“Thank you for taking me out of that house so I could die in peace. For two years, I never smiled as much as I have smiled since you came.” She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. They never opened again, and I knew she was gone.
I sat there for a long time, unable to move away from her.
Hasan eventually came back and found me. “Idil, you can’t help her.”
I continued to sit, holding Layla’s lifeless hand and staring into the distance.
“Idil.” Hasan came even closer. “Let her go, Idil.”
I lifted Layla’s hand, kissed it, and placed it in her lap.
“Here.” Hasan extended a white sheet one of the villagers had brought. “Cover her.”
I did, and then slipped out of the seat to join my family.
Amina emitted an ear-splitting cry when she saw me leave the truck alone. Adam wept so hard he gasped for air between sobs.
*
Hasan, with the help of villagers, hastily prepared funeral plans for Layla and the old man and then returned to us. “It is time,” he said. “The service will start soon.” Covered in blood, dirt, and oil stains, he led us a short distance along the road to a nearby masjid.
The crowd was much thinner than it had been by the truck after we were first attacked. During the brief funeral, the imam encouraged us to pray for the dead and for their return to their Creator, a peaceful sleep in their grave, and an easy reckoning on the Day of Judgment. We stood beside those who didn’t know Layla or the man. Later that night, we sat around a fire in an open field that served as a temporary camp for the passengers of the lost truck.
I didn’t know Layla well, but the story she’d told me about her family came back to me. “They drowned in a boat on the Red Sea near Yemen,” she’d told me as we sat in the truck just that afternoon. “Ahmed refused to let me leave with them, even after my father offered him money. I didn’t cry when the news of their deaths came for I had lost them long before that. It was then I stopped crying.” Layla had closed her eyes and stopped talking. I didn’t ask her any more about it. Now as I sat at the campfire, her loss hit me like a wave and I wept hours after the others went to sleep.
*
“I found someone who can take us tonight for five hundred dollars.” Hasan brought the good news and the man seven days after the attack. “But he says there are no guarantees.”
“No guarantees?” I asked.
“The Kenyan border guards are on high alert, so we might not be able to cross. He wants to be paid even if we don’t cross.”
The man limped in our direction. “This is your family? I didn’t know there were so many. Five hundred dollars isn’t enough. It’s dangerous work for so little money.”
Hasan spoke in a calm and measured tone. “Barre, you agreed to a family of five for five hundred to take us to the camp. That was the deal we made at the market.”
Barre’s mouth twitched. “I didn’t know children were included. Two children and three adults. Five hundred dollars isn’t enough. I only want what’s fair.” Barre’s eyes darted like a dragonfly in search of a place to land.
“How much are you asking?”
Barre’s face brightened. He swayed back and forth in an exaggerated motion. “I’m a reasonable man. I’ll take you for two hundred per adult and a hundred dollars for each child. That’s a fair price to get you all the way to Ifo camp. Cheaper than most.”
Hasan looked at me for confirmation.
I nodded.
“We’ll pay,” he said.
“Deal.” Barre shook hands with Hasan.
“I’ll be back in an hour, so have the money ready,” Barre said, and left without waiting for a response.
Barre came back two hours later, driving a battered old car. He lurched back and forth as if his feet were threatening to slip from under him. Green crust from the chat he’d been chewing formed crisscross lines on his lips. His tongue, pink and raw, came out in slow motion, licked his lips, and darted back inside. He brushed his right hand over his eyes as if to rub the sleep away. The words were heavy in his mouth. “Is the money ready?” He labored over each syllable.
Hasan handed him some cash. “We’ll give you four hundred dollars now and four hundred when we arrive.”
Barre counted the bills with practiced hands. “Thank you. Get in. We have to leave soon because it is going to take five hours to get there.” Barre inspected under the hood of the car, turned the key in the ignition, and started driving. He hummed a tune when he reached the main road.
We listened quietly as Barre continued to serenade us. “I should have been a singer. My mother said so herself from the time I was a boy.” He tapped a finger on the steering wheel to keep with the beat.
I fell into a deep sleep, soothed by Barre’s songs, and when he nudged me awake, I didn’t know where I was. It took me a minute to realize I was in Barre’s truck. “Are we at the camp?”
“We are almost there. You need to be awake in case they ask any questions. They usually don’t once I bribe them, but you never know. Let the children sleep. If the guards see them, they probably won’t wake them.”
“Okay.”
Barre started driving again, until we came upon six men sitting around a fire in front of a border outpost. Four of them stood up when they saw us and pointed their rifles in our direction.
Barre stopped the car and turned the engine off, but he took his time getting out, deliberately avoiding quick movements. He raised his hands before he walked to where the guards stood, and they in turn lowered their weapons. Barre and the men greeted each other like old acquaintances. They shook hands and chatted for a minute. Their smiles brightened when Barre gave some money to one of them. Barre walked back to his vehicle at a leisurely pace. He glanced back twice to assure himself of his accomplishment. “The magic of money,” he said when he came to us.
