‘Will you
stop
it? Listen to you! We’re
all
scared, Maddy. It’s hard for everybody, not just you.’
‘That’s not it! Of course I know it’s hard for everyone. But I’m no
good
, Sandy. I can’t do this. I can’t! Every time he asks me for … for these emotions … I
can’t
!’
‘That’s because you won’t
let
yourself, not because you
can’t
. Don’t think I don’t know what’s going on with you, Maddy. Don’t think I don’t know where you disappear to every night.’
Maddy stared at her. Embarrassment rippled up and down her spine. ‘Wh … what’re you talking about?’ she whispered, her voice
suddenly failing her.
‘Oh, come on. It’s so
obvious
. You starve yourself all day long, then you go and stuff your face with all kinds of shit. You think I don’t know what you’re
doing?’
There was a sudden silence. Maddy felt her knees give way. She sat down on the edge of her bed. Her head felt heavy and there
was an unfamiliar tightness in her chest. She couldn’t
speak. She opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out. Shame flooded her senses. Her dirty little secret was
out. ‘I … I’m …’ she stammered, unable to look up.
‘Look, Maddy … you don’t have to explain. I know what’s going on. My mom’s a shrink, remember? You need help. Quitting’s not
the answer.’
Maddy’s eyes flooded with tears. Help? How could anyone help her when even she didn’t know what was wrong? ‘I …’ She tried
to speak. ‘I … I’m OK,’ she stammered, wiping furiously at her cheeks. ‘I’m fine. I … I’m just a bit tired, that’s all. I
don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Sandy’s eyes narrowed. She looked searchingly at Maddy. Finally she lifted her shoulders, spreading her hands out before her.
‘OK. Fine. Whatever.’ She gave her another piercing glance and then left the room. Maddy was suddenly alone. She looked down
at her hands. They were shaking. Her whole body felt as though it was on fire. She’d come dangerously close to being found
out and it was all her own fault. She’d made the mistake of allowing someone to get too close to her; she’d been careless,
she’d let her guard down. She had to make sure it would never happen again. As much as she liked Sandy and as grateful as
she’d been to have a friend in this cold, lonely city, she simply couldn’t afford to let anyone come any closer. She was on
her own again, just as she’d always been. It was safer that way.
NIELA
Vienna, January 1992
Without a shadow of doubt, it was the waiting that was the hardest part. From the mile-long queues that formed before dawn
at the store where the food packs were handed out to the
interminable wait for their visas to come through, each and every day was spent in anxious anticipation. Niela could no longer
remember what it was like
not
to wait. But it was astonishing how quickly they adapted – Niela herself had grown so accustomed to the routine of watching
her father leave every morning and return empty-handed with no new information that it had become normal to her. It was almost
as if he was going to work. He rose before sunrise, dressing himself in the dark without a sound. He stepped outside the tent
to pray; then her mother got up, fumbling her way in the darkness to the box of matches that sat on top of the radio. In silence
she lit the stove and prepared his breakfast in the way she’d once ordered her own servants to. She served him coffee and
njera
, the sour, flat Ethiopian bread that Niela had grown to hate. He ate quickly, pausing only to wipe his mouth and pat down
his beard, and then he set off on his daily journey to the UN offices, where he waited all day for the interview or the request
for information that would take his family a step further in the long, arduous process of leaving. Only he knew what pride
he’d had to swallow in order to make that three-mile round trip, sitting patiently in front of college students barely older
than his daughter, answering their questions and demands with the correct aura of humility and the right amount of subservience
that would ensure he would get his family out, intact and alive.
One morning, about three months after their arrival, Niela was squatting uncomfortably on her haunches trying to slice onions
with a not-too-sharp knife when she heard the commotion. She opened the flap of the tent and peered outside. People were running
down the dusty track towards the tent. She looked up at her mother.
