Ahmed was tall, with fine features and long arms and fingers and the beginnings of a potbelly. He left Somalia nine years ago, going first to Dadaab, then to London, then coming here. He told me he has a wife and three children. The family lives in an apartment up the far end of the quays, near the National Museum.
I asked the obvious. “Do you miss it?”
“Never,” he said matter-of-factly. “We are better off here.”
“You could still miss it,” I said, “even if you’re better off.”
Ahmed smiled. “Yes, but then you wouldn’t be very smart.”
I laughed. I have met many refugees and immigrants, and in my experience they tend to fall into one of two categories: those who never get over the severing, the expulsion, who carry with them the air of rupture, as though it is a limb they’ve lost; and those, like Ahmed, who walk straight into the future and don’t look back, something in them cauterized.
We sipped our coffee and talked about Dublin and Ahmed’s job as a taxi driver. I’ve heard reports of white drivers on the ranks refusing to move their cars up to let African drivers in. But Ahmed said the work was fine.
“I mind my own business. I take my fares.” He shrugged. “Irish people, they’re like people anywhere.”
“Is that a good thing?”
He looked at me. “What do you think?”
I told him how I used to love the taxi rides to and from the airport in Nairobi, and he squinted—perplexed, I thought, by what my sentimentality alighted on. It was true, though. When I thought of the things I missed, I thought of being in the back of a taxi at dawn, heading out the Mombasa road for a flight to Somalia, when the city was only beginning to stir. On the verges along the highway there’d be people walking, probably miles, to work, and over the time it took the taxi to reach the airport the numbers moving toward the city would have swelled to the point where it looked as though a great migration were under way.
At the airport, boarding the Beechcraft, I always felt I was leaving the world behind. I felt like an astronaut. Once in-country, we flew on even smaller planes, with bench seats. From the windows, we could see the desiccated earth, distressingly near, goats scattering under the roar and shadow of our gleaming machine. On one of my last trips, I’d been to Wajid, in south-central Somalia, not far from Ahmed’s home place. I was reporting on two programs my office had recently begun supporting. I’d had one of those days, by which I don’t mean the best sort of day or the worst but rather the kind that would once have been inconceivable to me, the kind that makes me imagine playing a game. In the game, I am shown an image from the distant future of just such an unprecedented day, and I have to guess how I got there and what’s going on. I like this game, even if I can play it only retroactively, already knowing the answers, because it reminds me that there is a future full of people I’ve yet to encounter and moments worth waiting for. It reminds me that I know very little, in fact, about my life and even less about the world itself.
It was my third day in Wajid, and I was sitting in a classroom with about twenty adolescent girls wearing brightly colored head scarves. At the front of the class were two teachers, a woman named Amino and a man named Abdi. On a flip chart, Amino had sketched an erect penis, with testicles in the inadvertent shape of a heart. The penis dripped ejaculate in the direction of a chute, which blossomed, flute-shaped, into the roomier chamber of a uterus.
Amino was explaining, in Somali, how pregnancy occurred. Pregnancy wasn’t the half of it, though. We had just watched a video made by members of the Somali diaspora in Denmark campaigning against female genital mutilation, which was the real focus of the day. If statistics were accurate, about 95 percent of the girls in the classroom could expect to suffer it. Some might simply have the tip of the clitoris snipped off, but most would have the full treatment: total removal of the clitoris and labia minora and the sewing together of the labia majora, just a small opening left for urine and menstrual flow. Nearly all of them would be operated on with unsterilized instruments and without anesthesia. When the girls married, they would have to be recut, through thickened scar tissue, to enable intercourse.
