“He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind…”

Dear Mother,

I am often reminded of King Solomon’s proverb whenever I think of the history and trajectory of our family, our lives, and all that we once held dear, much of which has now vanished. Perhaps I’d rephrase this a bit more to fit our circumstances: Those who burn their own house shall inherit the wind—and there are certain late nights when I still smell the smoke of the political afterlives of you and father, and the rest of what used to be “family of blood and flesh,” as you’d put it. We all have indeed inherited the wind and the clouds and the darkness that accompany them. An appalling chasm has grown between us. The winds have scattered this once so-called invincible family in all directions. 

Sometimes I imagine you coming for a visit. I’d show you around, look for that pity on your face seeing how I ended up in this dilapidated “cape cod,” this shack of a home clothed in ugly white siding, a suburban hut, the likes of which in our former life would be reserved for grape pickers, hired laborers and gardeners, those people who shaved our lawns and embroidered our garden walls. On this visit I dream I’d finally have a conversation with you from the foul rag-and-bone shop of my heart, as that poet put it. But whenever I imagine that day and you landing in this country, I am unsettled and disturbed by an undercurrent of anxiety and fear that bears down on me.

How will a woman like you fit into a small and diminutive visit with only one person waiting for you at the airport. No red carpets, no one to hold your gloved hand, none to wave at, no curious crowds, no cameras, no one holding the door for you. Only a sea of strangers waiting for someone else. Only my eyes would fix on your subdued and subtracted figure, still pretending to keep that proud gait as you pass in a tunnel of people toward the exit.  

New reality, as it goes. Small consolations like this. We’d play our role faithfully as the refugees everyone thought we were. At home I’d show you around, take walks together in the neighborhood, customarily pet a dog or two, contort a smile here, spit a hello there, show you the “cursed house” which they say devoured a formerly happy family and scattered them every which way, and now the monster dwelling sits in its darkness, awaiting the next victim to enter its belly.

But wait. Perhaps I wouldn’t really be a dismal host like this—maybe I’d make an effort to skip such stories of rot and suburban decay. Let’s try again. Maybe, we’d walk in the quiet afternoon peace, the streets dripping with shade, and you and I would reminisce about the old country and its ways, at last getting off the dime, slipping cautiously into memories of that land of wonder and catastrophe. In the evening, we’d sit in the backyard and marvel at this life and our resilience, our survival, transformation. I’d cook a dinner for us, chicken thighs in tomato sauce or breaded pork chops extra crispy the way you always wanted them, back then when I was small and you would still take occasional pleasure to cook us dinner.    

I’d show you my modest library, a playhouse fantasy fitting in as a poor substitute for the lost sanctuary of my youth. Or maybe it’s more than that. Yes, I am dimly aware of certain pretentions that are both obsolete and sad. A personal library. Really? I see your bushy eyebrows, like Groucho Marx’s, lifting to question not the size of the library but the depth of my insanity, boredom. Or both. A room full of books to fill the abyss of exile, that marriage of convenience. The hole in the soul. Worse, to tell someone about it with bloated pride, croak about a wall of books as if this were still some kind of time-tested rampart that will keep marauding demons outside the gate. 

I hear you mother. I hear the voice of the cynic. The remorseful reader. The disillusioned scholar. The washed-up politician. The cliché. I get it. I concede defensively and partly to the frivolity and arrogance of talking about personal libraries today. I am aware of the downfall of the life of the mind and how in its heyday, as you once passionately argued, it could heal the human soul before you discovered the deadly and hypnotic playground of politics. I am aware, when I think of you, I am aware that at best book talking is vain distraction that brings no peace and no healing. 

Although you’d think that someone like me—who witnessed firsthand how books were the first things to be orphaned in war—would know a thing or two about the superfluous nature of literature.  The word ‘afterthought’ has never been more precise to describe something like books when your town is under siege and your children tremble before a killing squad. In times of blood-curling stress and howling of sirens, shelling, and the sky falling, the fleeing wretches abandoning their homes remember to grab only certain essentials on their way out: a jacket, under which they tuck a framed family photograph, and a loaf of bread, the cat, the cat, of course, a kid’s hand grabs a box of marbles, someone bags a dildo, another a hand mirror. But books? Almost never. Unless there is cash or gold stuffed in them. In such moments, books in general prove to be the last treasure anybody spares a thought for. In fact, books are a huge liability for the left-behind home in war as they become kindles and fuel to feed the flames that devour everything.  

I said almost never. Because there was that odd case of a man who must have held on to the sad idea that books possessed a kind of magic even in such dire circumstances. Someone whose village we besieged one night, moving in quickly to prevent the fleeing residents from hiding or taking away their valuables. This man—I have no idea why I am assuming it was a man because I never laid eyes on this person; but I can imagine only men with a galaxy-sized ego are self-absorbed enough to steal precious, perhaps last minutes from their life or the life of someone dear, to try and save their books at a moment when guns and people begin to crackle and scream outside on the street.

