Black Mamba Boy

EXODUS, MAY 1947

I think this is going to be a strange voyage,” said Abdullahi, Jama’s clansman. Abdullahi had been told at first to expect a short trip to Haifa then Cyprus, but on the journey to Port Said he had seen the captain in huddled conferences with military men. He took Jama to the cabin that they would share: a small porthole funneled in light and two bunk beds with thin mattresses stood with a night table and lamp between them. There were twelve Somali firemen to stoke the engine, and the rest of the crew were white British men, all senior to the Somalis. Jama was the youngest on board apart from a slip of an English galley boy with fine blond hair. Abdullahi took Jama from fore to aft, into the holds, around the engine room, through the coal bunker, past the steering room to where the lifeboats hung lifeless. Jama was happy, happy, happy, and when Abdullahi presented him to Captain Barclay, he genuflected, curtsied, and held on to his hand as if it were the hand of the emperor of the world. Jama’s pay was set at nineteen pounds a month, a quarter less than the British sailors, but still a fortune to a boy who had once fought cats and dogs over bones. He intended to send half to Bethlehem when he was finally paid. Jama asked what they would be transporting. “Jews,” said Abdullahi.

Jama’s work could not have been simpler. He had to shovel piles of coal into the giant furnace in the boiler room, while a trimmer wheelbarrowed the coal in from the bunker and deposited it at Jama’s feet. Four hours of work, eight hours of rest, and by the time they had reached Haifa in Palestine, Jama had fallen easily into the rhythm his life would run by for the next fifty years. In his leisure hours, Jama observed the construction of a cage on deck. A small lavatory block had been built inside the cage, but that was the only sign it was being made for human habitation. Haifa port was a battleground when they docked. Five hundred gunners of the British marines stood alongside tanks, trucks, military jeeps, their guns aimed at a broken-down steamship renamed Exodus 1947 and the unruly Jews on board it. Four thousand refugees were trying to force open the British quota into Palestine and were in sight of the Promised Land. The Exodus had been rammed by three British ships, including a navy destroyer, and it now lay motionless like a gutted whale, with Jewish refugees peering out of its bowels. The refugees from Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka were once again separated from their belongings and marched into shacks where they were sprayed with DDT and pushed onto the waiting prison ships. The hard young men and women on board the Exodus had to be forced from the wreckage with batons and gunfire, and three corpses were bundled by the British into waiting ambulances. Jama watched in amazement as thousands of bedraggled people trudged toward the Runnymede Park, toward his pristine ship, old men hobbling along as best they could, while children with lost eyes stifled tears. They looked nothing like the turbaned Jews of Yemen, these pale, haggard people. They looked over their shoulders, at the black jute sacks of clothing, food, jewelry, and mementos that the British had pried from them and dumped haphazardly on the dockside. A desperate cry rang out when part of the pile collapsed into the water and sank to the bottom of the sea. Two other prison ships, the Ocean Vigour and Empire Rival, were also waiting to collect the refugees, and Jama waved to the Somali sailors he could see distantly on their decks. Eighty Royal Marines boarded the Runnymede Park along with the refugees, the glossy young men with tanned skin and golden hair squashed under red berets seeming like a different species of human to the thin, angry Eastern Europeans they were pushing into the hold. After the Haganah zealots who had organized the Exodus revolt had been identified and placed under guard, women, children, and the elderly were allowed on deck. Some refugees had squeezed themselves into all the clothes they had rather than put them in the jute sacks, and now they peeled them off, clothes from their past lives, from the death camps, from the DP camps, their history folded into a few items beside them. Unlike the marines who only had eyes for the bewitching Hungarian girls with the sorceress green eyes and wide feline faces, Jama’s attention was caught by a woman sitting boulderlike by the railings away from the other refugees. She was heavyset but made larger by the woolen coat she continued to wear in the heat, and an infant slept at her breast; something about her gave Jama a powerful sensation of Ambaro. It was as if his mother had been transplanted onto the ship. For a long time Jama watched her stare into the sea, unconcerned with the hustle and bustle around her. She adjusted her headscarf and cast a weary look over the potato sacks that contained her worldly goods.

