The family and its possessions were loaded onto the back of a truck before dawn one morning. By the time the sun rose, they were driving through a desert landscape. It stayed precisely the same, just dry sand and scrawny bush and rock, for mile upon mile upon mile, until the sun went down and the truck stopped in a small village and they slept. They rose early the following morning and drove through more desert, arriving at their destination at around noon.
Everybody in this place called Wardheer was Ogadeni; the town was in Ethiopia, but it was really Somali. Even the currency people used was Somali in the center of the town, Ethiopian on the outskirts, and Asad wondered how one knew where the Somali currency zone ended and the Ethiopian zone began. There were many money changers, and they were always calculating and recalculating the rate of exchange; it was changing all the time, every hour, sometimes even more often.
He now knew for certain that something was horribly wrong. There were no American officials here to quiz them on whether Yindy was their relative. There was no airport from which a flight might take off and fly to America. They were deep in the desert. This place was full of reer baadiye, nomadic people who walked in from the bush, stinking and ignorant. It was the opposite of America.
There was a new, starker quality to his estrangement from the family. The moment they left Dire Dawa, in fact, he had felt a fresh coldness emanating from them. Even Hawo, who still looked at him fondly and with worry, stiffened when he tried to speak with her about the future. It was clear that she had been instructed to say nothing.
—
Asad now spent even more time away from the family than he had in Dire Dawa. He would leave at sunrise, carrying his breakfast in his hand, and return late at night to find that a plate of food had been left out for him. He was a ghost now; the boldest sign of his presence in the household was the food in his stomach.
To show me how he spent his days and evenings away from Yindy’s family, he takes my notebook from my hands once again and begins to sketch Wardheer.
“It is a beautiful town,” he says, as he draws, “but there is too much sand. It is thick and soft. When you walk, you get tired after just a moment or two. So nobody walks. Everyone sits for a long, long time.
“The town center is shaped in a circle,” he says, tapping his sketch with his fingernail. “There is an inner circle in the middle surrounded by tall, beautiful trees. And in the very center there is one tree, much bigger than all the rest. It is called the tala’ada.
“Then there is the outer circle. Between it and the inner circle, the sand is very, very thick. You think it looks easy to walk on. You learn soon that it isn’t. At the edge of the outer circle are all the cafeterias. That is where the whole town comes to drink tea and coffee and to eat and to discuss. And because it is shaped like a circle, everyone can see everyone. So the people sit there drinking their tea and they watch.
“Beyond the circle are the houses where the people live. And all the people live in their lineages, so one section is one lineage, another section is a second lineage, and so on. Even from this drawing,” he says, patting the page, “you can see that it is beautiful. All these people sitting around the edge of a huge circle drinking and eating and talking; and, in the circle, all these trees.”
I could not visit Wardheer on my trip to East Africa, for the Ethiopian military does not permit a foreigner to wander that far into the Somali region. I look for photographs on the Internet. The only ones there, it seems, are taken from satellites. This is the one that best describes Asad’s circle:
In the time before Yindy’s family left, Asad would spend most evenings in the town circle, watching. What he noticed, above all, was that this place was very poor, far poorer than anything he had seen since his days in the refugee camp at Liboi.
“There were two sorts of people,” Asad tells me, “the ones who would sit in the cafeterias drinking and eating, and the ones who would sit a short distance away and watch. Nobody would openly beg. That was too disgraceful. But there was an indirect way of begging. At the call to prayer, the people eating and drinking would get up and go to the mosque to pray. After they had finished praying, the poor ones would enter the mosque. The cafeteria customers will have left some coins for them.”
—
How did Asad come to know that Yindy’s family would move from Wardheer without him? He is not sure. Perhaps it was simply implicit. Several months had passed since their arrival in Wardheer, maybe as many as six, and the family began to pack their belongings. Nothing was said to Asad. He simply knew that he was not going along. That’s how he thinks it happened; he is not sure.
He recalls helping them carry their belongings out of the house. He understood that the moment they left he would lose his home, for the place was rented, and new tenants were moving in. His only visible expression of protest, he recalls, was to refuse to help them carry their possessions from outside the house to the truck. He remained indoors, staring into space, wondering what on earth he was going to do.
When the area around the front of the house fell silent, he took it that they had collected the last of their possessions and were gone. He left the house and walked in the direction of where the truck had stood. The sand through which he walked was very hot; the heat coursed through his legs and up his torso and into his head. He was on fire with anger, with sheer rage. He was also deeply afraid.
Sitting in my car, all these years later, he still marvels at what happened to him.
“They just left me in Wardheer. I had nowhere to stay, no one to look after me. I was twelve or thirteen years old. They thought that in Islii I had been a wild boy who could sleep anywhere. But it is not true. I was in a known place. Other kids could give me money. The Hotel Taleh was a roof over my head. Here I was truly alone. I was full of worry. What will happen to me? The only people I knew were in Islii. How can a twelve-year-old get himself from Wardheer to Islii? It was not possible.”
