Black Mamba Boy

SUDAN, EGYPT, AND PALESTINE, DECEMBER 1946

The train cut through nowhere, hurtling past virgin desert. It was British-made and inferior to the gliding Italian railway from Asmara, thrown down in haste by soldiers who were hurrying to avenge the assassination of Gordon by the dervishes. Jama had hitched a ride on the back of a camel to Kassala train station, quiet and morose the whole way. Leaving the tukul at dawn, Bethlehem’s hair sprawled over his old mat, he had knelt down and stroked her sleeping face, trying to burn her features into his memory. He could only put his faith in the stars, that they would bring him back to her.

Jama had never paid attention to the route Somalis took to Egypt. They were broke, hungry men who passed through Tessenei on their way to Sudan, and most could not speak Arabic and were perpetually lost. Now he strained to remember what the more mature ones had said. “Iskandriya? Sandriya? What was the name of that place?”

He spoke to his neighbors on the train but they were all Sudanese traders returning home to Khartoum who knew nothing of Egypt; they cut him off as he tried to make conversation, and talked among themselves. Jama looked through the wire mesh that covered the windows and stared at the barren, treeless wilderness beyond the tracks. He bought roasted sesame from hawkers at a small station, and embarrassed by the arcs of sweat spreading under his arms, on his back, and in his groin, remained by the train. When his legs grew tired he returned to his carriage. The leather stuck to his skin and he discreetly undid the buttons on his shirt as he nestled back into his seat.

At every stop he stuck his head out the door, looked around, and asked boarding passengers, “Egypt?” Most sullenly shook their heads and hurried past him to find a seat. Hours later, after people had performed afternoon, sunset, and evening prayers in the cramped carriage, a man who had journeyed with Jama from Kassala called out, “You need to get off here for the train to Egypt.” Jama thanked him and raced off, holding his father’s suitcase tightly under his arm. Crowds were walking toward the station, where uniformed policemen stopped and searched them. Jama had never needed identification before, he had no paper saying who he was and where he belonged, but from now on, his abtiris would not be enough to prove his identity. In this society you were nobody unless you had been anointed with a stamp by a bureaucrat. Fearful of the policemen, he skipped down from the platform before it entered the Wadi Halfa terminal, ran around the station, and followed the curve of a great lake into Egypt. Jama walked all night, the water in the lake as black and glossy as tar, the surface occasionally rippled by a fish struggling free from a hook. Only somnolent fishermen noticed him hurrying by with a nervy step. He did not see any policemen as he crossed the border, so he stopped to rest, falling asleep by a brick dam spanning the width of the Nile. When he reached Aswan station, with its proud waving flags and severe columns, he quickly bought another ticket to take him north before a policeman emerged. The train from Aswan terminated in Cairo, and after a three-day journey on hard wooden benches he was dismayed to learn that he needed another train to take him to the great port of Al-Iskanderiya.

Nausea crawled up his throat as the train trundled past the tanneries on the fringes of Alexandria; the smell of dead flesh hanging in the air was exactly like that of the battlefields of Keren. Jama suddenly felt certain that the train would be bombed and go up in a terrible conflagration like the Italian supply trains. Sweat poured down his face and neck, while his heart pounded in irregular beats. Even after the train had slid along the bright blue sea and screeched into the station, Jama sat slumped in the seat like a feverish man, waiting for the panic to subside. He had thrown himself headlong into an intimidating, alien land and began to regret the distance he had put between himself and Bethlehem.

With days of sweat, sand, and dirt on him, Jama first went to the washroom and cleaned himself, scrubbing his shirt in a porcelain sink, the first he had ever used. The wet shirt clinging to him, Jama drifted out into the city, his slight body pushed around by the crushing mass of people outside the station. Jama gazed bedu-like at the beautiful buildings, at their fancy glass windows and colorful tiled façades, and floated along with the cool sea breeze toward the port. Huge cargo ships were gathered together, sounding their deep-throated horns again and again; he would later find out they were celebrating the Ferengi Christmas, earlier and shorter than Bethlehem’s. As Jama sat on a bench, tired beyond the point of sleep, a Somali boy approached and introduced himself. The street lamps gave his black Indian hair a strange reddish tint. Jama could barely make out what he was saying, he hadn’t heard Somali for months, but he followed him deliriously. Liban led him back to the fifth-floor apartment he shared with seventeen other Somali migrants and offered him a mattress for the night. Liban showed him the damp washroom and then disappeared to speak with his roommates. From the windows Jama could see over a swath of Alexandria, and as dusk fell, lights appeared magically as far as the eye could see, buzzing in the hot dark like a swarm of fireflies. He finally found Bethlehem’s star and sleepily sent a kiss to it. He grabbed a mattress, pushed the suitcase under his head and kept hold of it as he slept.

