About the Author
----------------
Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in
1978. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a fellowship
in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Lannan
Literary Fellowship, and was named a “20 under 40” writer to
watch by The New Yorker. Mengestu’s writing has appeared in The
New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, Granta, and other
publications. He lives with his family in Washington, D.C.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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Part I
I
It was four hundred eighty-four miles from my parents' home in
Peoria, Illinois, to Nashville, Tennessee, a distance that in a
seven-year-old red Monte Carlo driving at roughly sixty miles an
hour could be crossed in eight to twelve hours, depending on
certain variables such as the number of road signs offering side
excursions to historical landmarks, and how often my mother,
Mariam, would have to go to the bathroom. They called the trip a
vacation, but only because neither of them was comfortable with
the word "honeymoon," which in its marrying of two completely
separate words, each of which they understood on its own, seemed
to imply when joined together a lavishness that neither was
prepared to accept. They were not newlyweds, but their three
years apart had made them strangers. They spoke to each other in
whispers, half in Amharic, half in English, as if any one word
uttered too loudly could reveal to both of them that, in fact,
they had never understood each other; they had never really known
who the other person was at all.
Learning a new language was, in the end, not so different from
learning to fall in love with your husband again, Mariam thought.
While standing in front of the bathroom mirror early in the
morning, she often told herself, in what she thought of as nearly
flawless diction, "Men can be strange. Wives are different." It
was an expression she had heard from one of the women at the
Baptist church that she and her husband had be attending. A
group of women were standing in the parking lot after the sermon
was over, and one of them had turned to Mariam and said, "Men can
be so strange. Wives are just different."
At the time she had simply repeated the words back, almost
verbatim, "Yes. That is true. Men can be strange," because that
was the only way that she could be certain that what she said was
understood by everyone. What she would have liked to say was far
more complicated and involved a list of sizable differences that
by any other standards would have been considered irreconcilable.
Regardless, since arriving in America six months earlier, she had
pushed herself to learn new things about her husband, like why,
for example, he spoke to himself when no one seemed to be
looking, and why some days, after coming home from work, he would
sit parked in the driveway for an extra ten or twenty minutes
while she watched him from behind the living room curtains. On
some nights he would wake up and leave the bedroom, careful not
to rouse her but always failing because most nights Mariam hardly
slept at all. He would lie down on the couch in the living room
naked, and from the bedroom she would eventually hear him let out
a small whimper followed by a grunt, and he would return to bed
and soundly until the morning. My mother learned these
things and filed them into a corner of her brain that she thought
of as being specifically reserved for facts about her husband.
And in just the same way, she pushed herself to try new words and
form new sentences in English, because just as there was a space
reserved for her husband, there was another for English, and
another one for foreign foods, and another for the names of
streets near her house. She learned to say, "It was a pleasure to
meet you." And she learned individual words, like "scattered" and
"diligent" and "sarcastic." She learned the past tense. For
example, I was tired yesterday, instead of: I am tired yesterday,
or Yesterday tired I am. She learned that Russell Street led to
Garfield Street, which would then take you to Main Street, which
you could follow to I-74, which could take you east or west to
anywhere you wanted to go. Eventually they would all make sense.
Verbs would be placed in the right order, sarcasm would be funny,
the town would be familiar: past, present, future, and husband,
they could all be under stood if given enough patience.
At this point in their marriage they had spent more time apart
than together. She added up the days by rounding up some months,
rounding down a few others. For every one day they had spent
together, 3.18 had been spent apart. To her, this meant a debt
had to be repaid, although who owed the other what remained
unclear. Is it the one who gets left behind who suffers more, or
is it the one who's sent out alone into the world to forage and
create a new life? She had always hated numbers, but since most
of the English she heard still escaped her, she now took comfort
in them and searched for things to add. At the grocery store she
calculated the cost of everything she brought to the register
before she got there: a can of peas, seventy-eight cents; a
package of salt, forty-nine cents; a bag of onions, forty cents.
The smiling faces behind the register always offered a few words
out loud before saying the total. All of them were lost on her,
but what difference did it make if she didn't know how to take a
compliment, banter, or understand what the phrase "two-for-one"
meant. She knew the number at the end, and that number, because
it didn't need translation, was power, and the fact that she knew
it as she went up to the register filled her with a sense of
accomplishment and pride unlike anything she had known since
coming here. It made her feel, in its own quiet fleeting way, as
if she were a woman to be reckoned with, a woman whom others
would someday come to envy.
She never knew what her husband had gone through in the three
years they had been apart, nor had she ever really tried to
imagine. Say America enough times, try to picture it enough
times, and you end up with a few skyscrapers stuck in the middle
of a cornfield with thousands of cars driving around. The one
picture she had received during those three years was of him
sitting in the driver's seat of a large car, the door open, his
body half in the car, half out. He kept one arm on the steering
wheel, the other balanced on his leg. He looked handsome and
dignified, his mustache neatly trimmed, his thick curly hair
sculpted into a perfect ball that highlighted the almost uncanny
resemblance his head had to the globe that her her kept
perched on top of his chest of drawers.
