A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (6 page)

“Two groups of people at Liboi spoke English,” Asad recalls. “The first was those who got jobs with the NGOs. They considered themselves the elite of the camp. They would speak English and French among themselves, in front of everyone else, to show that they were superior. The second group were the people who went to the private schools. They would also flaunt their English, practicing with each other in the middle of the camp. In loud voices, they would say: ‘How are you?' ‘Where do you come from?' ‘It is unusually hot today.' ”

I ask Asad why Yindy did not send him to a school that taught English, hoping, in this manner, to learn something of her thinking.

“I don't know,” he replies. “Some children went to madrassas, some to English schools, some to the mathematics schools. I think maybe it was just chance.”

It is not the first time I ask Asad a question designed to elicit something about Yindy. She and Asad were so viscerally close, the bonds between them made of pain and blood. And yet, when he speaks of her, a lifeless being spills from his tongue. His love for his mother he can conjure from a brief description of the plaits that run down her back. His father he brings to life in the recollection of a single embrace. Yindy, by contrast, is a mere corpse.

Once, driving through Bellville Town Centre, the streets around us thick with Somalis, we see a short, squat woman sitting on a low stool stirring a pot of stew. Her clothes are dirty and threadbare, her skin an unhealthy gray. When she looks up, her eyes are vacant, as if she has removed her spirit from the world.

“She is in trouble,” Asad says quietly. “You can see. She must have no family. We should give something. We should eat her stew.”

“When you feel pity for her,” I ask, “are you thinking of Yindy?”

He turns from me, looks straight ahead, and smiles without pleasure.

“I hate Yindy,” he says softly. “I do not have a place in my heart for her.”

We sit there in silence, watching the street life about us. A man comes to buy stew from the woman on the stool. She dishes his portion into a polystyrene bowl. It is no secret that memory is not very reliable. But here is a special case. For more than two years, Yindy and Asad relied upon each other in body and spirit. He must surely have loved her. And yet what happened subsequently has turned her to poison.

“One night,” Asad says quietly, apropos of nothing, “people broke into our place. They stood over us discussing whether to rape Yindy. Some said she was too crippled to rape. Others said, no, she was still rapeable. In the end, they left with the raw food the NGOs had brought us and then went to our neighbor's place and raped her instead.”

He begins talking of other things, and it seems from his rapid and rehearsed diction that the memory of that night is gone, that what he really keeps of that moment are the words with which he tells the tale.

At some time in 1993, Yindy told Asad that she had qualified for resettlement to America. It had happened, in some way or other, through an uncle who lived there. She had to report immediately to a temporary waiting center called Lang'ata. It was near Nairobi.

Asad remembers the conversation vividly. They were sitting under the shelter of the
balbalo,
each in a plastic chair provided by the kind
gaal.
Yindy said that she would have to go to America without Asad at first but that he would not have to wait long before he could come, too. Once she had settled there, she said, she could
responsa
him and he could join her.

Neither of them knew what this new word
responsa
might mean, only that it was drawn from the great stock of legal and other concepts that lubricated the world of the UNHCR and America. Yindy also told Asad that America had the finest schools in the world, and colleges, where people studied to become doctors and lawyers and engineers. She told him that he was her son, that he was very clever, and that in America he would have the opportunity to become someone great.

Yindy left him in the care of the neighbor who had been raped in her stead. She instructed him to stop attending school, to stop playing with other children, to leave the house only when accompanied by the neighbor. She said that she would find him a home in Nairobi, where he would live while he waited to leave for America. There were many AliYusuf in Nairobi, she said. She would find him somewhere safe.

When I ask Asad to recall his time in Liboi after Yindy's departure, he shrugs. He speaks instead of the end of this period. Yindy had called for him to come. She had sent him a ticket for the Ziafania Express, the intercity bus service. He bid Liboi farewell and boarded the bus. Although he was to travel alone, the conductor, who had been given instructions and money to care for him, bought him food whenever the bus stopped.

It was a very long journey, about twenty-four hours. He wondered what would happen if Yindy had the time of the bus's arrival wrong and nobody was waiting on the other side. “Nairobi” was a name to which he could not pin an image. As much as he tried, he could not fathom what he might find.

