Don't Tell Me You're Afraid

by Giuseppe Catozzella

I didn’t give it a second’s thought; I paid.

  For a week I slept in that room on a mattress that was damp from dog or goat piss.

  Outside there were hordes of goats, bleating as though possessed at all hours of the day or night: thirsty, starving, crazed like us. May a thousand liters of putrid, stinking water fall on their heads.

  CHAPTER 25

  AFTER A WEEK I set out again. Meanwhile, during those days everything had changed. From that fetid mattress, like a plant that suddenly bears fruit, the seed of self-interest had sprouted. I had begun thinking only of myself. Everything was secondary to my survival. I had become more unsociable, a loner. My only objective was to reach the end of the Journey. I alone had put myself in that situation, and the situation had transformed me. Forever. In just a few days. There was no way I could get out of it, unless I went back on foot. I could only continue. And accept my transformation. I had to make it at all costs. It was no longer about the ultimate goal. It was about survival.

  There were fewer of us this time: forty-eight. We were a little less packed; I didn’t have the feeling I would pass out each time we hit a pothole.

  We all knew that the worst of the Journey was yet to come: crossing the Sahara. Everyone had heard dozens of stories in his lifetime; we knew that the Sahara was the toughest test. For this reason we made every effort not to think about it. In addition, we had rested for a week and we had a little more space. This made us feel foolishly euphoric.

  We sang! During that second leg we sang. To pass the time, to mark the hours. The terrain around us didn’t help much. There was nothing to see. An endless ocher-colored expanse of nothing. Earth and more earth, everywhere you looked; fine dust that swirled up and got in your throat if you didn’t cover your mouth with your veil. Earth and dry brush. And a track, the road we were on, straight as a plumb line, headed north.

  We took turns singing the songs of our countries. An Ethiopian woman with her eleven-month-old son in her arms started it off. Her fellow countrymen immediately joined her. Then we Somalis did the same, and finally the Sudanese.

  Anything we could, just to avoid thinking. If Hodan had been there, she would have been happy. Who knows, maybe she sang too on her Journey. Maybe she’d been a big hit. Someday she would tell me about it. Not now. It makes no sense to think further than what you see in front of you. The future doesn’t exist.

  After driving for twenty hours we stopped again, in front of a brick building surrounded only by dusty desert. All around us, nothing. It was night, but it had been at least six hours since we’d seen anything but earth and rocks. Rocks and earth. Then, abruptly, the low brush merged with the soil, and soon everything turned to sand. Actual fine sand. Without realizing it we had crossed into the Sahara.

  It was the singing. That’s what it had done for us.

  We soon learned that once again we were not in Khartoum but in a village that we were told was called Sharif al Amin. This driver and his backup also spoke only Sudanese and a little Arabic. Again several among us acted as interpreters.

  They told us that the jeep had broken down and that we’d been forced to stop.

  You catch on quickly enough on the Journey.

  The truth is irrelevant to those who have fled and are in need of refuge. That jeep hadn’t broken down; that jeep was running just fine. But we wanted to believe it, simply because we wanted to get out and stretch our legs, straighten our backs. The truth is traded for survival. For a trifle. For naught.

  Only one Somali man got angry. He was thin and looked like an intellectual: He wore wire-rimmed glasses, the lenses coated with a layer of dust, which he must have been used to.

  “You’re all a bunch of filthy crooks,” he said in Arabic. “Thieves and bastards! Two-bit swindlers,” he ranted, foaming at the mouth.

  The backup driver went over to him and gave him a loud smack. The man fell to the ground. His glasses broke, cracked in half. Struggling to get up with the two broken pieces in his hand, he kept it up: “You’re disgusting. Filthy two-bit scammers.” The trafficker kicked him in the calf and made him fall again. “Shut up, hawaian,” he told him. Animal.

  And that was that.

  We were in their hands.