‘Keep slicing,’ her mother instructed her briskly, holding back the flap to look herself. She worried constantly about men
catching a glimpse of Niela – as if anyone would look at her, Niela often thought to herself with half a smile. From the three
or four showers she’d taken daily in Mogadishu and her
once-weekly trip with her mother to the salon, where her hair was washed, conditioned and braided, to the twice-a-week visit
to the female ablutions block, where she washed her hair with soap – no conditioning oils here – it was a miracle anyone still
thought of her as female, never mind anything so ridiculous as pretty. She’d long since given up looking at her own reflection.
Through the opening she could see their neighbours running towards them. In the centre of the small crowd, clutching a sheaf
of papers, was her father. She dropped her knife and jumped up, ignoring her mother’s reprimand, and ran outside. Her father
was running towards them, his long djellabah flying behind him, his worry beads jerking from side to side. Niela’s mouth dropped
open. She’d never seen her father run in her entire life.
They got the visas! They’re going to Austria! They’re leaving!
People were shouting and laughing excitedly. Her heart began to beat faster, and she searched her father’s face as it came
towards her. They’d waited so long for this very moment, she thought to herself wildly. It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t possibly
be true.
It was. After weeks and months of pleading his case, Hassan’s requests had finally found their way to the right department,
the right pair of ears. No one could know the private depths of strength in a person, Niela saw that night, as her parents
lay awake a few yards from her, whispering to each other. God alone knew what sort of understanding had passed between them
in the last few months as they struggled to keep the family together. But they’d done it. Somehow, through the means and channels
available to them, they’d managed to secure the visas they so desperately needed to get out of Africa to the safety of a new
life.
It took them less than a week to pack up their few belongings, make the journey from Hartishek to Addis Ababa and from there,
at long last, to Vienna. As the plane carrying the Adens and a few other families, whose shocked, dazed expressions revealed
their status as refugees more clearly than any travel document possibly could, flew steadily northwards, Niela looked
down on the finger of water that was the Red Sea and felt a part of her slipping away, sloughing off. For the third time in
as many months a new, different side of her was struggling to emerge – now, for the first time in months, there was a sense
of optimism mixed in with the pain she’d been struggling to contain.
Vienna. A city, a country, an entire
continent
buried under a suffocating blanket of snow. It was winter when they arrived. Days contracted to become brief intervals between
the longest nights Niela had ever known. She came out of the warm, steamy fug of Uncle Raageh’s apartment each morning into
a seizure of cold. His large, comfortable flat was on the first floor of an old building on Wallnerstrasse, close to the Volksgarten
and the Rathauspark, both jewel-encrusted landscapes under layers and layers of glittering ice. Every morning on their way
to German language classes that Niela and her brothers were required by law to attend, they walked down by the River Donau,
muffled in clothing borrowed from neighbours and friends to protect them from the cold.
‘Ich fahre. Du färhrst. Er fährt
.’ The teacher paused in her declensions to look expectantly at the class of foreigners sitting patiently in front of her.
‘
Jetzt bitte wiederholen Sie …
’
Niela joined in the chorus. After three months, she was finally beginning to get her tongue around the difficult language.
She no longer stood in silent embarrassment at the supermarket, pointing dumbly to things she couldn’t name. She no longer
had to shake her head in frustration when someone spoke to her. Like a complex piece of music, the individual notes had slowly
begun to fall into place. It helped that Ayanna, her cousin and so
far, at least, her only friend, only spoke German and a little English. Niela dimly remembered the fuss that had been made
when her Uncle Raageh had declined to marry the young Somali girl who’d been chosen for him and had married an Austrian girlfriend
instead. She couldn’t understand how anyone could possibly have objected – his marriage to Ulli had produced Ayanna, not only
the most beautiful young woman Niela had ever set eyes on, but also one of the nicest. Ayanna was twenty, only a couple of
years older than Niela, but she might as well have come from another planet. She was in her second year of a psychology degree
at university. She still lived with her parents – hers was the large, almost empty room at the end of the corridor that had
been given over to the Adens’ suitcases – but she spent most of her time at her boyfriend’s flat on the other side of the
city. Niela regarded her comings and goings with amazement. Ayanna wasn’t married and yet
she slept at her boyfriend’s home
? And he wasn’t Somali either! He was Turkish. Uncle Raageh seemed unperturbed. She overhead her father asking him one day
how on earth he could let it happen. ‘Oh, they all do it, Hassan,’ Raageh said, laughing. ‘What’m I to do? I can’t stop her.
