“Some days,” Asad said, “I worked very, very hard, taking families all over the city. I get home, I want to eat and sleep. The others are chewing mira. I don’t want to be rude. I just quietly sleep in a corner while they chew and talk.
“When I wake the next morning to go to work, they haven’t gone to bed yet. They are desperate to sleep, but the mira will not let them. Their eyes are glazed. Their skin is rough. They have not shaved. I say to them: ‘Last night you were telling funny stories. Today you look like shit.’ They ignore me. They slowly get up, wash, go to town, get more mira, come home, and chew.”
Asad thinks that he had been living in Addis more than a year the first time he chewed.
“It was a disappointment,” he recalls. “I ate nonstop for two, three hours, and I felt nothing. I thought: The whole thing is in their heads. They think that mira is strong, and so it becomes strong.
“Second night, also, I chew, I feel nothing. But then, late in the night, I get up to pee; fifteen minutes later, I am getting up to pee again, and then again. It is the first sign that it is working; mira makes you drink too much water. The other boys get excited. ‘Look at Asad. Look at his face. It is working.’ I say, ‘Rubbish, I feel nothing.’ But, actually, I am feeling nauseous, and I go outside and vomit. I come back and try to go to sleep, but my heart is beating very fast, and the blood is pounding in my head. I lie there. It is very uncomfortable. Time starts going very, very slowly. I cannot get rid of the nausea. It is stopping me from sleeping. By the time I feel myself going to sleep, it is almost light.
“It is not nice sleep. It is troubled. I’m not sure where I have been while sleeping, but it is somewhere that has upset me. I get out of bed to chase away my dreams. I go outside. The sunlight hits me deep in the eyes and makes me stumble. I cannot tolerate it. I am feeling like shit. I go back to bed and wait for evening.
“When I wake up, they are all there, eating mira again. ‘Come, eat,’ they say. ‘No, I cannot.’ ‘Eat!’ And so I eat. And now it is normal. I do not pee. I do not vomit. I just sit there, and my thoughts begin to speed up. I am thinking of all different things at the same time. I step away from myself and watch this Asad thinking all these thoughts at once. I am thinking much too much. I want to slow down, to take just one thought, pull it out, look at it. But the thoughts keep coming in. I am thinking about the near future and about the far future. I am thinking about tomorrow, about next year, and about ten years’ time. You are thinking who you will be when you are an old man and who you will be tomorrow, both at the same time.”
“What were some of your thoughts?” I ask.
He pauses a long time. “I don’t know,” he finally replies. “I don’t remember what I think when I am chewing mira. I just remember what the thoughts feel like. You are planning, but you are not planning for this world. You forget the hard things in life. You start planning for a life in which something can happen just because you have thought it.”
—
In early 2003, a little less than three years after moving to Addis, Asad bought a small, wooden box. He resolved that he would put at least one hundred dollars in it every month, a lot more, if possible. It was his exit ticket from Addis Ababa.
His restlessness grew from his rapid success. He had landed on the streets of a foreign city and within months had found a way of earning a good living. Bole Mikhael was full of Somali travelers, people passing through from here and from there, telling tales of riches and prosperity. As he listened, he placed himself in their shoes, and his view of himself grew increasingly romantic.
“After what I was able to do in Addis,” Asad tells me, “I thought that whatever a Somali can accomplish anywhere in the world I can also do.”
The question was where to go.
Bole Mikhael was full of Somalis on the brink of leaving and of news from Somalis who had just left. Asad had lost count of the times he had been asked to join a group on its passage north through Sudan. He had always declined, not because the idea of settling in Europe wasn’t enticing but because the journey there seemed unreasonably perilous.
“If you have travel documents, it is one thing,” Asad tells me. “But if you have none, trying to get to Europe can kill you. They would leave as a big group and travel in a bus toward the Sudanese border. Just before the checkpoints, they would break up into three or four groups. Each must find smugglers to get them across. On the other side, they wait for everyone in the group to arrive. Then they break again and come together in Khartoum. Then they break again. After Khartoum, it is the Sahara Desert for a long, long way, and that is where the people die.”