In the morning Liban took Jama around their neighborhood. The apartment was in the Street of Seven Girls, a street of rioters and pimps, notorious for the men, women, and children for sale behind its doors. Sailors, policemen, and local Ferengi merchants lurked lustfully in doorways. Alexandria was like the ancient harlot mother of Aden and Djibouti, who had grown rich and now put on airs and graces, but in dank, cobwebbed corners her truest colors were revealed. Jama watched the Arabs smoking shishas, the promenading Frenchwomen, the African waiters and doormen, Greek merchants, Jewish rabbis all moving in their orbits, creating a twentieth-century Babel. A tram scuttled past and Liban pulled Jama on board. From it they saw the heights and depths of Alexandria. Ships were lined up along the dock, more ships than Jama could remember ever seeing in Aden. Liban dragged him off the tram near a seaman’s store on the eastern harbor, where he pretended to be a sailor to buy a fivepenny box of cigarettes and encouraged Jama to do the same.

“We can sell these for six pennies to the soldiers and clerks in Midan Saad Zaghloul,” Liban whispered. “Enough to buy bread and pay for the room.”

Although small and immature-looking, Liban was a wily, knowledgeable guide: he had been in Alexandria for a year waiting to join the Royal Navy and was cynical about Jama’s chances.

“The British army is based in Port Said, why don’t you come with me and see if we can find work there?” Liban asked. “We’ve been given fake army papers by a man who’s just collected his passport at the British consulate. We’ll find work in Port Said, wallaahi.” Jama was adamant he would stay and try his luck with the merchant navy.

“You don’t have a chance, brother, it’s nearly impossible to get a passport, and you can’t get a navy job without it,” said Liban, shaking his head.

As they spent the day together, Jama learned that Liban was Yibir, but that in Alexandria, Somalis of all clans fell upon one another for news, companionship, and help. Liban had left Somaliland because of hunger and to escape the harassment his family suffered. Even now his British passport was held up in Hargeisa because no elder would claim a Yibir as part of his clan and the Yibir were forbidden by the British from appointing an aqil of their own. In Egypt, Ajis would share cups with Liban, eat with him, befriend him because there was no one to judge them, but their acceptance was a vapor that would burn away under a Somali sun. A Yibir wore the name of his clan like a yellow star, it marked him as low, dirty, despicable. A Yibir learned from infancy that he had nothing to be proud of, no suldaans to boast about, no herds of camels, no battalions of fighters. In a land of scarcity and superstition, myths were hard currency, and rather than claiming a Sharif, a descendant of the prophet, as their first father, the Yibros had a pagan, an African magician who believed he could defeat the Muslim missionaries. For this heresy they had been cursed to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, to work leather and metal while the Ajis roamed with their noble camels. Even when Ajis wiped their hands after touching him, Liban had learned to avert his gaze, to pretend that it was natural for them to believe he could contaminate them, but the farther he fled from Somaliland, the less his Yibirness mattered. In Egypt all the Somalis wore the same yellow star; their black skin taught the Ajis what it was to be despised.

More Somalis from the apartment gathered in the square, emerging from Shari El-Eskandar el-Akbar. They greeted Liban and shook Jama’s hand. All had cigarette packs in their hands, hawking them all day in the sun, tiring their bodies so they could sleep soundly at night. Underneath them, on the ground floor, was a cabaret club, and music pulsed through the floors of their cramped apartment. Jama sometimes poked his head into the cabaret, where a dancer called Sabreen had befriended him, a beautiful Punjabi with large brown eyes and suggestive lips whom he called Hindiyyadi, the Indian girl. Jama’s chief pleasure in Alexandria was to creep down at night and watch through the alley window as Sabreen danced cobralike from the depths of a large basket, cavorting and jiggling in the shisha smoke. Soon Liban began watching her, and then the other Somalis, until Sabreen had a dedicated following of Somali alley cats peering in through the window.

