.

Asad's fury came to him like a sharp blow. He was literally dizzy with anger. Of everything that had happened to him since leaving Addis, this, unfathomably, was the greatest indignity. Why were they not asked permission before a chemical was sprayed in their faces? Were they cattle being shipped to market or, worse, to slaughter?

Dimly, it occurred to him that he was caught in the spell of a kind of madness, that he was utterly exhausted and frightened, that were he to close his eyes and breathe evenly his emotions would soon settle once more into a pattern he could recognize. He sat there, eyes closed, seething. He imagined a person walking down the aisle and glancing briefly at him. What would this person see? Just a sleeping face, a face blank because of the fact that its eyes were closed. Little would such a person guess at the tumult inside. He tried to banish the thought, for it seemed to draw him closer to madness.

The moment the bus stopped in Harare the travelers were swarmed, once more, by all sorts of people offering all sorts of services. It seemed that there were a hundred ways of getting into South Africa. Asad was by now the group of seven's spokesperson and its primary decision maker. He chose the border post of Beitbridge, for no particular reason, he says, other than that the alliteration of the two
b
's was pleasant on the tongue.

The man who had offered to get them to Beitbridge wanted to be paid, and this turned Asad's attention to the question of Zimbabwean currency.

“Somebody walked past with a huge pile of money, brother. Just like that. In his hands.” He holds his hands in front of him and feigns to slump forward in the passenger seat, as if the weight of his load is folding him double. “I asked the smuggler man: ‘How much money is that man carrying?' Smuggler man says maybe five dollars.”

Of all he had seen since leaving Addis, this, oddly, was the starkest reminder that he was in a strange land. For a moment he imagined a country full of people weighed down by sacks of money, people hiring horses and donkeys to carry their savings to a safe place, people buying a mule merely to take home their change from the market.

He asked the smuggler how much it would cost to cross the border at Beitbridge, and the smuggler named a price in South African rand, not for the crossing, but just for information on how to proceed. Asad knew nothing about the rand. He gave the smuggler a ten-dollar note and asked for change as authoritat
ively as he could, well aware that he was about to be robbed.