How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

  The bullet that had been intended for him landed instead squarely in the abdomen of a sixteen-year-old boy who only two weeks earlier had arrived in the capital from a small town in the north. That boy had never heard of Lenin, or the Communist utopia, and unlike Yosef, he had missed the signs completely.

  My father did not want a fight that morning, but one was coming to him nonetheless. He waited to determine its shape, and once he had, he leaned over his wife, locked the door, and threw the car into reverse, his foot pressing hard on the gas as he sped backward out of the driveway, away from the trees that continued to wave their branches obstinately in the breeze. He was not a romantic, or a man given to casual admiration of nature, but as he pulled out of the driveway, his wife’s voice just beginning to reach its feverous pitch, he did think that in a different time and place, one better and more forgiving, he would have liked to have spent an afternoon like this sitting quietly under trees similar to the ones that surrounded his house. There he would have played out his fantasies of the lives he could have lived. The trees, in fact, were what had first drawn him to this house. Walking quietly alone on a summer night eight months earlier, he had spotted them from a block away, and compelled by forces he believed to be greater than himself, he rushed forward without pause or question toward them. He had been alone for so long that he had grown used to acting on instinct, and that night instinct had told him to head straight toward a row of trees on a street that was otherwise void of them. Once there he stared up and admired how simple it was to think the world beautiful, and to his surprise he found that perhaps that thought alone was enough to make life bearable.

  At least this is how I like to picture him, whether it’s accurate or not: as a man in search of a home standing underneath, or perhaps even across from, a row of trees on a summer night. If he was ever happy here, and I doubt he was, it would have been on that evening, which I’ve only just now invented for him. I can’t say that I ever actually saw him stand and stare at the trees, or that I remember him ever mentioning them. He was not that type of man anymore, admiration and reflections on beauty having long since become a thing of the past. More likely than not, the trees, like that apartment, like nearly everything else in his life, was an accident, one that he simply stumbled onto. Regardless, history sometimes deserves a little revision, if not for the sake of the dead, then at least for ourselves. And so I say that on a warm summer night my father, Yosef Getachew Woldemariam, walked with his back straight and his head held high toward a row of trees that, with their massive trunks and sky-piercing branches framed against a clear indigo sky, held the promise of the one thing he wanted more than anything else in his life: protection.

  VI

  The first real arguments that Angela and I had were sparked by minor things—a gas bill that had been paid late that Angela credited to my general negligence, or an unnecessary expenditure on a pair of three-hundred-dollar shoes that Angela claimed were still cheaper than a therapist. It was easy, as a result, to assume that they didn’t portend to touch on anything greater than the strains on our finances and the different ways we had of coping with them. From the beginning it was common for Angela to spend the better part of a Sunday afternoon struggling to add up the numbers that accounted for our daily life. She would add up her salary and my salary, and then deduct for taxes, rent, food, credit card bills, law school debt, and whatever sum she chose that month to wire back home to her mother. When she was finished she would always come to the same conclusion—it was never enough. Regardless of how much she occasionally scrimped on lunches, taxis, and after-work drinks, by her accounting we still came up short.

  “I don’t know how people live in this city,” she told me. “All these people and most of them seem to make it work.”

  After one particularly long week of late nights at her office, Angela spent four hours on a Saturday afternoon calculating the cost of our life. She did the numbers repeatedly, accounting for certain future variables such as a promotion or better than usual holiday bonus. When they still failed to amount to something substantial, she put her pencil down on the table and looked up as if she was waiting for me to grab hold of her before she fell. I had seen that look of profound disappointment and frustration on a woman before, although never on her. As soon as it appeared, I began to search for a reason to leave.

  “I’m going to go find us something for dinner,” I said. “I’ll be back soon.” I kissed her once on the forehead before walking out, which gave me just enough time to see the incredulous look on her face. Here she was worrying about our survival and I was thinking about dinner, she had wanted to say, neither one of which was true. We were both thinking about the same thing—our fragility, as individuals and now as a couple. Despite Angela’s mathematical aerobics, I always believed that we had enough to keep us afloat. I checked our balance every couple of days, and while nothing was being gained, oftentimes very little was lost at the end of the month. For a woman who had grown up deep on the side of poverty, however, that was far from enough. The line that separated the two halves of her life, in her mind, could be moved at any time, and she was convinced that only increasingly larger sums of wealth could protect her from a return to the poor, rootless childhood that she had known. There was little I could say in response. At the time I didn’t know what else I could do but run.

  When I came back home from the grocery store, our fight began. It continued throughout the rest of the evening. This is what it sounded like.

