Well, where was I? Yes, I had taken you on my journey through the wilderness of my solitude to the moment when we connected. On a superficial level, after that it was all plain sailing for the next ten years, wasn’t it? Courting, marriage, the move back to Asmara, the births of our children. The summer of our love.
But of course it was never that easy. Our relationship was an explosive shock to your family, I was from the wrong class, the wrong religion, and our move back to my homeland was less a positive step than an escape.
Back in Eritrea among my people, it was your turn to be the alien, our union frowned on despite your conversion to Islam. But we persevered, working hard to create a healthy home environment, careful to lead blameless lives. I drove my father’s taxi night and day, built up our savings and made plans to buy a plot of land in Kahawta. But it was you who made the true sacrifices. You threw yourself into your cultural and religious re-education, learning Tigrinya for everyday conversation, Arabic for your Qur’anic classes, recruiting my sister to teach you our cuisine, my aunt to show you our city, the best market stalls, cheapest shops, determined to make new friends, to fit into our society. You never complained about your exile, the rejection by your family, the loss of your friends. The times I felt low, I thought of you and your spirit inspired me, my love.
So as I struggled to build our financial security, you fought for acceptance, toiled to put down roots. And little by little our efforts were rewarded. You had graduated before leaving Addis and had even done a term’s teaching at that primary school in Keraniyo, the one with the Sudanese head teacher with all those gold teeth and those odd spinster twins who had been teaching there forever and a day. Now, in Asmara, you were determined to continue with your career, to play your part in the community and in contributing to the household finances. I remember your first day at your new teaching job, that pitiful school in Sembel, the dilapidated classrooms, doors off hinges, the missing window panes, the ever-hungry children. It must have been demoralising at times, but you never gave up and always made the best of the situation. And after the birth of each of our own children, after the maternity leave, once you felt they were happy and healthy, you always went back to your job, to your other children at that school.
So there we were, ten years of growth. A cheerful home, two people in love, blossoming children, the respect and affection of family, friends and colleagues around us. We felt secure, invulnerable, our home an impenetrable fortress. And then, in the course of a single fateful evening, our citadel laid siege to, overrun, laid waste. The fragility of happiness.
You remember the evening, don’t you? A day of national celebration, Eid ul-Fitr, the end of the month of fasting. The streets of Asmara heaving with crowds dressed up in their finest, the usual stream of families enjoying the passeggiata along Harnet Avenue, the stalls and cafés and restaurants buzzing.
You at home with the children, supervising their efforts to decorate the house, preparing a delicious family feast of Eritrean specialities you had taught yourself over the years: the lamb’s tongue sember, the spicy zilzil keih, the milder derho alicha.
And me out in the taxi, despite your protestations that on this one day of the year I should take a break. Up before the muezzin had made his early morning call to prayer, a full day’s work behind me already, ferrying the jubilant to their relatives or further afield, to the bus terminus, the train station, the airport. Returning home through the crowds at five, deciding to give in to your pleading and spend a precious evening together. And then, minutes after getting through the front entrance, no sooner had I kicked off my shoes, the knock at the door, the neighbour’s daughter bringing news of the onset of her mother’s labour, the plea to take her to hospital. So shoes back on, reversing out of the driveway, the women groaning in the backseat, her sister alongside me up front urging me to put my foot down.
And then the drop off outside the maternity ward entrance, the sister’s fumbling with coins and notes, my refusal to accept payment for such a noble mission. I remember thinking, that’s it, now home to my loved ones. I recall feeling excitement for my neighbour’s family, but also relief that I was not about to embark on a night like theirs. After all, we already had our children. Our family was already complete. Already perfect.
But before I could pull away from the hospital, I found myself blocked by a young white woman frantically trying to flag me down. She was smiling, mouthing something at me, an appeal to take pity and give her a ride I supposed, her face so pink it looked as if it had been scrubbed with a wire brush. I hesitated, picturing your disapproval as your feast grew cold and the disappointment of the children. But it went against my nature to turn down a fare, so I shrugged, pulled up beside her and waited as she climbed in alongside me.
I go train of Massawa thirty minutes, she began in breathless, halting Tigrinya. Please help quick. Then added, as if to clarify, Please railway station thank you.
And there it was. In accepting the challenge to reach the station before the departure of her train, I was sealing my fate. Of course, I cannot blame her. What is she guilty of? Slack timekeeping? An over-ambitious itinerary for the day? As we set off for the train station my speed was, I have to admit, a fraction higher than usual, but I was not distracted, my mind focused on navigating through the Asmara traffic and crowds of pedestrians.
I was just negotiating my way across Bahti Meskerem Square when I hit the boy. I swear he came out of nowhere, sprinting onto the road, his head turned back, chuckling as he ran clear of his chasing friends, his mind empty save for the thrill of his game, oblivious to the dangers of the road.
