The Invisible Crowd

by Ellen Wiles

  It was the morning after that when Melat came to him, sobbing, and told him what the commander had done. Yonas looked up at the lawyer, who was making notes on her laptop. ‘Then my sister…’ he began, but as he tried to make the words come, he knew they were going to break. He had to hold it together. It had worked out okay, in the end, after all – for the time being, anyway. And if it hadn’t been for that terrible day, Melat wouldn’t have Lemlem. But was this relevant to his claim? Did he have to say it here, out loud?

  ‘Yes?’ the lawyer said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was just… we were close to winning the war, but then my sister was abused. I mean, she was raped. But it was a commander who did it, so we could not report it. She became pregnant, and there was a part of the hospital where fighter women had their babies, so she said she would just go there and then give the baby away… But then – we won.’

  ‘You won? You mean, the war?’

  Yonas smiled a little. ‘Yes. Finally. I never really believed it would happen. The odds were so stacked against our little Eritrea. And that war had been going on my whole life. But we really won, and so we were able to go back home to Asmara, to our grandparents. I was sixteen years old.’ Somehow, from being embroiled in an infinite hell, it had all happened oddly quickly. Everything his father had dreamed of for their country appeared to have come true, to be right there in front of them, as bright and light as a cascade of balloons, ready for them all to grasp at with their bare hands like excited toddlers.

  ‘It was an amazing moment,’ he told the lawyer. ‘Euphoric. We were all still grieving, and Melat was still recovering, but we knew what independence would have meant to our parents. All our suffering was for that purpose. They would have wanted us to celebrate.’

  And it was impossible not to. The atmosphere was infectious. Independence had come to seem like a mythic word, yet now it was here, and everyone around them exploded like a bottle of fizz that had been shaken, and shaken, and shaken; they bubbled out onto the streets, heady, incredulous, for the celebration of all celebrations. The war is finally over! The future is bright and safe and happy for all free Eritreans! He remembered rolling ceremonially into Asmara on the back of a tank packed with children and young fighters, part of a slow procession into a wild cacophony of ululating and screaming and dancing and laughing and singing. Every resident, old and new, rich and poor, and from every religion, was out on the streets, jubilantly welcoming the victorious troops, as the tanks honked their horns and flaunted the Eritrean flag from their cannon barrels. Hot, sultry air, vibrating with people’s favourite revolutionary tunes, songs of freedom, clapping rhythms and drum beats. People waving palm leaves, flags or whatever they could get their hands on. Children and adults alike leaping, hugging, weeping with joy. Villagers from miles away descending upon the city on foot, some piling onto the tanks with the fighters.

  They approached their neighbourhood, and when they finally saw their grandparents wheeling Sheshy along amid a group of other maimed martyrs, they clambered down and ran towards them, arms outstretched. As he embraced his family, Yonas felt his heart was going to fly out of his chest, a bird released from a cage.

  ‘So, after independence, you were able to live back in Asmara for a while?’ the lawyer asked.

  Yonas nodded. There had been a slow let-down as normality sank in, like the balloons were gradually seeping air, as they registered the gaping absence around the kitchen table of their parents and Tekle. ‘We were together again – what was left of us. We tried to get used to being a half-size family but it wasn’t easy. Especially for my brother. He was trying to get used to having no twin, and no legs.’

  Sheshy had been the quickest of them all to retreat into gloom. It wasn’t worth it, he pronounced one morning. I don’t care how much better things are going to be for some people. Look at me. And Melat, whose bump was now pronounced, began to panic about how she would look after a child on her own, with no husband or mother to help.

  Yonas tried hard to keep them all positive, to remain buoyed by the new energy in the city, the fizzing plans for the future, for the new government, the new society. It wasn’t hard; out on the streets, most people were still walking around with wide smiles, talking excitedly and obsessively in coffee shops and street corners about visions and possibilities and freedoms.

