Divinity Road (7 page)

In the last letter I ever got from you, written in the early hours of the following morning after a night of sleepless worry, you outlined your plans. You would not risk the safety of the children by remaining in Addis. You had debated moving to a neighbouring country, Sudan perhaps or Kenya, but decided that more drastic action was needed to prevent any further threat to their lives. So you proposed selling up everything and using the money to pay a trafficker to smuggle you all overseas. It did not matter where – Canada, the USA, Great Britain, Germany. That would in any case be in the hands of the smugglers. Once you had set yourselves up in the new country, you would then contact me via my brother – I would have been recently released – and I would join you in the new home. Typically, you wrote with such enthusiasm for the scheme that you made this escape seem like the brightest of opportunities.

I had no choice but to bide my time and serve my sentence. The final months – the period following your supposed departure from Africa – were a constant battle to avoid plunging into depression, all my strength concentrated on refusing myself the easy slide into self-pity. The boy was dead, the mother anguished, and you and the children had embarked on a perilous journey. What right had I, the perpetrator of this upheaval, to complain? I embraced the penance.

As each week passed with no news from you, I felt the black hole of fear inside me grow.

The day of my release, I could not help but hope that somehow you and the children would be waiting for me at the prison entrance as the gates swung open.

In fact I spent the first evening at my sister’s, lay sleepless during the early hours, had packed my few clothes into a holdall by daybreak and was inside the taxi minibus en route for Addis before my sister had even stirred.

I deserve no pity, seek none. So I will give you nothing but the bare facts in describing the next three months, my relentless search in Addis for clues as to where you might have gone to. It was an odd time, a period of uncertainty and paranoia. I was trying to seek out the smugglers who had offered you their business, and my attempts to make contact with them were met with hostility. At the same time, I became increasingly conscious that I myself was being watched. I realised that the tentacles of the boy’s family were still spread across Addis and that spies had become aware of my return and were monitoring my every move.

What I learned about your flight was confused and contradictory. Through persistence and bribery I was introduced to a middleman who admitted setting you up with a group of Somali traffickers, but the group itself seemed to have disbanded or moved back to Mogadishu. One man I spoke to, a kat-chewing Yemeni, seemed certain that you were to have been taken overland to Sudan, then flown to Germany or Britain. Another lead, a businessman who had known my father, believed the Somalis’ favoured routes were always via Libya or Egypt.

One evening, returning to my tiny rented room deep in the Addis slums after another fruitless day’s investigations, I was crossing a quiet street when a car parked ahead of me pulled out at speed and swerved across the road. I looked up and threw myself out of its path a split second before it hit me. Needless to say, the car did not stop. It was, at best, a warning.

My enquiries were getting me nowhere. At around this time, I received the news that my brother had died of meningitis. The attempt on my life was the final straw. I contacted an uncle in Asmara and begged him to lend me some money. He agreed to send me $8,000, less a gift of love than a pay-off to disappear. There was nothing left for me in Asmara. The family home had been sold, both my sisters were by now married, their husbands afraid of contact with me, the family outcast.

So I went back to my trafficking contacts, this time in search of business, not information. Suddenly they were much more amenable. They took $5,000 of my money and promised me a problem-free journey to Germany. The route was more or less as the Yemeni had described yours. False papers and a truck providing a smooth ride to Khartoum. Then a new passport and plane ticket to Frankfurt, where I would claim political asylum. In my mind I imagined myself following in your footsteps, believed myself to be drawing ever nearer to my precious family.

The journey was a disaster from the outset. The departure was inexplicably delayed by two days, so that by the time I got the signal one chilly morning to make my way to the car park of an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts and clambered on board the truck, I was a tangle of nerves. The truck, loaded with flour, wheezed and clanked as it pulled out onto the road. I glanced at my fellow passengers – a father and young son, two young men who I later learned to be brothers, a teenage girl and her aunt – and sensed in them the same anxiety that I felt.

