When Life Gives You Tomatoes

When Life Gives You Tomatoes

“And I can't go on this way. With it stronger every day,” Hussein sang. “But being too shy to say that I really love you.” She smiled, wondering if the lyrics were his or someone else’s, appreciating the sentiment. “That’s Stevie, you know?” he commented, as if he’d heard her question.

“Really? I’ve never heard that one. It’s beautiful, though.” She turned left onto Medani Road, slid into the right lane and stopped in the dust. “Is this good?”

“Yes, I can get transport from here. Thanks for the ride,” he said, stepping out of the car.

“Anytime. Thanks for the songs! I’ve missed Stevie. Ma as-salaama.”

He closed the passenger side door and walked back along the road to find an amjad that would take him toward Soba. She pulled back onto the road, headed home. She never liked driving along Khartoum’s dark roads at night, eyes squinting against the glare of oncoming high beams, making it impossible to see clearly. Though there were streetlights, they were rarely on due to the inability of the city’s outdated power grid to handle the surge illuminating the lights would demand. Her own headlights did little to make visible what was ahead on the road. Rekshas with no lights and wandering donkeys sometimes appeared suddenly in front of her, so she had forced herself to trust that if there were something in the road she would see it, and that if she saw nothing, the road was clear.

She reflected on the evening as she passed the car dealerships and petrol stations, the CAT construction vehicles. She had sung in public for the second time, with Sudanese Band and Hussein, at a photo exhibition. She smiled at the fact that she’d sung Ain’t No Sunshine, a song that reminded her of spending time with her sister in Australia, many years before. It had been a good evening, but she had been up since six in the morning and had taught a full day before her night out. She was tired and ready for bed.

Her eyes scanned the side of the road, searching for the Matthew Petrol station that would indicate she had reached Shar’a Sitteen, 60th Street. One couldn’t see the actual intersections at night, so it was necessary to memorize the more visible landmarks to find the way home. Matthew Petrol appeared on the right and she downshifted, slowing to look carefully for the break in the divider that would allow her to turn.

Ahead of her, making the left, was a double flatbed trailer. It turned slowly, so she stopped, unable to see oncoming traffic on the other side of the divided road until the truck finished its slow turn. She considered accelerating to catch up with the truck allowing it to block her from whatever unseen vehicles approached on the other side of the road but decided to wait, play it safe. She was just a minute away from the school housing where she stayed with her eight-year-old son, Jibreel. The truck had almost finished its turn and she began to inch forward, eyes looking down the road toward Soba to see if anything was coming.

Suddenly, in her field of vision appeared the grill of a truck. It was immediately clear that impact was unavoidable. As the truck flew at her, she braced herself against the steering wheel and shut her eyes. Crunch!

She opened her eyes. The truck was behind her, in the dust on the right side of the road. The hood of her car was folded upwards, a jagged mountain of metallic blue. She turned the car off, yanked the emergency brake, put her flashers on and jumped out screaming, shaking, furious. She began to survey the damage to her car. “What the FUCK was that?!” she shrieked, aware that no one would understand the words, but sure the truck driver would get the idea. She reached back into the car, grabbing her handbag, stashing her cigarettes and lighter quickly in the inside pocket, lest someone see them.

Her chest heaved. Her hands trembled. She noted that she should have been wearing her seat belt. She looked down at her clothing, wide-legged tan slacks and a fitted sky blue, short-sleeved tee, no tarha to cover her head. She definitely wasn’t dressed appropriately to be standing in the middle of the street at night, though even in hijab it wouldn’t have been acceptable for her to be out, alone at such a late hour.

Men who had appeared from seemingly empty streets began talking, asking if she was ok. “Alhamdulila,” she answered again and again, “Ana tmam. Ana kweysa. Alhamdulila.” Her body continued to tremble, filled with anger and adrenaline. It became difficult to continue to struggle in Arabic, and she told everyone, “’Araby shweya bus. Only a little Arabic. Ma fahma kweys. I don't understand well.”

One bystander stepped toward her, “I am a doctor. Are you ok? You can speak to me in English.”

She responded, “I'm fine. Tmam, alhamdulila. Bus I don't understand what he was doing! Da shinu? What was that?”

Another bystander, “Inti baraki?”

