A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (2 page)
Read A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) Online
Authors: Jonny Steinberg
“You insist that we meet in the mornings because that is when gangsters sleep.”
“That's right.”
“And you want to meet in the car so that you can see danger coming.”
“In the shack,” he replies, “you can see nothing. The first you see of them is the gun in your face.”
By now, the three young men have walked right past us, and we are watching their backs as they disappear.
I turn off the engine and pick up my pen and notebook. I do not want to tell him what else I think I now know. Saying it out loud would be dangerous; would force us to examine our arrangement in its naked perversity; would make it hard for us to continue.
I am imagining the calculations he has made. He very much wants to hang on to me, for I am like Pearlie, a person from the other side, a person who travels within the orbit of law. Who knows when he may need such a person to come to his aid? Perhaps tonight.
But to keep our acquaintance he must sit for hours alongside me and remember his past. Otherwise, I will lose interest and disappear. And he must do this remembering in the vicinity of his home and family, for he cannot wander from his new business so often and for so long. Yet the routine of my recurring presence, he believes, is bound to attract men with guns.
And so he juggles. He draws close the parts of me that bring safety while diluting, as best he can, the parts that bring danger.
Hence, my car. Between October 2010 and September 2011 we spend many hours there. While his internal eye peers into his childhood, the eyes on either side of his nose scan the street.
Somalia to Kenya
In describing his childhood there is really only one place for Asad to begin. It was early one morning; he is not sure of the day, but the month was January 1991. This he understands from collective memory; nobody who knows Mogadishu, the capital city of Somalia, is unaware of what happened that month.
He believes that he was eight years old. Whether he knew before that he was Daarood and that others were not is irretrievable now, but he certainly came to know it on that day.
In January 1991, militias began to attack the northern parts of Mogadishu. The men in these militias were Hawiye, and they wanted to overthrow the government of President Mohamed Siad Barre, who was Daarood.
“The militias were based in the countryside outside the city,” Asad tells me. “They controlled the north of the country. They would come into Mogadishu to attack and regroup, attack and regroup, in waves.
“They came at night, and their target was all Daarood men. As far as they were concerned, Daarood men were government men. So, at night, the Daarood would leave their homes and gather together in government buildings for protection. They would leave women and children and the elderly at home. In Islam, one does not kill civiliansâthat means women, children, boys under fifteen, and the very old. Daytime, the men came back to see their wives.”
Asad's father was sleeping away at nights, coming home during the day. Then one morning he did not come back. Or the next, or the next. It had been five days.
“When I look back now, I see that if I had been more focused on my mother, I would have been aware. There were three women staying in the house. I see now that my mother was hiding them. She must have discovered that some neighbors who were not friends had seen these three women. She must have known that she was going to get finger-pointed. I can see that now. Back then, I could not grasp that a person as solid as a parent could feel fear.
“I woke in the morning and found my mother pressed up against the front door, staring through the cracks. I came up next to her and looked too. There were five militiamen on our property. They were moving around the yard. I had no fear. I wanted to look at them closer, not through cracks. I tried to open the door. My mother grabbed me and pulled me to her. I was right up against her leg. I still did not share her fear. I find myself thinking now: Where were my brothers and sisters? I don't remember. In my mind it is just me and my mother. We were watching the militiamen. Three of them came up to the door and knocked very hard. My mother did not want to let them in.
“They pushed against the door and she pushed back. Then they started kicking, thumping the door. My mother pushed herself heavily against it. The door started breaking. I saw a pair of hands come through. They tore a hole out of the door, big enough for a person to climb through. My mother just stood there, as if there was still a door to push against. Still, she held me to her leg. The first militiaman just stared at her. She stared back. Then the second militiaman pushed the first one out of the way and shot my mother in the chest.”
I wonder what the militiamen did when they entered the house. Did they slaughter the women hiding there? For how long did they remain? How much time elapsed between their departure and the arrival of the first friendly adults, for between those two moments the children were, I presume, alone with their mother's corpse. What did they make of it? What happened to their world during those minutes or hours?
Each time these questions find their way to the tip of my tongue, they stop and turn around, and I swallow them back down. I do not have the courage. I simply record what comes from his mouth.
