At the end of the interrogation the policeman told Jama that he would be deported back to Sudan and banned from entering Egypt again. Liban and Jama were put on the next train, without Jama’s rababa, which had been stolen from his suitcase. The whole carriage was full of Somalis who had also entered Egypt illegally, all roamers who had known only porous insubstantial borders and were now confronted with countries caged behind bars. Some of the detainees had been shuttled back and forth on this train in the past, and were amused when they reached the border to be told that the Sudanese would not accept the Egyptians’ “trash.” Liban breathed a sigh of relief but Jama was infuriated; he hadn’t left Gerset just to be treated like dirt again.
Back in the Damietta police station, Jama and Liban were placed in one of the large cells while the police decided what to do with them. They were locked up with suspected murderers and rapists, thieves and madmen, drunks and drug addicts. Jama and Liban huddled together in terror as the worst prisoners prowled around, casting wild looks at anyone who met their gaze. They had to pay for their own bread each day, and water was given to them in small cups that they had to share with men bleeding from the nostrils and ears. At night, hands would go exploring and knives were pressed into backs to extort money or caresses. Jama and Liban stayed awake in shifts so that they could protect each other. Liban had a small pocketknife but the other men had daggers and screwdrivers secreted in their waistbands or in crevices in the bare brick wall. The prisoners spoke in a rough dialect that Jama could barely understand, but this was a blessing, as they were a verbal bunch who grew tired of the two Somalis when they couldn’t understand or respond to the insults thrown at them. The balance of the cell was thrown off kilter when a man unlike any other was brought in. He was a giant, an African goliath, a megastructure, his head touched the ceiling and each of his thighs was wider than Jama’s waist, he blocked out the light as he came in and fury was etched across his face.
“Thieves! Thieves!” he roared at the police, who scampered out, afraid that one of those granite fists would come down on them. Veins stuck out all over the new prisoner’s hands and over his forearms and neck, and his anger sucked out noise and movement from the room. “Give me my hundred pounds back, you Arab dogs!” he bellowed.
Jama stared up at the goliath, felt his hot breath gust over him, and gathered his legs away from the crushing feet. The emasculated Egyptians had gathered in one corner for protection. The prisoner seethed in strange tongues, clenching and unclenching his fists, boxing with his shadow, a wad of tobacco forced into his cheek, a bruise just perceptible along his blue-black jaw.
“Just look down,” whispered Liban fearfully. Jama tried to, but his gaze was constantly drawn back to the man. The new prisoner met Jama’s eyes.
“What you want, kid?” he demanded.
“Nothing,” muttered Jama, hiding his head between his knees.
“You Sudanese?” he asked. Jama shook his head and hoped the man would reveal where he came from. “Bastards taking me to Sudan, I don’t want Sudan, I live in Lebanon.”
“They took us to Sudan but we were deported from there, too, they will probably send us to Palestine now,” said Jama, growing in confidence.
“I want to go to Palestine too, I can cross into Lebanon there. Will you speak for me? I speak their language badly, they don’t listen,” said the man tentatively in Arabic. “Good boy, good boy,” he exhorted as Jama nervously got to his feet.
Jama went to the bars of the cell and called for a policeman. When two policemen arrived, truncheons in hand, Jama explained that the new prisoner had come from Palestine and not Sudan, and if they took him to Sudan the border police would not let him in, but they were uninterested and shrugged their assent to deporting him to Palestine as well. Jama gave the good news to the prisoner, who picked him up and threw him in the air, kissing him profusely on the cheeks. “I go home to my woman! My baby! My taxi!” he yelled. Back on the ground, Jama took the man’s hand and introduced himself and Liban.
“My name is Joe Louis, you know Joe Louis, famous boxer? That me!” said the man, crushing their hands.
“Joy Low Is,” repeated Jama and Liban, trying to master the strange name.
“You speak French, garçons?” Joe Louis asked. “I speak perfect French.” Jama and Liban shook their heads.