Jama joined in with the daily routine of Liban and the others, buying cheap cigarettes at the dock and selling them for a penny profit to pay for the room. He boasted of his life in Gerset to all and sundry, his shop, his farm, his twenty employees, his beautiful wife. The Somalis humored him but made alcohol-guzzling gestures behind his back. He slipped out alone one day to change his inheritance into Egyptian pounds and never mentioned it to Liban or the others, worried that they would ask to borrow a share or even steal away with it in the night. He had to shred the prayers that had protected the Adeni notes for so long, collecting all the sacred wisps of paper and stuffing them into his trouser pocket.

On the façades of the cinemas were film posters, blown-up images of sleek men and their smoldering dames snarling down on the mortals beneath them. Jama stared up at the actors, wondering what they had done to achieve such glory; the posters drew his gaze more than the statues and grand buildings. He had never seen a film but concocted his own stories from the pictures: that one is fighting the rich man for the woman, this one wants revenge but doesn’t have the courage to grasp it. He grew a pencil mustache like the film men, so that he looked like a matinee idol playing the role of a man down on his luck. One day he borrowed a black jacket and a white shirt, combed his hair neatly to the side, and had his photograph taken in a cheap studio. He stared for a long time at the man in the photograph. He had the same expression as the film men, but his black eyes betrayed him; they were looking ever so slightly up at the sky, waiting for the stars to take mercy on him. Jama took the strange image and thrust it into the clerk’s face at the British consulate. “Give me a passport,” he demanded in Arabic.

Jama was asked to give his name, his address in Alexandria, his birth date, which he made up, his clan and the name of his clan’s aqil, and was told haughtily that he would be double-checked by the authorities in Hargeisa. He hesitated before handing over his photograph. He was the first in his family to have this paper twin made. He wanted people in centuries to come to point at the picture and say, “This is Jama Guure Mohamed, and he walked this earth.” He believed he would never die if his face survived him.

“It could take months, Jama, if they ever get back to you. Look at me; I have been waiting nearly a year,” Liban said as they left the office. “Let’s try our luck in Port Said in the meantime.” Jama nodded noncommittally and they sat by the duck pond in the municipal park.

Like Aden, cosmopolitan Alexandria was not an easy place for poor Africans. People looked through them as if through vapor or stared at their bodies dissectingly, commenting on their teeth, noses, backsides. Alexandria belonged to the pashas who walked down streets cleaned for them, past doors held open for them, into hotels and shops where people quivered and fluttered around them.

After enduring three months in Alexandria, Jama was running out of money and patience. On a sultry morning, after a fretful sleepless night, he shook Liban awake. He had ten shillings left of the money his mother’s sweat had given him, and he wanted something honorable to grow out of it, not this sleazy vagrant life. “Come on, then, let’s get out of this stinking place and try our luck in Port Said,” he told Liban.

Jama had no desire to join another army but needed to escape from the poverty of Alexandria. He spent every day dwelling on the bitterness Bethlehem would feel if he returned to Gerset empty-handed, having wasted the little money on which they could have built a life. He avoided the sailors returning to Somaliland through Eritrea, not wanting them to report back his poverty; he believed that Bethlehem would prefer happy dreams to gloomy reality. The apartment was a depressing place now, as many of the other Somalis had left for Port Said or Haifa, and those left behind were doomed to return to unemployment in Somaliland. Liban and Jama set off on foot for Port Said, eager to spare the remains of their money. They followed the Mediterranean coastline east for more than a hundred miles, passing through the outskirts of many small towns, but when they reached Damietta, two Egyptians in tarbooshes approached them, blocking their path. The plainclothes police officers demanded the Somalis’ papers. Liban proffered his fakes, while Jama left his hand-me-down papers in his shoe. The Egyptian took Liban’s certificates and gave them a cursory appraisal.

“This is shit,” sneered one of them. “You’re not Egyptian. I can tell by your faces that you’re damned Somalis.”

“Chief, we were just going to Port Said, to look for work, chief, that’s all,” Liban pleaded.

At the mention of Port Said the police officers pulled themselves up, stuck their chests out pugnaciously.

“Working for the British, eh? I see, Gamel, we have found two British spies in our country, think of that.”

“Let’s take them to the station, Naseer, they will turn their arses inside out.” On the spot, Jama and Liban were handcuffed together and marched into the industrial town. The locals jeered and spat at the detainees, and now and again one of the policemen would shove them from behind as they were made to walk in the road among the donkey carts and horse carriages. A crowd of street boys followed their progress after the excitement of Jama catching his shirt in the harness of a horse carriage and being dragged along beside it.