And so I know only that he spent one further night at his parents' home and that the following day his auntâthe wife of his father's brotherâwh
isked the five children across the city to her house. Later that evening, Asad's uncle appeared, the first adult male Daarood he had seen in days. He does not recall for how long he and his siblings stayed there. “When I say âa few days,'â” he advises me, “that could mean anything from two nights to two weeks. In any case, after some time, we split up. Rahma and I went with my uncle. The other children went with my aunt. We walked out of Mogadishu and kept walking. I think that that was the last day it was possible for Daarood people to sleep in Mogadishu.”
As I picture Asad heading farther from home, I think, more than anything else, not of what he left behind but of what he took with him. He would never again be firmly moored to any particular adult, to any family. He would become a child whose connections to others would dissolve and re-form and disappear again. And yet he says with certainty that on his great journey through childhood and across the African continent he took his mother.
He has no memory of her face, or of the sound of her voice: her place inside him is more ambient than that, more powerful. It is indistinguishable from his sense of himself, of why he is a man who works hard and is kind and finds things funny; indeed, why he is the sort of man who can share such memories and keep his composure.
“If there is such a thing as a best mother, mine was it,” he says. “My father was working all the time. It was she who was with us twenty-four hours a day. She was very, very kind. I do not remember her raising her voice or beating us. I remember calmness and gentleness. I remember that she enjoyed being with us. If we were naughty, she would tell us that our punishment would come when our father got home. But then, in the evenings, she would protect us from our father.
“I last saw her at such a young age. The way she taught me, although I grew up an orphan, I still feel that what she was I am today. I did not lose her despite her death. I am not sure that words can describe what I am trying to tell you. I mean that by the time I was seven, she had already made me.”
I press him to attach these feelings to particular memories of her. He thinks silently for a long time.
“Her hair was very beautiful,” he finally offers. “Some women had many plaits. My mother did not. She parted her hair in the middle into two long plaits that went halfway down her back. We children played with her hair, sometimes all of us at the same time. I remember my hand touching my sister Khadra's hand while we both played with our mother's hair. Khadra's skin was so sticky, my mother's hair so smooth. I remember taking Khadra's hand away and running my cheek across the smoothness of my mother's hair.”
When I ask him to describe his home in Mogadishu, he smiles and says he remembers each detail. But as soon as he begins talking, he stumbles and, in frustration, grabs my notebook and begins to draw.
He mumbles softly as he works, his cadences patient and singsongy, as if he is taking a small child through an exercise. Then he puts the notebook back in my lap. “Aha,” he says.
As I examine the geography of his first eight years, he points a finger to the very center of his drawing, the colored-in dot representing the
hindi
tree.
“It reminds me of my brothers and sisters,” he tells me. “When the
hindi
tree is big, it grows tall and wide, and everyone sits under it. But ours was still small, so the only people interested in it were the ones who did not mind the sunâthe children.”
He closes his eyes and tells me that he is picturing his siblings one by one, each under the
hindi
tree, each wrapped up in his own game. I ask him to describe them to me. “My older sister is Khadra,” he says. “She was much whiter than us. She was almost like you. And her eyes were not like my black eyes. She had the eyes of a goat. The color was
quruurax,
like glass: not black or brown, not red, but like glass.”
And then he describes his other siblingsâhis younger sister, Rahma, and his brothers, AbdiFaseeh and HasanAbshirâand I am startled as I listen, for he remembers them all, it seems, by their teeth.
“Hasan Abshir's were red,” he says. “Khadra's were red with white dots. Mine are long and straight and very white. And yet we had the same mother and father. It is strange.”
He curls his upper lip right up to the base of his nostrils and taps the nail of his index finger against his front teeth. Like his hands, they are long and well shaped.
I store this oddity in my notebook, not quite sure what to make of it. It is only later, after several weeks of conversation, that I come to understand what he invests in his teethâthey are his most vital connection to his father.
Asad refers to him as Aabbo, “Dad” in Somali. His memories of Aabbo take two forms.
The first is a medley of recollections, some of them images, others just disembodied ideas. Aabbo left early in the morning and returned very late, after the children had eaten dinner. In the first sequence in the medley, the children are summoned to the living room in the evening where their father receives them in the manner of a patriarch, quizzing each child about his or her day “top to bottom,” Asad says, like a stern inquisitor.
Aabbo was often away. “He traded somewhere in the Arab world,” Asad recalls, somewhere on the other side of the Gulf of Aden. On some days Asad says he does not remember what his father traded; on others he talks about animal skins bought from the nomads who came into Mogadishu, and sold on to Arabs in Yemen or Saudi Arabia or Dubai. He remembers that his father was once arrested and jailed in connection with his workâsomething to do with taxes or duties.