How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

  They had stopped at what was left of one village to rest and found a handful of old men who had chosen to stay behind to wait out their last days. Over a cup of tea one of the men had pointed to a mat of straw and brick lying just a few hundred feet away. He spoke in a language my father didn’t understand and so the man clasped his two hands together in the shape of a triangle to tell him that this was where his house once stood. A second later he swiped the air clean, as if decapitating it. Whether the houses stood completely upright or in ashes, the sense of emptiness that hovered over them was always the same.

  This forgotten fort was America’s version of a similar event—three hundred years earlier but a similar event nonetheless. My father knew for certain that this was why he had come here. He never said it to anyone, but he knew that in one of those villages, just as here in this fort, a child, a boy, had been accidentally or deliberately abandoned and that he was wandering out there in the savannah-turned-desert or in the forest searching for whoever it was that had left him behind.

  When my mother came walking out of the forest, my father’s first unmediated response had been to hold out his hand as if beckoning her to join him. He was relieved, almost delighted to see her, and there was something edifying in watching her emerge from the shadows, as if she were coming to rescue him. She caught the gesture from the other side of the meadow and rather than continue to walk forward came to an abrupt halt. He held his hand out for a few seconds longer, expecting her to take it at any moment, or for her to at least take a few steps in his direction as an acknowledgment that a sort of truce was being offered. When she failed to do so, he promised himself that he would never reach out to her again.

  Let her stand there for the rest of her fucking life, he thought. Let her fall down, drown, sink into a pit, and die. She’ll never have my hand to help her up again.

  PART III

  XIV

  I called in sick to the Academy the next day. The dean of students when I spoke to him laughed affably enough at my attempt to sound ill over the phone and concluded by saying, “We all like you very much here, Jonas. Let’s not make this a habit now.” I wondered precisely what the “this” he was talking about referred to. Was it the getting sick, or the pretending to be sick, or the calling in at the last minute when it would be impossible to find a substitute in time, leaving him to fill the role, or was it the fact that I had openly lied, and not with that much effort or conviction, and why if it was any of these things, or all of them at the same time, he should worry about it becoming a habit since I had never done it before and at the time as far as I could see would never do it again.

  When I left for work the following day, I was still carrying traces of my father with me. His boat sketches were in my pocket, and as I walked to the subway and again on the train, I occasionally ran my hand over the images without taking them out. Appropriately enough, I thought of this time together as being the closest we had ever been, and whether I wanted to or not, I had to take advantage of the situation.

  On an uptown-bound local train stuck just a few feet shy of Forty-second Street, I began to explain to my father all the reasons why he would have hated New York, had he ever dared to see it. We never had a conversation like that before—one in which I talked and he listened. Until then I didn’t think of it as something that haunted me.

  “These trains alone,” I told him, “would have killed you. You never had much patience. Anything could make you angry. Five minutes of waiting on one of these platforms for a train would have been too much for you. The crowds would have only made it worse, especially in the morning and after work. Remember you hated tight, enclosed spaces. As you got older, even too much time in a car could make you upset.”

  Had he actually been there he would have agreed. It was like traveling with a tourist who understood nothing about the world you inhabited and was discovering himself through it. If I knew something about the history of the train lines that ran under New York, I would have shared that as well. The one thing he liked was man-made history—the story of planes, buildings, anything that had been constructed against nature. At the Seventy-second Street stop I pointed out to him that we were now firmly on the Upper West Side. “Which can say a lot about who you are,” I explained. “It can be a good or bad thing. It depends on how you see it.”

  I decided to get off the subway a few stops early. We exited on Eighty-sixth Street. I continued the conversation once we were walking north on Amsterdam Avenue toward the academy.

  “That’s the academy right there,” I told him. “You can see the top of the bell tower through the trees. I’m the only one who calls it the academy. That’s not its real name. I stole it from a short story by Kafka that I read in college—a monkey who’s been trained to talk gives a report to an academy. That’s the title of the story: ‘A Report to an Academy.’ I used to think of that story every day when I first started teaching. I never told anyone that, not even my wife, Angela. I used to wonder if that was how my students and the other teachers, even with all their liberal, cultured learning, saw me—as a monkey trying to teach their language back to them. Do you remember how you spoke? I hated it. You used those short, broken sentences that sounded as if you were spitting out the words, as if you had just learned them but already despised them, even the simplest ones. ‘Take this.’ ‘Don’t touch.’ ‘Leave now.’ That was how you talked. I never wanted to sound like that. I’ve lived here my whole life, and even with all my education, I’m still afraid I do.”

  When we reached the gates of the academy, I pointed out to him that this stroll we had taken from home to school on a bright, warm fall morning, with broken leaves scattered on the ground and what a poet once described as slanted light that one could almost walk on, was one of the most important things in my life that he had missed out on.