“Oi, Sambo! Stop mooning at the white women and get back to your cabin,” yelled the donkeyman at Jama, beckoning with his thumb to the hot cabins below. Jama, only understanding the tone and hand gesture, turned away toward his cabin.

“Leave him, Bren, he ain’t hurting anyone,” called down the engineer, Sidney, who had observed the exchange. Jama loitered by the metal steps to try and decipher what the Ferengis were saying about him.

“Poor fella, yer true to yer title, Bren, you ride those Mohammeds as if they were donkeys. Me ’eart goes out to ’em. Poor, puzzled buggers never complain,” said Sidney.

“I’ve got to, matey, they might be quiet but they’re conniving bastards, they’ll have our jobs and our birds as soon as we turn our backs,” replied Brendan, the donkeyman.

“Good luck to ’em, if I owned these ships I’d employ ’em too, they’re like fucking barnacles, however bad it gets they hang on. Don’t see ’em bellyaching like you paddies, live off a stick of incense a week or a whiff of an oily rag. Ain’t surprised the bosses wanna keep ’em on. As for our women,” teased Sidney, “you know you ain’t that scrupulous in your dealings with colored girls when we dock in Bongo-Bongo Land either.”

The cabin rocked Jama gently to sleep, the distant roar of the engines and sea becoming part of his dream life. He had one of the top bunks and his dreams often made him leap from it, to wake up suddenly on the floor with a sore hip or elbow. It was usually hyenas that pursued him, frothing at the mouth as they pounced, or Italian gunmen kicking in the door and opening fire with machine guns.

Small muscles had formed on the top of Jama’s arms and his cheeks had filled out with the regular meals. Good dreams consisted of feedings that never ended, dish after dish served on the plastic trays he had grown to love. The white steward would smile and proffer the strange canned beef, the sweet corn, sardines, mashed potato. The hot, noisy inferno of the engine room never appeared in his dreams but dominated his waking life, every twelve hours he went down to feed the glowing fire, communicating over the scrape of shovel and coal with hand signals and lip reading. The ship was a world propelled forward by Jama and the other Somali firemen, an ark with more than two of each, English, Irish, Scottish, Somali, Polish, Hungarian, German, Palestinian: the Runnymede Park carried them all on her back away from the Promised Land to an unknown shore. The Jewish refugees had been told that they were being taken to a camp in Cyprus, but that was a lie, Cyprus lay far behind them and they were heading for Europe to be made an example of. The eighty marines kept a close watch on the young men and women, fearing the Haganah militants among them. At night a huge lamp was shone into the cage and over the Mediterranean, casting a ghostly eye over the bundled families and mysterious sea. The refugees were separated, with the most virile and threatening held under guard in the hold. Women, children, the elderly, and the sick were allowed on deck to visit the hospital, to prepare their meals of five-year-old army rations, and for the elderly to teach Hebrew to the children. There was little interaction between the crew and the refugees, but one day a determined-looking man made a beeline for Jama and presented a navy sports jacket with gold buttons. “You buy!” he declared.

Jama tried the jacket on. “One pound.” Jama held up one finger, and through hand gestures the Jew and the Somali haggled hard, until they agreed on an acceptable price and shook hands.

That was the only time the refugees acknowledged Jama, usually they looked through him with a baleful expression of suspended animation, of people caught between life and death. Even the children had suspicious adult gazes, demanding chocolate without childish gaiety but with a bullying tone learned in the camps. The woman who had reminded Jama of Ambaro was forever on deck, her overcoat folded underneath her large bottom. She had two daughters around six and eight years old as well as an infant son, and her girls were the happiest on the ship. Jama gave them the Bourneville chocolates he bought in the ship’s store. The mother never noticed when they ran up to Jama and pleaded for the red-and-gold-wrapped chocolates that he hid up his sleeve or behind his ear, neither did she help the women prepare the rations during the day. Instead she sat with her face upturned to the sunlight and ignored everyone.

