A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (21 page)

The woman's relative, a middle-aged man, came outside and spoke to the white men briefly and gave them some money. And then the white men went around shaking the hands of all seven travelers and wished them luck. Then they climbed back into their minibus and were gone.

“The man invites us in,” Asad tells me. “He tells us his name is Sheikh Mohammed. We all wait our turn to have another shower, even though we just had one in Pretoria. When we come out of the bathroom, there is something waiting for us to eat. We are asked to give dirty clothes to be washed. It is all very nice, very comfortable.

“Once we are all sitting together, Sheikh Mohammed takes out a notebook where he has long lists written down. And he goes around the room asking each of us our tribe. He listens and nods and then says, ‘Good.' No matter what your tribe, he says, ‘Good.' Then he looks at his lists and finds the right page and then he asks more questions. Your grandfather's name and nickname, your uncle's name and nickname. He writes these down. He is Ogadeni, brother. And we are also Ogadeni. He has a whole map of the Ogadeni in South Africa, and next to each name on the map he has a cell-phone number.”

Three of the travelers were of the same subclan. Sheikh Mohammed decided it was best to deal with them all together. He made one call on their behalf, then another, then another. For every new person he found at the other end of the line, he consulted his notebook and read out the names of the travelers' fathers and grandfathers. He listened carefully and took more notes in his book.

“You three will not be a problem,” he pronounced after the third phone call. “We will come back to you later.”

Then it came to Asad.

“I am Mohammed Zubeyr,” Asad said. “And AliYusuf.”

“I did not even bother with Abdullahi, brother. What are the chances there would be Abdullahi?”

“And your lineage?” Sheikh Mohammed asked.

“Abdullahi.”

Sheikh Mohammed made a call.

“There is an AliYusuf man just around the corner,” he said, as he waited for the phone to be answered. “I am trying him now.”

A long phone discussion ensued. Sheikh Mohammed asked Asad his father's name, his grandfather's name, then spoke on the phone. Then he asked Asad the names of his father's brothers. He spoke on the phone some more.

He hung up, put his cell phone down carefully on the table in front of him, and, raising an eyebrow, looked at Asad closely.

“Do you know Abdicuur Abdullahi?” he asked.

“I have never met him,” Asad replied. “But I know who he is. He is my father's oldest brother's oldest son.”

Sheikh Mohammed nodded and, again, examined Asad carefully.

“When did you last hear news of him?”

“Brother,” Asad replied. “I have not heard news about
anybody.
”

“Abdicuur is a wealthy man, an important man,” Sheikh Mohammed said. “He lives in a place in South Africa very far from here called Uitenhage. It is near a big city called Port Elizabeth.”

Sheikh Mohammed read a phone number out of his notebook and punched it into his phone. Now he was talking to Abdicuur. And now he was handing the phone to Asad.

Asad put the phone to his ear and spoke.

“My name is Asad Abdullahi,” he said. “My father is Hirsi.”

“Immediately, brother, the man on the phone asks me: ‘Have you seen your father?' I tell him, ‘Uncle, I have come a long, long way. I am tired.' I hand the phone back to Sheikh Mohammed.”

Sheikh Mohammed spoke into his phone briefly, nodded, then put the phone down.

“He says you are his son. He says I must keep you safe.”

Asad smiled briefly, then looked at his hands. He felt his tiredness as a weight bearing down on his head. His chin dropped, and his neck creaked. But inside the tiredness, Abdicuur's voice echoed. With great mental effort, Asad captured the voice and sealed it into his interior, then listened to it rebound inside his head. It was the first Abdullahi voice he had heard since the whistling mortar had wrenched him from his uncle in the town of Qoryooley. How much time had passed since then? It was now February 2004. It had been thirteen years.

By nightfall, five of the seven travelers had been scooped up and taken to the homes of family. Just Asad and a man named AbdiKeni remained. Sheikh Mohammed walked them to a lodge a few blocks from his house, informed the proprietor that he would pay the bill however long they stayed, and left them to rest.

Asad slumped onto his bed. He lay splayed on his back, his arms outstretched, and stared at the ceiling. He listened to the sounds coming from outside: several conversations were going on at once, each one shouted in voluble Somali, the voices full of passion and fire, as if these were their last conversations on earth. In the background he heard the blaring of an international news channel.

He closed his eyes and listened. He could be in Eastleigh or in Bole Mikhael—he could be anywhere Somali travelers gathered in lodges.

An image came to him: dense gatherings of Somalis, represented as clusters of flickering lights, scattered across a map of Africa. The east of the continent was aglow, but down here, too, in the south, the Somali lights blinked. He got up, had yet another bath, then tried to watch television. He was too tired to focus; he fell asleep almost at once.

