A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (23 page)

His life in Kirkwood sounds unremittingly bleak. He and the shopkeeper, a young man named Osman, shared a room at the back of the store. As with Abdicuur's shop in Motherwell, a tall wooden fence surrounded the yard, and the storefront was screened with bars and wire mesh. His trips to the wholesaler aside, Asad left the store only to use the outside toilet the two Somali men shared with their South African neighbors. And even these adventures were restricted; it was considered unwise to unlock the bolt on the front gate after dark; this was a cash business, after all, and a predator could simply wait in the darkness outside the gate. If Asad had to urinate after the sun went down, he did so in a bottle and emptied it the following morning.

And so the two men were confined to a small cage, sometimes for as long as seventy-two hours at a time. They cooked for each other, ate together, sat in the shop together, and slept on mattresses at opposite ends of the same room.

“Did you like Osman?” I ask cautiously.

“He was a good guy,” Asad replies. “When you live like that, you both behave very well because there is no choice.”

He came to know the people of the township primarily as pairs of eyes on the other side of the wire mesh and as dark hands that slid money through the opening above the counter. As slight as these encounters may seem, they were both invasive and profound.

“Brother, the customers were very rude,” he tells me. “I first saw it even before I started working, when I went with my uncle to his shop in Motherwell. Abdicuur is a very proud man. People much younger than him would come up to the counter and ask for salt-and-vinegar chips. He'd bring a packet, and they'd say: ‘Hey! Are you fucking deaf? I asked for airtime.' He'd put the chips aside and look at them calmly and say, ‘How much airtime would you like?'

“I was shocked. I wanted to unlock the gate and go around to the other side and challenge this man.

“My uncle watched me. He saw exactly what was happening inside me. He smiled. ‘You've just learned the most important three lessons about running a shop,' he said. ‘One, you must be clean twenty-four hours; two, never be rude; three, when the customer is wrong, he is right.'

“It was an unnatural thing to me, brother. To be nice to a person who is behaving like a piece of shit—I had to ask myself many times why a man like my uncle would allow for something like that.”

By the time I meet him, he has developed an elaborate theory about the value of his uncle's rules.

“Most of our customers are unemployed or on welfare,” he says. “They are the laughingstock of South Africa. But when they come to our shops, they are king. They can come with two rand. There are only a few things you can buy with that: single cigarettes, one or two chewing-gum sticks, sweets. The customer can come with his coins and say, ‘Give me a cigarette.' I get one. He says, ‘No, I've changed my mind; I want chewing gum.' I say, ‘Yes,
bra,
' and get it. By the time I am back at the counter, he has changed his mind again. ‘No,
kwerekwere,
I want sweets.'

“A South African shopkeeper will not tolerate that. He will say, ‘You are wasting my time. Fuck off.' A Somali cannot afford to say that. He can only say, ‘Yes,
sisi.
Yes,
bra.
' The laughingstock of South Africa come to us because our shops are the one place in their own country where they can say, ‘I want this!' and someone will respond.”

And so Asad suspended his honor, or, at any rate, kept it in reserve for the other parts of his life, and kept a serene face.

The exchanges over the counter were not Asad's only encounters with the people of the township. Whenever he returned from the wholesaler in his goods-laden pickup, young men would emerge from nowhere.

“It is a tricky time, brother,” Asad tells me. “You have to open your gate, open the back door to your shop; you have to walk in and out carrying goods. You and your property are exposed. The young men gather around you the way ants go for an ice cream a child has dropped on the ground. They are wanting to help.

“First time, I said, ‘Okay brothers, thanks.' There were so many of them, the packing was over in a few minutes. Then they stood around and wanted money. Whatever I was going to give them, brother, whatever, no matter how much, was not going to be enough. The situation was becoming difficult. Some of them were clicking their tongues and shaking their heads. They were talking to each other in Xhosa, and I did not understand. I backed away and bolted the gate and felt my heart beating very fast.”

The township was inhabited in part by Xhosa-speaking people and in part by mixed-race colored people. Asad was astounded at the differences between them.

