How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

  It was my first day of school, and taking me there was the only social outing she had had in months. She treated it with all the pomp and circumstance that other women bring to more significant affairs—a dinner party here, a first date there—since while she had had these things in the past, they belonged to a different Mariam, one utterly unrecognizable from the one who stood in front of a mirror worrying about whether her neckline revealed too much for an early Monday morning.

  We walked the six blocks to my school together, hand in hand, and I remember thinking, or maybe I’m just saying this now because there are few children in the world who do not want to remember their mothers as being beautiful beyond imagination, that there could be nothing better in the world than this. I had never seen my mother smile or walk that way before. She literally seemed to glow as she walked down the street, heels clicking and the inverted curls of her hair bouncing in sync, her beauty rising out of her in cone-shaped beams that I’m sure would have had the power to pierce any heart they touched. It was the most memorable walk I’ve ever had.

  It wasn’t until we arrived at the school that her mood changed. It was almost possible at that moment to breathe in the confusion and anxiety that came with her seeing herself surrounded by women as young as or younger than she was, but without the bruises and uncertainty of language she carried. Those women wore jeans and shirts with logos advertising baseball teams and hardware stores, their hair unkempt, their lips naked. They walked their kids to the top of the steps and shook hands with the teacher and then banded together in circles that seemed almost preordained, as if their gatherings were reflections of a natural law that grouped women together by the size of their bodies and the color of their hair and the year and model of the cars they drove.

  She left me just a few feet away from the school, kneeling down on the curb behind a rusted red van so she could hide in its shadow and see me clearly as she told me the first in a series of lessons that she later referred to simply as Things You Must Never Forget. She told me dozens of such lessons throughout my childhood, each delivered with the same insistent wide-eyed stare and stern voice that seemed to say on every occasion, you will never hear anything as important as this again, even if the point she had to make concerned utterly trivial matters: the proper way to break a clove of garlic; the necessity of keeping your socks dry. That first lesson went like this:

  Jonas, I want you to remember what I say now. Are you listening? You must listen. This is important. There are things that you must not ever tell anyone. Is that correct? Must not? It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. You know what I mean. You are good. Say that after me.

  Good.

  No. Say, I am good.

  I am good.

  Yes, you are. And so you will listen. If someone asks you what’s wrong, you say nothing. Say this, Nothing is wrong.

  Nothing is wrong.

  Good. Say it again.

  Nothing is wrong.

  Perfect.

  She kissed me once on both cheeks before safely crossing the street, where a row of identical two-story brick houses with small front porches and unguarded front lawns stood ready to hide her. With a few quick flutters of her hands, the kind generally used to shoo away dogs, pigeons, and the empty-handed poor, she waved me up the school’s steps, where I stopped and stared until she disappeared around the corner, because she knew that I would never leave until she was gone. A piece of dark blue fabric from the end of her dress trailed her for a fraction of a second and remained fluttering in space even after she had rounded the bend. It could have just as easily been a patch of blue stolen from the sky and delivered to earth for all the consideration I put into it. Imagined or not, that last patch of blue stayed floating in the air, and I could still see it even after she was gone just as clearly as I could see the stop sign on the corner and the maple tree that shaded the sign and intersection. That patch of blue was no less real for not having technically been there, just as my mother was no less real for being out of sight. We persist and linger longer than we think, leaving traces of ourselves wherever we go. If you take that away, then we all simply vanish.

  It took the firm grasp of a teacher to pull me into the school, the bells having made their last call.

  I said earlier that I couldn’t remember what happened to my mother the night before she took me to school, and perhaps that is true. Perhaps I can’t remember, neither then nor now. At the time I did know, however, that it was easy for terrible things to happen to women when they were out of sight. They took hard hits, and then later slept in your bed where you could protect them.

  VIII

  As Angela and I began to withdraw from each other, I found myself increasingly taken with my teaching; each new class was an opportunity to step farther away from what I thought of as my slightly bruised and sequestered self. Even if it was only for an hour and a half, after my first year at the academy was over, I knew that it was important to seize every chance to do so. I gradually began to transform myself from a quiet, seemingly sullen teacher, known primarily for my expensive black leather briefcase and the brown-bag lunches I carried to work, to a fully engaged and often dynamic lecturer who sometimes filled in his daily lessons with small digressions and slightly fanciful tales.

  From the beginning I loved my job at the academy, but at that point it wasn’t because I was attached to teaching or to my students, to the late-nineteenth-century classroom with the stained-glass windows I taught in or to any of my colleagues, who were generally at least a decade older than I was and looked at me as a curious but nonetheless interesting intruder. I wouldn’t form any deep attachments to my students or to the building until much later, until I was certain that I was leaving. Only then would I recognize them. What made me happiest when I began were the simple tools of my trade: my chalkboard, my attendance notebook, my grade book, and the top drawer in my desk that came stocked with a month’s supply of pens, chalk, staples, paper clips, white-out, tape, and glue.

