Thirty-five years after my father left Ethiopia, he died in a room in a boarding house in Peoria, Illinois, that came with a partial view of the river. We had never spoken much during his lifetime, but, on a warm October morning in New York shortly after he died, I found myself having a conversation with him as I walked north on Amsterdam Avenue, toward the high school where for the past three years I had been teaching a course in Early American literature to privileged freshmen.
“That’s the Academy right there,” I told him. “You can see the top of the bell tower through the trees. I’m the only one who calls it the Academy. That’s not its real name. I stole it from a short story by Kafka that I read in college—a monkey who’s been trained to talk gives a speech to an academy. I used to wonder if that was how my students and the other teachers, even with all their liberal, cultured learning, saw me—as a monkey trying to teach their language back to them. Do you remember how you spoke? I hated it. You used those short, broken sentences that sounded as if you were spitting out the words, as if you had just learned them but already despised them, even the simplest ones. ‘Take this.’ ‘Don’t touch.’ ‘Leave now.’ ”
I arrived in my classroom ten minutes before the bell rang, just as the first of my students trickled in. They were the smartest, and took their seats near the center. The rest arrived in no discernible order, but I noticed that all of them, smart and stupid alike, seemed hardly to talk, or, if they talked, it was only in whispers. Most said hello as they entered, but their voices were more hesitant than usual, as if they weren’t sure that it was really me they were addressing.
“I’m sorry for having missed class the other day,” I began, and because I felt obliged to explain my absence I told them the truth. “My father passed away recently. I had to attend to his affairs.”
And yet, because I had just finished talking to him, I felt that I hadn’t said enough. So I continued. “He was sixty-seven years old when he died. He was born in a small village in northern Ethiopia. He was thirty-two when he left his home for a port town in Sudan in order to come here.”
And while I could have ended there I had no desire to. I needed a history more complete than the strangled bits that he had owned and passed on to me—a short, brutal tale of having been trapped as a stowaway on a ship. So I continued with my father’s story, knowing that I could make up the missing details as I went.
He was an engineer before he left Ethiopia, I told my students, but after spending several months in prison for attending a political rally banned by the government he was reduced to nothing. He knew that if he returned home he would eventually be arrested again, and that this time he wouldn’t survive, so he took what little he had left and followed a group of men who told him that they were heading to Sudan, because it was the only way out.
For one week he walked west. He had never been in this part of the country before. Everything was flat, from the land to the horizon, one uninterrupted stream that not even a cloud dared to break. The fields were thick with wild green grass and bursts of yellow flowers. Eventually he found a ride on the back of a pickup truck already crowded with refugees heading toward the border. Every few hours, they passed a village, each one a cluster of thatch-roofed huts with a dirt road carved down the middle, where children eagerly waved as the refugees passed, as if the simple fact that they were travelling in a truck meant they were off to someplace better.
When he finally arrived at the port town in Sudan, he had already lost a dozen pounds. His slightly bulbous nose stood in stark contrast to the sunken cheeks and wide eyes that seemed to have been buried deep above them. His clothes fit him poorly. His hands looked larger; the bones were more visible. He thought his fingers were growing.
This was the farthest from home he had ever travelled, but he knew that he couldn’t stay there. He wanted to leave the entire continent far behind, for Europe or America, where life was rumored to be better.
It was the oldest port in Sudan and one of the oldest cities in the country. At its peak, fifty thousand people had lived there, but now only a fraction of the population was left. Several wars had been fought nearby, the last one in 1970, between a small group of rebels and the government. There were burned-out tanks on the edge of town and dozens of half-destroyed, abandoned houses. There was sand and dust everywhere, and on most days the temperature came close to a hundred degrees. The people who lived there were desperately poor. Some worked as fishermen but most spent their days by the dock, looking for work unloading crates from the dozens of small freight ships in the harbor. My father was told that he could find a job there, and that if he was patient and earned enough money he could even buy his way out of the country on one of the boats.
