Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

I developed on those walks a habit of continuing the stories I had told in my class, although now the narrative was expanded to include anyone who came into my line of sight. I thought if I could imagine where all of the people I passed had come from and how they had gotten here, then I could add their stories to my own basket of origins. To the Pakistani man who sold me my first plate of overripe lamb curry I gave a slightly distinguished military career thwarted by nepotism, rumors of homosexuality, and a change in the presidential guard. To the Haitians on the other side of Prospect Park I threw in a mix of political persecution at the hands of one of the Docs and several large-scale natural disasters, a mix of hurricanes and mudslides, to balance the picture out. There were Orthodox Jews deep in Brooklyn who were descendants of pogrom survivors who had made their way here immediately after the end of the Cold War and never once looked back. And of course there were plenty of Africans scattered throughout the city, many of whom I knew, despite the reports of torture and imprisonment on their asylum application forms, were here just because they wanted to have an easier time getting on with their business plans and dreams, and who could blame them? If my fictional narratives lacked any veracity, it didn’t really matter. Whatever real histories any of the people I encountered had were forfeited and had been long before I came along, subsumed under a vastly grander narrative that had them grateful just to be here; it was only a matter of whether they knew that or not.

By the time I returned home Angela had finished eating dinner. Initially I explained my late evenings to her as being the inevitable consequence of new responsibilities, scheduled to begin next semester.

“I’m going to be staying late at the academy to plan the classes I want to teach,” I told her. “I want to do something on modern American poetry: William Carlos Williams and a few others, but it’s been so long since I last studied them that I have to get my grounding back first.”

I couldn’t stop there, however. It wasn’t enough just to say that I wanted to plan a perfect course for my students, or that I wanted to make the best impression possible on the other teachers when my syllabus was put up for review. These were only minor gains in a game in which, if I wasn’t exactly losing, I could hardly claim to have been ahead. There had to be a bigger ambition and a better ending than the one I had come up with so far, and gradually I supplied it.

“There’s more to it than just my classes,” I told Angela a few nights later as we were getting dressed for bed. “I’m thinking now that these classes could be part of a bigger research project I undertake someday. I mean of course it wouldn’t be exactly this, but it would be related. Modern American poetry, or maybe American poetry between 1930 and 1950, when it was great and inventive. Even if you forget guys like Pound and Eliot, it’s still amazing. I was thinking that with all the work I put into my classes now, I can use it later for a dissertation. And honestly, even more than that, I forgot how much I enjoyed this type of research. I think it’s time I started really considering what it’s going to take to go back to school, even if it’s only at night.”

When I finished, she kissed me once on the lips while holding both my cheeks together, a sign of tenderness that had been common in the early days of our relationship. For the working-class immigrant child and only daughter of a mother who even in the best of times was often missing, great forward strides were being made. More letters of significance were to be added to our portfolio, and when it was over, you’d have a doctor and a lawyer who together no bill or credit-rating agency could touch.

I backed up my story by bringing home books from the library that I pretended to stay up even later reading, as if the five to six hours I had supposedly spent after my class was over weren’t enough. The sight of me surrounded by a wall of four-inch-thick volumes of critical studies and anthologies set off a maternal instinct in Angela, prompting her to say one night, as I sat at the dining room table that doubled as a desk, that she was confident someday soon I would make a wonderful father.

“I can see it,” she said. “It’s so clear. You’ll be great.”

I tried to make up for my prolonged absences from home with small thoughtful gifts, the kind I had once freely offered to Angela in the early months of our relationship. I picked up strange, obscure books for her on my evening walks — a beginner’s guide to Sanskrit, a Jewish holiday cookbook — along with homemade hair pomades from the Caribbean quarters of Brooklyn, all of which she genuinely loved. There were pieces of hand-strung jewelry sold outside a subway station, and a few overly sweet desserts that she claimed reminded her of home. What hurt was seeing just how far these little acts went in restoring her confidence not only in our relationship but in herself as well. The two had been deteriorating along the same path and in equal proportion; it wasn’t until she nearly wept at the sight of one of the small gifts I had brought her that I understood that. In our rush to presumably better ourselves we had both missed what had otherwise always been obvious — that it often didn’t take much more than careful consideration of each other’s needs to secure a degree of happiness.

In normal times it was Angela who stayed up late reading through papers, and now it was my turn to do the same. After she turned off her light, I’d continue to sit well past midnight, occasionally reading from the large texts I’d placed in front of me. I came across a William Carlos Williams poem that I later tried to commit to memory but always forgot after the first three lines:

When I was younger

It was plain to me

I must make something of myself.

I read those words perhaps a dozen times, and after each time I thought that was exactly what I was doing, whether anyone could see it or not: I was making something of myself while I was still young, and even if that something was little more than an ever-growing lie, it was still something to which I could claim sole credit and responsibility. I was, however wrong it may have been, making a go of things.

As my narrative spilled into a third and then fourth day, my students began to ask questions, shy, almost discreet in nature at the beginning, bolder, and more impossible to answer by the end.

I was asked to fill in narrative gaps that I had deliberately overlooked. Why had my father left? And how had he gotten here? And what were the causes of all these wars that I had hinted at?

I tried to tell my students that these were entirely different stories on their own, worthy of their own proper telling, but the short-changed response didn’t hold. They looked at me as if I had cheated them out of something they felt entitled to, and I suppose that was indeed the case. I did the best I could and I trekked backward into a part of the story that until then I knew nothing about.

“Before my father came to Sudan,” I told them, “he was in a prison just outside the Ethiopian capital for one hundred and thirty-three days. That may not seem like a lot to you, but you have to understand just how long one hundred and thirty-three days is in a place like that. There are no showers or toilets, just hundreds of large concrete blocks behind a barbed-wire fence where people are crammed together so close that the only way to lie down is on top of someone else. Food, when and if it came, was scarce — mere scraps given to them by the guards. With so many people diseases were rampant, especially cholera and typhoid.