From that evening Joe Louis treated Jama and Liban like his sons, paying for their food, giving them cigarettes, and shielding them. In broken Arabic he told them about his life in Lebanon, where he had a French wife and a young daughter, and made a nice living as a driver and occasional boxer. He had gone to Palestine to fight in a match against British soldiers but had gotten into trouble.
“Palestines bad bad people, everywhere they call me abid, you know abid? Slave! Me slave! So I fight, I fight too much, so they call police, take my taxi, say I’m illegal and bring me here, dirty Palestines, spit on them.” Every night Joe complained about the Palestinians until Liban and Jama were convinced that they were the most dangerous, bigoted, savage people on earth, and became afraid of their upcoming deportation. When the day came, Joe Louis took their arms and they were all put on the train to the border. The armed police played cards and smoked in the carriage, leaving the mostly black deportees to sleep out the long journey through the Sinai Desert. Deep in the night, Joe Louis became agitated, fidgeting and looking furtively around him. Jama, in the throes of sleeplessness, watched him. “What’s the matter, Jow?”
“I gonna jump off train,” whispered Joe.
“Why?” Jama whispered back, aghast.
“They will send us prison in Palestine, I want wife and baby, can’t wait.”
Jama glanced through the window at the black-and-silver desert and knew his friend was making a mistake. “You will die, Jow, you’ll never see your wife and baby again, halas, I also have a wife and she would be very angry if I did that,” warned Jama. Joe looked out at the desert and his face was twisted in doubt. “Don’t do it, Jow.”
Joe flung his hands up in frustration. Jama watched Joe out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t move, he fell into a heavy sleep, filling the air with his resonating snores. Jama wished that his own father had fought to get back to his family the way Joe did. In the morning, an off-duty policeman with stars on his breast came passing through the carriage, a fat blond child in a stained white shirt and navy shorts holding his hand. The senior policeman stopped in front of Jama and called for his deputy by sticking his newspaper in the air, and a man in a crumpled uniform hurried toward him.
“Have these boys been given breakfast?” the boss asked, looking at Jama’s and Liban’s dry white lips.
“No, sir,” said the deputy.
“Get them food and water. What have they done?” said the boss.
“They came into Egypt without papers, sir, we are taking them to the Palestinian jail.”
The boss looked at Jama and Liban—like disheveled crows they sat there, with messy black hair, their thin limbs visible through their dirty clothes—and back to his plump-cheeked son.
“Let them go at Al-‘Arish, they won’t survive prison,” he said before dragging his son into the next carriage.
The deputy kept his word, bringing them bread and water, and when they reached Al-‘Arish, Jama persuaded the deputy with a little of Joe’s money to let Joe alight with them. An old policeman was sent with the gang. Al-‘Arish was a beautiful seaside town, with a yellow beach caressed by white surf. Palms on the shore shook their fronds in delight. The old policeman handed them over at the police station. The belligerent rural policemen shouted “Yallah! Yallah!” as they herded the men into a jeep and then swept them toward the border with Palestine. They reached Rafah in a few hours and the sergeant turned to face them. With a dirty finger poking into their faces, he shouted, “You blacks come into Egypt again and I’ll personally make sure that you all spend a year in jail, understand me? Yallah, get out!”
Joe opened the door of the jeep and pulled Jama
and Liban out with him, screaming back at the deputy in his own language. Joe took charge now that they were in Palestine, walking them toward a British army canteen he knew from his boxing days. Jama was fearful of the reception they would get from the Palestinians but all they saw were a few hunched men leading heavily laden donkeys. To the side of the road, Joe saw the walls of an orchard and peered over. He threw Jama and Liban over the top and then jumped over the high wall as if it were a chicken coop. Inside, the orchard was a sight worthy of paradise, with bright globes of nectar hanging heavily from green trees. Jama felt as if he had not tasted an orange in centuries. They ravished the trees, squatting in the cool, fragrant shade and gorging themselves. The sticky juice ran all over their arms and chests, seared their lips, and attracted bees, but it was worth it. Before they could doze, they heard the orchard gate scrape open and an old man’s lamentful mutterings; they quickly fled back over the wall.
