How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

“Why not move to somewhere else, huh? This is what you want to know. Why not move to somewhere else? What do you mean by that?”

  During which an immovable fury would begin to swell, a force that as a child I often pictured as taking the shape of a comically large wave in the midst of a vast blue ocean slowly growing larger as it headed toward the shore. Sometimes I would plug my ears closed with my fingers so I could better imagine the crash when it finally came.

  “That would make you happy, wouldn’t it? To see us with no home, so I could go begging like a dog for a new place to live.”

  All angry men are depressingly the same, and my father was no different. Once he reached the apogee of his fury he had to let loose; this was when things would begin to fly. My father was a spectacular thrower, with a world-class arm that in another version of his life could have landed him in the minors. He threw whatever was near, mainly within reason. On several occasions I watched his better judgment take hold of him as he picked up an object that was far too heavy (there was nothing too precious to throw in our house) or dangerous—a category that included a range of objects from chairs to glasses and cutlery, a copper vase, and every lamp we owned. A brief list of things that were eventually airborne: books, spoons, plastic cases full of pens, my school notebooks, markers, crayons, a pack of cigarettes that he found in my bedroom, bottles of liquid soap, multiple types of fruits—bananas, oranges, apples—and one flashlight. All flew, as did a couple of pillows, which my mother easily caught, causing both of us to spontaneously burst into laughter.

  The worst of these fights often left my mother plotting our escape the next day. Over the course of my childhood I must have missed out on at least three months’ worth of school because of these attempts at leaving. After my father left for work, my mother would wake me up by telling me to hurry and get dressed because we were going on a trip. I don’t remember the first time she tried this. I imagine she must have begun shortly after I was old enough to walk. I know that on later occasions I was excited at the prospect of going somewhere just with her, and at that age any distance greater than a few miles seemed epic in scale. We would walk half a mile together to the nearest bus stop, with me holding her left hand while she carried a suitcase in the other. By the time we arrived I was always exhausted and ready to go back home. We tried this several times a year, and for a long time afterward I considered my mother foolish for doing so. How could she see these attempts as anything more than desperate measures? I didn’t understand yet that these were all just trial runs. She was gauging my strength and courage and testing the waters to see how we would fare on a long journey from home together. By the time I was ten we were taking bus trips out of the city. Two years later we even spent several nights away from home, once in a motel just outside of Chicago, on another occasion in Springfield supposedly on our way to St. Louis. My mother spent most of that time asking me if I wasn’t afraid being so far away from home by myself.

  “Are you scared, Jonas?” she had asked me at least once each morning and again several times at night.

  I had wanted to tell her at the time that I wasn’t scared or alone. I had her with me, but I suspected even then that might not have been completely true. Only a part of her was actually in the motel room with us—the other part was imagining how far she could get if she was by herself. She was afraid that once she abandoned her husband, leaving her son was no longer such a stretch of the imagination; the longer she stayed away, the farther she traveled, the easier it became for her to picture herself leaving me in the care of strangers.

  A few years later and I was almost old enough to travel without her, but by then she had calculated that it was already too late. I was starting high school. She wouldn’t be able to pull me away whenever she wanted. I’d resist, even if I never could have lived with my father without her, and so it wasn’t fair, was it? All that time spent waiting for me to grow up, and now that I had, she felt more stuck than ever.

  The night of the accident my mother had only the slightest sense of what awaited her. They still had their moments back then. My father could surprise her with an offhand joke, and even though he was far more somber and withdrawn than she remembered, it wasn’t hard to find traces of the man she had met through a friend of her father’s at a café in Addis.

  “Yosef, come here. I want to introduce you to my dear friend’s daughter. A very bright girl. She was at the top of her class at St. Mary’s Academy,” was how Dr. Alemiyahu had brought them together.

  When he came over she could see that he styled himself after some brazen image of a modern American gigolo, with the wide butterfly-collared shirt that was in fashion with all the affluent boys or those who dreamed of someday being rich. She could still hear his country accent when he spoke.

  “It’s an extraordinary pleasure to meet you,” was how he introduced himself, using a florid language that would have been better suited to a woman three times her age and of a much greater stature. He pulled up a chair next to them and for the next hour spoke of nothing but politics.

  “We will finish this tired old government,” he said. “Crooks, liars, thieves. They take and take from the poor, and look at what’s happening. People are starving, and they are growing fat.”

  She knew the same speech could be heard in all the cafés and bars, not only in Addis but throughout Africa, where the dream of revolution was endemic and seemed to almost be a birthright for this generation of men. It was charming to hear him talk in such grand terms, even if he lacked the convictions that she had heard in others. If no revolution came, then he would find another way to make his money and he would be just as happy. Of course it would be easier if it did come, regardless of the sacrifices that would have to be made, since those on the front lines would be the first to benefit. For all his talk she was convinced that he was a safe bet, a man who caught hold of the changing winds and bent with them before he could be blown away.