I had met both Abdi and Amino before class. We’d sat outside on the concrete step, and Abdi had told me about his wife. He held out his hand and ran an index finger over the smooth skin of his palm and said, “This is what it was like.” He was referring to her vagina, sewn nearly shut. He had traveled with her to Baidoa before their wedding to find a doctor who could open her up again without mutilating her further. He described her first pregnancy, three days of labor that ended in a stillbirth. Unlike a lot of men I met in Somalia, Abdi didn’t view the situation as part of the natural order of things. He found it barbaric and wanted to change it. Abdi was an instinctive feminist, meaning he had come by his ideas not because of some NGO training course but because he had an inborn conviction that people, men and women, had a right to life, to security, to bodily integrity.
As for Amino, she was running a safe house for women who suffered from fistula—a condition that can result from prolonged obstructed labor caused by genital mutilation, in which a hole opens between a woman’s vagina and her bladder or rectum and results in incontinence and infertility. A lot of women with fistula were abandoned by their husbands and shunned by their communities. Just then Amino had four women living with her, wearing diapers and awaiting transport to Addis for reconstructive surgery. Before class, we had visited the house. A satellite dish was beaming a tennis match, on mute, into the large living area, which contained three sofas covered by floral throws. It was midmorning, and the room was shadowy and cool. Now and then, one or another of the women would drift through the room. Every time they passed the sofa where we were sitting, we exchanged wan smiles. Only Amino spoke to me, and as she did, and as I looked around, I was filled with both utter despair and a feeling of being in the presence of absolute goodness: the ideal of compassion and rationality embodied.
After class, Amino and Abdi walked me to the courtyard, where the driver, Hassan, was waiting. A child—the driver’s daughter, who looked to be seven or eight and was in another class in the school—was standing beside him. She buried her face in his trouser leg as we approached, then slowly, flirtatiously, peek by peek, emerged.
She told me her name was Waris. Her hair was cropped short, and her features were delicate but strong and perfectly symmetrical. She had large almond-shaped eyes and a playful, teasing manner. I imagined her a bit older, visiting an uncle or aunt in New York, spotted by a modeling agency’s scout while queuing at a Burger King. I thought of my guess-the-future game: Waris ten years from now, gazing out a window over Central Park West, wondering what had hit her.
The next afternoon I caught the return flight to Nairobi. The city looked, as all cities do from the air, exposed and easily destructible, and I felt a surge of tenderness for the whole teeming, illogical, fucked-up world. In the taxi, the driver asked where I’d come from, and I said Somalia. The reaction was always the same. The driver clucked and raised his eyebrows and remarked on whatever the latest scrap of news or rumor was—that day it was the question of whether Ethiopian forces were going to pull out of Somalia—and I felt as though I had returned from a place of quarantine, where everything has gone awry and all the talk is of containment. In Nairobi, the guns were mostly hidden, and the landscape was so lush compared to the cracked earth of Somalia, and driving away from the low-slung airport, I could nearly feel the trees inhaling and exhaling, the warm breath of them. I was back on terra firma, and there seemed nowhere on earth as beautiful, as civilized, as reliable, as Jomo Kenyatta airport and the city that lay beyond.
I asked Ahmed about Dadaab, and he said that he and his wife had been there for seven months, and that a relative in London had sponsored them for resettlement. Seven months was good. A lot depended on timing, which countries had agreed to take how many people at a given time, and where you happened to be, geographically and in the asylum process, when things started to flow.
“Do you ever go home for a visit?” I asked.
He was gazing across the river to the far side, at the maw of Temple Bar and the traffic, which was at a standstill. He shook his head.
“You don’t want to?”
“I’m not homesick,” he said. “All my family are here, or dead.”
Maybe that was it, I thought, maybe place meant nothing to him, only people. I wanted him to talk some more, I wanted just to hear him. Why? I have no love for where he came from, certainly no claim on it; it was only my own life it reminded me of, and hardly its most cheerful period. But he said he needed to be on his way. He got up, stretched his long arms up over his head, and said goodbye.
