Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

“‘They’ll take one look at you and know you’re not from here,’ he told him, ‘and then, if you’re lucky, they’ll put you in jail, but more likely they’ll simply beat you and take everything you have.’

“After a week out there he heard footsteps near his head just as he was falling asleep. He kept a large rock next to him and before opening his eyes quickly slid one hand behind his back to where he kept it hidden. When he opened his eyes and looked up he saw three men standing nearby, their backs all slightly turned to him, so that he couldn’t see any of their faces, just their long white djellabas, dirty but not nearly as filthy as some of the others that he had recently seen. As he watched, one of the men lifted his hands into the air slowly, as if he were struggling to pass something over his head. He recited a prayer that my father was already familiar with. He had heard it several times on his way to Sudan and on multiple occasions in Ethiopia at the homes of Muslim friends. The man repeated it a second and then a third time, and when he was finished, the two other men who bent down and picked up what at first appeared to be a sack of grain but which he realized, a second later, was clearly a body. The man had been lying there when my father went to sleep. There had been nothing to indicate that he was dead or even injured, which somehow made it even worse to him. He stayed awake for the rest of that night and the next day hardly had enough strength to get through work. When my father told Abrahim later that evening, his response was a simple one: ‘Don’t think about it too much,’ he told him. ‘It’s easy to die around here and have no one notice.’

“He promised to find my father a better place to sleep, and the next day he did. He found my father preparing his mat near his stretch of the harbor and told him to follow him. ‘I have a surprise for you,’ he said.

“The owner of the boardinghouse where he was going to stay from now on was a business associate of Abrahim’s. ‘We’ve worked together many times over the years,’ he told my father, although he never explained what they did. When my father finally asked him how he could repay his kindness, Abrahim waved the question away.

“‘Don’t worry,’ he told him. ‘You can do something for me later.’”

When my mother came out of the diner she found, to her great and unending surprise, that she was not only relieved but grateful to see the 1971 red Monte Carlo waiting for her exactly where she had last seen it, a few feet to the right of the diner’s entrance, in a space that wasn’t reserved for cars but that was occupied by one nonetheless. For the first time she sensed that she could have stayed inside that restaurant for hours — ordered food for one or two meals, lingered over dessert, and that still she could have come outside and found that car waiting for her in exactly the same spot as it stood in now — a red rock of unwavering conviction in which feet were firmly planted and never budged. She admired this fact about her husband. His persistent, blind, nearly doglike devotion to certain principles. Her father had tried to tell her before she got married that such men were better suited to plowing fields like donkeys than raising families, but she rejected that judgment on the grounds that their world was already changing fast enough, and that it was better to be tied to a donkey than to nothing at all.

She opened the passenger door and took her seat next to her husband, placing her hand gently on top of his. Even though the car was an automatic he continued to drive with his hand next to the emergency brake, an imaginary gearshift that gave him a greater sense of control over his actions.

“Thank you for stopping,” she said.

My father was never an exceptionally cruel man, despite so much of what he said and did in his life, and here is further proof of that. A simple thank-you set his heart briefly racing, although he wouldn’t have known how to say in which direction. Let me explain it like this. No one thanked Yosef Woldemariam for anything. Not his boss at work and not any of the casual strangers he encountered day in and day out. He heard dozens of expressions of gratitude uttered every day, at restaurants where he ate, at the gas stations he visited, but none ever seemed to be directed at him. He considered himself nearly invisible in that regard, a man who, even in his most decent and polite gestures, passed through unnoticed, and so when my mother said, “Thank you,” merely for pulling the car off the road so she could use the restroom, he saw himself as briefly belonging to that legion of polite, good-natured men whose smallest act of consideration never went unnoticed, whose wives, children, and coworkers fell over themselves to compliment on the quality of their manners. He armed himself with those two simple words. He donned them like a knight, confident in the knowledge that at least for now there were few things that could touch him. He lifted his hand off the imaginary gear stick, slid the car into reverse, and headed toward the highway, the few rural clapboard houses nearby, long since decayed, slipping away into the background along with their acres of untended fields and the bright neon signs of the gas stations. A song came to him — one that he hadn’t heard or thought of in years. It was one of Mahmoud’s more mournful ballads — a song dedicated to love lost, a favorite not only of his father’s but of all the young men he had once known in Addis who despite their seemingly carefree, braggart ways when it came to women were all looking to be coddled like children. He wondered briefly what had happened to them, and for a few seconds he took the risk of remembering some of their faces, bodiless of course, just as they would have been had he seen them hanging framed on a wall in their mother’s home now that they were dead or missing. He began to whistle the song, slowly at first, and then with greater confidence, the tune swelling and slowly filling the car with a melancholic tone that brought a smile to the face of anyone who heard it.

He whistled louder and with more passion than before. He was wonderful at it, and he knew that as well. His voice was never made for singing — too coarse around the edges — but when it came to whistling he could sing like a bird, and he did precisely that, until his lungs began to ache and all four verses of the song had been completed. He turned to look at his wife, vaguely aware as he was doing so that he had already passed the exit for the highway and was on a road that seemed to lead in the wrong direction. She was watching him too, and not out of the corner of her eye as she normally did but head-on, with something resembling a tear swelling in her eye for this man she hardly understood, much less loved, but who she knew would try to hold on to her with every last trembling breath.

Less than an hour later they were completely lost. The two-lane country road they had been driving on had forked, and not knowing what else to do my father turned and followed another. He suspected that at any moment now they would come back upon the highway, see its glimmering headlight-lit lanes from either above or from the side, but no such thing occurred and all that was around them were corn and soy fields dotted from time to time by a solitary oak tree that served as a resting spot for a group of cows who sat indolent underneath them. For now neither of them was particularly worried. You could even say both were slightly relieved to have been freed from the straight and narrow pressure of highway driving, which allowed little time to slow down. Here my father drove with only one hand on the steering wheel, his body slightly slumped as if he could fall asleep at any moment, if only it weren’t for this business of driving.