Don't Tell Me You're Afraid (16 page)

I was glad to be gaining strength, and I was pleased with the work that Eshetu was making me do. It was just that I had a need to compete, to measure myself against the others. A need that was becoming increasingly urgent. Was all that effort leading to results? I craved what I liked best about running: competing. Pushing myself to the extreme. Winning.

During those months in Addis Ababa I realized that winning
was an irreplaceable fuel, that only victory could give me the energy to continue. But that wasn't possible there. To compete I needed the light of day, not the shadows of night. I needed other athletes.

Instead there I was again, alone, at night, on a field. Once more under the light of the moon.

The more months passed, the greater the certainty that the documents from Somalia would never come. Nor, with them, the possibility that Eshetu might treat me like the others, signing me up for competitions, letting me compete, putting me to the test.

Every so often I went to the field before the end of the training sessions and watched the others run from outside the wire mesh fence, for fear that Eshetu might see me and get angry. If they were to catch me at the field, he said, if they were to do an inspection and find me there, I would likely not be able to use it anymore, not even at night. So I went a little early and watched them run from outside. I stood there gripping the green diamond-patterned wire mesh and observed them. Sometimes I hid behind a hedge near an electricity meter, and from there I spied on them, the way you spy on those kissed by fate, by good fortune.

I forgot about the races I had won, about the Beijing Olympics, all of it. I became an amateur dreaming about racing. While the others seemed unreachable. They were perfect. Incredibly swift. It was like being in front of the TV. Power, precision, dedication, drive. It was all there in their movements.

They were everything I might never be able to be. I remained a
tahrib,
running alone.

But in truth there was only one thing I wanted, and that was to win.

Little by little during those months, without even being aware of it, I began to entertain the desire to leave that place as well. I realized that occasionally, talking with Amina and Yenee, I would speak about Addis Ababa and our house as if they were already part of the past, as though I felt the need to start preserving their memory. Even though I was there.

I lived the last few months in a kind of melancholy countdown toward the future. The more I began to feel uncertain about what was to come, the more I tried to stamp those places and sensations in my memory. As in Mogadishu six months earlier. I had a premonition that those memories would accompany me on a Journey that I couldn't decide to face but that I increasingly felt was crucial.

I said things like “Someday I'm going to miss your cooking and all the commotion you make before you go to bed.” They looked at me and didn't understand. They thought I was homesick for my house and for Hooyo and that that was why I was sad every now and then.

Though I realized it only later, the truth is that those six months flew by and gave breath to the desire to leave behind the condition of
tahrib
for good.

Slowly, day by day, the desire to join Hodan in Finland took shape, the urge to find a competent coach in a place where I wasn't an illegal and could do everything like a normal person, like any other girl.

More than anything else I wanted to feel normal, ordinary. I had to leave there. It was the only way to qualify for the London Olympics and try to win them. I understood that now.

At ten o'clock one morning, after planning everything in
secret, without saying a word to anyone, not even to Eshetu or to Amina and Yenee, I tossed my few belongings in my bag and left.

On the table I left the money for the week's rent and a note:
Dear Yenee and Amina, I'll miss you. Good luck, Samia.

I left on foot, alone. In my pocket, the money I'd earned working during those six months.

Like Hodan, I would get to Europe.

I would face the Journey.

It was July 15, 2011. I had just turned twenty and still had one more year to qualify for the Olympics.

I would make it, there was no doubt.

In a short time I'd be gone from there.

Safe at last.

Safe.

K
NOWING
WHERE
TO
FI
ND
the human traffickers was easy. All the Somalis in Addis Ababa knew it, and in recent weeks I had asked the right questions. Sooner or later every Somali living in Ethiopia would turn to them in order to get to Sudan. And from there to Libya. And then finally to Italy.

It wasn't difficult to track down Asnake.

As a cover, Asnake worked at the Addis Ababa market. I would have to pay the equivalent of seven hundred American dollars in reali
,
the Ethiopian currency. He or one of his friends would take me to Khartoum, in Sudan. I didn't have much more money, but I had no choice, and I didn't want to wait any longer. So I went to Asnake and he told me to be patient, that I couldn't leave right away; they would let me know when my day came.

I waited those last ten days trying to stay calm and not let on to Amina and Yenee; I didn't want any questions; I didn't want to explain myself.

Then one morning around ten o'clock Asnake sent a boy to the house to summon me.

We would leave three hours later. The first time I'd met Asnake he had warned me that I would have no time to prepare, that when the time came, it came, and I would have to leave immediately. But I really didn't need to prepare; I had been waiting for that moment for days now.

So I tossed my few belongings in my bag, rewound Hooyo's handkerchief with the shell around my wrist, took a bottle of water, left a note for Amina and Yenee, and left.

As I resolutely performed those small acts, I had no idea what I was committing myself to.