I sat for a while longer, just watching, everything made rich with sunlight and the city gone hushed, as it does on such days. I thought about Harry, of something he said to me the last time I saw him. We’ve been meeting up every couple of weeks, for coffee or lunch. It’s a friendship based, ostensibly, on work, but I know that it’s also about Harry knowing I’m on my own and a bit adrift, and maybe liking the idea that he’s keeping an eye on me. Last week, for the first time, we went for dinner, and maybe it was that—the fact that it was evening, and everything felt that much less like it had anything to do with work—that made him open up about his life. He started talking about the many moves he’d made over the years and all the traveling, which his marriage had not survived. He said the irony was that, as his work had become focused on trying to settle people, migrants and refugees and the displaced, his own life had become more peripatetic, so that by the time he finally came back to Dublin nowhere felt like home, or maybe everywhere did, just a little. He wanted to believe that he’d gained more than he’d lost in that transaction, that in becoming less exclusive in his attachments, he’d come to feel a deeper kind of affection for the world. He said there was always a rupture when you left a place, until you realized it had to do with the person you had somehow decided to be. Until you saw that you carried all these rifts and partings with you, like you carried scars, and that instead of feeling like things torn from you, they were part of you.
I like this idea. I like Harry. He calms me. He has a way of expanding the view. Panning out, and out, into a panorama. It’s not that the view is all good—Harry is essentially a pessimist. It’s just that there’s a sense of perspective. I think he has lost a lot and survived, though I don’t know what exactly I’m referring to. Apart from the limitations on his mobility, Harry’s losses seem not greater than most. He has, in many ways, a rather nice life. But I get the sense he’s made peace with himself, and that it took some doing, and that he’s emerged from that battle wistful, bemused, a little elsewhere. He watches the world as though it were a faraway thing and he a minor god made melancholy by us humans, by the fact that we never, ever seem to learn.
Over dinner, he said that if we don’t know where we belong, we can feel homesick for almost anywhere we’ve been.
I thought then of the place I’d lived in Nairobi, a cottage on the grounds of a larger house. The cottage was lovely—parquet floors and hardwood furnishings and breezes drifting through the ornate iron grilles set across the windows. But in the evenings or the middle of the night, I could sometimes hear gunshots in the distance, and the week after my mother died my next-door neighbor was badly beaten during a burglary. The neighbor wasn’t a friend, I had never met her or even seen her—the walls between properties were high, and when you entered your own drive, it was through solid metal gates that a guard pulled closed behind you. The guards patrolled the grounds throughout the night, their boots swishing through the grass, and even if they were trustworthy, which I believed ours to be, I was made uneasy by the fact of men circling in the darkness, and I rarely slept well in that house.
By day, I felt only marginally freer. The gardens on the property were lavish and varied, and outside the cottage I had my own small patch of lawn and herbs and flowers, bordered by a low brick wall and furnished with a stone-topped table and two rattan chairs. But I could never quite bring myself to sit out there, not without a cringing self-consciousness, and I never touched the garden. It was clear that everything that grew on the property belonged, in its way, to Dixon. Dixon was the gardener, and he despised me. He had from the day I moved in. I didn’t take it personally. I knew it wasn’t me he disliked. And he knew that I knew. We understood each other. We understood that I could never sufficiently atone for acts that I myself had not committed but of which I had been, in whatever vague or concrete way, the beneficiary. So while Dixon ambled loosely about the grounds, a pair of long shears or a clump of just-cut stalks hanging from his hand, his stare cold and dead, I sat at my kitchen table and gazed dolefully out the window at the trumpet flowers and the birds of paradise, like a sickly child who couldn’t risk the out-of-doors.
I told Harry about a certain strange day in Nairobi. I was walking down the street toward that cottage with the parquet floors and the garden I couldn’t touch and the gardener who loathed me—a place where I had not known peace and that I thought often of leaving—and as I looked toward the solid gray gate that would open to admit me, I felt a wave of nostalgia break in me. I had projected myself spontaneously into the future, a future in which I looked back on this house, on this unhappy time, and saw it all through the soft focus of recollection, and—lo!—it grew lovely.
I said to Harry that my immediate impulse had been to figure out how to repeat the trick, so as more often to enjoy this terrible, crushing tenderness for the present.