“Chalk and cheese, brother,” he tells me. “The colored people are like children. They are ruled by whatever they are feeling at a particular moment. You make one little mistake behind the counter with a colored person and he will say something terrible to you, like, ‘
Jou ma se poes!
[Your mother's cunt!].' The next day, you run outside to fight with him for insulting your mother. He looks at you like you are crazy. ‘
Naai, broer
[No, brother],' he says, ‘that was yesterday.' He's happy now. He's forgotten.

“The Xhosas are something else. They never show what is in their heart. And if they are going to insult you, they do it softly. A customer will stare at me through the wire mesh and say, so soft I can hardly hear, ‘
Uthanda imali
[You like money].' If I challenge him, he will throw up his hands and say, ‘You are right, my friend.
Ixolo
[I am sorry].' Brother, they do not show you what is in their heart. When I think of them, I feel cold.”

Aside from the two men who had driven him and his companions from the Zimbabwean border to Johannesburg, Asad had barely come across white people.

“I only knew stories about whites,” he tells me. “I was told about apartheid, how whites did not like blacks. But from what I could see, whites were educated and had power, so I was very keen to make white friends. But I did not know how to meet white people.”

Among his first customers in Kirkwood was an elderly Xhosa man. He appeared unfailingly each morning to buy bread and milk and two cigarettes. He would greet Asad with a smile that appeared to carry genuine warmth. Asad took pleasure in addressing him each day as Tata, the Xhosa word for “father.”

Every now and again, Asad and the old man talked. In the little language they shared, Tata told Asad something of the history of the settlement in which he now lived. At some point, he nodded his head in the direction of the Kirkwood town center, where white people lived.

“I want to go there, Tata,” Asad said with a light smile. “I want to be where the money is.”

The old man laughed at Asad's foolishness. “Black people cannot live there,” he replied. “You cannot be a part of what is there.”

Asad stared back at the old man in astonishment.

“Brother,” he tells me, “I never thought I would see the day I am described as black.”

He returned the old man's stare. “I am not black,” he said sternly. “I have my own culture.”

The old man laughed: not his usual quiet chuckle, but an open-throated, mirthful guffaw. “When you are here in South Africa,” he said, turning away, his milk tucked under one arm, his loaf of bread under the other, “you are black.”

At the end of his first month in Kirkwood, Asad received his salary in one-hundred-rand notes. He phoned his uncle immediately.

Abdicuur was confused by the call.

“That's nice,” he said. “But what do you want me to do?”

“I thought I was meant to give it to you to manage for me,” Asad replied.

“No. It is your money.”

Asad was now a little confused in turn. This is not how he had imagined things. He asked his uncle to keep his savings anyhow.

When he next drove into Uitenhage to buy stock, he handed his uncle one thousand eight hundred rand—his fourteen-hundred-rand salary, plus overtime he had received for working on four Saturdays.

Abdicuur counted the money and looked at his nephew in astonishment.

“You haven't spent a cent,” he said.

“There is no need to spend,” Asad replied. “I eat in the shop. I sleep in the shop. I do not smoke cigarettes. I do not chew
mira.
”

Actually, Asad and Osman did chew
mira,
but he kept this concealed from his uncle.

“If he knew,” Asad tells me, “it would have been a big problem. He was a pious man. He did not chew. If he knew, I would lose my reputation.”

I ponder Asad's relationship with his uncle. He was about twenty years old now. For much of his childhood, he had had nobody to tell him how much to save and how much to spend. In Addis, he had used his own wits to conjure a living. He had supported a large household, paid for a wedding, saved to go south. Now he had adopted the position of a minor, surrendering his will and his judgment to a man he had just met. He did so hungrily, it seems, like a small child climbing under the sheets and blankets of an inviting bed.

His job in Kirkwood did not last. About six weeks in, he received a call from his employer's wife summoning him to her home in Uitenhage. Upon arriving, he discovered that all she wanted was to have him drive her to friends less than a kilometer away. He had to wait in the car all afternoon while she drank tea.

A few days later, she called again. This time, Asad was to take her grocery shopping.

On the third occasion, Asad phoned his employer.

“I have a problem,” he said. “I am being paid to take care of stock in your shop, not to be your wife's driver. I cannot do both jobs at once.”

The two men exchanged words. Abdicuur was brought in to mediate. Asad went back to work, but under what terms he was not sure.

A week later, his new mistress phoned again. Another trip to the grocery.

