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

yet, when Haliimo hailed a stranger and told him the name of the family they were looking for, the man frowned in confusion. And so did the next stranger, and the next. There were many, many Somalis in this city, it seemed. Soon, a congregation had assembled at the roadside to tackle the matter of Haliimo’s family. Young children were sent to summon people from the other end of the city. The summoned ones came hours later, but they, too, shook their heads in puzzlement and offered advice of their own. Haliimo and Asad spent the night under the stars, covered by a thin blanket, in the yard of a Somali family that had taken pity on them. It was only on the afternoon of his second day in Dire Dawa that Asad was finally led to Yindy’s family’s house in Hafad—his home for the better part of the next year.
    His memory narrows. The streets and their sounds disappear from his story, making way for just one face and one voice—that of Yindy’s father.
    “He was standing at the front door,” Asad recalls, “watching our taxi approach his house. He was holding himself straight and stiff, with his hands at his sides, like a soldier. He watched us get out of the car, watched us take our bags. As I walked toward him, he stared at me with a scowl on his face, like I was a piece of shit about to come into his house and make it smelly. I felt cold when he looked at me.”
    Asad folds his arm behind his head and touches the back of his neck. “I felt his look here. He turned away from me and started talking to the person next to him. ‘Yindy is too concerned with the AliYusuf.’ He said it like I could not hear him, just because I was a child. My pressure went very high. I had just met him, and already I hated him. I targeted him. From that day forward, I showed him no respect. He would address me, and I would turn my back.”
    I try to tease more memories from Asad. Who were the other members of the family party? What were their names? Were they a nuclear family or members of disparate families joined together by the fact that Yindy had summoned them? Each time Asad tries to answer my questions, his tongue thickens.
    “I slept in a room with three other children,” he tells me. “They took their example from the old man and treated me like I was invisible. If I tried to talk to them, they’d shout at me to go away. I would wake up in the morning and eat breakfast with the family, and then I would disappear for the whole day. I would miss lunch. I would return to them only when the sun was setting. I did not want to be with them. I felt like a dog to whom the family throws scraps.”
    And so his days were spent around the soccer table on the street, his refuge from his home. Here, he began to learn something of the city in which he now lived.
    “There were two main groups in Dire Dawa,” he tells me, “the Oromo and the Somali. Both thought that the city was theirs, and they fought each other for it. This fight would sometimes come to the table soccer. People would be playing together for hours and hours, Oromo alongside Somali, and then there would be a dispute over a goal, and, all of a sudden, it is Oromos on one side, Somalis on the other. The feeling in the air is not nice, and the fight is about much more than table soccer.
    “Also, it was not always so nice being young around the soccer table. Sometimes, I would skip breakfast with Yindy’s family and go and play as soon as I woke up, early, early. Then, it is only boys playing. But as the sun gets higher, the older ones come to play, and they do not think it is very dignified to wait for young boys, so they throw you out of the queue. And I must wait until they are finished playing. Sometimes it is the whole day, and the sun is already going down by the time I am on the table again.
    “The way it worked, you would hold the table until you lose. Sometimes, if I won too many in a row, and the people around became frustrated, they would just push me off the table,