How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

  A few days before my classes were scheduled to begin, Angela came home from work with a large elaborately wrapped bag that she set on the kitchen table as soon as she entered. She didn’t have to tell me that the package was a gift for me. It was obvious from the unrestrained smile on her face when she walked in. Angela was one of those people who took an almost excessive pleasure in seeing their gifts received, although in her case there was nothing vain or self-serving in it, and if anything, the act of gift-giving as performed by her was fraught with danger, which made the genuine looks of surprise and pleasure that much more meaningful when they came.

  Before I had finished unwrapping it Angela told me what it was.

  “It’s a satchel,” she said. “You’ll need a nice one when you’re a teacher. Or at least that’s what I hear anyway. Although if you hate it you can tell me. I still have a receipt. It’s black so it will go with everything.”

  The bag was highly polished and elegantly stitched, most likely by hand, around all the edges, and although I made no mention of the price, and almost went out of my way to prove my ignorance of its worth, I knew from the first click of its silver clasps that it had cost multiple times more than what we could have ever hoped to have honestly afforded.

  I began teaching at the start of the new year. It was early January and I was heading off once again to school for what felt like the first time. Angela sensed my anxiety, even though I never mentioned it. Without saying anything she woke up earlier than normal with me. We dressed for work standing side by side at the foot of the bed. Afterward we even took the same northbound train to Fourteenth Street, where Angela eventually transferred to the proper line. Her excuse for doing so was that she wanted to make sure I got to work safely.

  “You never know,” she said. “You could get lost or kidnapped in this city.” On a crowded train we pressed ourselves together. I slid my hand under Angela’s jacket and held her stomach for support. When it was time for her to get off the train, she leaned back so I could kiss her good-bye, and in parting said, “Don’t be afraid of them, Jonas. They’re just kids.”

  When I arrived at the academy and the first of my students entered the class, I understood what Angela had meant. By any standard I had been afraid for too long of anything that I thought might pose a physical or emotional risk, and Angela, in her own way, had always been aware of that. I hardly spoke in the company of strangers, and went out of my way to avoid expressing a contradictory opinion. Until Angela, I had kept my attachments to a minimum.

  As soon as I began teaching at the academy I noticed that there was a distinct, almost palpable difference in the general haze through which until then I had conducted my life. Things, objects, people all suddenly appeared sharper, as if I had been wandering through the world with a pair of dirty, poorly cared-for glasses that blurred the lines and washed away distinctions. Angela, who had always struck me as pretty, with her large, wide eyes and equally large head, in which every feature was somehow perfectly exaggerated from her ears down to her lips, was now strikingly and even beyond that alarmingly beautiful. I couldn’t help staring often, and not only at her but at so much else throughout the city, from women on the street to men freely urinating in parks. There were vast swaths of both city and normal life that I had failed to notice, if only for the simple reason that none of it, as far as I had understood, concerned me and the quiet discreet life I had been living. I had always suspected that at some early point in my life, while still living with my parents and their daily battles, I had gone numb as a tactical strategy, perhaps at exactly that moment when we’re supposed to be waking up to the world and stepping into our own.

  With my new job at the academy, I began to see myself as part of that active, breathing world which millions of others claimed membership to. When asked how my day was, I had, if I wanted, more than just a one-word response at hand. I had whole stories now that I often wanted to tell, even if I didn’t have the words for them yet.

  V

  When my mother finally entered the car, she noticed that today the seat belt only half worked. It hung tired and limp from the car ceiling, unable to tighten or relax, its position fixed, permanent, like a dead limb that can only be lifted and dropped and lifted again, vital and useless at the same time. When she slid into the passenger-side seat and buckled the belt into its metal clasp, it took on a second, unintended presence that was more than just physical. The belt, clasped around her stomach, became for her a confirmation of the simple fact that in some places, life did indeed matter, and deserved careful, deliberate protection. The lower half wrapped around her waist and today, the feeling was not that different from the sensation she felt when she wrapped one arm around her stomach and squeezed herself to the point of nausea.