In the end, the first person he saw when he stepped off the bus was Yindy. She was standing in a circle with several other ladies and a boy. Asad was struck for the first time since Afmadow by how short she was; even the boy, who was no more than nine or ten years old, was taller than her. He wondered how such a stubby woman had survived so momentous a journey.

Asad remembers that the boy wanted to talk to him but that he felt tired and, in ways that confused him, a little upset. Yindy took his hand, and together they boarded another bus, this one to Lang'ata. She led him to her refugee tent and put him to bed.

“I was very dizzy,” he recalls. “Everything was upside down. The sun seemed to set where it should be rising. At night, lying down, it felt like the ground was moving. When I woke up, the door was not in the same place I remembered it. Maybe this was because of all the movement on the bus.”

“In English,” I say to him, “the word that describes what you were feeling is ‘disoriented.' ”

“Disoriented,” he repeats slowly. He files it, along with the countless English, Swahili, and Amharic words he has learned this way, and I can see from the expression on his face that he will not forget; he is attaching the word to a mental image of this conversation, and, when the occasion arises, he will use it himself.

“The Somali word for that feeling,” he says, “is
salal.
”

On Asad's second day at Lang'ata, Yindy told him of a neighborhood in Nairobi called Islii. It was not a refugee camp, she said, just a part of the city, but it was nonetheless full of Somalis who had escaped the war. They lived in houses and buildings like other people. The moment she had settled at Lang'ata, she told him, she went to Islii in search of family. There were many AliYusuf people there. She had made contact with one of them, a man by the name of Ahmad Noor Galal. He told her to bring the boy Asad to Nairobi; he was the one who had paid for Asad's bus ticket and had given the conductor money to feed him along the journey.

In a matter-of-fact tone, Yindy told Asad that he would be staying with his new uncle, and she made sure to say in the same breath that it would be temporary. She did not know how long it would take until she could
responsa
Asad and bring him to America, but she promised that it would be soon.

He said nothing. Yindy's words swirled around his head as if caught in a gust and then flew out and up into the sky above Nairobi.

Asad stayed in Lang'ata one more night. The next morning he and Yindy took a bus to this place called Islii and made their way through the streets. And then they were standing outside a house that belonged to the AliYusuf man called Ahmad Noor Galal, and they were speaking with him. Ahmad Noor Galal had a wide girth. He stood in front of his house with his hands on his hips. He also had two children, a boy and a girl, both about Asad's age; Asad remembers them hovering with interest somewhere in the background.

“Yindy began speaking about me to my uncle right in front of me,” Asad recalls. “ ‘The boy is clever. The boy is polite. He is a wonderful boy who looked after me when I could not walk.'

“My new uncle cut her off. ‘Say no more. He is my son. That is the beginning and the end of the matter.' Then he turned to me and said, ‘I invite you. Be a part of my family.' ”

Asad and Yindy slept that night in the house of Ahmad Noor Galal. The family asked them many questions about the two years that had passed since they had left Mogadishu and, in return, offered stories of their own. The family's route to Islii had not been easy; it had been lubricated, it seemed, by forms of inventiveness Asad strained to grasp. During the course of the evening, the conversation sketched a great map of what had happened to the AliYusuf since the outbreak of war. It seemed that they had exploded into countless shards, and that the task of gathering them all together again was hopeless. Asad's father's name did not come up until late in the evening.

“Alas,” Ahmad Noor Galal said, “we have heard nothing of him. But there are many possible reasons for the silence. He could turn up here in Islii any day.”

“Did you ever meet him?” Asad plucked up the courage to ask.

“No,” he replied. “There are so many AliYusuf men one only hears about but never meets.”

The following morning, Yindy prepared to return to Lang'ata alone.

“No, I am coming with you,” Asad said.

It was not a question. It was a demand.

A distraction was found. Asad was sent on an errand with his new stepbrother and -sister. When they returned, Yindy was gone.

He does not have a final image of her. Instead, he has a series of numbers.

“Yindy either flew on 09-03-1993 or on 03-09-1993. It is one of the two. I don't remember which.”

“Why do you remember the date in that particular way?” I ask. “Did you see it written down like that somewhere?”

“I don't remember where I saw it,” he replies. “I just remember the numbers.”

When Asad first mentions Islii, I ask him to spell it.

“I-s-l-i-i,”
he says.

That evening I begin reading about Somalis in Nairobi and immediately come across a place called Eastleigh.

Islii. Eastleigh.

