Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

When I reached this point, I knew it was the last thing I was going to say to my class. The bell rang, and as when I had first begun this story, there were a good ten to fifteen seconds when no one in the classroom moved. My students, for all their considerable wealth and privilege, were still at that age where they believed that the world was a fascinating, remarkable place, worthy of curious inquiry and close scrutiny, and I’d like to think that I had reminded them of that. Soon enough they will grow out of that and concern themselves with the things that were the most immediately relevant to their own lives. They will opt for the domestic and local news any day of the week; they will form rigid political alliances and dogmatic convictions that place them in good standing with one group or another, but at that time these things had yet to pass.

Eventually one bag was picked up off the floor, then twenty-eight others joined in. Most of my students waved or nodded their heads as they left the room, and there was a part of me that wanted to call them back to their seats and tell them that the story wasn’t quite finished yet. Getting out of Sudan was only the beginning; there was still much more ahead. Sometimes in my imagination, that is exactly what I tell them. I pick up where I left off, and go on to describe how, despite all appearances, my father did not actually make it off that boat alive. He arrived in Europe just as Abrahim had promised he would, but an important part of him had died during the journey, somewhere in the final three days when he was reduced to drinking his urine for water and could no longer feel his hands or feet and was certain that if death came to him he would welcome it without the slightest hesitation. He spent six months afterward in a detention camp on an island off the coast of Italy. He was surprised to find that there were plenty of other men like him there, from every possible corner of Africa, and that many had fared worse than him. He heard stories of men who had died trying to make a similar voyage: who had suffocated or been thrown overboard alive. My father couldn’t bring himself to pity them. Contrary to what Abrahim had told him, there was nothing remotely heavenly about where he was held: one large whitewashed room with cots every ten inches and bars over the windows. He had a hard time understanding most of what the guards said. They often yelled at him and the other prisoners. The guards spat at their feet and made vague, animal sounds when they looked at them confused. He quickly learned a few words in Italian and was mocked viciously the first time he used them. He was once forced to repeat a single phrase over and over to each new guard who arrived. When he tried to refuse, his first meal of the day, a plate of cold dried meat and stale bread, was taken away from him. “Speak,” the guards commanded, and he did so dozens of times in the course of several days even though there was no humor left in it for anyone.

“You speak Italian?” the guards asked.

“No.”

After which the subject of the sentence was always dropped and the question transformed into an order.

Speak. Talk. Or more rarely, Say something.

In Italy he was given asylum and set free. From there he worked his way north and west across Europe. He met dozens of other Abrahims along the way, men who promised him that when they made it to London, the rest of their lives would finally resolve into the picture they had imagined. “It’s different there,” they always said. They placed their faith in difference, which is to say they placed their faith in the idea that there had to be at least one place in this world where life could be lived in accordance with the plans and dreams they had concocted for themselves. For most that was London; for a few it was Paris; and for a smaller but bolder few, America. That faith had carried them this far, and even though it was weakening, and needed constant readjustment (“Rome is not what I thought it would be. France will surely be better”), it persisted out of sheer necessity. By the time my father finally made it to London eighteen months later, he had begun to think of all the men he met as being variations of Abrahim, all of them crippled and deformed by their dreams.

Abrahim had followed him all the way to London to test him, and my father was determined to settle that debt. On his first day in the city he found a quiet corner in Hampstead Heath. A guidebook for Americans that he had picked up in France had said that he would be afforded a wide, sweeping view of the city from there. At the edge of the park, with London at his feet, he set fire to all the documents that he had brought with him from Sudan. The fake marriage license turned to ashes in seconds. The picture of Abrahim’s daughter melted away near a large green hedge with ripe, inedible red berries hanging from it. For many nights afterward he refused to think about her or her father. There were no rewards in life for such stupidity, and he promised himself to never fall victim to that kind of blind, wishful thinking. Anyone who did deserved whatever suffering he was bound to meet.

Let me be honest and admit that many more days if not weeks would have been needed to have told this properly, and that most of my students would have lost interest by then. My story would have slipped into the curious but rather boring file into which these things were logged, and long before the end they would have gone back to staring at me blankly.

When the last of my students had left, I finally took my seat behind my desk, even though I knew the dean and the school’s president were upstairs waiting for me to join them. I pictured them sitting around the coffee table near the front entrance to the office casting stray glances at their watches. Scones were neatly arranged on a plate; coffee had recently been made. They would go to such lengths to make me comfortable. When I arrived they would want to hear for a second time everything that I had said earlier to the dean when it was just the two of us in his office. They would ask me to repeat exactly what I had said, and one or both of them would record it. They would counter my response with Andrew’s version, and then demand to know if I was telling the truth, and if not, then why hadn’t I been honest with them from the beginning. Before I stood up and left my classroom I knew I couldn’t go through that. To have sat there and lied once was enough, and what I wanted was to come clean. My stories, all of them, were over, and the first person I wanted to tell that to was Angela. Rather than go upstairs, I left the building through a rarely used side door that opened up immediately onto the avenue. I walked two blocks south, to a quieter side street, and called Angela from the steps of a brownstone whose façade was being repaired.

Angela processed bad news better while she was at work. In her office, surrounded by colleagues, she kept her professional demeanor intact and was never anything else but a lawyer. When her mother passed away, the call had come into her office and she had accepted it as she accepted all of her clients’ calls, and while I wasn’t there with her I did see the notes that she recorded from the conversation, written as if they were to be billed at a later point to an imaginary agency charged for tallying up the costs of our deaths. In her neat, formal penmanship, under that day’s date, she had quickly scrawled a series of questions on a yellow legal pad:

What time/Time of death?

Cause of death suspected?

Proof of cause?

Autopsy to be expected?

Name of doctor on staff?

Name of hospital administrator?

Name of hospital counsel?

She recorded the answers for the first three questions next to each one:

11:34 a.m.

Coronary heart failure aka heart attack