Read Online Divinity Road by Martin Pevsner - Free Book Online

that I myself was being watched. I realised that the tentacles of the boy’s family were still spread across Addis and that spies had become aware of my return and were monitoring my every move.
    What I learned about your flight was confused and contradictory. Through persistence and bribery I was introduced to a middleman who admitted setting you up with a group of Somali traffickers, but the group itself seemed to have disbanded or moved back to Mogadishu. One man I spoke to, a kat-chewing Yemeni, seemed certain that you were to have been taken overland to Sudan, then flown to Germany or Britain. Another lead, a businessman who had known my father, believed the Somalis’ favoured routes were always via Libya or Egypt.
    One evening, returning to my tiny rented room deep in the Addis slums after another fruitless day’s investigations, I was crossing a quiet street when a car parked ahead of me pulled out at speed and swerved across the road. I looked up and threw myself out of its path a split second before it hit me. Needless to say, the car did not stop. It was, at best, a warning.
    My enquiries were getting me nowhere. At around this time, I received the news that my brother had died of meningitis. The attempt on my life was the final straw. I contacted an uncle in Asmara and begged him to lend me some money. He agreed to send me $8,000, less a gift of love than a pay-off to disappear. There was nothing left for me in Asmara. The family home had been sold, both my sisters were by now married, their husbands afraid of contact with me, the family outcast.
    So I went back to my trafficking contacts, this time in search of business, not information. Suddenly they were much more amenable. They took $5,000 of my money and promised me a problem-free journey to Germany. The route was more or less as the Yemeni had described yours. False papers and a truck providing a smooth ride to Khartoum. Then a new passport and plane ticket to Frankfurt, where I would claim political asylum. In my mind I imagined myself following in your footsteps, believed myself to be drawing ever nearer to my precious family.
    The journey was a disaster from the outset. The departure was inexplicably delayed by two days, so that by the time I got the signal one chilly morning to make my way to the car park of an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts and clambered on board the truck, I was a tangle of nerves. The truck, loaded with flour, wheezed and clanked as it pulled out onto the road. I glanced at my fellow passengers – a father and young son, two young men who I later learned to be brothers, a teenage girl and her aunt – and sensed in them the same anxiety that I felt.
    We crossed the border at Kurmuk, but rather than turn a blind eye, as we had been promised, the Sudanese border guards pounced on us. They seemed almost to have been expecting our arrival, arrested the driver, confiscated our papers and locked us up in police cells. The next day we were loaded up into a military truck and driven north, up to a remote area on the border with Eritrea, where we were abandoned in a refugee camp they called Kilo Sitta Wa Eshrin. It was a hellish place, squalid with little food to go round. The Sudanese soldiers in the vicinity were a brutal rabble and because many of the residents were Eritreans escaping military service, the Eritrean army would sometimes raid at night, kidnapping any young men they came across. I survived a week, then bribed a Sudanese soldier to give me a lift to Kassala. From there, another few dollars paid for a hitched ride into Khartoum.
    I thought, briefly, that my luck was turning. I should have known better. I bought some Sudanese identity papers from a Lebanese market trader. He suggested I head for Libya, where I could live illegally without too many problems from the authorities while I earned enough to set me up in Europe. I was told that from the Libyan coast I could buy passage on a boat crossing to France or Spain or