The bell for the end of first period rang then. My students waited a moment before gathering their bags and leaving; they were either compelled or baffled by what I had told them. I tried to see them all in one long glance before they were gone. They had always been just bodies to me, a prescribed number that came and went each day of the semester until they were replaced by others, who would do the same. For a few seconds, though, I saw them clearly—the deliberately rumpled hair of the boys and the neat, tidy composure of the girls in opposition. They were still in the making, each and every one of them. Somehow I had missed that. None of them looked away or averted their gaze from mine, which I took as confirmation that I could continue.
As I walked home that night I was aware of a growing vortex of e-mails and text messages being passed among my students. Millions of invisible bits of data were being transmitted through underground cable wires and satellite networks, and I was their sole subject and object of concern. I don’t know why I found so much comfort in that thought, but it nearly lifted me off the ground, and suddenly, everywhere, I felt embraced. As I walked down Riverside Drive, with the Hudson River and the rush of traffic pouring up and down the West Side Highway to my right, the tightly controlled neighborhood borders and divisions hardly mattered.
The next day at the Academy I told my students at the start of class that they could put their anthologies and worksheets away. “We won’t be needing them for now,” I said.
My father’s first job at the port was bringing tea to the dockworkers, a job for which he was paid only in tips—a few cents here and there that gradually added up. On an average day, he would serve anywhere between three and five hundred cups of tea. He could carry as many as ten at a time on a large wooden platter that he learned to balance on his forearm. As a child he had been clumsy; his father would often yell at him for breaking a glass or for being unable to bring him a cup of coffee without spilling it. So as soon as he got the job he began practicing at night with a tray full of stones that were as light as the cups of tea. If the stones moved he knew he had failed and would try again, until eventually he probably could have walked several miles without spilling a drop of tea or shifting a single stone.
He hid his earnings in a pocket sewn into the inside of his pants. The one friend he had in town, a man by the name of Abrahim, had told him never to let anyone know how much money he had: “If someone sees you have two dollars, he will think you have twenty. It’s always better to make people think you have nothing at all.”
Abrahim was the one who found him the job carrying tea. He met my father on his third day in town and knew immediately that he was a foreigner. He went up to him and said, in perfect English, “Hello. My name is Abrahim, like the prophet. Let me help you while you’re in this town.”
He was several inches shorter and better dressed than most of the other men that my father had seen there. His head was bald, with the exception of two graying tufts of hair that arced behind his ears. The last two fingers on his right hand looked as if they had been crushed and then tied together. He bowed slightly when he introduced himself and walked with what might have been a small limp, which in my father’s mind made trusting him easier.
At first, my father slept outside, near the harbor, where hundreds of other men also camped out, most of them refugees like him. Abrahim had told him that it was dangerous to sleep alone, but he had also said that if he slept in the town he was certain to be beaten and arrested by the police.
After a week out there, he heard footsteps near his head just as he was falling asleep. When he opened his eyes and looked up he saw three men standing nearby, their backs all slightly turned to him, so that he could see only their long white djellabahs, dirty but not nearly as filthy as some of the others that he had recently seen. As he watched, one of the men lifted his hands into the air slowly, as if he were struggling to pass something over his head. He recited a prayer that my father had heard several times on his way to Sudan and on multiple occasions in Ethiopia at the homes of Muslim friends. The man repeated the prayer a second and then a third time, and when he was finished the two other men bent down and picked up what at first appeared to be a sack of grain but which, he realized a second later, was clearly a body. The man had been lying there when my father went to sleep. There had been nothing to indicate that he was dead or even injured. When my father told Abrahim the next day, his response was simple: “Don’t think about it too much. It’s easy to die around here and have no one notice.”
He promised to find my father a better place to sleep, and he did. Later that same day, he found my father preparing his mat near the harbor, and told him to follow him. “I have a surprise for you,” he said.
The owner of the boarding house where he was going to stay from now on was a business associate of Abrahim’s. “We’ve worked together many times over the years,” Abrahim told my father, although he never explained what they did. When my father asked him how he could repay his kindness, he waved the question away. “Don’t worry,” Abrahim told him. “You can do something for me later. ”
Unlike most of what I had told my students so far, Abrahim had a real history that I could draw on. My father had mentioned him regularly, not as a part of normal conversation but as a casual aside that could come up at any time without warning. Unbidden, my father had often said that Abrahim was the only real friend he had ever had, and on several occasions he had credited him with saving his life. At other times, my father had claimed that the world was full of crooks, and that after his experiences with a man named Abrahim in Sudan he would never trust a Sudanese, Muslim, or African again.
