A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (16 page)

Making contact with Foosiya's father proved difficult and laborious.

“First, I had to meet with Isaaq people living in Addis,” Asad says. “They were not close family of Foosiya's but connected enough for their opinion to be important. I had to meet with them, talk to them. Then they phoned Foosiya's family to give their opinion. Then I had to phone Foosiya's father. I would arrange a time to phone the father, but he was not there. Another time, he is still not there. I was frustrated. The marriage was not at risk. I knew from the way these Isaaq cousins of hers were behaving that the family was happy. In those times, you are happy if your daughter gets married: she is away from home; she moves around; she can get a bad reputation. You worry.”

Finally, after several failed attempts to contact Foosiya's father, it was arranged that he would speak to one of her elder brothers who lived in the Somaliland city of Burio. The conversation was brief and cursory. The line was not very good, and neither man could make out much of what the other was saying. The brother's voice was just audible enough for Asad to hear him give his consent.

“The wedding was in 2003,” Asad tells me, “I think in July. I didn't want to spend a lot of money. I wanted just to pay an imam to do the ceremony, maybe buy some new materials for the house; that's it. I was not sure I would be married very long. So why spend a lot of money?

“But in my culture, others are in charge of the wedding, even though you are the one who pays. Yusuf was in charge. He said I must buy a suit. I said, No, that is too expensive. Eventually, they took me off to some Somali sellers. We bought black shoes, black pants, a white collared shirt, all secondhand. I rented a black jacket. Then I was told we must buy fruit; we must buy meat. We must hire a person who is going to video the wedding. When I arrived at the ceremony there were so many people. Not just Somalis. Lots of Ethiopians. Other Ethiopians. It cost me six hundred dollars in the end. Before that day, I had never even spent sixty dollars on one thing, never even twenty dollars on one thing.

“That six hundred dollars was spent for other people, for curious people, for people who wanted to talk about this strange wedding. The beautiful older woman marrying the
kurai.
”

On the night of the wedding, the young men with whom Asad shared a room cleared out. Before they left, they washed the floor and the walls. They removed all the mattresses but one. It lay ceremoniously in the very center of the room, dressed in new linen. It was as if they had cleaned the room, not just of the signs of their own presence, but of all the lurid conversations they had ever had there; as if the place had to be expunged of its boyishness so that it might be inhabited by a man and a woman.

The only woman's body Asad had ever touched and observed was Yindy's, in the tent their neighbors had made in Dhoobley, some eleven years earlier. Asad had been a prepubescent boy then, and he had seen Yindy's body only to clean it.

Broaching the question of Asad's wedding night is awkward. It is not something I can casually toss into the confined space of my car. It is something to wait for, something that will arise in the course of another discussion. That other discussion is female circumcision. I had just interviewed a young white doctor; she was in her midtwenties, I think, and worked in the obstetrics ward of a public hospital not far from where Asad lived. What she had seen of Somali women's genitalia had filled her with indignation; during the course of our interview she had grown angry and shouted into my voice recorder.

Now, in the car, I recount the doctor's words as well as some of her fury. Asad listens carefully, the expression on his face quite neutral.

“Did the doctor explain to you carefully about Somali circumcision?” he asks. “They do not only cut the clitoris; they also do the skin around the vagina. They use strong string from a tree to stitch the vagina closed, leaving a hole so small all you can fit into it is your baby finger. If it happens when you are five years old, then for the next twenty years, until you are married, it is sore every time you pee. When you menstruate, the blood stays inside, and you get infected. But the women are ashamed, and they will not tell you.

“Foosiya had these problems after we came to live in South Africa. She was too ashamed to say. I would get home, and she was not there, and neighbors would say, ‘She has gone to the clinic.' I would follow and find her there, and she would not want to talk about it. I only found out because she spoke no English, and the doctor needed a translator. I asked the doctor why this infection comes back all the time. The doctor asked when she was circumcised. She did not remember exactly. She also had kidney problems. The doctor said that to remain healthy a woman must be clear and clean, but with this circumcision the blood stays and mixes with the urine, and the kidneys get infected. Walking out of the clinic, I say to Foosiya, ‘You must tell me.' She says, ‘There's nothing you can do, so why must I tell you?' ”

I take notes and say nothing, but he knows what my silence is asking of him. He is free either to answer or to change the subject.