  They knew it; they’d learned how to tell when a man turns into a needy refugee. They read it in your eyes. It’s something that shows. Plain as the rising sun, clear as flowing water. It’s something you carry with you, written in your eyes. You can try all you want to hide it, but you’ll never be able to. It’s the smell of a downtrodden animal.

  There, for the first time, we were called animals. When you enter the desert, you stop being a human being. I had been a tahrib in Addis Ababa, but now I was a needy tahrib refugee. A vulnerable illegal. An animal tethered to life by an ever-more-tenuous thread.

  They beat you.

  If you don’t have the money, they beat you.

  If you don’t obey orders, they beat you.

  If you dare to respond, they beat you.

  If you ask for more water, they beat you. They don’t care if you’re a man or a woman, an adult or a child: They beat you.

  If you protest, they bring you to the police.

  And there you have only two options. Pay the police to be handed over to other traffickers, or let them take you back to the border with Ethiopia.

  Early in the Journey you learn to keep silent and pray.

  Early in the Journey you learn to forget why you’re there and to practice silence and prayer.

  For ten days I stayed in Sharif al Amin, in that brick house that was actually a prison with bars on the windows. Two liters of water every twenty-four hours, and two servings of food. A mattress on the floor in quarters for thirty people.

  To get to Khartoum, another two hundred dollars were needed.

  I had almost run out of money.

  On the third day I called Hodan in Finland and revealed that I had left. She thought I was still in Addis Ababa; I hadn’t wanted to tell anyone. I had only one minute’s time, not a second more. She knew. That’s what the traffickers allow you on their satellite phones. A minute doesn’t seem like very much, but in that situation it becomes timeless. In a minute you can say everything you need. You learn that a minute can save your life. That’s all you need.

  Hodan wasn’t expecting me; speaking in rapid-fire bursts she told me to be careful, to try to become friendly with the Somalis, to always stay in a group, never to go off on my own, to do as the others did so I wouldn’t stand out. Suddenly my brain started functioning again; I took in everything she said.

  She asked me where I was and I told her.

  She hadn’t been there; she didn’t know the place. Her Journey had taken a different route.

  I told her I needed money to continue, that I had used up what I had, and that I didn’t want to call Hooyo or Said; I didn’t want them to worry. I would call them from Italy once I got there.

  I told her where to send the money.

  Before ending the call she reminded me not to be afraid.

  “Never say you’re afraid, Samia.”

  “Okay, abaayo.”

  Never.

  It was what I used to tell her during her Journey.

  But everything was different now. I was afraid; I was very afraid. Frayed. I felt frayed. Like the worn photo of Mo Farah stuffed in my bag; I felt as fragile as butterfly wings. As insubstantial as a cloud. Poof.

  What a lot of things you can say in a minute. A lot.

  The money from Hodan arrived after eight days, and two nights later I resumed the Journey.

  CHAPTER 26

  WHEN I GOT TO KHARTOUM, I knew I had to rest up and recoup my strength for the hardest part, crossing the Sahara.

  I was shattered. I was a memory of myself, not a presence, a slender thread of memories and scattered images. That’s all I was.

 
; I stayed in a tiny apartment on the outskirts south of the city for six weeks, along with thirty other women. A month and a half. All we did was sleep and take turns going out to buy food at the market or in a store a short distance from the house. We were tahrib; we had to be careful. We crept around like tahrib. We were shifty-eyed like tahrib. We looked like paranoid, frantic mice, always on guard. In danger of being sent back to where we’d started.

  I had to call Hodan again and have her send me another five hundred dollars for a leg of the trip that was supposed to get me to Tripoli. Reluctantly, I was having her give me back Alì’s money that I had sent her for Mannaar. But things had changed. Mannaar came to me in my dreams and no longer in my waking thoughts. Awake, all I thought of was staying alive.

  And no one had told me that the Journey would be so expensive.

  I knew they wouldn’t take us to Tripoli, that they would leave us someplace else. But I had learned. If I didn’t want fear to get the better of me, what I had to do was not think about it.