“Aiwa,” she answered aloud while in her head screaming, “Yes, I’m alone! Do you see anyone else? So what?”

A man in a white jelabiya and turban asked those next to him, “Jinsiyat-ha shinu?”

“Amrikiya,” she snapped, in standard Arabic, the language she had studied. “Amrikaniya,” she corrected herself, trying to use Sudanese dialect and appear less strange. “I'm American.” Maybe that would explain her clothes and the fact that she was alone, past midnight, driving home.

“I have to make a phone call,” she told them, walking away. She tried to steady her hands, digging through the pockets of her black bag. She scrolled through her contacts, looking for the name of the person whose job it was to help unlucky expatriate teachers with car issues. “Hi, Hamed. I just got hit by a truck. I’m fine, thanks, just a little shaken. But my car is smashed. Khalas. It's finished. Yes, I'm fine. No, I don't need a doctor. Yes, I’m sure. Just send someone, please. Thanks.”

She waited for the call back. The phone rang. It was Hussein. “Are you okay? I saw a car in the road. I just passed by in an amjad, but he didn’t stop. I couldn’t see.”

“Yes and no. That was my car. I’m fine, alhamdulila, but my car isn’t,” she answered, sounding calmer than she felt. “It’s a good thing you weren’t still in the car. I have to go. Waiting for a call back from the school. Take care.”

The call came. She turned to the bystanders, “Jaeen. They’re coming.”

Within minutes, a van appeared with the school’s colorful logo on the side. Khalil, the same driver who had rescued her on the first day of school, when she was lost, was there to rescue her again. In the passenger seat sat Mustafa, the guard she had befriended who had been flirting with her for the past few months, looking very concerned. They talked to her briefly, making sure she wasn’t injured, escorted her to the side of the road and went to talk to the bystanders and occupants of the truck.

As she stood on the side of the road, it again occurred to her that she had been very lucky. But what if she hadn’t been so lucky? A few feet difference would have meant a head on collision with the truck, without a seatbelt on. Her son, home asleep with his 19 year old babysitter, might have been left without her. What would have happened to him? Who would have ensured his safe return to New York, to his father and grandmothers? Tears brimmed in her eyes and began to roll down her face faster than she could wipe them away. She turned away from the people still talking in the street hoping no one would notice.

One of the guards, the one who had been flirting with her, came over and took her hand, asking what was wrong. “Mafi haja. It’s nothing. Bus khaifa shweya. Just a little scared,” she told him, pulling her hand out of his. Sudan was still Sudan and, car accident or not, men and women didn’t hold hands in the street. “Ana bus aiza sijara. I just want a cigarette.”

“Mafi mushkila,” he told her, and though she was unconvinced that it wasn’t a problem, she pulled out a cigarette from the gold pack and lit it, avoiding the stares she was sure would ensue by turning her back to the crowd of people still gathered.

He told her they would have to walk to the school, just a minute or two away. They began the walk along the unlit road and he again reached out to take her hand. “La,” she told him, shaking her head. “No.”

His eyes searched her face, her eyes, for a clue as to why she didn’t want his hand. He paused for a moment, quiet, then looked down. “M'alesh,” he said, “Sorry.”

“Ma fi mushkila. No problem,” she quickly responded, not wanting him to feel bad, knowing he was doing his best to comfort her in a way he never could during working hours, on school grounds. He always noticed when she was down, no matter how she tried to hide it. She tried to smile and was relieved when the school van turned the corner, invading the unwelcome privacy of the dark street.

A second school driver, one she didn’t know appeared and the driver told her to sit inside the van while they waited for the truck driver to return from his house where he’d gone to retrieve his insurance papers. She sat, relieved and tearful and thirsty, waiting.

When the driver returned, they all – two school vans and the truck – headed for the police station to tell the police there had been an accident. She wondered about the logic of people having to leave the scene of an accident to inform the police that they were needed. And how would an ambulance have been called if it were needed?

On the way to the police station, she realized she was hungry, having eaten lunch many hours before and not had dinner. She asked the driver to stop for a sandwich and a drink and when he did, he refused to allow her to pay. She ate the ful sandwich quickly and washed it down with a Diet Pepsi. “M’alesh,” she said to him, “but I don’t know your name.”

“Aziz,” he answered.