—
In the time before the family left, Asad began to notice a group of three boys at the town circle. They were always there, day in and day out, and he found the sight of them funny, for the first was tall and thin, the second short and fat, and the third kind of in between. Something else about them struck him: although they seemed unconnected to any adults, they carried themselves with confidence, as if they knew where they belonged. But where did they belong? Toward the end of the evening, as the circle was emptying, they would vanish; where to, Asad was not sure.
Now, on his first evening alone, he approached the tall, scrawny one.
“Where do you go to at night?” he asked.
The thin one looked him up and down. The way Asad remembers it, the boy had a stick lodged in the side of his mouth, and he chewed on it thoughtfully while Asad spoke.
“My people have left Wardheer,” Asad continued. “The house in which I have always slept now belongs to other people.”
The thin boy looked over Asad’s shoulder, somewhere in the distance; Asad thought that he was about to walk away.
“Wait for us to finish working,” he said, “and we will show you.”
Asad waited a long time. It was not until the cafeteria workers were packing away their plastic chairs that the tall boy went to the other two and the three of them whispered and looked at Asad. Then one of them signaled for him to come. They led him around the back of a cafeteria. Tucked into a corner, under an awning, were three long pieces of cardboard.
“These are our beds,” the tall one said. “Find yourself something to sleep on.”
“That was my first night without Yindy’s family,” Asad tells me. “The second night, we slept on a street corner a little way back from the circle. On the third night, we slept in a mosque. That is how it goes. You sleep in a cafeteria for a few nights, until the owner chases you away, and then you find somewhere else to sleep.”
During the day, the boys worked. There were two ways of earning money. The first was to scour the town for plastic bags and,
once one had a few, to take them to the market beyond the edge of the circle where men buy mira to chew. You watch a man buy his mira and then offer to sell him a plastic bag so that he can carry his purchase home.
The second was more lucrative, but far more difficult. Each cafeteria on the town circle kept its water in a four-hundred-liter barrel. Wardheer was very hot, Asad says, the hottest place he has ever lived, and the restaurant owners would bury these huge barrels in the ground, just the top half sticking out, for water stored in direct sunlight would be too hot to drink. On a busy day, a cafeteria would have to replenish its container several times.
That is how the three boys earned a living. The town had but one source of water, a well at the edge of the circle, just off the main road leading into Wardheer.
“The soft sand makes water very hard to transport,” Asad says. “You cannot use a wheelbarrow, for instance. And so, when a cafeteria needs water, the waiter gives you a sixty-liter drum. You carry it to the well. There is always a very long queue. You wait your turn, fill the drum, and then you close the cap very tight. The drum is much too heavy to carry. You kick it back to the cafeteria. You call the waiter, and he picks up the drum and empties it into the barrel; he is much stronger than you are. Then he brings you another empty drum. While you are bringing back the second drum, they have already finished the water from the first. The restaurants paid one hundred Somali shillings a barrel. That is enough to buy a cup of tea or a glass of milk. What was more important was the leftover food the cook would give you when you brought water for him. Sometimes, he didn’t want to give it to you. Then you had spent half the day kicking a barrel for nothing.”
At first, Asad could not get any work. Nobody in town knew him as a water carrier, and thus nobody came to him. And he was shy. But in the absence of work, he was going hungry. On the first evening, one of the three boys left Asad a few morsels of his dinner. On the second, one of them gave him a few shillings with which to buy a glass of camel milk. He could not live off their largesse. By the end of the third day he was so ravenously hungry that he could not sleep. They were in a mosque that night. He got up and walked around the empty building and ground his teeth, imagining that he was chewing food.
On the fourth morning, the boys went their separate ways, as they always did. They would work alone during the day, each looking for his own packets and kicking his heavy barrel across the sand; they would only come together again well into the evening, once the restaurants stopped calling for more water. Asad picked a cafeteria and went inside, and when a waiter came to chase him away, Asad pushed out his chest and announced that he was here to carry water. The waiter shouted that he had no need for thin little boys and told Asad if he did not get out from under his feet, he would kick him into the sand.
Asad turned his back and left and sat down on the hot sand and felt the sun throbbing on his head and allowed the sand to run through his fingers. He steeled himself to stand up and try another waiter, but before he could get to his feet, something large and heavy hit him on the very top of his head. The thud echoed along the walls of his skull, and he reeled backward. The waiter who had just turfed him into the sand was walking away from him. A sixty-liter barrel lay at his side. He had just been asked to fetch water.
And so it began. By the time the sun went down he had done four or five trips to the well and his stomach was full and he was so sore and so tired that he could barely stand.
That is how he remembers some days. Other days, he says that the work was impossibly hard; for the first week or two, he was quite sure that he could not keep it up and that he was destined to die. When he woke in the mornings, his weariness was so profound he was not certain whether he could rise, let alone kick another barrel of water through the soft sand. Lying there one morning, he felt his breathing grow awry. For a moment, he wondered whether some invisible creature was sitting on his stomach, until it dawned on him that his own panic had seized his diaphragm and contorted it into a clench. He truly did not know whether he could survive this life. And if he could not, if he fell very ill, he wondered whether anyone would care enough to nurse him.
