Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

“And where are you applying?”

“Columbia, and maybe Yale — it’s still close enough to New York to commute from sometimes.”

“Best of luck with that,” he said. “I’ll have to tell my son to look out for you. Too bad you won’t have him in your class.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s a shame.”

I would ask myself several months later if I didn’t know exactly what I was doing when I said all of that to Andrew, and whether or not his last words were a parting shot or were spoken sincerely. The best answer that I’ve been able to come up with for the former is that it doesn’t really matter whether or not I had examined the consequences beforehand — I said what I did out of necessity. I had met my challenge head-on.

Angela waited until we were on the street to ask me what had just happened. “Why did you say that?” she said.

“Say what?”

“Everything — about your job, graduate school. You never told me any of that.”

And now it was my chance to dare her to tell me I was lying. We stopped walking near the intersection of Thirty-first and Sixth Avenue, which at that hour was crowded with people rushing to get to the subway; we instantly became barriers to what had been a rapid flow of human traffic up and down the sidewalk. Several people bumped directly into us. One man told me to fucking move as he passed by, but I didn’t. I stood there and stared at Angela and waited to see if she had the courage to say that I had lied, or at the very least stretched the truth as she knew it, while we were upstairs talking to Andrew. Only after I was confident that she wouldn’t, and that we were both culpable, did I take her hand and begin walking toward the restaurant as if nothing had just happened. I was more convinced than ever that we were going to be okay.

When I returned to the academy the next day, I realized that my father’s story had already gone on longer than I had intended, and that soon it was going to have to come to an end. There was a feeling among my students that we were all engaged in a quiet and perhaps even subversive act of deception as we passed our days ignoring the school’s requirements for all first-year students. I noticed them lingering together in the hallway after class, convinced that they were privy to a private history that only they could understand. Even though large parts of what they had been told were fabricated, I took pride in feeling I had brought them together. While the rest of the teachers were fulfilling their mandate to prepare the students for what most assumed would be a bright, affluent future, my students indulged me by letting me pass off this story as being somehow relevant to their own lives. I told myself that it was for their sake that the story of my father’s life and near death in Sudan had to have a fittingly moving dénouement.

Four months and three weeks after my father arrived in the port town in Sudan, war broke out in the east. A garrison of soldiers stationed in a village five hundred miles away revolted, and with the help of the villagers began to take over vast swaths of territory in the name of forming an independent state for all the black tribes of the country. There were rumors of massacres on both sides. Who was responsible for the killing always depended on who was doing the talking. It was said that in one village all the young boys had been forced to dig graves for their parents and siblings before watching their executions. Afterward they were forced to join the army rebellion that still didn’t have a name.

Factions began to erupt all over the town. Older men who remembered the last war tended to favor the government since they had once been soldiers as well. Anyone who was born in the south of the country was ardently in favor of the rebels, and many vowed to join them if they ever came close.

Neighbors began to shutter themselves off from one another. Children were pulled from schools. The streets became increasingly deserted at night. Abrahim and my father stopped going to the port. “If fighting breaks out here,” Abrahim told him, “they’ll attack the port first. They’ll burn the local ships and try to take control of the government ones.”

Every day more soldiers arrived. There had always been soldiers in the town, but these new ones were different. They came from opposite corners of the country and spoke none of the local languages; what Arabic they spoke was difficult to understand. The senior commanders, who rode standing up in their jeeps, all wore bright gold sunglasses that covered half their face and made it difficult to see their eyes, but it was clear regardless that they were foreigners and had been brought here because they had no attachments to the town or its people.

Abrahim guided my father around the newly set up garrisons for his safety. He gave him a list of streets and neighborhoods to avoid. “Stay away from the post office,” he said. “Never go to the bank. The cafés that have a view of the port are no good as well.”

At night my father often heard sporadic gunfire mixed in with the sound of dogs howling. If the war came closer, soon there would be only minor differences between shooting a dog and shooting a man. He was determined not to be there for that. Every day he pleaded with Abrahim to help him find a way out.

“I have plenty of money saved,” he said, even though it was a lie. If there was an honest exit, he would find a way to pay for it. Abrahim’s response was always the same. “A man who has no patience here is better off in Hell.”

Two weeks after the first stories of the rebellion appeared, there was talk in the market of a mile-long convoy of jeeps heading toward the town. The rebels were advancing and would be there by the end of the afternoon. They would spare no one. They would attack only the soldiers. They would be greeted as liberators. They were like animals and should be treated as such. Within hours the rumors had swirled the town into a frenzy. Soldiers were on the move in every street, but it was hard to tell if they were running or taking up defensive positions. The convoy was now two miles long and there were possible tanks in the background. A general from the army had defected to the rebels and had moved his troops with him. Even the capital, Khartoum, was no longer safe and possibly even under attack at that moment.

My father watched as the women who lived in all the nearby houses folded their belongings into bags and suitcases and made for the road with their children at their side or strapped to their backs. Where are they going? he wondered. They have the sea on one side and a desert on the other.

Abrahim found him during lunch resting under his usual tree. They walked back to the café where my father had once worked. There was no one to serve them tea.

“It’s very busy,” Abrahim said. “Maybe we should come back when it’s less crowded?”

“Give me a few minutes,” my father said. “I know the owner. Let me try to find us a table.”

It was the first joke he had made in months, and as if to acknowledge that, neither one said anything for a few seconds, long enough for my father to wonder if he shouldn’t try to offer Abrahim tea after all.

“Are you leaving?” my father finally asked him.

“I already have,” Abrahim said. “A long time ago. My entire family is in Khartoum. I’m just waiting for my body to join them.”

Abrahim didn’t ask my father if he was planning on leaving. He knew my father had nowhere to go — no relations in neighboring villages he could turn to. To be a refugee once was hard enough — you abandon home and family in order to start all over again in a foreign country with nothing. To be one again, before you had even settled, was pointless. After that, one had to accept that you could never run far enough; God or the devil would always find you.