He was, he now realizes, preserving himself for America, for he was no longer merely a lost boy but an asset, a person in whom much was to be invested.
“I had this picture in my mind of Yindy waiting at the airport. But there is no Asad on the airplane. He is buried back in Kenya. This wonderful future with a university education and everything never happens because Asad is no longer there.”
When the AliYusuf elders finally told him that he was going to Ethiopia, Asad had long known it in his bones. The moment was nonetheless enormous. He walked out of the hotel, and the people in the streets appeared to be moving much slower than usual. The sun itself seemed to have frozen in the middle of the sky. He traced a long circuit around the Hotel Taleh, his path taking him right to the other side of Islii, and, although it seemed that hours had passed, when he returned it remained early afternoon.
In the period that followed, the movement of time seemed almost to cease. “I couldn’t believe how long it took for a day to pass,” Asad recalls. “Something that happened just yesterday seemed like it happened last year. When it was a week left to go, I didn’t think I could last that long.”
—
Asad left Nairobi one scorching afternoon on the back of a truck. He believes that it was November 1995 and that he was eleven or twelve years old, but he cannot be sure. He had with him a small bag containing three or four changes of clothes, a Koran, and a dozen or so snapshots taken in various parts of Nairobi. I have three of them with me now; when I met Asad, they were the last of his photographs that remained in his possession.
His minder was a kindly woman named Haliimo. He does not recall now who she was or why she was making the journey. He remembers that she had a round, padded face and that she spoke to him softly and with care; she was someone who knew how to be with children.
The lorry took them to Mandera, a city wedged into the northeastern corner of Kenya, the Ethiopian border directly to the north, the Somali border to the east. In Mandera, they transferred to a donkey cart, which for many miles tracked the southern bank of a brown river. Finally, they crossed the water in a boat.
There were men in uniform on the other side who spoke a language Asad had never heard before. When Haliimo told them that neither she nor Asad had documents, they demanded the two travelers’ bags and emptied them onto the riverbank. Instinctively, Asad got to his knees, picked his Koran out of the mud, and clutched it to his chest. The soldiers wanted to see it; they pointed at it and spoke about it, and then one of them made to prize open Asad’s arms. He turned his back and clutched his book tighter.
“Koran! Koran!” Asad heard somebody explain to the soldiers. From behind his back came quiet murmuring, then a brief chuckle. Then the voices of the soldiers receded. Haliimo took Asad’s Koran from him and tucked it back into his bag. Then she took his hand and led him into Ethiopia.
They stayed for two days in a small town just a few kilometers from the border, and on their third evening climbed onto another lorry. It drove through the night and into the dawn, and by noon it was chuntering up a mountain pass that appeared to Asad to take them into a different world. Mist and cloud formed around them, and the air was wet, sometimes with drizzle, sometimes just with fog. In the midst of this new world, a town appeared. The people neither walked nor drove cars; everyone moved about on horseback. They spoke several languages; one resembled the sounds he had heard from the tongues of the border soldiers; the others were unlike anything he had heard before.
They were delayed there for a week—Asad has no idea why—and throughout those seven days, the rain did not cease, and Asad did not see the sun. Finally, they were moving again, this time on a bus. It took them to Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia.
The moment Asad begins describing Addis, the pitch of his voice changes. He speaks with urgency, with surprise; he has brushed aside subsequent experience, it seems, and is reinhabiting first impressions.
“This was an interesting place, brother,” he tells me. “It was very, very interesting. It was cool, not just in the weather, but in the feeling it left inside you. The doors were all closed. The streets were empty. There was no noise. No hurry. No exhaustion. A city full of people, but all of them behind walls. This was a very different place. From way, way back they did things very differently from us.”