We crossed the border at Kurmuk, but rather than turn a blind eye, as we had been promised, the Sudanese border guards pounced on us. They seemed almost to have been expecting our arrival, arrested the driver, confiscated our papers and locked us up in police cells. The next day we were loaded up into a military truck and driven north, up to a remote area on the border with Eritrea, where we were abandoned in a refugee camp they called Kilo Sitta Wa Eshrin. It was a hellish place, squalid with little food to go round. The Sudanese soldiers in the vicinity were a brutal rabble and because many of the residents were Eritreans escaping military service, the Eritrean army would sometimes raid at night, kidnapping any young men they came across. I survived a week, then bribed a Sudanese soldier to give me a lift to Kassala. From there, another few dollars paid for a hitched ride into Khartoum.

I thought, briefly, that my luck was turning. I should have known better. I bought some Sudanese identity papers from a Lebanese market trader. He suggested I head for Libya, where I could live illegally without too many problems from the authorities while I earned enough to set me up in Europe. I was told that from the Libyan coast I could buy passage on a boat crossing to France or Spain or Italy.

I travelled up to Dongolla with a series of bokasi, the pickup taxis that cross that vast country. I had been given a contact name by my Lebanese friend, and through this man, I secured another boksi ride across the Libyan Desert. It was a gruelling experience, my memories now a blur of heat and thirst.

Crossing the border, a repeat of my earlier disaster. A patrol of Libyan soldiers came across us by chance, and once again I suffered the indignity of arrest and transportation, this time to a detention centre named Misratah.

It was another hellhole, the inmates a mixture of Ethiopians, Eritreans and Somalis, men and women, the elderly down to the new-born, packed seventy to each windowless cell. We had blankets for beds, overflowing toilets, meagre rations and dirty water, no medicines to treat the cases of malaria and diarrhoea and TB. The guards were sadists, the weekly drip drip of physical abuse culminating each Thursday in an orgy of drink and violence, women inmates dragged from their cells to be raped, any attempt by their male counterparts to halt this torture met with teargas and beatings.

Six weeks of this purgatory. Every few days the guards would line us all up and read out lists of names of detainees to be deported. Sometimes, filled with the thought that I was following in your footsteps, I felt a fiery determination to fight on, to complete this journey regardless of where it eventually took me. At other times, when the task of locating you seemed altogether hopeless, I felt resigned to a return to Asmara and to the vengeance of that unforgiving family.

Together with two fellow countrymen, I began to plan my escape, a hazardous breakout involving decoy fires and the scaling of a fence topped with razor wire.

Fortunately, our getaway was actually far more straightforward. Like me, one of my co-conspirators had his remaining wealth – in his case, three gold rings – sewn into the seam of his shirt. Afraid of the risks involved in my escape plan, this man, an army deserter from Beylul named Hassan, simply approached the most corrupt-looking of the guards and offered him the rings for our freedom.

The guard did not hesitate. The following Thursday he placed the three of us in a separate punishment cell for some invented infringement of rules and that night, after the other guards had collapsed into a drunken stupor, he unlocked the door, guessing that our escape would be covered up the following day by his shame-faced, hungover colleagues.

The following weeks are hazy, days hiding out in orange groves, nights walking the highways, skirting the towns, scavenging just enough to stay alive. Hassan had the name of a contact in Benghazi who organised passage by boat to southern Italy and then sealed lorry runs to France and Britain, so it was to that city that we headed.

One night, sleeping rough on the outskirts of Benghazi, Hassan and our other companion went to buy bread. Whether they were caught by the police or simply abandoned me, I never saw them again. I had the name of the contact and of a restaurant in the sprawling market, the Souq al-Jreed, and after a day of discreet enquiries, was finally introduced to the trafficker.

I still had two thousand dollars left, and all of that went on my new identity papers and getaway. Though in hindsight it was money well spent, at the time it felt as if it was torture that I was buying.