The police station was a grim place, alternately full of shouts and moans and tense silences. They were put in a room next to the main entrance, an armed policeman keeping guard. The handcuffs were taken off them and Jama’s suitcase was taken away for inspection. He let it go sullenly, and they sat down on the cement floor to await their fate. Jama was called out first for questioning, and they sat him on a broken wooden chair and stared him down. The chief policeman was fat and clean-shaven, his thinning hair stood up in a black fuzz over his head, and the dark bags under his eyes gave him a threatening look, but when he spoke his voice was even and dispassionate. “How did you get here?” “What do you want in Egypt?” “Where did your friend get the fake document?”

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 depressed 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.”

I would rather die, thought Jama. He was in a belligerent mood, a Shidane mood, his patience and optimism exhausted.

“You Ajis always think everything is owed to you.”

“What?”

“Deep down, you’re surprised when things don’t fall into your lap,” Liban persisted.

“You don’t know what I’ve been through, Liban, nothing has ever fallen into my lap!”

“It has, think about it. You have a strong clan behind you, someone wherever you go will give you food and water, will think you’re important enough to milk their camels for.”

“Liban, shut up, what camels are you talking about? From the age of six I slept on the streets in Aden with any passing maniac liable to drop a rock on my head. You had a father watching over you, a mother, sisters, cousins.”

Liban stared at Jama, lightning in his eyes. “Yes, I had a father, a father who could only watch as my mother was beaten up by an Aji, for a goatskin of water she had walked miles for!”

“Ooleh! Shut up, you two!” yelled the bus driver. Liban moved clumsily to a seat at the back of the bus.

“Suit yourself,” yelled Jama.

Sarafand was a town holding its breath; within a year it would be a ghost town, with stray dogs sleeping on mattresses and storing bones in the deserted kitchens. If only a place could speak, or howl, or bark a warning. In May 1947 the women of Sarafand collected olives, gave birth, drew water from the well, and arranged marriages as they had done for centuries on their native soil, the soil in which their mothers, fathers, and stillborn infants were held. But Sarafand held a secret. After the harvest and winter rains, a rolling black barrel filled with explosives and fuel would trundle along the main dirt path and stop outside the beyt al-deef, the guesthouse for strangers. After the blast, Jewish men would come with machine guns and order everyone to leave, destroying the old mudbrick homes with grenades.

The sprawling British garrison was the only clue to the coming devastation. Jama and Liban waited sullenly outside this garrison for the Somali askaris that Samatar had described to them. “I’m sorry that happened to your mother,” Jama finally said.

“I shouldn’t have shouted at you, brother.” Liban held out his hand. Jama took it and shook it hard.

They spotted the askaris late in the afternoon, three Somali men in their thirties and forties in tidy uniforms. The askaris knew the procedure; they each gave a pound to the boys, and Jama’s clansman walked them to where the other Somali worked. The clansman’s name was Jeylani, and like the others he repaired shoes, holsters, and other leather goods for the British soldiers; he was a former nomad who had acquiesced to this unclean but profitable work. Jeylani had been taught to work leather by Mahmoud, the Yibir man they were about to meet.

Jeylani was not impressed by Jama and Liban’s escapades. “Go home, boys. You look intelligent, I know you speak good Arabic, but don’t waste your lives being pushed around in Arab lands. Go home, there is nothing for you here, there is going to be nothing but violence. My advice is to head into Jordan, then Arabia, do your pilgrimages and then get a boat home. Every week I see boys like you fleeing from God knows what.”

Jama listened carefully to what their elder was saying and nodded in agreement, but Liban walked on ahead with his wide, optimistic strides, certain that he would never return to Somaliland a poor man. Mahmoud was a gentle, thin man with deep wrinkles across his forehead, who poured tea for them and asked how they had found him. He smiled knowingly at mention of Musa the Drunk, and was quick to give his share of the langaad, tipping Liban with an extra pound as Jeylani had done with Jama.

Mahmoud took a deep breath and said bismillah before biting into a slab of bread and meat. “I was just telling these boys to go home, to stop wasting their time here,” Jeylani said.

Mahmoud waggled his head. “Oh, they won’t stop until they have tried and exhausted their luck. I didn’t either, only after the seventh failed attempt to cross to Port Said did I give up.” Mahmoud laughed. “Each time I walk, they pick me up, I walk, they pick me up; my feet were cut to shreds!” he said, lifting up his black army boots. “If you two are desperate to get to Egypt and have better luck than me, I will tell you everything I know, no one knows that route better than me.”

