A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (35 page)

Jet-lagged and without enough sleep, a transatlantic journey in my bones, I board a flight from Newark International to Kansas City, Missouri. I am going to visit Asad in his new home. He has been there five and a half months.

It happened very fast. In mid-March 2013, without warning, he received the call for which he had waited almost three years. He and Sadicya and the two children would fly to Johannesburg one afternoon the following week, he was told, just in time to board the evening flight to New York. The following day, they would get a transfer to Kansas City, Missouri, their new home.

No sooner had Asad put down his phone than it signaled an incoming text message. On his screen was the street address and zip code of his apartment in Kansas City. He stared at it a long time. Then he forwarded it to me.

I was in Johannesburg at the time.

“The kids don't have new clothes for America,” he said to me on the phone later that day. “There are so many things we must buy.”

Several times over the last year, I had offered him a loan. It would be deducted from his portion of the royalty advance we would receive once I had finished writing this book. He had always declined it. Until this moment.

He had been banking his side of our deal. He did not want to spill a drop of it on South African soil. It was for America.

We have struggled to communicate since he left. Our relationship was destined to be played out in a car, it seems. Robbed of this proximity, there is no traction between us. His voice at the other end of the line is thin, whatever life it once possessed left somewhere in the ocean between us. I try to compensate by enthusing my own voice with energy, but it comes out all tin and zinc.

And so I know that the family lived rent-free for three months and was given food stamps, but that by the time this grace period ended, Asad had not found a job. He was offered work cleaning corridors and bathrooms in the middle of the night but had refused it. Sadicya had been going off each morning for English lessons, leaving Asad to look after Rahma. “I have become a housewife,” he told me, giggling. Finally, just a week ago, he found work at the airport, parking rental cars.

I know these things, but I cannot imagine them. I have no idea what they might mean for Asad's spirit.

Looking down at New Jersey's rusted colors, I race ahead of the aircraft and fly low and fast above Missouri's wide farmland. I catch sight of Asad at the end of my journey, wandering around his kitchen in a purple
macawi,
in an apartment I cannot properly imagine. In the months since I saw him last I have thought and written about him more than I have done anything else, and my sense of him has changed.

It has taken this long to see him properly, I think, because the language with which he describes himself is misleading.

When he told me his story he did so in the words of a refugee, for these are the words he must use, always, at every border post he approaches, at every government office outside which he queues.

A refugee has lost control. Great historical forces have upended him and he no longer has a place in the world. He has become an in-between sort of being, suspended between a past in which he belonged somewhere and a future in which he might belong somewhere once more. But for now he is in abeyance; he is swept this way and that, like flotsam in a tide.

I no longer think this a useful way to understand Asad. He is in America now, I have concluded, because he is a person with an enormous appetite for risk. If I look at the course his life has taken, it is simply not adequate to say that he has been kicked around like a stone. His trajectory has been shaped by his propensity to plunge, again and again, into the unknown. He is a man who stuffs twelve hundred dollars in his pocket and heads south, without a clue how he will reach his destination or what he will find there, all because a traveler once showed him a suitcase full of money. He is a man who returns to South Africa's townships, again and again, to open a cash business, in full knowledge that his course of action will probably kill him. He is a person prepared to say good-bye to his beloved children and wife because he will not go back to the past.

I have come to understand that Asad and I are very different. He is prepared to court death in ways that I am not.

I do not mean by this that he has some dark proclivity I cannot understand, nor that he is insane. At the back of all of our thoughts and our actions, I think, stands an image of a completed life, a sense of who we will have been at the moment of our deaths. For Asad, to have lived a fully human life is to have altered radically the course of his family's history, so that his children and their children and their children in turn live lives nobody in Somalia at the time of his own birth could have imagined.

If this is indeed Asad's idea of a worthwhile life then it must by definition entail plunging into the unknown. For there is no bridge from the world of his parents to the one he imagines for his children. Getting there requires jumping over a void in the hope that he will land on his feet on the other side.

It is a Tuesday, which is fortuitous, for Tuesday is his day off, and he has set several hours aside for me. I have told him that my flight lands a little after 11 a.m., that I will come to him shortly thereafter.

But the GPS in my rented car will not accept my hotel's address, and the one-page city map I have been given is awfully schematic, and I get lost and drive around for ages. By the time I call Asad from my hotel room to tell him I am on my way it is two in the afternoon.

“I have been waiting for you since eleven thirty,” he says sharply. “If I had known that you were only coming in the afternoon, I would have worked a half-shift overtime this morning.”

I am silent for a moment. In the three years I have known him he has been gracious to a fault. I have come to see it has a kind of a trademark.

“I was in fact meant to do two overtime shifts today,” he continues. “Now I am missing the morning and the afternoon.”

“I'm sorry,” I say. “I will pay you what you have lost.”

“That's good,” he replies, in a much lighter tone. “But even if you hadn't offered, if I'd been given the choice between earning extra money and seeing Jonny, I would see Jonny.”

If this is a retraction, or an attempt to backtrack, it is halfhearted and lazy. He hangs up the phone.

Driving to his apartment, I wonder whence his rudeness comes. What has he been thinking about me in the months we've been apart?

Perhaps my doggedness has simply become too weird for him. Hour upon hour I sat him down in the passenger seat of my car and twisted and tugged at every last memory inside him. All the while, he kept an eye in the rearview mirror for the violent death he believed that my presence might court. Then I went to Kenya and to Ethiopia to trace his footsteps and then to London to find his family; there was nothing, it seemed, that I would not do, nowhere I would not go. I had come back brandishing the rewards of my travels—news of some tender and difficult family history. And, now, it still isn't over. I have followed him all the way to America to probe and fiddle some more, like some cartoon character who is always waiting around the next corner.