Witnesses backed me up. It was a glancing blow to his side. I had seen him at the last second, braked and swerved. The impact was not enough to kill him. It was barely forceful enough to cause more than heavy bruising, but he fell awkwardly, spinning round so that his arms could not cushion his fall, so that the first contact with the tarmac was his head. It was this blow, a split second’s trauma to his skull, that did for him. By the time I had pulled up and raced to the boy, a crowd had gathered around him. Already blood was seeping from his nostrils, a trickle from his mouth. His friends stood around, silent and shaken, while we waited for the police and an ambulance. I stumbled back to the car to collect my documents and found the white women had disappeared. I think I knew the boy would die as soon as it happened, I remember the feeling of certainty as I was driven to the police station in the back of the patrol car. As I found out an hour later, he never regained consciousness.
I have never gone into so much detail about that catastrophic evening. It has always been taboo, marking as it did the end of our carefree life, the beginning of our downward spiral. The rest you know, of course. Not just the legal cost – my trial and three-year prison sentence for careless driving and manslaughter – but the less tangible consequences. Our attempts to settle the accidental death with the victim’s family through compensation payments. The realisation not only of the power and influence of the boy’s family, but of their relentless desire for vengeance. Their refusal to accept our efforts at mediation. Their unyielding, ruthless campaign against you and the children while I was incarcerated.
I will not speak of my experiences in prison. Suffice to say, I felt, still feel, tremendous guilt for my crime. That whatever pain and misery I suffered behind bars was entirely justified as settlement for what I had done. After all, there was a mother sitting alone somewhere in Asmara grieving for a son she would never see again.
No, I felt no self-pity. I took my punishment as a form of redemption. But what they did to you and the children, my love, was nothing short of mental torture. And if the purpose was to tear our lives apart just as I had torn theirs, then of course they were triumphantly successful.
It started very quietly, didn’t it? I remember you telling me during one of your monthly prison visits that a stranger had sidled up to you in the market and whispered in your ear that yo
ur house was being watched, that one of your children was to be targeted for an unpleasant accident. You were too stunned to speak, dropped your shopping bag in shock, and by the time you had bent down to pick it up, the figure had vanished into the crowd.
A few days later, you opened the front door first thing in the morning to find the dead dog disembowelled on the porch. A stone was thrown through the front window one evening the following week. More threats, incidents of intimidation, men approaching our children, silently drawing a finger across their throats, neighbours telling of loitering strangers, night visits warning them not to associate with us. Little by little we became social pariahs.
And then came the message from the boy’s family, delivered verbally to you by an uncle one evening twelve months into my sentence. Only the life of one of our children would ease the loss of their son, no other compensation would be acceptable. Perhaps it was a serious threat, perhaps just an upping of pressure to drive us out of Asmara for good. Whatever the case, it was enough to galvanise you into action. I remember your last visit so clearly, the strain etched painfully into the lines of your face, your eyes puffy from lack of sleep.
We agreed that you would take all our savings and drive the taxi back to Addis. It would be a hazardous journey for someone who had only just picked up the basics of driving, though I thanked God for our perseverance in the ritual of our Sunday morning driving lessons.
And that, my love, was the last time I ever saw you. You sold up our household goods, gave away what nobody would buy, packed the rest into the taxi wedged between children, then set off for your home city. You continued to write, of course, wonderful stirring letters that gave me the strength to bear the pain of our separation. You wrote regularly, though the unreliable postal service meant that some months I would receive nothing for weeks, then four letters in as many days.
You wrote of your attempts to re-build a life in Addis, your efforts at mending relations with your family, their rejection of you and your ‘heathen’ children. Setting up a new home, just a modest room in a poor district of the city, paying school fees, new school uniforms, repairs to the ailing taxi, all ate away at our savings. Frightened by the threats to the children, you were unwilling to return to teaching and to leave them alone for any length of time, so you bought a sewing machine and set up a tailoring business from home. As always, you showed courage, spirit, enterprise. My love and pride were never stronger.
There were many obstacles to overcome, but your steely determination and good spirits prevailed, and over the next eighteen months you forged a new life for yourselves. And then, when least expected, the axe fell again. Another evening visit, another stranger at the door. The message, that the boy’s family had branches of the extended family living in Addis, that they had got wind of your move there, that the situation had not changed, the old threats still applied.
In the last letter I ever got from you, written in the early hours of the following morning after a night of sleepless worry, you outlined your plans. You would not risk the safety of the children by remaining in Addis. You had debated moving to a neighbouring country, Sudan perhaps or Kenya, but decided that more drastic action was needed to prevent any further threat to their lives. So you proposed selling up everything and using the money to pay a trafficker to smuggle you all overseas. It did not matter where – Canada, the USA, Great Britain, Germany. That would in any case be in the hands of the smugglers. Once you had set yourselves up in the new country, you would then contact me via my brother – I would have been recently released – and I would join you in the new home. Typically, you wrote with such enthusiasm for the scheme that you made this escape seem like the brightest of opportunities.
I had no choice but to bide my time and serve my sentence. The final months – the period following your supposed departure from Africa – were a constant battle to avoid plunging into depression, all my strength concentrated on refusing myself the easy slide into self-pity. The boy was dead, the mother anguished, and you and the children had embarked on a perilous journey. What right had I, the perpetrator of this upheaval, to complain? I embraced the penance.
