Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

“At that time the government was busy arresting anyone who they thought might be a threat against them, and what’s funny of course is that the same thing is still true today. The prison in fact is still there, and the only reason why my father was able to get out of it was because an old high school friend of his had recently been appointed the minister of justice. He saw my father’s name on a long list of people who should potentially be executed, and while he couldn’t let him out of prison directly, he did get my father a temporary release while his case was reviewed. My father knew that as soon as he was out he would have to leave the country immediately, without telling anyone where he had gone.”

And while this part of the story wasn’t true to anything I or anyone I knew had ever experienced, it had an air of serendipitous salvation that struck me as being so unlikely that one had to believe it had occurred that way.

As soon as I resolved my students’ questions about what had happened to my father before he reached Sudan, I returned to the story of his still-burgeoning friendship with Abrahim. I told them more about how my father spent his afternoons with him learning to fit in at the dusty port town in which he had found himself, and how Abrahim taught him a few words of Arabic and how to make a proper greeting and departure when it came to strangers. While much of what I had said until then was a mix of fact and fiction, Abrahim had a real history I could draw from. Abrahim had played an active role in my father’s memory, and by extension mine as well. My father had mentioned him regularly, not as a part of normal conversation but as a casual aside that could come up at any time without warning. Unbidden, my father had often said that Abrahim was the only real friend he had ever had, and on several occasions he had credited him with saving his life. At other times my father had claimed that the world was full of crooks, and that after his experiences with a man named Abrahim in Sudan, he would never trust a Sudanese, Muslim, or African again.

I could never have asked him what exactly Abrahim had done for him, or what their relationship had been like, but I had never asked him anything to begin with, not about his past, his current intentions, or his plans for the future. By the time I was old enough to be genuinely curious about what type of man my father had been before I knew him, I had made up my mind already. He had been a bastard from birth and would remain one until he died. Anything beyond that was irrelevant. Often, however, I did think that it would have been better if Abrahim had let him die, or I remember wishing that at the very least Abrahim had managed to inflict some righteous form of punishment, one strong enough to be felt for decades, right up to and including the moment that had my father standing over me with his fist raised. Some children need heroes to right the imbalances in their world and to settle the scores that they can’t; I would have taken a greater villain any day of the week.

The Abrahim who came to life in my classroom was a far nobler man than the one I had previously imagined, and was more likely than not a more decent man than the one who had actually existed, and maybe even still did exist in the port town where my father had found him. This Abrahim had a flair for blunt yet nonetheless poetic statements, like the time he told my father that even the sand in the port town was of a quality inferior to the kind he had known in his home village, hundreds of kilometers west of here. “Everything here is shit,” he said. “Even the sand.” He had a soft, gentle voice that barely rose above a whisper, and unlike most of the other men in the town, was immaculate in his dress and perfect in his manners.

I relayed all this to my students in a slightly dispassionate voice only marginally different from the one I used to teach my standard English lessons. I wanted to give them the impression that this was a true history being told. And even though it was unnecessary, I began to support my story with dates and figures. “It was late June now and the rains were about to start. Ten to fifteen boats were pulling into the harbor every day, and soon, once the rains had passed, there would be three to four times more.

“My father went to great lengths to disguise his origins; he bought himself two white djellabas and grew a small beard. When asked where he was from, he said that he was a Muslim from Asmara, where barely even the imams spoke Arabic. Did you know what was happening right now in Asmara? he would then add. It was terrible. The communist Ethiopians were killing Muslims by the thousands, bombing their villages into ashes because this was what Moscow and most likely America wanted. That’s why he was here. He had barely escaped with his own life, he would add, thanks only to the mercy and grace of God.

“Abrahim got him a better-paying job as a porter on the docks. He told him on their third full day together, ‘You’re going to be my best investment yet. Everything I give to you I will get back tenfold.’ His words were cryptic and yet were said in a tone that made it impossible to be afraid. Abrahim came by almost every day to share a cup of tea shortly after evening prayers, when hundreds of individual trails of smoke from the campfires would be winding their way up into the sky along with the prayers that only minutes ago had preceded them. Abrahim would pinch and pull at my father’s waist as if he were a goat or a sheep and then say, ‘What do you expect, I have to check on the health of my investment. ’ Afterward, as he was leaving, he would always offer him the same simple piece of advice:

“‘Stretch, Yosef,’ he would yell out. ‘Stretch all the time until your body becomes as loose as a monkey’s.’

“At the docks he carried boxes from dawn until midday, when it became too hot to work. Before his shift at the teahouse, he’d take a nap under a tree and look at the sea and think about the water in front of him. Like most of the men he was thirsty all the time, and he was convinced that there was something irreparably cruel about a place that put water that could not be drunk in front of you. He imagined building a boat of his own, something simple but sturdy that could at the very least make its way across the Gulf into Saudi Arabia. And if that was to fail, then he’d stuff himself into a box, hurl himself into the water and drift until he reached a foreign shore or died trying. Even that, he thought, would be better than a lifetime of this.”

When I was afraid the story was moving too slowly, I moved the narrative back into the heart of the port town. I filled its streets and harbor as best I could with a sense of mystery and danger not unlike the type that could be found in old black-and-white movies with raincoat-clad men in foreign settings, or even in more contemporary accounts of Africa that never shied away from reveling in the continent’s darkness, both literal and imagined. The story needed intrigue and conspiracy and until then was wholly lacking in villains of any sort, and while I initially saw these sidelines as being at best only marginally related to the story I had begun, I quickly found that they had a purpose as well. Somewhere on the blank canvas on which parts of my father’s life was starting to take form, there had surely been moments in which he had been forced to take stock of the greater machinations occurring around him, and as I sat in my classroom early each morning, completely alone with the exception of the school’s janitor, I tried to imagine, without bias, what some of those moments might have been. He had throughout his life been an ardently politically minded man of the conspiratorial sort and was fond of accusing any government or head of state in the news as being full of lies. American politicians were all liars; the former Soviet Union was full of fucking liars, and all of Western Europe was bullshit. Ronald Reagan had been a hero almost everywhere in Illinois but in our house, except for those moments when the president was threatening war; the same was true of every president who followed, Republican and Democrat alike. The only heroes for him were those who had died, the Lincolns, Kings, and Kennedys, and even then I suspect it was only because in dying they proved what he had known all along about corruption, power, and the hidden forces who really governed things. He was fond of saying that he was certain to see some sort of coup take place in America within his lifetime. “People don’t think these things can happen,” he would say, not to me or to my mother, but to the television, whose early-evening news often sparked these proclamations. “Because they are stupid and don’t know better. But I know how governments really work.” And while I had always dismissed such statements as those of a paranoid man who had come to consider his experiences as vastly more important than they really were, I realized now that they must have had their origin somewhere, and here at last with my students I was starting to discover them.