Sitting in my car, he ducks his chin and brushes the back of his hand over his chest and down his stomach. “I became very thin,” he says. “I have never become fat again.”
I glance down at the parts of his body his hand has shown, and, momentarily, I glimpse his form through his eyes. He is indeed lean, but he is also broad-shouldered and tall, and I have always understood his body as a badge of elegance. For him, I now realize, it is a legacy of hardship, a mold in which his life experiences have found form.
Aside from those who gave him work, he avoided contact with adults, for they asked questions. “I told some truths and some lies,” Asad recalls. “An adult would come up to me in the street and ask why I was alone. I would shrug. He would ask my lineage. I would answer truthfully: Reer Abdullahi. But when he asked where my family was, I would say they were all in Somalia. I am not sure why I lied. Sometimes I would say, It is none of your business, and walk away.”
As for the boys, Asad warms whenever he speaks of them. It is the in-between one whom he remembers most vividly, the boy who was neither short nor tall, neither thin nor fat. His name was Khadar.
“We called him Zena,” Asad tells me, “which means ‘news’ in Amharic. He was a spy, always picking up information and taking it to other people, even though nobody forced him to. It is just something he enjoyed doing. The other two were Abdi, the short one, and Tube, the tall one. I have no memory of us fighting. Well, we would have small fights, as children do. But never anything serious. We sometimes lent each other money. We cared about each other. Even long after I stopped staying with them, I would come and find them, I would do things for them.”
I ask Asad what sorts of news Zena brought to the boys from the world of adults, and my question is not innocent. The more I read about the places where Asad lived as a child, the more astonished I become. Asad is telling me his story with a child’s innocence, questions of history and of politics all but invisible. Through my reading, I discover that he was living in the midst of something of a catastrophe. I ask Asad about the news Zena brought from the world of adults because I know that the town circle in Wardheer had been the scene of a massacre just two years before Asad arrived. The Ethiopian army accused the town’s leading families of harboring Somali rebels; it took its revenge by dragging several dozen of Wardheer’s most prominent residents into the circle and executing them in front of their peers.
For several days I try to prompt this information from Asad without suggesting it myself, but nothing is forthcoming. Eventually, I ask him if he did not hear of the killings that occurred before he arrived.
“Yes, you are right,” he says. “In 1994, the army killed a lot of people in the town center, nearly a hundred, I think. The rebels were in town. The army tried to catch the president of the rebels. The town defended him. People were talking about it when I got there. The kids I was sleeping with were witnesses. They would say the names of people. They would show where and how they were killed.”
Beyond that, he has nothing to say, not how he felt about it then, nor how he feels about it now. It is something I have brought in; it does not arise from the feelings his memories evoke.
I imagine Zena and Tube and Asad in the town circle in the dead of night. Zena and Tube lead Asad to a spot in the inner circle and point to it and tell him that it is the ground on which the head of Reer Abrahim was killed. Zena takes Tube by the throat and enacts the scene. The rest of the town is still. In all of Wardheer, there are just three people awake, three street kids, and they are replaying the town’s great trauma.
I wonder about the countless events that do not come into a person’s head when he is telling his life story to a chronicler. Is it simply a question of chance? Had we not been in Blikkiesdorp, but elsewhere, in some Somali settlement in an American city, for instance, would Asad’s recollections of Wardheer have tr
iggered very different memories? Would the reenactment of the massacre have taken center stage? Or does it simply lie untouched, out of reach, on the deep ocean bed of his inner world?
Dire Dawa, 2012
I was walking past Dire Dawa’s railway station on a Saturday afternoon in April 2012 when the heavens opened. Solid sheets of water slammed down onto the street and onto the backs and the heads of passersby. People scattered, their shirts clinging heavily to their shoulders and chests, goose bumps welling up on their necks and arms.
I scurried onto the veranda of the large café opposite the railway station. Already it was filling with wet bodies and hot breath, all of us refugees from the torrent. After an initial flurry—furniture being rearranged, waiters weaving their way through the crowds in response to the deluge of new orders—the café calmed. We sat there, about a hundred of us, staring at the rain. The noise of the storm drowned the sounds of conversation, so that it seemed we were sitting in silence. A lovely feeling descended upon me: the rhythm of the rain outside, the protection of the shelter within, the many faces looking out; for a while, the gathering felt almost religious, as if we were paying homage to a force much larger than us.
As I sat there, my mind played an odd trick. I wondered whether people had huddled together in this very space thirty-five years earlier, in 1977, when the skies over Dire Dawa were filled, not with rain, but with fighter jets, the Somali air force’s Russian MiGs in battle against the Ethiopian military’s F-16s. I have tried to find out how badly the city was damaged during the war and how many of its civilians lost their lives, but the documentation I have found skates over these questions. What I do know is that the city was under siege for several months and that the crux of the battle was for air supremacy. Relations between Dire Dawa’s residents could only have been tense, for while most of them wished desperately for the Ethiopian forces to successfully defend the city, some wanted the Somalis to overrun it.
A Man of Good Hope Page 8