The meeting place was a garage that was used to store motorcycles or bicycles. When I arrived, almost everyone was already there waiting. All together there were a lot of us; I had always thought it would be just me, or at least just a few of us. Instead I counted seventy-two of us.

We were left there for an hour, not knowing what to do, inside that garage with the rolling shutter pulled down. Crammed into a tiny space. With each passing minute I wondered what would happen. I hugged the bag tightly under my arm. It was my past, my history: Right away I felt the need to make contact with something familiar, a memory. Surrounded by so many people you're likely to lose yourself, to give up; I realized that right away. There were mothers with children, a lot of women, and even some elderly people. The acrid smell of gasoline and burned oil quickly tainted what little oxygen there was; in addition, the sweating bodies soon gave off a nauseating odor. We were close together, packed so tightly that the skin of our arms touched. Under the
veils we were drenched; the men had drops of perspiration on their faces. And so we waited. No one knew exactly for what.

After an hour the children began crying. That senseless waiting was getting on our nerves. We would have to wait longer. After another hour the shutter was rolled up and a Land Rover arrived with six men.

When I realized that all seventy-two of us were expected to crowd into the open bed of the jeep, my legs buckled and I had to grab hold of the woman standing beside me. Some of the others were desperate; a few seemed to know it all.

With no time to think, we were ordered to pile everything we had in a corner. Everything. They would see to our bags later. Each of us was allowed only one small plastic bag. One of the traffickers distributed them. Nobody wanted to be separated from his baggage: Inside was all that remained of our lives. Like premature butterflies, we didn't want to leave our cocoons. I thought about the headband, the newspaper clipping; I touched the shell at my wrist. Then, like a lightbulb going off, came the thought of returning, running back to the house, tearing up the note on the table and acting like nothing had happened. Sooner or later the documents would come; I just had to hang on.

The traffickers came forward to seize the bags of those up ahead who didn't want to let go of them. A few people tried to protest; the answer was that if they didn't like it, they could stay there.

Did I really want to stay in Addis Ababa? For how long? My whole life? For how long would I have to run by moonlight, like a cockroach? I opened my bag and took out Aabe's headband, the photo of Mo Farah, a
qamar,
and a
garbasar,
and I left all the rest in the corner.

Immediately my bag was buried under a thousand others.

In silence the six men set out two benches in the center of the jeep's bed, so as to form four rows of seats. It seemed impossible that we could all squeeze in. But slowly, with a surgical precision that suggested the skill of certain craftsmen, they fit us in like pieces of a puzzle.

We had to keep our knees open to make room for a stranger's leg between them.

I was so wedged in that I was barely able to breathe. Again I had the urge to get out of there. Then a baby started wailing in my ear, and I came to my senses.

I tried to remember why I was there. I had to keep going.

The trip was to last three days; it was critical that we bring nothing with us but the plastic bag: The jeep would be our living space for seventy-two hours, they told us. We couldn't even bring water. They had jerricans for all of us.

They did another round of inspection and confiscated a few things from those who thought they were being smart.

After half an hour packed in like sardines, our breath already caught in our throats, we finally left. With the driver and his backup in the cab and seventy-two of us in the bed. The other four men stayed behind to scoop up the baggage.

We knew it once we were on our way: We were leaving our bags behind forever. Just as I was leaving behind forever my life as it had been up till then. I realized it right from the start, crushed between those unfamiliar bodies. Nothing would ever be the same. I was leaving behind Africa, my family, my land. My cocoon, big or small, good or bad though it might be. All that was left of my past was crammed inside a white plastic bag.

Was that all my life was worth up to that point? My heart told me otherwise, even as it pounded in my chest.

I held back tears, biting my lip hard. I closed my eyes in the midst of all those arms, shoulders, elbows, and I prayed to Aabe and to Allah. That they would let me find the way.

My way.

The first stretch was through the city. During those twenty minutes driving through Addis Ababa, I felt shame. A shame not divided by seventy-two but multiplied by seventy-two. I felt like a nonentity. We stopped at a traffic light, the one that led onto the national boulevard. The eyes that watched us were filled with a mixture of pity and suspicion.

Why had we let ourselves be reduced to that, they wondered.

Then we finally left the city and took the great desert highway, as everyone calls it: the big road leading to the north. At each jolt I thought my liver would burst, or my spleen, because of the dozens of elbows poking me on all sides. The city's asphalt had given way to the usual dirt road, which, exposed to the rain and brutal sunlight, was studded with deep potholes.

The road was absolutely straight, and we kept up a steady speed of about eighty kilometers an hour, but after a while some people began to feel sick in those conditions. I was having trouble breathing; every now and then I felt faint and had to make a superhuman effort, prying aside the others, to sit up a little and find some fresh air. I kept thinking of the wind, which Alì used to tell me to ride. Stretches of green swept by wind and graced by yellow butterflies. That's the image I held in my mind. That's what filled my eyes. That's what I forced myself to picture, so as not to think.