The Abrahim who came to life in my classroom was a far nobler man than the one I had previously imagined. This Abrahim had a flair for blunt but poetic statements, like the time he told my father that even the sand in the port town was of an inferior quality to the kind he had known in his home village, hundreds of kilometres west of there. “Everything here is shit,” he said. “Even the sand.”
Eventually he got my father a better-paying second job, as a porter on the docks. He told him, “You’re going to be my best investment yet. Everything I give to you I will get back tenfold.” Abrahim came by almost every day to share a cup of tea shortly after evening prayers, when hundreds of individual trails of smoke from the campfires wound their way up into the sky. He would pinch and pull at my father’s waist as if he were a goat or a sheep and then say, “What do you expect? I have to check on the health of my investment.” Afterward, as he was leaving, he always offered the same simple piece of advice:
“Stretch, Yosef!” he would yell out. “Stretch all the time, until your body becomes as loose as a monkey’s.”
At the docks, my father carried boxes from dawn until midday, when it got too hot too work. Before his shift at the teahouse, he would take a nap under a tree and look at the sea and think about the water in front of him. Like most of the men, he was thirsty all the time and convinced that there was something irreparably cruel about a place that put water that could not be drunk in front of you. He imagined building a boat of his own, something simple but sturdy that could at the very least make its way across the gulf to Saudi Arabia. And, if that were to fail, then he’d stuff himself into a box and drift until he reached a foreign shore or died trying.
At least once or twice a week, Abrahim would pick my father up from his room in the evening and walk him down to the docks in order to explain to him how the port town really worked. The only lights they saw came from the scattered fires around which groups of men were huddled. Despite the darkness, people moved about freely and in greater numbers than during the day. It was as if a second city were buried underneath the first, and excavated each night. Women without veils could be spotted along some of the narrow back streets, and my father could smell roasting meat and strong liquor.
“The ships that you see at the far end of the port are all government-controlled,” Abrahim told my father. “They carry one of two things: food or weapons. We don’t make either in Sudan. You may have noticed this. That doesn’t mean we don’t love them equally. Maybe the weapons more. Have you ever seen a hungry man with a gun? Of course not. Always stay away from that part of the dock. It’s run by a couple of generals and a colonel who report straight to the President. They are like gods in this little town, but with better cars. If a soldier sees you there’s nothing I can do to help. Not even God will save a fool.
“The food is supposed to go to the south. It comes from all over the world in great big sacks that say ‘U.S.A.’ Instead, it goes straight to Khartoum with the weapons. And do you know why? Because it’s easier and cheaper to starve people to death than to shoot them. Bullets cost money. Soldiers cost money. Keeping all the food in a warehouse costs nothing.”
In the course of several evenings, Abrahim worked his way down the line of boats docked in the harbor. His favorite ones, he said, were those near the end.
“Those ships over there—all the way at the other end. Those are the ones you need to think about. Those are the ones that go to Europe. You know how you can tell? Look at the flags. You see that one there—with the black and gold? It goes all the way to Italy or Spain. Maybe even France. Some of the men who work on it are friends of mine. Business associates. You can trust them. They’re not like the rest of the people here, who will disappear with your money.”
After that night, my father began to take seriously Abrahim’s advice about stretching. He worked his body into various positions that he would hold for ten or fifteen minutes, and then for as long as an hour. At night before he went to bed he practiced sitting with his legs crossed, and then he stretched his back by curling himself into a ball. After four months he could hold that position for hours, which was precisely what Abrahim told him he would need to do.
“The first few hours will be the hardest,” he said. “You’ll have to be on the ship before it’s fully loaded, and then you will have to stay completely hidden. Only once it’s far out to sea will you be able to move.”
My father thought about writing a letter to his family, but he didn’t know what to say. No one knew for certain if he was alive, and, until he was confident that he would remain so, he preferred to keep it that way. It was better than writing home and saying, “Hello. I miss you. I’m alive and well,” when only the first half of that statement was certain still to be true by the time the letter arrived.
