Dinaw Mengestu - All Our Names

During the three days I lived in that enclave, I learned there was pleasure to be found in anonymity. Of the forty-five people that I was certain lived there most of the year, all knew only one thing about me — that I was hiding and had the money to pay not to be found. I told the man who escorted me to the village my real name, the one given to me at birth. Both he and his son laughed when they tried to pronounce it, and each had his own variation. We had a few common words among us, which took all the pressure off the silence and left me happily wordless. By the time we arrived at the clearing, my name had been transformed into Daniel — a Biblically familiar name among the devoutly Christian people who lived there. I enjoyed hearing the children say it. It sounded like a song. They were the ones who spoke to me most often. They watched me closely the first day I was there, seemingly incapable of exhausting their interest in me and in the pleasure they took in saying “Hello, Daniel,” or “Okay, Daniel,” every time I moved so much as an inch.

I stayed in a thatch-roofed hut next to where the man and his son lived with a much older woman whom I took to be the man’s mother or grandmother. Unlike in most villages I knew, women were scarce here, not men. Among the few there, most were in the last half of their lives. There were dozens of children, however, both girls and boys, so the loss of women was clearly recent. It was easy enough to guess what might have happened, but I refused to think too long on it. I wanted silence, and that was what I had been given.

That first night alone, I had to contend with knowing Isaac was out there fighting. Initially, I found myself praying for his safe return, but I cut that thought short as well; his win could only be the product of someone else’s loss, and the same held true the other way. Before sleeping, I settled on a simple enough prayer, made without fealty to any faith or cause: Have mercy on them all.

My mother waved goodbye to us from the porch, with one hand on the screen door. She watched as Isaac and I got into the car, and was still standing outside as I steered us back onto the road. She waited until we were out of sight before letting go of the door. I knew that she would take either the wicker chair at the far end of the porch, or the rocking chair that sat in the middle. Whichever one she chose, she would remain there for hours. This was what she always did. We rarely had guests, and when they did come, she would walk them to their car and remain on the porch a while longer, as if she wasn’t sure they were really gone, or was reluctant to go back into the house because they were. When I looked back and saw her still on the porch, I knew she would stay out there longer than normal, wondering if she had lost me, and if she had, how much longer she could bear living in such an empty house by herself.

I worried that I was being too quiet now that Isaac and I were alone again, but when I looked over he seemed equally removed, his gaze fixed on the soy fields outside his window. When we reached a red light, he asked if it was hard for my mother to live in such a big house. He didn’t say she was alone, or lonely, but that was implied; he didn’t say “big house,” either. He referred to it as a house with so many rooms, as if it wasn’t the scale that mattered but the way the space had been divided. I wasn’t listening closely enough to understand the distinction at the time, but I knew he had chosen those words for a reason.

The simple answer to his question was yes, but I was unwilling to admit that. Her loneliness had multiple strains; as her daughter, I knew each and every one, and tended to them from a distance.

“Why would it be hard? She’s very comfortable. She has everything she needs, and I still live there.”

Comfort wasn’t the point, though, and it was meaningless to claim to Isaac that I lived there.

“You are right. Forget what I said.”

When we neared downtown, I told Isaac I wanted to make a brief detour to visit an old client. I had thought of Rose as soon as I had thought of Chicago, but never with the intention of visiting her. Like my mother, she lived alone, but she was much older and had far less space. At least a month had gone by since I had last spoken to her, more since I had gone to her house.

“You can wait in the car this time,” I said. “It will only take a few minutes. She’s an old woman. She’s not comfortable with strangers.”

I imagined finding Rose sitting on her couch, gracefully looking through old photos when I arrived. She would tell me that all was fine, her health and her home, and I would tell her that I was on my way now to Chicago with a man I loved, and that, in honor of her, we would stay at the Knickerbocker Hotel, perhaps in the same room that Al Capone had once lived in.

• • •

David had warned me never to confuse my clients’ lives with my own. “If your life is falling apart,” he said, “don’t think you can make it better by trying to save someone else’s. And the same is true the other way. Be grateful when you’re happy. Being miserable isn’t required.”

He had one expression taped to his door: “Why do [we] [they] think we can save them?”

And underneath that: “Depending on your mood, circle one.”

My life wasn’t falling apart, but I believed an important part of it was coming to an end, and I wanted Rose, with her photo albums and stories, to show me the brightest possible version of what that end might look like — not now, but twenty, thirty, fifty years in the future.

As soon as I turned onto her street, I knew I had made a mistake. The neighborhood, and in particular that block, had been emptying out rapidly in the past two years, as some of the older stores downtown began to close. The families who lived in this neighborhood worked in those shops, or in places that depended on their owners, and so they were the first to feel the loss. There had been at least three “For Sale” signs visibly displayed on front lawns the first time I visited Rose, and now here was a fourth, which I could tell even from the opposite end of the block had landed in front of Rose’s house. I continued on anyway. There was a chance that Rose was there; in order to believe that, I avoided answering the obvious question: where would an eighty-something-year-old woman with no close family go after her house was sold?

• • •

I parked across the street from her house, even though there were no cars in front of it. Rose’s home could have fit comfortably on the first floor of my mother’s. It was short and narrow, a sturdier, brightly painted version of a shotgun shack. The two windows on either side of the front door had been boarded over, as if the house had been blinded. It was hard to imagine someone had lived there recently, or would do so again anytime soon.

“Is this where you wanted to go?” Isaac asked.

I didn’t want to answer him directly.

“This was where my client Rose lived.”

I was afraid the state of the house said something about me as well.

“And where is she now?”

“She was very old,” I said. “In her eighties. She was the one who told me to go to Chicago.”

We remained parked across the street a while longer. My claims of caring, and not just for Rose, felt fraudulent. David knew when her file was closed, and had chosen not to tell me. It was part of the agreement we had struck almost a year ago. As long as I had Isaac, I had no funerals or hospital visits to attend to.

Isaac placed my hand on the gearshift. He thought I was mourning.

“I think this means that we should definitely go to Chicago,” he said.

A slow, winding parade of tired and wounded refugees invaded the village on the fourth day. They emerged into the clearing shortly after dawn from a footpath on the eastern edge of the village. There must have been more than a hundred of them, but at least half were children, and as far as I could tell from behind the fence of my compound, many of the men and women were injured and could barely walk. Most of the village came out to witness their arrival, including the man and boy I was staying with. The man had an old rifle gripped to his chest, his son a pickax that he dragged behind him. When the boy saw me, he dropped his grip on the ax so he could wave to me with both hands as he said, “Okay, Daniel.” His father turned to grab him by the collar, but by that point it was too late. A dozen other children standing in their own compounds had picked up the call and were waving with both hands, each shouting either “Okay, Daniel,” or “Hello, Daniel.” Their voices were a reminder of my place as a curious stranger — not totally welcome, but easily tolerated. It was a privileged perch. The previous evening, while trying to write for the fourth or fifth time the most general observations of what I had seen and done that day, I finally understood why my father had called me Bird: nothing made me happier than looking down, and in that village, that was all I had to do. I watched the old women pound maize in the morning while the children dug for ants and beetles and the men set off for work, either to their farms or back to town. When the children shouted hello to me that morning, I could hear the imaginary perch I lived on break.