“Opening that hole is a big business, brother,” he says. “You can't open it with your finger. You can't take your wife to the clinic, because it is shameful if you cannot open your wife with your penis. You need to push and push, night after night. The day of your wedding, a big problem begins. It was like that with me and Foosiya. It was very painful. It took a long time. But Foosiya would not have a single discussion about it. It was weird, brother. When I tried to talk about her terrible pain, she turned her head away. We had to pretend it was not there.

“It is cruel. I will not allow my daughter to be circumcised. Not my daughter, and not anyone who gets advice from me.”

It strikes me that if he married Foosiya to take revenge, the task of opening her vagina offered ample opportunity.

“You married Foosiya to hurt her,” I say. “Is this—?”

“No, brother,” he interrupts. “No, no. You are there naked together, exposed to each other, and one of you has this terrible pain. It is not right. It is an injustice. I think maybe it was when we were alone on the first night that my feelings for her began to change.”

The day after the wedding, the boys moved back into Asad's room, and the newlyweds moved out. Asad's landlady had a grandmother who lived in a room in the house. The old lady gallantly agreed to give it up and share a bedroom with her great-grandchildren so that the newlyweds could have their own space. As a wedding present, she waived the first month's rent. With the money he saved, Asad bought a bed, a bedside table, a cupboard, and new curtains. He kept paying for his old room, now occupied solely by his friends. He had become the breadwinner in an eccentric household, his dependents consisting of a wife and a group of unemployed,
mira
-chewing young men all older than he was.

On the third morning after the wedding, Foosiya rose early and walked unannounced into Asad's old room. Five young men lay there, fast asleep. She took a spoon and hit it against the door to wake them. Once she was sure she had an audience, she began to speak. While her husband was paying for the roof over their heads, she said, and for the food on their table, they were to follow her rules.

She would cook three meals a day, she announced, and attendance at meals was compulsory. A person who persistently missed meals would be evicted. Second, she would wash all their clothes, but on two conditions. First, they were to stop sharing clothes. They had reached the point where they did not know whose clothes belonged to whom. Adult men didn't behave that way. They knew what was theirs and what wasn't. Second, she said, it was time to end this business of one's girlfriend washing one's clothes. In fact, the girlfriend business must end entirely. Either you were married to a girl, or you went about courting her in the proper way. This in-between business was unhealthy. It led to disrespect of young women. The Somali women in this city, Foosiya said, were far from home. Many were here without their families. To be a woman alone in a foreign city was not easy. Such a woman should command special respect.

Finally, Foosiya said, her husband would no longer spend the money he earned on
mira
for them. He was going to be saving as much money as he could so that they could plan their future. And even if they managed to find somebody else to buy their
mira,
they could not bring it there. If they wanted to chew
mira
at home, they had to find somewhere else to live.

Foosiya went back to her own bedroom and asked Asad a long series of questions about how he earned his income. He was asked to estimate how much came from helping people acquire documents, how much from helping people settle into Addis, and so forth. When she was finished asking questions, she made a pronouncement: Asad was to cut ties with Yared. He was not the main source of his income, he did not need him, and he was not the sort of person a good Muslim man spends his time with.

“There are no gangsters in Addis,” Asad explains to me, “not like here in South Africa where you have people who kill you, then never think about you again. The closest you get to a gangster in Addis is a taxi driver. They are undercover people. They are involved in all sorts of business, aboveboard, below board. Foosiya did not like Yared. She would look at his filthy vest and the way he walked with his arms showing their muscles. She just stared with her strong green eyes, and she was not thinking good thoughts.”

Each member of the household responded to Foosiya's presence in his own way. Some were angry and challenged Asad to manage his life by his own lights. Others, like Yusuf, took to Foosiya immediately and reformed themselves, cutting
mira
out of their lives and falling gratefully into the rhythm of her days. Most kept chewing
mira
but not at home; they would wander off after dinner to feed their habit out of sight. If they were unable to rise for breakfast the following morning, they would find their dirty clothes returned to them unwashed.