“Shukran,” she said, “Thank you, ya Aziz.” She knew all the workers in the school already knew her name, Shereen, Shereen Mohammed. Since her first day at the international school, everyone had been curious to know about the single American woman who seemed to be single, had a child, looked Sudanese and had a Sudanese name, but didn’t speak Arabic and didn’t dress or act like a Sudanese woman.

They continued on to the police station, off the paved roads, squeezing between piles of dirt and rocks from ongoing construction everywhere.

Eventually the police station appeared in front of them, dingy and old. Officers strutted in and out in their crisp uniforms. Two officers embraced each other in a way that would clearly have been identified as gay by the woman’s New York friends, but was perfectly acceptable in Sudan, despite the intense homophobia.

She stayed in the van while he walked in. After some time, two officers followed him out and got into their pick up truck. The small convoy wove its way back out onto the paved road and headed back to the accident site, following the police pick up. When the police pick up turned right instead of left as expected, they saw that they were investigating a small accident between two large double trailers. Though it made sense not to allow the large trucks to travel through the city before midnight, having the large trucks on the seemingly empty streets at night, in the dark, posed its own problems. They sat and waited as the police talked to the drivers of the trucks.

The woman turned to Aziz, gesturing toward the truck that had hit her, “What kind of truck is it anyway? What is it carrying?”

“Tamatim,” he answered.

She laughed. “Alhamdulila,” she told him, “Kulluna kweyseen. All of us are fine – the people, the tomatoes, kweyseen.”

“Alhamdulila,” he agreed.

Sudanese tomatoes from the banks of the Nile river were a thousand times better than watery American tomatoes, and the thought that she might get some made her smile.

They returned to the police station in the middle of the dusty field. The same men squatted outside chatting. They went inside, offering the woman a seat on the metal bench. She retrieved her New York license when it was requested and watched the kittens scavenging for food. A scowling man who looked as if he could be Italian or Greek wandered back and forth with a gash on the bridge of his nose. She wondered if he was the victim of an accident or drunken fight, though the redness of his skin could have been sun and heat-induced.

Her eyes began to close involuntarily and the two school drivers insisted that she rest in the van. She fell asleep almost immediately and after what seemed like just a few minutes, Aziz was waking her to go inside for questioning.

They walked into the station again, turning into a small hallway and then into a room that held two desks and several chairs. She sat in the chair next to the desk. The driver of the truck sat in a chair against the wall.

Two officers entered the room and sat down at their respective desks, assembling the things they needed to take down the accident reports from her accident and another. She thought it quite possible that in every police station in Khartoum officers were sitting down and taking accident reports from the lucky ones, those that were able to make it to the police station.

The shorter officer sat at the desk where the woman, the truck driver and the school drivers were gathered. His brows furrowed in great concentration or self-importance as he took out several sheets of white paper and began using a ruler to draw lines, creating the form he would use to take the report. She was amused, imagining the NYPD creating forms with a ruler and pen each time they had to take a report. She refrained from laughing because it was clear that no one else found this unusual or funny.

He talked to the driver of the truck for quite some time, taking down his information and his version of what happened. He stopped occasionally to ask her to pass the ruler to the officer at the other desk, who was drawing his own lines and taking another accident report, or to ask for the ruler. She couldn’t imagine why each officer didn’t at least have his own ruler. Surely that would speed up the process.

Her officer turned to her and said something. “He want to know if there is damage to your car,” Khalil translated. She laughed quietly, pulling out her mobile phone and showing the officer the picture she had snapped of the folded hood and torn side panel while she waited on the side of the road. When he was done speaking to the truck driver, the officer turned to face the woman.

The officer picked up the woman’s driver’s license. She knew she should have had a Sudanese license but, having returned from a trip to New York less than three months ago, she was safe. “Ismik minu?” he asked, studying the license intently.

“Shereen Mohammed.”

“Shereen Mohammed minu?” he asked.

“Shereen Mohammed Abdelrahim Abdelaziz,” she answered, doing her best to pronounce it properly, sure they thought she didn’t know her full name. But her eldest sister had taught it to her, teased her and coached her until she could say it properly when she first met her. For that she was grateful.

“Omrik kam?”

“Arb’a wa telateen sena, thirty four.”