Haganah activists circulated secretly among the passengers, and when a careless marine told one of them, “We’re sending you bastards back to where you came from,” the news spread within minutes and created a kind of millennial hysteria. “Palestine! Palestine!” was the chant. The refugees had borne the filth, heat, worm-infested soups, moldy crackers, and varied deprivations quietly for three weeks but now they exploded with angry yelling faces, painted gentian violet to heal the blisters and rashes that had erupted on board. By the time the ship docked at Port-de-Bouc in France, a swastika had been painted over the flying Union Jack and the marines had had to force the seething purple masses back into the cage after their riot.

The refugees had gathered from all over Europe, some by foot, to secure a precious place on the Exodus, but now they were captives again. The Haganah men were losing control, they thought they were assisting helpless refugees, but they were dealing with men and women who had withstood every kind of possible torment. Each day there were bomb scares and the marines treated all of the refugees as potential terrorists. The British refused to give the refugees water and rations, in the hope of forcing them to disembark, and in response a hunger strike was defiantly declared. The British pleaded and threatened, the French tried to mediate, but the refugees were adamant they would disembark only in Palestine. One woman had given birth in the cage and Jama could still see her lying in her blood and gore, her baby wrapped in a dirty rag torn from her skirt. He did not understand why they would not get off the filthy, hostile ship. If he had not bent with circumstances he would have been broken by them, but these people seemed to want to be broken or at least did not care.

The hunger strike fizzled out with the arrival of manna on launches operated by Haganah agents and paid for by American Jews; each day arrived crates of Irish stewed steak, French sardines, American evaporated milk, Spanish jam, French baguettes. The marines bayoneted the cans, to prevent smuggling, they said, but mainly out of jealousy, as they were still eating army rations. Even the crew looked on in envy at the refugees’ food aid. Books were also delivered by the launches, Torahs, novels, dictionaries, but the British confiscated these, fearing the propaganda secreted within them. Food was the only succor the refugees had. Even the weather had turned against them: it was the hottest summer on record in the south of France and the holds became ovens, the steel walls scalding bare flesh, the air fetid and unbreathable. The British were called Nazis, Hitler commandos, the Runnymede Park a floating Auschwitz. On this floating Auschwitz, the sailors and soldiers fished, sunbathed, and swam in the Med in their free time, just as SS men had frolicked in the pine resort of Solahutte near Auschwitz.

After the heat came the deluge, a four-day storm that forced all fifteen hundred refugees into the holds. The sky was black, strong winds tossed the ship from east to west, rain poured through the grilles and the holds filled with inches of bilgewater mixed with vomit. The British Nazis waited for the storm to break the refugees’ spirit but still they refused to leave. While the refugees relived the Old Testament on the Runnymede Park, Jama and a few other Somalis went on shore leave. A bus took them to Marseille and Abdullahi showed them around, guiding them in a crocodile line as if they were schoolchildren. He explained everything: the banks, post offices, the pigs’ heads and intestines hanging in the butchers. To unbelieving laughter, Abdullahi told them that the French also ate frogs and horses. Some of the Frenchwomen wore shorts, and the Somalis giggled at their exposed thighs. The sailors crept gingerly forward as if they had landed on another planet, everything strange and outlandish, and Jama recorded every detail to recount to Bethlehem. They went down touristy Rue de la Joliette and listened to the buskers along the Vieux Port, ate long crusty loaves on La Canebière, and ended up in the seedy Ditch, in an African bar run by a Senegalese man. An American named Banjo sat by them and played wild songs, “Jelly Roll,” “Shake That Thing,” “Let My People Go.” Jama danced Kunama-style to the strange music and the bar filled with black sailors from the West Indies, United States, South America, West Africa, and East Africa. Banjo introduced them to his friends Ray, Dengel, Goosey, Bugsy, and a pretty Abyssinian girl called Latnah, and Jama smiled as he shook their hands, wondering if Bethlehem would believe that there were Habashi girls in France. There was no need for translation between the dancers, they were spiritual siblings, all they needed to know was that they had washed up in this bar to spend the night together, the money that passed from the sailors to Banjo and his friends was irrelevant.

