“He tried to talk nicely to the other people. ‘We wait,’ he said. ‘We try again. But it will take time.’ ”
PART IV
Cape Town
Abris
At first, Asad did not understand that he had aborted his American plans. He thought that he was simply marking time.
“When the smuggler told us that we must be patient, that he would reconnect the line, I thought, Okay, that’s fine. But I cannot eat my money while I wait.”
He had blown twenty thousand rand on his attempt to get to America, but he still had fifty thousand change from the sale of his Sterkstroom business.
For twenty-eight thousand rand he bought a pickup truck and spread word that he could deliver stock to spaza shops throughout the province of Gauteng.
“My thinking was: I buy the car. I use it to make money. When it is time to go to America, I sell the car and get the twenty-eight thousand back.”
The way he remembers it now, his new business was successful from the start. Mayfair is a hub connecting every Somali throughout the north of the country; from there, it does not take much time for word to spread. And within an hour’s drive, there were literally hundreds of Somali shop owners without their own transport.
His phone started ringing the day after he took possession of the pickup. Within a week, he was declining work. The rent at his lodge in Mayfair was six hundred rand a month. He calculated that if business remained good he would be making that in ten days; the rest of each month’s takings would be profit. In his daily prayers, he found himself both thanking and berating his God. “You make things so easy for me now,” he muttered. “While my family was still here, nothing was possible.”
He understood now that Somalis in South Africa lived in two zones. There was Mayfair in Johannesburg, Marabastad in Pretoria, the town center of Uitenhage: each of the country’s urban centers had a Somali space. These pockets of the world were safe. There would be no guns pointed at one’s head here, no worrying about the private thoughts of one’s neighbors.
But unless one was already rich or well connected or lucky enough to find a good job, living in these spaces kept one poor. To make money one had to venture into the townships or the shacklands or to rural hamlets like Sterkstroom and take one’s chances among black South Africans. With hard work, their money would find its way to your pockets. But in exchange for your riches, you lived in fear. Anyone could kill you, not just strangers who come with gun in hand, but also your neighbor, the quiet man whose car you took the trouble to repair. He, too, could come and slaughter you, and the people you thought you had come to know would look away.
Asad was reaping the benefits of both worlds. He bedded down each night in the security of Mayfair. But he was also making a little money. Yes, he spent his days outside the Somali bubble, driving from spaza shop to wholesale store. But the very fact that he was on the move kept him safe. He would come to a shop, help carry the stock from his pickup into the store, and then leave. There were no Madodas in his life now. No sitting behind cash registers worrying about the money above one’s knees. No listening to the noise of the corrugated-iron roof in the night.
He slept well in Mayfair. South Africa was not going to take his life. Less than a month after she left, Foosiya sent word that she had given birth to a son. There were now three people in the world who made him what he was: a father and a husband.
—
Several of Asad’s new customers owned shops in the townships around Pretoria—Mabopane, Soshanguve, Mamelodi, Atteridgeville. Once or twice a week, when his last delivery of the day was in one of these places, he would drive to the Somali section of Marabastad, Pretoria’s equivalent of Mayfair, and spend the night in a Somali lodge.
That is where he met an AliYusuf store owner called AbdiKadir.
Abdi was a man of ritual. When the sun set each day, he would turn his store in Mabopane over to his shopkeeper, drive to Marabastad, and eat his dinner in the Somali restaurant across the street from the Home Affairs office. Asad would take his dinner in the same restaurant. It did not take long before the two AliYusuf men were eating together.
On the third or fourth evening of their acquaintance, Abdi tossed a proposal into Asad’s lap. His business was thriving, Abdi said, but he had no car, and the costs of hiring transport irked him. If Asad were to bring his car into the business, Abdi said, he would get 50 percent equity in return.
Owning another shop had not figured in Asad’s plans. He was happy with his mobile life. And he had it in his mind that one day soon he would up and leave. A car could be sold in a day. Half of a business was another story.
It was too tempting an offer to turn down flat. He chewed on it for a day or two and tried to absorb what it might mean to put down roots again. He told himself that he would put aside time to go and see Abdi’s business. But he was always busy, and work did not take him to Mabopane; the idea soon drifted from his mind.
Two or three weeks later, his cell phone rang, and it was Abdi, asking if Asad had thought about the offer. Asad was in a Pretoria township when he took the call, less than half an hour away. He hung up and drove straight to Mabopane.
Abdi was a man of easy laughter and light spirit; his rapport with his customers seemed comfortable. His shop was ordered, his stock clearly tailored to a customer base he knew well. There seemed to be a serenity about the place.
Asad visited two or three more times before offering Abdi a proposition of his own.
“I told him I liked the deal,” Asad recalls, “but that I did not want ever to sleep in the shop. I did not want ever to spend more than an hour or two in the shop. He said fine, but I must be reasonable. If there are times when there is nobody available to manage the shop, I must help out.”
In January 2007, the two men went into business. Asad moved his base from Mayfair to a lodge in Marabastad. He was happy there; it was a small version of Mayfair, a pure Somali world. When one slept, one could close the eyes in the back of one’s head.