  ‘Eventually my sister had her baby,’ he told the lawyer. Even Sheshy had cracked a laugh at the little bright-eyed bundle with her miniature fingers and tufty mohawk. They all passed Lemlem around and gazed at her adorably crumpled face, her bright, trusting, inquisitive eyes. ‘I finished school, and went to university.’ He had been so eager to study, to get good grades, to prove that the revolutionary school hadn’t held him back, that he could still excel and then he could go on to work as part of the new government, which was revving up, getting in gear for change, for building the future out of solid planks of law and policy, cemented by hope. The horizon glittered.

  ‘What did you study?’

  ‘Eritrean literature and languages,’ he said. ‘I graduated top of my class.’

  ‘Great. And what did you do next?’

  ‘I got a job working in the Department of Cultural Affairs. It was a good job, the job that I wanted – I was happy. But then after a short time I got conscripted for the border war.’

  The day they announced that conscription was beginning again, Yonas had left work early and gone over to see Gebre, who by then had his own art studio. He found Gebre in the middle of a painting, and persuaded him to take a break and come for a walk. They found their way to Independence Avenue as the sun dipped behind the palm fronds and the buildings glowed pink. Everything still looked serene, but it felt now as if the air were laced with an invisible pollution they had no choice but to breathe. As they talked, Gebre began to panic. ‘I can’t do it,’ he said. ‘Not again.’

  ‘You probably won’t get called up,’ Yonas had lied. ‘And this should be over soon – we’ve all had more than our fair share of war.’ He was thinking guiltily, as he said it, that his job was more likely to protect him from conscription than Gebre’s. But, almost as if they had been overheard, the next day they were both served with conscription papers, to different places.

  ‘I was posted to Badme – you know, the town at the heart of the border dispute,’ Yonas told the lawyer. Barely a green shoot grew there, and Yonas wondered why either side would want to claim such an uninspiring backwater. And to be back in a war zone, now fully exposed on the front line, and without Melat or Gebre around, felt even more forbidding than he had expected. Every day he stepped out of the barracks with a dry mouth, physically shaking. Life descended into a cocktail of terror, boredom and exhaustion, which he got through by mindlessly following orders… until, to his surprise, he was promoted.

  ‘After six months, they made me head of a platoon, and I got re-posted to Senafe. And I met a girl.’ He found he was smiling now, remembering that moment he first saw Sarama. How he felt his legs walk him over to her before his mind had worked out what to say, so he ended up standing right in front of her, speechless. She had a long neck like a swan, supporting a three-inch-thick fro, and perfect crescent-moon eyebrows framing improbably huge almond eyes that bored into him.

  ‘Hello! You are new here, right? I – thought I could – maybe show you around. I am head of a platoon here,’ he’d said, managing to sound both desperate and pompous at the same time.

  She’d laughed dismissively. ‘I am fine, thanks,’ she’d told him, and started to walk off.

  But he’d kept on walking next to her. ‘So, where are you from?’ Now he felt like one of those street kids trying to sell a car driver some plastic object they knew was useless.

  ‘Dekemhare,’ she’d said brusquely.

  ‘I have never been there…’ Yonas found himself stuck for questions, but was desperate to keep the conversation going. ‘My father is Abraham Kelati,’ he said, a fact that was completely disconnected from their convers
ation so far, but might just impress her if she knew a bit about culture. ‘I am a writer as well,’ he added.

  Then she did look at him, but only momentarily, before rolling those eyes up to the sky and then returning them to the path ahead. ‘I am a poet,’ she said. ‘But my father is a farmer and none of my family are educated, so I guess my poetry has to be good enough to stand on its own.’

  He told her he was sure it was, and pressed her to tell him more, and gradually she began to loosen up. It turned out she had gone to the University of Asmara as well, two years after Yonas, and had landed a plum job with an NGO after graduating, moving quickly from admin to management, until she was called up. It was during outside work, she told him, that she used to recite poetry – a tradition among all the women in her family – and she did it regularly at a bar he knew in Asmara. They both agreed it was strange that they had never crossed paths before.