I discover later that all Somalis say and spell it this way. I will come to see what they have done to the English name of the neighborhood as an analogue for what they have done to the neighborhood itself.

“Islii was dirty back then,” Asad says. “It rains a lot in Nairobi. There was no tar on the streets, no bricks on the pavements. There was a lot of mud. And there was nobody to come and take the rubbish. The place stank. It was overcrowded with Somalis, at that stage, all Daaroods. They were streaming in, more every day. But the kiosks and the shops were all run by Kenyans. The Somalis were not yet the businesspeople they are in Islii today.

“There is the Ring Road around the whole of Nairobi. Islii is just outside the Ring Road. People would watch the taxis and buses going to the rest of the city. But they were not for us. Most Somalis stayed in Islii the whole time.

“Although Kenyans ran the kiosks,” Asad continues, “Somalis ran the lodges. They were overcrowded with families and with children. Sometimes there was more than one family in a room. There was the Hotel Taleh, Morion Lodge, Alfalaah Hotel, Garissa Lodge. They were full of wives and children. In general, each hotel was occupied by a different clan. The Hotel Taleh was full of AliYusuf people. Most had nothing to do. They would sit all day and talk and talk and talk about other AliYusuf people and where they might be.”

Unlike most Somalis in Eastleigh, Ahmad Noor Galal had a steady, well-paid job. There was no need for his family to squeeze into a hotel room. They rented a house all their own. They ate three square meals a day. Their clothes were new.

For Asad, this was, on the face of it, manna from heaven. A house, a family, a patriarch who put meat on the table: just a week earlier, it had been doubtful that Asad would ever again be exposed to such precious normalcy. But his new home also had its politics.

“My uncle was very nice,” Asad recalls, “but it was clear from the beginning that his wife was uncomfortable with a strange child in the house. Us three children would play inside and make a mess. My aunt would shout at us, punish us. The children would say, No, Asad did it. She would immediately take their side. Soon, it became the way of the house. If there's a problem, the children automatically point my way: Asad did it. I was very, very lonely, my brother. More lonely than if there had been nobody else there.”

Sometimes, Asad would take refuge with his uncle, who whiled away many an afternoon in the yard at the back of his house chewing khat, which Somalis call
mira,
and talking to friends. Asad would sit a few paces away, the back of his head against the wall. He would close his eyes and listen to the men's voices. They spoke of Mogadishu with such exquisite and gentle nostalgia that Asad would sometimes find himself weeping. He did not always follow what the men were saying. But as the sounds of their voices washed over him they became the voices of his own father and
his
friends; and if he closed his eyes for long enough, his mother was there, too, somewhere in the background, cooking the men dinner.

Ahmad Noor Galal was often away. He had a job with CARE International, for which he drove a supply truck between Nairobi and the Dadaab refugee camps. He would head off before daybreak for northeastern Kenya and not return for days. While he was gone, there were only enemies in the house.

Asad began to drift. He would wander from the house after breakfast, skip lunch, and not return until the sun was setting. Staring at the tips of his bare toes, trying as hard as he might to imagine the American world in which Yindy now lived, he walked through Eastleigh street by street.

Looking back, Asad thinks that at this time his thoughts of his mother took on a new intensity. The image of her two thick plaits, the feeling of her smooth hair passing through the webs of his open fingers: he associates that image with the beginning of his time in Eastleigh. He believes that this was when he installed the feeling of her inside him, permanently, such that, whatever he did and wherever he went, he took with him a mother's love.

One afternoon, during his daily wanderings, Asad came across a group of Somali men leaning against a wall chewing
mira.
He is not sure why he chose to linger. Cautiously, he picked a spot close to them and crouched on his haunches. They eyed him lazily and then returned to their conversation. He drew a little closer to them and, finally, pushed his back against the wall, closed his eyes, and listened. He sat there a long time. The sun slanted, the street became fuller and noisier; still, nobody chased him away.

When night fell, the men retired indoors, and Asad followed behind. They laughed at his precociousness and cuffed the back of his head and asked his name, but they did not shoo him out. A woman served food. Once the men were eating, she called Asad over, handed him a bowl, and invited him to fill it.

Sometime during the course of the evening, there was a rap on the door. Somebody answered it, and Asad heard urgent voices; he recognized one of them as that of Ahmad Noor Galal. He had been searching the length and breadth of Eastleigh for Asad and now called him in a firm and angry voice. Asad walked past the men he had befriended as if through a gauntlet, his cheeks burning with shame.