At first no one had the courage to complain; it was more like
a subdued moaning. Then the lament became louder until it spewed into vomiting.

Since we couldn't move our arms, the vomit ended up on everyone around us. We couldn't shield ourselves; we were windows open to the world and all types of weather.

We passed through two villages with not many inhabitants.

Those small communities had been preceded by huge, colorful billboards: a pair of lions with flowing manes and underneath the name of a travel agency advertising safaris: a big off-road vehicle, all polished and gleaming, with the inscription
CAPTURE
YOUR
DREAMS
.

At the sides of the road stood a handful of vendors exposing the vegetables or fruit picked that morning to the exhaust fumes of passing vehicles. Or wooden shacks selling potato chips, water, cookies, pretzels, juices, and chewing gum.

As we drove by, the few people on the street followed us with their eyes. Maybe they thought we were funny or ridiculous. Or maybe they were used to it and looked at us with no more curiosity than you show about a leaf that falls to the ground after being carried along by the wind. At the beginning, for the first few hours, I didn't want to feel like I was part of the group, and I did all I could to think of it as a temporary situation. I thought about the London Olympics in 2012 and I told myself that I had nothing to do with these people. But then I gave in. I accepted the fact that this was my condition now. I had turned into a
journeyer
. I had no choice, if I wanted to survive.

And in any case, we had become a single body.

Each time I shifted, I had to adapt to the five or six people next to me.

Every now and then along the way, we encountered women returning from the fields with huge baskets on their heads, or groups of barefoot children chasing after nothing, who stood dazed as they watched us go by: a jeep jam-packed with people.

Around eleven o'clock that night, after ten hours, we finally stopped. In the middle of nowhere. We had turned onto a side road and followed it for thirty minutes. It was pitch dark. There was nothing anywhere except a shed.

Getting out was much more difficult than getting in.

My joints were stiff; I had a hard time bending my knees and walking. The race. The race flashed in my mind like a bolt from the blue. The older people couldn't straighten their backs. Too many hours with their weight on the sacrum, and some hadn't even been able to rest their feet on the floor of the bed.

With a great deal of effort they made us get out, one by one. A woman who in Addis Ababa had smiled at me encouragingly now looked at me resentfully. She didn't recognize me. Hardened. Everyone seemed much more hardened. Withdrawn inside their armor.

We had to sleep in that shed lit by a single small, central neon fixture. The light was cold and eerie. On the floor, no mattresses. They brought the jeep in as well and closed the door.

Only then did I realize that until that moment I'd been living in suspension, as if I'd been holding my breath since the boy had come to summon me at the apartment in Addis Ababa. When they barred the door from the inside with a big bolt, and I found myself on the floor in a corner without so much as a mat, that's when it hit me.

This was the Journey. Hodan had already gone through it.

In an instant it all came back, along with the urge to vomit.
My body had become accustomed to potholes and abrupt jolts; lying still made my bowels churn. Many people threw up on the floor wherever they happened to be. I recalled people's eyes at the stoplight in Addis Ababa: They'd looked at us as if we were worthless nobodies, as if we were mere things being transported from one place to another.

None of us had said a word; none of us had protested. In the two hours we'd spent locked in that garage in Addis Ababa, with its reek of gasoline and sweat, we had managed to efface our dignity.

Before turning off the light they handed out cereal bars and advised us to get some rest. We would leave again at dawn, in six hours, at five in the morning.

The second day was even worse. The aches and soreness, which until then had been held in check by anger, had all intensified. My right shoulder was giving me excruciating pain. Having to sit still, squashed in without being able to move, was enough to drive you crazy. After a while I began to feel the need to move. I tried and tried; the only thing I was able to do was sit up a little straighter, which was a lifesaver. I was confined in a straitjacket.

Every once in a while someone screamed into the air.

Then, after a while, he quieted down.

We passed only one village, larger than the other two. It must have been market day because the road was lined with a parade of stalls selling clothes, shoes, straw hats, sunglasses, American jeans, motor oil and windshield wipers, women's veils, men's turbans, cucumbers, peaches, lettuce, tomatoes, cookies, milk, Coca-Cola, you name it. It all passed swiftly in front of us like a mirage.

Someone yelled at the driver to stop, but he kept going as if he hadn't heard.

Then the terrain turned to low-lying brush; the trees vanished altogether, giving way to scrub that was all around. Like the ever-present dust that was kicked up as we drove along, coating the jeep and our heads within minutes. That fine powder. I loved it. It was just like the dust that Alì and I used to kick up, which ended up in the old men's
shaat
. I caught myself laughing. The woman next to me looked at me as if I were nuts. She didn't approve of me. She clicked her tongue to say that I was unspeakable. I ignored her. I went on laughing to myself, lulled by memories of being safe.