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

airport and fill it with well-wishers, adults and children alike. They would wave and cheer and take photographs as he walked away from Kenya and into the tube of an airplane. Of the journey itself he had no notion at all; he knew only that Yindy would be waiting on the other side to lead him into a new life.
    It was not that simple. Yindy’s proposal was an awkward one. She was able to
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a dozen people to join her in America. Among them were her mother—who was also Asad’s father’s sister—her father, and several of their relatives. They were all in Dire Dawa, a town in Ethiopia many hundreds of miles from Nairobi, waiting for their applications to be processed. Asad must go to them, Yindy said. It was only from there that he could get the documents to go to America.
    The AliYusuf elders held long discussions about these people waiting in Dire Dawa. Who were they, precisely? There were close blood family among them, to be sure: Asad’s paternal aunt. But she was part of her husband’s family now, and while he was Ogadeni, he was not AliYusuf; the ties were thus thin. And so the question arose: Do we send this lone AliYusuf boy far away into the care of a man we don’t know? What if Asad’s father should come to Islii to collect him? He must stay with his people.
    In the beginning, that was the majority opinion. But as the discussions with Yindy continued, perspectives changed. What if his father never arrives? What if he is an orphan? Can we deny him the opportunity of a life in America for the sake of a father who is quite possibly dead? Life is for the living; one does not wait for ghosts.
    Once, Asad himself spoke to Yindy on the phone. Her voice sounded surprisingly close, as if she might walk into the Hotel Taleh at any moment. But her manner was stiff and nervous: Your uncles are thinking, she said. You must do whatever they decide.
    As the weeks passed, Asad grew increasingly certain that the elders would tell him that he was going to Ethiopia. And as his certainty grew, so his relation to the world around him began to change.
    “Something funny happened with me. I became quiet. I didn’t drift far from Islii. I stopped leading the other kiddies to trouble.”
    He was, he now realizes, preserving himself for America, for he was no longer merely a lost boy but an asset, a person in whom much was to be invested.
    “I had this picture in my mind of Yindy waiting at the airport. But there is no Asad on the airplane. He is buried back in Kenya. This wonderful future with a university education and everything never happens because Asad is no longer there.”
    When the AliYusuf elders finally told him that he was going to Ethiopia, Asad had long known it in his bones. The moment was nonetheless enormous. He walked out of the hotel, and the people in the streets appeared to be moving much slower than usual. The sun itself seemed to have frozen in the middle of the sky. He traced a long circuit around the Hotel Taleh, his path taking him right to the other side of Islii, and, although it seemed that hours had passed, when he returned it remained early afternoon.
    In the period that followed, the movement of time seemed almost to cease. “I couldn’t believe how long it took for a day to pass,” Asad recalls. “Something that happened just yesterday seemed like it happened last year. When it was a week left to go, I didn’t think I could last that long.”
    —
    Asad left Nairobi one scorching afternoon on the back of a truck. He believes that it was November 1995 and that he was eleven or twelve years old, but he cannot be sure. He had with him a small bag containing three or four changes of clothes, a Koran, and a dozen or so snapshots taken in various parts of Nairobi. I have three of them with me now; when I met Asad, they were the last of his photographs that remained in his possession.
    His minder was a kindly woman named Haliimo. He does not recall now who she was or why she was making the