But this man whose story I want to share with you did not seem, after all, to have had enough time to save his library because when we entered the village at the crack of dawn, the man’s failure was both poignant and pathetic. Maybe he ran out of darkness, but in this mysterious man’s garden, there was an open grave with bulging burlap sacks of corpsed books. A pitiful sight, but also perhaps ironic. As I stood on the edge of this literary grave, I tried to picture the man lowering those bags into the hole, as our tanks growled and rumbled somewhere in the vicinity.

Who knows what went through that man’s mind that minute, but when I got there, it was, I admit, a moving sight. His books were not only dead, but their corpses were left in the open for defilement and desecration. Symbols of a disgraced idea of the good life, the life of the mind, the sham and the shame of a certain type of man who thought reading was going to save his life and protect his home from enemies.   

Imagine this man, mother, imagine him succumbing to a sudden humiliation brought on by a tragic awareness that instead of having used all that money to buy guns—which would have been the very thing to have in his hands on that fateful night, to stand his ground and defend his home and family—he had books that needed his attention and care. Can anything be more offensive to life’s dignity (questionable as that is in war) in such circumstances than the picture of a man fondling his books. 

And so the sudden revelation comes crashing in on the man kneeling by the grave that this might have been the day when he’d grip his rifle and defend his honor and that of his ancestors. This would have been the moment about which the posterity would reward him for his valor and bravery, the man who put up a futile and small, but nevertheless heroic fight against the enemy coming to rape and pillage. This heroic imagery and legacy must have flashed in the man’s head when, in a moment of self-disgust, he threw the shovel on the ground, abandoned the bags and walked away, having failed his books, his honor, and his family.       

But perhaps it was too late. The man could no longer run back into the house because he must have seen from his garden that our killing squad had already reached his family. What did he do in that moment? The man of books? His family falling into the hands of an enemy who is there to prove his worth as a sadistic beast. Imagine him wielding his narrative in the face of those monsters. If this literary man saved his own ass, would he go on and pretend there was nothing he could do to save his children before he ran for the hills that early dawn? How is he to make sense of his love for literature now, the man who abandoned his panicked family to take care of his books. Has he gone on to rebuild his library, console his soul with stories, seek redemption amidst a desert of specters and illusions. Or would he be fabricating a memoir now, telling the world how, bound to a tree, he was made to witness the killing of his family. 

That’s what I think, mother, happened that morning with the man who left that unfinished literary deed behind. And it wouldn’t be the first time I came upon a scene of devastation that I didn’t take a few minutes to think about the victim. To reconstruct the last moments of someone begging for their life. Sometimes I even felt the screams, piercing as a late autumn chill in my bones. Heard their last breath— be that the defiled body of a dead woman at my feet or that of a young man on a rope suspended from a beam, his pants freshly wet. 

Now, let us go back to that grave one more time. As I contemplated the ghost of our bookman with the shovel, I couldn’t help it but unbag a few of his books if only to understand a little about the reading taste of that vanished hero. The Russians tumbled over: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol. The universal bookshelf. A book of Italian poetry. I don’t know. Some miscellaneous works of lesser known and forgotten mortals. Hopeless and stuffy texts on something about dialectics or ethics. A manual for carrier pigeons, dogeared at a chapter titled, Pigeon and Man: How Do They Compare? A hand had highlighted the following sentence: “Research in letter sending during wartime shows that postal workers delivered mail at the wrong address at a shocking high rate of forty percent, while carrier pigeons, when not shot down, maintained their near one-hundred percent accuracy in delivering their messages to the intended addressee.” And so on. 

I took the shovel by the grave and, as if to cover a shame, pushed some dirt over the bags, the only unburied corpses in those days I came across and found myself covering from the elements.  

And so, mother, I often think of that morning and imagine that scene of those books in the grave has played a part in my inexplicable obsession of collecting books since exiling myself to this country. And perhaps the difference between that man and me is that I have no one to save anymore. I have little left to do but mount the horse of imagination and head for the unknown. Only in that fairy land of myth do I feel I get a chance to meet myself the hero I never was, to meet the ghosts of that war and beseech them to understand. But to understand what exactly? What is left there to explain? Why cling to the sham of words and speech? What is language in the aftermath of war but the murmur of a beast, a primeval grunt of pain.

But then again what choice do I have, mother? Haven’t I, after all, joined the legion of all those exiled men, torn away from their country and past, those clichés who eventually turn to literature to seek a friendly hand to shake, so to speak, swaddle themselves with warm blankets of fiction, if only to wear themselves off to a heavy sleep, keep the amassing army of the dead from intruding the dreams, ruining yet another night as the past keep returning with vengeance as they grow old.

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Mikra Namani has had work featured in various publications including Heresy Press, Socrates On the Beach, The Washington Post, and others. He holds an MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where he was awarded a De Alba Fellowship for his fiction. This extract is taken from The Sentimental Monster, an epistolary novel-in-progress about the relationship of an ex-militiaman with his mother. Mikra lives in Maryland.