The twenty-eight days docked in Port-de-Bouc passed quickly, spent either in Marseille with Banjo and the other panhandlers, or on the ship sleeping and resting. Even on this gigantic vessel he felt crowded and trapped; the angry refugees and the armed marines were like two armies on the verge of war. Everything had become discordant and fraught. The British crew drank the days and nights away, arguments breaking out like summer storms, and when they were particularly violent, Jama would lock his cabin door and hide in bed afraid that they would take their anger out on him. The Somali firemen would force him to open the door and tell stories to distract him, of lands where the men dressed like women and women married trees, of sailors thrown overboard after petty arguments, of stowaways found too late. One of the sailors had earned the epithet Grave Reject, as he had survived three torpedoed ships during the war, appearing on the surface of the water as if by magic even though he was unable to swim. Another sailor had been to Australia and met an old Somali man living alone in a desert outpost; he had arrived in the last century as a camel trainer and now couldn’t remember a word of Somali. Australia, Panama, Brazil, Singapore, these were names Jama had never heard before, they might as well have been describing moons or planets, but these countries were now part of his world. Then they started to talk about women.

“The thing is, you can’t trust women, look at the kind of job we do! We’re gone too long, they end up thinking that we’ve forgotten them, so they forget us,” Abdullahi said.

“That’s not true,” cut in Jama.

“What do you know about it? The only thing you do in bed is piss yourself!” jeered Abdullahi.

“I’m a married man, with a wife ten times more beautiful than yours!” shouted Jama. He did not confess he had spent only one night with his bride.

“Oh yeah? Well, if she’s that beautiful and delicious, you have left your dinner out for another man to eat,” snorted Abdullahi. Jama turned his back to all of them and sulked.

For all their stories, the sailors had to admit that Jama had chanced upon a very remarkable ship for his maiden voyage. On the twenty-eighth day, distinguished men with medals covering their chests came on board and read out a declaration to the assembled refugees. Through the many interpretations of the Somalis who had a little English, Jama learned that the British were threatening the Jews, giving them a day to surrender or be taken to Germany. One Somali said that the Germans were the archenemies of Jews, and this was a very grave threat that the Jews could not ignore. To show their serious intent, the British handed out leaflets to the refugees and wrote the threat in many languages on a blackboard, and when the British finished talking, the Jews defiantly applauded and went back to the cage. That night launches filled with Haganah agents sidled up to the boat and with megaphones encouraged the refugees to stay on board. The British silenced them with a siren but it was too late. The next day, as the six o’clock deadline approached, only a solitary self-composed little girl, around twelve years old, left the ship. The rest stood to attention like legionnaires under their general, Mordechai Rosman, a partisan leader who had led a band of fighters out of the Warsaw Ghetto. With his long hair and bare bony chest, Rosman looked like an ancient prophet lost amid the modern world, where the Pharaoh had gas chambers, the Promised Land was subject to United Nations resolutions, and only desperate Somalis tried to wade across the Red Sea.

With only one less passenger, the Runnymede Park set off for Hamburg. Despite their defiance, something had been lost among the refugees; they finally realized that they were prisoners, in no position to negotiate or barter, and worst of all, they felt as if the world had forgotten them. More children were born on the way to Gibraltar, where the ship refueled. These babies were prisoners of the British, but also of their parents’ dreams. Jama was back at work but even he was infected with the melancholy of the refugees; a ship full of heartbroken people has a particular flavor, a certain spirit that is hard on the soul. Jama only had to look into the faces of the refugees to be sent back to his own nightmares, to feel again deep fear, despair, and self-hate. The refugees had been treated like animals, had been mocked, beaten, degraded by men reveling in their power, as had Jama, and that humiliation never left anyone. It sat on their backs like a demon, and these demons would intermittently dig their talons into flesh and remind them of where they had been. Jama approached the large lady one day; her daughters didn’t run around anymore, just sat quietly next to her. He pressed a couple of chocolates into the mother’s hand, she hid them in her bra and took Jama’s hand, her large brown eyes read his palm while he tried to remember his words of Hebrew.

