Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

Poor man, she thought. Without even knowing it he had become something else. If he died now it wouldn’t be a stretch to think that it was for the second time. She considered what would happen if she ran away in search of help. By all measures this was the right thing to do, and she knew that if she succeeded she could be branded a hero for helping to save her husband’s life. He could say nothing to her then, and if asked to explain what had happened she could say it was an accident, or that she had acted quickly in fear of her own life. There would be no one to blame, and all, at least in her mind, would be equal.

There was also a suitcase with enough clothes to last a few weeks, or to comfortably make it through the night sitting quietly right here with her husband until he completed his last breath.

Before opening the passenger-side door, she told herself two things: I’m going to go search for help, and I should be prepared in case I never find it. She reached behind her and grabbed the smallest of the two valises, the one that would be necessary to get through the night somewhere else, and then from her husband’s side pocket his wallet, which was easily accessible because for the first time in its short life it was bulging with money. She didn’t know yet how these things worked in this country. If you could walk into a hospital and say, “Here is my husband. Do something to save him.” Or if first you have to be cautious and make some sort of down payment to prove that you are serious and do indeed want this man to live. If she found someone on the road, she could say, “Here, take this money and get us some help,” and more likely than not the person would, because that is what money does. It commands and dictates in a way no earnest words can. And if there was none of that, if there was only her walking at night by herself for hours along the side of the road, then she could do so until she came to a small-town motel, or maybe even a boardinghouse, and with the money in her pocket she could say, “Please, I’d like to have a room for the night. My husband has just died.” And because of her money and her loss, she would be granted a room for as long as she liked.

She tried not to think of all the options at once but there they were. She opened the door and got out slowly, one careful foot at a time since she was standing at an angle and her balance was uneven, and there was the risk that the weight of her suitcase would tip her too far to one side and send her tumbling back down into the ditch. She was surprised to find how cold it had gotten, as if all the warmth accumulated over the course of the day had been casually abandoned, let loose with no regard for the people who lived here, and instead been replaced with a wide half-moon that seemed impossibly large rising directly in front of her. As a final consolation before closing the door, she whispered into the car, suddenly convinced that her husband could hear her, “Don’t worry, I’ll be right back,” in English, which was the language she preferred to use when she was uncertain if what she was saying was true.

As soon as my father’s ship was ready to set sail, stories about him began circulating freely around the academy. I had snippets of my own narrative played back to me in a slightly distorted form — in these versions the story took place in the Congo amid famine. By Thursday it was said that my father had been in multiple wars across Africa. Another claimed that he had lived through a forgotten genocide, one in which tens of thousands were killed in a single day. Some wondered whether he had also been in Rwanda, or in Darfur, where such things were commonly known to occur.

Across the academy, huge tides of sympathy were mounting for my dead father and me. Students I had never spoken to, even when they were in my class, now said hello to me when they saw me in the hallway. Standing outside my classroom, before or after the bell had rung, I was a figure to consider, and at least for a few days no one passed me without a flicker of recognition. There were smiles for me everywhere I went, all because I had brought directly to their door a tragedy that finally outstripped anything my students could have personally hoped to experience.

Once the story had reached that size, I knew it was only a matter of time before I was called in to account for what I had been teaching my students. I expected some form of mildly stern lecture from the dean reminding me of the school’s principles and obligations not only to the students, but also to the parents who were spending a substantial amount of money to send their children here. My job was to teach freshman English, not African history. Once that was addressed, I expected as well that he would want to know how much of what I had told them was true, given the gross exaggerations that he must have heard, and what I was going to do to set the record straight, for my students’ benefit as much as my own.

On Friday the dean caught me in the hallway just as I was preparing to enter my classroom. There was nothing threatening or angry in his voice. He simply said, “Come and see me in my office when your class is over.”

That day I decided to skip the story and return to my usual syllabus. I said to my students, “We have some work to catch up on today. Here are the assignments from last week. I want you to work on them quietly.” If they groaned or mumbled something, I didn’t hear it, and could have hardly cared. When class was over, I walked slowly up the three flights of stairs that led to the dean’s office. He was waiting for me with the door open. He motioned with his hand for me to take the one seat opposite him. The other chairs in the room had been deliberately pushed to the side to make for a more direct conversation. His wide and slightly awkward body was pitched over the large wooden desk far enough so that it might have made it difficult for him to breathe. As soon as I sat down, he leaned back and exhaled.

“How was class today?” he asked me.

“Fine,” I told him. “Nothing exceptional.”

“I’ve heard some of the stories about your father that you’ve been telling your students,” he said, and at that point I expected his tone to reveal at least a hint of anger at what I had done, but there wasn’t even a dramatic folding of the arms.

“It’s very interesting,” he said. “What I’ve heard, at least. Awful, of course, as well. No one should have to live through anything even remotely like that, which leads me to ask: How much of what they’re saying is true?”

“Almost none of it,” I told him. I was ready to admit that my students weren’t the only ones who had exaggerated the truth. I had made up most of what I had told them — the late nights at the port, and the story of an invading rebel army storming across the desert. More likely than not, nothing he had heard in the hallways was true. Had he called me a liar directly I would have been braced for that, but before I could say anything further he gave me a sly, almost sarcastic smile. The facts in this case didn’t concern him at all.

“Well, regardless of that,” he said, “it’s good to hear them talking about important things. So much of what I hear from them are shallow, silly rumors. Who said what to whom. That sort of thing. They can sort out what’s true for themselves later.”

And that was all it came down to: I had given my students something to think about it, and whether what they heard from me had any relationship to reality hardly mattered; real or not, it was all imaginary for them. That death was involved only made the story more compelling. Had I taken that away I could have easily imagined a certain level of outrage at my distortion of history and geography, but there was just enough suffering to claim that neither really mattered.