“I want you to have this,” he said, placing a wad of Somali money in my hands. “Take.”
I objected. Somali refugees shouldn’t give cash to American tourists. Quite the opposite. And I had absolutely no intention of handing out handfuls of American money in return.
“No, no, no,” I said. “You shouldn’t do that.”
“Yes, yes.” He thrust the money back into my hands. “Take.”
“It’s very pretty,” I said. It came to about fifteen thousand Somali shillings. “I cannot take this. You’re a crazy man.”
An Ethiopian who spoke better English intervened. The Somali government no longer existed. The money was worthless. I reluctantly accepted the pretty pieces of paper. Mohammed appeared mystified as to why I would only accept his gift if I thought it was worthless.
Ali was also distraught, mainly because in Yemen she would be obliged to don the veil. She pulled the hem of her robe over her face mockingly.
“Bad, bad,” she said. “Not in my country.”
Her face was a wonderful mix of Arab and African features. She plied me with tea and biscuits. I gave her my Arab-English dictionary.
Around two in the morning they pulled out their prized possession, a Casio minikeyboard. I played them the opening to Mozart’s Sonata in A, but they were more interested in the machine’s auto-rhythm controls, which produced a steady syncopation in whatever style you selected. In the days when coffee made this journey, these two would have been bound for slavery, I thought, listening to the tinselly bossa novas thumping against the wind. Now they were only refugees; I wondered if that qualified as a real improvement.
1 In the Rastafarian religion, which derives from Ethiopia, God is referred to as Jah.
In his travels he passed by a coffee bush and nourished himself, as is the custom of the pious, on its fruit which he found untouched. He found that it made his ain nimble, promoting wakefulness for the performance of religious duties.
al-Kawakib al-sa’irn bi-a’yan al-mi’a al-’ashira by Najm al-Din al-Ghazzi (1570–1651)
THE SHIP’S MOTOR WOKE ME in the morning. Djibouti had disappeared, and, peering over the railing, all I could see was a heaving sea of turquoise water flecked with whitecaps. It was like looking into a shattered mirror reflecting the sky. It didn’t seem to me that the windstorm had died down at all.
I noticed that the others had moved their belongings to the lean-to at the rear of the boat. I decided to stay where I was. A wave crashed over the bow and drenched me from head to foot. Another wave crashed over, and another. I was still moving my belongings to the rear with the others’, when I noticed that the deck had started to tilt at a twenty-degree angle.
The Qasid stopped moving forward. The crew had turned the ship’s nose out of the wind while they bailed water out of the hold and got the ship righted. Boxes were shifted about, and I decided the problem was only that the cargo’s weight had been poorly distributed. Then a fishing vessel came racing by, and I noticed how high it was riding. The Qasid was riding about seven feet lower. Our captain had overloaded the boat.
We set out and immediately waves started crashing over the bow. Again, we pulled over and bailed. This continued all day. Finally our crew became concerned that the cargo of “cookies” might be damaged by the salt water. The real problem, however, was that the Qasid was carrying mainly booze and AK-47s.
The booze was from Djibouti, but the guns, I was later told, were returning to Yemen after an unsuccessful sales trip to Eritrea. The weight of all those weapons was pulling us down.
The crew decided to find an island and wait out the gale. I write “the crew” because I realize now that I never saw Captain Abdou on board. No matter. The three teenagers and two old men who manned the Qasid soon had us anchored next to an island. All of us immediately hung our belongings out to dry. I noted that even here, out of the wind, the gale kept the clothes flapping at a ninety-degree angle. It was, I suppose, really the Red Sea equivalent of an interstate rest stop. But, technically, we were now shipwrecked on a desert island. I was rather pleased. After all the boat’s engine still ran. We’d probably get to Yemen eventually.
Some of my fellow passengers, however, were less sanguine about the situation. Paulious, for instance, an Ethiopian qat addict. Habitual chewers deprived of their daily mouthful are haunted by the demon katou, and Paulious was perturbed at being stranded in such an obviously qat-free environment.
“Oh, bad thoughts will come,” he kept whining. “We have to leave.”
The first fight broke out between an ancient sailor, whom I’d dubbed “the Toothless One,” and a passenger who had tried to steal his qat. The others quickly pulled them apart—Toothless had been threatening the young man with his flip-flop—but it was a bad omen. Toothless had earned his sobriquet when I’d noticed him grinding up a green purée in some sort of mill. At first I’d thought he was preparing food. Later I realized that it was his precious qat. Being toothless, he had to first “chew” it with this mechanical device in order to extract the leaf’s precious juices.
There was another crew member, a boy of perhaps sixteen, with curly hair, whom I’d caught staring at me a number of times. He had an honest, open face that bordered on simple, and a monkey-like way of moving that made me think he must have spent his life on boats like the Qasid. I was talking with the others and the word America came up. The boy, who was sitting on the crate above us, pointed in puzzlement toward al-Makkha.
“He is from al-Merica?” he inquired of the others. “Is that near al-Makkha?”
The others laughed, Paulious loudest of all. “He doesn’t even know what America is!” he said.
“Is it an island?” the boy asked.
I pointed northwest. “It’s over there.”
“By Eritrea?”
The others laughed again.
“No, no. It’s very far,” I said. “If you were to go there, you would come first to Eritrea, then Ethiopia, than all of Africa and Turkey and then Europe and then there’s another place, England, and the sea beyond that. A great sea. Beyond all that,” I said, “that’s where America is.” The others translated.
The boy looked at me as if he just couldn’t understand how a place could be that far away.
“It’s not as far as it sounds,” I said lamely.
He looked even more confused. Then his eyes narrowed—the others were still laughing. I think he thought that they were laughing at him and that I was lying, making fun of him. He moved away, with a look wavering between anger and puzzlement, and suddenly I thought, yes, he was right, it was impossibly far. Too far to go, and even if such a voyage was possible, why would anybody want to go so far from home? And why should he care about a place that might as well be on the moon? He, the boy, lived here. He had lived here all his life, probably on this very boat; this was his home, this and al-Makkha and the sand and the sea and the wind and the waiting. And one day he would be the Toothless One sitting by the mast, laughing and stealing orange cream cookies from the cargo. He would be thirty, maybe forty, but he would look much, much older.
After that, whenever I smiled at him he moved away. He referred to me only as the American, as did all the others. I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting alone.
The port we were headed