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

slept there that night.”
    In the morning, when he braved the hotel corridors, one of the first people he saw was the boy he had hurt.
    “His eye was very bad. I said I was sorry. I said I didn’t mean it. And his father did not beat me, but after that everyone kept their children away from me.”
    —
    “The most senior AliYusuf at the hotel,” Asad tells me, “was a man named Mohamed Sheikh Abdi. He complained that there were no schools good enough for his children in the whole of Nairobi. So he found a Muslim boarding school in a town far away, still in Kenya, but on the border with Tanzania. When he enrolled his children there, he said, ‘Asad is going, too. One day, his father will come, and he will expect to greet a child with an education.’ Other AliYusuf men with money also sent their children. My old stepbrother, Galal’s child, he went, too, and also one of Galal’s brothers. Mohamed Sheikh Abdi took us personally in a hired minibus.”
    Asad no longer recalls how many times he escaped from the school and returned to Eastleigh. He thinks three, maybe four.
    “In Kenya,” he says, “if you wear a school uniform, you can hitch a lift. Anyone will stop for you. On the journey down, I knew that I would soon be coming back the other way. I did not want to go to school. I think that that first time, I was there maybe a week.” He stops speaking to let out a long giggle. “The adults at the Hotel Taleh think they have gotten ridden of Asad. One morning they wake up and there he is, leading the little ones through the streets.”
    I press him on what school was like, on why it was so intolerable. He shrugs.
    “I was too wild for the other children. I was either hurting them or upsetting them. This was a very proper school, a strict boarding school for Muslim Kenyan children to learn Arabic. The teachers did not tolerate my wildness. I felt bored. The teachers shouted too much. I would come up to other children to ask them questions in the middle of a class, when you are meant to be quietly listening to the teacher. I would take other children away to skip class with me. Mohamed Sheikh Abdi kept sending me back, but I never lasted. I think the longest was maybe three weeks.”
    —
    There was one Eastleigh ritual that did turn the crazy orphan boy into a solemn child. Every now and again, a Ogadeni would arrive in Eastleigh having escaped from a part of southern Somalia controlled by enemies. News of each arrival would crisscross the neighborhood in minutes. The following morning, after the newcomer had been given a chance to eat and rest, people would begin queueing at the door where he or she was staying. Everyone had been cut off from family. Everyone was hungry for information.
    Each time, Asad would go and listen. And each time he would convince himself that he was about to hear news of his father. He did learn about other people. His uncle, for instance, in whose care he had fled Mogadishu, had been captured by enemy forces in the town of Qoryooley, taken back to Mogadishu, and tortured. It was said that he had lost an eye while in enemy hands but had escaped and was safe now, somewhere in Ethiopia. And Asad’s cousin Abdi, into whose arms he had just been transferred when the mortar exploded, had been killed in battle.
    About his father, he heard nothing.
    In his mind, always, he believed that he was living in an unfortunate interval from which he would soon be delivered. Either his father would appear and sweep him away. Or Yindy would call for him.

PART II
Ethiopia

To Addis and Dire Dawa
    Yindy did call for him, but not in the manner he had imagined. The way he saw it in his mind, an air ticket would appear; he did not know from where. In the Hotel Taleh, it would pass from one AliYusuf hand to the next, each person who touched it imagining in his own private way the land to which this thin piece of cardboard was to take Asad. Then Mohamed Sheikh Abdi would hire a minibus to take him to the