Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

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 take 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.