Better we know where she is.’ Niela didn’t hear her father’s reply. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.
By the time spring was over and the city emerged from under its blanket of snow, the Adens, each in their own way, had begun
to settle in. Hassan found work, although it was nothing even remotely like that which he’d been qualified to do. He no longer
had a profession. His profession had become the task of putting food on the table for his family. He left every morning to
work in the Turkish wholesaler’s, where he managed to find a bookkeeping position, and returned every evening. His work had
no place in their lives. He did not speak of it, and neither did they. The refugee housing authorities had found them a small
flat in Simmering, to the south of the city. Niela’s mother spent her days cooking and cleaning, much as she’d done in Mogadishu,
though without the help of half a dozen servants or the support of her close-knit community of friends.
In June, after almost four months of the government-mandated language courses, Korfa and Raageh were deemed fluent enough
to begin school. Niela’s position was more precarious. She was too old for high school, but her German wasn’t yet good enough
to sit the entrance exam for university, even if they’d have been able to afford it. It was a strange hiatus. The past was
no longer available, but the future was too uncertain to believe in. Suspended between two worlds – one to which she no longer
belonged and another to which she couldn’t – she waited. As her German improved and the boys were swallowed up by school,
it fell naturally to her to become the family’s eyes and ears, to interpret the what was happening around them and to do whatever
she could to make sense of their new lives. She struggled against it at first. With her father and brothers gone from morning
to evening, she couldn’t bear the routine of helping her mother prepare the flat every day for their return, cooking, cleaning,
fussing around the men when they came home at the end of the day. She began to look around for something else to do.
The relationship between her uncle and her cousin fascinated her. Her Uncle Raageh was a lawyer. After a particularly hard
day in court, he would come home, loosen his tie and, if Ayanna and Niela happened to be around, beckon them into his book-lined
study. ‘Come. Set up the board. I’ve had a hellish day. Let’s play.’ The three of them would play chess, Niela and Ayanna
on one side, Uncle Raageh on the other, until Tante Ulli came in with wine and cheese and the game was abandoned in favour
of talk. Niela, who had always considered herself close to both her parents, was astonished to find a different sort of closeness
here. With Uncle Raageh and Tante Ulli she talked about other things. Life. Politics. Sometimes even boyfriends. She could
feel her cheeks turning hot with embarrassment as Ayanna and her mother discussed things that Niela couldn’t even imagine
thinking
about, much less talking to Saira about. Although she loved
her parents dearly, it came to her slowly, listening to her aunt and uncle and cousin, that the aloof inflexibility her father
displayed back in Somalia, so useful back at home, would be of no advantage to him whatsoever in Europe. Here it was all about
change and adaptation. How to move
with
the times, not fight against them. As she sat between her parents one night and at the dining room table with Ayanna and
her uncle and aunt the next, she had the strong, uncomfortable sensation of her two lives coming together, not in harmony,
but in collision. Something would have to give. And soon.
‘Can you type?’ The middle-aged woman sitting opposite Niela looked at her suspiciously.
Niela nodded vigorously. ‘Yes. Quite well,’ she added with a confidence she certainly didn’t have.
‘And file?’
Niela nodded again. The woman looked her up and down, pursed her lips and made a sudden decision. ‘OK. I’ll take you on for
a month and then we see how it goes.
Gut?
’
Niela felt a quick surge of relief. ‘Oh,
thank
you, Frau Henschler. Thank you.’
‘
Nichts zu danken
. Let’s see how you get on. You can start on Monday morning. Nine a.m. Please be on time.’