Asad refused to cut ties with Yared. He liked the big man, and he especially liked the money he earned by working for him.

“It was an unreasonable demand,” Asad tells me. “It would have made us poor, which would not have been good for Foosiya either.”

But aside from this one moment of dissent, Asad was simply dazed. His life had been snatched from him and was now being refashioned in her hands, and he watched in amazement.

“Something was going on that took me a while to understand,” Asad says. “She was the wise one. She was the one deciding how things should be. But it didn't seem like that. She was so respectful toward me, so polite to me. Even when she was angry, she never failed to be respectful. So maybe she was molding me, but she was molding me into the sort of man a woman respects. You understand, brother? I didn't feel she was taking over my life. I felt that I was for the first time becoming the sort of man who takes over his own life.”

Their marriage was built over the ensuing weeks by two cycles of labor, one performed at night, the other during the day. After dark, they would persist in the bloody business of consummating their marriage. Asad would turn off the lights, close the curtains, and come to Foosiya in pitch darkness. She would not permit him to see her face in pain. He experienced it only in the shuddering of her body and in her dulled moans.

They set about the task with grim purpose, both now of the same mind about what they were doing. They were not tearing open a cavity in which Asad might pleasure himself or take his revenge. They were parting the entrance to the womb in which Asad was to deposit his seed. For as time passed, it became clear to Asad that he wanted to settle with Foosiya and father her children. His idea of marrying her in order to hurt her, perhaps even to ruin her, seemed, already, embarrassingly boyish and wantonly cruel. She was offering him something infinitely richer than the quick satisfaction of revenge.

But what was she offering him? Today, Asad struggles to put words to the unsettling ideas he began to entertain in the weeks after his wedding. They were at once about the past and about the future.

“Something happened when I knew that I was going to have children with Foosiya,” he says. “The best way I can explain it: I started having regrets. Why did I not go to school? Why did I leave driving trucks? Why did I not stay in Kenya where I maybe would have found my family? For the first time, I saw that my life was a series of decisions. I saw that each decision decided who I was going to be from now on. That is a big realization, brother. I felt dizzy and had to sit down. It is the sort of realization that can make you fall over.”

Asad had kept some vital information to himself. He did not let Foosiya know, for instance, about the small wooden box he had begun to keep, about the money he added to it every month, and about his plans to go to South Africa. As he began to commit to her, so his South African plans receded. He had always imagined going alone.

He kept filling his wooden box with money. And he kept its existence a secret from Foosiya. Quite how or when he would put it to use, he no longer knew. He and Foosiya would stay in Addis for a while. They would have children here. And then they would see.

But no sooner had he put his South African plans on hold than they beckoned again, this time for quite different reasons.

Asad and Foosiya were married in August or September 2003. Around this time, the political currents that streamed through Addis began to grow rough and nasty. The Ethiopian government had for a long time had an uneasy relationship with the student body at the Addis Ababa University, and with the city's youth more generally. And it was also in perpetual conflict with several insurgencies in its borderlands, some Oromo, others Somali, all supported by the Ethiopian government's bitterest foe, Eritrea. In late 2003, the currents of these various conflicts kicked at the foundations of Asad's life. He thought that he could read them in ways that other Somalis could not. And what he read scared him.

“There was a student march on the campus one day,” Asad tells me. “I'm not sure exactly when, but very soon after Foosiya and I were married. A student was killed by the soldiers. There was a rumor among the students that the soldiers were coming to their residence to kill more of them, so they fled all over the city. Many ran to Bole Mikhael; there were a lot of students living in the neighborhood. And government people came after them. All of a sudden, government men were walking around Bole Mikhael. They were knocking down doors and breaking into houses. They had lists of names. They were looking for particular people.

“And then things became hard to understand. There was this old Amhara man who lived in Bole Mikhael. He owned some flats. He was a harmless old man. He used to just sit all day in the sun on a plastic chair, greeting people. One day, he was gone. I was told that intelligence people came to his house in the middle of the night and took him away. He never came back, not while I was still living in Addis.

“Then about a week after the old man disappeared, soldiers came for someone I knew well. His name was Faizel. He used to chew
mira
with us. We would call him Fooljeex, which means ‘cracked front tooth.' He was taken away. This was maybe three months before I left Addis. I did not see him again. I'm not sure if he ever came back.