“Shalom!” Jama said.

“Shalom,” the woman replied, stroking the lines on his hand, nodding her approval; she saw a good life there.

Jama pointed to his chest and said, “Jama.”

The woman held out her hand. “Chaja.”

At seven in the evening the refugees gathered on the deck, everyone but a few women on laundry duty, and found whatever space they could to sit or stand around the cage. These meetings were called regularly to solve disputes between refugees, or between the refugees and the British, but sometimes the people gathered just to talk and sing. Jama, Abdullahi, and Sidney were the only crewmen who seemed interested in these powwows, and they joined the refugees whenever they were called. Abdullahi treated the meetings as a kind of theater: he shook his head, laughed, shouted out “Ajeeb!” and clapped his hands together. Jama also enjoyed the drama; the actors took him back to Gerset and its domestic intrigues and machinations. Sidney sat apart, scratching things into his notepad. Under the glare of the searchlight, ghostly figures complained about the mothers who did not clean up after their children in the latrines, the noisiness of the British marines walking along the duckwalks at night, sometimes even disputes from the war or before the war were brought up. An old man in nothing but his undergarments was squaring off with a much stronger bare-chested man.

Jama asked Abdullahi what the old man wanted. “He says this young man stole his property before the war.”

Sidney was laughing at the amateur boxers, as were some of the refugees, but Jama worried for the old bearded man. His bony legs could barely hold him up but he persisted in shoving and enraging the younger man.

The old man cried out in English, “I used to be somebody! I had a name that was respected, I owned a farm, a flour mill, a forest!”

The men were separated and a young woman stood up to speak. “I knew this man in Poland, he was a friend of my father’s, he taught Hebrew to my sisters and me. When the German and Polish soldiers came, he saved my life. He hid me in a barrel in his flour mill while the rest of my family were walked to the river and shot. I saw their naked bodies floating down the river. If it wasn’t for this man I would be in that river with them. If he says this man stole his property, then it is the truth.”

German burghers spoke after Hungarian farmers and Red Army soldiers, some described prewar lives of furs, chauffeurs, and governesses while others had known only the misery of poor harvests, pogroms, and bitter winters. Even now, good fortune was sprinkled haphazardly and confusingly, as many refugees had lost forty or fifty members of their family while others were still huddled with their children and parents. Abdullahi translated as much as he could for Jama while Sidney scribbled things down. The children were also given time to speak, and a little girl with a crooked back told the people that her family had fled to Uzbekistan during the war, and when they had tried to return to their village in Poland afterward her parents had been attacked and killed. She was now one of the many frail orphans aboard the Runnymede Park who believed that Palestine would be a land of peace and milk. All the refugees spoke of Palestine as a kind of empty paradise where orange trees grew and birds sang, which had no relation to the poor Arab country that Jama had passed through. There were too many here to squeeze into all the beyt al-deefs of Palestine. They had been set adrift on the dark sea, and Jama wondered where this ship would take them and where it would take him. He had long stopped thinking of Somaliland as his home, but the refugees made him realize how precarious it was to never belong anywhere. These floating Jews — hounded, harried, and lost — had no stars to guide them, but he did.

Chaja stood up, waiting for her chance to speak; she was impatiently tapping her feet, grasping her son to her hip. A young Polish partisan was speaking about the need to fight for a Jewish state. Many of the young people had been part of Zionist groups in their villages and their hunger for a homeland now coalesced with a desire to avenge their families. The partisan seemed unable to see a future without more violence, more battles, more ghettos, more blood on the streets. “If they do not let us live on our land, we will crush them like ants, we will smash their heads against boulders and walls,” he said in heavily accented English.

