A Matter of Honor

It was 1997. I was a senior in high school, eager to venture out into the world and secure in the knowing the universe revolved around me. The world wide web was America Online, everyone on the planet wanted to wear Air Jordans, and I lived around the corner from the Mall of America. What more proof did I need?

The bell on the sandwich shop door nearly shattered my nerve. I froze in the entry and scanned the room. The crowd was too absorbed in their conversations and cheese curds, except the man who’d been waiting for me. His eyes caught mine like distant searchlights and we stared at each other; he patient and I terrified. This rendezvous could not have been more opposite from what it should have been. I wasn’t the criminal. He was. I was sure of it. This was America. If anyone knew how it worked, I did.

The urge to run nearly overtook me. I tightened my grip on the black notebook, as if it were some amulet from which I could draw courage.

He sat in the middle of the room at a small table with a cup of coffee in front of him. He wasn’t smoking. He couldn’t indoors. At the coffee stand where I worked, he was always smoking. He wore the same odd suit he always did, black slacks and a too-blue button-up under a charcoal jacket. It hung off his slight frame like a scarecrow. Even his head was ghoulishly lean, with sunken cheeks and sunken eyes and even sunken temples; an adult version of the countless poster children for African charity drives at my church.

He extended a reed-thin arm and gestured to the empty chair across from him. His countenance was somehow both piteous and sinister. I wanted him to be nourished, but something in me was scared he might devour me if I got too close.

I sat and he regarded me with eyes that betrayed neither intention nor feeling. I had never been so close to him for so long. Whenever I was, I had been more intent on the contents of his notebook or refilling his coffee cup. Three long, thin lines down his cheek suggested he’d been somehow attacked long ago. Not by claws, but by something that drew each cut in succession. I imagined him being forced to hold still while whatever it was had been done to him.

The sound of my phone sliding across the table was a welcome release from looking at him. I glanced back up and he gestured an invitation to it. I picked up the phone and flipped it open. In addition to my brother, he’d called a couple of my friends. My brother was the one who gave me the message when I got home. “Hey, some guy called from your phone. Said he had it and wanted to meet at Karney’s Sandwich Shop in an hour. Is everything cool?”

I said it was. Not that I didn’t consider telling him about the suspicious African man who sat at my coffee shop every day taking money from people who don’t speak English. Just that when I did think about it, it didn’t sound like compelling justification to steal the man’s notebook and run away.

I put the phone in my pocket. If it bothered him that I didn’t offer thanks, he didn’t show it. Another awful moment passed before he reached into his coat pocket. This time he put an envelope on the table. I looked from his eyes to the package and back again.

“For the book,” he said.

“What is it?”

“It is money. Twenty thousand dollars.” He said it so matter-of-factly that I almost turned to ask the couple beside us if I’d heard him right. It was an astounding sum. A frightening sum. I gripped the book tighter and leaned in.

“Why so much?”

“It is a matter of honor.”

“No,” I refused to believe him. He was trying to buy my silence. My complicity. “What makes this book so important?”

He puzzled at me a moment, as if trying to understand my English.

“Surely, you wouldn’t take it if you didn’t know.”

It occurred to me that was exactly what I’d done. The look on my face must have made it clear to him, as well. “Why would you steal it, then, if you did not know it?”

Remembering my purpose renewed my courage. “You come to the coffee stand where I work every day. And I watch you taking money from people. You write their names and the amounts in this book. You’re doing something illegal.”

He held out his hands, palms up. “What?”

“I don’t know. I can’t read it. But it’s a lot of money. A lot more than… you should have.”

“You mean more than a man like me should have.” He smoothed one hand along the worn lapel of his jacket. I could see he felt insulted, but not in a way that manifested in anger. Not the way I would have reacted. And that made me feel worse.

He returned his hand to his coffee cup. “If I have committed a crime, why didn’t you give the book to the police?”

“You called my friends before I could,” I replied. “I worried that you might look for them.” I looked down at the table, saw the envelope, and looked away out the window. I wished I could be out there, not dealing with this. “Why didn’t you tell my boss what I did?”

“There are places in the world where men who do what I do would look for your friends. They would punish you and your father. Not because they want to, but because they have to. In places where people have very little, stealing even a small thing can be a matter of life and death. But we are in America, so I thought maybe we can avoid things like this.”

“What do you do with the money? Is this—” I bent low and close. “Do you sell drugs?”

