How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

  Finally she saw a car approaching, perhaps a mile or so away. Its headlights were far brighter than those of the houses that she claimed to have seen. While for most the sight of an approaching car would be more than welcome, my mother, after a fleeting burst of relief, was confronted by a host of doubts and worries.

  “I know I should have been relieved,” she said. “But I wasn’t. I think maybe for a few seconds there I was. That didn’t last long, though.”

  When the car was less than a half-mile away, she was certain that she had to get out of its line of sight.

  “There was a tree not too far away on the other side of the road. I remember that. I thought of hiding there. But then I was afraid they would see me running across the street.”

  And so she made a quick, impetuous decision to duck back into the ditch that ran along the side of the road. She scurried all the way to the bottom for safety, lying flat against the embankment to make sure no one could see her.

  “It doesn’t make sense to you now why I would do that. I know that. It was different at the time, though. I didn’t know who was in that car. I kept thinking that maybe they were going to try to hit me with it. How did I know that they wouldn’t? What if I had stood in the road and they crashed right into me. We would both be dead then. There were so many things I didn’t know back then. I was only twenty-eight. I never used to be afraid of anything, but it was completely different once we came here. I was always afraid. I used to hate to leave the house by myself. What if someone yelled at me or hit me? I never knew what was going to happen. A little boy with red hair once swore at me. I think he called me dirty. Or something like that. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I was very afraid of him, even though he was just a boy. What could he have done to me? I don’t know. You don’t know what that feels like. To be afraid of everything, even children. My English wasn’t very good then. Most people were very nice and they would say, ‘Oh, where are you from?’ but not everyone was like that. Some people would get very angry, and it wasn’t just at me. It was at your father as well. The people in that car could have done anything they wanted to me and no one would have known. I was afraid of getting lost and disappearing all the time.”

  She hid in the ditch by the side of the road until the headlights came and then passed. For good measure, she waited at least five more minutes to make sure they were completely out of sight before she even attempted to stand up again. Once she did she found that she was tired and nauseous and more comfortable lying on the ground.

  She staked out a space next to a newly erected wooden fence, on the other side of which were hundreds of acres of more farmland. Today, this is all part of the same estate, everything that stretches from where my mother sat down to rest to the place where the accident occurred belonging to one company known for its cereal. The estate continues on for another two miles before breaking open to allow for a now half-dead small town.

  The barbed wire along the fence is surely new. My mother made no mention of it and would have been less likely to stay had it been here then. She always thought Americans were too territorial. “All those fences and flags,” she had once said, seeing very little difference between the two. Take the barbed wire away and it’s easy to see the appeal in resting here. The road remains relatively untrafficked even today and were it not for the private property markers along the border I’d be inclined to do the same as her. She, for her part, did the best she could to make herself comfortable, pulling out another sweater from her valise to use as a blanket around her shoulders and a second to rest her head against. She leaned back against the fence and drew her knees into her chest for warmth. She said she had never felt so tired.

  “It was like I had walked a hundred miles,” she said. “I was so exhausted. Every part of me was tired.”

  She drifted off to sleep. For the first time she had a dream of a house that resembled the one she had grown up in, except larger and in this version dressed in the same type of furniture she had picked out for herself from the catalogues—all of it sleek and dark with smooth, clean lines that nearly hugged the floor. When she woke up a few minutes later, she was convinced that her husband had finally gone ahead and died without her.

  “I was sure of it,” she said. “I don’t remember why anymore. Maybe it was because of the dream. He wasn’t in it. Maybe there was no reason. Maybe it was just because I thought it would be better for the both of us if he had.”

  I was struck by that sudden hint of concern for my father. Never once before had she made any mention of how he suffered or how deeply miserable they were when together.

  “Was he that unhappy?” I asked her.

  She looked at me briefly stunned, as if I had spoken to her in a language similar to the ones she knew in form and tone and yet still completely incomprehensible.

  “I don’t mean him,” she said. “I mean you and me. Better for us.”

  She leaned in at that moment and almost touched her hands to mine, but pulled back before she could complete the gesture; she didn’t know if I was fully on her side, and was afraid of finding out that I wasn’t.

  It was with that thought of her husband already dead that she picked herself up and continued her walk along the road, this time no longer worried about who she would or would not find to rescue her. Suddenly it seemed to her as if there was nothing out there that she had to fear, neither cars nor man, and that if called upon to do so, she could walks for miles, straight through the night and into the morning.

  “A great weight,” she said, “had been lifted off my shoulders.”

