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

using the streets only to get from A to B, and he allowed himself an idle fantasy, imagining himself to be an Ethiopian boy.
    —
    “Dire Dawa is a very beautiful city, brother,” Asad tells me. “We lived in a neighborhood called Hafad. There are trees everywhere, and they throw their shadows from one side of the street to the other, so you are always walking in the shade. And on each street, under the biggest tree, there is table soccer. I lived there from the end of 1995 until somewhere near the end of 1996; I think that I played table soccer every day. And when I say every day, brother, I mean
all day
every day.”
    More than sixteen years later, in the first week of April 2012, I arrive in Dire Dawa, my aim to find whatever traces remain of the footprint Asad has left there. I check into my Dire Dawa hotel and walk into the street clutching a map. Unable to make head or tail of it, I slip it into my pocket and decide to get utterly lost.
    I find myself on a long, straight road lined with trees I do not recognize. There are cobbles underfoot, and the trees cast shade from one side of the street to the other, just as Asad has described. I will only discover the next day that, quite by chance, the neighborhood through which I am wandering is Hafad, the very place Asad had lived. I am quite literally walking in his footsteps.
    It is no wonder that Asad was so struck by the appearance of Hafad. The people who designed it had in mind a neighborhood in Toulouse or Marseille. Dire Dawa was born in 1902 as a railway town linking southern and eastern Ethiopia to the port of Djibouti in the north, and the French company that won the concession to build the railway was also given a ninety-nine-year lease on half the town. It put down a grid of wide avenues, some of them bisected by ornamented pedestrian walkways. In the middle of the larger intersections were traffic circles filled with landscaped flowerbeds. But the town’s French population of engineers and other personnel was never large enough to occupy all the land the company had leased, and so many of these lovely streets stood empty for years.
    Three or four blocks into my stroll, under the shade of a hefty tree, a group of boys is playing table soccer. I watch them from a discreet distance until one of them comes to me and offers to shake my hand. He tells me that his name is David and invites me to play. I smile at him broadly, considering whether to explain that he is, to my eyes, an incarnation of a boy who once lived here, and whom I have brought with me in my thoughts.
    —
    I wonder whether Asad chooses to begin the story of his time in Dire Dawa with the streets and the trees and the table soccer because the most obvious beginning, his arrival, is so rude an introduction.
    His first taste of the city was not the placid streets of Hafad but the central bus station, a place whose order and design were beyond his grasp. People moved fast, with purpose and in great numbers. They wore strange clothes, their jabber was unintelligible, and their facial expressions told you little about what was inside them. From her hesitation, it was plain to Asad that Haliimo, too, was out of her depth. The first two people she approached ignored her, just walked on in their distracted busyness, as if acknowledging this lost and confused woman could only bring bother. But the third took a great interest. He was tall and very thin and wore wire-framed spectacles, and he bent low to hear what Haliimo was saying and nodded and pointed a long finger into the distance. He led them through the crowds and onto a busy street, and the next thing Asad knew he and Haliimo were on the back of a donkey cart.
    At the intersection where they stopped, everyone was Somali. There were restaurants and loud music. For the first time since Islii, Asad was on a street that smelled and sounded like home, his mother tongue bouncing from one mouth to the next, the world a hive of shouting and laughing. And