He grimaced. “No! I am a hawaladar.”

“A what?”

“Hawaladar. It is like a bank, for people like me.”

For people like me. It deepened my sense of shame to hear him turn those words on himself.

“Pretend you are a Somali man,” he began, as if this was something I could do. You come work in America and want to send money to your family. But there is no American bank with an office in Somalia. So, what do you do? It is very expensive to send the money, and there are many people who would steal it. I am able to do this.”

“How?”

“I have a man I know in Mogadishu. He is also hawaladar. You give me money here. I call him and tell him to give money to your family there.”

“How does the money get there for him to give it?”

“He has money that he gives.”

“But now you owe him money.”

“Yes, of course.”

“How do you pay him back?”

He shrugged as if this was some trivial detail. For a moment, I forgot all about our purpose here.

“Wait. All these people who come to you, you’re saying they want to send money to Somalia?”

“Yes. It is very poor, there.”

“So, your friend in Somalia gives money to people, and nobody ever gives money to him?”

“It is very poor.”

“Where does he get the money?”

“I work with other people in other places. It is easier for them to give the money.”

“But… then you owe the money to them.”

“Yes, but all of this can be arranged. Perhaps they owe something to a man in Canada, and I take care of this for them.”

“There are hundreds of thousands of dollars in this book.”

“Not so much, really. It is like a balance.” He made a face to indicate his dissatisfaction with the word. I nodded my understanding, or at least my mutual lack of it.

“How do you know these people will pay the money?”

“It is a matter of honor.”

“What if they decide to keep it?”

“It would be shame for him and all his family. A hawaladar is not like this.”

Not like this. It wasn’t his intention to judge me, but I couldn’t avoid feeling it. Such was the parallax of our human experience.

“Do all the others have a book like yours?”

“Something like this.”

“Why pay me for the book, then? Why not just ask them to tell you?”

“It would be embarrassing for me.”

“You want to pay me this money to get your book back… so you’re not embarrassed.”

“Yes.”

“This is a lot of money.”

“It is a matter of honor.”

I stared at the book. Just adding up the symbols and numbers I understood, it was inconceivable for a system like this to remain honest based on honor alone.

“The people here who give you money to send. They’re all from Somalia?”

“Most, yes. Not all.”

“Where do they get the money?”

“They have jobs. They wash dishes and houses. Things like this.”

“I don’t believe you.” How could a dishwasher send seven hundred dollars to Somalia? “This is wrong somehow.”

“How can it be wrong for men to deal with each other honorably?”

“If people wanted to send money, they should do it the right way.”

“What is the right way?”

“Through banks.”

“I told you, there are no banks.”

“Then what do the people do with their money?”

“They have no money. I told you, they are poor.”

“Being poor isn’t an excuse. You still have to do things the same way as the rest of us.”

“Who is this ‘rest of us’?”

“What do you mean?” I sputtered. It felt like he’d asked me to describe chocolate. “The rest of us! Everybody else!”

“You mean America. This is what confuses people like me about people like you. Everyone knows that America is the center of all things. People like me know that we are not America. But people like you don’t realize you’re not everyone else. Only Americans believe they can be the center and everyone else.”

We sat quietly for a long time in something between meditation and mourning.

“I think,” he said, weaving his fingers together around his coffee cup, “this is the worst thing about America.”

I nodded. This man had survived places I couldn’t find on a map and I had never ventured past the city limits or broken my curfew. Who was I to dispute such truth?

“If I took this book to the police, what would you do?”

“I would tell them you stole it. I would tell them the owner of the coffee shop knows about it. I would demand you be arrested and lose your job.”

“The American way.”

“As you say.”

I pushed the book across the table and looked him in the eye. I wanted to apologize, but I didn’t know for what or how. He in turn slid the envelope toward me. I put up a hand.

“I’m sorry, but no.”

“I must give this to you.”

“I can’t take it. It’s a matter of honor.”

He put his hand over his heart and bowed his head. I wanted desperately to go back to the world I knew and was comfortable in. “I think that what you do is somehow wrong. Not in the rest of the world, maybe. But this isn’t the rest of the world.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “That is true.” I didn’t know which part he referred to. He sipped his coffee. “I think you will not see me again.”

I turned and walked outside. The streets of Minneapolis no longer stretched out before me. They reached in from a world that had introduced itself to me before I was ready to step out into it. It was 1997.