Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

“Are you scared, Jonas?” she had asked me at least once each morning and again several times at night.

I had wanted to tell her at the time that I wasn’t scared or alone. I had her with me, but I suspected even then that might not have been completely true. Only a part of her was actually in the motel room with us — the other part was imagining how far she could get if she was by herself. She was afraid that once she abandoned her husband, leaving her son was no longer such a stretch of the imagination; the longer she stayed away, the farther she traveled, the easier it became for her to picture herself leaving me in the care of strangers.

A few years later and I was almost old enough to travel without her, but by then she had calculated that it was already too late. I was starting high school. She wouldn’t be able to pull me away whenever she wanted. I’d resist, even if I never could have lived with my father without her, and so it wasn’t fair, was it? All that time spent waiting for me to grow up, and now that I had, she felt more stuck than ever.

The night of the accident my mother had only the slightest sense of what awaited her. They still had their moments back then. My father could surprise her with an offhand joke, and even though he was far more somber and withdrawn than she remembered, it wasn’t hard to find traces of the man she had met through a friend of her father’s at a café in Addis.

“Yosef, come here. I want to introduce you to my dear friend’s daughter. A very bright girl. She was at the top of her class at St. Mary’s Academy,” was how Dr. Alemiyahu had brought them together.

When he came over she could see that he styled himself after some brazen image of a modern American gigolo, with the wide butterfly-collared shirt that was in fashion with all the affluent boys or those who dreamed of someday being rich. She could still hear his country accent when he spoke.

“It’s an extraordinary pleasure to meet you,” was how he introduced himself, using a florid language that would have been better suited to a woman three times her age and of a much greater stature. He pulled up a chair next to them and for the next hour spoke of nothing but politics.

“We will finish this tired old government,” he said. “Crooks, liars, thieves. They take and take from the poor, and look at what’s happening. People are starving, and they are growing fat.”

She knew the same speech could be heard in all the cafés and bars, not only in Addis but throughout Africa, where the dream of revolution was endemic and seemed to almost be a birthright for this generation of men. It was charming to hear him talk in such grand terms, even if he lacked the convictions that she had heard in others. If no revolution came, then he would find another way to make his money and he would be just as happy. Of course it would be easier if it did come, regardless of the sacrifices that would have to be made, since those on the front lines would be the first to benefit. For all his talk she was convinced that he was a safe bet, a man who caught hold of the changing winds and bent with them before he could be blown away.

When they finally met again in America they did not talk about “old times.” They made no mention of their previous lives together in Addis — the two-day-long wedding or the home they rented after they were married; friends, cousins, landmarks were all equally forgotten, as were the details of what had happened to him after he left.

“I went to Sudan,” was all he said when she asked him where he had disappeared to. “Then I took a boat to Europe.”

“He never wanted to say more than that,” she said. “I asked him several times to tell me, but he refused. After a short time of knowing him, I didn’t care.”

The present was insistent enough to demand their full attention, and yet there was the possibility that some of who they had been would find a way to reassert itself here in America, if not now, then perhaps soon, in another few months, six at the most, Mariam hoped.

When my mother left the car with him inside it, she was weighing several options at once. If he died while she was gone, then she would be free to do as she pleased. She could find a job as a nurse, or even if need be as a maid until her son or daughter was born. There was the chance that her husband would survive as well and that she would be the one to rescue him. If she found a house or a passing car and got him “immediate medical attention,” as all the poison labels on the cleaning supplies in the house said to do, then for all the remaining days of his life he would stand in her debt. A man who owed a woman his life would have to treat her like a queen. He would have to be if not kind and gentle, then at the very least guarded and in full control of his emotions when it came to her — a sort of stoic knight whom you never really knew but who was pleasant to be with and in whose presence you always felt safe.

She tucked her suitcase under her arm and prepared herself for the long lonely walk in front of her, confident that regardless of what happened or whom she found, she was certain to come out of this ahead.

Angela and I parted at the train station in New York. She agreed to take the suitcase home while I headed north to the academy.

“You don’t have to go home before going to class?” she asked me.

I shook my head no.

“I have everything I need in here,” I said, pointing to the satchel she had given me. There was enough evidence of neglect in that gesture to confirm all the doubts that Angela already had about my supposed future at the academy. We kissed twice on the same cheek, and held each other briefly afterward. Neither of us was comfortable making a scene in Penn Station, but every moment after we separated was going to divide us further, an understanding that we shared and which could have been expressed by saying we might not feel this close to each other ever again. I resisted the urge to apologize, and I think Angela did so as well. There would be time for that soon enough.

I was the only teacher at the academy when I arrived. The school was closing early on Wednesday for Thanksgiving, but by tomorrow many of our students would have already left for extended weekend vacations to country homes up north. This was supposed to be the last day of the week for serious learning, but it was always tinged with too much holiday nostalgia and restlessness for the upcoming break to get much of anything done. While all the teachers pretended to treat it as a normal day, most had partly checked out and were worrying about their own upcoming holiday fates. In years past it had always been one of the days of the school year that I hated the most, with the distractions to my class almost too numerous to mention. This time, however, I wanted to take the day in, and before entering the academy, I spent a good fifteen minutes slowly walking in circles around it. There was the faint light of an early fall morning, but even more critical to the particular mood I was searching for was the slightly frigid breeze blowing in from across the Hudson River that felt as if it had been put in place that morning strictly to remind me of the value and vigor behind life. The wind came in steady bursts, shuffling thoroughly the dimly colored leaves that instead of turning colors would simply wither and fall to the ground. I didn’t want to think about the conversation that Angela and I had yesterday, much less worry about more abstract thoughts like whether we were going to survive it, or what we could do next to make things right between us. Nor did I want to think about what the dean had recently said to me, or what I had said to my students over the past two weeks. There were vast swaths of my life that I knew if I looked at closely I would come to regret, and I was certain that soon enough I was going to find the time to do that. I’d regret and wonder, and then do so again until all known ground was covered. This was certainly part of the cost that had to be paid. Before that was forfeited, however, I had this repose, and it was important to take it. I didn’t know when or if I would see the academy again, and I wanted to admire it briefly in its own right. An awkward blend of neo-Gothic and late Renaissance styles, it had undoubtedly come out looking all wrong, but time had healed those errors, so now one was struck by details such as the elaborate molding over the cornices that on any other building would have seemed like too much but on the academy appeared to be natural expressions of the school’s ethos. Time had also done justice to the stones. They seemed to have aged more rapidly on the small hill on which the school was built. They were a darker and more mottled shade of brown near the top, full of texture and slight gradations in color that made them perfect to stare at that morning.