How to Read the Air (27 page)

 

 

 

 

When I returned to the academy the next day, I realized that my father’s story had already gone on longer than I had intended, and that soon it was going to have to come to an end. There was a feeling among my students that we were all engaged in a quiet and perhaps even subversive act of deception as we passed our days ignoring the school’s requirements for all first-year students. I noticed them lingering together in the hallway after class, convinced that they were privy to a private history that only they could understand. Even though large parts of what they had been told were fabricated, I took pride in feeling I had brought them together. While the rest of the teachers were fulfilling their mandate to prepare the students for what most assumed would be a bright, affluent future, my students indulged me by letting me pass off this story as being somehow relevant to their own lives. I told myself that it was for their sake that the story of my father’s life and near death in Sudan had to have a fittingly moving dénouement.

 

 

 

 

Four months and three weeks after my father arrived in the port town in Sudan, war broke out in the east. A garrison of soldiers stationed in a village five hundred miles away revolted, and with the help of the villagers began to take over vast swaths of territory in the name of forming an independent state for all the black tribes of the country. There were rumors of massacres on both sides. Who was responsible for the killing always depended on who was doing the talking. It was said that in one village all the young boys had been forced to dig graves for their parents and siblings before watching their executions. Afterward they were forced to join the army rebellion that still didn’t have a name.

Factions began to erupt all over the town. Older men who remembered the last war tended to favor the government since they had once been soldiers as well. Anyone who was born in the south of the country was ardently in favor of the rebels, and many vowed to join them if they ever came close.

Neighbors began to shutter themselves off from one another. Children were pulled from schools. The streets became increasingly deserted at night. Abrahim and my father stopped going to the port. “If fighting breaks out here,” Abrahim told him, “they’ll attack the port first. They’ll burn the local ships and try to take control of the government ones.”

Every day more soldiers arrived. There had always been soldiers in the town, but these new ones were different. They came from opposite corners of the country and spoke none of the local languages; what Arabic they spoke was difficult to understand. The senior commanders, who rode standing up in their jeeps, all wore bright gold sunglasses that covered half their face and made it difficult to see their eyes, but it was clear regardless that they were foreigners and had been brought here because they had no attachments to the town or its people.

Abrahim guided my father around the newly set up garrisons for his safety. He gave him a list of streets and neighborhoods to avoid. “Stay away from the post office,” he said. “Never go to the bank. The cafés that have a view of the port are no good as well.”

At night my father often heard sporadic gunfire mixed in with the sound of dogs howling. If the war came closer, soon there would be only minor differences between shooting a dog and shooting a man. He was determined not to be there for that. Every day he pleaded with Abrahim to help him find a way out.

“I have plenty of money saved,” he said, even though it was a lie. If there was an honest exit, he would find a way to pay for it. Abrahim’s response was always the same. “A man who has no patience here is better off in Hell.”

Two weeks after the first stories of the rebellion appeared, there was talk in the market of a mile-long convoy of jeeps heading toward the town. The rebels were advancing and would be there by the end of the afternoon. They would spare no one. They would attack only the soldiers. They would be greeted as liberators. They were like animals and should be treated as such. Within hours the rumors had swirled the town into a frenzy. Soldiers were on the move in every street, but it was hard to tell if they were running or taking up defensive positions. The convoy was now two miles long and there were possible tanks in the background. A general from the army had defected to the rebels and had moved his troops with him. Even the capital, Khartoum, was no longer safe and possibly even under attack at that moment.

My father watched as the women who lived in all the nearby houses folded their belongings into bags and suitcases and made for the road with their children at their side or strapped to their backs. Where are they going? he wondered. They have the sea on one side and a desert on the other.

Abrahim found him during lunch resting under his usual tree. They walked back to the café where my father had once worked. There was no one to serve them tea.

“It’s very busy,” Abrahim said. “Maybe we should come back when it’s less crowded?”

“Give me a few minutes,” my father said. “I know the owner. Let me try to find us a table.”

It was the first joke he had made in months, and as if to acknowledge that, neither one said anything for a few seconds, long enough for my father to wonder if he shouldn’t try to offer Abrahim tea after all.

“Are you leaving?” my father finally asked him.

“I already have,” Abrahim said. “A long time ago. My entire family is in Khartoum. I’m just waiting for my body to join them.”

Abrahim didn’t ask my father if he was planning on leaving. He knew my father had nowhere to go—no relations in neighboring villages he could turn to. To be a refugee once was hard enough—you abandon home and family in order to start all over again in a foreign country with nothing. To be one again, before you had even settled, was pointless. After that, one had to accept that you could never run far enough; God or the devil would always find you.

Abrahim suggested they watch whatever was going to happen from the roof of the boardinghouse.

“At least that way,” he said, “we have a good seat.”

By late in the afternoon they could hear mortar shells slamming into the desert.

“They’re like children with toys,” Abrahim said, pointing west, toward where the rebels were supposed to be advancing from. “They don’t even know yet how far they can shoot with their big guns. There’s nothing out there—or maybe they’ll get lucky and kill a camel. They’ll keep doing that until eventually they run out of shells, or camels. It’s just a question of which one is going to happen first.”

They were the only two men standing on the roof, but across the town they could see other men in similar positions, with their hands raised to their brows as they stared west. Every now and then there was another shallow explosion, and a burst of sand could be seen flying into the air.

“It’s going to be terrible what happens to them,” Abrahim said. “They think they can scare away the soldiers because they have a couple of big guns. They think it’s 1898 and the Battle of Omdurman again, except now they’re the British.”