  The car didn’t roar to life so much as it sputtered, as if waiting to be convinced of the role it still had to play in my parents’ marriage. My mother adjusted her weight from one side to the other, and the white vinyl seats squeaked along. The seats had baked throughout the summer, at times becoming too hot to touch, and now, for once, they were cool, almost perfect. In the winter they would freeze, becoming as cold as their color promised, and in six years the vinyl would begin to crack into long, thin, parallel streams that leaked artificial fabrics into the hair of anyone who sat there. She wasn’t showing yet but soon enough she would. Her stomach had already started to round just slightly, as if someone had crawled underneath her skin and blown one burst of air, a breath just strong enough to puff the skin into a soft little ball. Her hair had begun to grow damp and limp with constant sweat, making even the slightest curl all but impossible. She had seen this happen before, first with her girlfriends and then one by one with each of her three younger sisters, all of whom had married after her, all of whom had taken a small sadistic pleasure in taunting her with their outstretched stomachs and physically present husbands. One by one she had watched them swell and then burst like balloons, suddenly shocked and disappointed to find that the great surprise hiding in their stomachs was simply just another baby, no greater or worse than the thousands of others who were born and died that day. She, however, was a modern woman, one liberated from the standard burdens of family life. She envied no one, least of all her sisters. With a husband at the time lost to God knows where (perhaps Kenya, perhaps Egypt, she had thought, never suspecting him to be one for jail or cargo ships), and no children to clean or feed or watch over, she was free to take the money she made each month typing letters in the Ministry of Agriculture—“failing crops and historic food shortages are to be expected”—and put them to use in the modern way. She bought shoes: black, brown, tan, red, blue, white, gold, purple, all with heels, straps, and the all-important gold stamp: Made in Italy. She bought cigarettes imported from England, a bottle of scotch to entertain friends with. Mariam took taxis instead of buses home from work when it rained in the winter or when the crowd had swelled to a near-violent breaking point in the summer. At those moments she would step gingerly from the curb just a few feet away from the bus stop and raise one arm (the left one, carrying two gold bracelets and a quarter-carat diamond ring), quietly imagining the jealous stares of the women she worked with, of the dozens of other women she didn’t know and had never met but who happened to be standing there at that moment with their children or husband next to them, their heads still wrapped in a shawl, their eyes cast down.

  If she had known any English at the time, she would have turned to them and said, To hell with you all.

  As the car slowly slid in reverse out of the driveway, she remembered that she had forgotten something upstairs.

  “Wait,” she said. It was the first word she had spoken to her husband that morning, and if either one of them had had a penchant or taste for symbolic speculation, one of them would have said, “But isn’t that all we’ve done? Isn’t that the only thing we have to offer each other anymore?”

  No such taste existed in either of them, however, and that “Wait” was simply uttered an
d then lost and left for me to interpret.

  My mother took her time getting out of the car and walking back up the stairs to the apartment. She slid her hand along the banister as she went up the steps and took account of the dust that gathered around her fingers. Her own house in Addis, she realized, had never been so dirty. There had been a maid to clean and cook; a gardener to tend to the yard; a squadron of neighborhood boys to lift heavy objects, change lightbulbs, and screw in broken locks (three on the front, three on the rear, and one on each window, because a woman living alone could never be too safe, could never trust solely the kindness of strangers). The dust now was her responsibility. It was what she heard the other women at the church talk about: dust and stains and collars that never got clean. Sofas that were ruined by grape juice left to sit too long. Children’s pants stained with blood. All of that was supposed to be her charge now.

  She took a seat on the bed, and then after a few minutes laid back, allowing herself the luxury of placing her feet on the hand-me-down white duvet given to her by one of the women at the church. There was nothing she needed or had forgotten. She had come back here for purely selfish reasons. In those few minutes between opening the car door and taking her seat next to her husband, she had caught a glimpse of her life as it would have looked to her if she were standing outside of it: the poor woman with the cheap and overstuffed valise being more of a cliché than she was willing to bear. Unlike those stories, however, she was not running from but to, her suitcase packed not in defiance but in submission, with her in no particular rush at all. She should have expected more from herself, the voice she was trying to quell threatened to say. To which she would have agreed wholeheartedly.

  Coming back up to this room was just another one of the minor lies my mother told herself to get through each day. There was only this quiet, solitary repose that she sought, and if the world was a kinder and better place, I imagine sometimes, it would have stopped permanently right then and there exclusively for her. Everything else around her could have continued. Neighborhood children could have aged, graduated, and fallen into drugs and love and premature pregnancies. The old women at the church—Agnes, Harriet, and Jean—could have faded away into their deaths one at a time, like summer months ticked off so quickly they hardly seem to have ever happened. Life in general, in other words, need not have ended, just so long as my mother could be granted the small gift of lying endlessly on a bed on an early September afternoon staring at the ceiling while her husband sat parked in the driveway waiting for her. It could have made a picture-perfect scene, supposing the canvas was drawn wide enough to allow for a view of house, bedroom, trees, and car—a scene quiet enough to deserve the merit of being hung in a famous museum. People could have gazed at it in some future era and said to themselves, “So, this was life.”

  My mother lay on the bed and counted off the minutes in her head one second at a time. Today, she gave herself two hundred and twenty seconds, a record. On other days she needed only twenty or thirty to step back gracefully into life. That was enough time to compensate for a broken dish, for a day and evening of complete silence between her and her husband. The seconds themselves were nothing more than that. They were the smallest fragments of time that she knew how to account for, and she believed that if she could count and accept them, then she could believe again in the hours and days they made up. If she knew how to do it, she would have counted to the tenth or hundredth of each second. She would have gotten to the very bottom of time, and having arrived, stared at it directly and said, “Okay, I can do this. If this is all there is.”

  Until today the most she had ever needed was one hundred and eighty-four seconds. That had been enough time to make up for getting lost on an afternoon stroll and being told by a young white boy with bright red hair and freckles that if she knew what was good for her, she would turn around and get the fuck back to wherever she had come from. Most of what he said was lost on her, but she understood the intent of violence and threat in his voice, as we almost all always do. Long before we understand anything we know this.