Chaja pushed him aside and stepped under the huge lamp. “I have lived through Polish hell, Russian hell, German hell, and now British hell, but I swear by God that I will not condemn my children to Palestinian hell. I have lost my husband and son already, watched their ashes blow out of Nazi chimneys. I want peace, just peace, give me a little scrap of wasteland as long as my children can eat and sleep in peace. My father was a philosophy teacher but my daughters cannot even read, you think they can learn while you are fighting and smashing heads? Take your violence and murder to people who have had enough of comfort. I want nothing from guns and bombs. You think you are David from the Bible but we are not your worshippers or subjects. In Palestine there must be no war. If there is war we may as well stay in Poland, or go to Eritrea, Cyprus, or wherever the British want to send us.”

Chaja spoke until her throat was raw and thick veins stuck out along her neck, and she brandished her baby like a weapon, thrusting him at the partisan. Jama barely understood what she said but he was moved by her. The partisan looked so weak beside her that if Jama had to follow either of them, he would follow Chaja. He had seen how strong women were better leaders than strong men. With the Italians he had learned how to destroy, but the women of Gerset had taught him how to create and sustain life.

The refugees remained quiet after Chaja’s speech, they nursed their dreams of peace and dreams of war in silence. They were cut off from the rest of the world, unable to comprehend real life anymore; farms, schoolhouses, synagogues were all things of their imagination now. Eventually a teenage boy pulled out a harmonica and played to them, children clapped and sang “Hatikvah,” serenading their fearful parents with sweet wavering voices.

Jama, Abdullahi, and Sidney clapped along. Jama remembered sitting as a child beside his father under the gigantic moon of the Somali desert. Old men dominated the evenings, talking about trade and clan disputes until they grew tired, then the young men would take their place to sing love songs and recite poetry that gloried in the richness of their language. Jama wished that his mother had had her chance to speak out like Chaja, to show those men all the workings of her wonderful mind and all the courage in her heart.

The journey to Hamburg brought back all the memories the refugees had been suppressing for months, smothered with fanciful ideas of a Jewish heaven in Palestine. On German soil there could be no denial of what had happened, the smell of burnt corpses would return to nostrils and the pain of unending hunger would torment stomachs whatever food they were given. Brendan the donkeyman had no time for the refugees, he called them “smelly ungrateful yids” and encouraged the soldiers to take a hard line with them. The soldiers were angry and resentful; they had been duped along with the refugees, having been told that they were only to escort the ship to Cyprus. Now they vented their frustration whenever they could, shoving the children, refusing small requests, and talking loudly as the prisoners tried to sleep. It was a forlorn ship that approached Hamburg, the long, slow funeral march had come to an end. “We have returned. We have returned to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen,” cried one man.

“I lost twenty-eight of my family here,” said an old woman. The refugees broke out in wailing and ripped their clothes, even Mordechai Rosman watched the dark land appearing through the fog with his head bowed, his arms outstretched as if on a rack. The Runnymede Park waited while the two other prison ships, Ocean Vigour and Empire Rival, were cleared out. British troops and German guards dragged out frenzied men and women, American jazz blaring out to muffle the screams. A homemade bomb was found on the Empire Rival, to the pleasure of the British; at last their suspicions had been confirmed, the purported refugees were actually dangerous terrorists desperate to injure their British guardians. The bomb was safely detonated on the dockside, but the refugees on the Runnymede Park would suffer for it. Batons went flying, hair was pulled out, soldiers kicked Mordechai Rosman down the gangplank, and possessions were thrown into the sea. Jama came on deck during this festival of violence, and he had never believed white people could treat each other with such open violence, without regard for age or infirmity, but in front of his eyes was proof.