  There was more to it than just this, however. Shortly after I began teaching at the academy, I began to think of English as my subject and then my discipline in a way I had never done before, not even in college when I stayed up late writing essays on Robert Browning and the emphasis on light in Hart Crane’s poems. Having grown up in the shadows of my parents’ high-pitched accents and broken grammar, I had always hesitated before I spoke and often whispered my words in case they failed to properly impress whatever audience was before me. What I didn’t understand until I began teaching was that knowledge, or perhaps intimate knowledge I should say, was the first step toward possessing anything. I knew every corner and inch of my apartment and the house I had grown up in. I knew Angela and large fragments of her sad history from when she was born until we separated, and I can say that each in some way was mine. Angela was my girlfriend and for three years my wife, and until I moved out of the basement apartment, with its secondhand furniture and low ceiling, it was mine as well. I had a more intimate knowledge of each, and therefore a greater claim on each, than anyone else living on this planet. Often when I went home from work on the subway at the end of each day, I thought to myself, I am going home to my wife. I am leaving for my home. The my was everything. Take that away and what did you have beyond a series of meaningless nouns—home, wife, car, dog, child. After one year at the academy, I began to think of English in the same way. First it was my class, and then it was my subject, and then my discipline, until inevitably I had finally claimed the entire language as my own.

  I rewrote newspaper articles in my head, and at night ran through my collection of books for fragments of novels that I could bring to class the next day. I graded my students’ essays with a dark red pen whose ink I spread liberally across the page so that entire paragraphs were often rendered almost illegible. Unlike most people who stake their claims on a particular field or discipline, however, I wore my ownership lightly. I rarely corrected my students when they misspoke, and not simply out of decorum or considerat
ion, but because I had come to believe that true ownership did not have to be announced, much less fought over. Mistakes and assaults on the English language were made by the millions every hour of every day, and yet not even those infinite errors had the power to take away what I thought of as truly being mine.

  My classes ended early each morning, and yet I often stayed throughout the afternoon in order to prepare my lessons. I had a list of standard texts that were supposed to be covered—a Faulkner short story, some pieces by Poe, and a handful of nineteenth- and twentieth-century poems, many of which I committed to memory so I could recite them to my students as I strolled through the aisles. There was the familiar “Let us go then ...” and “I heard a fly buzz ...” and of course the singing songs of myself; to these I added some of my own, slightly exotic favorites—a page from Rilke and selected bits from Rimbaud, Bishop’s “One Art”—all of which I imagined gave my class a more personalized, global feel. While many of the other teachers seem to have merely stumbled into the courses they taught, I began to think of myself as having been born or almost preordained for my course. The economics teacher was also the football coach, while our history teacher had been, until just four years earlier, an aspiring Broadway actor. No one seemed to complain, though, not the teachers or the students, despite the academy’s reputation and motto of being an “institution of exceptional scholarship.”

  My syllabus had an intuitive, logical arc to it. We began with familiar domestic narratives, essays, and poems, before moving on to more modern and slightly obtuse pieces, several of which were read in competing translations. I explained it to Angela as being a part of the same pattern in which life was lived. As babies and young children we know and understand only what is immediate and before us, I told her. We accumulate memories and in doing so begin to make our first tentative steps backward in time, to say things such as “I remember when I was.” And from there our lives grow into multiple dimensions until eventually we learn to regret and finally to imagine.

  While it was common even among the most disciplined teachers to allow for small fabrications, from the beginning the stories I told my students existed on a more ambitious plane. Now when asked for details about my life, I indulged myself. When one of my students wanted to know what I did before I began teaching at the academy, I told him that I had spent years working in a coal mine and had the blackened lungs to prove it. To another I was the captain of a Japanese trawler, and then a few days later a pimp and hustler. The more outlandish my responses were, the more my students wanted to know the truth, which had been the point all along.

  Not only was I good at these inventions, I was grateful for them; only in fiction could I step outside of myself long enough to feel fully at ease. The stories all came naturally, just as I had shown myself more than capable of coming up with last-minute narrative fillers for the asylum applications I once worked on. I thought of this as a distinctly American trait—this ability to unwind whatever ties supposedly bind you to the past and to invent new ones as you went along. While most of it was frivolous—these stories of imaginary childhood deprivations and absurd careers were never more than an easy laugh for my students—I strayed on occasion into darker ground, if only to make sure that I held their interest.

  “My family,” I told my students once after having been asked why we came to America, “had to leave their home abruptly. That’s why we ended up here.”

  They fell hard for anything that sounded like that, and were quick to imagine the missing details on their own. They assumed war first, hunger and poverty second; despite their best intentions, and how many times they had recently heard someone say that Africa was more than just the sum of that, I knew these were the only images they had. Africa was everywhere in the news and the pity for it and its inhabitants had spiked a thousandfold as a result. There were rallies in Central Park for the dead of Sudan, and protests outside the UN and several different African consulates against more general crimes ranging from corruption to blanket oppression. The news at night showed throngs of people gathered around a stage wearing the names of the dead, while at the same time celebrities across the country thoughtfully called for an end to genocide.

