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

foothold in the city. “The Hotel Taleh was full of people with no work,” Asad recalls. “Most Somalis had no jobs, no businesses, they knew nobody. Everyone would get up every morning and hunt. And there was no school for the children to go to. So we would also get up and hunt. The adults and children of Islii all hunting together.”
    How Asad feels about his years at the Hotel Taleh depends on his mood. When he is feeling light, he remembers the joy of being unencumbered.
    “It became a free life,” he says. “If something is good, I do it. If something is not good, I don’t do it. In the mornings, I would go out with the other kiddies who lived at the hotel. We would visit this one and that one. We would go and fight with the Kenyan kids. There was an old lady who only came out of her house once a day. We would throw stones on her roof to force her to come outside. Sometimes, we would sleep wherever we happened to be when night fell. We’d walk back to the hotel for breakfast the next morning.
    “Inside the hotel, every room was mine. I would sleep with a different family every night. I would eat with a different family every mealtime. I was the orphan AliYusuf boy. Because I belonged to everybody, I belonged to nobody.”
    But on days when he is not feeling so good, his memories of this time are taut and anxious.
    Early one morning, for instance, before the adults had emerged from their rooms, Asad picked up a stone and hurled it at an unwitting boy. He does not remember now what provoked him, but he does recall the trajectory of the stone. The moment it left his hand, the world around him paused, for he knew that he had thrown too hard and too straight. The stone slammed into the top of the boy’s cheekbone, just below the eye, and when the world unfroze, the boy was lying on the ground, and the left side of his face was streaked with blood.
    Somebody ran to wake the boy’s father, an important AliYusuf man at the Hotel Taleh, and word went around among the children that he would catch Asad and drag him to his room and thrash him.
    Asad bolted. Once he was across the street, he looked back at the Hotel Taleh, picked up an assortment of stones, and waited. Then he dropped his stones and ran.
    “There is a bus that goes around and around Nairobi’s Ring Road,” Asad says. “It is free for children. I jumped on the bus. It was overloaded like you can’t believe. I went around and around Nairobi three times before I got off.”
    The spot he chose was miles from Eastleigh. He wandered away from the Ring Road, into Nairobi’s central business district, and walked and watched for hours.
    “It was becoming dark. I heard this loud, pumping music coming closer and closer from behind me. It was a minibus taxi, full of people. They stop. One of them puts his head out of the window and talks to me in Swahili.
    “ ‘Small boy, where are you going?’
    “ ‘Islii.’
    “They all laughed, the whole taxi. ‘We are not going to Islii. We are going the opposite way.’
    “But they took me to Islii anyhow. On the journey, questions, questions, questions. ‘Why you wander so far? You want to be a Kenyan? You looking for a nice young Kenyan girl?’ They did not charge me. They dropped me far from the hotel, the other end of Islii.”
    Asad walked home very slowly. He had half a mind to turn around and bolt again, but he had just come from Nairobi with his tail between his legs, and he did not have the stomach for another defeat, especially now that the sun had set. He thought of taking refuge elsewhere in Eastleigh, but there was no such thing. Everyone knew him as the AliYusuf orphan boy. The whole place was a conveyer belt that would deliver him to the Hotel Taleh.
    “When I got to the hotel, there were these guys outside chewing
mira.
    “ ‘Asad, why did you hurt that boy?’
    “ ‘It was a mistake.’
    “ ‘His dad is going to beat you.’
    “ ‘No.’
    “They hid me in their room, and I