by Dohra Ahmad
“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.
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br /> 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 bar
s 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.