He followed Galal through the streets of Eastleigh, his head bowed. He trembled when he thought of the beating he would receive once they were home. Still some distance from the house, Galal suddenly stopped and turned. Instead of striking Asad, he knelt on one knee. He put his hand on Asad's shoulder and asked him quietly what was wrong. It was such a gentle, sensitive gesture, this tall man lowering himself to put his face so close to Asad's. Willing himself not to burst into tears, Asad was mute.

And then, with the wind of Galal's breath brushing his cheeks, something silent and unpleasant passed between them. Asad knows now, if he did not then, that it was the chill of a new estrangement. They walked home together in silence. Dimly, but palpably enough, Asad understood that in that moment Galal had given up. He had weighed the costs of forcing his wife to accept Asad, and he had calculated that it was too high a price to pay.

“The family ate breakfast together every morning,” Asad tells me. “When it was finished, everyone was responsible for washing their own plate. One morning, the other two children did not wash their dishes. They put their dirty plates in the washing bowl and went out to play. At lunchtime, my aunt sees these dirty dishes, and she starts to shout at me. Automatically at me. I tell her I have already washed my plate. She gets even angrier. For lying, she says, I must wash the whole family's plates.”

Asad imagined himself cleaning the dishes his lying stepsiblings had dirtied, and the humiliation of it flooded his cheeks and his head. He picked up a dish and threw it as hard as he could at Galal's wife. He aimed for the bridge of her nose, but instead struck her square on the shoulder. The plate rebounded onto a wall and shattered.

Asad ran outside, his aunt close on his heels. When he had crossed the street, he stopped, armed himself with a handful of stones, and turned.

“We stood like that for a long time,” Asad recalls. “Me on one side of the street, the family on the other. Whenever one of them took a step toward me, I threw a stone. My uncle was out back eating
mira
with some friends. Somebody went to call him. I ran. My aim was to go to the furthest place in Islii, to get somewhere they couldn't find me.”

It was by chance that Asad's route took him past the house where the men had sat eating
mira.
There was just one man there now, and Asad stopped, walked up to him, and stared. The man chuckled and invited Asad to sit.

“What's with you?” he asked. “What's wrong at home?”

They sat together in silence for a long time. Finally, when the man got up to go, Asad followed. They walked several blocks before entering a hotel. The man's room was on the second floor. Bare and simple, it had a single bed and a few possessions. The man told Asad that his name was Bashir.

He cut Asad a thick slice of bread and poured him a glass of milk.

“When you are finished eating,” Bashir said, “you must go home.”

Asad shook his head.

“Okay,” Bashir bargained. “You stay here. I will go and speak to your family. I will smooth everything. Then you will come.”

“No,” Asad said.

The stalemate was only broken when Asad drifted off to sleep. At some point, he felt himself being lifted and carried. Then he was gently settled on the bed. He woke during the night to find Bashir in the bed beside him.

The next time he woke it was morning. Bashir was dressed.

“I am leaving,” he said. “I will not chase you out now, but when I return this evening you must not be here. You must go to your family.”

Asad left about an hour later, but not for home. During the course of the previous three months, he had come to know several Somali children. He went to the house of one of them, sat down, and settled in. At nightfall, the adults of the household told him to go home. He refused and was allowed to spend the night. The following day, he visited another child and did the same there.

“Four nights in a row I spent in different homes,” he tells me. “Now, my story is out. The women talk among themselves. They bitch about my foster mother. ‘How can that woman…? The child has nobody. Who does she think she is…?'

“The story is now reaching Galal and his wife. It is becoming embarrassing for them. So I am caught. But I am not taken back to Galal's house. A meeting is held among the AliYusuf elders. It is decided that I will live in the Hotel Taleh. The whole hotel is full of AliYusuf. Two floors. Wherever you go, families, full, full, full, mattresses in the corridor. Everyone offered me food. Everyone knew my story. I became friends to all the children. I slept in a different bed in the hotel every night.”

The AliYusuf allowed for this situation on the grounds that it was temporary. Sooner or later, Yindy would call for Asad to come to America. Or his father would turn up unannounced in Eastleigh. That was the thinking. In the end, Asad would live this way in the Hotel Taleh for more than two years.