The traffickers came forward to seize the bags of those up ahead who didn’t want to let go of them. A few people tried to protest; the answer was that if they didn’t like it, they could stay there.
Did I really want to stay in Addis Ababa? For how long? My whole life? For how long would I have to run by moonlight, like a cockroach? I opened my bag and took out Aabe’s headband, the photo of Mo Farah, a qamar, and a garbasar, and I left all the rest in the corner.
Immediately my bag was buried under a thousand others.
In silence the six men set out two benches in the center of the jeep’s bed, so as to form four rows of seats. It seemed impossible that we could all squeeze in. But slowly, with a surgical precision that suggested the skill of certain craftsmen, they fit us in like pieces of a puzzle.
We had to keep our knees open to make room for a stranger’s leg between them.
I was so wedged in that I was barely able to breathe. Again I had the urge to get out of there. Then a baby started wailing in my ear, and I came to my senses.
I tried to remember why I was there. I had to keep going.
The trip was to last three days; it was critical that we bring nothing with us but the plastic bag: The jeep would be our living space for seventy-two hours, they told us. We couldn’t even bring water. They had jerricans for all of us.
They did another round of inspection and confiscated a few things from those who thought they were being smart.
After half an hour packed in like sardines, our breath already caught in our throats, we finally left. With the driver and his backup in the cab and seventy-two of us in the bed. The other four men stayed behind to scoop up the baggage.
We knew it once we were on our way: We were leaving our bags behind forever. Just as I was leaving behind forever my life as it had been up till then. I realized it right from the start, crushed between those unfamiliar bodies. Nothing would ever be the same. I was leaving behind Africa, my family, my land. My cocoon, big or small, good or bad though it might be. All that was left of my past was crammed inside a white plastic bag.
Was that all my life was worth up to that point? My heart told me otherwise, even as it pounded in my chest.
I held back tears, biting my lip hard. I closed my eyes in the midst of all those arms, shoulders, elbows, and I prayed to Aabe and to Allah. That they would let me find the way.
My way.
The first stretch was through the city. During those twenty minutes driving through Addis Ababa, I felt shame. A shame not divided by seventy-two but multiplied by seventy-two. I felt like a nonentity. We stopped at a traffic light, the one that led onto the national boulevard. The eyes that watched us were filled with a mixture of pity and suspicion.
Why had we let ourselves be reduced to that, they wondered.
Then we finally left the city and took the great desert highway, as everyone calls it: the big road leading to the north. At each jolt I thought my liver would burst, or my spleen, because of the dozens of elbows poking me on all sides. The city’s asphalt had given way to the usual dirt road, which, exposed to the rain and brutal sunlight, was studded with deep potholes.
The road was absolutely straight, and we kept up a steady speed of about eighty kilometers an hour, but after a while some people began to feel sick in those conditions. I was having trouble breathing; every now and then I felt faint and had to make a superhuman effort, prying aside the others, to sit up a little and find some fresh air. I kept thinking of the wind, which Alì used to tell me to ride. Stretches of green swept by wind and graced by yellow butterflies. That’s the image I held in my mind. That’s what filled my eyes. That’s what I forced myself to picture, so as not to think.
At first no one had the courage to complain; it was more like a subdued moaning. Then the lament became louder until it spewed into vomiting.
Since we couldn’t move our arms, the vomit ended up on everyone around us. We couldn’t shield ourselves; we were windows open to the world and all types of weather.
We passed through two villages with not many inhabitants.
Those small communities had been preceded by huge, colorful billboards: a pair of lions with flowing manes and underneath the name of a travel agency advertising safaris: a big off-road vehicle, all polished and gleaming, with the inscription CAPTURE YOUR DREAMS.
At the sides of the road stood a handful of vendors exposing the vegetables or fruit picked that morning to the exhaust fumes of passing vehicles. Or wooden shacks selling potato chips, water, cookies, pretzels, juices, and chewing gum.
As we drove by, the few people on the street followed us with their eyes. Maybe they thought we were funny or ridiculous. Or maybe they were used to it and looked at us with no more curiosity than you show about a leaf that falls to the ground after being carried along by the wind. At the beginning, for the first few hours, I didn’t want to feel like I was part of the group, and I did all I could to think of it as a temporary situation. I thought about the London Olympics in 2012 and I told myself that I had nothing to do with these people. But then I gave in. I accepted the fact that this was my condition now. I had turned into a journeyer. I had no choice, if I wanted to survive.
And in any case, we had become a single body.
Each time I shifted, I had to adapt to the five or six people next to me.
Every now and then along the way, we encountered women returning from the fields with huge baskets on their heads, or groups of barefoot children chasing after nothing, who stood dazed as they watched us go by: a jeep jam-packed with people.
Around eleven o’clock that night, after ten hours, we finally stopped. In the middle of nowhere. We had turned onto a side road and followed it for thirty minutes. It was pitch dark. There was nothing anywhere except a shed.
Getting out was much more difficult than getting in.