This time, Asad phoned his uncle and told him he was quitting his job. He was in a stronger position now. Via the network of Somalis he encountered whenever he went to the wholesaler, he knew of an opening as a shopkeeper in a town quite close to Kirkwood. The pay was not as good—just twelve hundred rand a month, no overtime, and no free airtime—but he was prepared to cut his losses.

“Was your uncle sympathetic?” I ask.

“Very. He said, ‘This is bullshit. Abdullahis do not work like that.' I was very proud when he said that. I took strength from that.”

Just days after Asad changed jobs, Foosiya replied to his e-mail.

During her extended silence, he had begun to wonder. On some days, when it was just he and Osman and their shop, and he had too much time to think, he imagined that Foosiya had drifted into another life, one replete with a husband and children. He would shake the thought from his head and chastise himself for his mental wandering.

His trips to the wholesaler were often too rushed to permit him to stop at an Internet café. He was only able to check his e-mail every ten days or so. He had come to numb his excitement each time he logged in. He had trained himself to expect nothing.

Now she was back, and as he read her news, he grew angry. She had left Addis before Asad even arrived in South Africa. For the past two months or more, she had been living in the port town of Berbera in Somaliland. She had broken the first line of their agreement—to stay put for three months.

She explained what had happened. A week after Asad had left, she had been attacked one night in Bole Mikhael by a group of Ethiopian youths. They had ripped her necklace from her throat and had even tried to tear an earring from her ear. She had realized, on that very night, that she could not be in Addis without a man; it had been a mistake to allow Asad to go. She had wasted no time; within a week, she was in Berbera, with family.

She stressed that she had not reneged. She was his wife. She was waiting for him to send for her.

At the bottom of the e-mail was a cell-phone number. When he tried to call it he found that his phone did not reach beyond South African borders.

Lying in bed that night, two Asads danced before his eyes. The first was a young man saving a lot of money, a man waiting for his wife to come. There would be children soon and a thriving business and a good home. The second Asad was a boy locked in a bolted room. He was trapped there, day in and day out, a lone Somali in a very strange land, the people outside toyingly hostile, his employer an exploitative man who would squeeze him for all he was worth.

Where in this life was there a place for Foosiya? He had much to do before he could send for her. And she was clearly not a patient woman. When he woke the next morning he felt very alone, as if he had known Foosiya in another lifetime.

On the evening of April 9, 2004, an hour or so after he had gone to bed, Asad was woken by a phone call.

“Abdicuur is dead,” the voice at the other end announced.

“Who is this?” Asad asked.

“Asad, listen. Abdicuur was shot in his
spaza
shop. He is dead.”

Asad sprang out of bed and looked at his watch. It was a little before ten o'clock. He had no car. Taxis to Uitenhage would only begin running in six hours' time. He looked around his bedroom and took in its contents. Everything suddenly seemed unfamiliar—the bedclothes, the chair, the duffel bag—as if he had just walked into a stranger's private quarters. His uncle was dead, and he was stranded here in a room and in a town that seemed, now, the most inhospitable place he'd ever been.

He began pacing like an animal, drawing an invisible square over and again along the perimeter of the room. Then he lay down very carefully on his bed, as if the news had turned his body into something brittle, something that might snap.

“Brother,” he says, “what happened when I lay down on that bed: I lost control of my body. My legs started to shake. The muscles in my stomach started to jump up and down. It was like that all night. Until four o'clock, I lay there trying to keep my body under control. Then I ran outside and looked for a taxi.”

He arrived at Abdicuur's house shortly after dawn to find it locked up and empty. For a moment, he wondered whether it wasn't all a joke, whether his uncle had simply taken his family on a trip to Johannesburg. He put his head down and walked quickly to the Somali restaurant down the road.

From a block away, he saw the crowd. He believes that there were as many as three hundred people standing there in the dawn. He did not know that so many Somalis lived in the Port Elizabeth area. They were mainly men and largely silent, and in their white
thobes
and prayer caps they looked ethereal against the morning's gray light, as if they might vanish at any moment.

Asad walked into the crowd. He did not tell anybody that he was the dead man's nephew. He stood shoulder to shoulder with people he did not know.