When they reached the canteen, a Palestinian chef raced over to them and embraced Joe wholeheartedly, without any of the bigotry Jama had expected. Joe threw his heavy arm over the Arab’s shoulder and led him away to talk quietly. When they returned, the chef asked Jama and Liban if they had really worked as galley boys on British ships, and they convinced him with enthusiastic tall tales. The chef offered them work in the kitchen.
Joe held the top of Jama’s head in his massive palm. “Petit garçon, you have no problem now, good pay, good food, Allah rewards the kind,” he said, kissing Jama on the cheeks before pulling money from his pocket and shoving it into their hands, “Take, take, merci, merci.”
Jama and Liban weakly resisted before accepting. Joe stayed for a last meal with them before wandering away with old acquaintances and disappearing into a lorry. He gave them a thumbs-up before zooming off into the distance and returning to his wife and daughter. Jama felt as if a mantle had been pulled off his back. As darkness fell, Jama and Liban grew afraid; they were two African boys in a congregation of Arab men and they had lied to them.
“What will happen tomorrow when they realize we don’t know what we’re doing?” asked Liban looking over his shoulder.
“I don’t know, but we’ve already lied, they’re going to be angry.”
The chef cheerfully brought them dinner and laid down canvas sheets in the storeroom for the night. “See you bright and early, boys; I need the best of you two.” Jama and Liban smiled and nodded at the chef, pretended to bed down but instead they sat up, waiting for the dawn. When the first slivers of light were visible through the barred windows, Jama and Liban grabbed their meager belongings and ran away. They were afraid of the Arab soldiers but more important, they had not left home to work in a canteen in a Palestinian border town and their destiny demanded another throw of the dice. They avoided the road, walking along the dunes, just keeping the stretch of tarmac in sight. They had made a mistake in not bringing food and water, and by midday they needed to rest under a tree.
“You only see a dead man sitting under a tree,” panted Liban. The gravity of their situation was beginning to dawn on Jama when a group of dark men appeared in the distance.
“Police, police!” hissed Liban. “Quick, behind the tree!”
Jama and Liban each nudged the other, believing their harsh breathing would give them away, but it was the banging of their heartbeats that seemed so loud. They could hear footfalls and voices a few meters away; the language sounded strange to Jama, guttural and accusatory, and it took him a few moments to recognize it as Somali. He poked his head out and saw Bootaan, Rooble, Samatar, Keynaan, and Gaani from the apartment in Alexandria walking past, arguing among themselves.
Jama ran out after them. “Waryaa! Waryaa! Wait for us!” he yelled.
The men looked back in shock before falling about in laughter. “Would you look at them? You look like jinns,” laughed Rooble, picking leaves out of Jama’s hair. “What happened to you?” he asked.
“We got jailed in Port Said and they brought us here,” said Jama, delighted. It had been a deep worry to him that no one knew where they were, that Bethlehem would never know what had become of him.
“Where are you going now?” asked Gaani of them, as if they were crazy children.
Jama and Liban looked toward each other. “We don’t know,” they said in unison. The older men, older only by a few months or years, tutted and shook their heads. “First get to Gaza. There is a Somali man always at the bus stop, Musa the Drunk, he will find you. Tell him to put you on the bus for Sarafand. In Sarafand there are Somali men working for the British. One of them is your people, Liban, and one yours, Jama, but they will all give you money and then you can go where you like,” counseled Samatar.
“Yes, that’s right, that’s what you should do,” agreed the others.
They pointed out the way to Gaza and then turned back toward Sinai. Jama and Liban followed the route the men had cursorily pointed out. Most Somalis avoided sharing the precise routes and tricks that they hoped to benefit from themselves, as they did not want to be beaten to a ship, and careless words might put border guards on their trail. They turned away from the road when they heard an army lorry approaching, but it was traveling so fast it was upon them in seconds. It slowed down beside them and Joe Louis stuck his head out the passenger window, squinting in disbelief. “Jama? Liban? Garçons? Where you walking to?”
