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

were the two rooms, each insufferably hot and dark; there was the yard, barely large enough for him to pace; and there was the sleeping Yindy in her
balbalo.
Sometimes, he would enter the
balbalo
and watch her diaphragm expand and contract until the rhythms hypnotized him and the street outside disintegrated. He would find enormous relief in this movement of her body; he had no idea why.
    He was left with his thoughts, and these, recurrently, were of his house in Mogadishu, of his mother, his father, of his life. His memories, he found, took the form of several images—some of his mother, others of siblings, others of the
hindi
tree, some of the madrassa. They would come to him in sequence and reel over and over before his eyes, the order in which they appeared always the same. It was so unreal, the recurring sequence; it struck him that, already, after just a few weeks, he was losing his memory of his life. For these spooling images did not seem to involve him: they were images from another world.
    On some evenings, he accompanied Yindy to the cafeteria, where he would sit and listen to the adults talk and thus get some sense of what was happening. It was here that people kept discussing an imminent Hawiye attack and exchanged stories about refugees shooting one another in the streets of Afmadow. They discussed, too, whatever news or rumor they had received from Mogadishu. These discussions fell together into one big stew of talk so that Afmadow and Mogadishu, the past and the present, bubbled and cooked.
    In Mogadishu, it seemed, the Daarood people who had not left had been sucked into a hole of butchering and slaughter, and he wondered whether his father had escaped or whether he was among the dead. He heard, too, at the cafeteria, that the Hawiye militias had taken the towns on the Kismayo highway one by one, and as the names spilled off the tongues of Yindy’s customers, he recognized each as a town he had passed through. Until, finally, someone among Yindy’s customers mentioned the town of Qoryooley, where Asad had been separated from his family. The Daarood in this town and the others, people said, were “hostages.” Although it was not a word he had heard before, he soon knew what it meant, for the people were saying that the hostages were like slaves and that those believed to have worked for the Somali government were being tortured, some of them killed.
    —
    How long had he been in Afmadow when it happened? He is not sure. He thinks maybe a month. It was late morning on an especially hot day. Yindy was asleep in the
balbalo.
Asad, a child with no use for shade, even when the sun pelted down, was lying on his stomach on a concrete slab between the house and the
balbalo.
Half awake, half asleep, his ear flat against the slab, he was roused by a thumping and pounding that seemed to emanate from the ground. He raised his head in time to watch a woman hurdle his prostrate body and make for the house. She pulled unsuccessfully at the door; it was locked. Then she jumped over Asad once more and ran to the entrance of the
balbalo,
kicked aside the barrel that served as its door, and went inside.
    A man ran into the yard from the street and skidded to a halt. Only once he was past Asad and standing in the mouth of the
balbalo
did Asad notice that in one of his hands was a pistol, its barrel pointing at the ground. The man lifted his gun, turned his face away, and fired twice into the
balbalo.
In that instant, Asad recalls, he was struck by the oddity of the man looking away. Why shoot at all if you do not direct your eyes at your target? What is the point?
    From the
balbalo
came a volley of cries. Although he had never heard Yindy cry like that before, Asad nonetheless recognized them as hers. The man turned on his heels and ran. Asad pursued him, primarily to get away from the noise Yindy was making. He recalls sprinting through the crowded streets of Afmadow, screaming, for all he was worth, “You have killed