A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (12 page)

There is a truck stop in Dire Dawa. When Asad described it to me, I imagined it as a place teeming with stalls and markets and filled with noise. It is in fact just a quiet street in a tree-lined neighborhood, several trucks parked on either side of the road. A green-walled mosque is in sight, half a block away, and the loudest sound about is the dreamy, drifting call to prayer. I'd thought it so big and loud, I now realized, because of its significance in Asad's life.

The afternoon on which I visited was very hot; a lone
kirishbooy
braved the direct sunlight, crouching over the exposed intestines of his truck's engine. Everyone else sat quietly in the shade, their rest interrupted when I foolishly took out my camera.

It was at this truck stop that Asad met the students Yusuf, Abdirashid, Molid, Khadaar, and Abdiaziz.

Dire Dawa heaves with students. They come in from the Ogaden on the roofs of trucks with little more than the clothes on their backs. They rent places in the poorest parts of the city, five, sometimes ten, of them to a single room. They register at schools and at colleges and then scrounge for money to pay their fees and buy their textbooks. For the youth in the surrounding villages and towns, the only route to prosperity is the civil service, and the only way there is through a university education. And so a region's youth descends en masse on the provincial capital's schools and college, whether they can afford to or not.

“Yusuf and his friends hung around at the truck stop for two reasons,” Asad tells me. “During school holidays they wanted to go home to their various places in the Ogaden to see their families, but they had no money to travel. So they thought that if they befriend the
kirishbooys
and the
denis
maybe it will be possible to get a free place on the roof of a truck. And, second, truck stops are a place of businessmen, and businessmen have money, so they come to tell businessmen about their plight.”

It was on the roof of Rooda's truck, on a trip from Dire Dawa to Jigajiga, that Asad got to know the five students. Asad had told me often how much he enjoyed the conversations on the road, but it is only now, when he speaks of these particular young men, that I see the attraction. What he enjoyed was the opportunity to imagine other lives and to contemplate that these lives might be his own.

“They were clean,” Asad tells me, “and I was full of grass. They had books in their bags. And I could not read properly. I asked Abdirashid to show me a book. I paged through it. Then I asked him to read some of it to me. It was about which parts of Ethiopia were high and which parts were low. Tigray, where the rulers of Ethiopia come from, was in the highlands. The Ogaden was in the lowlands. I thought about this. I kept looking up from the book at Abdirashid's face. It was so clean, the sort of clean your face gets when you wash it every day.”

Asad was generous to the students. Whenever Rooda or the
deni
gave him a decent sum of money, he would hold on to it until he was next in Dire Dawa. He would either spend it with the students or simply give them half of what he had.

After a few months, it came to him that he was living for the time the truck stopped in Dire Dawa, and that whenever he was elsewhere, the students remained in his mind. This business of being in one place and imagining all the time that one is somewhere else: when it happened he realized at once that he had not felt this way in a long time.

The years he spent in Nairobi, the long trip through Ethiopia, the time in Dire Dawa: for all those uncountable hours and minutes and seconds he was, in his head, a boy on the brink of living in America. He understood now that adjusting to the disappointment that America was gone had exhausted him; that being a boy who did not imagine his future was hard work.

Without warning, he felt the presence of his mother. He thought of the two thick plaits of hair running down her back, and he realized that the image was not nearly as powerful as the feeling and that the feeling was indescribable. She was with him always; something truly terrible would have to happen to shake her out. He recalls the revelation coming to him on the back of Rooda's truck, the wind in his face, the yellow desert all around.

From the truck stop I walk down a gentle hill, past the green mosque. I turn right at the corner and come to the entrance of a large wholesaler's shop. I am retracing the steps Asad took as he went to announce to Rooda that he would be staying with the students in Dire Dawa.

“Rooda was sitting at the entrance to the shop talking to somebody,” Asad recalls. “That was his standard position. He would spend hours there, talking, chewing
mira.
I stopped quite far from him, maybe ten paces.

“I said, ‘I need to talk to you.'

“He said, ‘Then come here and talk.'

“I didn't want to tell him I was leaving in front of the other people. ‘No,' I said. ‘You come here.'

“He got up from his chair, sighing, like it was a big effort, and came over to me.

“ ‘I'm leaving,' I said.

“ ‘Why? What's wrong?'

“ ‘Nothing. I want to study.'

“He said nothing, nothing at all. He just stood there and looked at me and nodded his head. He is not the sort of person to shout. He just walks away. The first and last time he ever shouted at me was on that first night when he realized I hadn't eaten, and that was only because he was panicked. He was a gentle man, a very kind man.

“I sat there in the wholesaler's shop feeling quite upset, quite confused. He came back about two hours later, and I could see from his face he was still shocked that I was leaving. He put money in my hand; it was a lot of money, more than I had ever held in one pile. I think he said, ‘Do not be naughty,' but I cannot remember for sure. The guys were waiting for me at the truck stop. I turned and walked away. I never saw Rooda again.”

There is a long silence. We both stare at the Blikkiesdorp scene in front of us. About fifty paces away, two young men are sitting in the narrow slice of shade cast by a shack. Asad has been eyeing them carefully all morning.

“Do you regret leaving Rooda?” I ask.

“It is foolish to regret what you did when you were young,” he replies. “But if I had stayed with Rooda I would have a very different life now. He wasn't pleased when I left him. He wanted to train me to change tires, to train me from bottom to top so that I could become a driver. But people disappoint you, even your children. That's not what I wanted to do.

