A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (10 page)

Walking his barrel through the sand in Wardheer's midday heat, Asad felt a pair of eyes on him. He looked up to see a woman standing at the entrance of a cafeteria, her hands on her hips, scrutinizing him without apology. She was young, about twenty, he guessed, and she was beautiful, her eyes wide and very large, her back straight and resolute. Her stare was curious, rather than hostile, but he nonetheless recoiled from it. He imagined himself from her perspective, a scrawny, half-grown boy pushing a barrel many times his weight through boiling sand. He stood up and returned her gaze with silent anger. She held his stare for a moment, unembarrassed, then turned away.

Later in the day, after he had delivered his barrel of water, he walked into her cafeteria and told her that he wanted to fetch water. If she could stare at me like that, he thought, she could at least do something useful for me, too. She smiled at him in a way that made it seem as if she was laughing to herself and told him to come back the following morning.

That night, Asad asked Zena about her, and Zena, who knew everything about everyone, said that her name was Nasri and that she was entirely alone: she had no brothers with her in Wardheer, no father. She ran the cafeteria Asad had gone into she was a young, independent businesswoman, her own boss. Her house was at the back of her restaurant; she shared it with another single woman.

Within a week, Nasri had become Asad's most regular client. He carried water for her at least twice a day. She said very little to him. But her waiters would reward him well, not so much with money but with a good supply of healthy food. It was, he believed, on her instructions that he was so well fed.

As his presence became routine, so Nasri began using him for other work. Once, when the cafeteria ran out of meat in the middle of dinnertime, she gave him money and instructed him to rush to the butchery. The following day, she sent him to buy camel milk. He treated these errands as urgent business, batting off all distractions and returning to her restaurant with speed. And he made a point of giving her the right change, never pocketing so much as a shilling.

Among Nasri's regular customers was a young truck driver. “His name was Abdiyare,” Asad tells me. “But nobody called him that. His nickname was Rooda. It is a girl's name. I don't know why he got that name. He was in love with Nasri. He wanted to marry her. Whenever he passed through Wardheer—and it was often, sometimes as much as every week—Nasri's cafeteria was where he would chew his
mira
and eat his meals. He would stay until she closed, always the last customer to leave, every single day he was in town. He was a very warm man, a gentle, laughing man. It would be a long time before I saw him angry.”

And then Asad suddenly pivots the discussion in another direction and says something I don't quite understand.

“I was suspicious of him and Nasri. Her house was at the back of the cafeteria. She did not allow anyone there, except Rooda. He was always going back there. I wondered why.”

“Do you think they were having sex?” I ask.

“No. That would have been bad. They were not married. Culturally, premarital sex is not something we do.”

“Maybe something short of sex, but still physical?”

“Nasri was a good girl,” he replies. “If any customer tried to touch her body, she chased him away. She had a reputation for that.”

“So why did she and Rooda make you suspicious?”

“Because she was always taking him back there to her house.”

“But you don't think that they were doing anything untoward there?”

“No.”

We were going around in circles, and so I changed the subject. But as I drove away from Blikkiesdorp that afternoon, it was still on my mind. Was Asad filtering away his subsequent, adult thoughts and simply reinhabiting his thirteen-year-old self? Was he telling me that he recognized sexual play without yet having the words or the concepts to know what it was? Or was it that his sense of decorum prevented him from talking frankly with me about sex? I am not sure about that, as he would soon share something of his own sexual experience, albeit it in the most measured way. In any event, I would imagine that he feared for Nasri: a young woman alone, running her own business; so much rested on her reputation. Perhaps he was troubled that others might see what he saw.

As Asad remembers him, Rooda spent his waking hours feeding himself a succession of stimulants. If he was not chewing
mira,
he was drinking Coke. Often he did both at the same time. That is how he and Asad got to know each other. Nasri did not sell Coke. Instead, she stocked an Arabic drink called Shani. Rooda would call Asad over and give him five hundred shillings and instruct him to come back with a few bottles of Coke. Asad would return with Rooda's drinks and his change, and Rooda would line the Coke bottles up on the table in front of him and drink them one after another in the course of the evening.