  In the days that followed, Yonas kept on looking out for Sarama, and finding excuses to snatch snippets of conversation with her, and one evening he spied one of her girlfriends watching him stare at her, then tapping her on the shoulder, pointing at him, giggling and whispering something behind her hand. He walked off; it was risky to cultivate rumours that you were interested in someone when all relationships on the front line were forbidden. But the next time he caught Sarama alone, filling up a cup of water in the canteen, he grabbed an empty cup and went over to stand next to her. ‘As an officer here, I think it would be a good idea for me to understand the diversity of skills in our division.’ She’d looked at him quizzically, but flirtatiously. ‘You mentioned you are a poet,’ he said. ‘I would like to hear some of your poetry, in private.’ She giggled and asked him how this would contribute to military tactics, and he said that was the brilliant thing about poetry: it could have so many meanings that even the poet might not expect, and that sometimes going on a walk was the best way to understand those meanings. She asked what he had in mind.

  They met the next evening, after dinner, and walked up the track behind the barracks at dusk, and found a quiet spot to sit. ‘So. You really want to hear a poem?’ she asked, and looked at him, and in that moment of silence his whole body seemed to turn from flesh into electricity. And then she began. And her words seemed to contain such music that even though they were just sitting by themselves in the dust, in their dirty uniforms, he felt lifted up, transported – and he could easily imagine her captivating crowds.

  When she’d finished, he told her he was impressed, which seemed inadequate, so he offered to recite something in return. ‘Go ahead,’ she said. At the last minute, he decided against the romantic poem he had been thinking of, and found himself reciting a Siegfried Sassoon poem, in English, that he’d been slightly obsessed with at university because of how it seemed to cut to the quick about what happened to Sheshy and the attempts of so-called patriots to suppress the brutal effects of war on soldiers, which resonated with him even more now that he was back in the fray. But as he finished, he felt embarrassed about his choice, and hoped Sarama wouldn’t disdain him for showing off, or picking something colonial, or conclude that he wasn’t romantic enough. But she wasn’t unimpressed enough to stop him kissing her afterwards. And from then on, life in the barracks was transformed.

  Nobody could know about them, of course – but somehow the risk to them both if it were discovered made each secret touch, each hidden moment, more significant, more precious. For a couple of months Yonas injected a new vigour into military exercises, feeling almost deliriously happy. ‘Isn’t it crazy,’ he said to Sarama one evening, ‘that I can be in the place and doing the work I hate most in the whole world, but with the person I love most in the world, and that makes it all okay, even if I die tomorrow?’

  It was around three months later that she told him she had something important to say. She said it so solemnly, her big eyes glittering, that he immediately thought of Melat, that terrible day, and started to panic. She waited until they were out of earshot, then pulled him to look at her, and held both his hands. ‘Yonas, I’m pregnant.’ She was staring into his eyes, wanting him to respond.

  ‘Who – did someone…?’

  ‘What do you mean, did someone! You did, you idiot!’

  ‘But I thought… that’s incredible!’ He laughed, giddy with relief. ‘I mean, you can get discharged, so you’ll be safe, and we can get married, as soon as we next get leave, and you can finally meet my family…’

  In weeks that followed, hostilities heated up, but the warm glow of the new knowledge somehow warded off Yonas’s fear. One day, though, that warmth seemed to morph into a strange heat and wooziness, and during a training session Yonas collapsed at the front of the line, and was almost trampled on as the men around him tripped over each other to avoid him, falling around like dominos.

  Malaria, the doctor pronounced. Yonas’s fever was at its height when a vicious battle kicked off. As he lay, shivering, he was unsure how much of the agonizing racket pounding in his skull was gunfire and how much was his over-heated brain. Time distorted and he had no idea how long he had been lying there, when the voice of Eyob, a guy from his unit, swam into clarity as it told him that sixteen soldiers from the company had just been killed in a blast. Through his fuzzy brain Yonas managed to articulate her name, to raise the pitch of his voice into a question.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ came his reply, as if into muffled darkness. ‘I wanted to be the one to tell you, before you found out another way…’

  Yonas remembered where he was, realized that the lawyer was looking at him, concerned. ‘But she… my girlfriend… she got killed,’ Yonas managed to utter, before shoving his chair back and running down the corridor all the way to the end, where he pushed his palms hard against the wall, and leaned his forehead against the cold, hard paint.