My father never thought that war could look so pathetic, but from that rooftop it did. The rebels were loudly announcing their approach, and, from what my father could see, the soldiers in the town had disappeared. He began to think that Abrahim was wrong, and that the rebels, despite their foolishness, would sweep into town with barely a struggle. He was debating whether to say this to Abrahim when he heard the first distant rumbling over his head. Abrahim and my father looked out toward the sea, where a plane was approaching, flying far too low. Within less than a minute it was over them.

“This will be over soon,” Abrahim said. They both waited to hear the sound of a bomb dropping, but nothing happened. The plane had pulled up at the last minute. Shots were harmlessly fired in its direction and the convoy kept approaching—a long, jagged line of old jeeps trying to escape the horizon.

Neither one of them spoke after that. Nothing had happened yet, but soon something terrible would take place and it would be over so quickly that there would hardly be time to acknowledge it. They were trying hard to do so before the moment passed.

When the same plane returned twenty minutes later, three slimmer and clearly foreign-made jets were flying close to it.

“The first was just a warning,” Abrahim said. “To give them a chance to at least try to run away. They were too stupid to understand that. They thought they had won.”

The planes passed. My father and Abrahim counted the seconds. Forty-three for my father, twenty-one for Abrahim, before the first shots were fired. Even from a distance they made a spectacular roar—at least seven bombs were dropped directly onto rebels, whose convoy disappeared into a cloud of smoke and sand. From some of the other neighboring rooftops there were shouts of joy. Soldiers were soon spilling out into the street singing of their victory.

“They should never have tried to take the port,” Abrahim said. “They could have spent years fighting in the desert for their little villages and no one would have really bothered them. But do you think any of those big countries was going to risk losing this beautiful port? By the end of tonight all the foreign ships will come back. Their governments will tell them that it’s safe. They’ve taken care of the problem, and soon, maybe in a day or two, you’ll be able to leave.”

 

 

 

 

A week later, during his midafternoon break on September 4, 1975, Abrahim found my father resting under his normal spot in the shade, staring out at the water. He kicked him once in the ribs, like a dog.

“Look at you, resting here like a typical Sudanese. Maybe you belong here after all.”

The two of them walked to a nearby café, and for the first time since my father came to Sudan someone brought him a cup of tea and lunch.

“This is your going-away meal. Enjoy it,” Abrahim said. “You’re leaving tonight.”

Abrahim ordered for the both of them: a large plate of grilled meats—sheep intestines and what looked to be the neck of a goat—cooked in a brown stew, a feast unlike anything my father had eaten in four months. When the food came he almost wanted to cry and was briefly afraid to eat it. Abrahim had always told him never to trust anyone, and of course my father had extended that advice to Abrahim himself. Good men were hard to find anywhere, and here there seemed to be none at all. Perhaps this was Abrahim’s final trick on him. Perhaps the food would disappear just as he leaned over to touch it, or perhaps it was poisoned with something that would send him off into a deep sleep from which he would awake in shackles. My father reached into his pants and untied the pouch in which he carried all his money. He placed it on the table.

“That’s everything I have,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s enough.”

Abrahim ignored the money and dipped into the food with a piece of bread.

“After where your hand has just been, I suggest you wash it before eating. Take your purse with you.”

When my father came back, all the food except for a small portion had been pushed to his side of the plate.

“Eat,” Abrahim said. “You’re going to need all of it.”

When they were finished, Abrahim walked my father to a part of town he had never seen before—a wide, dusty street that gradually grew increasingly narrow until the tin-roofed shacks that lined it were almost touching. The few men they passed along the way walked quickly, with their heads turned, as if they were being issued from a factory with explicit directions to walk and move in unison. They stopped in front of one of the houses and Abrahim pulled back the curtain that served as the door. Inside, a heavyset older woman with her head partly veiled sat behind a wooden counter on top of which rested a row of variously sized glass bottles. Abrahim grabbed one and told my father to take a seat in the corner of the room where a group of pillows had been laid. He negotiated with the woman for several minutes until, finally, he pulled a large bundle of Sudanese notes from his breast pocket. He counted off three and handed them to the woman before choosing a bottle from the counter. He sat next to my father and handed it to him.

“A drink for the road,” he said. “Take it slow.”

If Abrahim’s intention was to harm my father, then so be it, he thought. A decent meal and a drink afterward were not the worst way to go. If such things had been offered to every dying man in this town, my father imagined, then the line of men waiting to die would have stretched for miles.

“Give me your little purse now,” Abrahim said. He handed him the pouch and Abrahim flipped through the bills quickly. He then took a few notes from his own pile of money and added it to the collection.

“This will buy you water, maybe a little food, and the silence of a few people on board. Don’t expect anything else from them. Don’t ask for food or for anything that they don’t give you. Don’t look at them in the eyes and don’t try to talk to them. They will act as if you don’t exist, which is the best thing. If you do exist, then they will throw you overboard at night. It’s happened many times before. Men get on board and they begin to complain. They say their backs hurt or their legs hurt. They say they’re thirsty or hungry. When that happens they’re gagged and thrown into the sea where they can have all the space and water they want.”

My father took a sip of the spirits, whose harsh, acrid smell had filled the air from the moment Abrahim popped the lid.

“When you get to Europe, this is what you are going to do. You are going to be arrested. You will tell them that you want political asylum, and they will take you to a jail that looks like Heaven. They will give you food and clothes and even a bed to sleep in. You may never want to leave—that’s how good it will feel. Tell them you were fighting against the Communists and they will love you. They will give you your pick of countries and you will tell them that you want to go to England. You will tell them that you have left behind your wife in Sudan, and that her life is now in danger and you want her to come as well. You will show them this picture.”