Haliimo and Asad were there less than a week. Their hosts were family of Haliimo’s, Somalis who had lived in Addis many years. The block on which they stayed was inhabited entirely by Somalis, but from the end of the block onward, the city was a foreign place. Asad had strict instructions not to wander. Each day, he would walk to the end of the little island of Somali life and watch the silent streets beyond, where the scarcity of people and the quietness of those few who did pass never ceased to amaze him. On his fourth or fifth day it came to him as an epiphany: the streets here felt so different because they were used differently; they were a means of getting from one place to another, and that was all. He marveled at his discovery. He contrasted it with Islii, where everyone lived their lives in public spaces. And he wondered what it was that caused some people to live one way and others another.
His last memory of the streets of Addis Ababa was of a long bag-laden walk, right through the center of the city, to the bus that would take him and Haliimo the final five hundred kilometers of their journey to Dire Dawa. He, too, now, was using the streets only to get from A to B, and he allowed himself an idle fantasy, imagining himself to be an Ethiopian boy.
—
“Dire Dawa is a very beautiful city, brother,” Asad tells me. “We lived in a neighborhood called Hafad. There are trees everywhere, and they throw their shadows from one side of the street to the other, so you are always walking in the shade. And on each street, under the biggest tree, there is table soccer. I lived there from the end of 1995 until somewhere near the end of 1996; I think that I played table soccer every day. And when I say every day, brother, I mean all day every day.”
More than sixteen years later, in the first week of April 2012, I arrive in Dire Dawa, my aim to find whatever traces remain of the footprint Asad has left there. I check into my Dire Dawa hotel and walk into the street clutching a map. Unable to make head or tail of it, I slip it into my pocket and decide to get utterly lost.
I find myself on a long, straight road lined with trees I do not recognize. There are cobbles underfoot, and the trees cast shade from one side of the street to the other, just as Asad has described. I will only discover the next day that, quite by chance, the neighborhood through which I am wandering is Hafad, the very place Asad had lived. I am quite literally walking in his footsteps.
It is no wonder that Asad was so struck by the appearance of Hafad. The people who designed it had in mind a neighborhood in Toulouse or Marseille. Dire Dawa was born in 1902 as a railway town linking southern and eastern Ethiopia to the port of Djibouti in the north, and the French company that won the concession to build the railway was also given a ninety-nine-year lease on half the town. It put down a grid of wide avenues, some of them bisected by ornamented pedestrian walkways. In the middle of the larger intersections were traffic circles filled with landscaped flowerbeds. But the town’s French population of engineers and other personnel was never large enough to occupy all the land the company had leased, and so many of these lovely streets stood empty for years.
Three or four blocks into my stroll, under the shade of a hefty tree, a group of boys is playing table soccer. I watch them from a discreet distance until one of them comes to me and offers to shake my hand. He tells me that his name is David and invites me to play. I smile at him broadly, considering whether to explain that he is, to my eyes, an incarnation of a boy who once lived here, and whom I have brought with me in my thoughts.
—
I wonder whether Asad chooses to begin the story of his time in Dire Dawa with the streets and the trees and the table soccer because the most obvious beginning, his arrival, is so rude an introduction.
; His first taste of the city was not the placid streets of Hafad but the central bus station, a place whose order and design were beyond his grasp. People moved fast, with purpose and in great numbers. They wore strange clothes, their jabber was unintelligible, and their facial expressions told you little about what was inside them. From her hesitation, it was plain to Asad that Haliimo, too, was out of her depth. The first two people she approached ignored her, just walked on in their distracted busyness, as if acknowledging this lost and confused woman could only bring bother. But the third took a great interest. He was tall and very thin and wore wire-framed spectacles, and he bent low to hear what Haliimo was saying and nodded and pointed a long finger into the distance. He led them through the crowds and onto a busy street, and the next thing Asad knew he and Haliimo were on the back of a donkey cart.
