Dinaw Mengestu - All Our Names

“You boys must be tired,” he said. “I apologize for making you wait outside like that. I hope we didn’t offend you. My colleagues are a bit nervous and aren’t used to speaking in front of others.”

He was the only man I had ever met who spoke like that. It wasn’t the accent but the words themselves that were striking, at once formal and yet seemingly more gentle, as if he were trying not just to communicate but to elevate whomever he was speaking to onto the same privileged plane on which he existed.

“We didn’t mind,” Isaac said. “We would have been happy to stay outside longer.”

It had been decided that Isaac and I would share my room on the top floor, and Joseph, the three other men, and the two soldiers with them would take over the rooms on the first and second floors.

“We are going to need all the space we have,” Joseph said. “This is just the beginning.”

As he talked, two of the house guards quietly entered, carrying a mattress that must have belonged to one of them. Joseph stopped them just as they were climbing the stairs. He had them turn the mattress over so he could see both sides, and then said something in Kiswahili that made both of them smile and Isaac turn away in embarrassment.

That was the second time Isaac and I shared a room — the first had been back in the slums, after Isaac was kicked out of his house. Neither of us had slept well that night, fearful about what would happen next. I felt a similar fear that second night, though it was hard to know what lay behind it. We were safe in that house, at least for the moment, but there was something else at risk. Isaac seemed to know that, too. He didn’t say a word to me after we entered the room, just undressed in the dark and went straight to his mattress, which had been placed opposite mine, next to the door. It fell to him to say that everything would be okay, even if we were both certain that it wasn’t. As tired as I was, I couldn’t sleep while he was visibly disturbed. I turned my back to him so he couldn’t see that, though I was lying perfectly motionless, I had both eyes wide open.

Either my performance was better than I thought or, after an hour of silently waiting, Isaac no longer cared. Sometime around 3 a.m., Isaac rose from his bed. I didn’t turn around to see him, but I could hear him pull back the sheet and put his pants on. He opened the door just enough to slip out; not until I was certain that he was gone did I turn over.

Whatever I had been afraid of left with Isaac. With him gone, I was asleep in a few minutes. I suppose I knew that night where he had gone, and I suppose I also knew that he was trusting me not just to keep that knowledge to myself, but to ignore it altogether. There was no secret to guard, nothing to deny, because, according to the deal we had silently struck, nothing had happened.

When I woke the next morning, Isaac was back in his bed. His pants and shirt were strewn on the floor just as he had left them when he arrived. He was, to my surprise, deeply asleep. I had never felt protective of him before. I had seen him injured, beaten, and knocked unconscious, and all I had ever felt was pity or sadness and maybe a bit of envy for his reckless courage. He had never needed me to come to his defense, and to be honest, I wouldn’t have known how to. Had I woken him up and told him that when it came to me he was safe, he had nothing to worry about, he would have kicked me out of that house, and we would never have spoken again. I wanted him to know that, though, and so I did the only thing I could think of: I picked his clothes up from the floor. I folded his pants and shirts, just as my mother had done for my father and for me — a seemingly insignificant gesture that was still one of the things I missed most about living so far away from home. It had something to do with knowing that even in your sleep you were watched over, and that each morning, no matter what mistakes you might have made, you had the right to begin again. I laid Isaac’s clothes next to his bed, which was how my mother had always done it; before leaving, I swept my hands over his shirt and pants to shake off the dirt and smooth out the wrinkles as best I could.

“Good night, Helen.” It was a simple, seemingly harmless statement, and yet as soon as the car turned the corner I realized I had been holding my breath since hearing my name. I didn’t move until I felt certain the car wasn’t coming back, and then I panicked. I looked for the keys in the ignition and slapped the steering wheel when I didn’t find them. I searched my pockets and the passenger seat before I remembered I had thrown them in the glove compartment. I imagined Isaac and the bald man looking down at me earlier and laughing. I told myself I was frightened, but really the embarrassment was the hardest thing to bear.

I took my time putting the keys in the ignition. If Isaac was watching me, I wanted him to see me calmly drive away, and so I did my best to imitate a woman of composure. I fastened my seat belt, I adjusted the mirrors, and I was about to turn the key when the front door of Isaac’s building opened. He came out slowly, or at least he appeared to. I noticed he wasn’t wearing a coat. He tucked his hands in his pockets, and his shoulders hunched together. I remembered that this was his first glimpse of winter, and that he had worried almost since the day he arrived how he would handle the cold. He had asked me in September if the weather would get much worse. “You have no idea,” I had told him, not knowing that for him there was nothing humorous about winter. The temperature had been dropping all evening; my fingers and toes felt almost numb, even though it was still above freezing. I wanted to tell Isaac that he should go back upstairs and get his coat.

He turned to where I was parked. I couldn’t decide if I was relieved or disappointed that he knew immediately where to find me. I didn’t hold on to the question for long. His standing under the light meant I could see him all too clearly. He made no attempt to hide his grief; I could feel it splayed across his face as surely as if he were lying next to me.

Isaac got into the car, and we drove away. How we came to that point without speaking doesn’t matter, although David would later insist that it did.

“You had no idea what he was doing, who he was with, or where he had been,” David said. “Please, tell me at least he apologized.”

“He didn’t say anything,” I told him.

“That makes you either a saint or an idiot,” he said.

I wasn’t either. I simply saw a man in need, and knew I could do something to ease that.

We drove past Isaac’s apartment, made a loop around the center of town, and within ten minutes were on the ramp leading to the highway. I didn’t have a destination in mind. The farther we drove, the heavier Isaac’s breathing became, and for a while, that was all I concentrated on. The rapid fall and rise of his breath would eventually have to break, and shortly after we got on the highway it did. First one short sob, followed by another, after which he finally gave in and cried openly. I drove faster. I knew as soon as he stopped crying he would be embarrassed, and I thought that if I drove fast enough we could pretend it had never happened, or was already such a trivial thing of the past, miles behind us, that it was no longer worth speaking about. I drove like that across two county lines; there were signs I had never seen before leading to Kansas, St. Louis, and Chicago. Had Isaac needed me to, I would have gone on longer, but the weight began to lift. His breathing returned to normal. He wiped his face clean with his forearms and placed one hand on my shoulder.

“Who was that man with you?” I asked him.

I drove for several miles waiting for an answer. When none came I tried again. “Can you tell me why he knows my name?”