Ahmed

AHMED

Ahmed waxed floors while I changed the ballast in a fluorescent fixture on the sixth floor of a building in San Francisco that housed Glide Memorial Church, where I worked a winter job as a "superintendent of maintenance."
Ahmed and Raffi were janitors, recent immigrants from North Yemen. Between them they held four jobs. While Ahmed buffed floors in our building, Raffi collected tolls at the Universal Parking Garage a block away. At six p.m., they traded places. Their home was the locker room in the basement of our building. They scrambled half way around the planet to work hard and earn enough to open an Arabic restaurant in San Francisco.
Ahmed hit the kill switch on the floor waxer and watched my every twist of the wire nut. When the ballast was installed and the bulbs were snapped back into place, I nodded, and he threw the switch. A slight flicker, then full wattage from tubes bounced off his shiny floor. His teeth flashed against his black mustache. "You are an engineer, no G. D.?"
The three of us became weekend pals. I learned how to say "Allah has given us a great day" in Yemen, and taught then how to interpret the comics in the Sunday Chronicle. We wandered Marin County in my truck, drank Pepsi, and chose the mansions where they would live when their American dreams came true.
When Spring hit the great divide I went home to Idaho and tended hamburger on the hoof until the forage was gone and the trucks came to carry the cattle down onto the winter range in the desert.
The next winter I found a job tending horses on a tax-write-off ranch fifty miles north of San Francisco. On my first Saturday off, I rode a bus into the city and went to our building, where I found Raffi working the day shift on the floors. He was every excited to see me. "Ahmed has done the restaurant, G. D., Ahmed has done the restaurant. Go now to see him. Go to the Hofbrau."
Ahmed had leased a German restaurant, Rolf’s Hofbrau, complete with huge neon sign of women in dirndls carrying steins of lager to men smoking curved pipes. Inside the restaurant were dark men holding cigarettes between ring and middle finger and drinking heavy coffee from tiny cups. Against the wall, a long steam table held trays of couscous, bulgar, mint, lamb and melon.
When Ahmed spotted me, he came running toward me, clapping his hands above his head. "G. D. is here! G. D. is here!" His customers stood, Ahmed introduced me to them, and we shook hands. Each of them offered to buy for me a meal or a coffee or a cigarette.
But I was Ahmed's friend, in Ahmed's restaurant, and it was his privilege to place a feast before me, and sit with me and hold my hand and smile as I savored the saffron and pinon nuts and kebobs.
I asked him when he was going to let the rest of San Francisco know that he operated a fine Arabic restaurant, when was he going to change the German decor on the outside of the building?
"Oh, no, G. D. If they know that this is an Arabic restaurant, someone who does not like us will bomb us. I have many friends, see? They all know that the restaurant is here. It is much safer to allow the others to think that the Germans still own this place."
On the eve of the third winter I took a job editing a magazine in Sausalito. I rode the Golden Gate ferry to San Francisco, walked from the piers into the Tenderloin and found Ahmed’s restaurant abandoned. In gold script on the transom above the entry door was a small string of Arabic characters.
I found Raffi sitting in the janitor's room, lonely, sad and waiting for a ride to the airport. Three weeks before, on a Saturday night, Ahmed was caught in a sting. Supposedly someone from the San Francisco chapter of the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals lodged a complaint against Ahmed with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and accompanied the INS on a raid of Ahmed's restaurant. The authorities found Ahmed and three of his customers in the basement, butchering a lamb for the final feast of Ramadan. The INS pulled Ahmed's green card and deported him.
Raffi had no recourse. He was going back to North Yemen, because he could not work four jobs alone. As we hugged goodbye, Raffi said "You know, G. D., this America is a very bloody country. You come someday to live with us, O.K.?"
I asked him about the Arabic script above the door at the restaurant.
“Oh, yes, G. D. It says ‘Ahmed’s Hofbrau.’”