  “Did you find what you wanted at the store?”

  “Yes. Everything was there.”

  “So you’re going to make dinner?”

  “Unless you want to order in.”

  “No. Do whatever you want.”

  And then, for the next four hours.

  “——”

  “——”

  The only words we exchanged before falling asleep were questions, polite and meaningless.

  “Can I get you something to drink?”

  “Do you mind if I watch television?”

  After that we turned out the lights in succession, first me and then two hours later Angela, who had spent the latter half of the night back at her table scratching out one by one all the figures she had added up.

  You see, at the beginning we weren’t fighters. We weren’t yellers or throwers, even if we eventually came to be. It would take time and much deeper wounds for us to get to that point.

  It was shortly after that Angela and I decided to get married. Having seen some of our weaknesses exposed, we hoped to cover them back up with a small, almost clandestine marriage at city hall. Angela’s boss Andrew arranged for a private ceremony in a judge’s chamber, even though he couldn’t attend. It would be two more years before I ever met him. The only common friend of ours there was Bill, in whose office we had first met and who we credited with having brought us together. He came with a former client of his, a Pakistani woman who now that she was in America was hoping to someday be an accountant.

  “Maybe next time it’ll be me standing here,” Bill told me, even though I could tell he didn’t really believe that. He thought he was saying that for my benefit or for the benefit of the woman standing quietly next to him, but he was the only one who needed to hear those words. In the end there were six of us gathered in the judge’s chamber, which had none of the oak-paneled walls that I had expected but was instead poorly dressed in slightly fading yellow wallpaper adorned with pictures of a much younger man standing with the various mayors of the city. The whole thing was done and over with in less than a half hour.

  “Is this how you imagined it?” I asked Angela over an elaborate lunch at the Four Seasons that the partners at her firm were paying for.

  “It’s better,” she said. “By far. We could have been married in a garage and I would have been happy. For most of my life I’ve tried not to imagine much of anything. Or maybe I did once, but then I got tired of never seeing any of it come true so I eventually stopped. I never eve
n thought about what I wanted to do when I grew up or where I wanted to live, much less who I would marry. You have to believe in better things to come in order to do that. I don’t think I had much of an imagination, which must be why I’m so fond of you.”

  Angela leaned awkwardly across the table to kiss me once on the forehead, and then again on the lips, a gesture that seemed born as much out of gratitude as love. We raised our glasses of champagne to toast and looked around curiously to see if anyone was watching us. It was a Friday afternoon and the restaurant was crowded with a dozen other couples in suits. Once we realized that no one was, we searched for other ways to the change the subject.

  “Don’t look now,” Angela said, “but we’re the only black people here.” She pretended to whisper to me from behind her menu.

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. I covered the left side of my face with the menu. “I don’t think anyone’s noticed.”

  “Someone is probably wondering why they don’t see more black people here, especially since we’ve all supposedly come so far.”

  “I’m sure then that they’re grateful to see us.”

  “As long as it’s just the two of us, trust me. They’re delighted.”

  When we returned home later that evening, we promised ourselves that in a not so distant future, we would do the day all over again in a more elaborate fashion.

  “I’d like to do it in Central Park,” Angela said.

  “Where?”

  “You know that little castle in the middle? I want to do it there. We can rent the whole place out.”

  “And you think that’ll be big enough for all our guests?”

  “You’re right, Jonas.”

  “I was thinking of something slightly bigger.”

  Eventually we settled on taking over the grounds surrounding Bethesda Fountain, including the tunnels leading into it and the surrounding pond, a grand affair that only a fairy tale could sustain. And if at the end, behind our idle bedtime chatter, there was something deeply unsatisfying about what we said, there was also at least an underlying belief that what we had done, while far from perfect, was still more than either of us had ever expected.

  I was still reveling in the fact of our marriage when I returned to the academy on Monday. A chemistry teacher who had been at the school for fifteen years and still wore on her blouse and skirt stains that appeared to date from her first year in the lab had warned me earlier to never let my students into my personal life. “Once you do,” she had told me, “you’ll never be able to get them out. They’re like viruses. They’ll pass anything you tell them along from one year to the next, but it will only get distorted and warped and worse as it goes along.”

  I had attributed my one-day absence to personal reasons, but of course my students were careful observers of all their teachers, and within ten minutes of my class beginning a hand was raised in the front.

  “Is that a wedding ring, Mr. Woldemariam?”

  I looked at my hand, as if to confirm the fact that the ring Angela had slipped onto my finger three days earlier was actually there.

  “It is,” I said.