  In his fevered state, Yonas had thought perhaps he was just in an extension of the dream he used to have about the day his parents died, where he’d seen the planes roaring across the horizon towards them, and had somehow managed to focus his eyes into a fierce heat of concentration that slowed the flight of all the ammunition down to a crawling pace, and he had redirected the fatal bullets back up in long, curving lines to the sky, where they collided back into the planes which exploded in the air like fireworks. Wet and shivering, he kept on finding himself calling out Sarama’s name and thinking she might be sitting there next to him, before remembering. He had already imagined their wedding in Asmara, surrounded by Melat, his brothers, his parents and his grandmother, all laughing, clapping, dancing, and he couldn’t make the scene go away; but then he was on the back of a truck, bumping and shuddering, and then he seemed to be in a bright, white room. Gebre materialized every so often to sponge his forehead with cold water, but wasn’t Gebre fighting? Was he a ghost, too?

  Slowly the fever passed. The doctors informed Yonas he’d had a particularly virulent strain but he was on the mend now. ‘You were lucky,’ they said. Lucky.

  He returned to the lawyer’s room after a few minutes, and took his seat, determined to carry on. ‘I was discharged from the army soon after that,’ he told her slowly. ‘I had been very sick with malaria, so they let me go home to Asmara.’ And that was that. The story of Sarama, and the end of his military service, compressed and handed over for the legal record. He still couldn’t bring himself to expose the secret of the unborn baby that he had kept swaddled in his chest all this time. He doubted now that he ever would.

  Chapter 14: Veata

  LAWYERS ‘PLAY THE SYSTEM ON ASYLUM’

  I will have a mocha, please, with extra chocolate. Thank you.

  I have had so many clients that some of them blur together after a while. But there was something about Yonas Kelati that was memorable: he had a strong presence, but it could disappear into a haunting absence, like a star getting sucked into a black hole. What I mean is, he would be talking to me in a really compelling way one moment, but the next he would just go off somewhere, in the middle of a conversat
ion, staring at empty space. There was a lot more going on in his head than he was saying – that much was clear.

  I’ve learned that one of the most important ways to help my clients is just to be a good listener. I know from experience that it hurts so much, finally to arrive in an unfamiliar place where you believe that, if you can just tell your story, you’ll at least be safe – but the person you are speaking to is not interested. Still worse, if they accuse you of lying. If you are properly listened to, it makes a difference. Still, they are not always easy to help, our clients. A lot of them are traumatized or depressed so it is hard for them to communicate their stories. And that affects us too – hearing about such terrible suffering is hard to shake from your mind after you leave work. Even so, I wouldn’t change my job for anything.

  Before we started our interview, Yonas Kelati was very concerned to get my assurance that I would not report him if he decided not claim asylum. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said, and reassured him that it was all confidential. He looked so relieved. It is a big responsibility, being an asylum caseworker for people who are so vulnerable here, so fearful all the time that they will be deported or punished for the smallest thing. Sometimes if my children’s school friends’ parents find out I am a lawyer, they say wow! Like it’s glamorous. But this kind of lawyer is not the glamorous kind. Your clients are scared. They are desperate. And the government is cutting and cutting legal aid so it has got really hard to do a decent job for them. Our office building is old with no air conditioning, no kitchen and a miniature staff room, and I don’t get paid much, especially as I work evenings and weekends. I had never had a holiday in this country until my girls were old enough to do paper rounds and shop work, and then we all went to the Isle of Wight to stay in a caravan for a week and it rained. But that is the UK! At least it is safe here. We did drawings and played games and found ways to have a nice time, and when the girls complained, I just reminded them: ‘You are lucky to be alive and to have a holiday at all. Our freedom is what we make it.’ But they don’t get that. They don’t remember what came before. Every day I walk into work from my flat in Stepney Green and I tell myself: I made us free, and today I could help to make somebody else free too.