  “This was the best part of the day for me,” I told him. “I’m probably the only child in history who woke up each morning looking forward to his walk to school. I loved leaving that house, and I should tell you that on many mornings I hoped my mother and I would never return. Sometimes we came close, and even though we always came back, because I was young I never stopped believing that it was possible that someday we wouldn’t. After two blocks I’d find myself thinking that at any moment now we were going to head off in a different direction. I imagined cars and helicopters coming to pick us up, and I would have had my mother entirely to myself. I wonder if it surprised you that we didn’t disappear.”

  We parted at the school’s front doors with a promise that I would see him later. I arrived in my classroom ten minutes before the first bell rang. In my first days of teaching I had always arrived at least thirty or forty minutes early, in large part to gape in wonder at my classroom and my place in it. Other teachers used the room later in the afternoon, but it was mine at the beginning of the day; those were the best hours to claim it. As the sun rose higher, I would watch the light stream in through the windows and spread across the darkly polished wooden floors and the desks that in previous decades had been bolted to them. For the first couple of years it had always struck me as a remarkable sight, one worth waking up a little bit earlier to witness and for which I would often remain grateful throughout the day. Recently I had stopped doing this, and generally arrived only minutes before the morning bell.

  I took my place behind my desk and waited for my students. I hadn’t done that since my first year at the academy, when every day was full of a punishing anxiety. I needed those thirty minutes behind my desk to remind myself that I did indeed know what I was doing, and had every right to be there. Angela had caught hold of that anxiety as well, and for nine months had woken up early and made breakfast for the both of us. On numerous occasions I’d run part of my lecture by her.

  “Pastoral poems,” I told her, “are almost as old as poetry itself. Some of the first poems written were pastoral. Even if they don’t seem like it initially.”

  She would sit at the table and pretend to tak
e notes on what I was saying, and in more mischievous moments would raise her hand and ask questions to which she knew I had the answer.

  “I’m sorry,” she asked, “but what exactly does pastoral mean?”

  The first of my students trickled in a few minutes before the bell. They were the smartest of the group and took their seats near the center. The rest arrived in no discernible order, but I noticed that all of them, smart and stupid alike, seemed to hardly talk, or, if they talked, it was only in whispers. Most said hello as they entered, but their voices were more hesitant than usual, as if they weren’t sure that it was really me they were addressing.

  I watched them as they filed past my desk. They were an attractive group, and several of the girls in the class of mainly boys would undoubtedly grow up to be described by both men and women as striking, if not beautiful, a fact most had already begun to prepare themselves for with their year-round tans and delicately applied streaks of blush and mascara. I waited until they had all taken their seats, and when I looked at them, I saw something approaching a hint of wonder on their faces, which may very well have always been there but which I was just recognizing.

  “I’m sorry for having missed class the other day,” I began, and because I felt obliged to explain my absence, I told them what I thought was the next closest thing to the truth.

  “My father passed away recently. I had to attend to his affairs.”

  And yet because I had just finished talking to him, I felt that didn’t say enough. So I continued.

  “He was sixty-seven when he died. He was born in a small village in northern Ethiopia. He was thirty-two when he left his home for a port town in Sudan in order to come here.”

  And while I could have ended there I had no desire to. I needed a history more complete than the strangled bits that he had owned and passed on to me—the short brutal tale of having been trapped as a stowaway on a ship was all he had to explain himself. It made for such a tragic and bitter man, and as he got older it must have been even worse. I imagine the past died multiple times within him as his memory faded and whatever words he had left to describe it disappeared alongside. And so I continued with my father’s story, knowing that I could make up the missing details as I went, just as I had once done for Bill and his brood of migrants at the center.

  “He was an engineer before he left Ethiopia,” I told my students, “but after spending several months in prison for attending a political rally banned by the government, he was reduced to nothing. He knew that if he returned home he would eventually be arrested again, and that this time he wouldn’t survive, so he took what little he had left and followed a group of men who told him that they were heading to Sudan, because it was the only way out.

  “For one week he walked west. He had never been in this part of the country before. The mountains that surrounded the city had disappeared, and after several days on foot he realized he was going to miss them. Everything was flat, from the land to the horizon, one uninterrupted view that not even a cloud dared to break. The fields were thick with wild green grass and bursts of yellow flowers. Eventually he found a ride on the back of a pickup truck already crowded with refugees heading toward the border. Every few hours, they passed a village each one of thatched-roof huts a cluster with a dirt road carved down the middle, where children eagerly waved as the refugees passed, as if the simple fact that they were traveling in a truck meant they were off to someplace better. He had done the same as a child; cars were rare and precious back then and even the adults would have chased them on their horses if they hadn’t considered it beneath them. He thought about how terrible it was going to be for some of those children when they realized how much misery leaving often entailed.

  “When he finally arrived at the port town in Sudan, he had already lost a dozen pounds. His slightly bulbous nose stood in stark contrast to the sunken cheeks and wide eyes that seemed to have been buried deep above them. His clothes fit him poorly. His hands looked larger; the bones were more visible. He thought his fingers were growing.

