A. The presence of fathers, the fathers I had
My father followed a pillar of smoke by day and a
pillar of fire by night, sometimes running out into the street in his pajamas
to chase after it, or after something else he had lost. When we lived in
Macedonia and I couldn’t sleep I often watched him from our balcony as he
stormed up and down the sidewalks and muttered, looking to the left and to the
right in search of it. We rarely saw the pillar ourselves, but we felt its
wandering keenly as it dragged us from city to village to coasts, across seas
and continents—never reaching the promised land. As a child, I had nightmares
about being on a raft with my parents in the middle of the ocean, and as the
raft drifted past different shores, my parents’ faces changed to match,
becoming Chinese one moment and Indian the next, then Arab, then African. They
stared at me with strange, dark eyes and forgot how to pronounce my name.
Beginning just after my sixth birthday, I lived
apart from my family at boarding school, first on a tropical island seething
with tender, deadly jellyfish in Malaysia and then later in a tiny village
surrounded by apple orchards and vineyards in Germany. Our tan stucco house,
with its chalet roof and flapping shutters, crumbled with each gust of wind
that skipped across the cobblestones and thrilled our red geraniums, trembling
on each windowsill. Leaves crunched under our feet as we walked home from
school, collecting prickled horse chestnuts and peeling away the barbed shells
to reveal a dark nut smooth as polished stone. Crossing the street and climbing
the stone steps to the front door, jazz music beckoned us in, past the curving
banister carved with clusters of grapes, and into the piano room where Mr.
Jespersen played us home every afternoon. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, white-haired
Canadian with biceps so big he couldn’t touch his shoulders and a voice so
gentle you had to lean in close to hear him.
Mr. Jespersen was the type of man who buttered our
breakfast toast for us in the mornings and heated hot chocolate on the
woodstove for us on rainy days. He raised the twelve of us children, gathering
us around his armchair each evening to hear him tell stories by the fire,
exotic stories of jungle tribes and tigers and spears. He befriended the
suspendered farmers who lived in our village, and the Italian man who owned the
gelato shop, practicing his soft German on them and sharing apples from their
orchards. He and his wife June raised us almost as their own, almost, while our
parents served on the mission field in bleak and wild places. My own father
lived in Kosovo at the time, just after the war ended when the United Nations
bombed the Serbs out of the capital city.
My father was a preacher, the kind who hated
weakness because he saw it in himself and couldn’t bear the sight. We left
China because he wanted something harder, some higher mountain to conquer, and he
wore the hills as his sleeves. When Dad preached, he dressed in blue jeans, a
light blue collared shirt, a grey tweed blazer with leather elbow patches, and brown
leather shoes, his preaching shoes. Every Sunday morning, he rose with the sun,
ground coffee in his Turkish grinder and brewed it in his French press, and
walked to church, which met in the back of a bookshop across from the bakery
that sold loaves of crusty white bread for 60 pfennig. My sister and I helped
set up the chairs as the singers practiced, a riotous roar of wails and
tambourines. Crammed into the tiny room, the congregation fidgeted earnestly,
listening to Dad speak, stopping at the end of every sentence to let Femi
Cakolli, the Kosovar pastor of the Bashkësia Ungjillore Church, translate into
Albanian. At the end of every sermon, Dad’s eyes filled with tears as he told
us about grace, the kind that forgives every day and set us free forever, a
message that struck home in Kosovo, a land coming out of five hundred years of
oppression at the hands of the Ottomans and Serbs. The white-blossomed branches
of peach and plum trees frosted the windows like doves nesting on the sills as
the church received the benediction and brought out baklava, çaj, and pineapple soda. At night, he sang me that
same benediction as a lullaby: “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make
His face shine upon you, and give you peace, and give you peace, and give you
peace forever.”
During the school year, I lived in Germany with Mr.
Jespersen, but at Christmas and during the summer, I lived in Prishtinë with my
family in our house at the top of a hill surrounded by the clamour of mosques
on all sides. One summer Sunday morning, Dad woke early to find that someone
had broken into our front gate and stolen all our shoes from beside the door.
Albanians never wore shoes inside, and packs of nomadic Roma gypsies were
notorious in the area for petty theft. Young boys from their clan often climbed
our green steel fence to steal pears and apricots from our landlord’s trees and
their elderly sat on every street corner, begging. Rummaging through what was
left, our bicycles still sitting on the stairs, Dad became still and pale with
rage, a happening that was not unusual in our household but terrified me every
time. It took us a moment to realize the most important theft—the gypsies stole
his leather preaching shoes.
The next evening, we piled into our car, a massive
white truck that was sometimes mistaken for an UNMIK official’s transport at
the border and waved through the passport checkpoint, heading out to visit
friends across town. As my sister and I buckled our seatbelts and my mom put my
brothers in their car seats, Dad began to mutter to himself, staring across the
street at three Roma boys, one of them sitting on an upended bucket as they
waited for the bus. “Watching us,” he was saying, “waiting for us to leave,
right there in the open, bold as anything. Just waiting…” Pulling away from our
front door with my mother just barely in the car, Dad roared to life and gunned
the car straight toward the three boys, making my breath catch in my chest,
stabbing. His eyes darkened, and the car shot up onto the sidewalk, swiping the
bucket as the three boys threw themselves backwards out of the truck’s path.
Dad whipped the car back off the sidewalk and turned down the street, glaring
obsidian at our shock, squinting at the boys in the rearview mirror as they
picked each other up off the curb, unhurt. My mother was speechless.
I spent half of my childhood chasing after my father
in his marches up and down the streets and across the face of the earth, and the
other half throwing myself out of his path, tumbling onto the curb and away
from his rage, praying that he would one day fill our home with jazz instead of
fury.
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