I couldn’t believe it was that easy to cross into another country until the image of the men sitting by their fire grew smaller and receded into the distance. The fifty-miles between the border and Ifo refugee camp was the easiest trip of my life. The fear of not getting out of Somalia and away from Jamac, Father, Rhoda, and Omar fell away and I found myself imagining a future with challenges that I could overcome. The car left the main road and headed toward the camp, and the bright red sandy landscape confirmed that I was far away from the bleak outlook of my former life.
“Here we are,” Barre announced at the sight of the endless shacks that littered the place. “I think you line up there.” He pointed at the only brick structure. “I could take you to the market if you want to eat something before you start,” Barre suggested. We took him up on his offer. Barre waved us a cheerful good-bye at the front of small eatery. “I must visit a friend before I go.” He walked toward the west section of the camp, carefully counting the second half of his payment.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
By the time we had eaten and walked back to the registration site, the line at the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in the Ifo Camp looped around the huts surrounding the brick office. I had left the children with their grandmother under a tree to rest while Hasan and I waited in line.
“Should I have my family here to register?” I asked the woman ahead of us.
She moved a baby from her back and placed it on her chest to nurse. “They don’t have to stand here. They can come later for their pictures to be taken. It’ll be hours before we get to the door.” She rocked the baby. “When did you get here?” she asked.
“Just this morning.”
“You are lucky to have come today. They only see new refugees on Wednesdays. I’ve been waiting since I arrived on Monday.”
“How long did you travel to get here?” I asked.
“Nine days. We walked on some days and took a cattle truck on others.”
The w
ay she spoke suggested she was from my parents’ tribe. The distance she’d come confirmed my suspicion. “Did you travel alone?” I asked.
“No. I was with my husband and his mother, but she got sick on the way, and he decided to take her back to die among her own people. I wanted to go with them, but my husband said, ‘Go with our little one. Get away from here, now!’ He yelled so loud that I had to leave, may Allah forgive me.” She stopped as if she’d noticed something. “Where is your husband?”
“I am a widow,” I said. “I came with my husband’s mother, brother, and my two children.”
“Your husband is dead?” She hesitated. “Was he shot? Did a gun take your husband?”
“No, he wasn’t shot. He just died.”
“At least there’s some comfort in that. The sick and dying give us time to accept that they are leaving. A gun takes them without warning. They’re here one second and gone in an instant.”
We both fell into complete silence as we waited. The woman was right. We stood in line until the sun reached the middle of the sky, pouring down stifling heat. When we were close to the door, I asked Hasan to go and call his mother and the children.
The woman stared at Adam and Amina as they came our way. “These are your children?” She pointed an accusing finger and pulled away as if she were ready to leave the line she’d stood in for hours.
“Yes,” I replied, drawing them to me and raising my chin defiantly.
“They don’t look like you.” She glared at the rest of the family.
In the refugee camp, we might have been far from the reach of our immediate enemies—Father, Omar, Rhoda, Jamac, and Ahmed—but we were not safe. The tribal hatred that had devastated us at home was here in the snickers of the others in line.
“Your children are…” She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to. She turned to the woman in front of her. “Those are her children,” she whispered loud enough for me to hear. “Why in the name of Allah would she marry a Boon man and still walk around with such children after he died? I would have abandoned them in a heartbeat.” The woman spoke as if I were not there.
“She is brave. To drag the Boon’s children and his mother after the Boon died is the mark of courage.”
“Courage or stupidity?” the first one questioned.
I kept my eyes on the front of the queue.
*
The process, once inside the office, was much easier than the wait. They wrote all the names of the family members, took pictures, gave us identification cards, assigned us a piece of land to build our tin hut and handed us an ID card. After that, we were asked to register with CARE for our rations and the Red Cross for contacting any relatives we might have outside Somalia. I wrote Elmi’s name and gave the address on his last letter, sent two years earlier.
“Why was that woman so mean?” Amina asked as soon as we were well away from her.
I took her by the hand with a weak and weary smile. “I am sorry.”
“Why do people hate us so much?”
I could offer no protection from the ever-present bigotry that would follow Amina wherever she went. “Because we are different.”
“So?”
Mother’s threat to send me to Timbuktu when I had asked why she hated Sidow rang in my ears. “Never mind. We won’t allow them to hurt us because they don’t matter,” I said. But I knew they did matter. Oh, how I knew they mattered.
*
A messenger from the Red Cross office handed me an envelope a month after our arrival at the camp. Your brother Elmi has been located. Come to the office tomorrow morning at 8:30.
I read and reread the note that night and the following morning, until I started out for the office much earlier than necessary.
I spent most of the ten minutes they gave me on the phone with Elmi trying to speak, but I ended up crying each time I opened my mouth. The words of joy and gratitude that formed in my mind, weren’t reaching my tongue.
“I have been looking for you ever since Father told me you left Mogadishu. I am so happy you have contacted me.”
“Father?” I repeated.