Then Mahmoud began a finely nuanced recital of roads that led to Egypt, referring to an internal map that included humps in the sand, electricity pylons, noteworthy bird’s nests, forks in sandy paths, and shallow marshes in the Red Sea. So detailed, in fact, that Jama and Liban had to ask him to repeat everything from the beginning; they could not read or write but they memorized everything with a skill found only in the illiterate. He ordered Jama and Liban to follow the coastline of Palestine during the day and sleep in villages at night, and to avoid any wealthy areas.

With the few pounds they had collected in their pockets, they left Sarafand and began to walk. Jama was still tempted to turn in the opposite direction and go to Jordan and then Mecca to perform the hajj, but Liban would not hear of it, and deep down Jama was frightened of going alone. Only later in life do we see the tugs of fate with clear eyes, the minute delays that lead to terrible loss, the unconscious decisions that make our lives worth living; fate told Jama to head west to Egypt, and he listened.

The Palestinians they came across were not recognizable from the portrait of irascible bigots that Joe Louis had painted. Each night Jama and Liban turned inland and went to the nearest village, and each night they were accepted and led to the beyt al-deef, the guesthouse that every village, however poor or remote, maintained. The hospitality was usually brisk and businesslike but very generous; every household brought something: bread, water, meat, eggs, milk, fruit, dates, rugs and blankets. No questions were asked of the strange boys and no one reported their presence to the police, they treated Jama and Liban as otherwordly spirits who would report their compassion or meanness to a higher authority. The lingering awkwardness between them following their argument on the bus dissipated in the comfort they found in the beyt al-deef. They talked late into the night under the goat-hair blankets. Liban told Jama that he had six older sisters, that his parents were musicians, and that he had served in Eritrea but had avoided the battles; if he weren’t Yibir his life would have been enviable. The journey to the Egyptian border was almost fun. The long day’s walking gave them a purpose and they competed to see who could go faster, while at night they relaxed and enjoyed the grilled lamb and rice. Near Khan Yunis, they stopped to rest at a village and found a wedding in full flow, and the guesthouse occupied by a band armed with ney, darbucka, oud, and kanun. They hovered at the entrance, listening to the songs, until the singer beckoned to them to sit down and they crept in. The music thumped at the walls and glided over them and out through the window. After a large meal of mansaf, the men went out to perform the dabke, twirling handkerchiefs over their heads. The musicians whipped the guests into a frenzy, the beats on the darbucka working faster and faster, until Jama and Liban lost all shyness and added their feet to the dancing centipede. Unlike in Somaliland and Eritrea, the Muslim men and women here celebrated separately, but the chants and piercing ululations of the women could clearly be heard even when the men began to tire and drift away. When the bride arrived, she was a sight to behold, seated sideways on a white horse, her head covered by a shawl twinkling with coins, her proud mother, aunts, and sisters flanking her in gorgeous dresses. Bethlehem would have looked so beautiful in those clothes, thought Jama, regretting his own rushed wedding. The bride took all attention away from the musicians and only then did they quieten down, playing delicate wedding songs as Jama and Liban laid out their rugs under the stars.

They walked beyond Khan Yunis, and a few hours later crossed the border into Egypt. On the outskirts of Al-‘Arish, they waded far into the Mediterranean to scrub their filthy bodies, and had a quick snooze under a palm tree. They chased each other to Romani, and were delighted to find there the pylons that Mahmoud had described. It was the last outpost of civilization; there were no more villages to sleep or be fed in until they crossed the Suez Canal. By the sea at Romani, they nervously approached a group of fishermen resting around a fire, pushing each other to speak to them. Jama asked for any leftovers they might have but the fishermen gesticulated to the empty bowls and fish bones. One man passed over his bowl and Jama handed the tiny handful of rice to Liban, expecting another bowl to be forthcoming, but there wasn’t, and within a few seconds Liban had wolfed it all down. Jama would have kicked Liban if the fishermen weren’t watching, but they laughed at the choked-down annoyance in his face. They passed fresh water to Jama, and he drank enough to fill out his stomach before handing it to Liban.

“Where you boys from?” they asked.

