“I asked him once, ‘What kind of revolutionary has a woman scrub his floors?’ He laughed at me. He said, ‘That’s why people become revolutionaries—so they can have someone else clean their floors.’ What could I say to that? I was living in his house by then. For the first time in my life, every day when I woke up I had clean clothes, and something to eat two, three times a day, as much as I wanted. Once I had that, I realized my revolution was over.”
Isaac opened the windows in what would have been his room. A banana tree right outside tempered the heat and allowed a slightly cool breeze to blow through. He leaned his body over the frame and stuck his head outside.
“He thinks I am already halfway to Kenya by now, but I wanted to see this house again. Neither of us will ever live here.”
“We can leave now,” I said.
“I promise, soon we will.”
The sun covered the room in a yellow haze. Not since our first day at Joseph’s house in the capital had I felt such peace. We knew to do our best not to disturb it. We took a place on the floor against the back wall and held that pose until dusk approached. The light shifted from yellow to a reddish pink, a sign that the air was full of sand and dust from a strong wind blowing in from somewhere.
Isaac stood up first.
“We should go now,” he said. “Joseph will be at the hotel soon. I need to tell him we are leaving.”
I didn’t argue; I wanted him to have his goodbye if it meant he was free to leave. We took the shortest route back to the main road. When we arrived, we were exactly halfway between the bronze fist and the hotel. The dust had turned what would have been a common sunset into an occasion to color the sky a shade of red that was either glorious or frightening to witness. We stood at the intersection and looked up until we heard a large diesel engine and could see a lorry and a car trailing it, approaching us.
“Here they come,” Isaac said.
“You don’t want to leave now?” I asked him.
“There is one more thing I have to show you,” he said.
We arrived at the hotel before the cars. Isaac said it was best if I waited for him in one of the other rooms while he spoke to Joseph.
“I will come find you when it is time to leave,” he said.
The injured soldiers were still lying in the courtyard; three had passed away since morning, and their bodies were draped in light-blue sheets lifted from the beds. The soldier who had told me to bury the bodies was gone, as were many others, but there must have been at least two dozen able-bodied men remaining.
Isaac suggested I take a room on the second floor, where I would have more privacy. I climbed the stairs while he remained in the courtyard. He wanted me to stay in my room until he was finished, but I couldn’t resist seeing Joseph again.
The lorry full of soldiers and the sedan trailing it stopped in front of the hotel. Isaac was standing in the middle of the courtyard with his arms folded, as if he were the owner waiting for his guests to arrive. When soldiers entered with their guns drawn and pointed squarely at him, he seemed more amused than bothered. They formed a semicircle around the courtyard, while a second wave of men entered, with Joseph securely hidden in the middle. They were the same guards who had been with him at the house in the capital—tall, powerful men whose loyalty had been bought. Once inside the courtyard, they opened up just enough for me to see Joseph. He was no longer dressed as a soldier. He had traded in his fatigues for a dark three-piece suit, a return to his original role as a politician rather than a soldier.
He walked directly to Isaac, who wasn’t supposed to be there. From the smile on his face, he seemed grateful to find that Isaac had stayed. Joseph placed his hand on Isaac’s shoulder, and with that the two of them, along with Joseph’s bodyguards, walked off to an empty room on the ground floor.
I waited in the doorway for them to come back; after an hour had passed, I went to the bed and lay down; without intending to, I fell asleep. On a mattress propped up by a stack of wooden boxes, I dreamed of being in a large house that stood near the center of a city; I was late to meet someone but couldn’t find my way out. I wandered through hundreds of identical rooms, or rooms that seemed identical, because I kept thinking, I’ve been here before, there has to be another way out. The dream was a nightmare in that it seemed I might never escape from it, and yet I wasn’t afraid: as desperate as I might have been to leave, another part of me thought that all would be fine in the end, that whoever was waiting to meet me would wait for as long as was needed. I was still in the throes of that dream when Isaac entered. Half awake, I thought I was right not to have been worried. Isaac had waited for me after all. I didn’t realize I was still in my dream until I heard Isaac’s voice tell me calmly not to get up. I opened my eyes, and when I did, I saw him standing over me, but since there was no light in the room and it was night outside, I could see only his form. I stood up, though he had told me not to. For the first time he called me by the name my father had given me when I was born. “D——, don’t get up. Stay where you are. It will soon be over.”
I could hear soldiers shouting in English and Kiswahili. I understood the threats and curses in both languages.
“Don’t worry about it,” Isaac said. “It is finished now.”
He hadn’t closed the door fully behind him, and despite what he had said, he made no effort to stop me from going out. When I reached the balcony, I saw Joseph standing alone with what was left of his army surrounding him. I looked for his guards and saw them on the opposite side of the courtyard, talking among themselves; none of them were looking down. I turned around to look for Isaac, but he was in the room and wasn’t going to come out.
Joseph was still dressed in his elegant suit; he hadn’t been harmed in the least; only his tie was slightly askew. I looked at the soldiers surrounding him and realized there were many more now than there had been when we returned to the hotel, and that among them was the soldier who had spoken with his fist clenched. He was now in charge. This was one thing Isaac had wanted me to see.
That soldier took three steps toward Joseph, and as he did so, the rest of the men stopped shouting. He spoke while standing at attention. Though I couldn’t hear, I knew he was uttering a list of crimes against Joseph.