  I had no sooner said that than two other hands went up. When did I get married, and what was my wife’s name? When I told them she was a lawyer, there was a general hum of approval; all assumed that I must have married up. Without my considering it, fifteen or twenty minutes passed like this. I went from one-word responses to more elaborate narratives about how we met and how long we had been together. I had to defend the intimate size of our marriage by explaining that neither of us had family nearby and we wanted to make the wedding about us. I took as much pleasure in my divulgences as my students. I had rarely spoken at such length about myself, and never so honestly. When the class ended we had covered only a fraction of what I had planned, but I hardly cared. I could credit the lost morning to a necessary student-teacher bonding.

  Something broke after that day. I shed many of the reservations I had around my students and increasingly found myself engaged in short periods of idle chatter with them. I was often interrupted by questions of an entirely personal nature that I sometimes tried to diffuse quickly and which on other occasions I went to great lengths to respond to. My students soon knew that I lived in the East Village, north of Houston, somewhere between First and Fourteenth streets, in a one-bedroom apartment that got little to almost no light during the mornings, and that before then I had spent time in Brooklyn and Queens. In college I had tried briefly to be a poet—I had a love for the modernists, Bishop, Pound, and Williams being top among them—as did most of the people I knew, but while I had given that up, I still kept my love for certain poets alive. These were only warm-up questions to the greater narrative that they wanted to get ahold of. Near the end of my first semester one of my students—a round, freckled-faced blonde who until then had never spoken in my class—finally asked me where I was from.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Woldemariam. Where are you from?”

  I had heard the question before, of course. Bill had asked it and then answered it as he saw fit during our first meeting, although with less tact and subtlety.

  “Woldemariam? What is that? Eritrean. No, let me guess. Ethiopian. Probably an Amhara name, am I right?”

  I had come to an easy agreement with Bill, but I found myself reluctant to do the same with my students.

  “I’m from Illinois,” I said. “If that’s what you mean.”

  The girl, I think Katherine was her name, fidgeted in her seat until one of her friends whose name I no longer recall came to what she must have thought as being her friend’s defense.

  “No. I think she means where are you really from.”

  I had considered saying that I was really from Illinois, but then I realized that most if not all of my students knew the answer they were looking for already, whether it was specifically Ethiopia or just Africa in general that they wanted acknowledged. They had heard it, just never from me, and now they wanted a personal confirmation that would elevate their knowledge of who I was beyond the general rumors that swirled around the teachers at the academy. In that way they could mark me as being theirs. At that point, as fond as I may have been of my students, I had no need to give that to them.

  When I later told Angela about the questions my students had asked, she laughed and said, “If they can get an answer to that, I’d like to know too.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning sometimes I think you’re not from anywhere at all. Your parents are Ethiopian, or I assume they are, because I never met them. The only thing you’ve ever told me about them is that they didn’t like each other, and none of you are close. I don’t ask you for more than that because I figure you must have your reasons, but it gives you a cold, sometimes abstract air. You know what Bill told me once about you?”

  “What?”

  “That when he first met you he thought you might have come here illegally. He was only partly joking. He said there was something about the way you barely spoke in the office that reminded him of the illegal immigrants he used to work with. He was wrong though. Talk to any immigrant long enough and they’ll tell you where they came from, and then once they start most of the time they won’t really want to stop. Next thing you know you’re looking at pictures of someone’s grandparents or village, but the most anyone can get out of you is that you were born in the Midwest. Most of the time you don’t even say the city. Just the Midwest, as if that means anything.”

  I had heard something similar before from Angela. Shortly after we started dating she noted what she referred to as my unusual reserve. Friends in college had often told me that I could sometimes come across as indifferent. Rarely was I confided in, but it wasn’t trust that I seemed to lack, but empathy, or empathy that could properly express itself as such. People needed to know in tangible and familiar ways that they were being heard; it wasn’t enough to say that they were, or to stand in close proximity when called upon, even if you were willing to do so for as long as
needed. If there weren’t warm feelings, then perhaps there were no feelings at all.

  I dismissed most of what Angela said. I still thought of myself as capable of the great displays of affection she seemed to be waiting for, and who knows, maybe with time I may very well have found a way to express them, but there was always another crisis lurking not too far off to which we had to respond. In quick succession Angela lost two important cases that she had spent the better part of the past six months arduously working on. Even though she had no reason for thinking so, she assumed after the first loss that her job was in jeopardy. Other more senior lawyers at her firm were involved in the case as well, but it was Angela who decided she would assume the brunt of the failure. She came home after the first defeat and lay down on the bed in a semi-fetal position. She was worried about her future. “I hate not knowing what happens next,” she said.