Four months and three weeks after my father arrived in the port town, war broke out in the east. A garrison of soldiers stationed in a village five hundred miles away revolted, and with the help of the villagers began to take over vast swaths of territory in the name of forming an independent state for all the black tribes of the country. There were rumors of massacres on both sides. Who was responsible for the killing always depended on who was talking. It was said that in one village all the young boys had been forced to dig graves for their parents and siblings before watching their executions. Afterward they were forced to join the rebellion that still didn’t have a name.
Factions began to erupt all over the town. Older men who remembered the last war tended to favor the government, since they had once been soldiers as well. Anyone who was born in the south of the country was ardently in favor of the rebels, and many vowed to join them if they ever came close.
Abrahim and my father stopped going to the port at night. “When the fighting breaks out here,” Abrahim told him, “they’ll attack the port first. They’ll burn the local ships and try to take control of the government ones.”
Every day more soldiers arrived. There had always been soldiers in town, but these new ones were different. They came from the opposite corner of the country and spoke none of the local languages; what Arabic they spoke was often almost impossible to understand. The senior commanders, who rode standing up in their jeeps, all wore bright-gold sunglasses that covered half their face, but it was clear regardless that they were foreigners, and had been brought here because they had no attachment to the town or to its people.
At night my father often heard gunfire mixed in with the sound of dogs howling. Every day he pleaded with Abrahim to help him find a way out.
“I have plenty of money saved now,” he said, even though it was a lie. If there was an honest exit, he would find a way to pay for it. Abrahim’s response was always the same: “A man who has no patience here is better off in Hell.”
Two weeks after the first stories of the rebellion appeared, there was talk in the market of a mile-long convoy of jeeps heading toward the town. The foreign ships had begun to leave the port that morning. The rebels were advancing, and would be there by the end of the afternoon. Within hours the rumors had circled the town. They would spare no one. They would attack only the soldiers. They would be greeted as liberators. They were like animals and should be treated as such. My father watched as the women who lived nearby folded their belongings into bags and made for the road with their children at their side or strapped to their backs. Where are they going? he wondered. They have the sea on one side and a desert on the other.
Abrahim found him after lunch. There was no one to serve tea to that day.
“I see you’re very busy,” he said. “You want me to come back when it’s less crowded?”
“Are you leaving?” my father asked him.
“I already have,” Abrahim said. “A long time ago. My entire family is already in Khartoum. I’m just waiting for my body to join them.”
By late in the afternoon they could hear distant mortar shells slamming into the desert. “They’re like children with toys,” Abrahim said, pointing out to the desert from the roof of the boarding house, where they were standing. “They don’t even know yet how far they can shoot with their big guns. There’s nothing out there—or maybe they’ll get lucky and kill a camel. They’ll keep doing that until eventually they run out of shells, or camels.
“It’s going to be terrible what happens to them,” Abrahim continued. “They think they can scare away the soldiers because they have a couple of big guns. They think it’s 1898 and the Battle of Omdurman again, except now they’re the British.”
My father never thought that war could look simple or pathetic, but from that rooftop it did. The rebels were loudly announcing their approach, and, from what my father could see, the soldiers in the town had disappeared. He began to think that Abrahim was wrong, and that the rebels, despite their foolishness, would sweep into town with barely a struggle. He was thinking whether or not to say this to Abrahim when he heard the first distant rumbling over his head. Abrahim and my father turned and looked out toward the sea, where a plane was approaching, flying far too low. Within a minute, it was above them.
“This will be over soon,” Abrahim said. They both waited to hear the sound of a bomb dropping, but nothing happened. The plane had pulled up at the last minute. Shots were harmlessly fired in its direction and the convoy kept approaching—a long, jagged line of old pickup trucks trying to escape the horizon.
When the same plane returned twenty minutes later, three slimmer and clearly foreign-made jets were flying close to it.
“The first was just a warning,” Abrahim said. “To give them a chance to at least try to run away. They were too stupid to understand that. They thought they had won.”