I never thought about closing my eyes. I didn’t blink as that man raised his arm and shot Joseph in the head, nor did I turn away as he stood over Joseph’s body and fired twice more into his chest, because Joseph deserved at least that much, and because that was what Isaac had taught me to do.
I didn’t weep for Joseph, but I mourned him nonetheless. I gripped the rails on the balcony until my palms almost bled. When I went back into the room, I found Isaac on the bed, staring at me calmly. There was enough light with the door open to see he had been crying.
“It had to be done. There was no other way,” he said. And because I knew he loved Joseph, I believed him.
He made room on the bed for me. He handed me what I thought was his wallet. I held it close to my face and saw that it was a Kenyan passport.
“There’s no picture in it,” he said. “You will have to do that on your own after you cross the border. But it belongs to you now.”
On the first page was Isaac’s name attached to Joseph’s: Isaac Mabira.
“This is what I wanted to show you,” he said. “Joseph gave me that just before we left the capital. He bought a plane ticket and found a way to get me a visa, but I told him I would never leave. He thought I would when the time came, but this is my country. I don’t know who I am if I leave it.”
We didn’t fight long. The argument wasn’t heated. We never raised our voices. I begged Isaac not to do this. I promised to go to America if he left for Kenya with me, but no man of worth gives up his faith that easily, and in the sickest corner of my heart I was prepared to give up anyone in order to leave.
He gave me a satchel that l had noticed was lying on the floor. Inside was a notebook exactly like the one he had given me when I was in the hosp
ital.
“Take the bag with you,” he said. “There is money inside. I’ve written everything you need to know. All you have to do now is go, and tell me that we’ll see each other again.”
He stood and walked out onto the terrace.
“I’m not going to go any farther than this,” he said. “So say it.”
“I promise we’ll see each other again soon,” I said.
He put his hands on my shoulders. We kissed on both cheeks, and when that wasn’t enough, embraced each other until our arms hurt.
He wasn’t on the balcony when I looked up from the courtyard. The door to the room was closed, so he never heard the engine of Joseph’s car as it pulled away. He had so much more than my leaving to mourn that I would like to think I slipped away as quietly as possible.
It took me two weeks to reach the Kenyan border. The car dropped me off hundreds of miles away, and from there I walked and rode in the back of several different trucks, all of which were crowded with others fleeing. Joseph’s army was one of many fighting to liberate the country. Together, they left a trail of deserted villages, some of which were still smoldering when we passed, that lasted the entire journey. When I reached Nairobi, I opened the notebook Isaac had given me. It was just as he had promised: there was a list of everything I needed to know about going to America, from the visa at the embassy to the airline and how to find Henry when I arrived. Its middle pages were filled with notes he had written for me. On one page he rewrote his list of Crimes Against the Country, with an addition at the end: “It is a Crime Against the Country to forget this happened.” On another, a list of names he had given me: Professor, Langston, Ali, ending with the one on the passport, Isaac Mabira, which is our name now. He had made a better record of our lives than I had ever done. He knew why he was writing. It was always for me. The last thing he wrote, dated the same day I left that village, which I read over and over as I made my way to Kenya and then again when I was on the plane to America, which I tore out and placed in the middle of the passport that he had given me, and which I read again after saying goodbye to Helen on a street in Chicago, and which was what I said to her before she left with a promise to return:
No one will have ever loved each other more than we did.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to my parents, Hirut and Tesfaye Mengestu; my sister, Bezawit; and my family in Ethiopia, America, and France. To my dear friends, colleagues, and editors: Mark Binelli, Jonathan Ringen, Jonathan Hickman, Steve Toltz, Julien Chatelin, Pierre Scipion, Manuel Gonzales, Stanislas Wang-Ghen, John Freeman, Ellah Affrey, Francis Geffard, Pervaiz Shallwani, Aamer Madhani, Julia Holmes (conqueror of the Erie Canal), Jessica Lamb-Shapiro, Marcela Valdes, Shawn McGibboney, Nam Le, Christian Lorentzen, Megan Lynch, Mih-ho Cha, Michael Bronner, Bhakti Shringapure and Brian Plazas. Thank you for your years of support. I am indebted to Andrew Rice’s wonderful book, The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget, and to Mark Gevisser, for his brilliant essay “Edenvale,” and to my colleagues at Georgetown University, especially Carolyn Forche, David Gewanter, Henry Schwarz, Norma Tilden, Mark McMorris, Penn Szittya, and Jessica Williams. I am also deeply indebted to Patrick Lannan, Jo Chapman, and the entire Lannan Foundation; as well as to Jan Vilcek, Marica Vilcek, and the Vilcek Foundation; the Baton Rouge Area Foundation; and the MacArthur Foundation, whose support was vital in the final stages. To the staff at Knopf, especially Caroline Bleeke and Gabrielle Brooks, thank you for all you have done to bring this book to life. And to my agent, P. J. Mark, and my editor, Jordan Pavlin, I can’t thank you enough for your patience, wisdom, and support. And, of course, and above all, to Gabriel, Louis-Selassie, and Anne-Emmanuelle.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dinaw Mengestu is the award-winning author of two novels, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2008) and How to Read the Air (2010). He is a graduate of Georgetown University and Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction and the recipient of a 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation and a 20 Under 40 Award from The New Yorker. His journalism and fiction have appeared in such publications as Harper’s, Granta, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal. He is a recipient of a 2012 MacArthur Foundation genius grant and currently lives in New York City.
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