“How do you know?” I ask.
“The survivors spread the news,” he replies. “There are websites for just this purpose. You go online, and you see who has died: the name, the clan, the nickname. And if it was somebody from Bole Mikhael, their name will be printed off the Internet and stuck on a wall on the main street. So you were always reminded of the risk: last month you were chewing mira with so-and-so; now he is a name you see on the wall.”
Many people in Bole Mikhael had uncles and aunts and cousins and siblings in America, in Britain, in Italy, in Scandinavia, and they all received regular wire transfers or wads of cash from hawala agents. So, clearly, there was a good life to be had in Europe. But who, precisely, got to live this good life was never clear, for the flesh-and-blood people one knew in Bole Mikhael who went to Europe seldom communicated much. What exactly happened to them on the other side? It was hard to form a picture.
The world to the south was even more mysterious. Asad knew South Africa only as Nelson Mandela’s country, where black and white had reconciled and people were at peace. It had a constitution that made the government accountable for what it did and for what it failed to do. It was not free to lock a person in jail and throw away the key. People did not just disappear in South Africa.
And it was not just to its own citizens that the government was accountable. Somalis, who could not return home because their country was at war, could get refugee papers in South Africa. Once you had these papers, you were free to move, free to put your children in the country’s schools, to go to its hospitals when you fell ill.
Sometime in 2003, a group of Somali travelers stayed over at Asad’s place. They were close relatives of Yusuf’s, and so the household made a fuss over them and cooked them a fine meal. They had come from South Africa and were heading for Italy.
“There were three of them,” Asad recalls. “They were all young, all in their twenties, and they spoke big about South Africa. One of them said he had been down south only five years, and already he had built himself a double-story house in Somalia. ‘How do you make so much money so quickly?’ we asked. He told us that setting up a business was easy. First, everything was so cheap. You could buy a pickup truck for nothing. You could rent premises from a South African. And you were free to move. No soldiers asking where you were going or why. It was a free country.
“ ‘What if you don’t have money to set up a business?’ we asked. Easy, he replied. You work as a shopkeeper for a Somali. You earn two hundred or three hundred dollars a month. Money goes very far in South Africa. Even with the silver coins, you can buy a meal. You save most of your wage. You use it to buy a business.
“ ‘If it is so good down there,’ we asked, ‘why are you traveling the other way?’ Because South Africa was still Africa. There was no substitute for Europe.”
The interrogation continued into the small hours of the morning. As the traveler grew tired, so his annoyance at his audience’s skepticism increased. He wanted to sleep, but he did not want to end the evening while his hosts thought him a liar. And so he stripped his big suitcase and then his little suitcase and then his jacket, each time emerging with a small pile of one-hundred-dollar bills. By the time he was finished, they lay strewn in front of him on the floor. “Count them,” he invited. Yusuf gathered up the bills into a pile and counted them, then counted them again. He anno
unced that he was holding nearly twenty thousand U.S. dollars in his hand.
Foosiya
It was about two or three in the morning. Half a dozen young men sat in Asad’s room chewing mira. One of them, Ahmed Afgud, was talking at length about his girlfriend.
“He spoke about the shape of her hips,” Asad recalls, “and what you can see of her thighs when she is sitting and her clothes are tight against her legs. He spoke about her smile. This was typical mira talk. Boys would talk about their girlfriends until everyone was so excited, brother, that you would not want to light a match in that room.
“Ahmed Afgud’s girlfriend shared a house with five or six other women on the other side of Bole Mikhael. I thought of her sleeping while Ahmed Afgud was talking about her. If his words could travel through the night and find their way to her ears she would be having troubled sleep.
“ ‘Girlfriend’ does not mean what it means in South Africa,” Asad points out, not for the first time. “It does not mean they had sex. They were never even in a room alone together. It means that Ahmed Afgud went to her house where he was received by some of the other ladies who lived there. He would ask to see his girlfriend. Ahmed would be told to wait. She would come maybe half an hour later. They would talk. Always, there was somebody else in the room. To show that she was serious, his girlfriend would maybe offer to wash his clothes for him, maybe even cook him a meal.
