Free Transit by Abdourahman A. Waberi

pastry with unique sedimentation. Your father joined me there, abandoning his band of friends with a heavy heart. He seemed to have grown up: in a few weeks, he had climbed the steps of age it usually takes many years to ascend. The perspective of finding his country still under colonial rule had given him wings, even if he dreaded the ordinary racism on both sides of the fence and what people might say once we were settled there. He lived through the last months of his life in Paris like a passerby, light-heartedly wearing the first wrinkles on his brow and a little paunch in his midsection. He couldn't care less about it, because in Djibouti, when you're married and past thirty, people talk to you like you're a responsible man, the head of a family, an almost-old man. Then, very quickly, came the whirlwind of the return. For the first few months, you don't really know who you are. You go from one house to another, one family to another, one friend to another with the assurance of a tightrope walker. You listen to advice; you collect various views and contradictory opinions with the same ears, without asking yourself too many questions. You don't really know who you are, or who they are. Everything is intoxicating: visiting the country, combing the city. Real life, right? But that feeling won't last. Soon, they put you in a ready-made box: you're the mixed couple people look at suspiciously. On lonely evenings (or their corollary, boring ones), you'll catch yourself sobbing at the prospect of once again having to face the gaping sadness that comes after dusk. You tell yourself that for him, you're ready to accept pain, humiliation, and even the sorrow to come, when things become normal, when his family wants to take back their man. We'll be caught in the midst of the storm,but alive and strong. In that situation of insidious adversity, you can only get tougher. A little inner voice would whisper to me on difficult days: “What made you come here to this land of echoes and dust, this antechamber of the desert where they bury the dead quickly to prevent the flies from gathering and performing their diabolical ballet? You're breathing an air made of boredom, routine, and triumphant poverty. Here, no one's going to ask much of you. Where will you put your tombstone if anything happened to you? Let this man and people like him soliloquize till the end of time.”
    A month after our arrival, both of us found work. The authorities must have wanted to polish up their image: a domino couple with college degrees just off the plane, isn't exactly run-of-the-mill here, even if the president of the territorial council, M. Ali Aref, dug up a Frenchwoman from Nîmes—a naive lady, they say—with the help of Jacques Foccart, the man who distributes destinies in French-speaking countries allied with France. In September 1973, I was starting my first year of teaching at the Boulaos junior high school and your father joined the little scientific institute mainly devoted to geology, which had just opened its doors on the road to the airport. I really couldn't bring myself to be a journalist under the “leadership” of the high commissioner of the Republic, and aside from reporting on sports scores, I don't see what I could have shared with this milieu. I remained walled up in my silence with my colleagues; almost all of them were French, spurred on by the prospect of buying their rented apartment in a few months. Open my heart to them—are you kidding? They would have thought I was crazy, a terrorist almost, a half-wit who should be sent back on the first ship bound for France. I could read hypocrisy, spinelessness, and cowardice in their eyes. I kept my distance, never letting them think their meaningful glances or invitations had any effect on me.
    Stay on your own side of the river, and above all never throw oil on the fire, never arouse the right-wing crowds of the colony and pet the muzzle of Lucifer. At first,