“Wahollah! My God, this is terrible!” said Jama as he saw Chaja trying to escape down the gangplank, her head bent to avoid the blows as her children skidded and tripped beside her.

The Jews were handed over to the smirking Germans, to be returned to barbed wire and watchtowers in isolated camps in northern Germany. The men from the Haganah and the boys who had thrown biscuit tins and dirty clothes at the British soldiers were arrested for unruly behavior. The Runnymede Park became a ghost ship. After the ABs returned it to a semblance of order, Captain Barclay told the crew that they were going to Port Talbot in Wales for dry-docking before returning to Port Said. Jama would earn eighty pounds for this journey. His aim was to return to Gerset with two hundred pounds, and buy a prize camel and a large store and house for Bethlehem, but the other sailors laughed at his plan.

“Forget it, boy, we’re leaving this ship at Port Talbot. All the work is here, why do you want to return to stinking Egypt? If you stay on, it will be without any of us,” said Abdullahi.

“So what are you going to do?” asked Jama.

“Get another ship from Port Talbot or Hull. We get English wages on ships from England, a quarter more.”

The prospect of even greater pay was seductive but Jama worried that Bethlehem would give up on him; a year had already passed without any contact between them. She wouldn’t wait anymore, he thought. What if she had found someone else, he wondered, a Kunama or some rich Sudanese merchant? Any imam would consider Jama’s disappearance abandonment and grounds for divorce. As a child Jama had wanted desperately to have wings, and to go home now was like asking Icarus to set fire to his wings mid-flight, but he could not fly forever and keep Bethlehem.

Without the distraction of the refugees and soldiers, the Runnymede Park was now an ordinary freighter and the typical tensions in a mixed crew became clear. The British cooks would prepare pork alongside the Muslim men’s food, the British would mock their accents and skinny bodies, the drunken behavior of the ABs was abhorrent to the Somalis. The ABs liked Jama, though, his youth brought out a paternalistic kindness, and his inability to understand their insults meant his happy, ingenuous demeanor was not hardened.

They pronounced his name “Jammy.” “Hey, Jammy”; “You finished, Jammy?”; “Want a jammy biscuit, Jammy?” They enjoyed using his name, and as the chill of the North Sea deepened it was “Want a jumper, Jammy?” and “Bet you’re not used to this,” with exaggerated shivers.

The older Somalis told Jama that he was being mocked but he found it hard to care. His earlier fear of the white men had subsided; the British had given him work, high-paid work, and for that they could say what they liked. The ABs were positively loving in comparison with the Italians he had worked for, they never hit or humiliated him, they were nothing to be scared of despite Brendan the donkeyman’s efforts. Brendan stalked around after the Somalis, his large baby blue eyes threaded with red veins. Buck teeth stuck out from his puckered mouth, and his hair was balding in patches across his skull. The Somalis called him Sir Ilkadameer, “Sir Donkeyteeth,” to his face, and he would glow at the “Sir,” believing Ilkadameer to be a native term of respect.

Sidney would call the Somalis to join the rest of the crew for cigarette breaks and Jama would converse slowly in sign language and broken English. Sidney was especially friendly to Jama, though when he invited him to his cabin, Abdullahi forbade him to go; he will make you drink whiskey, he warned, but Jama went anyway. Sidney had a large cabin to himself underneath where the cage had been, and on the white wall he had stuck up pictures of white women in underwear that made their breasts point like goat horns. The only other picture on the wall was a yellow hammer and sickle on a red background. “You know what that means, Jama?”

Jama thought it must be something to do with his work, maybe he was a farmer as well as a sailor, but he shook his head, not wanting to embarrass himself.

“It means I believe that workers like you”—he poked his finger in Jama’s chest for emphasis and then pointed at himself—“and me should unite, together, understand?” His fingers were now knotted, caressing one another.

The smile fell from Jama’s face. The intertwined fingers meant only one thing and he didn’t want that, but what about the naked women, perhaps they were just to disguise Sidney’s real intentions?