“Inti Muslima wala Mesikhiya?” Muslim or Christian? She wanted to laugh again. “Are those the only possibilities?” she wondered, not daring to ask the question aloud, wanting to say Ana Yehudiya, I’m Jewish, just to see what the reaction would be.

“Muslima,” she answered, assuming this was the right answer and thinking that perhaps she was telling the truth.

The questioning continued until the officer felt he had a satisfactory understanding of who she was and what had happened and had jotted it all down on the forms he had drawn up.

He again began to draw lines on a piece of paper, this time with some lines perpendicular to others and she watched intently, wondering what form he was creating this time. After a few more lines were drawn, she saw that it was a map of the intersection where the crash had occurred. He added rectangles to represent the vehicles and arrows to indicate the direction of travel of each vehicle, the truck’s arrow crossing the intersection diagonally and continuing off the road. He drew a circle on the front right corner of the rectangle that was her car to show the point of impact.

Papers were signed and the officer, Shereen, the truck driver and the school drivers walked back to the center of the police station.

There was conversation, but she was too tired to try to understand it. An officer who hadn’t been in the room walked over to the cell, an old fashioned cell, like Old West movies, iron bars forming one wall, the rest concrete. The cell was surely a relic from times of British rule. Inside three disheveled men slept, oblivious to the bustle of the police station. The officer unlocked the door to the cell with a key, swung the door open. The truck driver shook hands with his passenger, the school drivers, then with the woman, saying something apologetic she didn’t understand. He walked into the cell.

Her eyes opened wide. This was not expected. She had come from a place where there were, at least in theory, trials and lawyers, and where – even if she had been present for the crime – she wouldn’t have been present for the actual placing of a man behind bars. She was embarrassed, felt like she bore some of the guilt of this man’s incarceration. Though she knew she was no longer in the States, she couldn’t help but feel some dismay at seeing another Black man behind bars, real bars, not like the prisons she had visited in upstate New York. She cast her eyes down as the officer locked the door behind him, wondering how long he would stay there.

Those that remained free left the station and walked slowly outside. Khalil turned to her, “You are lucky it is not your fault or they would keep you here. But women don’t go inside the cell, they stay outside.”

The passenger in the tomato truck stepped onto the truck’s rear bumper and then scaled the side, pulling down a bucket full of tomatoes. He emptied these into a large yellow shopping bag and insisted that the woman take them. She thanked him, shaking his hand, trying not to laugh. She had gotten her tomatoes after all.

She climbed back into the school van, grateful that she could finally go home. It was already past five in the morning. The driver drove slowly and the woman was irked. She wanted to get home. The roads were empty. Why were they traveling at half the speed limit?

And then the driver began to talk, “If it is possible but I would like to know you more. I not marriage. I would like you to marriage me.”

She shook her head, thinking he must be joking. “You don’t know me,” she said.

“That is not important. In Islam you have look four things when a man want to married. One is beauty of the woman. Two is her din, her religion. Three is her acts, what she does. Four is family. Inshallah we can know each other more in time.”

She wanted to just say, “No. Leave me alone. Take me home. Drive faster.” She wanted to say, "I've already got someone in mind." Instead she said, “I don’t want to marry now. When I marry I think I need to marry someone who knows Sudan and the West, both sides of me, or they can’t know me.”

He continued to explain why he wanted to marry her and she continued to wish that would arrive home faster. She told him who her friends in school were because he wanted to talk to them about marrying her and made a note to herself to tell her friends to tell him she wasn’t interested.

By the time they arrived, she was done, wanted to run away from the van, the man trying to marry her and the tomatoes. The building guard and driver walked her up to her apartment, carrying the five kilos of tomatoes. She was relieved when they left and she locked the door behind them.

She looked in at her son and his babysitter, sleeping peacefully. She grabbed her laptop, logged in, and sprawled out on her balcony floor. She began chatting with friends in New York, telling them about what a night she’d just had. She thought that tomorrow, she’d make a big pot of tomato sauce and give away lots of tomatoes. When life gives you tomatoes, make sauce.

The silence behind her to fill with the sounds of the the azzan, the call to prayer for fajr, the dawn, “Allah u akbar…” Roosters welcomed the coming sun. She lit one last cigarette thinking, only in Sudan, and readied herself for bed.

Alhamdulila, she thought. Alhamdulila.