As each week passed with no news from you, I felt the black hole of fear inside me grow.
The day of my release, I could not help but hope that somehow you and the children would be waiting for me at the prison entrance as the gates swung open.
In fact I spent the first evening at my sister’s, lay sleepless during the early hours, had packed my few clothes into a holdall by daybreak and was inside the taxi minibus en route for Addis before my sister had even stirred.
I deserve no pity, seek none. So I will give you nothing but the bare facts in describing the next three months, my relentless search in Addis for clues as to where you might have gone to. It was an odd time, a period of uncertainty and paranoia. I was trying to seek out the smugglers who had offered you their business, and my attempts to make contact with them were met with hostility. At the same time, I became increasingly conscious that I myself was being watched. I realised that the tentacles of the boy’s family were still spread across Addis and that spies had become aware of my return and were monitoring my every move.
What I learned about your flight was confused and contradictory. Through persistence and bribery I was introduced to a middleman who admitted setting you up with a group of Somali traffickers, but the group itself seemed to have disbanded or moved back to Mogadishu. One man I spoke to, a kat-chewing Yemeni, seemed certain that you were to have been taken overland to Sudan, then flown to Germany or Britain. Another lead, a businessman who had known my father, believed the Somalis’ favoured routes were always via Libya or Egypt.
One evening, returning to my tiny rented room deep in the Addis slums after another fruitless day’s investigations, I was crossing a quiet street when a car parked ahead of me pulled out at speed and swerved across the road. I looked up and threw myself out of its path a split second before it hit me. Needless to say, the car did not stop. It was, at best, a warning.
My enquiries were getting me nowhere. At around this time, I received the news that my brother had died of meningitis. The attempt on my life was the final straw. I contacted an uncle in Asmara and begged him to lend me some money. He agreed to send me $8,000, less a gift of love than a pay-off to disappear. There was nothing left for me in Asmara. The family home had been sold, both my sisters were by now married, their husbands afraid of contact with me, the family outcast.
So I went back to my trafficking contacts, this time in search of business, not information. Suddenly they were much more amenable. They took $5,000 of my money and promised me a problem-free journey to Germany. The route was more or less as the Yemeni had described yours. False papers and a truck providing a smooth ride to Khartoum. Then a new passport and plane ticket to Frankfurt, where I would claim political asylum. In my mind I imagined myself following in your footsteps, believed myself to be drawing ever nearer to my precious family.
The journey was a disaster from the outset. The departure was inexplicably delayed by two days, so that by the time I got the signal one chilly morning to make my way to the car park of an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts and clambered on board the truck, I was a tangle of nerves. The truck, loaded with flour, wheezed and clanked as it pulled out onto the road. I glanced at my fellow passengers – a father and young son, two young men who I later learned to be brothers, a teenage girl and her aunt – and sensed in them the same anxiety that I felt.
We crossed the border at Kurmuk, but rather than turn a blind eye, as we had been promised, the Sudanese border guards pounced on us. They seemed almost to have been expecting our arrival, arrested the driver, confiscated our papers and locked us up in police cells. The next day we were loaded up into a military truck and driven north, up to a remote area on the border with Eritrea, where we were abandoned in a refugee camp they called Kilo Sitta Wa Eshrin. It was a hellish place, squalid with
little food to go round. The Sudanese soldiers in the vicinity were a brutal rabble and because many of the residents were Eritreans escaping military service, the Eritrean army would sometimes raid at night, kidnapping any young men they came across. I survived a week, then bribed a Sudanese soldier to give me a lift to Kassala. From there, another few dollars paid for a hitched ride into Khartoum.
I thought, briefly, that my luck was turning. I should have known better. I bought some Sudanese identity papers from a Lebanese market trader. He suggested I head for Libya, where I could live illegally without too many problems from the authorities while I earned enough to set me up in Europe. I was told that from the Libyan coast I could buy passage on a boat crossing to France or Spain or Italy.
I travelled up to Dongolla with a series of bokasi, the pickup taxis that cross that vast country. I had been given a contact name by my Lebanese friend, and through this man, I secured another boksi ride across the Libyan Desert. It was a gruelling experience, my memories now a blur of heat and thirst.
Crossing the border, a repeat of my earlier disaster. A patrol of Libyan soldiers came across us by chance, and once again I suffered the indignity of arrest and transportation, this time to a detention centre named Misratah.
It was another hellhole, the inmates a mixture of Ethiopians, Eritreans and Somalis, men and women, the elderly down to the new-born, packed seventy to each windowless cell. We had blankets for beds, overflowing toilets, meagre rations and dirty water, no medicines to treat the cases of malaria and diarrhoea and TB. The guards were sadists, the weekly drip drip of physical abuse culminating each Thursday in an orgy of drink and violence, women inmates dragged from their cells to be raped, any attempt by their male counterparts to halt this torture met with teargas and beatings.
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