The shop was even more successful than Asad had calculated. By the end of March, his share of the profit was more than twenty thousand rand. The business partners hired a young man to drive Asad’s pickup, and Asad used his profits to buy a sedan and start a taxi business, ferrying Somalis between Pretoria and Johannesburg. He charged some 15 percent less than the minibus taxis that traded on the same route and took grim pleasure in the fact that, whatever business he entered, undercutting South Africans’ prices was easy.
What were his thoughts about Foosiya and his children at this time? I frame it as a question because I’m not sure that he is able truly to reinhabit this moment in his life. Given all that has happened since, too much is at stake.
The first time I ask, he tells me that for each second of each day he was thinking of Foosiya and the children and of the future. But when I ask him again several weeks later, his answer is different.
“I forgot the other thing,” he says.
“What other thing?”
“I forgot the plan to go to Brazil and kept working.”
Months later, when I remind him of his words, he shows a flash of impatience.
“I was thinking of the future every fucking day,” he snaps.
In the moment of his rebuke, I feel duly chastised. I sit with pen in hand, looking out over the Blikkiesdorp street, and avoid his eyes. Who on earth am I to second-guess a man’s feelings about the woman and children he has just lost? How can I presume to see that far into a person’s inner world?
But in the afternoon, sitting alone in my office, the heat of that moment now cooled, I know that it is himself he is rebuking, not me. I have brought to the surface a feeling of discomfort with which it isn’t easy to live.
He had more than enough money to head north. He could have rejoined Foosiya anytime. And if the idea of living among the Isaaq in Somaliland was unbearable, he might have twisted her arm into settling elsewhere in East Africa, perhaps in Addis again.
I
drew his ire, I think, because I had asked what it was he wanted, and the answer lay beyond any words he might wish to utter. He desired more than anything to be a husband and a father, but not in the world he knew. He would have to burst through a wall and into another world. Only there, on the other side, could he build a family. His planned trip to São Paulo had failed. He did not know how else to burst through that wall. Perhaps if he began making money again, another way would come.
—
Soon after he bought into the Mabopane business, Foosiya phoned him with an ultimatum.
“I left South Africa on November 18, 2006,” she said, her voice icily formal. “If you have not joined me by November 18, 2007, we will be divorced and I will look for another man and he will be father to my children.”
It was February 2007. He had nine months. He resolved that he would be with Foosiya by then. Whether he believed his resolution, neither of us knows.
—
He spent more time at the shop in Mabopane than he would have liked. It is hard to judge what is going to happen in a business day by day. A family member of Abdi’s falls ill, and he must take her to the hospital, and the shop ought not stand empty. Or the shopkeeper they have hired part-time has urgent business in Johannesburg. There were always reasons for Asad to be called.
He soon became familiar with some of the regulars. As in Sterkstroom, and in Kirkwood before that, he took comfort in old people. He enjoyed their slowness, their evenness of temper. They smiled with their eyes, not just their mouths. They took time to greet.
Two people in particular warmed his heart. One was a woman called Evelyn. When he looks back now, he recalls that she was not especially old—fifty, perhaps—but at the time he thought of her as a woman of seventy. She was alone and she was poor; perhaps that is what made him think of her as a pensioner. There were days when she lingered at the storefront without buying, and Asad knew that she had no money. He would slip her a loaf of bread and make sure not to make eye contact, saving her the shame of acknowledging his charity.
Then there was an old man named Bra Sam. He was positively ancient, in his late eighties at least. From Asad’s place behind the counter, he had a clear line of vision to Bra Sam’s front door, some fifty yards down the street. He would watch the old man’s progress from home to shop, his stick stretched out before him like an antenna, feeling the gravel surface for the stone or ditch that might trip him. Upon his arrival, Bra Sam’s eyes would flash with triumph. He, too, would get a free loaf of bread, Asad’s acknowledgment of the feat of the journey.
In the feelings he harbored for these old people, I wonder whether he was not searching for a bond, one strong enough to keep him in South Africa. Way below consciousness, I suspect he knew that he was to stay a long while.
—
On the afternoon of April 21, 2007, Asad and his driver went to Pretoria to buy stock. They returned to Mabopane in the twilight and parked at the rear of the shop. Asad lifted a box from the back of the pickup, walked into the shop, and greeted Abdi.
From outside the back door, he heard a scream. It was not the scream of somebody who had dropped a heavy load on his foot or stepped into a ditch and sprained his ankle. It was a yawning, existential scream. Yindy came instantly to his mind—the terrible sounds she emitted when she was shot in the leg under the shade of her balbalo. He put the box down and made for the door.
The moment Asad appeared in the doorway, one of the three men surrounding Asad’s driver lifted his gun, pointed it at Asad, and fired. Above his head, the wooden doorframe shattered, and a shower of splinters hit the back of his neck. As he turned to take cover inside, he heard another shot. His sweater tugged against him, as if some fleeting demon had tried briefly to tear it off. Later, when it was all over, he would find a neat round bullet hole in his sweater’s hood.