Harry laughed. “Mind that,” he said. “Beware of attachment.” Harry is something of a Buddhist.
I said, “Come on, try it, close your eyes. Say it’s six months in the future, and you are remembering right now.”
“Okay,” he said gamely, and we closed our eyes.
I don’t know how long I kept mine closed—a minute, maybe two; it was hard to judge the time. Sounds differentiated themselves amidst the clatter and din of the restaurant: a door opening and closing, the rise and fall of voices, the thump of a cork pulled from a wine bottle. I heard Harry shift in his seat. I heard my own breathing. I became aware of what felt like a very faint, very subtle electric current in my body and a twitchiness around my eyes. I tried not to feel self-conscious, but at a certain point I had the sudden funny fear that Harry wasn’t at the table anymore, and I opened my eyes again. He was there, sitting very still in his chair, his eyes open, watching me. I stared at him, surprised. He blinked a couple of times and hesitated before looking away. Neither of us said another word about it.
IT WAS MID-MAY the first time I visited Cauley. The day was eerily still, with a flat, unvarying heat. We were in his bedsit with the sash window raised. The lace curtains hung grayish and unmoving. We had just made love, and Cauley was sleeping, fitfully. Every so often his mouth would twitch, or he would jut his chin out quickly and part his dry lips and wet them with the tip of his tongue, before turning his head to the side and nestling it into the pillow as though consoling himself.
It had been three weeks since the night we were introduced in Sligo. I had written him a circumspect note saying that I would likely be in Dublin on such and such a date and perhaps we might meet for a drink, upon which he had sent a note to the house. I’d been in town that day and come home with Eddie, and when we walked through the door it was Eddie who picked the post up off the floo
r of the entryway. He sifted through it and handed two letters to me, one a bank statement and the other a hand-addressed envelope, which I opened with idle curiosity rather than excitement. At that moment, I wasn’t thinking of Cauley. Had I been, I might’ve been better prepared when Eddie said to me, “What’s that?”
There was no accusation in his tone, no reason for there to be, and he was still perusing some letter of his own, but he must’ve sensed my absorption, because he looked up at me then with concern, wondering if I’d received bad news.
“Oh,” I said, shaking my head as though puzzled to be receiving the letter. “It’s from Kevin’s friend. The journalist who lives in Dublin.” I had mentioned Cauley to Eddie after meeting him; I had told him that Cauley said he could introduce me to someone at The Irish Times. I was calculating, in case Cauley’s name came up later, that it wouldn’t seem strange. But I hadn’t said I’d written to him.
“The one who works for The Irish Times?” Eddie said.
“He doesn’t work for them, but he knows people who do. He writes plays,” I said, then added, “I think.” I hadn’t even told my first lie, and I could feel my throat constricting.
“What’s his name?” Eddie said, but he’d already gone back to reading his own letter.
“His name is Darragh Cauley.”
The note read simply, Yes, it would be good to meet up, I have a few ideas of people I can introduce you to. Let’s arrange a time. Mornings best to ring me D. Underneath, he’d written the phone number again, the same one he’d given me the first night.
I put the letter in my bag and went into the living room. For something to do, I picked up Olivia and lifted her so that her legs swung free, and I pressed my head to hers until she squirmed.
From the kitchen, Eddie called, “The Irish Times would be good.”
The next morning, I phoned Cauley. One week later, we met. I was in Dublin to interview a man who was the head psychologist of an Alzheimer’s unit at a hospital in Stillorgan. I sat there listening to that man, who was dignified and somewhat wearied, knowing that behind him, in rooms padded for safety, people were growing ever more frail and demented, and I felt a terrible thrill about the likelihood that I would soon be making love. When the interview ended and we’d toured what we could of the unit, and the man was bidding me goodbye, I had the urge to go tearing from the hospital lobby out into the car park, to toss my folder in the air and, as the papers scattered to the wind, flee toward the land of the living.
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