Dinaw Mengestu - All Our Names

I’d never felt afraid of him before, but seeing him in that chair that morning I was reminded of how little I knew about him, and for a few seconds I considered turning around and running away. I told myself I was worried about what my coworkers would think if they came through the door and saw us so awkwardly arranged, that there was something valid to that logic made it easier to believe that was the real reason I found it hard to stand there.

I tried my best to give off an air of professional detachment.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Did we have an appointment scheduled for today?”

If David had heard me, he would have said I was a terrible actress. My attempt at sounding detached was a bad cliché of the wounded-lover role I was trying so hard to avoid.

“No,” Isaac said. “We did not have an appointment scheduled for today. I came for personal reasons.”

Who speaks like that? I wanted to yell this at him until he gave me an honest answer. It wasn’t just his words but the tone that came with them. If he sounded like a character from Dickens, it was because he had decided that was what proper English sounded like. I didn’t hear his real voice until the very end of our relationship, in the months just before he was supposed to leave. It began with a slip — he called me “love” instead of Helen. “Love,” he said, “come here,” and he extended his arms to me, knowing I would meet him. He rarely ever called me Helen again. Instead of asking if I wanted to stay the night, he’d simply say, “So what now, love?” while squeezing my hand or pressing his body against mine.

But before getting to that point, I had to convince myself that whatever Isaac said next was true. When he said, “I came here because I was concerned about you. I wanted to make sure you were all right,” I focused strictly on the words; despite their restraint, they were enough to move me. He didn’t say that he missed me or cared about me; I added that for him. I told myself the only reason he hadn’t said as much was that he lacked the confidence to do so, not the heart.

“Are you happy to see me?” he asked. “Should I have not come?”

“Of course I’m happy,” I told him.

And I genuinely was.

Isaac left the office immediately afterward. He looked to make sure no one was watching before kissing me as softly as possible on the cheek. I wished he’d had an old bowler hat he could have put on before walking out the door, something to match the antiquated way we had made up. For the next two weeks, I left work early and went to his apartment. In the beginning, we hardly talked before moving to the bedroom. The first two times, he acted as if he was surprised I had come at all.

“You’re here,” he said.

“I got lost on my way home,” I told him.

“Follow me,” he said. “I have a map somewhere in my bedroom.”

We needed disguises. One day it was a map; the next, I pretended I had come in search of a glass of water.

“Water?” he said.

“Tomorrow I promise to do better.”

We didn’t know where all the cracks and fault lines between us lay, and so we said little, in order to avoid them. Once we were in the bedroom, we rushed through our clothes. Kissing was an afterthought. It wasn’t until he was inside me that I felt I could look at him closely. We spent hours in bed each night, testing the range of what could be said. We’d fall asleep, and then one of us would wake up and immediately climb on top of the other, as if desperately trying to make a point that hadn’t yet been touched upon or that needed repeating. By the time I left, it was always well after midnight — six to eight hours would have passed, during which I might have said no more than a few hundred words, not one of which had any special meaning. Once I returned home, on the way up to my bedroom, I’d stop outside my mother’s room, at the opposite end of the long hallway lined with pictures taken more than two decades ago. Even before they separated, the only thing my parents had that resembled a relationship was the fact that they slept in the same bed. I remembered trying to sleep with them as a child and finding that I felt more alone lying between them than I did in my own room.

I hadn’t stood outside their bedroom door since I was a teenager, trying to sneak out of the house. I used to press my ear against the door and count to fifty before deciding it was safe to go. Gradually, that number was whittled down to thirty, and then ten, until I was finally certain that I would never hear anything coming out of that room.

The first five nights I came home late from Isaac’s apartment, I found myself pitying my mother for the cold and virtually barren life she had shared with my father. I thought the kindest thing I could do for her would be to crawl into her bed and press my body against hers, so she would know how much comfort could be found in being held while you slept. If I did this, maybe some trace of that affection would linger on in her room after I left.

As I said, though, those feelings only lasted for five nights. By the sixth, I couldn’t remember what had made me carry on like that. I left Isaac’s apartment knowing that we were sleeping with each other not to draw closer but to try and rid ourselves of a desire we both thought we would be better off without. After he came, I’d try to get him back inside me, and when that failed, I told him, “Don’t sleep. I can wait.” I left thinking I had had enough of him, only to realize, before reaching home, that I felt emptier now than I had before I saw him.

I still stopped outside my mother’s bedroom that night, and every night after for the next week, but it wasn’t out of pity. Each time I stood in front of the door, I wanted to throw it open so I could stand at the foot of her bed and, as she dragged herself out of sleep, tell her in intimate detail how I’d spent my evening with Isaac, from the time I walked into his apartment and silently undressed in his bedroom, until the moment I left while he was sleeping, or at least pretending to. And if when I finished she asked why I was telling her this, I’d say, “So you can see how much we resemble one another.”

It wasn’t long before students began to join Isaac and me at our tree in the center of campus. They had heard rumors about Isaac and knew nothing about me, but regardless our daily vigil on the grass had made us familiar, comforting figures to gather around. We had no obvious politics, and, compared with many of the other students, who squatted on the grass under banners of Lenin and maps of a borderless Africa, we seemed innocent, if not harmless. The only marker we had to distinguish us was a sign that Isaac posted on the tree behind us every day we were there: “What Crimes Against the Country have you committed today?”

The sign, as he saw it, was an invitation for the entire campus to join our paper revolution, since, according to him, “everyone has a crime to confess.”

On either side of us were two opposing camps of student communists. Each day they unfurled signs announcing the People’s Revolution and the Communist Utopia. Their portraits of Marx and Lenin grew larger every week. They yelled insults at each other from their separate camps — rarely in English, the language of the capitalists.

“You know what they fight over?” Isaac said. “Posters — who has the bigger flag.”

Isaac claimed that, unlike the other student radicals and revolutionaries, he had no agenda. “We are a true democracy,” he said. “The paper revolution is for everyone.”

I assumed that the story of our paper revolution was already forgotten, and that Isaac’s crude sign was a poor attempt to recapture some of the glory of that afternoon. The day Isaac hung his sign, however, students came. Whether it was out of curiosity or boredom didn’t matter. Even the ones who knew nothing about him did exactly what he wanted: they played the game; they sat down and stayed long enough to confess.