Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

Before the port in Sudan there had been a prison cell just outside of Addis, which was not acknowledged to exist or have been built, filled with dozens of men and boys, all of whom learned to sleep standing upright by finding a wall or trustworthy shoulder to press against. They sat in stages, squatting on the ground with their knees pulled all the way up to their chest, the oldest and youngest, of which he was neither, being granted the longest intervals. Eventually the floor was covered in shit and urine, but the men continued to sit anyway because despite how hard they may have tried, how much will they may have exerted, there was always a point at which the body had to relent. After he was abruptly released for reasons he never learned, there had been days spent crammed on the bed of a white pickup truck, hidden at times under a plastic blue tarp that if seen from above reminded you of a caricature of the sea, complete with ripples and waves, and so by the time he reached the port in Sudan two months later he was already well versed in the body’s governing rules, nearly all of which he had already broken.

My father, Yosef Getachew Woldemariam, dreamed of boxes until the last days of his life. He dreamed of them in French, Spanish, Italian, Amharic, and English, of which only the last two he spoke fluently. His Italian had been reduced to Ciao, bella . His French to Oui, ça va . His Spanish to Quiero tener . At night, however, the missing words came back, and he continued to chatter away with the boxes in French, Spanish, Italian, and English — whatever they demanded — picking up the conversation that had begun thirty years earlier when he was a scrawny refugee working in a port in Sudan. He continued to ask the boxes where they were going, and how much they could carry, and most important, whether or not they had room enough for him, drawing on every language and country he had ever known, proving that language, like memory, suffered from the same need for context in order to survive.

During the last eighteen months of his life he granted the boxes permission to step out of his dreams into his day-to-day life, giving them the presence they had always deserved. It was a form of peace, long withheld and finally discovered in a one-room studio (itself a type of box) at a YMCA built close enough to the banks of the Illinois River to offer an occasional view of a passing cargo ship. Alone in that tiny room he drew pictures, some of which I still have, of three-dimensional boxes on the backs of take-out menus, on the rare envelope that found its way to his mailbox, on the backs of his social security checks, just under the space reserved for his signature. He collected discarded cardboard boxes from the trash and reassembled them in his room — an act that he thought of in near religious terms, with the same promises of rescue and salvation that a preacher brings to his flock. While the other widows and widowers who haunted the long fluorescent-lit hallways of the YMCA rescued cats, stray dogs, scraps of metal, aluminum cans, and empty bottles to be recycled, my father gathered the stained and worn boxes left outside restaurants and grocery stores. He brought them back to proper form, leaving them to dry in the sun, even taping up their battered edges when necessary so they could live again, this time without the burden of having to support any weight other than their own.

My father sat hunched over the wheel of his 1971 red Monte Carlo and watched as his wife of three years and one hundred twenty-three days walked down the steps of their two-story apartment building carrying far too many suitcases for such a short trip. She had retained her looks, and for that he had been grateful. After more than three years apart, without so much as a single picture passing from her to him, he had begun to suspect that the long-legged nimble young woman he had left at the peak of her beauty had been traded in for a prematurely aged woman: one who wore her hair tied in a conservative bun, wrapped herself in a white shawl, and carried herself with the same demeanor as the older mothers who spent all but the least precious hours of the day kneeling outside some church in Addis, praying for the dead and salvation. His worst fears had been relieved the moment she stepped off the plane into the waiting terminal where he stood holding a bouquet of flowers, flanked on either side by a photographer and reporter from the town’s local newspaper. (The headline three days later in the Peoria Herald would declare “True Love Reunited,” beneath which ran a two-hundred-word article on shrinking profits and impending layoffs at the local tire factory.)

On first seeing her enter through the glass doors of gate A2 of the Greater Peoria Regional Airport, my father could have said, at least for a second, that he was ready to fall in love if not all over again, then for the first time. Mariam, as it turned out, was still beautiful. She was still young and wore her hair down with the ends curled just slightly like the peak of a question mark. He could have never said that this was the same woman he had married on a sunny summer afternoon at St. Stephanos church in Addis, partly because he had never really known who that girl had been. Their courtship had been brief and dramatic. Most of it had occurred under a backdrop of fiery speeches and frequent gunfire in the last days of a monarchy, a time that those young enough not to know better declared to be the end of history. It was easy to fall in love under such circumstances, and in fact, you could have said that those who weren’t busy dying or in jail were busy fucking and falling in love in cafés and motels all across the capital. Love was in full bloom, and on the same evening that my father, Yosef Getachew Woldemariam, declared the need for a violent and unrelenting upheaval of society to a café crowd of recently radicalized college students, he promised Mariam that as long as there was breath in his lungs he would love her. With so much at stake, it was easy to give yourself over to another person. Declarations of love were general all over Addis, offered simply, without hesitation.

Here she was now at the foot of the stairs, three years after they met, her hair still shoulder length but without the curl, a sign perhaps of a growing maturity and wisdom, a sign perhaps that there was not that much left to question or wonder over. As Mariam Woldemariam, twenty-eight years old and three months pregnant, lifted the loose door handle of the 1971 red Monte Carlo her husband had scraped and saved to buy in order to live up to an old black-and-white picture that was itself a lie, my father sat hunched across the steering wheel, thinking to himself over and over, in a voice that rang as true as if the words had been spit from a god, that if he wasn’t careful, this woman would surely destroy him.

When I returned home that evening, Angela was already back from her office. She had taken her position at the dining room table where she often worked late into the night on whatever legal memo was due the following day. She seemed genuinely surprised when I entered. Since I had moved in she had never come home from work and found the apartment empty without knowing why in advance; doing so now had awakened a series of old anxieties within her.

“Where were you, Jonas? I called you several times but your phone was off.”

“I stayed late at the office to help Bill with a statement,” I said.

I could see a faint trace of relief come over her with those few words, which I said as convincingly as if they had been true. Her greatest fear was of abrupt and sudden abandonment, whether it came through death or a simpler form of departure. She tried like most people to never show that, but it was evident even in the way she insisted on always holding hands when crossing a busy street, as if that offered any protection against what she feared.