My joints were stiff; I had a hard time bending my knees and walking. The race. The race flashed in my mind like a bolt from the blue. The older people couldn’t straighten their backs. Too many hours with their weight on the sacrum, and some hadn’t even been able to rest their feet on the floor of the bed.
With a great deal of effort they made us get out, one by one. A woman who in Addis Ababa had smiled at me encouragingly now looked at me resentfully. She didn’t recognize me. Hardened. Everyone seemed much more hardened. Withdrawn inside their armor.
We had to sleep in that shed lit by a single small, central neon fixture. The light was cold and eerie. On the floor, no mattresses. They brought the jeep in as well and closed the door.
Only then did I realize that until that moment I’d been living in suspension, as if I’d been holding my breath since the boy had come to summon me at the apartment in Addis Ababa. When they barred the door from the inside with a big bolt, and I found myself on the floor in a corner without so much as a mat, that’s when it hit me.
This was the Journey. Hodan had already gone through it.
In an instant it all came back, along with the urge to vomit. My body had become accustomed to potholes and abrupt jolts; lying still made my bowels churn. Many people threw up on the floor wherever they happened to be. I recalled people’s eyes at the stoplight in Addis Ababa: They’d looked at us as if we were worthless nobodies, as if we were mere things being transported from one place to another.
None of us had said a word; none of us had protested. In the two hours we’d spent locked in that garage in Addis Ababa, with its reek of gasoline and sweat, we had managed to efface our dignity.
Before turning off the light they handed out cereal bars and advised us to get some rest. We would leave again at dawn, in six hours, at five in the morning.
The second day was even worse. The aches and soreness, which until then had been held in check by anger, had all intensified. My right shoulder was giving me excruciating pain. Having to sit still, squashed in without being able to move, was enough to drive you crazy. After a while I began to feel the need to move. I tried and tried; the
only thing I was able to do was sit up a little straighter, which was a lifesaver. I was confined in a straitjacket.
Every once in a while someone screamed into the air.
Then, after a while, he quieted down.
We passed only one village, larger than the other two. It must have been market day because the road was lined with a parade of stalls selling clothes, shoes, straw hats, sunglasses, American jeans, motor oil and windshield wipers, women’s veils, men’s turbans, cucumbers, peaches, lettuce, tomatoes, cookies, milk, Coca-Cola, you name it. It all passed swiftly in front of us like a mirage.
Someone yelled at the driver to stop, but he kept going as if he hadn’t heard.
Then the terrain turned to low-lying brush; the trees vanished altogether, giving way to scrub that was all around. Like the ever-present dust that was kicked up as we drove along, coating the jeep and our heads within minutes. That fine powder. I loved it. It was just like the dust that Alì and I used to kick up, which ended up in the old men’s shaat. I caught myself laughing. The woman next to me looked at me as if I were nuts. She didn’t approve of me. She clicked her tongue to say that I was unspeakable. I ignored her. I went on laughing to myself, lulled by memories of being safe.
That night around midnight, one day early, we were told we had arrived.
We were just outside a town and could see some lights in the distance. The men stopped the jeep and ordered us to remain on board. Some people immediately started celebrating, making a racket, thinking we’d made it. They were mistaken.
A man quickly called for silence. We’d better try to understand what the two traffickers were telling us in a language that wasn’t ours: a mixture of Arabic and Sudanese. Luckily someone in the group understood Arabic and acted as interpreter.
“We are not in Khartoum,” the trafficker said. “We are two kilometers from Al Qadarif, which is just across the border in Sudan. Anyone who doesn’t like it can continue on foot.”
Without giving us time to react, the two men got back in the jeep and restarted the engine. Al Qadarif is a small town in the desert. The bad news was that we were not where we had paid to go. The good news was that we were no longer in Ethiopia.
They took us to a garage again and, without a word, handed us over to another group of traffickers, who were already there waiting for us. When we went in, we found ourselves facing the same scene as in Addis Ababa. An off-road vehicle and six men who appeared nervous. They smoked and spat on the ground, swearing in a language that none of us understood.
We’d been swindled.
Getting out of the jeep was even more difficult than it had been the day before.
Our bodies were getting used to not responding to commands, to being forced into unnatural, painful positions and to constant, rapid motion.
A couple of men, two Ethiopians, tried to say something. They raised their voices. One was alone; the other was traveling with his wife and three small children. They’d been sitting side by side for hours. Now they were beating their breasts and their heads with their hands, saying things I didn’t understand but that didn’t seem friendly toward the first traffickers. The latter, ignoring them, restarted the motor and said that anyone who was unhappy was welcome to go back with them.
Immediately. They would even return their money, they said. I couldn’t tell if they were kidding or not. In any case, no one budged.
In an instant they were gone, along with the jeep that had been our home for two whole days.
We were left staring at one another, not knowing what to do. I would soon realize that, more than anything else, this is the one thing about the Journey that changes you forever: No one, at any time, can ever know what will happen a moment later.
While we were still standing there, I tried to strike up a conversation with a Somali girl who was traveling with her sister, to have the comfort of a voice. A voice that spoke my language. Everything had happened so fast. In two days I had forgotten who I was.