  Night in the rural Midwest, miles away from any large towns, can be a remarkable thing precisely because there is often so little to behold. There are plenty of stars, but a greater number could always be found in other remote corners of the country. I’ve seen more of them for example on a single clear night outside of Boston than I’ve ever seen here, and I’ve stared up in obligatory wonder. Still, that doesn’t mean that I loved this place any less. The insects, whether they’re cicadas or crickets, are going at it right now, and their pulsing, whirring hum more than makes up for what the sky may lack. They haven’t quite yet reached their full force, and won’t until hours after the sun has completely set, their sound more of a persistent hum than the full-fledged chorus that it will soon be. My mother was kept in their company for the last thirty minutes of her walk, and I’d like to think that she also reveled in their sound, even if she made no direct mention of them. There isn’t much time left for her to enjoy these things. When the next set of lights finally approached, they obviously came with her and my father in mind. Someone, most likely the car that had passed, had spotted the tail end of the red Monte Carlo sticking out of the ditch and had done the right thing and called for help, and now help was finally coming, bringing with it a cavalcade of lights and sirens. Very soon they are going to be the only things that she can hear. The rest will fade into the background, and for the next eighteen-odd years she’ll spend much of her solitary time remembering how it felt to have briefly wandered even one small piece of earth with absolutely nothing and no one at all to fear.

  “It was lovely,” she said when I asked her what those last minutes before she was picked up by a policeman and returned to the scene of the accident had been like. “Really, absolutely lovely. I can say that, can’t I?”

  “Of course,” I told her. “You can say whatever you like.”

  XXVI

  I began my final lesson from where I had left off, with my father and Abrahim walking to the pier on their last morning together. They didn’t say much along the way, but every now and then a few words slipped out. Abrahim had important ideas that he wanted to express, but he had never known the exact words for them in any language. If he could have, he would have grabbed my father firmly by the wrist and held him there until he was certain that he understood just how much he depended on him and how much he had begun to hate him for that. To pin so much hope to a man seemed cruel and stupid in e
qual parts. My father meanwhile was desperate to get away. He was terrified of boarding the ship, but he was more frightened of Abrahim’s desire. A man could easily be crushed under an obligation like that, and he felt himself already being weighed down, as if his shoulders were slowly being loaded with stones as he waded into water.

  When they reached the pier Abrahim pointed to the last of three boats docked in the harbor.

  “It’s that one,” he said. “The one with the blue hull.”

  My father stared at the boat for a long time and tried to imagine what it would be like to be buried inside it, first for an hour and then for a day. He didn’t have the courage to imagine anything longer. The boat was old, but almost everything in the town was old. The cars, the tin roofs on most of the homes, the fabric that the men, women, and children wrapped themselves in, and then the very same men, women, and children themselves—all were engaged in a long-running state of gradual decay, one that may very well have been sustainable for as long as or perhaps even longer than a normal lifetime, as if the key to survival wasn’t living well but dying slowly, in such gradual increments that actual death would bypass you all together.

  There was a tall, light-skinned man at the end of the docks. He was from one of the Arab tribes in the north. Such men were common in town. They controlled most of its business and politics and had done so for centuries. They were traders, merchants, and sold anything or anyone. The effect was noticeable. They held themselves at a slight remove from other men, spotless white or, on occasion, pastel-colored robes that proved immune to the dust that covered every inch of the town.

  “He’s arranged everything,” Abrahim said. “That man over there.”

  My father tried to make out his face from where they were standing, but the man seemed to understand that they were talking about him and kept his head turned slightly away. The only feature that my father could make out was that of a rather abnormally long and narrow nose, a feature that seemed almost predatory in nature.

  Abrahim handed my father a slip of yellow legal paper on which he had written something in Arabic. He handed him another piece of paper with an address and phone number in Khartoum, the capital. He understood that the first was for the man standing near the pier and the latter for him, but he wasn’t sure as to what to do with either. Did he fold them into his pockets or did he clench them tightly in his hands? He would have liked for Abrahim to say something kind and reassuring to him. He wanted him to say, “Have a safe journey,” or “Don’t worry. You’re going to be fine,” but he knew that he could have stood there for years and no such false reassurances would have ever come.

  “Don’t keep him waiting,” Abrahim said. “Give him the note and the rest of your money. And do whatever he tells you.”

  My father walked away from Abrahim wishing that he had never come here. He looked around him and saw the same scene that he had seen every day—a long, poorly organized parade of men, mostly black with a few occasional shades of light brown, stripped down to their barest piece of clothing and almost always loaded with something on their backs. There were herds of donkeys who fared only a little worse than those crowding the one unpaved road that ran adjacent to the harbor, with a sun that shone down harshly on all of them. He tried to get a read on the man’s face as he approached him, to see if there were any signs of hidden malice that could be detected in his eyes or smile, but the man kept his head turned away from him so that the only thing my father could see were the folds in the blue head scarf the man was wearing as they trembled in the breeze.

  When he was halfway to the ship, Abrahim called out to him: “I’ll be waiting to hear from you soon,” and my father knew that was the last time he would ever hear his voice.

  My father handed over the slip of paper Abrahim had given him. He couldn’t read what was written on it and was worried that it might say any one of a dozen different things, from “treat this man well” to “take his money and do whatever you want with him.” He told himself that he was a fool for being so trusting and that there was nothing else he could do but be a fool; it was too late already, events had been set in motion and the only thing was to silently follow the man up the gangplank and into the boat, where they entered unmolested, as if the crew had either failed to notice them or had been expecting them the whole time.