At the intersection where they stopped, everyone was Somali. There were restaurants and loud music. For the first time since Islii, Asad was on a street that smelled and sounded like home, his mother tongue bouncing from one mouth to the next, the world a hive of shouting and laughing. And yet, when Haliimo hailed a stranger and told him the name of the family they were looking for, the man frowned in confusion. And so did the next stranger, and the next. There were many, many Somalis in this city, it seemed. Soon, a congregation had assembled at the roadside to tackle the matter of Haliimo’s family. Young children were sent to summon people from the other end of the city. The summoned ones came hours later, but they, too, shook their heads in puzzlement and offered advice of their own. Haliimo and Asad spent the night under the stars, covered by a thin blanket, in the yard of a Somali family that had taken pity on them. It was only on the afternoon of his second day in Dire Dawa that Asad was finally led to Yindy’s family’s house in Hafad—his home for the better part of the next year.
His memory narrows. The streets and their sounds disappear from his story, making way for just one face and one voice—that of Yindy’s father.
“He was standing at the front door,” Asad recalls, “watching our taxi approach his house. He was holding himself straight and stiff, with his hands at his sides, like a soldier. He watched us get out of the car, watched us take our bags. As I walked toward him, he stared at me with a scowl on his face, like I was a piece of shit about to come into his house and make it smelly. I felt cold when he looked at me.”
Asad folds his arm behind his head and touches the back of his neck. “I felt his look here. He turned away from me and started talking to the person next to him. ‘Yindy is too concerned with the AliYusuf.’ He said it like I could not hear him, just because I was a child. My pressure went very high. I had just met him, and already I hated him. I targeted him. From that day forward, I showed him no respect. He would address me, and I would turn my back.”
I try to tease more memories from Asad. Who were the other members of the family party? What were their names? Were they a nuclear family or members of disparate families joined together by the fact that Yindy had summoned them? Each time Asad tries to answer my questions, his tongue thickens.
“I slept in a room with three other children,” he tells me. “They took their example from the old man and treated me like I was invisible. If I tried to talk to them, they’d shout at me to go away. I would wake up in the morning and eat breakfast with the family, and then I would disappear for the whole day. I would miss lunch. I would return to them only when the sun was setting. I did not want to be with them. I felt like a dog to whom the family throws scraps.”
And so his days were spent around the soccer table on the street, his refuge from his home. Here, he began to learn something of the city in which he now lived.
“There were two main groups in Dire Dawa,” he tells me, “the Oromo and the Somali. Both thought that the city was theirs, and they fought each other for it. This fight would sometimes come to the table soccer. People would be playing together for hours and hours, Oromo alongside Somali, and then there would be a dispute over a goal, and, all of a sudden, it is Oromos on one side, Somalis on the other. The feeling in the air is not nice, and the fight is about much more than table soccer.
“Also, it was not always so nice being young around the soccer table. Sometimes, I would skip breakfast with Yindy’s family and go and play as soon as I woke up, early, early. Then, it is only boys playing. But as the sun gets higher, the older ones come to play, and they do not think it is very dignified to wait for young boys, so they throw you out of the queue. And I must wait until they are finished playing. Sometimes it is the whole day, and the sun is already going down by the time I am on the table again.
“The way it worked, you would hold the table until you lose. Sometimes, if I won too many in a row, and the people around became frustrated, they would just push me off the table, and I would try to fight my way back. I would throw stones at the people playing. They would abandon their game and come after me to give me a hiding. I would go home with a bleeding mouth or with the dirt of the street stuck to the side of my head.
“Sometimes, the older ones would play for money, and that’s when things became very tense. That is when it would turn into Oromo versus Somali.”
Asad came to see these daily pilgrimages to the soccer table as the circuits in a holding pattern. This was merely an unexpected delay in his journey between Islii and America. For as long as it lasted, he would wake in the morning and make his way to the table; the days would tick away, one after the other, until, finally, word would come that they would be joining Yindy.