“Where are you from?” I asked. “Are you from Mogadishu?” She didn’t answer. She kept her eyes on her younger sister, still hunched over on the ground, uncramping her knees and throwing up.
“Are you Somali?” I tried again.
The girl turned around; her face was powdered with white dust up to the hairline, even under the hijab. She looked like a ghost, a white mask with lifeless eyes.
“Yes,” she replied in a faint voice. Then she bent over her sister and stroked her head.
We soon learned that we needed another two hundred dollars to get to Khartoum.
Another rusty old Land Rover.
We would leave Al Qadarif in a week.
Those who had the money could pay immediately; the others had to find a job or have relatives send the funds to a nearby money-transfer location that they showed us. The traffickers had a satellite phone that could be used to call home. But for those who didn’t have the money right then, the two hundred dollars would become two hundred and fifty.
I didn’t give it a second’s thought; I paid.
For a week I slept in that room on a mattress that was damp from dog or goat piss.
Outside there were hordes of goats, bleating as though possessed at all hours of the day or night: thirsty, starving, crazed like us. May a thousand liters of putrid, stinking water fall on their heads.
CHAPTER 25
AFTER A WEEK I set out again. Meanwhile, during those days everything had changed. From that fetid mattress, like a plant that suddenly bears fruit, the seed of self-interest had sprouted. I had begun thinking only of myself. Everything was secondary to my survival. I had become more unsociable, a loner. My only objective was to reach the end of the Journey. I alone had put myself in that situation, and the situation had transformed me. Forever. In just a few days. There was no way I could get out of it, unless I went back on foot. I could only continue. And accept my transformation. I had to make it at all costs. It was no longer about the ultimate goal. It was about survival.
There were fewer of us this time: forty-eight. We were a little less packed; I didn’t have the feeling I would pass out each time we hit a pothole.
We all knew that the worst of the Journey was yet to come: crossing the Sahara. Everyone had heard dozens of stories in his lifetime; we knew that the Sahara was the toughest test. For this reason we made every effort not to think about it. In addition, we had rested for a week and we had a little more space. This made us feel foolishly euphoric.
We sang! During that second leg we sang. To pass the time, to mark the hours. The terrain around us didn’t help much. There was nothing to see. An endless ocher-colored expanse of nothing. Earth and more earth, everywhere you looked; fine dust that swirled up and got in your throat if you didn’t cover your mouth with your veil. Earth and dry brush. And a track, the road we were on, straight as a plumb line, headed north.
We took turns singing the songs of our countries. An Ethiopian woman with her eleven-month-old son in her arms started it off. Her fellow countrymen immediately joined her. Then we Somalis did the same, and finally the Sudanese.
Anything we could, just to avoid thinking. If Hodan had been there, she would have been happy. Who knows, maybe she sang too on her Journey. Maybe she’d been a big hit. Someday she would tell me about it. Not now. It makes no sense to think further than what you see in front of you. The future doesn’t exist.
After driving for twenty hours we stopped again, in front of a brick building surrounded only by dusty desert. All around us, nothing. It was night, but it had been at least six hours since we’d seen anything but earth and rocks. Rocks and earth. Then, abruptly, the low brush merged with the soil, and soon everything turned to sand. Actual fine sand. Without realizing it we had crossed into the Sahara.
It was the singing. That’s what it had done for us.
We soon learned that once again we were not in Khartoum but in a village that we were told was called Sharif al Amin. This driver and his backup also spoke only Sudanese
and a little Arabic. Again several among us acted as interpreters.
They told us that the jeep had broken down and that we’d been forced to stop.
You catch on quickly enough on the Journey.
The truth is irrelevant to those who have fled and are in need of refuge. That jeep hadn’t broken down; that jeep was running just fine. But we wanted to believe it, simply because we wanted to get out and stretch our legs, straighten our backs. The truth is traded for survival. For a trifle. For naught.
Only one Somali man got angry. He was thin and looked like an intellectual: He wore wire-rimmed glasses, the lenses coated with a layer of dust, which he must have been used to.
“You’re all a bunch of filthy crooks,” he said in Arabic. “Thieves and bastards! Two-bit swindlers,” he ranted, foaming at the mouth.
The backup driver went over to him and gave him a loud smack. The man fell to the ground. His glasses broke, cracked in half. Struggling to get up with the two broken pieces in his hand, he kept it up: “You’re disgusting. Filthy two-bit scammers.” The trafficker kicked him in the calf and made him fall again. “Shut up, hawaian,” he told him. Animal.
And that was that.
We were in their hands.
They knew it; they’d learned how to tell when a man turns into a needy refugee. They read it in your eyes. It’s something that shows. Plain as the rising sun, clear as flowing water. It’s something you carry with you, written in your eyes. You can try all you want to hide it, but you’ll never be able to. It’s the smell of a downtrodden animal.
There, for the first time, we were called animals. When you enter the desert, you stop being a human being. I had been a tahrib in Addis Ababa, but now I was a needy tahrib refugee. A vulnerable illegal. An animal tethered to life by an ever-more-tenuous thread.
They beat you.
Little Warrior Page 15