A single thought filled his mind: he must save his precious pickup; he must hide the keys. To his irritation, he could not recall where he had put them down.
“The keys!” he shouted to Abdi once he was back in the shop.
“What?”
“Where are they?”
“What keys?”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw them. They were lying in plain sight, on a table behind the counter. Where to put them? He could throw them in the dustbin, but that was so obvious a place. He stood there frozen—at the time it seemed for some minutes, but it could only have been for a second or two—staring over the counter into the faces of the customers in front of the shop. They stared back at him, their faces quite inscrutable. Did they understand what was happening? Why did they not run away? He dropped the keys onto the floor and kicked them under the counter, the sounds of the robbers’ footfalls in his ears.
The three men were in the shop now, and the one who had shot at Asad told him to turn around and put his hands in the air. The moment he did so, he heard the thud of a pistol butt against the back of his head. He felt curiously distant from the part of him that had just been attacked, as if it were the tabletop or the wall that had come in for a beating.
“I told you to lie on your stomach.”
Asad dropped to his knees, then stretched himself flat against the bags of mealie-meal that lay on the floor. Soon, he was joined by the driver, Abdi, and the shopkeeper, whom the robbers had dragged from the toilet.
“Brother, the four of us were lying there side by side on the bags of mealie-meal,” Asad tells me. “And our customers were standing in front of the shop watching. I could hear them talking quietly to each other. The robbers picked up the shopkeeper, took him to the other side of the shop, and asked him where the money was. He said there was no money here, aside from what was in the till. They hit him very badly, brother. They hit him in the face with a bottle. Then they kicked his teeth out. I was lying facedown. I could not see. But I could hear. The sound of a person’s face breaking, brother. It is something I do not know how to describe.
“They left the shopkeeper on the floor. He was quiet. He must have been unconscious. They came back to us. They wanted to know where the money was, where the safe was. They checked our pockets.
“One of them grabbed my sweater and turned me around onto my back. He kept shouting, ‘Don’t look at me, Somali! Don’t look at my face!’
“He asked me for the key to the pickup. I said I didn’t know. He picked up a bottle and raised it above his head.
“Brother, here in the Western Cape, bottles are plastic. Up in Gauteng, they are glass. Thick glass. I used my arm to protect my face. I heard a crack. I knew that my arm was broken. I did not need an X-ray to know.”
Asad found his assailant’s eyes. It was an instinctive thing to do. A man has just smashed your arm as if you are a carcass. You show him your humanity; you do not even know you are doing it.
“The second our eyes met,” Asad says, “he grew very, very angry.
“ ‘What the fuck did I tell you? I fucking told you not to look! Turn around! Turn the fuck around!’
“He dragged me by my feet away from the mealie-meal bags onto the cold floor. Then he started hitting me on the back of the head with his feet. My head bounced off the floor and he hit it again. Hit, up, hit, up, hit, up, like my head was a ball. I felt dizzy. I started losing my vision.
“But, brother, the thing I must share with you from that time is my mood. I felt no fear. Even as my head was being bashed in, the thought that I might die did not come to me. I was worried about the pickup.”
From outside the storefront, he heard a voice. It was Evelyn’s. Unmistakably. It was scratched and gnarled, as if her throat had dried out many years ago, and the words had to scrape their way out.
“Look under the counter,” she said in Pedi. “He kicked them under the counter.”
Asad heard footsteps and then the jangle of keys. And with that, the mood in the shop changed. The voices of the robbers grew light, almost cheerful.
“One of them went to the front of the shop and addressed the customers.
“ ‘Does anyone want anything?’ he asked.
“He told them to come around the back. Then he opened the door for them.
“The four of us lay facedown on the floor listening to our customers walk around our bodies. They were helping themselves to bags of mealie-meal, to frozen chickens, to airtime. Some of them took cartons of cigarettes.”
—
The robbers left. Asad heard his pickup’s engine rev. The Somalis lay silently on the floor. Then Asad staggered to his feet and stumbled through the back door.
“Where are you going?” Abdi asked.
“To save my pickup,” Asad replied.
It was as if he had cracked a whip. Abdi and the driver jumped to their feet and followed Asad, and the three men sprinted through the darkening streets. They had not even checked to see if their shopkeeper was still alive.
They found the pickup abandoned three blocks away.
“If you start the car with the alarm on,” Asad explains, “the engine cuts out in a few minutes. And the button to disarm it is in a place you would not think to look; it is right above the driver’s head.”
An hour or so later the police arrived. The Somalis were taken to the station, where they made statements, and then the police took them to the hospital. The shopkeeper was badly hurt; his jaw was broken, and one of his cheekbones was cracked. He was missing several teeth.
As for Asad, his arm was X-rayed and set in plaster, as he had expected. But it was his right eye that bothered him most. It had throbbed throughout his police interview, and when he closed his left eye he realized that the injured one was almost blind. He raised his hand to touch it and felt a thick, rubbery swelling. He pressed gently against it to feel if it was as soft and liquid as it felt; a spear of pain shot deep into the inside of his head.
A Man of Good Hope Page 25