Jama and Liban raced each other to the window to explain their predicament. Jama forced his voice over Liban’s. “He was a very bad man, Jow, we woke up in the morning, worked for him and then he sent us away, he wanted to give the work to his Arab friends.”
Joe kissed his teeth. “So where you want to go?” he asked.
“Gaza,” replied Liban, annoyed that Jama was doing all the talking. Joe pulled them into the lorry and took over the wheel from his Ferengi companion; he rushed them to the Gaza bus station, tearing past the checkpoints in the powerful and unquestionable army vehicle. Liban slept next to Jama, his head thrown back in exhaustion, while Jama massaged his painful feet and reveled in the luxury of being driven. The bedu walking along the road, dragging their donkeys behind them, looked infinitely, hopelessly poor in comparison. Joe drove at dangerous speed but was a born driver, an equal match for any hazard the road jinns threw up; he drove with one hand, his face relaxed and content, staring at the open road. At the bus station, with a paternal slap on their cheeks, he disappeared for the last time.
As Samatar had said, Musa the Drunk quickly found them. They shared with him the same mishmash of features, an awkward alchemy of eyes, noses, mouths, hair textures, and skin tones that belonged to different continents but somehow came together. Their faces were passports inscribed with the stamps of many places but in their countenances was something ancient, the variety of those who went wandering and peopled the earth. Musa was completely incongruous in the quiet bus station, a shabby middle-aged Somali man, barefoot and balding, with the sharp smell of alcohol emanating from somewhere about his person.
“My sons, my sons,” Musa slurred, staggering with alarming speed toward them, shamelessly scratching his balls before grabbing them in a fevered embrace. Jama and Liban were embarrassed by him; they looked terrible already, but his company gave their appearance another level of seediness and destitution. Musa, whose thick ribs stuck out from a soiled, buttonless shirt, was lonely and talkative, the poster boy of failed migration. He spoke little Arabic after all his years in Palestine and had no interest in what the locals thought of him. After listening to their story, Musa ushered them to the stop for the Sarafand bus, where they sat on a bench, stinking in the sun, Musa talking loudly and obscenely: “I’ve had her”; “I’ve done her”; “He wants me.”
Jama and Liban cringed beside him and feared he would attract the police to them, but the Palestinians ignored him completely. Jama gave Musa money to buy musakhan from a nearby vendor and he scuttled off, to their relief. They took all the deep breaths they could before he returned and brought his miasma back. Sitting with him depr
essed Jama. As Musa continued to talk Jama could see the remnants of what had been a sharp, witty mind, but it had been pickled in gin and blunted by isolation.
Musa told them how he had ended up in Gaza. “I have worked for the British all my life, I was their donkey, but most of the time a happy donkey. I learned how to read and write English. I got a good wage, lived in nice quarters, had a household back in Somaliland, but they sacked me, my wife divorced me, and I have stayed in this bus stop for some years now. Whenever I want to leave, I will just take one of these buses.” As Jama listened he could see his own life taking Musa’s terrible trajectory, see himself forever poised to try the next place, only to belatedly grasp that the good life was not there. Jama looked at Musa and realized that not even a madman would have left everything he had on the advice of a ghost.
“You can’t force your fate,” mused Musa.
“Come with us to Sarafand,” offered Liban, but Musa shook his head silently, adamant that he had business in Gaza.
Jama started to question his own journey. He had spent all the savings his mother had left him, was living on what charity others gave him in a strange hostile land, and had no realistic hope that he would ever become a sailor. The bus came while Jama was in this funk, and he boarded it simply because he had nothing else to do. Musa ran alongside the bus, waving and banging the window, but Jama didn’t wave back.
“What a fool,” Jama sneered.
“Oh, leave him be, poor man doesn’t know today from tomorrow.”
“That’s his own fault.”
“No, that was his fate. Who knows, it could be ours.”
Black Mamba Boy Page 21