Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

When they reached the pier Abrahim pointed to the last of three boats docked in the harbor.

“It’s that one,” he said. “The one with the blue hull.”

My father stared at the boat for a long time and tried to imagine what it would be like to be buried inside it, first for an hour and then for a day. He didn’t have the courage to imagine anything longer. The boat was old, but almost everything in the town was old. The cars, the tin roofs on most of the homes, the fabric that the men, women, and children wrapped themselves in, and then the very same men, women, and children themselves — all were engaged in a long-running state of gradual decay, one that may very well have been sustainable for as long as or perhaps even longer than a normal lifetime, as if the key to survival wasn’t living well but dying slowly, in such gradual increments that actual death would bypass you all together.

There was a tall, light-skinned man at the end of the docks. He was from one of the Arab tribes in the north. Such men were common in town. They controlled most of its business and politics and had done so for centuries. They were traders, merchants, and sold anything or anyone. The effect was noticeable. They held themselves at a slight remove from other men, spotless white or, on occasion, pastel-colored robes that proved immune to the dust that covered every inch of the town.

“He’s arranged everything,” Abrahim said. “That man over there.”

My father tried to make out his face from where they were standing, but the man seemed to understand that they were talking about him and kept his head turned slightly away. The only feature that my father could make out was that of a rather abnormally long and narrow nose, a feature that seemed almost predatory in nature.

Abrahim handed my father a slip of yellow legal paper on which he had written something in Arabic. He handed him another piece of paper with an address and phone number in Khartoum, the capital. He understood that the first was for the man standing near the pier and the latter for him, but he wasn’t sure as to what to do with either. Did he fold them into his pockets or did he clench them tightly in his hands? He would have liked for Abrahim to say something kind and reassuring to him. He wanted him to say, “Have a safe journey,” or “Don’t worry. You’re going to be fine,” but he knew that he could have stood there for years and no such false reassurances would have ever come.

“Don’t keep him waiting,” Abrahim said. “Give him the note and the rest of your money. And do whatever he tells you.”

My father walked away from Abrahim wishing that he had never come here. He looked around him and saw the same scene that he had seen every day — a long, poorly organized parade of men, mostly black with a few occasional shades of light brown, stripped down to their barest piece of clothing and almost always loaded with something on their backs. There were herds of donkeys who fared only a little worse than those crowding the one unpaved road that ran adjacent to the harbor, with a sun that shone down harshly on all of them. He tried to get a read on the man’s face as he approached him, to see if there were any signs of hidden malice that could be detected in his eyes or smile, but the man kept his head turned away from him so that the only thing my father could see were the folds in the blue head scarf the man was wearing as they trembled in the breeze.

When he was halfway to the ship, Abrahim called out to him: “I’ll be waiting to hear from you soon,” and my father knew that was the last time he would ever hear his voice.

My father handed over the slip of paper Abrahim had given him. He couldn’t read what was written on it and was worried that it might say any one of a dozen different things, from “treat this man well” to “take his money and do whatever you want with him.” He told himself that he was a fool for being so trusting and that there was nothing else he could do but be a fool; it was too late already, events had been set in motion and the only thing was to silently follow the man up the gangplank and into the boat, where they entered unmolested, as if the crew had either failed to notice them or had been expecting them the whole time.

The man pointed to a group of small storage slots near the stern of the boat that were used for holding the more delicate cargo. These crates were usually unloaded last and he had often seen people waiting at the docks for hours to receive them. They always bore the stamp of a Western country and carried their instructions in a foreign language— Cuidado; Fragile . He had unloaded several such crates himself recently, and while he had never known their actual contents, he had tried to guess what was inside: cartons of powdered milk, a television or stereo, vodka, scotch, Ethiopian coffee, soft blankets, clean water, hundreds of new shoes and shirts and underwear, anything that he was missing or knew he would never have he imagined arriving in those boxes.

There was a square hole just large enough for my father to fit into if he pulled his knees up to his chest. He understood this was where he was supposed to go and yet he naturally hesitated, sizing up the dimensions just as he had once sized up the crates he had helped unload. He considered its angles and its depth and then imagined all the ways in which he could and could not move inside it. He could lean his body slightly to the side and rest his head against the wall when he needed to sleep. He could cross his legs. He could not raise his elbows above his head.

My father felt the man’s hand around his neck pushing him toward the crate. His father had often done the same thing to him as a child, and also to a goat or a sheep when it was being led into the compound to be slaughtered. He wanted to tell the man that he was prepared to enter on his own and in fact had been preparing to do so for months now, but he wouldn’t have been understood, so my father let himself be led. He crawled in on his knees, which was not how he would have liked to enter. Headfirst was the way to go, but it was too late now. In a final humiliating gesture, the man shoved him with his foot, stuffing him inside so quickly that his legs and arms collapsed around him. He had just enough time to arrange himself before the man sealed the entrance shut with a wooden door that was resting nearby.

Before getting on the boat, my father had made a list of things to think about in order to get through the journey. In the preceding weeks he had come up with several items he recorded in his head by repeating them over and over until he fell asleep. They were filed away under topic headings such as: The Place Where I Was Born, Plans for the Future, and Important Words in English. He wasn’t sure if he should turn to them now or wait until the boat was out of the harbor. The darkness inside the box was startling, but it wasn’t yet complete. Light still filtered in through the entrance and continued to do so until the hold was closed and the boat began to pull away from the shore. He remembered that as a child he had often been afraid of the dark, a foolish, almost impossible thing for a country boy, but there it was. Of the vast extended family that lived around him, his mother was the only one who never mocked him for this, and even though he would have liked to have saved her image for later in the journey, at a point when he was far off at sea, he let himself think about her now. He saw her as she looked shortly before she died. She had been a large woman, but at that point there wasn’t much left of her. Her hair hadn’t gone gray yet, but it had been cut short on the advice of a cousin who had dreamed that the illness attacking her body was buried somewhere in her head and needed a way out. Desperate, she had it cut completely off, which had made her look even younger than her thirty-odd years. This was the image he had of his mother in an almost doll-like state just two months before she died, and while he would have liked to have a better memory of her, he settled for the one he’d been given and closed his eyes to concentrate on it. It would be some minutes before he noticed the engine churning as the ship pulled up its anchors and slowly headed out to sea.