  I spent forty days stuck in that apartment in a six-story building on the ugly outskirts of Khartoum. There were only two windows, and all you could see was the concrete facades of other dilapidated buildings like ours. Flaking walls and decrepit balconies. In the distance, as far as you could see, a patch of desert could be glimpsed between two buildings.

  Golden.

  The heat was asphyxiating. And there were thirty-one women and three children in very cramped quarters. I spent the first ten days lying on the ground on a mat.

  I didn’t even have enough air to dream.

  Then I made a mistake.

  In spite of everything, maybe I still felt like I was invulnerable, invincible, the Samia I’d always been. True, I had effaced myself and struggled to even remember who I was; memories flashed by only when they chose to. But maybe what we are deep inside can’t be effaced. Maybe that’s how it is, and we end up recognizing who we are only through what we do. Anyway, Ayana, a Somali girl, warned me not to do it. But the water was all used up, and we were waiting for the sun to go down to go out and buy some containers. I was parched. That night I’d sweated so profusely that the moisture had drenched my clothes and soaked through to the hard mat. I drank tap water from the bathroom. Within three hours I began to feel strong shudders running down my back, along my arms and legs, everywhere. Cold sweats. Then nausea and hallucinations. I was gripped by a fever I’d never experienced before. And dysentery. Since I’d left, I hadn’t eaten much. The muscles I had developed with Eshetu were slowly wasting away. I could see for myself. The dysentery was the final blow.

  I spent twenty days on the mat in a comatose state. Ayana comforted me. She remained healthy while others fell ill as I did. If it wasn’t the water, it could be an unwashed fruit. Or a fruit rinsed with that same water. Or some rotten fish.

  I should have left sooner, but I waited to get my strength back. Ayana had no one to call in Europe for money, so she would remain in that house much longer than I. She’d almost begun to think of it as home.

  Then, finally, I was well again. I’d recovered my strength. At least as much as I needed.

  They squeezed us all in, only this time there were even more of us than the first time. Eighty-six. So packed in that we gagged for lack of air. Once again a jeep.

  After a few kilometers no one spoke anymore, no one complained, no one even thought of singing. The stretch through the desert is much tougher. The heat is so intense you could die, and besides that, the vehicle proceeds more slowly, maintaining a constant low speed. It doesn’t brake or accelerate, so as not to get stuck in the sand. Everything is grueling, even breathing. It’s like crawling along on an endless road at a snail’s pace. As you move ahead, you can see the road lengthen rather than shorten.

  That leg was supposed to last four days. We waited only for the times when the jeep would stop, twice a day. Once, in daylight, to do our business and sip some water. The other, at night, to sleep on the sand. The days had turned into a single, endless, prolonged waiting. From the moment you set out again, you started counting the minutes until the next stop.

  All around, a lunar landscape in which earth and sky are one. Your points of reference vanish. It’s like diving into a mirror. An endless expanse of sand. So uniform that you too end up turning into sand. And not just because it filters in everywhere, so that it quickly fills your eyes, throat, and lungs with grit, and you have to swallow so it won’t clog up your mouth. Soon you stop fighting it and simply close your eyes, clamp your jaws shut, and count. You count to a thousand, and at every hundred you swallow what little saliva you have left, keeping count with your fingers. You know that when you get to a thousand, twenty minutes will have passed. Amir, a Somali, taught this to me on the first leg of the trip from Addis Ababa to Al Qadarif. Then you count to ten thousand. That comes to over three hours. When you’ve counted to ten thousand three times, it’s almost time for the stop. Going on like that, you too end up becoming sand, because you see yourself as a minute grain of that white expanse, or as one of the seconds of time that, like a madwoman, you can’t get out of your head.

  I kept my plastic bag tucked under my T-shirt.

  We had ten liters of water per person for four days. Two and a half liters a day, which in the intense heat of the Sahara aren’t enough for even a few hours.

