Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

Half an hour after the Angelus rang I went inside. I had almost an hour until my class began — time that I would have previously happily spent in my classroom. Even though I had been at the academy for three years, I still didn’t know its hallways intimately. I rarely walked down corridors where I didn’t belong. As a result, there were entire floors of the school that I had barely seen and had taken almost no notice of. I wasn’t interested in attaching myself to them now, but I did want at the very least to be able to say that I had really seen all of the academy and not just the selected portions of it that I felt comfortable in, that because I was there it had made a full, proper impression on me. I had already spent enough years without noticing anything; I had walked for a long time with my eyes half closed. I wasn’t suddenly passionate about the hallways of the academy that morning, and made no effort to search for any distinguishing detail other than noting, as I had always done, that the walls were painted a terrible shade of yellow. Such efforts weren’t really necessary and couldn’t be sustained, regardless; if one was really looking, which was what I felt I was finally doing — looking, with neither judgment nor fear at what was around me — then that was enough to say you had truly been there.

Thirty more minutes passed like that — time enough to cover the missing three floors. Once I was finished, groups of students started entering the building in steady droves. The hallways were soon flooded with their bodies; without knowing it, they took up more space than rightfully belonged to them. They constantly reached out to touch one another, affectionately or violently or both at the same time. Their limbs and voices were everywhere.

It was with the full appreciation of this spectacle that I finally entered my classroom, a few minutes before the first bell was to ring. I was still waiting for it when the dean’s secretary came and knocked at the door. Most messages that came from the fourth floor were passed down through students and other teachers. It was rare to see Mrs. Adams anywhere other than in her office. My students knew as well as I did that something important was happening, even if they didn’t know what it was yet. To save me the embarrassment of being publicly summoned, Mrs. Adams was careful to whisper into my ear that the dean and the school’s president would be waiting for me upstairs once my class was finished. I thanked her in the kindest voice I could for the message. “Tell them I’ll be there,” I said, but a part of me doubted already if that was true. The whole exchange lasted only a matter of seconds — thirty to forty at most, and yet undoubtedly it changed the mood, enough so that when I turned and faced my students, it felt as if they had been replaced by a whole new class, one slightly more nervous and on edge than the previous.

Just what my mother hoped to find after she left the car was never clear. She claimed to have seen lights in the distance as soon as she stepped out, but it was never certain that she expected to reach them, much less find anyone there.

“They weren’t very bright,” she said when I asked her to describe them, “but there was nothing else out there, so they were easy to see.”

She spoke with a rehearsed conviction, her hands nearly but not quite gently folded on her lap, as if she was attempting to model to her long-lost son a form of good behavior and proper decorum that she had never quite practiced but was willing to pretend to do now. Her voice was perceptibly sterner and less nostalgic than it had otherwise been until then, and yet, despite her best efforts, I had a hard time believing her, both then and even more so now. Having walked along the side of the road for over an hour, I have seen lights only from the few passing cars that have gone by, helmed by overly cautious drivers who have turned their headlights on early even though dusk is still at least an hour away, because it’s true, you never know what you might find along these quieter back roads. There are no nearby towns, and all the houses are set far back from the road and are blocked by trees or bends that keep them hidden. It’s possible that thirty years ago there was more here. Plenty of homes since then I’m sure have been destroyed — sold off to make more room for farming or just simply abandoned as corn prices fell and small fortunes were lost, and so perhaps this is what my mother saw — a few twinkling porch lights on the horizon that may very well have been there, even if it was only because she wanted them to be.

According to her, after she left the car she walked in the general direction of the scattered lights for close to an hour in search of help.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” she told me, and at least in this regard, I was fully convinced. She would have never claimed to be at a loss for anything unless she really was. It wasn’t in her nature to do so.

“I was afraid of sitting in the car by myself, and I saw the lights. I didn’t know how far away they were. I thought I would reach them after just a few minutes, but it didn’t turn out that way.”

To hear her tell it necessitated a belief that she began her search with the best of intentions, and that it was only because of an error in perception that things had gone wrong. The lights were too far. Distances were deceptive, especially in the dark, and given how empty this road generally is, particularly after dark, what else was she to do.

She stopped at least once to put on a sweater.

“It was much colder than I thought,” she said. “I was freezing once I left the car.”

And again later to briefly catch her breath.

“I didn’t have much energy, you know. I was pregnant with you and always tired.”

She thought several times about turning around, or simply stopping where she was and giving up.

“I almost went back,” she said. “I kept looking behind me expecting to see your father waving at me. He could do something like that. He used to do that all the time. He’d leave and then come right back a few minutes later or he’d get up in the middle of the night, but I’d always find him next to me in the morning. I thought if I walked a little bit farther he’d find a way to get the car back on the road and would come and find me. When I couldn’t see the car anymore, I wanted to stop and give up, but then I remembered that I had you to think about as well.”

The first half hour was the hardest.

“It was so dark out there you wouldn’t believe it. I kept thinking there was something hiding in the fields. I didn’t know about these things back then. No one had ever told me what happened in those places. The only thing we had ever really learned in school about America was that it was very rich and they treated the black people terribly. Maybe it sounds stupid to you, but my father had told me to be careful of strangers in America. He said they would kill you if they saw you. He knew about these things and I believed him.”

Finally she saw a car approaching, perhaps a mile or so away. Its headlights were far brighter than those of the houses that she claimed to have seen. While for most the sight of an approaching car would be more than welcome, my mother, after a fleeting burst of relief, was confronted by a host of doubts and worries.

“I know I should have been relieved,” she said. “But I wasn’t. I think maybe for a few seconds there I was. That didn’t last long, though.”

When the car was less than a half-mile away, she was certain that she had to get out of its line of sight.

“There was a tree not too far away on the other side of the road. I remember that. I thought of hiding there. But then I was afraid they would see me running across the street.”