The planes passed. My father and Abrahim counted the seconds. Even from a distance they made a spectacular roar—at least seven bombs were dropped directly onto the rebels, whose convoy disappeared into a cloud of smoke and sand. From some of the neighboring rooftops there were shouts of joy. Soldiers were soon spilling back out into the street singing their victory.
“They should never have tried to take the port,” Abrahim said. “They could have spent years fighting in the desert for their little villages and no one would have really bothered them. But do you think any of those big countries were going to risk losing this beautiful port? By the end of tonight all the foreign ships will be back. Their governments will tell them that it’s safe. They’ve taken care of the problem, and soon, maybe in a day or two, you’ll be able to leave.”
A week later, during my father’s mid-afternoon break, Abrahim found him resting in his usual spot in the shade, staring out at the water. The two of them walked to a nearby café, and for the first time since my father had come to Sudan someone brought him a cup of tea and lunch.
‘This is your going-away meal. Enjoy it,” Abrahim said. “You’re leaving tonight.”
Abrahim ordered a large plate of grilled meats—sheep intestines and what looked to be the neck of a goat—cooked in a brown stew, a feast unlike anything my father had eaten in months. When the food came, he wanted to cry and was briefly afraid to eat it. Abrahim had always told him never to trust anyone, and of course my father had extended that advice to Abrahim himself. Perhaps this was Abrahim’s final trick on him: perhaps the food would disappear just as he leaned over to touch it, or perhaps it was poisoned with something that would send him off into a deep sleep from which he would awake in shackles. My father reached into his pants and untied the pouch in which he carried all his money. He placed it on the table.
“That’s everything I have,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s enough.”
Abrahim ignored the money and dipped into the food with a piece of bread.
“After where your hand has just been I suggest you wash it before eating,” he said. “And take your purse with you.”
When they were finished, Abrahim walked my father to a part of the town he had never seen before—a wide dusty street that grew increasingly narrow, until the tin-roofed shacks that lined it were almost touching one another. Abrahim and my father stopped in front of one of the houses, and Abrahim pulled back the curtain that served as the door. Inside, a heavyset older woman, head partly veiled, sat behind a wooden counter on top of which rested a row of variously sized glass bottles. Abrahim grabbed one and told my father to take a seat in the corner of the room where a group of pillows had been laid. He negotiated and argued with the woman for several minutes until, finally, he pulled a bundle of Sudanese notes from his breast pocket. He sat down next to my father and handed the bottle to him.
“A drink for the road,” he said. “Take it slow.”
If Abrahim’s intention was to harm him, then so be it, my father thought. A decent meal and a drink afterward were not the worst way to go. If such things had been offered to every dying man in this town, then the line of men waiting to die would have stretched for miles.
“Give me your little purse now,” Abrahim said. My father handed him the pouch and Abrahim flipped through the bills. He took a few notes from his own pile and added it to the collection.
“This will buy you water, maybe a little food, and the silence of a few people on board. Don’t expect anything else from them. Don’t ask for food or for anything that they don’t give you. Don’t look them in the eyes, and don’t try to talk to them. They will act as if you don’t exist, which is the best thing. If you do exist then they will throw you overboard at night. Men get on board and they begin to complain. They say their backs hurt or their legs hurt. They say they’re thirsty or hungry. When that happens they’re gagged and thrown into the sea, where they can have all the space and water they want.”
My father took a sip of the liquor, whose harsh, acrid smell had filled the air the moment Abrahim popped the lid.
“When you get to Europe, this is what you are going to do. You are going to be arrested. You will tell them that you want political asylum and they will take you to a jail that looks like Heaven. They will give you food and clothes and even a bed to sleep in. You may never want to leave—that’s how good it will feel. Tell them you were fighting against the Communists and they will love you. They will give you your pick of countries, and you will tell them that you want to go to England. You will tell them that you have left behind your wife in Sudan, and that her life is now in danger and you want her to come as well. You will show them this picture.”
Abrahim pulled from his wallet a photograph of a young girl, no older than fifteen or sixteen, dressed in a bizarre array of Western clothes—a pleated black-and-white polka-dot dress that was several sizes too large, a pair of high-top sneakers, and makeup that had been painted on to make her look older.