This book was never his, after all. I wedged him between the seven thousand rand I paid to start his business and the promise of a share of royalties. He cooperated in part out of gratitude for what I had done and in part for the prospect of future reward.

But it is more than that. I know that he abandoned the book shortly after starting it and has been unable to pick it up again. We have not yet discussed in any depth why he reacted this way. The book has upset him. His upset, I think, has become anger.

When I arrive at the apartment, his irritation is gone. He is walking around barefoot, in an undershirt and jeans, and is breezy and full of laughter. Sadicya greets me in an English she did not possess when I last saw her, and Rahma grabs a fistful of Asad's jeans and stares at me from between his legs. They are the happy immigrant family, pleased to see the guest who has come from so far.

The apartment is sparsely furnished, but not unpleasant. Sadicya sits at the end of a very long couch, long enough for her lanky husband to stretch out on, I surmise, and the floor is strewn with Rahma's toys. The two bedrooms at the back are roomy and high-ceilinged and furnished with good beds. It strikes me that this is the first time Asad has ever had a home shared with nobody but his own family. There was the shack in Blikkiesdorp, of course, but that was barely longer than his couch.

In Cape Town, our customary space was the inside of a car. Now, in Kansas City, we begin another custom—we walk long distances through the stifling heat. It starts on our first afternoon together. He tells me that the family has just moved to the apartment in which we are sitting, and I ask if we can walk to the one to which they arrived.

“Walk?” he asks. “It's quite far. Let's take the car.”

“No,” I say. “Let's walk.”

We stroll through a neighborhood of freestanding clapboard houses, each surrounded by a square of garden. Every so often, the houses are interrupted by brown apartment blocks like the one in which I found Asad and his family. Kansas City is so very neat, so green and manicured, even the poorer parts, like Asad's neighborhood. And it is so mysteriously empty. There is nobody on the front porches and nobody on the sidewalks.

We cross a bridge. Beneath us on the left, rich, matted parkland stretches into the distance. A little farther on is a large lake surrounded by a landscaped garden and then forest. Like everything else in Kansas City, all this space is empty.

“When I arrived,” Asad says, “the trees were bare. Now, this whole city is thick with green. It is as if there are two Kansas Cities, one for winter and the other for summer. It is amazing to me.”

We cross a small, handsome park with fountains and symmetrical paths and carefully cut grass, and Asad tells me that during their first weeks in Kansas City he would take Rahma and Musharaf here every morning. Rahma would put her finger in the fountain, he says, as if the finger were a person and the fountain a massive waterfall. The moment the water hit her hand she would shriek.

I picture them in this pretty American park, these three Africans trailing their crazy history, and for a split second, I see the whole thing: Asad's and Musharaf's odysseys from East Africa to Cape Town, Rahma's birth in Blikkiesdorp, their trip across the Atlantic. Their pasts are attached to them like long, smoky tails, and I am momentarily overcome with emotion.

“Asad,” I say. “It is amazing that you are here. I can barely believe it.”

“It was very hard for a while, brother,” he tells me. “For the first few weeks, I was not so sure about this place.”

An organization called Jewish Vocational Service was responsible for resettling them. They were fetched from the airport and delivered to an apartment with a fridge full of fresh food and a check for just sixty-eight dollars. The following weeks were filled with the bureaucracy of becoming American residents: applications for Social Security numbers, for food stamps, for Medicaid.

The primary function of Jewish Vocational Service, it seemed, was to place refugees in employment. Asad did not like the way they went about it.

“They only wanted us to work downtown,” he tells me. “They would get very upset if we wanted to work anywhere else. And they only wanted us to do bullshit work. They wanted me to clean toilets, brother, to wash floors in some empty building at three o'clock in the morning. And for this, they take a dollar an hour of your pay for the first three months.”

He got online and looked for work.

“Everything requires a high school certificate,” he tells me. “Everything requires this or that or something I don't have. Every day, I would walk to the Somali shop, I would get online and search for jobs. There was nothing for me. Then I would walk to Jewish Vocational Service and see if they needed an interpreter that day. Brother, I walked for hours and hours and hours. I walked this whole city. I would come home every evening with nothing.”

A couple of months after he arrived, the first advance on royalties for this book came through, and Asad immediately bought a car.

“A Toyota,” he tells me. “They have Fords and Chevrolets in this country, but what I know to be reliable are Toyotas.”

It was this, a car, registered in his name, a driver's license in his wallet, that took him truly inside America. For with these things, he discovered that America was watching him and that it remembered what it saw.

“Brother,” he says, “you commit a traffic offense in this country and it goes into a system and the system remembers. After your third offense, your fourth offense, they take away your license.”

It was a revelation. In this city of half a million people, everyone was clocked and monitored and bound to a sprawling filigree of rules. And when you were caught breaking one of them, your violation was marked, and the mark did not go away.

At first, it frightened him. Not only did this place want certificates and qualifications he could not possibly acquire. It also circled above him like a hunting bird ready to swoop. He was locked out, incessantly watched, ready to be devoured.

And then something happened that changed his perspective. Sadicya had gotten pregnant again before they left Cape Town; on an evening in late July, four months to the week after their arrival in Kansas City, she went into labor.

“We phone for the ambulance,” Asad recalls, “and the woman on the phone starts talking. ‘Do not allow her to cross her legs. Position her like this. Do not allow her to do that.' While she is still talking, I hear the siren. It has taken maybe four minutes. And I realize: there is a whole machine in this city waiting for the ladies to go into labor. You pick up the phone and it comes to you. Before I had hung up, I said to myself: When I get a job, I want to pay taxes in this country.