A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) Read Online Free PDF

in the mouth. What I remember is that they were darker than the skin on her face. She was very pale, and also very short.”
    It was early evening. Yindy, it appeared, was serving customers. They sat on plastic chairs at the roadside and drank her tea and spoke to one another. Much later, Yindy opened a large black pot and began serving them food. Asad remembers thinking that Yindy resembled her pot: short and squat on legs that barely raised her from the ground.
    This drinking of tea and eating and talking seemed to Asad to go on forever. Several times, he drifted off and found himself hurtling through the night toward Mogadishu, only to be startled back to Afmadow by a shout or a laugh. He seemed to have entered a world that did not sleep, where people drank tea through the small hours instead of going home to families.
    Eventually, he grew so tired that he crawled under a plastic chair and slept, the voices of Yindy’s patrons filtering through his dreams. He was woken, gently, by the morning call to prayer and by the shuffling of many feet. He climbed out from under his chair to discover that the patrons were all gone, their place taken by several middle-aged women who were moving about among the pots and brewing tea. Yindy chatted with them for a while and then led Asad away.
    At first, he did not realize that they had arrived at Yindy’s home, for it did not seem a private space at all. It was a two-room shelter made of wood and zinc and mud. In front of it stood a small yard that opened onto the street. The room in which Yindy put him to sleep was so close to the people walking by, it felt as if a hand could reach in at any time and snatch him away.
    —
    He does not recall whether it was Yindy or someone else who explained it to him, but she was a close relative, the daughter of Asad’s father’s sister.
    “She had walked by herself all the way from Mogadishu,” Asad recalls. “I am not sure what her family situation was, only that she was divorced and that her husband’s family was not helping her. She was alone and in trouble. She got by running a cafeteria, cooking, and selling tea. She worked very, very hard and each day had just enough to eat.”
    Yindy was not quite alone. Asad had entered a world of women. There were about half a dozen of them, as he recalls, and they shared the cafeteria in shifts. Each day, Yindy would leave her home for work at five or six o’clock in the evening and would begin to make tea and food. She would work through the night. In the morning, at first prayers, other women would take over, and Yindy would go home to rest. She seldom slept in one of her two rooms. Instead, she would make herself a bed in what Somalis call the
balbalo.
Each Somali household has one, some two or three. It is a wall-less shed—four poles holding up a thatched roof—and stands in the family yard. When the temperature reaches a hundred or so degrees it is too hot to be indoors or in the sunlight, and people live in the shade of their
balbalo.
    Lying there under her thatched roof during the daylight hours, Yindy was practically on the street, her only shield from passersby a large barrel that lay on its side across the width of the
balbalo;
Asad wondered how she managed to sleep. But sleep Yindy did, without stirring, sometimes until as late as two or three o’clock in the afternoon.
    Asad was forbidden to leave the yard while Yindy rested. The world outside was deadly, she kept warning. It was no place for a child.
    “She was not wrong,” Asad recalls. “Everyone was shooting. Two people would start arguing in the street. One would shoot the other. Ogadeni shooting Ogadeni. Refugee shooting refugee. And there were constant rumors that the Hawiye were going to attack. And so there was this nervousness, this fear, that tomorrow the world is going to fall on everyone’s head, so maybe it is better not to care so much about anyone today.”
    Yindy’s yard became the whole of Asad’s world. There