by Dohra Ahmad
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 to 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,” Abrah
im 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.