“This is my daughter. She lives in Khartoum right now with her mother and aunts. She’s very bright. The best student in her class. When you get to England you’re going to say that she’s your wife. This is how you’re going to repay me. Do you understand?”
My father nodded.
“This is proof of your marriage,” Abrahim said. “I had to spend a lot of money to get that made.”
Abrahim handed him a slip of paper that had been folded only twice in its life, since such paper didn’t last long in environments like this. The words spelled it out clearly. My father had been married for almost two years to a person he had never met.
“You will give this to someone at the British Embassy,” Abrahim said, laying his hands on top of my father’s, as if the two were entering into a secret pact simply by touching the same piece of paper. “It may take some weeks, but eventually they will give her the visa. You will then call me from London, and I will take care of the rest. We have the money for the ticket, and some more for both of you when she arrives. Maybe after one or two years her mother and I will join you in London. We will buy a home. Start a business together. My daughter will continue her studies.”
Even for a skeptical man like my father, who had little faith in governments, the story was seductive: a tale that began with heavenly prisons and ended with a pre-made family living in a home in London. He didn’t want to see how much Abrahim believed in it himself, and so he kept his head slightly turned away. When it came to Europe or America, even people supposedly hardened by time and experience were susceptible to almost childish fantasies.
My father took the photograph from Abrahim and placed it in his pocket. He didn’t say, “Of course I will do this,” or even a simple “Yes,” because such confirmation would have meant that there was an option to refuse, and no such thing existed between them. Abrahim told him to finish his drink. “Your ship is waiting,” he said.
Soon, stories about my father were circulating freely around the Academy. I heard snippets of my own narrative played back to me in a slightly distorted form—in these versions, the story might take place in the Congo, amid famine. One version I heard said that my father had been in multiple wars across Africa. Another claimed that he had lived through a forgotten genocide, one in which tens of thousands were killed in a single day. Some wondered whether he had also been in Rwanda—or in Darfur, where such things were commonly known to occur.
Huge tides of sympathy were mounting for my dead father and me. Students I had never spoken to now said hello to me when they saw me in the hallway. There were smiles for me everywhere I went, all because I had brought directly to their door a tragedy that outstripped anything they could personally have hoped to experience.
I knew that it was only a matter of time before I was called to account for what I had been teaching my students. On a Friday, the dean caught me in the hall just as I was preparing to enter my classroom. There was nothing threatening or angry in his voice. He simply said, “Come and see me in my office when your class is over.”
That day I decided to skip the story and return to my usual syllabus. I said to my students, “We have some work to catch up on today. Here are the assignments from last week. I want you to work on them quietly.” If they groaned or mumbled something, I didn’t hear it, and hardly cared. When class was over, I walked slowly up the three flights of stairs that led to the dean’s office. He was waiting for me with the door open. His wide and slightly awkward body was pitched over the large wooden desk far enough so that it might have made it difficult for him to breathe. As soon as I sat down, he leaned back and exhaled.
“How was class today?” he asked me.
“Fine,” I told him. “Nothing exceptional.”
“I’ve heard some of the stories about your father that you’ve been telling your students,” he said. At that point I expected him to reveal at least a hint of anger at what I had done, but there wasn’t even a dramatic folding of the arms.
“It’s very interesting what they’re saying,” he said. “Awful, of course, as well. No one should have to live through anything even remotely like that, which leads me to ask: How much of what they’re saying is true?”
“Almost none of it,” I told him. I was ready to admit that I had made up most of what I had told my students—the late nights at the port, the story of an invading rebel army storming across the desert. But before I could say anything further he gave me a sly, almost sarcastic smile.
“Well, regardless of that,” he said, “it’s good to hear them talking about important things. So much of what I hear from them is shallow, silly rumors. They can sort out what’s true for themselves later.”
And that was all it came down to: I had given my students something to think about, and whether what they heard from me had any relationship to reality hardly mattered; real or not, it was all imaginary for them. That death was involved only made the story more compelling.