  When they finally met again in America they did not talk about “old times.” They made no mention of their previous lives together in Addis—the two-day-long wedding or the home they rented after they were married; friends, cousins, landmarks were all equally forgotten, as were the details of what had happened to him after he left.

  “I went to Sudan,” was all he said when she asked him where he had disappeared to. “Then I took a boat to Europe.”

  “He never wanted to say more than that,” she said. “I asked him several times to tell me, but he refused. After a short time of knowing him, I didn’t care.”

  The present was insistent enough to demand their full attention, and yet there was the possibility that some of who they had been would find a way to reassert itself here in America, if not now, then perhaps soon, in another few months, six at the most, Mariam hoped.

  When my mother left the car with him inside it, she was weighing several options at once. If he died while she was gone, then she would be free to do as she pleased. She could find a job as a nurse, or even if need be as a maid until her son or daughter was born. There was the chance that her husband would survive as well and that she would be the one to rescue him. If she found a house or a passing car and got him “immediate medical attention,” as all the poison labels on the cleaning supplies in the house said to do, then for all the remaining days of his life he would stand in her debt. A man who owed a woman his life would have to treat her like a queen. He would have to be if not kind and gentle, then at the very least guarded and in full control of his emotions when it came to her—a sort of stoic knight whom you never really knew but who was pleasant to be with and in whose presence you always felt safe.

  She tucked her suitcase under her arm and prepared herself for the long lonely walk in front of her, confident that regardless of what happened or whom she found, she was certain to come out of this ahead.

  XXIV

  Angela and I parted at the train station in New York. She agreed to take the suitcase home while I headed north to the academy.

&nbs
p; “You don’t have to go home before going to class?” she asked me.

  I shook my head no.

  “I have everything I need in here,” I said, pointing to the satchel she had given me. There was enough evidence of neglect in that gesture to confirm all the doubts that Angela already had about my supposed future at the academy. We kissed twice on the same cheek, and held each other briefly afterward. Neither of us was comfortable making a scene in Penn Station, but every moment after we separated was going to divide us further, an understanding that we shared and which could have been expressed by saying we might not feel this close to each other ever again. I resisted the urge to apologize, and I think Angela did so as well. There would be time for that soon enough.

  I was the only teacher at the academy when I arrived. The school was closing early on Wednesday for Thanksgiving, but by tomorrow many of our students would have already left for extended weekend vacations to country homes up north. This was supposed to be the last day of the week for serious learning, but it was always tinged with too much holiday nostalgia and restlessness for the upcoming break to get much of anything done. While all the teachers pretended to treat it as a normal day, most had partly checked out and were worrying about their own upcoming holiday fates. In years past it had always been one of the days of the school year that I hated the most, with the distractions to my class almost too numerous to mention. This time, however, I wanted to take the day in, and before entering the academy, I spent a good fifteen minutes slowly walking in circles around it. There was the faint light of an early fall morning, but even more critical to the particular mood I was searching for was the slightly frigid breeze blowing in from across the Hudson River that felt as if it had been put in place that morning strictly to remind me of the value and vigor behind life. The wind came in steady bursts, shuffling thoroughly the dimly colored leaves that instead of turning colors would simply wither and fall to the ground. I didn’t want to think about the conversation that Angela and I had yesterday, much less worry about more abstract thoughts like whether we were going to survive it, or what we could do next to make things right between us. Nor did I want to think about what the dean had recently said to me, or what I had said to my students over the past two weeks. There were vast swaths of my life that I knew if I looked at closely I would come to regret, and I was certain that soon enough I was going to find the time to do that. I’d regret and wonder, and then do so again until all known ground was covered. This was certainly part of the cost that had to be paid. Before that was forfeited, however, I had this repose, and it was important to take it. I didn’t know when or if I would see the academy again, and I wanted to admire it briefly in its own right. An awkward blend of neo-Gothic and late Renaissance styles, it had undoubtedly come out looking all wrong, but time had healed those errors, so now one was struck by details such as the elaborate molding over the cornices that on any other building would have seemed like too much but on the academy appeared to be natural expressions of the school’s ethos. Time had also done justice to the stones. They seemed to have aged more rapidly on the small hill on which the school was built. They were a darker and more mottled shade of brown near the top, full of texture and slight gradations in color that made them perfect to stare at that morning.

  Half an hour after the Angelus rang I went inside. I had almost an hour until my class began—time that I would have previously happily spent in my classroom. Even though I had been at the academy for three years, I still didn’t know its hallways intimately. I rarely walked down corridors where I didn’t belong. As a result, there were entire floors of the school that I had barely seen and had taken almost no notice of. I wasn’t interested in attaching myself to them now, but I did want at the very least to be able to say that I had really seen all of the academy and not just the selected portions of it that I felt comfortable in, that because I was there it had made a full, proper impression on me. I had already spent enough years without noticing anything; I had walked for a long time with my eyes half closed. I wasn’t suddenly passionate about the hallways of the academy that morning, and made no effort to search for any distinguishing detail other than noting, as I had always done, that the walls were painted a terrible shade of yellow. Such efforts weren’t really necessary and couldn’t be sustained, regardless; if one was really looking, which was what I felt I was finally doing—looking, with neither judgment nor fear at what was around me—then that was enough to say you had truly been there.