  My students were naturally infected. Some of the first ones I had taught at the academy were organizing a Save Africa Now campaign, which they asked me to be a part of, assuming, however naively, that they had a natural ally in me. Two years later I hardly remembered them; they had been shy to the point of invisibility in my class, but they had grown into themselves, and with one year left at the academy before college, they stood taller than me, with matching dark brown shaggy hair that dipped just below their eyebrows as if they were still afraid of being taken too seriously. I asked them what they wanted to save Africa from.

  “Violence,” one of them said. And if that wasn’t enough, the second one followed up by adding, “Millions are dying, Mr. Woldemariam.”

  I never asked them how they planned on ending the violence that had recently upset them; letters and more rallies were somewhere in the plan, money would surely be raised and sent—the fact that action was being taken was enough to ensure that whatever they did was right. I had already heard all I needed. They were visibly disappointed and I’m sure later full of contempt when I refused.

  “My family’s Irish,” I told them. “I’d feel like a fraud if I joined.”

  I shared little of my life at the academy with Angela, and so she never heard anything about those early stories, any one of which would have given her a moment’s pause. When she asked me how the job was going, all I could tell her was that it was fine, in part because I suspected she no longer cared.

  “What about going back to school?” she finally asked me. “You’ve been there for two years. I thought you wanted to get your Ph.D.”

  The idea of me with a doctorate still held sway over Angela, even if I had quietly placed it on the same shelf where numerous other ambitions of mine now rested. It was part of her faith that this was one of the only ways that we could secure a bright and happy future, and in that regard she was no different from the immigrant parents I had known at the center who were convinced that the only thing that would save and protect their children in America were advanced, specialized degrees.

  “I don’t think I’m ready yet,” I told her. “I still have a lot more reading I need to do. And more experience teaching can only help.”

  “And for how long are you going to do that. Two more years? Five, six? It’s just a part-time job, Jonas. It’s not supposed to become your life.”

  And that was at the heart of what worried Angela—that despite our being married we had yet to form a life as commonly prescribed by others. In life, one made steady but consistent progress. Capital was raised, furnishings and homes were purchased and then later resold for a double-digit profit. More than two years into our marriage and we were nowhere near that. Angela’s concerns over money and stability had yet to diminish. As time passed she needed more pillars to keep her fully propped. Her law degree had been the first, and now she wanted to know where the second was.

  A few weeks later Angela told me I lacked a clear sense of identity. We were sitting at opposite corners of the apartment on a Sunday afternoon in late or early April, both of us supposedly busy with work, when Angela called out across the room to me, “You don’t have any idea who you are, do you, Jonas.”

  It wasn’t the full-on frontal attack that I had been expecting. Instead, Angela tried to soothe her frustration and disappointment with me by naming its origins. If I didn’t know who I really was, then I could hardly be held accountable for not facing life head-on as she expected me to. I was innocent if there was no person behind the skin that could be charged.

  Had I defended myself at that moment, we might have reached some sort of an accord. I might have been able to explain to Angela that she was, in fact, partly correct in her statement, but not in the way she presumed. I may not have had a solid definition of who I was, but that was
only because for so long I had concentrated my efforts on trying to appear to be almost nothing at all—neither nameless nor invisible, just obscure enough to blend into the background and be quickly forgotten. It had begun with my father, who I had always hoped would never notice me. It was in his company that I first learned how to occupy a room without disturbing it. Whenever he came home from work, I’d sit in different parts of the living room—in the center of the couch, on the floor, or next to the coffee table in order to see how he acknowledged me. On several occasions I came too close and was told to get out of his way, on others I was either grunted at or quizzed about my progress in school that day. Eventually one evening he came home from work and didn’t notice me at all. I was sitting near the end of the couch, with my knees lifted to my chest and the lamp next to me deliberately turned off, and I realized then that all I had to do to avoid him was blend into the background. That knowledge followed me from there so that eventually I thought of my obscurity as being essential to my survival. Whoever can’t see you can’t hurt you. That was the reigning philosophy of my days.

  Learned instincts, however, are hard to wean oneself off, and so I offered no meaningful defense to Angela, just a sly, hostile retort.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way. It must be very hard on you.”

  After that, who I really was became a source of constant debate between us.

  “Are you an illegal alien, Jonas? If so you know you can tell me. I love refugees, remember.”

  We were in a taxi heading north on First Avenue to a Christmas party being thrown by Angela’s firm when she said that. Our driver was from The Gambia—Angela had asked him where he was from as a way of instigating this conversation. She had pressed her head directly against the partition and asked, “Excuse me, sir. Where are you originally from?” She had often claimed to hate it when people asked cabdrivers this question. She and Bill had once loudly debated it in the center’s conference room just before she left and began her career as a lawyer.