He turned to the door but Sidney grabbed his shoulder. “Hold on a second, take this.” He shoved a fat dictionary into Jama’s hand. “I’m sure you’ve been about a bit, I would like to hear about it someday.”

Jama took the dictionary and ran out, giving a cursory “Tanks much” to Sidney.

For Jama, the rest of the journey to Port Talbot couldn’t have been more peaceful. He met Sidney occasionally in the smoking room, and when he didn’t repeat his hand caressing, Jama brought the dictionary with him and asked for help in learning to read it. Sidney read out articles from Time, following the words with his finger while Jama peered over his shoulder. The smell of cigarettes and the pleasure of reading would forever become entwined for Jama. Not only were his eyes being fed with new sights but the magazine articles poured news from the world into his mind, he listened to Sidney as if he were a sorcerer divining events in tea leaves, and he began to see his place in history. He now understood that the war that had ravaged Eritrea had blazed across the world. Jama stared at the photographs of Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Dresden. Naked children screaming with hollow mouths appeared in all the photographs, calling to each other. African, European, and Asian corpses were piled up in the pages of the magazine beside adverts for lipstick and toothpaste. Already the world was moving on, from somber black-and-white to lurid color.

Sometimes Sidney stopped reading and reached for a map. “Over here in Burma was the worst hell, North Africa was a picnic in comparison. I can handle desert heat but a man isn’t made to fight in a jungle, gave me the fucking willies. Me and the Somalis in the battalion were going barmy. When you can’t see the sky or feel a breeze it does something funny to a fella. The Japs would just appear out of nowhere, slit your throat, and jump back into the bushes. Look, a Somali mate put this on my arm.”

Sidney rolled up his sleeve and revealed a dark blue snake cut into his flesh. Jama touched the livid serpent resting on Sidney’s biceps like a python bathing on a hot boulder. It reminded him of the signs nomads cut into their camels. The snake was Jama’s totem; perhaps Sidney would put one on his arm.

“I thought I was gonna die in that place, honestly and truly, I’m surprised to be sitting here, between Hitler and Hirohito I thought my number was up.”

Jama rolled up his sleeve, and gestured between his small hump of a biceps and Sidney’s.

“You want one?” laughed Sidney.

“Si.”

“You worked for Italians, eh? Well, I’ll make more a hash of a tattoo than an Italian would soldiering. Better you get one done in London.”

Jama took the map out of Sidney’s hands, found the pink spot Idea had said was Somaliland, moved his finger along the Red Sea coast, beyond Gerset, into Sudan and Egypt, to where a sea separated his old world from the new.

Sidney put his blackened fingernail in the blue sea of the cold north. “That’s where we are, lad. Right up in the North Sea. You’re a long way from home, aren’t you?”

Jama nodded.

Sidney ripped a piece off the map, took a pen out of his shirt pocket. “Jama, I live in London, by the river in Putney. If you ever need anything, come by and give me a bell.” Sidney wrote down his address in awkward capitals and gave it to Jama.

Jama walked the perimeter of the deck. The searchlight was switched off and a full moon beamed down on the sea, its reflection floating on the indigo waves. Light from the ship scintillated and sent stars over the water. Jama breathed in the cold salty air, found Bethlehem’s star, and blew a kiss to it. A whale cruised in the distance, cutting slowly through undulating waves, and Jama turned around to show someone the whale but the deck was deserted. He had never imagined such creatures existed, but every day brought new wonders, monsters and knowledge. Bethlehem would never believe his stories. How could he explain the size of a whale to her, how it shot a geyser from its back, how it lived in ice-cold water? Jama closed his eyes and pictured Bethlehem’s nighttime routine; she would check her chickens were safely locked up, then the goats, she would then take the half-empty pan off the fire and store the remains for breakfast. The day’s labor over, she would find Jama’s star, send her love, and then stretch out her lovely limbs on the mat that still smelled faintly of him and sing herself to sleep.