I began my final lesson with my father and Abrahim walking down to the pier on their last morning together. They didn’t say much along the way, but on occasion a few words slipped out. Abrahim had important ideas that he wanted to express, but he had never known the exact words for them in any language. If he could have, he would have grabbed my father firmly by the wrist and held him until he was certain that he understood just how much he depended on him and how much he had begun almost to hate him for that. My father, meanwhile, was desperate to get away. He was terrified of boarding the ship, but he was more frightened of Abrahim’s desire.
When they reached the pier, Abrahim pointed to the last of three boats docked in the harbor. “It’s that one,” he said. “The one with the blue hull.”
My father stared at the boat for a long time and tried to imagine what it would be like to be buried inside it, first for an hour and then for a day. He didn’t have the courage to imagine anything longer. The boat was old, but almost everything in the town was old.
There was a tall, light-skinned man waiting at the end of the docks. He was from one of the Arab tribes in the north. Such men were common in town. They controlled most of its business and politics and had done so for centuries. They were traders, merchants, and sold anything or anyone. They held themselves at a slight remove from other men, gowned in spotless white or, on occasion, pastel-colored robes that somehow proved immune to the dust that covered every inch of the town.
“He’s arranged everything,” Abrahim said. “That man over there.”
My father tried to make out his face from where they were standing, but the man seemed to understand that they were talking about him and kept his head turned slightly away. The only feature that my father could make out was an abnormally long and narrow nose, a feature that seemed almost predatory.
Abrahim handed my father a slip of yellow legal paper on which he had written something in Arabic. He would have liked Abrahim to say something kind and reassuring to him. He wanted him to say, “Have a safe journey” or “Don’t worry. You’re going to be fine,” but he knew that he could stand there for years and no such reassurances would come.
“Don’t keep him waiting,” Abrahim said. “Give him the note and your money. And do whatever he tells you.”
When my father was halfway between Abrahim and the man, Abrahim called out to him, “I’ll be waiting to hear from you soon,” and my father knew that was the last time he would ever hear Abrahim’s voice.
My father handed over the slip of paper Abrahim had given him. He couldn’t read what was written on it and was worried that it might say any of a thousand different things, from “Treat this man well” to “Take his money and do whatever you want with him.”
The man pointed to a group of small storage slots at the stern of the boat that were used for holding the more delicate cargo. These crates were usually unloaded last, and he had often seen people waiting at the docks for hours to receive them. They always bore the stamp of a Western country and carried their instructions in a foreign language—“Cuidado,” “Fragile.” He had unloaded several such crates himself recently, and while he had never known their actual contents he had tried to guess what was inside: cartons of powdered milk, a television or stereo, vodka, Scotch, Ethiopian coffee, soft blankets, clean water, hundreds of new shoes and shirts and underwear. Anything that he was missing or knew he would never have he imagined arriving in those boxes.
There was a square hole just large enough for my father to fit into if he pulled his knees up to his chest. He understood that this was where he was supposed to go and yet naturally he hesitated, sizing up the dimensions just as he had once sized up the crates he had helped unload.
My father felt the man’s hand around the back of his neck, pushing him toward the ground. He wanted to tell the man that he was prepared to enter on his own, and had in fact been preparing to do so for months now, but he wouldn’t have been understood, so my father let himself be led. He crawled into the space on his knees, which was not how he would have liked to enter. Head first was the way to go, but it was too late now. In a final humiliating gesture, the man shoved him with his foot, stuffing him inside so quickly that his legs and arms collapsed around him. He had just enough time to arrange himself before the man sealed the entrance with a wooden door that was resting nearby.
Before getting on the boat, my father had made a list of things to think about in order to get through the journey. They were filed away under topic headings such as The Place Where I Was Born, Plans for the Future, and Important Words in English. He wasn’t sure if he should turn to them now or wait until the boat was out of the harbor. The darkness inside the box was alarming, but it wasn’t yet complete. Light still filtered in through the entrance, and continued to do so until the hull was closed and the boat began to pull away from the shore. He remembered that as a child he had often been afraid of the dark, a foolish, almost impossible thing for a country boy, but there it was. Of the vast extended family that lived around him, his mother was the only one who never mocked him for this, and even though he would have liked to save her image for later in the journey, at a point when he was far off at sea, he let himself think about her now. He saw her as she looked shortly before she died. She had been a large woman, but at that point there wasn’t much left of her. Her hair hadn’t gone gray yet, but it had been cut short on the advice of a cousin who had dreamed that the illness attacking her body was buried somewhere in her head and needed a way out. Desperate, she had had almost all her hair cut off, which had made her look even younger than her thirty-something years. This was the image he had, of his mother in an almost doll-like state, just two months before she died, and while he would have liked to have a better memory of her, he settled for the one he’d been given and closed his eyes to concentrate on it. It would be some minutes before he noticed the engine churning as the ship pulled up its anchors and slowly headed out to sea.