“Ahmed Afgud was talking and talking and talking about his girlfriend until somebody cut him off. ‘Enough already! Ask her to get married!’ He said, ‘Okay, I am going to ask her tomorrow.’ And I said, ‘If you are going to ask her tomorrow, I am going to come with you.’ ”
And so the two young men visited Ahmed Afgud’s girlfriend the following afternoon, and Ahmed Afgud proposed marriage, causing consternation in his girlfriend’s house. After a tense week of waiting and interminable discussion in both houses, Ahmed Afgud’s girlfriend accepted.
Asad was among the people Ahmed Afgud asked to witness the wedding ceremony. His first thought was that he did not have clothes appropriate for so solemn an occasion. And so he borrowed a jacket from his Ethiopian landlady, which he wore over a T-shirt, for he did not own a collared shirt. He stared at himself in the mirror, wondering whether the combination made him look smarter or just a little silly. He took the jacket off and gave it back to his landlady.
The ceremony was held at a mosque some ten or twelve blocks from Asad’s house. Just a handful of guests was invited. The only sign of ostentation was in the transport: the entire wedding party would drive to the venue, rather than walk. They set off in a convoy of three cars, each driver sounding his horn all the way. Some of the other drivers on the road pulled up and stared. Some cheered. Others waved their fists and shouted abuse.
Asad has little memory of the wedding itself, but he remembers every moment of the car journey home. The imam who performed the ceremony was in the passenger seat. Three people were in the back: Asad in one corner, his housemate Abdirashid in the middle, and, in the other corner, Foosiya, a friend of the bride’s.
The imam was boisterous and talkative. He was turned in his seat, facing the back, and remarking at length on Foosiya’s beauty. He spoke also of the bridewealth he would pay for her—camels, horses, guns.
“Foosiya stayed in the same house as Ahmed’s new wife,” Asad tells me. “We were very interested in the comings and goings of that house. We spent hours discussing each woman who lived there. Foosiya stood out among them. First, it was because she was amazingly beautiful. She had a long, powerful face and green eyes. Her eyes were very strong. She carried herself with independence, with confidence. When I watched her I would sometimes think of Nasri in Wardheer: a young woman alone, making her way with no doubts. But Foosiya was older than Nasri had been when I was in Wardheer. Foosiya was maybe twenty-eight, twenty-nine. That made her even more powerful. We discussed her often. Who would she marry? Would she even marry anybody? Who was big enough for her? She was an Isaaq woman from Somaliland, the traditional enemy of the Ogadeni. This made her even more powerful in my eyes.”
And so the imam spoke of the camels and horses and guns he would pay for the gorgeous Foosiya.
“You are too old for me,” she said coolly, and turned her face and stared out of the window.
The imam smiled and pointed at Asad.
“Marry this one, then,” he said.
Foosiya turned to Asad, examined him for a moment or two, as if she was taking him in for the first time, then stared out of the window again.
“He is kurai,” she said matter-of-factly. “I cannot marry him either.”
Asad leaves the word untranslated. Literally, it means “small boy.” But its full import has no direct equivalent in English. “Runt” perhaps gets close. This beautiful and haughty woman had settled her gaze just once upon Asad, long enough to flick him away like dirt from under her fingernail.
Everyone in the car fell quiet. Asad stared ahead, avoiding everybody’s eyes.
The imam broke the silence; he laughed and slapped his hand against the car seat. “I’m too old, and Asad is kurai,” he said, shaking his head in mock disbelief. “Nobody in Addis Ababa is just right for Miss Foosiya. She will have to travel far to find a man.”
Asad felt the heat rising from his body. His clothes sat heavily on him, irritating his skin. He found, to his surprise, that a bead of sweat was rolling down the bridge of his nose. Were he to speak, he would only draw attention to his discomfort. And yet neither would silence restore his dignity. All he could do was to sit out his shame.