“Yes. Father said you were at his home, but you…” Elmi’s sentence, naked and incomplete, hung in the air.
“I did what?” I asked.
“Father said he wanted to make sure you were safe, but you refused to stay.”
I laughed bitterly. “He has a strange idea of what home and safe means.”
“Why? What happened?” he asked with concern.
Maybe it was good that Elmi didn’t know. Part of me wanted to tell, to make sure he knew how evil Father, Omar, Jamac, and Rhoda were, but I couldn’t—not on the phone, not like this. “You should ask Father, or better yet, Rhoda.”
“I’ll ask Father, then. I don’t talk to Rhoda, or Omar for that matter.” Our time was running out and Elmi changed the subject abruptly to deal with more urgent matters. “I’m coming to visit you as soon as I can. Send me the names and ages of everyone in the family. I’ll try to apply for immigration visas to Canada before I leave.”
Elmi called me six weeks later to say that with the help of a local church and a financial guarantee of twenty thousand dollars from him, our visa process would start soon.
“All that money for us.” I was in awe for the depth of the commitment needed to get us out of the camp.
“It is to ensure that the people who come are not a burden on the existing society,” Elmi explained.
“We’ll not be a burden to anyone, not to the country, not to the church, not to you.”
“I know, you won’t.”
I shared the good news with Hasan and my mother-in-law. The whole family rejoiced at the hope brought on by Elmi’s call.
*
Three months after his first call and four months after we came to the camp. Elmi visited. I cried more than I spoke for the entire two weeks he was with us. Elmi’s coming coincided with the notice of an intake interview scheduled by the High Commission of Canada.
“My immigration lawyer in Canada told me there would be an interview in the next few days, so I decided to be here with you for that,” Elmi said us as soon as he arrived.
On the morning of the interview, our neighbors visited in droves, congratulating us on the quick opportunity to leave the camp. Amina, and Adam waved us good-bye for children weren’t required to attend, but the walk to the office where the interview by the High Commissioner of Canada was to be held felt long.
“Do you want to sit?” Elmi asked as soon as we entered the waiting room.
“I am not tired, just afraid.”
“I know, but it will be over soon. The wait is the hardest part.” Elmi sat down and patted the chair beside him.
Sitting next to Elmi, I tried to calm down, but the old wooden chair wasn’t large enough to contain me. A wave of uncertainty rumbled within me, so I got up and paced around the waiting area to soothe my frayed nerves. “What happens if they reject us?”
“There is no reason to think like that. This is a family class application. It’s already been approved in Canada. This is just to make sure everything matches what I put on the application.”
“What’s taking them so long?” I wondered aloud.
An hour later, an attendant opened the door. “Moallim family.” His raspy voice startled me. “Come.” He motioned for us to follow him inside.
Elmi smiled at me. “I’ll be right here when you return.”
Hasan, my mother-in-law, and I followed the attendant.
The man sitting behind a large oak desk looked up from a folder when we entered. He pointed at the wooden chairs lined up against the wall. “I’m Mr. Hanson. Are you the Moallim family?” he asked through an interpreter—a young Somali man sitting to our left.
“Yes,” I responded.
“Do you have a husba
nd?”
When I told him I was a widow, he asked the details of Sidow’s death, the way I found him, who told me where his body was, and what condition he was in. The painful memory prickled my senses.
The officer allowed me to stop several times to compose myself and continue. “Do you have a death certificate for your husband?” he asked.
I looked at him, surprised. I explained that due to the war there was no way to get any certificate: birth, marriage, or death.
Mr. Hanson spent the next few seconds searching though some folders. He finally found what he was after and handed me an official-looking sheet of paper. “Here. Please fill out this form.”
The paper required the date of Sidow’s death, the cause of death, and his age at the time of death. Upon completion, I handed it back to him.
He gave me a blank piece of paper. “Describe the position of the body as you remember it.”
It was not too hard to locate the image of Sidow in my mind, but it was very difficult to look at it. I had spent so much energy suppressing the horror that the road back to it was treacherous. I stared at the page, unable to start.
“Just do as much as you can,” the officer urged. He wanted me to include the location of Sidow’s wounds. Finally, he took the paper from me and examined it carefully. “Thank you. This will do.” He turned the paper face-down and wrote notes on the back of the page.
The officer moved on to inquire about my relationship with Elmi, our sponsor. He listened to the rest of my narrative and the reasons behind my application.
“How many children do you have?”
It was a simple question, but I gasped. The man raised his eyebrows, peered at me, stared for a few seconds, and turned to the interpreter. “Madam, how many children do you have?” he asked again.
“Two,” I answered. The hesitation that came with the word planted itself between us like a pack of hyenas. I waited for his suspicion to transform into a question, but nothing came except that distinct kick in my belly. It jolted me back to reality just as it had absorbed my attention for the past few weeks.
“And their ages?” He was now looking at papers, taking notes, his demeanor less suspicious, almost indifferent.
Tale of a Boon's Wife Page 23