Dinaw Mengestu - All Our Names

I parked in front of Isaac’s building rather than around the corner, as was my habit. His apartment was on the second floor; all the windows faced the street. I could see the lights in the bedroom, but before going inside, I wanted to see him once more from a safe distance. I turned on the radio. Bob Dylan was singing. I looked up and saw Isaac standing in the window. I turned off the engine and got out of the car. Before crossing the street, I looked up again and saw him staring directly at me. I expected him to smile or at least wave, but there wasn’t a trace of joy on his face. I never made it up to his apartment. I stood on the curb trying to decide whether I should leave; before I could come to a decision, Isaac was in front of me.

“Now is not a good time,” he began saying, but before he could finish he had taken hold of my arm and was leading me back to my car. He was calm, morose. When he took my arm I had the feeling that Isaac was trying to protect me, the same way my father often wrapped his arm around me while we were crossing the street if there was a car anywhere near us. The intention didn’t matter, though; as soon as he grabbed my arm, we both felt the breach, and without thinking, my entire body recoiled.

Isaac tried to apologize: “I’m sorry if I surprised you,” he said.

And I did as well: “You didn’t surprise me. You just never know who’s watching.”

But it was a poor defense. No one was watching. Our fears and prejudices were ingrained deep enough that we didn’t need an audience to enforce them. I had thought there could be nothing worse than our lunch at the diner, but I was wrong. What was worse was being alone in public and, for reasons you were reluctant to admit, feeling frightened because your lover held your arm.

I wonder whether, if before meeting Isaac I had tried to challenge the easy, small-time bigotry that was so common to our daily lives that I noticed it only in its extremes, I might have felt a little less shame that evening. It’s possible that I might have been able to release some of it slowly over the years, like one of those pressure valves that let out enough steam on a constant basis to keep the pipes from bursting. It’s also equally possible that such relief is impossible, that, regardless of what we do, we are tied to all the prejudices in our country and the crimes that come with them. As Isaac turned away from me, I wished that there were some way I could vanish or simply slip out of my skin, keep my flesh but without the exterior that came with it. The shame was so complete that I didn’t notice until Isaac had actually gone through the front door and I had heard it close that while he was outside with me the lights in his living room, specifically the lamp next to the dining-room table — the one I had brought from my own house after he told me that his living room was too dark to read in at night — had been turned on.

On the day the owners of the house arrived, the guards who had spent the past two days half asleep at their posts were up before dawn, raking the gravel in the courtyard. I watched the four of them from my bedroom window as they scraped the ground to reveal the fine red dust that lay beneath. They were meticulous to the point of obsession, running lines over the same few square meters of earth over and over until every bit of gravel was gone.

I watched them for at least half an hour, waiting for them to slacken their pace, to turn their rakes to the side and make meaningless observations that, bit by bit, would devour the time; but they remained committed to their task for as long as I watched them. At first I thought they did so because they were grateful finally to have something to do, but then I leaned my head out the window and saw Isaac standing against the sole tree in the courtyard, watching them, his legs crossed, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He was, without effort, the perfect vision of an overlord, a man who wielded his power casually, as if it had always been his right to do so.

I took my time getting dressed. My injuries had healed enough for me to take the stairs on my own, but I still missed having Isaac there to lean on. As soon as I stepped outside, I understood what all that tedious raking had been for. A wide, sweeping arc of nearly polished earth leading from the gate to the front door had been cleared to make a red carpet of dirt that looked like a half-drawn heart; this gave the house a dignity I would have thought impossible had I not seen it myself. I had to admire what Isaac had done. He yelled out to me from his tree, “Look at what we’ve done.” The pride wasn’t his alone — there was more than enough to go around. The guards stopped raking and looked at him with admiration and gratitude as well.

Isaac clapped his hands, and one of the guards brought a chair to the tree for me to sit on.

“We don’t have much time,” he said. “They’ll be here in a few hours.”

I had vague notions of who “they” were, and the images I did have were borrowed from the glimpses of powerful men I had experienced in my life. The men I pictured wore gold-rimmed sunglasses and had hefty stomachs they were proud of. They wore matching loose pants and button-down shirts, and the oldest or wealthiest of the group carried a walking stick topped by a shiny gold handle. I had seen those men on numerous occasions, stepping out of their cars in the capital. They may have been businessmen, army men, or government ministers. Street spectators like myself never knew and were too afraid to ask. Their mystery was a part of their power, and even though I was in that house with Isaac, the same rules of hierarchy applied.

When the courtyard was finished, the guards began work on the rest of the grounds. They gathered the fallen leaves and emptied the dirty water from the fountain. The young girl with the white headscarf who brought us our meals appeared, with two other girls her age. When I saw those girls, who couldn’t have been older than sixteen or seventeen, a harsh, sarcastic voice in my head said, “There is your Hope and Patience.” They spent the morning and afternoon carting buckets of water from the kitchen in the back and later scrubbing the floors on their knees, while Isaac watched. I wanted to know what their names were but avoided getting too close to them; every time I caught a fleeting glimpse of either, I thought, Patience is on her knees, or Hope is out back looking for water.

Isaac asked only one thing of me: “You have to look your best today,” he said. “Go to my room and change.”

He pointed to the sling that I still wore on my right arm to keep my ribs from moving too much.

“Do you need that?” he asked me.

And suddenly I was also desperate to impress and to be rewarded.

“Are you joking?” I said. I slipped my arm out of the sling and did my best to raise it above my head. The pain was far greater than I had expected. “I never needed it.”

He smiled. He gave my injured arm a gentle pat. He didn’t say it, but I felt that I had made him proud.

By midafternoon, all the preparations that Isaac had been able to think of had been made. The house shone, and every half-hour or so the grounds were swept again so that they were as spotless as they had been that morning. There was nothing left to do but wait.

“They’ll be here by three or four p.m. at the latest,” Isaac said. In anticipation, Isaac had the guards and girls who had spent the morning cleaning and cooking line up in two perfect rows outside the front door. They held their place for at least an hour; at three, when no one had arrived, Isaac had them line up parallel to the house instead. He kept them there for a few minutes before deciding that it was all wrong.

“It’s unacceptable,” he said. “Look at them. They look like they just came off the streets.”