When she first saw the picture she didn't believe the car was
his. She thought he had found it parked on the side of the road
and had seized the rtunity to show himself off, which was
indeed almost exactly what he had done. Still, that didn't stop
her from showing the picture to her mother, sisters, and
girlfriends, or from writing on the back, in English: Yosef Car.
She expected other pictures would eventually follow: pictures of
him standing in front of a large house with a yard; pictures of
him in a suit with a briefcase in hand; and then later, as the
days, weeks, and months collided, and two years was quickly
approaching three, she began to wait for pictures of him with his
arm around another woman, with two young children at his side.
She had secretly feared the latter would happen from the day he
first left, because who had ever heard of a man waiting for his
wife? The world didn't work that way. Men came into your life and
stayed only as long as you could convince them to. She even named
the children for him: the boy Adam and the girl Sarah, names that
she would never have chosen for her own children because they
were common and typical, and Mariam's children, when they came,
were going to be extraordinary.
When no such pictures arrived, she wanted to write him and tell
him to show her a picture of him in the middle of something, a
square, a city park, a picture in which he played just one, minor
role.
"Show me a picture of you doing something," she had wanted to
write, but that wasn't it exactly. What she wanted was to see him
somehow fully alive in a picture, breathing, walking, laughing,
living his life without her.
On the morning they left for Nashville, my mother packed a small
suitcase with two weeks' worth of underwear, three heavy wool
sweaters she had bought at a garage sale for two dollars apiece,
and pants and shirts suitable for summer, fall, and winter, even
though it was the first week of September and so far the days had
been nothing but mild, sunny, and occasionally even too warm for
the thin cotton tank tops she had seen other women wearing as
they walked casually through the aisles of the grocery store,
through shopping malls, and down the deserted Main Street. Those
women were neither slim nor graceful. They were plain, pale, and
average, and to her eyes entirely indistinguishable one from
another, which was precisely what she resented and envied the
most. The trip was supposed to last from start to finish four
nights and five days, but as she stuffed her suitcase to its
limits, she decided it was best to always be prepared for the
unexpected, for the broken-down car, for the potential wrong
turn, for the long walk at night that for one reason or another
never ended. She had packed up her entire life once before, and
now six months later, if she had learned anything at all about
herself, it was that she could do with far less. She could, if
she wanted, get away with almost nothing.
Her husband, Yosef, was already waiting for her outside in the
red Monte Carlo he had scraped and saved for more than a year to
buy and now could hardly afford. It was not the same car as the
one in the photo. She couldn't have said how or why, but it was
less elegant, smaller perhaps, and even though the picture had
been black and white, she thought of the Monte Carlo he was
waiting in as being a shabbier shade of red than the one she
imagined.
The car horn honked twice for her: two short high-pitched bleeps
that could have gone unnoticed but did not because she half
expected, half prayed for them. When they came she pictured a
bird—a dove, or something dovelike—being set free, its rapidly
fluttering wings disturbing the air. Had she known more words in
English she would have said the sound of the horn pierced through
the silence, pierced being the operative word here, with its
suggestion that something violent had occurred.
If he honks one more time, my mother said to herself, I will
refuse to go. It was a matter of principle and conviction, or at
least something that so closely resembled the two that even if it
was merely pride or rage in disguise, she was willing to fight
and tear down the house to stand by it. She had, after all,
waited for him for years—a virtual widow but without the corpse
and sympathy. If she was owed anything now it was time. Time to
pack her clothes, fix the straps of her dress, and take account
of everything she might have missed and would perhaps potentially
later need.
If he honks again, she told herself, I will unpack my suitcase,
lock the bedroom door, and wait until he leaves without me.
This was the way most if not all of my parents' fights began.
With a minor, almost invisible transgression that each seized
upon, as if they were fighting not about being rushed or about
too many lights having been left on, but for their very right to
exist, to live and breathe God's clean air. As a child I learned
quickly that a fight was never far off or long in the making, and
imagined it sometimes as a real physical presence lurking in the
shadows of whatever space my parents happened to occupy at that
given moment—a grocery store, a car, a restaurant. I pictured the
fight sitting down with us on the couch in front of the
television, a solemn black figure in executioner's robes, a
caricature of death and tragedy clearly stolen from books and
movies but no less real as a result. Ghosts are common to the
life of any child: mine just happened to come to dinner more
often than most.
The last fight they had had before that morning left my mother
with a deep black and purple on her right arm, just below
her shoulder. The had a rotting plum color and that was
how she thought of it, as a rotten plum, one pressed so fast and
hard into her skin that it had broken through the surface and
flattened itself out underneath. She found it almost beautiful.
That the body could turn so many different shades amazed her,
made her believe that there was more lurking under the surface of
our skin than a mess of blood and tissue.
She waited with one hand on top of the suitcase for the car to
honk again. She tried not to think it, but it came to her
nonetheless, a selfish, almost impregnable desire to hear even
the accidental bleating of a car horn crying out.
Just once more, she thought. Honk just once more.
