All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu

Author:Dinaw Mengestu [Mengestu, Dinaw]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780385349994
Google: 1Tz4AAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00F1W0DLS
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2014-03-04T08:00:00+00:00

ISAAC

Isaac and I were half asleep on the chairs by the time we were allowed back into the house. By then the girls and the house guards had gone off to the servants’ quarters. The cicada lights had gone off, as had all the lights in the city. It was two weeks since the government had started cutting off the streetlights after midnight, but I had never noticed until then how complete the blackness was. Looking out at the capital from our secluded corner reminded me of a story my father had told me about a city that disappeared each night once the last inhabitant fell asleep. He was good at telling stories—not great, like my uncles and grandfathers, who reveled in the theatrics. Compared to them, a story was a solemn occasion delivered in a calm, measured voice that nonetheless left a lasting impression on anyone who was listening. He told me that story about the city that disappeared at night shortly after I developed a sudden, irrational fear of the dark. I must have been ten or eleven at the time, old enough to have known better than to be afraid of something so common and simple as the end of the day, and well past the age of bedtime stories, but for the first few nights of my terror, my father indulged me. He told me one night about the countries thousands of miles to the north of us where months went by without the sun setting—hoping I would find comfort in knowing that the world didn’t end simply because the lights went out in our village.

According to my father, the city in the story was once a real place. “I’m not inventing this for you,” he said. “Everything I tell you is true.” I believed him in that semiconscious way that children have of dismissing reality in the hope of finding something better. “For hundreds of years,” my father said, “that city existed as long as one person dreamed of it each night. In the beginning, everyone kept some part of the city alive in their dreams—people dreamed of their garden, the flowers they had planted that they hoped would bloom in the spring, or the onions that were still not ripe enough to eat. They dreamed of their neighbor’s house, which in most cases they believed was nicer than their own, or the streets they walked to work on every day, or, if they didn’t have a job, then of the café where they spent hours drinking tea. It didn’t matter what they dreamed of as long as they kept one image alive just for themselves, and in many cases they would pass that image on to their children, who would inherit their house, or attend the same school, or work in the same office. After many years, though, people grew tired of having to dream the same image night after night. They complained. They bickered and fought among themselves about whether they shouldn’t abandon the city altogether.

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