“The next day was very strange,” he recalls. “When I went down to the restaurant for breakfast it seemed to be facing the opposite way from the way it faced the day before. I went onto the street to try to trace the direction from which we had come. I had no idea. I realized I would not be able to find my way back to Sheikh Mohammed's house. There was nothing to do but sit in the lodge. I spoke to people about changing my hundred dollars. But it seemed too much effort.”

Over the next three days, he occasionally joined AbdiKeni's attempts to find family. But the task could not hold his attention for long. He chewed
mira.
He watched television. He ate. He slept. Dimly, he observed the systems and circuits inside him shutting down. The spectacle was of momentary interest. The feeling of thinking of nothing at all was far preferable.

Ten days after his arrival in South Africa, he found himself sitting on a Greyhound bus in Park Station, Johannesburg. It was two o'clock on a mid-February afternoon in 2004. At six the following morning, the bus journey would terminate in Port Elizabeth, where Uncle Abdicuur would collect him.

He did not sleep a wink. Whenever he looked about him, he saw people slumped in their seats or buried under mounds of blankets. He heard snoring and sleep murmuring. He seemed to be the only person awake.

He remembers being very cold throughout the journey, which is odd, since it was February, an unfailingly warm month throughout the country. He remembers staring out of the window, into the night, trying to gather from the little he could see the character of the country in which he now lived.

Every town the bus passed, he noticed, was divided into two distinct sections. There was always a settlement on the outskirts: it consisted of straight, narrow rows of identical houses, each as modest as the next. And it was always in darkness, save for the occasional blinding light mounted on a towering pylon. The effect was eerie, the homes around the light brilliantly lit up, everything beyond it dissolving slowly into darkness. He wondered why anyone would choose to cast such sharp, naked light from on high.

While the settlements at the outskirts seemed to have been slapped down in a day, the towns proper appeared to have grown organically and with grace. The steeples of fine churches stared at him, like ones he had seen in Addis and Dire Dawa, but much sharper, much more severe. And there were many, many trees, some of them heavy and ample and clearly very old. Lights burned behind drawn curtains. He tried to imagine the families inside, but he could not; he was not sufficiently familiar with this place.

He knew, from what he had been told, that the outer settlements were black townships, the inner towns white neighborhoods, that what he was seeing had been built under the infamous system of apartheid. It occurred to him that the home to which the young taxi driver at the Zimbabwean border had taken him and his companions was in a township. That is why everyone on the streets had said that there was no transport to Johannesburg from that place. What they meant, he now realized, was that intercity transport departed only from the white town.

From what he had seen thus far, South Africa was as prosperous as promised. Every Somali he had met lived in a good house and drove a good car. It appeared also that South Africa harbored far more prosperous places still, places Somalis seemed not to venture to. About the country was a general sense of plenty, a sense he couldn't quite pin down. There seemed to be an abundance of food and drink. Everything was cheap. You could use small coins—two rand, five rand—and buy a lot with them. What they said about South Africa was true.

He knew, from the talk around him, that many Somalis made their money selling food and drink to black people in townships. You cannot arrive and simply settle in Mayfair, he was told, as if jobs in Mayfair grow on trees. You have to go out into the townships and open a business; that is the way to make money. But he had still not set foot in one, aside from that first night on South African soil. As the bus passed one township after another, he tried to imagine himself walking down one of its streets or sleeping in one of its houses.

He thought, also, of his uncle Abdicuur, and this made him a little anxious. His uncle would want to confirm that Asad was indeed who he claimed to be. The first hours, perhaps even the first day, would consist of an unannounced test.

“How does the test work?” I ask Asad. “If you were to receive a call now saying that your brother's son was in Johannesburg, what would you do?”

“I would tell my nephew to come. I would pay for his journey to Cape Town. I would meet him and hug him and welcome him into my home. But I would be examining him: the nose, the cheeks, the way he talks.”

“The teeth?” I ask.

He looks at me with laughing eyes. “Especially the teeth,” he says.

Nobody was waiting for him at the bus terminal in Port Elizabeth. Two young Somali men who had been on the journey from Johannesburg invited him to come with them. He took in their worn bags, their casual clothes, and their slight, young men's frames; it seemed he was looking at the last decade of his life. These rootless Somalis who hook up with one another on a whim, spend the next year or two together, night and day, without respite, without asking a question, sharing everything. And then, at a moment's notice, one of them drifts off, never to be heard of again.