  One hundred eighty-four seconds were not enough for her today, however, nor were two hundred ten, or twelve, or eighteen. Two hundred twenty alone were enough, while anything greater would have been too much. The consideration of time in itself was a threat, one no less real than the sneering red-headed boy on a bike.

  She checked the seconds off with her eyes closed. When they were all gone, she opened her eyes and planted her feet firmly on the floor. Time had started over just enough so that the woman who rose from the bed and walked quickly down the steps to the waiting car with a random book in hand (in this case, a coverless tan-colored hardback copy of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk that had been bought by her husband at a garage sale for decoration) was not the same one who had gone upstairs. This Mariam was lighter, more prone to smiling and acknowledging the simple beauty of a fall afternoon drenched in solid light and smoothed over by sporadic pollen-filled breezes. Like the other Mariam who preceded her, though, this one knew just as well that a time was approaching when closing your eyes and counting off the seconds would not be enough. What happened when that time finally came remained a mystery to both. Would they flail and tear their hair apart, or simply sink quietly to the bottom of whatever life they had, never to be heard from or seen again?

  She opened the car door, slid in, and shut it hard. It was still possible to believe in Nashville at that moment, to think, perhaps, that a honeymoon was not so impossible after all.

  She turned to her husband, who appeared not to have moved a muscle or inch since she left him, and said, with more conviction than anything she had said to him in weeks, if not months, “Okay, I’m ready now.”

  When she returned to the car, my father took note of what my mother had claimed she’d forgotten. Just enough time had passed between her leaving and returning for him to begin to doubt what she had said about forgetting something upstairs. He pictured her in the apartment staring at him with contempt from the window, or perched in front of the bathroom mirror thinking that she had grown far too beautiful for a man like him. The last thing he had wanted that morning was a fight, but it was clear now that it was going to happen anyway. The fights grew out of their own organic, independent force, obliged only to their own rules and standards. They existed independently in the world, just as surely as the oak trees that lined the driveway existed whether he was present to see them or not. He could no more keep the fights from erupting than he could make the trees vanish by an act of will or, say he had the authority, one of mercy.

  That morning the fight began as soon as my mother returned to the car with a copy of a book she had never heard of and could hardly read in her hand. In retrospect it’s easy for me to say that it was the book that did it, but it could have just as easily been a change in a pair of shoes, earrings, a favorite shade of lipstick that proved to my father that he had waited for nothing, and had therefore been made, once again, into a fool.

  “It seems,” my father said to his wife as soon as she sat down in the car, “that you didn’t forget anything at all.”

  Note the words, the first that my father said to his wife that morning, deliberate and in a different context almost polite. They’re important here. Of the tens of thousands of ways two people can turn against each other, my mother and father were faithful to a handful of words to provide that final spark, chief among them being “you didn’t.” As in, “You didn’t turn down the heat before you went to bed last night.” Or in later years, “You didn’t pay the rent last month,” and “You didn’t find a job, a career, a life, a home we can live in, a school to send our son to.” There was always a “you” who had failed to do something and another “you” who never failed to see that. Sometimes I think if they had never learned to use the second person singular their lives could have turned out so much better. They could have turned to that indifferent and guiltless third person the same way they later turned to faith and car
dboard boxes to keep death at bay. They could have used it to endure the burden of layoffs, failed spelling tests, and the soaring cost of heating oil, but at least in this way they were like most Americans, saddled with a “you” to blame and the need to see someone hang.

  As soon as my father said the last two words of that sentence, he felt the abrupt and dramatic shift in the air that precedes any violent confrontation. Something vibrated, buzzed. If there was a way to narrate it, he would have described it as the tiniest particles that make up the air we breathe becoming suddenly charged and electrified with a palpable life all their own. The world around us is alive, he would have said, with our emotions and thoughts, and the space between any two people contains them all. He had learned early in his life that before any violent gesture there is a moment when the act is born, not as something that can be seen or felt, but by the change it precipitates in the air. Once, at the port in Sudan on his way to work on the loading dock, he had almost rounded a bend on the other side of which a young man from Kenya or Tanzania (he could no longer be certain which) was being kicked to death by a group of men for reasons no one ever learned. They were all living there in makeshift boardinghouses—refugees and migrant workers—piled on high together, which sometimes made it hard for him to read the air for signs of disturbance. That day, however, Yosef had come to a corner where one goat stood tethered to a pole in the ground, and there, just as he was about to turn, he had felt something that told him to turn away in the other direction and wait until the news of whatever was happening reached him at lunch. He had felt the same thing before in minor and significant ways. His father had once nearly killed him when in a rage he had swung at him with a knife still in his hand. The blade had cut seamlessly through the air, dividing the space Yosef had been standing in less than a second earlier cleanly in two. He was only nine years old at the time, which made him old enough to remember what he had sensed in the moment between his calling his father a bastard and the knife swooshing through the air. At a rally of high school and college students in Addis twenty-four years later, he had been the first to duck as the crowd approached a wall of waiting soldiers, at least one of whom had his sights firmly fixed on him because he had stood in the front, tall and proud and far too arrogant, with a picture of Lenin raised high over his head. That soldier had caught Yosef from more than a yard away, and just as he began to curl his finger around the trigger, Yosef had felt the shift that told him death was near.