She held her breath. She closed the lid of the suitcase in
complete silence. With her hand pressing down on the top, she
zipped it halfway shut. A tiny stitch of blue fabric from a pair
of padded hospital socks picked up two weeks earlier peeked out
over the edge. She pressed the sock back in with one finger,
granted the zipper its closure, and with that, acknowledged that
on this occasion her husband had won. He had held out long enough
for her to complete the one minor task that stood between her and
leaving, and despite her best efforts, that was how she saw it,
as a victory won and a loss delivered. She was going. Even if he
pressed on the horn now with all his might she would have to go,
would have to walk down the stairs and apologize for having taken
so long, because he had pressed her just far enough without going
too far. Sometimes she suspected that he knew the invisible lines
she was constantly drawing. There were dozens of such lines
spread out all over their one-bedroom apartment like tripwire
that, once crossed, signaled the start of yet another battle.
There was the line around how many dishes could be left in the
sink, another around shoes worn in the house, and others that had
to do with looks and touches, with the way he entered a room,
took off his clothes, or kissed her on the cheek. Once, after an
especially rough night of , she felt her husband's breath on
the back of her neck. It was warm and came in the steady
consistent bursts of a man soundly a. She didn't know which
one she really hated—the breaths or the man breathing. In the
end, she created a wall of pillows behind her, one she would deny
having made the next morning.
The four large oak trees that lined the driveway were the last of
their kind. The largest and oldest of the group stood just a few
feet away from the two-story duplex that my mother and her
shared with a frail, hunchbacked older woman with milky-blue eyes
who hissed under her breath every time she passed my mother on
her way in or out of the house. The oak trees cooled the living
room in the summer, allowing the afternoon light to filter
through seemingly oversized leaves that Mariam thought of as
deliberately keeping the worst parts of the light out, leaving
only the softer, quieter shades. Now that it was September and
supposedly the harshest of the summer heat had passed, she
noticed as she prepared to leave the apartment that the leaves
nearest the tops of the trees had be to turn; a small pile of
dead ones had already grown around their bases. So this was fall.
A woman at the Baptist church had told her just a few weeks
earlier, "Oh, just wait until fall. You'll see. You'll love it."
Her name was Agnes and she wore a curly black wig to hide the
bald patches in the center of her head. A-G-N-E-S, Mariam wrote
on the back of a church pamphlet that went on in great detail
about the agony of Christ, which prompted her to write, after
their first meeting, A-G-O-N-Y, on the back of the pamphlet, and
next to that, Agnes is in agony, which was a simple sentence,
with a subject and verb, which formed a declarative statement
that Mariam decided was more likely than not absolutely true.
At the time my mother had thought to herself, I could never love
anything called "fall." There was fall and Fall. To fall was to
sink, to drop. When my mother was nine, her grandher came out
of his bedroom at the back of the house wearing only a robe with
the strings untied. He was deaf and half blind and had been for
as long as Mariam could remember. He walked into the middle of
the living room, and having reached the center, where he was
surrounded on all sides by his family, fell, not to his knees,
but straight forward, like a tree that had been felled, the side
of his head splitting open on the edge of the fireplace mantel,
spraying the wall and couch with blood. That was one way to fall.
One could also fall down a flight of stairs, as in, your husband
falls down the stairs while leaving for work one morning. She had
this thought at least once, sometimes as many as three times a
week. She pictured him tripping, stumbling, feet over head, just
like the characters in the cartoons she had grown addicted to
watching between the hours of one p.m. and four p.m. In those
shows the characters all shook the fall off after a few seconds,
bending an arm back into place here, twisting an ankle there. The
cartoons made her laugh, and when she thought of her husband
falling down the steps, his tall, narrow body perfectly suited to
roll uninterrupted down the shag-carpeted stairwell, stopping
perhaps briefly at the one minor bend that led to the final
descent, it was only partly with those cartoon images in mind.
When real bodies fell, as Mariam knew well enough, they did not
get up. They did not bounce back or spring into shape. They
crumpled and needed to be rescued.
Despite my mother's best efforts to resist fall, she found
herself taken by the season more and more each day. The sun set
earlier, and soon she learned, an entire hour would be shaved off
the day, an act that she sometimes wished could be repeated over
and over until the day was nothing more than a thumbnail sketch
of its former self. The nights were growing marginally but
noticeably cooler. Leaves were changing, and children who over
the course of the summer had ruled the neighborhood like tyrants
were once again neatly arranged in groups of twos and threes each
morning, beaten (or so Mariam thought) into submission by the
changing rules of the season. There was enough room in the
shrinking day to believe that the world was somehow sensitive to
grief and longing, and responded to it the same way she did when
she felt convinced that time had been arranged incorrectly,
making the loss of one extra minute nearly every day a welcome
.
My mother could never have said she loved fall, but as she walked
down the steps with her suitcase in hand toward the red Monte
Carlo her husband had been waiting in for nearly an hour, she
could have said that she respected its place as a mediator
between two extremes. Fall came and went, while winter was
endured and summer was revered. Fall was the repose that made
both possible and bearable, and now here she was with her husband
next to her, heading headlong into an early-fall afternoon with
only the vaguest ideas of who they were becoming and what came
next.
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