“My fear was a very lonely fear, brother. Other Somalis did not understand what was happening the way I did. To most of the Somalis in Bole Mikhael, all Ethiopians were the same; they were all Amhara. I was different. I got to know Ethiopians better than that, so I could see things other people could not see, and what I saw was frightening me.

“There are layers among any group, brother. Even Somalis. Most Ethiopians thought we were all the same. But no. There are those from Ethiopia and those from Somalia. And then even within those two groups there are Daarood, Hawiye, Isaaq. You have a group in general, and then you look deeper. I went deeper into the Ethiopians. I knew more than most Somalis about what was going on. I knew because some taxi drivers were talking to intelligence: they were spies. And I knew the taxi drivers, I knew Yared and his friends. Yared had many lives, brother.

“And so I knew that the sort of people they were after were specific. They were after student activists, Oromo nationalists, Ogadeni nationalists, and some Amhara people who were against the government. But I also knew that their information systems were rubbish, brother. They just listened to talk. And then a person disappeared. That old Amhara man: somebody whispered about him; he had nothing to do with anything.

“And I was an Ogadeni, brother. And I was out and about, talking to this one and that one. It was my work to be out and about. I thought: It's a matter of time before somebody finger-points me. I will be taken away one night, and Foosiya will never see me again.

“So that is why I thought again about South Africa. Of all the many things we'd heard about that country, one of them was this: if the police come and throw you in jail, you have a right to a lawyer. You do not just disappear into the prisons and never return. There is justice.”

When I visited Bole Mikhael in April 2012, I searched for people who had lived there in the second half of 2003, the time that Asad decided to go to South Africa. I wanted other people's recollections of that time; I wanted to know, in particular, how other people experienced the Ethiopian military.

Bole Mikhael is a transient place, Somalis coming and going all the time, and it took a while to find the sort of people I was looking for. Even then, it was not easy. For one, only a fool would talk openly with a stranger who comes asking questions about the secret activities of the Ethiopian security forces. And, besides, something happened after Asad's departure that tampered with the memories of those who remained.

In July 2005, nineteen months after Asad left, the Ethiopian government went to war with Addis Ababa's youth in the wake of a disputed national election. More than a hundred students were killed on the streets. Tens of thousands of people were rounded up and thrown in jail. Such dramatic events scupper even the most meticulous memories. My interviewees couldn't really distinguish between the second half of 2003 and the second half of 2002, or 2004, for that matter. The past was divided into a before and an after. July 2005 was the only moment they could pinpoint with precision.

I spoke, too, with scholars of the Ethiopian youth movement and also with scholars of Somali resistance to Ethiopian rule in the Ogaden. Neither marks the second half of 2003 as a time of unusual fragility or of heightened repression. All I spoke to were puzzled that this was the moment that Asad took fright.

I am guessing freely, and I may well be wrong, but I do not think that Asad was fleeing danger. On the contrary, he was courting risk; he was plunging from the shore of a life he knew into the depths of one he did not.

There were two ways to get to South Africa. One was to head for the Kenyan coast and buy a place on a boat heading south. It would dock in secret on a quiet beach in Mozambique. Its passengers would make their way to the South African border on foot. The idea filled Asad with dread.

“You do not want to mess with the sea, brother,” he tells me. “You want land under your feet. On the boat, it is just you and the ocean, and you have no control over the ocean.”

The other option was to stuff his pockets with his savings and head south by bus. There were many borders to cross: first into Kenya, then Tanzania, then Zambia, then Zimbabwe, then, finally, South Africa. At each border, a smuggler of human beings would have to be hired; officials would have to be bribed. As Asad describes it, the journey seems to me so obviously uncertain, the chances of safe arrival much too scant. How does one begin to read so treacherous an environment as a lone stranger? One must serially place one's life and liberty in the hands of the most dubious strangers.

“I didn't even think of the journey,” Asad tells me. “I thought only of life on the other side.”

“But you were so frightened by other journeys,” I protest. “You thought that the Sahara would kill you, that the ocean would kill you, but this…”