When I reached this point, I knew that it was the last thing I was going to say to my class. Soon, the dean would call me back to his office to tell me that, as interesting as my father’s story was, it had gone on long enough, and it was time to return my class to normal, or risk my place at the Academy. The bell rang, and, as when I had begun this story, there were a good ten to fifteen seconds when no one in the classroom moved. My students, for all their considerable wealth and privilege, were still at an age where they believed that the world was a fascinating, remarkable place, worthy of curious inquiry and close scrutiny, and I’d like to think that I had reminded them of that. Soon enough they would grow out of that and concern themselves with the things that were most immediately relevant to their own lives. Eventually one bag was picked up off the floor, and then twenty-eight others joined it. Most of my students waved or nodded their heads as they left the room, and there was a part of me that wanted to call them back to their seats and tell them that the story wasn’t quite finished yet. Getting out of Sudan was only the beginning; there was still much more ahead. Sometimes, in my imagination, that is exactly what I tell them. I pick up where I left off, and go on to describe to them how, despite all appearances, my father did not actually make it off that boat alive. He arrived in Europe just as Abrahim had promised he would, but an important part of him had died during the journey, somewhere in the final three days, when he was reduced to drinking his urine for water and could no longer feel his hands or feet.
He spent six months in a detention camp on an island off the coast of Italy. He was surprised to find that there were plenty of other men like him there, from every possible corner of Africa, and that many had fared worse than he had. He heard stories of men who had died trying to make a similar voyage, who had suffocated or been thrown overboard alive. My father couldn’t even bring himself to pity them. Contrary to what Abrahim had told him, there was nothing even remotely heavenly about where he was held: one large whitewashed room with cots every ten inches and bars over the windows. The guards often yelled at him and the other prisoners. He learned a few words in Italian and was mocked viciously the first time he used them. He was once forced to repeat a single phrase over and over to each new guard who arrived. When he tried to refuse, his first meal of the day, a plate of cold, dry meat and stale bread, was taken away from him. “Speak,” the guards commanded, and he did so dozens of times in the course of several days, even though there was no humor left in it for anyone.
“You speak Italian?” the guards asked.
“No.”
Speak. Talk. Or, more rarely, Say something.
In Italy he was given asylum and set free. From there he worked his way north and then west across Europe. He met dozens of other Abrahims, men who promised him that when they made it to London the rest of their lives would finally resolve into the picture they had imagined. “It’s different there,” they always said. There had to be at least one place in this world where life could be lived in accordance with the plans and dreams they had concocted for themselves. For most, that place was London; for some it was Paris, and for a smaller but bolder few it was America. That faith had carried them this far, and even though it was weakening, and needed constant readjustment (“Rome is not what I thought it would be. France will surely be better”), it persisted out of sheer necessity. By the time my father finally made it to London, eighteen months later, he had begun to think of all the men he met as variations of Abrahim, all of them crippled and deformed by their dreams.
Abrahim had followed him all the way to London to test him, and my father was determined to settle that debt now that he was there. On his first day in the city he found a quiet corner of Hampstead Heath. An American guidebook that he had picked up in France had said that he would be afforded a wide, sweeping view of the city from there. At the edge of the park, with London at his feet, he set fire to all the documents that he had brought with him from Sudan. The fake marriage license turned to ashes in seconds. The picture of Abrahim’s daughter melted away near a large green hedge with ripe, inedible red berries hanging from it. For many nights afterward, he refused to think about her or her father. There were no rewards in life for such stupidity, and he promised himself never to fall victim to that kind of blind, wishful thinking. Anyone who did deserved whatever suffering he was bound to meet. ♦