A man was beginning to address the gathering. He spoke in a quiet voice that Asad strained to hear. He was saying that he had been the first on the scene, that he had watched Abdicuur Abdullahi die. It happened shortly after dusk, he said. Five men had walked into the store and demanded money. Whether Abdicuur had tried to resist, he could not say, but the men had opened fire, and Abdicuur had been shot nine times. Still, he was not dead, the man continued. He lived another ten or fifteen minutes. He was conscious for some of that time. The two men had exchanged parting words.

A murmur rose from the gathering, as if it had just this moment become a single being and was taking its first labored breath. Then people began to speak softly to one another, and the illusion subsided.

Asad no longer recalls how long the crowds lingered outside the restaurant, only that they gathered again at the mosque later in the day. Still, he remained anonymous. He walked slowly through the gathering, head bowed, eavesdropping on myriad conversations. In each one, he heard a note of panic.

“My uncle was a big man in that area,” he says. “It was like a pillar had fallen, and now the house was going to fall down with it. It was only then that I realized what a very big man my uncle was.”

Sometime in the midafternoon the body arrived. Asad followed it through the crowds until two men blocked his way.

“I asked to see it,” he recalls, “and they shook their heads and said no.”

When he explained that he was the dead man's nephew, he was examined with skepticism. Strangers had taken over the scene, people he could have sworn he had never seen before in his life. It dawned on him how little he knew of South Africa's Somali community. A crisis arises, and people come from nowhere to take command. He did not know how and by what rights they had come to control access to the body.

“We negotiated for some time,” Asad says. “Eventually, they allowed me through.”

I have asked him twice what he saw and felt when he stood over his uncle's corpse. His two answers are not at odds with each other, but they are very different.

A white sheet covered Abdicuur's body, up to the top of his neck, and his face seemed exposed and disembodied.

“It is for a son to wash the body,” he says. “I felt sorry that I had not been there to do it.”

He took the sheet in both hands and slowly pulled it down to Abdicuur's waist. There were two wounds in his chest and two on his left side. They were small and neat, almost as if a craftsman had made them, laboring away delicately and with much care.

“Then I saw the stitches from where they had cut him open after he died,” Asad recalls. “It is against Islam to remove the organs from the body. I do not believe that what they were doing was ascertaining the cause of death. I believe that because we are Somali and defenseless they were taking the organs for other people to use. We do not accept this. They did not ask us.”

In the months and years following Abdicuur's death, it became an obsession. Asad has written to the newspapers. He has tried to speak on the radio. Of all the terrors inflicted upon Somalis in South Africa, it is this, the surgical work performed upon the corpse, that he feels most deeply.

“They did it without our permission,” he says. “They need to ask a relative for permission. They see it as a chance: ‘These people do not have anybody to stand up for them. They do not know their rights.' ”

The second time I ask him about that day, his response is very brief.

“It was the first relative I've seen dead,” he says. “There was a switch in me. A change. It has happened. Now it will continue.”

On the tip of my tongue is an observation: this was not the first time he had seen a relative's corpse. There was his mother. I hesitate a moment and then say it.

He nods very quickly, his face inscrutable, and changes the subject. It is an image, I think, that he has long cast from his head. He remembers holding on to her leg as the door to their home was being bashed down. He remembers the two thick plaits that ran down her back. And he has the sense, always, that he carries her in his being, for she was the first to love him. Her corpse does not figure among these images and feelings. She represents a foundation, not its shattering. It is Abdicuur's dead body that must stand in for the feeling that the bottom of the world has fallen away.

He remembers sitting with other members of the family as one person after another filed past and said sorry. Of the burial itself, he says only, “We carried the body very slowly. It was not a hurried affair. The feelings must come out.”

Afterward, about thirty people gathered at Abdicuur's house, all of them AliYusuf.

“We talked and talked and talked,” Asad recalls. “All the shop owners agreed: we must sell and leave. We must take Abdicuur's wife and children with us and go to Johannesburg.

“Fourteen of us left immediately, within a week of my uncle's burial. We took his wife and children with us. The AliYusufs all chipped in to pay their first six months' rent in Johannesburg. The remaining AliYusuf remained in the Eastern Cape long enough to sell their property. Then they also packed up.

“My uncle was killed in April 2004. By July, to my knowledge, there were no more AliYusuf people in the Port Elizabeth area.”