Soon, Rooda was asking Asad to do all sorts of things. Sometimes, he would remember that he had left something he needed in his truck—a pocketknife, perhaps, or an article of clothing. Asad would hoist himself into the cabin of this great beast and wriggle into the imprint Rooda's form had left in the cracked plastic cover on the driver's seat. He would finger the gear stick and press his palms down on the dashboard until the heat shot into his fingers, and he would pull his hand away.

Other times, Rooda would send Asad to the
mira
market. This was, without doubt, his most exciting task, for East African men take their
mira
extremely seriously, feeling the texture of the leaf in their fingers, burying their nose in the plant to ascertain its purity. And here was Asad, a mere street boy, expertly roaming through the plants, running leaves through his hands. He would return with his purchase and wait eagerly for Rooda to put the first of his replenished stock in his mouth and then watch his face to see whether he was pleased.

“After a while,” Asad recalls, “Rooda learned everything about my life. I did not tell him, but he found out. He would ask me about being alone, about being on the street. He would ask about Islii. Once, he even asked me about my mother. But he did it in a way that did not make me want to run away. He did it in a sidewise sort of way. Sometimes, I would be sitting in the sand outside Nasri's restaurant, and I would look up and see that he was watching me. He would be laughing and talking loudly and chewing his
mira,
but while all this was going on, he would look at me out of the corner of his eye.”

Expecting to hear a story about teeth, I ask Asad what Rooda looked like. But, for once, his portraiture drifts from physical description and melts into an account of Rooda's spirit.

“Rooda is a short man,” Asad says. “He has white skin, soft hair, a long nose. He is a happy person. He is always smiling. And he is a great
mira
eater. You wonder when he sleeps.

“I would miss him when he was traveling. Sometimes he was away for a month, sometimes two weeks or a week. I would wait for him to come. Someone would tell me that his truck had arrived, and I would feel excited.”

One afternoon in Nasri's restaurant, a couple of months after he and Asad met, Rooda tossed a proposition into Asad's lap. He was leaving the following morning, and he wanted Asad to come along. Asad had asked him several times in the preceding weeks if he could accompany him. Rooda had just laughed, as if Asad had been joking. He recalls the proposition as two great hands grabbing him by his sides and shaking him.

“How long will we be gone?” Asad asked.

Rooda shrugged. “Maybe a week.”

“I have nothing,” Asad said. “No food, nothing.”

Rooda smiled. “
I
have food,” he said, poking a finger into his own chest. He leaned back in his chair and laughed. “We will be going to Dire Dawa. I will buy you clothes there. The things you have on your shoulders are rags.”

Asad picked at a hole in his shirt's sleeve.

“I do not know what a person does in a truck,” he said.

“What a person does,” Rooda replied, “is follow Rooda. Rooda will show a person everything he needs to know. You are not going anywhere alone. You are going with Rooda.”

Asad takes my notebook and pen from me and begins yet another sketch, not of a place, but of a set of relationships: he is showing me the division of labor on an Ogadeni truck.

“You get three people in the vehicle,” Asad tells me as he draws. “The first is the truck driver. The second is called the
deni.
He is the one representing the owner of the truck. He is responsible for the safety of the cargo, for negotiating with officials in and out of the Ogaden, negotiating the price of the load, negotiating with people who want to travel on the roof of the truck. And then you get the
kirishbooy,
who is in charge of the cargo, flat tires, the engine: everything to do with the truck except driving it. That is what Rooda had in mind, that he would save me from the streets by training me to be a
kirishbooy.
It was a long-term vision. I was still too small and weak. The truck jack, for instance: you let it go, the truck will crush you.”