“Looking back now, I should have stayed with him. I was a kid. I didn't know what I was doing. I could have had my own truck by now. I did not realize I was changing the rest of my life. Like I say, I was like a stone lying on the ground. Anyone could pick it up and throw it.”

“What do you think would have happened if you'd gone back to Rooda a month later?” I asked.

“He would not have said a word. I just would have climbed up, and we would have driven off. But it didn't even come to my mind. I had a free life. I had no worries.”

There is another long silence.

“What was Rooda's clan?” I finally ask.

“I don't know. It was not the sort of question you asked Rooda.”

“Never? His clan never once came up in conversation?”

“No. Even if I were to sit here and try to imagine myself asking Rooda his clan, I can't imagine it. You spoke to Rooda only about now, about the truck, about the road, about his
mira,
about his Coca-Cola.”

Including Asad, there were six students. They shared a single room in the neighborhood of Gandeqore, which was built after the fashion of the city's original French neighborhood with wide streets and stucco houses and sprawling, shady trees. Asad was the only one among them with no income, but it seemed genuinely not to matter. They lived simple lives, there was enough to go around, and, besides, Asad had been more than generous to all of them in the past.

“They were all from different places,” Asad tells me, “but they were all from the Ogaden.”

I find it difficult to coax to life Asad's memories of this time. His description of Gandeqore is flat and halfhearted, and it is only when I walk through the neighborhood myself that I get a sense of it. It is such a peaceful, quiet place, full of the shade cast by the trees. Groups of people lean against walls or sit on plastic chairs, talking for hours and hours and going nowhere. In little coffee shops the patrons drink espressos and cross their legs and look out into the street.

The truth, I think, is that Asad was bored. The others would leave early for school, abandoning him to this deserted neighborhood. He would pad about the room, doze and wake and stare at the ceiling. He would go to mosque and sometimes remain after prayers and talk, but the men there were mainly middle-aged, and he had little in common with them. He found himself marking time, waiting for the midafternoon, when the others would return from school. They were always ravenously hungry; they would change their clothes and go out to the canteens and restaurants to find food. Sometimes they would come home again in the early evenings and do schoolwork. Other times they would walk into the center of town and hang out all evening in the market or around the restaurants and coffee shops.

Twice, Asad tried to go to school. The first attempt was at a government-run institution in the neighborhood of Lagaharka. He sat in the principal's office growing increasingly dismayed as the man before him erected one obstacle after another. He could not admit Asad, he said, without a referral letter from his previous school. Where was his previous school? Asad panicked. Were he to blurt out that he had never been to school, but for an abortive attempt at that Muslim institution in southern Kenya, he feared the principal would laugh in his face.

“Jigjiga,” Asad said.

“Well, then you must go to Jigjiga for a referral letter, so that I know what grade to put you in. I cannot assign you to a grade without knowing that you have passed the previous grade.”

Asad's friends advised him to go to Jigjiga and get a referral letter, even if he had to buy one, even if he had to get somebody to forge one. But the very thought of such an expedition exhausted him, and he stayed at home in the mornings and stared at the ceiling.

He again went to see the headmaster at the school in Lagaharka, and told him that he had no referral letter.

“Then I will have to put you in the first grade,” the headmaster said.

“Show me,” Asad replied.

They walked through the school, and the headmaster invited Asad to peer through a window, and there, sitting at small desks made for small bodies, a group of children, no more than eight or nine years old, sat listening to a teacher. The idea that Asad might sit at one of those little desks appalled him. He was now about fifteen years old and could pick up the tire of a truck and make a tent on the roof and take care of the truck alone in a strange town crowded with strange people: that such an Asad might sit at a little desk among little people filled him with a sense of indignity so powerful that he cannot describe it. He sits in my passenger seat and grins and shrugs his shoulders.

And so he spent a lot of his life waiting—pr
imarily for the others to return from school. They would take out their books to study, and Asad would watch from over their shoulders, and sometimes he would ask questions, but he could tell that he was irritating them, and so soon his questions ceased. Sometimes, when a book was lying around, he would examine it, and if it was in English he would pick it up, sit himself down in a corner, and read.

“I only read two books during my time in Dire Dawa,” Asad says. “One was geographical, the other biological. The geography book had a chapter called ‘Civics': democratic Ethiopia, how government works, the relationship between the regions and the central government in Addis. There was another chapter on terrain, and I saw once again that the Ogaden was the lowland, the rest of Ethiopia the highland. In the biology book I learned about different trees. Two types: one with sap, one without. Also, ones that shed their leaves and ones that do not.

“I would read awhile, and then I would put down the book and join in whatever conversation the others were having.”

“What did they talk about?” I ask.

“Their plans. Always their plans. They wanted to change from this school to that school because they knew that somebody from that school once got into university. But this better school costs money, so then they talk about their finances. Also, their plans for when they are finished with school. Should they live in this village or that village? There are many jobs in the civil service here, but not there.

“Sometimes, they told funny stories about girls. In fact, whenever they were not talking about their finances or their plans, they were talking about girls.”

Frustratingly, he says no more.

“What did they say about girls?” I ask.

“Just gossiping, just showing off. This one is so beautiful around the hips. That one is hot for me. This one is like this, that one is like that.”