Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

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.

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.