He was filled with warmth, with pleasure, with gratitude. But he felt, too, a rising nausea, a sense of panic. He declined politely and waited for his uncle, who appeared just as the young men were leaving, an unmistakably Somali face beaming at him from the driver's seat of a smart new pickup.

Abdicuur got out of the car, revealing a prosperous belly, and embraced Asad and addressed him as “my son” and insisted on picking up the duffel bag and putting it very carefully in the back of the cabin, as if it contained recently blown glass.

On the journey home, he asked Asad where he had been. For a brief moment, the question seemed ridiculous. How could he possibly answer in one sentence?

“Everywhere,” he replied. “Islii, Addis, Dire Dawa, Wardheer, then all over the Ogaden on a truck—”

“All over the Ogaden?” his uncle interrupted. “Did you not hear on the BBC that your father was looking for you?”

“No. When was that?”

“In 1998 and 1999. He sent out messages twice. He was in Qabridahre in Qorahay. The message said you must make your way to Qabridahre.”

“Where is my father now?” Asad asked.

“We heard news that you were in Islii,” Abdicuur replied. “Then we heard that you had left and we did not know where to find you.”

Asad does not remember what they spoke of next. He thinks that his uncle told him a very long story and that he struggled to follow, in part because he was very tired, and in part because the news that his father had been looking for him was upsetting.

Abdicuur's house was in a suburb in the white town of Uitenhage. It was full of things. Asad is at a loss when I ask him to recall precisely what, but they were the sorts of things, he says, that gradually fill a house inhabited by people who have money.

He wanted desperately to sleep, but his uncle was hovering anxiously; it seemed that he had taken the day off work, probably at great trouble, to be with his lost nephew. The two men danced awkwardly around each other for some time, each wanting to please the other but unsure what he might want. Eventually, Abdicuur went off to work, and Asad slept. When he woke, his aunt had prepared lunch.

Abdicuur returned in the early evening and took Asad out. A big soccer game was about to start, he said. His team, Real Madrid, was playing. Long-lost son or not, there was never an excuse for missing Real Madrid.

They drove to a Somali canteen nearby. It was packed with Somalis, perhaps fifty or sixty people sardined into a small room. Half of the clientele appeared to support Real Madrid and the other the opposition, and each side took turns shouting and exclaiming and sometimes both shouted and exclaimed at the same time.

When the game ended, Abdicuur chatted merrily.

“Where is my father?” Asad asked.

An invisible hand washed the merriness off his uncle's face.

“He died two months ago. In Qabridahre.”

“How long had he been there?” Asad asked.

“Since 1991. He went straight there at the beginning of the war. He remarried there. You have a new brother. He is maybe seven or eight years old. He is growing up in Qabridahre.”

“How did my father die?”

“His time was finished. He got sick and died.”

Asad was silent a long time. He desperately wanted to ask a question. But he did not know how to formulate it. He was not even sure what it was that he wanted to know.

“How is it I never heard about him all the years I was in Ethiopia?” Asad finally asked.

“Well, where were you?”

“In Qabridahre!” Asad shouted. “I was in Qabridahre three times!”

He heard the incredulity in his voice and tried to calm himself. Then he told his uncle everything: about the decision of the AliYusuf in the Hotel Taleh to send him to Dire Dawa; about Yindy's cold and loveless family and the months it took them to shake him off; about his abandonment in Wardheer; about the time on the truck with Rooda.

His uncle listened carefully but said nothing. Whether Asad's story shamed him or just saddened him, he did not know. Perhaps he had heard a dozen versions of the same story before. Maybe the tale of Asad's life was old and familiar and filled his uncle with nothing but weariness.

Abdicuur began telling him what had become of his siblings. A sister and a brother had settled in the North East Province of Kenya, near Garissa. A brother was in Somalia, in Kismayo. A sister was in a refugee camp in Yemen. As for the uncles Asad knew in Mogadishu, the one whom he lost in Qoryooley and who he later heard had lost an eye: he had been captured the very same day Asad lost him. He had been severely tortured but had eventually gotten away and was now safe and in good health. Another uncle, who had been a senior police officer in Siad Barre's old regime, had been captured when Mogadishu fell; his torturers had broken one of his legs. He, too, was fine now and was living in Kenya.

“There's something I'm struggling to understand,” I tell Asad. “In all the conversations you had with your uncle, you never discovered that your parents came from the Ogaden.”

He shrugs. “He said that my father was in Qorahay, but my brothers and sisters were in Kenya, in Yemen. There didn't seem to me to be anything special about Ethiopia.”

“You didn't ask your uncle why your father chose to go to Qorahay, of all places?”

“There are so many things I regret not asking my uncle,” Asad replies.