Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

“At least once or twice a week, Abrahim would pick my father up from his room in the evening and walk him down to the docks in order to explain to him how the port town really worked. The two would walk slowly, careful not to disturb anyone or draw attention to themselves, partly out of fear of being robbed. The port was an entirely different town come dark. The only lights came from the scattered corner fires around which groups of men were huddled. Despite the darkness, people moved around freely and in even greater numbers than during the day. It was as if a second city were buried underneath the first and were excavated each night. Women without veils could be spotted along some of the narrow back streets, and my father could smell roasting meat and strong liquor.

“It was down at the harbor, in the shadows cast by the bright lights that illuminated the piers, that Abrahim taught my father how to interpret the ships and cargo that were being quietly unloaded under military guard.

“‘The ships that you see at the far end of the port are all government controlled,’ he told him. ‘They carry one of two things: food or weapons. We don’t make either of them in Sudan. You may have noticed this. That doesn’t mean we don’t love them equally. Maybe the weapons more. Have you ever seen a hungry man with a gun? Of course not. Such things don’t exist. It’s like saying, have you ever seen a hungry lion? Of course not, because as soon as you did he wouldn’t be hungry anymore. The men here with guns are the same. Always stay away from that part of the dock. It’s run by a couple of generals and a colonel who report straight to the president. They can shoot, arrest, kill anyone they want. They’ve done it many times before. They are like gods in this little town, but with better cars. If a soldier sees you there’s nothing I can do to help. Not even God will save a fool.’

“‘The food is supposed to go to the south. It comes from America and Europe and from all over the world in great big sacks that say USA. Instead it goes straight to Khartoum with the weapons. And do you know why? Because it’s easier and cheaper to starve people to death than to shoot them. Bullets cost money. Soldiers cost money. Bombs cost a lot of money. Keeping all the food in a warehouse costs nothing. Even better you can sell it to buy more bullets and soldiers just in case what you have isn’t enough already. Everything destroying this country is happening right there.’

“In the course of several evenings Abrahim worked his way steadily down the line of boats docked in the harbor. His favorite ones, he said, were those near the end.

“‘You see the ships at the very end of the harbor? They are full of oil. Barrels and barrels of it. All of it comes from the Middle East, but we have plenty of it right here in Sudan. Enough to make us all rich, but the government doesn’t want us to know that. It’s true. If you don’t believe me, ask anyone. Who knows, though, maybe in ten or fifteen years things will change. Maybe then we will all be like the Saudis and those other Arabs, living in big houses with Mercedeses, rather than living here like rats. If that happens, believe me, you will wish you never left here.’

“On other late-night journeys to the port Abrahim described to my father how he planned to get him out. He showed him a group of newly arrived ships and told him that as far as my father was concerned, those were the most important boats in the world.

“‘And those ships over there, the ones all the way at the other end. Those are the ones you need to think about. Those are the ones that go to Europe. You know how you can tell? Look at the flags. You see that one there — with the black and gold? It goes all the way to Italy or Spain. Maybe even France. Some of the men who work on it are friends of mine. Business associates. You can trust them. They’re not like the rest of the people here who will disappear with your money.’

“After several visits to the pier at night, my father began to take seriously Abrahim’s advice about stretching. He worked his body into various controlled positions that he would hold for ten, fifteen, and eventually thirty minutes and then for as long as an hour. At night before he went to bed he practiced sitting with his legs crossed and then he stretched his back by curling himself into a ball. After four months he could hold that position for hours, which was precisely what Abrahim had told him he would need to do.

“‘The first few hours will be the hardest,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to be on the ship before it’s fully loaded and then you will have to stay completely hidden. Only once it’s far out to the sea will you be able to move.’

“My father thought about writing letters back to his family, but he didn’t know what to say. No one, not even his wife, knew for certain if he was alive, and until he was confident that he would remain so, he preferred to keep it that way. It was better than writing home and saying, ‘Hello. I miss you. I’m alive and well,’ when only the first half of that statement was certain to still be true by the time the letter arrived.”

For the next twenty-five miles, my father drove in what he believed to be the direction of the Illinois-Tennessee border, full of grand and heady thoughts. If asked what exactly he was thinking of, he would have said that he was remembering the names of every border he had crossed throughout his life, and that there was a time when he imagined that was precisely what he was going to do for the rest of his days, cross and recross different lines on a map until he had touched and memorized them all. The first time he had crossed a border had seemed like something of a miracle to him. The pickup truck he and a dozen other people had been hiding in had pulled over abruptly, and the driver, a tall, lanky man from one of the border tribes who was Ethiopian some days, Sudanese on others, walked over to the rear of the truck and threw the blue tarp off their backs. With the sun suddenly glaring down on them, he had declared, rather proudly in English: Welcome to Sudan. Those who hadn’t paid the full fare into town were pushed out of the truck, and for the first time in two days there were only two other people. My father suddenly had enough room to stretch his legs and stare freely out at a blinding midday sun that would soon scorch his lips and leave him faint and nearly dying for water. The people who got out of the truck gathered their belongings, if they had any, and headed off in separate directions. No one stopped to look back at what had been the border — a thin frayed line of rope stretched between two trees and guarded by two soldiers who were just as gaunt as the half-dead trees they were resting under for shade. Those departing simply walked off, a few alone, most in groups, in the direction of what appeared to be, and most likely was, little more than sand, dirt, and wild thorn brush, with a hamlet of straw-and-mud houses identical to the ones they had left behind in Ethiopia. My father felt like he couldn’t have been the only one who wanted to say it, but in the end no one did, perhaps because it was so obvious a thought, or perhaps because there was no simple way to express an idea with so many contradictions inherent in it — so much for so little, and yet still we’re left with nothing at all.

Every time he crossed a border since then he remembered that first one. Other crossings were grander in scale and offered more dramatic backdrops — Africa into Europe, Europe into America, and even Europe into Europe, but none bore the weight and meaning of the first. For all the expressed differences between the various nations of the world, none compared to the one made between living and dying. There were still countless ways for him to have been killed in Sudan, and he had already considered nearly all of them, from being thrown from the truck, to disease, to being on the wrong side of a bored government soldier, but the odds were in his favor and had been from the moment he crossed onto the other side of the rope. The rest since then — the languages, currencies, the darker and paler skins, the curlier versus straighter hair, and the lighter shades of eyes, along with the topography of certain cities and the customs people took for granted, from the times they ate their meals to the way they looked at you when you entered their stores clearly poorly dressed for the cold and more likely than not hungry — was just window dressing to him. People imagined their differences as they needed to, so let them if that was what was called for. He would have never said if you’ve seen one border you’ve seen them all. He respected and noted their differences. He had his favorites among them — the crossing from France into Italy along the Mediterranean coastline being the best of them all. You crossed only really one, maybe two, such borders in your life where the differences were infinitely greater than those between nations, and none at all if you were fortunate. It was these that you had to really note because nothing would ever compare to them again.