Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

“It seems,” my father said to his wife as soon as she sat down in the car, “that you didn’t forget anything at all.”

Note the words, the first that my father said to his wife that morning, deliberate and in a different context almost polite. They’re important here. Of the tens of thousands of ways two people can turn against each other, my mother and father were faithful to a handful of words to provide that final spark, chief among them being “you didn’t.” As in, “You didn’t turn down the heat before you went to bed last night.” Or in later years, “You didn’t pay the rent last month,” and “You didn’t find a job, a career, a life, a home we can live in, a school to send our son to.” There was always a “you” who had failed to do something and another “you” who never failed to see that. Sometimes I think if they had never learned to use the second person singular their lives could have turned out so much better. They could have turned to that indifferent and guiltless third person the same way they later turned to faith and cardboard boxes to keep death at bay. They could have used it to endure the burden of layoffs, failed spelling tests, and the soaring cost of heating oil, but at least in this way they were like most Americans, saddled with a “you” to blame and the need to see someone hang.

As soon as my father said the last two words of that sentence, he felt the abrupt and dramatic shift in the air that precedes any violent confrontation. Something vibrated, buzzed. If there was a way to narrate it, he would have described it as the tiniest particles that make up the air we breathe becoming suddenly charged and electrified with a palpable life all their own. The world around us is alive, he would have said, with our emotions and thoughts, and the space between any two people contains them all. He had learned early in his life that before any violent gesture there is a moment when the act is born, not as something that can be seen or felt, but by the change it precipitates in the air. Once, at the port in Sudan on his way to work on the loading dock, he had almost rounded a bend on the other side of which a young man from Kenya or Tanzania (he could no longer be certain which) was being kicked to death by a group of men for reasons no one ever learned. They were all living there in makeshift boardinghouses — refugees and migrant workers — piled on high together, which sometimes made it hard for him to read the air for signs of disturbance. That day, however, Yosef had come to a corner where one goat stood tethered to a pole in the ground, and there, just as he was about to turn, he had felt something that told him to turn away in the other direction and wait until the news of whatever was happening reached him at lunch. He had felt the same thing before in minor and significant ways. His father had once nearly killed him when in a rage he had swung at him with a knife still in his hand. The blade had cut seamlessly through the air, dividing the space Yosef had been standing in less than a second earlier cleanly in two. He was only nine years old at the time, which made him old enough to remember what he had sensed in the moment between his calling his father a bastard and the knife swooshing through the air. At a rally of high school and college students in Addis twenty-four years later, he had been the first to duck as the crowd approached a wall of waiting soldiers, at least one of whom had his sights firmly fixed on him because he had stood in the front, tall and proud and far too arrogant, with a picture of Lenin raised high over his head. That soldier had caught Yosef from more than a yard away, and just as he began to curl his finger around the trigger, Yosef had felt the shift that told him death was near.

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.

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.