When the journey finally ended, he climbed out of the car, put his head down, and walked. He wanted to storm Foosiya; he wanted to grip her by the arms and shake her hard. He imagined her composure collapsing in shouts and protests, perhaps even in tears. But that was a small boy’s way of seeking attention. He kept walking.
Over the following days, he felt Foosiya’s growing presence under his skin, teasing and agitating him. He believed that her image of him as kurai was somehow contagious, that, by now, every woman in her house saw an insignificant child whenever they laid eyes on him. The injustice of it grieved him. After all, he was the one supporting his entire household. What more did he need to do to prove himself?
His feelings confused him. Why was he so upset? He had survived a childhood of hell; he had needed to grow four or five skins to fend off the world. Yet an idle comment uttered by a woman he barely knew had felled him. An old taste settled in the back of his mouth, one he had almost forgotten. It was a taste he had slowly spat out during the two years he spent with Rooda on the truck. What was it? He had no words for it. He remembered it in his mouth as he watched Nasri and Rooda disappear into Nasri’s house in Wardheer. They were inside together, and he had felt very alone. He remembered swallowing hard and feeling in his throat the endless miles of desert beyond the boundaries of Wardheer.
A week or so after the wedding, Asad announced to Abdirashid that he was going to propose marriage to Foosiya.
Abdirashid raised his eyebrows. Then he whistled through his teeth.
“You’ll never do it,” he said.
“You’re advising me not to do it?” Asad asked. “Or are you saying you do not believe that I will do it?”
“I am saying that you don’t have the courage.”
Asad stared hard at Abdirashid. He was a good ten years older than Asad. He was wise, self-assured. He knew what he knew.
Abdirashid smiled mischievously. “Like I say, I don’t believe you’ll do it. But if you do, I will back you. I will come with you. I will help you through it.”
That very afternoon, the two of them called at Foosiya’s house. A young woman received them and invited them to sit in the front room. Abdirashid said that they had come to see Foosiya. Asad was silent.
The young woman left and came back a few minutes later. Foosiya would see them, she said, but they must be patient. Foosiya needed to wash, then to pray. Only then would she
receive her guests.
They waited almost an hour. Two or three women joined them and asked oblique questions; they were curious why these men wanted to see Foosiya, but they would not ask directly. The young men were nervous and answered the questions posed to them in riddles. The conversation grew more and more awkward.
When Foosiya finally entered the room, she nodded a polite greeting to both men and sat down without saying a word. Abdirashid took command. After a few pleasantries, he told Foosiya that he was there merely as an adviser, that the visit was Asad’s, that Asad was interested in seeing her again. She nodded and looked at her fingernails, then took a long glance around the room, before finally settling her eyes on Asad. The sun was shining directly at her through the window, and her green eyes looked quite translucent. Asad returned her gaze without flinching. The imperious expression she had worn when she had looked him up and down in the car was gone. Her face was quite inscrutable. It seemed to Asad that perhaps she was curious, inquiring, but he could not be sure. In any event, she said that if Asad were to come again, alone, she would see him.
Sitting in my car outside his shack in Blikkiesdorp, Asad is bracingly candid about his intentions. He wanted to marry Foosiya, certainly, but he did not like her, and he did not want to spend his life with her. The way he saw it, the marriage would last a few weeks. He would win her and fuck her and divorce her. She had humiliated him. One of her eyes for one of his.
—
Asad’s memories of his courtship of Foosiya are strangely ethereal. When I ask him what they spoke about, he says that he deliberately did not prepare anything to say. He looked at her across the room and said whatever was in his head.
“What was in your head?” I ask.
“Rubbish. Nothing. Whatever came, I said. Sometimes a conversation came from it. Sometimes not.”
He did not know how to broach the subject on his mind. A couple of times, he was on the brink of telling her that he wanted to marry her, but the very idea that the words might spring from his head into the room seemed impossible, and he swallowed them back down his throat.
A Man of Good Hope Page 13
