A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) by Jonny Steinberg

journey. He remembers that she had a round, padded face and that she spoke to him softly and with care; she was someone who knew how to be with children.
    The lorry took them to Mandera, a city wedged into the northeastern corner of Kenya, the Ethiopian border directly to the north, the Somali border to the east. In Mandera, they transferred to a donkey cart, which for many miles tracked the southern bank of a brown river. Finally, they crossed the water in a boat.
    There were men in uniform on the other side who spoke a language Asad had never heard before. When Haliimo told them that neither she nor Asad had documents, they demanded the two travelers’ bags and emptied them onto the riverbank. Instinctively, Asad got to his knees, picked his Koran out of the mud, and clutched it to his chest. The soldiers wanted to see it; they pointed at it and spoke about it, and then one of them made to prize open Asad’s arms. He turned his back and clutched his book tighter.
    “Koran! Koran!” Asad heard somebody explain to the soldiers. From behind his back came quiet murmuring, then a brief chuckle. Then the voices of the soldiers receded. Haliimo took Asad’s Koran from him and tucked it back into his bag. Then she took his hand and led him into Ethiopia.
    They stayed for two days in a small town just a few kilometers from the border, and on their third evening climbed onto another lorry. It drove through the night and into the dawn, and by noon it was chuntering up a mountain pass that appeared to Asad to take them into a different world. Mist and cloud formed around them, and the air was wet, sometimes with drizzle, sometimes just with fog. In the midst of this new world, a town appeared. The people neither walked nor drove cars; everyone moved about on horseback. They spoke several languages; one resembled the sounds he had heard from the tongues of the border soldiers; the others were unlike anything he had heard before.
    They were delayed there for a week—Asad has no idea why—and throughout those seven days, the rain did not cease, and Asad did not see the sun. Finally, they were moving again, this time on a bus. It took them to Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia.
    The moment Asad begins describing Addis, the pitch of his voice changes. He speaks with urgency, with surprise; he has brushed aside subsequent experience, it seems, and is reinhabiting first impressions.
    “This was an interesting place, brother,” he tells me. “It was very, very interesting. It was cool, not just in the weather, but in the feeling it left inside you. The doors were all closed. The streets were empty. There was no noise. No hurry. No exhaustion. A city full of people, but all of them behind walls. This was a very different place. From way, way back they did things very differently from us.”
    Haliimo and Asad were there less than a week. Their hosts were family of Haliimo’s, Somalis who had lived in Addis many years. The block on which they stayed was inhabited entirely by Somalis, but from the end of the block onward, the city was a foreign place. Asad had strict instructions not to wander. Each day, he would walk to the end of the little island of Somali life and watch the silent streets beyond, where the scarcity of people and the quietness of those few who did pass never ceased to amaze him. On his fourth or fifth day it came to him as an epiphany: the streets here felt so different because they were used differently; they were a means of getting from one place to another, and that was all. He marveled at his discovery. He contrasted it with Islii, where everyone lived their lives in public spaces. And he wondered what it was that caused some people to live one way and others another.
    His last memory of the streets of Addis Ababa was of a long bag-laden walk, right through the center of the city, to the bus that would take him and Haliimo the final five hundred kilometers of their journey to Dire Dawa. He, too, now, was