  Thirty more minutes passed like that—time enough to cover the missing three floors. Once I was finished, groups of students started entering the building in steady droves. The hallways were soon flooded with their bodies; without knowing it, they took up more space than rightfully belonged to them. They constantly reached out to touch one another, affectionately or violently or both at the same time. Their limbs and voices were everywhere.

  It was with the full appreciation of this spectacle that I finally entered my classroom, a few minutes before the first bell was to ring. I was still waiting for it when the dean’s secretary came and knocked at the door. Most messages that came from the fourth floor were passed down through students and other teachers. It was rare to see Mrs. Adams anywhere other than in her office. My students knew as well as I did that something important was happening, even if they didn’t know what it was yet. To save me the embarrassment of being publicly summoned, Mrs. Adams was careful to whisper into my ear that the dean and the school’s president would be waiting for me upstairs once my class was finished. I thanked her in the kindest voice I could for the message. “Tell them I’ll be there,” I said, but a part of me doubted already if that was true. The whole exchange lasted only a matter of seconds—thirty to forty at most, and yet undoubtedly it changed the mood, enough so that when I turned and faced my students, it felt as if they had been replaced by a whole new class, one slightly more nervous and on edge than the previous.

  XXV

  Just what my mother hoped to find after she left the car was never clear. She claimed to have seen lights in the distance as soon as she stepped out, but it was never certain that she expected to reach them, much less find anyone there.

  “They weren’t very bright,” she said when I asked her to describe them, “but there was nothing else out there, so they were easy to see.”

  She spoke with a rehearsed conviction, her hands nearly but not quite gently folded on her lap, as if she was attempting to model to her long-lost son a form of good behavior and proper decorum that she had never quite practiced but was willing to pretend to do now. Her voice was perceptibly sterner and less nostalgic than it had otherwise been until then, and yet, despite her best efforts, I had a hard time believing her, both then and even more so now. Having walked along the side of the road for over an hour, I have seen lights only from the few passing cars that have gone by, helmed by overly cautious drivers who have turned their headlights on early even though dusk is still at least an hour away, because it’s true, you never know what you might find along these quieter back roads. There are no nearby towns, and all the houses are set far back from the road and are blocked by trees or bends that keep them hidden. It’s possible that thirty years ago there was more here. Plenty of homes since then I’m sure have been destroyed—sold off to make more room for farming or just simply abandoned as corn prices fell and small fortunes were lost, and so perhaps this is what my mother saw—a few twinkling porch lights on the horizon that may very well have been there, even if it was only because she wanted them to be.

  According to her, after she left the car she walked in the general direction of the scattered lights for close to an hour in search of help.

  “I didn’t know what else to do,” she told me, and at least in this regard, I was fully convinced. She would have never claimed to be at a loss for anything unless she really was. It wasn’t in her nature to do so.

  “I was afraid of sitting in the car by myself, and I saw the lights. I didn’t know how far away t
hey were. I thought I would reach them after just a few minutes, but it didn’t turn out that way.”

  To hear her tell it necessitated a belief that she began her search with the best of intentions, and that it was only because of an error in perception that things had gone wrong. The lights were too far. Distances were deceptive, especially in the dark, and given how empty this road generally is, particularly after dark, what else was she to do.

  She stopped at least once to put on a sweater.

  “It was much colder than I thought,” she said. “I was freezing once I left the car.”

  And again later to briefly catch her breath.

  “I didn’t have much energy, you know. I was pregnant with you and always tired.”

  She thought several times about turning around, or simply stopping where she was and giving up.

  “I almost went back,” she said. “I kept looking behind me expecting to see your father waving at me. He could do something like that. He used to do that all the time. He’d leave and then come right back a few minutes later or he’d get up in the middle of the night, but I’d always find him next to me in the morning. I thought if I walked a little bit farther he’d find a way to get the car back on the road and would come and find me. When I couldn’t see the car anymore, I wanted to stop and give up, but then I remembered that I had you to think about as well.”

  The first half hour was the hardest.

  “It was so dark out there you wouldn’t believe it. I kept thinking there was something hiding in the fields. I didn’t know about these things back then. No one had ever told me what happened in those places. The only thing we had ever really learned in school about America was that it was very rich and they treated the black people terribly. Maybe it sounds stupid to you, but my father had told me to be careful of strangers in America. He said they would kill you if they saw you. He knew about these things and I believed him.”