The following morning Asad found himself in the back of the truck cabin with the
kirishbooy.
Rooda was in the driver's seat, the
deni
in the passenger seat. Before the truck had even started moving, the
kirishbooy
complained to the
deni
about having to share his space. The
kirishbooy
was a very tall young man, and thin, too, which made him seem even taller. His name was Bille Dheer,
dheer
being the Somali word for “tall.” He folded his arms and told the
deni
that he refused to travel with this young boy all over his space. Rooda turned around in his seat and told the
kirishbooy
to be quiet. And then the
deni
joined the dispute on the
kirishbooy'
s side, asking why a little shrimp of a boy of no use to anybody should take up valuable space in the cabin. In future, Asad would travel on the roof.

When they finally drove out of Wardheer, the vehicle that carried them seemed to Asad not so much a truck as a moving city. The back was packed to the ceiling with all sorts of cargo from livestock to furniture to an assortment of sealed boxes. And the roof was filled with people, about forty of them in all, each on his or her way to somewhere in the Ogaden.

They drove through many, many miles of desert, and it seemed as if they were going nowhere, for everything looked the same. At about midday, they stopped, and the
kirishbooy
jumped down from the cabin and began pointing out young men on the roof, commanding them to help him. Together, three of them took a two-hundred-liter barrel of gasoline off the truck. Bille Dheer uncapped it, lowered a short pipe into the petrol, sucked, and then quickly steered the pipe into the petrol tank. He filled the radiator with water and checked the tires, and by the time they were moving again, the sun was at its zenith, the temperature well over a hundred degrees.

It was late afternoon before they finally drove into a town. On the outskirts, two or three children ran alongside the truck. They were joined by more people, and still more; by the time the truck stopped in the center of town it was surrounded by an excited crowd. People pressed their hands against the windows, and some scrambled onto the truck's nose, others onto the ledge at the rear. Most were children, but Asad was shocked to see that many were not; there were elderly women thumping the windows and middle-aged men tapping the sides of the truck with sticks. The thought of climbing down terrified him. What if he lost Rooda in the mob? As the others opened their doors, Asad remained frozen in his seat.

Rooda, the
deni,
and Bille Dheer got out of the cabin, and as they moved off they resembled the corpses of large cockroaches or locusts, carried away by swarms of flies. The cafeteria where they chose to eat was in sight of the truck, and Asad watched in amazement as it filled with dozens upon dozens of people. At one point, Rooda came into clear view; he was sitting at a table eating his meal, and the people around him were quite literally reaching for his plate with their hands.

Asad sat there frozen. There was no way he was going to venture out of the truck. He feared that the crowd would rip a limb from his torso, that he would stand and watch helplessly as dozens of mouths gnawed at his severed arm. And so he waited, his hunger mounting, his hands running urgently against the plastic of the car seats.

When they had finished eating, the three men returned to the truck. Rooda started the engine and had to move at a crawl, his way blocked by the crowds. On the outskirts of the town, they had still not shaken everybody off; a few stragglers jogged alongside the truck on either side. One of them scrambled onto the side of the vehicle, and the
deni
leaned out of the window and shouted blue murder until the intruder let go and tumbled into the dust.

They were out in open desert once again. The hours passed, and Rooda chewed his
mira
and drank his Coke and laughed his laugh. Not once did he turn around and look at Asad. The garrulous man, so pleased to be on the road, had forgotten his charge.

It was very late by the time they stopped again, close to midnight, as Asad recalls. They were in a tiny village. Asad turned out his pockets and found that he had one hundred twenty shillings, enough for a glass of camel milk and no more. There was one remaining canteen open, and he went there and bought his milk and sat down. He had taken but a sip when Rooda came striding up to him.

“Before he started speaking, I knew he was furious,” Asad recalls. “It was such a shock seeing Rooda's face angry. I had never seen that face before without its smile around the eyes. It was like another person had jumped inside Rooda and taken over his face. I think I stopped breathing.”