If the voyage on the fishing trawler was an awful three days of nausea and suffering, in comparison to the lorry journey that followed, it was a pleasure trip of sumptuous luxury. Locked in the back of the lorry along with twenty or so fellow Africans, I passed the endless hours in complete darkness, the air fetid with sweat and human waste, the continual motion and lack of light creating a sense of total disorientation. How many days and nights did the journey take? Which countries did we pass through? After a day or two I could barely differentiate between sleep and wakefulness, let alone answer such complex questions.

But I was getting closer to you, my darling. So when the back of the lorry opened for the last time and we emerged, dazzled by the light and still nauseous from the Channel crossing, onto the potholed tarmac of a lorry park on the outskirts of some English coastal town, the loss of nerve I experienced was tempered by my belief in your proximity.

I stood on that tarmac, rubbing my eyes and blinking in the sunlight, watching the other new arrivals slink off, some alone, others in twos and threes, all anxious to slip away and protect their new-found freedom.

From talking to these fellow-travellers during the interminable journey, I had gathered two essential pieces of information regarding my status in this country: firstly, that if I did not apply for asylum with the authorities immediately on arrival, I would have no recourse to public funds, would not be allowed to seek legal employment and would therefore face homelessness and starvation; and secondly, that according to EU law, if the authorities could prove that I had arrived here from another ‘safe’ country – in my case France, I supposed – I could be deported to that country on the basis that I should have claimed asylum there.

Standing on that tarmac, watching the last of my fellow-travellers disappear, I dithered, unable to square my fear of police, born out of my Sudanese and Libyan experiences, with the urge to throw myself at their mercy and set my application for asylum in motion. And of course I shilly-shallied to the end, finally handing myself in at a police station in Brighton, but only after four days of sleeping rough and aimless wandering. Cold, filthy, hungry, the loss of freedom seemed at the time a small price to pay for a hot meal and warm bed.

And from there to here, my love, was but a short hop. The police could not locate a Tigrinya-speaking interpreter, and even with the half-hearted assistance of an Arabic-speaking one, the confusion caused by my language problems and my genuine ignorance of the route I had taken to Britain raised immediate suspicion. Two days after handing myself in, I found myself here at Glynbourne House. I feel suspended in time and space, my existence in limbo.

And you, my love? Am I closing in on my beloved family, drawing ever nearer, tolerating these short-term inconveniences for the sake of our long-term future together? Or is this, as I sometimes fear during those bleak early hours before daybreak, just a long and lonely wild goose chase?

Dear Kassa

Well, it must be after midnight. The heating is off and the flat is icy so I am wrapped up in two thick sweaters. Winter here is no joke, I can tell you. Nothing can prepare you for the numbing cold. Yanit has been asleep for hours. She is feeling anxious about her first day at school tomorrow and switching off is her way of coping, I suppose. She spent the evening immersed in a book, lost in its fictional world. It will be tough for her starting a new school mid-year, straight into a Year 4 classroom, but I have told her just to be herself, that friendships will come, insh’Allah.

Abebe is in an easier position since he is starting in Year 1. As his teacher explained, there will be a number of other new children starting in his class tomorrow. Being that much younger, he feels none of Yanit’s anxieties, only excitement at the prospect of an end to these months of boredom and at the thought of all that school offers – games and playmates and organised entertainment. The buzz of expectation has kept him awake long past Yanit’s bedtime, but he too has finally succumbed.

It is such a relief to finally have a place of our own. The flat, two bedrooms, kitchenette, lounge and bathroom, may not be a palace – compared to Africa, everything is cramped in this small, overcrowded island – and I know it is only temporary accommodation, but it certainly beats the madness of the hostel we stayed in when we first arrived here after our dispersal. Oh, Kassa, those were crazy times. Women and their children crammed together, everyone’s fuse shortened by exhaustion and despair, no outlet for the tension, no escape,