“We’re Egyptian. We wanted to find work in Palestine but the police told us to go back, so we’re walking to Port Said,” Liban lied, afraid they would alert the beret-wearing Egyptian police camel corps.

From Romani to Port Said was the deadliest, most treacherous part of the journey, forty miles of sand dunes and lifeless rock. There was just sea on one side and murderous desert on the other. They would not be able to find food or water, and if they were caught by the midday sun or the camel corps, they were finished. Mahmoud had warned that Somali skeletons lay on that stretch of sand, and it was the most perilous journey of all the journeys in Jama’s life. Liban and Jama decided to rest hidden in the sand until sunset so that they could travel in the cool night and evade the police patrols. Sunset came and they scuttled out of the sandbank like crabs, the moon lighting the way forward and the crash of waves applauding their progress. It was too dangerous to enter Romani and buy food and water, and they would lose precious hours of darkness, so they decided to struggle on until Port Said. The beyt al-deefs had lulled them into dangerous nonchalance but now they felt superhuman, too defiant to think about turning back.

Jama turned to Liban and said, “If I can’t walk with you, don’t wait. And if you can’t walk, I won’t wait for you, I’ll go on so at least one of us can survive.” They shook hands and carried on side by side.

Neither fell back, their desire and hunger were too strong, their paces identical, unstoppable. In sixteen hours they walked more than forty miles, they resembled two slivers of soul light more than men made of flesh and blood. They broke the tenets of human survival: dehydrated, starved, exhausted, they did not stop, they would not stop until they got to Port Said. The land began to fragment into reedy marshes as they reached the end of the Sinai. Jama and Liban held on to each other when they saw how close they were to their promised land, the white light of the Port Said lighthouse calling them in.

A salt lake yawned between them and Port Fuad. Mahmoud had told them it was too deep to cross except at one point, where the pylons were planted on each bank. Mahmoud’s memory was photographic, and as he had said, the water between the pylons was shallow and thick with salt. They waded slowly across, both frightened of the water, which reached above their waists. Jama crossed the Red Sea with his father’s battered suitcase held up over his head and his heart in his mouth. They reached the other bank panting with relief and excitement, they had performed a feat of human endurance, but the Nubian man shouting “Hey, Hey!” and running at them with a stick had no concern for that. The Nubian chased Jama and Liban, caught the weak men in his strong hands, put them in a car, and drove them to a nearby villa.

He went and told the manager that he had found two layabouts crossing his water, but the man was in no mood for action, his hair was stood up, sleep in his eyes. “I don’t give a damn about them, look at the time! Don’t wake me up again, you fool.”

The Nubian sheepishly led them out of the villa. “You want to buy me tea?” he asked audaciously, but they were so happy to be let loose that they agreed.

The last task was to cross the Suez Canal to Port Said, and with the money given by the Sarafand men, they bought two boat tickets for two pounds. They boarded the ferry, and Jama scanned furtively around for undercover policemen, moving with solemn poise to a secluded bench. The sun appeared from behind the one scrappy cloud in the sky, and its spilled rays lit up the lateen sails of the feluccas as they skated between the clumsy cargo ships. On either side of the canal were fishing villages crowded under giant palms, and beyond them telegraph poles stretched into the distance, holding hands.

“Mahmoud said we leave the ferry at exit gate ten for the garden, didn’t he?” checked Jama.

“Yes,” guessed Liban. All they knew was to head for a garden where there was a tea shop frequented by Somalis.

“We’ll sit apart in case one of us gets caught,” ordered Jama as the boat started its engine. He sat next to a bedu and made small talk to calm his nerves.

“This is gate ten,” said the bedu man at last, and Jama signaled to Liban, bade the bedu a safe journey, and disembarked. Liban wanted to rest on a park bench but Jama was unable to stop, he was a bloodhound with a scent, and he led Liban out of the garden and finally to the teahouse.

“Oh God, it cannot be, you little hoodlums!” the crowd shouted as they caught sight of Jama and Liban. Jama looked around as if in a daze and saw all the boys he had met outside Rafah, the ones who had told him to go to Sarafand in the first place. They had made the same journey across Palestine a week earlier and were still recuperating. “Tell them the news, then,” said Gaani, his face full of mischief.

“The tea shop owner has some bad news for you,” said Keynaan gravely.

Jama’s knees buckled. “What?” he whispered.

“I had two customers here from Alexandria, they had just picked up their passports and saw two other names on the list. I’m sorry to say both your passports have arrived and are waiting for you in Alexandria,” the chai-wallah boomed. “The luck some people have!”