Yet if this was the shell of the story Asad wrapped around himself, there was also a stick of doubt tapping away at it, and the echoes of this tapping at times caused him to panic. The family did not once discuss their American plans in front of Asad, nor did it come to his attention that the family had been summoned to an interview with American officials. At times he wondered whether they were going through the process behind his back. He was desperate to speak to Yindy, the only person in this world he was sure had his interests at heart. He knew that her father was in touch with her; every now and again, he would hear the old man speaking to her on the phone. Once, Yindy asked explicitly to talk to Asad. He knows that this was so because he heard the old man quickly swallow the words “Asad is not here” and “No, he is fine” before hastily changing the subject.
At times, Asad woke with a shudder in the night at the prospect that secret plans were being hatched to leave him in this strange city.
Then there was Yindy’s mother, Asad’s father’s own sister, his flesh and blood. Her name was Hawo. Asad would often feel her eyes upon him, turn around, look at her closely, and see that he had been occupying her thoughts. He could see, too, that these thoughts were troubled. He would stare at the flesh on her forearms and at the dry, crusty points of her elbows. He would marvel at the fact that his own father, whose image in his mind was now more and more reduced to a mouthful of teeth, had watched those very same forearms and elbows when they belonged to a small girl. His family was right here in front of him in the form of Hawo, quite literally close enough to touch, and yet it was also as elusive as ever.
“When the AliYusuf at the Hotel Taleh decided it was okay to send me to Ethiopia after all, they said to themselves: Maybe we are not sure about this America thing, maybe it won’t happen after all. But we can be sure that we are sending the boy to family. So we know that he will be okay.
“They were wrong about that. The only family I had there was a woman, and females have no rights, no freedom. They are somebody’s sister or mother or daughter. They are nothing in themselves. Hawo wanted to help me. She liked me. She worried about me. But she didn’t have the power.”
When they were alone, they would talk.
“Where is my dad?” Asad recalls asking her.
“I don’t know,” Hawo replied.
“I think maybe he is here in Ethiopia,” Asad said. “All the time I was in Islii, many hostages came from Somalia, and none of them had news about him. I think he
left early on for Ethiopia.”
“Ethiopia is a huge country,” Hawo said. “If he came, it would be to a particular place, a place called Qorahay. That is where the Abdullahis are from.”
If it seemed strange to him that his forebears hailed from Ethiopia, rather than from somewhere in Somalia, he did not dwell upon it for long.
“How far is Qorahay from here?” he recalls asking.
“It is not so far, maybe three hundred kilometers.”
As he sat next to Hawo, his mind raced. He imagined waking at dawn the next morning, hurrying to the soccer table, holding the game for long enough to win money for a bus ticket, making his way to the central bus station, and going to Qorahay. Could it really be so hard? When he and Haliimo arrived here in Dire Dawa they knew nothing but the clan names of the people they sought. Why could he not do the same in this place called Qorahay? He imagined himself getting off the bus and shaking at the sleeve of the first respectable-looking person he found. “I am looking for my father,” he would tell them. “His name is Hirsi. His father’s name was Abdullahi. His lineage is AliYusuf of the subclan of the Mohammed Zubeyr.”
There on the street in Qorahay, the people would scratch their beards and murmur among themselves and instruct young children to fetch this one and that one, and eventually—who knows?—Asad’s father would appear in the distance, walking slowly, perhaps even shuffling (maybe he sustained injuries after the attack on Mogadishu?), but nonetheless moving palpably closer to the Qorahay bus station.
As the weeks passed, the vision grew fainter. What remained was the name, Qorahay, chiseled into his memory, along with the many, many other names—Qoryooley, Afmadow, Liboi, Islii—that Asad had acquired since his flight from Mogadishu more than five years earlier.
Ogaden
Sometime in 1996—probably August or September—Asad was told that he and the family would leave Dire Dawa for good in four days’ time. Nobody told him why they were leaving, or whether the move had anything to do with their American plans. And, but for its name—Wardheer in Somali, Werder in Amharic—they told him nothing of the place they were going. He did not even know in which direction one went to get to Wardheer.
A Man of Good Hope Page 7