  The man pointed to a group of small storage slots near the stern of the boat that were used for holding the more delicate cargo. These crates were usually unloaded last and he had often seen people waiting at the docks for hours to receive them. They always bore the stamp of a Western country and carried their instructions in a foreign language—Cuidado; Fragile. He had unloaded several such crates himself recently, and while he had never known their actual contents, he had tried to guess what was inside: cartons of powdered milk, a television or stereo, vodka, scotch, Ethiopian coffee, soft blankets, clean water, hundreds of new shoes and shirts and underwear, anything that he was missing or knew he would never have he imagined arriving in those boxes.

  There was a square hole just large enough for my father to fit into if he pulled his knees up to his chest. He understood this was where he was supposed to go and yet he naturally hesitated, sizing up the dimensions just as he had once sized up the crates he had helped unload. He considered its angles and its depth and then imagined all the ways in which he could and could not move inside it. He could lean his body slightly to the side and rest his head against the wall when he needed to sleep. He could cross his legs. He could not raise his elbows above his head.

  My father felt the man’s hand around his neck pushing him toward the crate. His father had often done the same thing to him as a child, and also to a goat or a sheep when it was being led into the compound to be slaughtered. He wanted to tell the man that he was prepared to enter on his own and in fact had been preparing to do so for months now, but he wouldn’t have been understood, so my father let himself be led. He crawled in on his knees, which was not how he would have liked to enter. Headfirst was the way to go, but it was too late now. In a final humiliating gesture, the man shoved him with his foot, stuffing him inside so quickly that his legs and arms collapsed around him. He had just enough time to arrange himself before the man sealed the entrance shut with a wooden door that was resting nearby.

  Before getting on the boat, my father had made a list of things to think about in order to get through the journey. In the preceding weeks he had come up with several items he recorded in his head by repeating them over and over until he fell asleep. They were filed away under topic headings such as: The Place Where I Was Born, Plans for the Future, and Important Words in English. He wasn’t sure if he should turn to them now or wait until the boat was out of the harbor. The darkness inside the box was startling, but it wasn’t yet complete. Light still filtered in through the entrance and continued to do so until the hold was closed and the boat began to pull away from the shore. He remembered that as a child he had often been afraid of the dark, a foolish, almost impossible thing for a country boy, but there it was. Of the vast extended family that lived around him, his mother was the only one who never mocked him for this, and even though he would have liked to have saved her image for later in the journey, at a point when he was far off at sea, he let himself think about her now. He saw her as she looked shortly before she died. She had been a large woman, but at that point there wasn’t much left of her. Her hair hadn’t gone gray yet, but it had been cut short on the advice of a cousin who had dreamed that the illness attacking her body was buried somewhere in her head and needed a way out. Desperate, she had it cut completely off, which had made her look even younger than her thirty-odd years. This was the image he had of his mother in an almost doll-like state just two months before she died, and while he would have liked to have a better memory of her, he settled for the one he’d been given and closed his eyes to concentrate on it. It would be some minutes before he noticed the engine churning as the ship pulled up its anchors and slowly headed out to sea.
>
  When I reached this point, I knew it was the last thing I was going to say to my class. The bell rang, and as when I had first begun this story, there were a good ten to fifteen seconds when no one in the classroom moved. My students, for all their considerable wealth and privilege, were still at that age where they believed that the world was a fascinating, remarkable place, worthy of curious inquiry and close scrutiny, and I’d like to think that I had reminded them of that. Soon enough they will grow out of that and concern themselves with the things that were the most immediately relevant to their own lives. They will opt for the domestic and local news any day of the week; they will form rigid political alliances and dogmatic convictions that place them in good standing with one group or another, but at that time these things had yet to pass.

  Eventually one bag was picked up off the floor, then twenty-eight others joined in. Most of my students waved or nodded their heads as they left the room, and there was a part of me that wanted to call them back to their seats and tell them that the story wasn’t quite finished yet. Getting out of Sudan was only the beginning; there was still much more ahead. Sometimes in my imagination, that is exactly what I tell them. I pick up where I left off, and go on to describe how, despite all appearances, my father did not actually make it off that boat alive. He arrived in Europe just as Abrahim had promised he would, but an important part of him had died during the journey, somewhere in the final three days when he was reduced to drinking his urine for water and could no longer feel his hands or feet and was certain that if death came to him he would welcome it without the slightest hesitation. He spent six months afterward in a detention camp on an island off the coast of Italy. He was surprised to find that there were plenty of other men like him there, from every possible corner of Africa, and that many had fared worse than him. He heard stories of men who had died trying to make a similar voyage: who had suffocated or been thrown overboard alive. My father couldn’t bring himself to pity them. Contrary to what Abrahim had told him, there was nothing remotely heavenly about where he was held: one large whitewashed room with cots every ten inches and bars over the windows. He had a hard time understanding most of what the guards said. They often yelled at him and the other prisoners. The guards spat at their feet and made vague, animal sounds when they looked at them confused. He quickly learned a few words in Italian and was mocked viciously the first time he used them. He was once forced to repeat a single phrase over and over to each new guard who arrived. When he tried to refuse, his first meal of the day, a plate of cold dried meat and stale bread, was taken away from him. “Speak,” the guards commanded, and he did so dozens of times in the course of several days even though there was no humor left in it for anyone.