The men picked them up and threw them into the air, cheering and singing.

Jama and Liban held hands over the men’s heads and shook with hunger and happiness. They knew they might now make something of their lives. The chai-wallah, the only man there with any money, opened the leather pouch hanging from his belt and gave Jama and Liban eight shillings each to buy return tickets to Alexandria. They collapsed onto his dirty kitchen floor and slept for many, many hours before venturing to the train station.

_______

NAME: Jama Guure Mohamed

DATE OF BIRTH: 1/1/1925

EYES: Brown

HAIR: Black

COMPLEXION: Man Of Colour

NATIONALITY: British

PLACE OF BIRTH: Hargeisa, British Somaliland

This thin description of Jama in the dark green passport was all that the Western world needed to know about him; he was a subject of the British Empire. The passport determined where he could go and where he couldn’t, the ports where his cheap labor would be welcome and the ports where it would not. In Alexandria, Liban and Jama were constantly asked by the other Somali boys to show their precious passports. The documents were passed around in awed silence. Jealous boys leafed through the pretty watermarked pages and fingered the embossed lion and unicorn on the covers, stared at the black-and-white snapshots, scrutinized the cross that Jama had made as his signature, wondered if they could do it better.

“You’re going to become Fortune Men,” “No more jail for you,” “Sell it to me,” they said before handing the passports back.

Liban and Jama were now gentlemen; all they needed was a job to enter the richest caste of Somali society. Stoking the boilers of steamships could earn them in a week more than they had lived on in a year. They headed back to Port Said on their return tickets, where the British Shipping Federation officers recruited new sailors. Liban sat back in his seat, smiling at the villages and towns running past the train, confident that the British consulate would now save them from harassment. Neither Jama nor Liban knew anyone in Port Said but they expected to turn up and find a ship ready to take them aboard. The reality would turn out that way for one of them but not the other.

Liban and Jama found lodgings with other prospective sailors, and the word was sent out that they were looking for work. A Somali elder who had remained in Port Said after losing an arm aboard a British ship was the local headhunter, spending his days arranging work for clansmen. As Ambaro’s clansman rather than Guure’s, the Somali elder was not compelled to help Jama, but he called him in for an audience. Liban was less fortunate, as he was the only Yibir in all of Port Said, and with scarce work for Aji Somalis, he was locked out of the old nomad’s network. As Jama was shuttled from one meeting to another, Liban was left to wander around the docks, looking for work as a stevedore or panhandling for food. With a useless passport in his pocket, he thought of the walk from Romani with growing bitterness as a failed escape from a family curse. The Somali elder had found an Eidegalle sailor on a British ship sailing to Haifa, and the sailor was sure that with a certain kind of sweetening, the captain would take Jama as part of the crew. The elder arranged a collection and raised five pounds from Jama’s clan, and this was smuggled to the ship’s captain, who then signed Jama on as a fireman. Within sixteen days of collecting their passports from Alexandria, Jama had his first navy job and Liban was wondering where else in the world he could go.

Jama gave Liban all the money he had before departing for the ship. “When I come back, brother, I’ll help you find a job.”

Liban nodded as if he believed him and embraced Jama in his new shirt and trousers. “Take care of yourself,” said Liban, hiding his envy and sadness.

Their goodbye was protracted and uncomfortable; Jama kept trying to reassure Liban. “Who knows! Maybe when I get back you’ll be away working.”

“Go, man, don’t keep him waiting,” said Liban finally.

Jama’s clansman walked him to the ship that had taken nearly a year of his life to reach. She was a leviathan, the tallest, longest, greatest thing he had ever seen, stretching like a steel town along the canal, black hull bobbing gently in the water. Jama pointed at the meter-high white letters near the prow and Abdullahi read them for him: “Runnymede Park, London.”

Jama stopped at the gangplank and took a last look at Africa. Beyond the faux European skyline of Port Said lay his heart and home, the mountains and deserts of Somaliland and the valleys of Eritrea. He knew that if he died this would be the last thing he saw in his black eyes. The hot red dirt of Africa, scintillating with mica as if God had made the earth with broken diamonds, would not be found anywhere else. But like the Somali women in Aden, Africa struggled to look after her children and let them run with the wind, giving them freedom to find their own way in the world. Jama placed both feet firmly onto the Runnymede Park and waited to be borne away.