  Every so often someone would fall asleep or pass out from lack of air. It happened to me too. The woman next to me, an old Somali, noticed it and tried to wake me up by nudging me with her shoulders, but I didn’t respond. Then someone who had managed to hide a bottle of water pulled it out. They passed the word and in a few minutes the bottle reached the woman. She poured a little on my head and I came to. What had happened to my strength? Where was the little Olympic warrior? Had I really been in Beijing, or was it all a dream? The opening ceremony, with me a bright star in the firmament of the strongest in the whole world? And Mo Farah in the middle of the field, laughing and relaxed? Another hallucination?

  In the evening we traveled until even the drivers were ready to drop. To avoid being seen by police helicopters patrolling the desert, the traffickers keep the lights turned off, using them as little as possible. You’re in the Sahara at night with no light, crushed among dozens of bodies on a dilapidated jeep creeping along like a snail.

  As soon as the sun went down it felt like we were traveling in a nightmare. Counting relaxed me and fed my imagination. Every now and then I thought I was on a plane, like when I went to Beijing and took the sleeping pill. As it had then, the constant noise of the engine made me dream of being in an endless, dark tunnel. Suddenly I opened my eyes and everything slipped away. I was going to China; they were my Olympics. The hotel would be beautiful. I would shake hands with Veronica Campbell-Brown. She would look at me curiously at first, then with admiration. I would run in a huge stadium in front of TV cameras from around the world. I would give it my best. At the end everyone would stand up to applaud me, journalists from throughout the world would interview me, my face would be seen in every corner of the planet.

  Then a sharp bump, an abrupt swerve, or a deep depression, someone vomiting. I was plunged back to where I was. In a dark tunnel that wasn’t a dream. Hours and hours without headlights, guided only by GPS.

  Eighty-six of us clinging to the technology of a GPS.

  There are no roads in the Sahara. There are no tracks. Each trafficker on each Journey follows his own particular route. In the morning the tire marks are covered over by sand. Erased forever. No Journey is the same as another.

  For days you’re in the hands of human traffickers who in turn are in the hands of a small box that communicates with a satellite.

  Around three in the morning we’d stop someplace in the midst of that expanse of sand dunes, eat moffa, a grain and corn-flour mush, and try to get some sleep; we lay there huddled around that rusted vehicle, which from outside seemed minuscul
e.

  The families stayed together, the children crying. The older people moaned and groaned.

  I had become friends with an Ethiopian girl, Zena, a little older than me, who wanted to be a doctor. Her dream was to get to Europe and enroll in college. Any university in any European city—to her it made no difference. She was traveling with her elderly grandmother, who was always glued to her.

  In spite of everything, we couldn’t sleep. It was difficult to sleep. Many people prayed. They prayed out loud. The children were never still and the parents didn’t know what to do. There was one child in particular, Said, four years old, with his mother and father. Said seemed possessed. He cried all day and didn’t stop, not even at night. He never stopped. Given the way he kept crying, making his throat sore and scratchy, his voice had become hoarse and croaky, like that of a muttering, demented old man or an abandoned dog tied to a post for weeks. The parents did their best to keep him quiet. Every night they had to take turns moving a distance away in order not to disturb the group. Otherwise someone might go berserk. You had to be careful about everything.

  On those nights, lying on the sand with the aimless, dark forms of the desert cockroaches and beetles, I thought about Hooyo and I thought about Aabe. I cried and silently begged my father for help. Or I talked to Hodan, telling her that I would be with her soon. I thought about Beijing, the happy days, about that first morning at the hotel in front of the BBC. About the applause, the fans standing and shouting my name.

  I focused on the upcoming London Olympics and tried to bear up.

  By doing that, I was slowly able to fall asleep.

  At noon, after driving for two days, the Land Rover broke down, this time for real.

  It started jolting and jerking for a while; then it got mired in the sand. We were in the middle of the Sahara with brutal heat and no protection.

  We all got out. The traffickers tried to disassemble a few parts without letting anyone get near the engine. After three hours they realized that there was nothing they could do and called for help, transmitting the coordinates of the GPS.