  “This was the farthest from home he had ever traveled, but he knew that he couldn’t stay there. He wanted to leave the entire continent far behind, for Europe or America, where life was rumored to be better. He didn’t really care where, as long as he could find work and sleep peacefully at night.

  “It was the oldest port in Sudan and one of the oldest cities in the country. It was originally built by the English in 1875 after they had taken the country, although at that time it was mainly used to bring in weapons from Europe because there were constant uprisings. At its peak hundreds of thousands of people lived there, but now only a fraction of that population was left. Several wars had been fought nearby, the last one in 1970, between a small group of rebels and the government, but things had been quiet since then. He could still see the remains of those wars all over the country. There were burned-out tanks and cars on the edge of town and dozens of half-destroyed abandoned houses. There was sand and dust everywhere and on most days the temperature came close to a hundred degrees. The people who lived there were desperately poor. Some worked as fishermen but most spent their days by the docks looking for work. My father was told that he could find a job here, and that if he was patient and earned enough money he could even buy his way out of the country on one of the boats.

  “On his first day in the town he walked down to the docks where hundreds of men were already waiting. Most of them were Sudanese, but there were plenty of migrants from different corners of Africa. The whole continent seemed to be at war and those who weren’t seemed to have converged on this town. Some of the men were busy unloading crates from the dozens of small freight ships in the harbor. Many more were idly standing by watching or sitting on their haunches in the shade. He had never seen anything like it, and his first instinct was to try to find a way to get out of there as fast as possible, but it had taken him weeks to get there and he was tired and almost out of money. He had only one small bag, which held a few days’ worth of clothes and a picture of himself at home that had been taken six weeks before he left.”

  The bell for the end of first period rang then. My students waited before gathering their bags and leaving; they were either compelled or baffled by what I had told them. For a brief moment I was afraid of knowing. Quickly, though, I looked straight ahead and I tried to see them all in one long glance before they were gone. They had always been just bodies to me, a prescribed number that came and went each day of the semester until they were replaced by others who would do the same. For a second, though, I saw them clearly—the deliberately rumpled hair of the boys and the neat, tidy composure of the girls in opposition. They were still in the making, each and every one of them. Somehow I had missed that. As it turned out, I had nothing to fear. None of them looked away or averted their gaze from mine, which I took as confirmation that I could continue.

  XV

  Normally at this time in the afternoon I would be standing by the windows in my classroom, watching as the four hundred fifty-six students of the academy stripped themselves free of their uniforms, ran their hands through their hair, and lit up cigarettes concealed in the bottom of their book bags. This daily ritual always had a calm, soothing effect on me—the lives played out on the corner, from my vantage point, having the somewhat surreal effect of feeling like a special, private performance of adolescent rituals being screened solely for my benefit. At their age I was so deeply invested in my own solitary world that not even my parents, with their relentless arguments and theatrics, could broach the shell I had formed around myself. I failed to notice most of what was happening around me, and later grew to believe that there was some culturally important film that I had failed to watch at the right age, and could therefore never fully understand. In college and even after college friends had shown me pictures of high-school dances, proms, pictures of their first cars and dates. I heard stories of having sex in bedrooms while parents stayed downstairs watching television, and other stories of suspe
nsions, runaways, and failing grades. I knew of course that these things had also happened during my own childhood, but they had no relation to my life at the time. My concerns back then were more private; they primarily involved finding new ways of numbing myself so nothing my parents, or by extension the outside world, did could touch me. Within two years of my leaving home most of what had occurred there had already begun to seem like a long-distant dream whose edges were funny and whose details had been washed away. And while it’s obviously true that you can never go back in time and make up for what was lost, you can at the very least spy on it to get a sense of where you might have fit in had you been around to play the game. We think our personalities are solid, definitive bodies, but watching the students at the academy has led me to believe otherwise. In fact, there is nothing so easily remade as our definitions of ourselves. I could, on good days, see myself as one of those boys who stood in the center of the crowds, confident, mildly amusing, and otherwise completely harmless, while on other days I saw myself as better suited to the fringes, with one or two piercings beyond convention, or to the groups that sat on the edge of the parking lot, scorning the spectacle in front of them as they would surely do later in their lives. To label what I did while standing at my classroom window an act of voyeurism is to miss the point entirely. Even the simplest of fools can watch and fantasize. It takes more, however, to really put yourself in the center of things, to watch yourself as you would have looked had you been that age at that time, as if you were witnessing different screen-test versions of yourself in which you were called upon to play all the various roles of adolescence, from the lonely child, to the popular socialite or star athlete, or simply just one of the general majority. For an hour or so on many afternoons I graded and judged my various performances, just as I graded my students’ papers and worksheets with a cold, unsparing, critical eye. At the end of the day I returned home and waited for Angela so I could tell her some of the things that I had discovered about myself. A common complaint of hers during the early months of our relationship was how little I revealed about my life before her.