Free One Secret Summer by Lesley Lokko Page A

she’d taken daily in Mogadishu and heronce-weekly trip with her mother to the salon, where her hair was washed, conditioned and braided, to the twice-a-week visit
     to the female ablutions block, where she washed her hair with soap – no conditioning oils here – it was a miracle anyone still
     thought of her as female, never mind anything so ridiculous as pretty. She’d long since given up looking at her own reflection.
    Through the opening she could see their neighbours running towards them. In the centre of the small crowd, clutching a sheaf
     of papers, was her father. She dropped her knife and jumped up, ignoring her mother’s reprimand, and ran outside. Her father
     was running towards them, his long djellabah flying behind him, his worry beads jerking from side to side. Niela’s mouth dropped
     open. She’d never seen her father run in her entire life.
They got the visas! They’re going to Austria! They’re leaving!
People were shouting and laughing excitedly. Her heart began to beat faster, and she searched her father’s face as it came
     towards her. They’d waited so long for this very moment, she thought to herself wildly. It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t possibly
     be true.
    It was. After weeks and months of pleading his case, Hassan’s requests had finally found their way to the right department,
     the right pair of ears. No one could know the private depths of strength in a person, Niela saw that night, as her parents
     lay awake a few yards from her, whispering to each other. God alone knew what sort of understanding had passed between them
     in the last few months as they struggled to keep the family together. But they’d done it. Somehow, through the means and channels
     available to them, they’d managed to secure the visas they so desperately needed to get out of Africa to the safety of a new
     life.
    It took them less than a week to pack up their few belongings, make the journey from Hartishek to Addis Ababa and from there,
     at long last, to Vienna. As the plane carrying the Adens and a few other families, whose shocked, dazed expressions revealed
     their status as refugees more clearly than any travel document possibly could, flew steadily northwards, Niela lookeddown on the finger of water that was the Red Sea and felt a part of her slipping away, sloughing off. For the third time in
     as many months a new, different side of her was struggling to emerge – now, for the first time in months, there was a sense
     of optimism mixed in with the pain she’d been struggling to contain.

11
    Vienna. A city, a country, an entire
continent
buried under a suffocating blanket of snow. It was winter when they arrived. Days contracted to become brief intervals between
     the longest nights Niela had ever known. She came out of the warm, steamy fug of Uncle Raageh’s apartment each morning into
     a seizure of cold. His large, comfortable flat was on the first floor of an old building on Wallnerstrasse, close to the Volksgarten
     and the Rathauspark, both jewel-encrusted landscapes under layers and layers of glittering ice. Every morning on their way
     to German language classes that Niela and her brothers were required by law to attend, they walked down by the River Donau,
     muffled in clothing borrowed from neighbours and friends to protect them from the cold.
    ‘Ich fahre. Du färhrst. Er fährt
.’ The teacher paused in her declensions to look expectantly at the class of foreigners sitting patiently in front of her.
     ‘
Jetzt bitte wiederholen Sie …
’
    Niela joined in the chorus. After three months, she was finally beginning to get her tongue around the difficult language.
     She no longer stood in silent embarrassment at the supermarket, pointing dumbly to things she couldn’t name. She no longer
     had to shake her head in frustration when someone spoke to her. Like a complex piece of music, the individual notes had slowly
     begun to fall into place. It helped that Ayanna, her cousin