Someone Like Us

An excerpt from Dinaw Mengestu's novel Someone Like Us. 

I learned of Samuel’s death two days before Christmas while standing in the doorway of my mother’s new home. She lived fifteen minutes away from the airport in a Virginia suburb twenty miles south of Washington, DC, that had become popular with retired middle-class immigrants like her. We hadn’t seen each other in almost five years, and the cab ride from the airport was the last chance I had to indulge the fantasy that at any moment, Samuel might call to say he was running late but had every intention of meeting me at the airport. The trip was supposed to have been both family vacation and reunion, a chance for my wife, Hannah, and me to introduce our two-year-old son to his not-quite American grandmother and almost-grandfather. Instead, as the cab pulled up to my mother’s new home, Hannah and my son were more than three thousand miles away in Paris and Samuel had been dead for several hours.

*

My mother told me the news of Samuel’s death as soon as I dropped my suitcase at the bottom of the half-spiral staircase that led to the four bedrooms and two bathrooms she was so proud of. I had felt lightheaded walking up the driveway, having barely slept the night before, and might have collapsed from exhaustion as soon as I reached the banister had my mother not taken me in her arms and whispered, even though we were alone, “Yenegeta. I know you’re tired, but something terrible has happened to Samuel.”

Even though I’d known for years that Samuel was my father, neither he nor my mother had ever expected me to treat him as such. For most of my life he was my mother’s close childhood friend who, when I was six, had shown up at our apartment in Chicago in search of a place to live. He had only one suitcase and was wearing a brown leather jacket that was too thin for a Chicago winter. When my mother opened the door and found him on the other side, she seemed more resigned than alarmed to find him there, as if she had always known it was only a matter of time before he showed up at our door unannounced and with nowhere to go.

“We did everything together when we were younger,” my mother told me when I first met him. “My father worked all the time. My mother was very quiet and liked to be by herself. On most days there was nobody at our home but us and the servants. I would have been completely alone if Samuel wasn’t there.”

According to my mother, that made Samuel something like an uncle to me, although I never called him that either—only Samuel, or sometimes Sammy. She never shared how and why she and Samuel had left Ethiopia, nor did she ever say why, years later, he followed her to Chicago and then the suburbs of Washington, DC. Not long after he arrived, though, it seemed as if Samuel had always been an integral part of our lives. In Chicago Samuel slept on our living room couch and, except for one long absence, was there most mornings when I went to school and was often the first person I saw when I came home, something he often reminded me of when he thought I wasn’t listening to him.

“I’m not some stranger,” he would tell me. “I hope you understand that. I know you better than anyone, maybe even your mother.”

Two years later, when my mother and I moved to the DC suburbs, Samuel found a one-bedroom apartment in the same building as us; he shared it with as many as six other men who, like him, drove cabs in the evenings and worked in parking garages in the mornings and afternoons. At my mother’s insistence, Samuel still came to our apartment on the weekends to sleep, one of the many things she worried he wouldn’t do if left on his own. Whatever friendship they’d had in Ethiopia had evolved into something far more guarded and yet protective. They barely seemed to speak directly to each other but every night my mother made sure there was a blanket and pillow at the foot of the couch. It wasn’t until Samuel met and then married Elsa that my mother began to relinquish her obligation to tend to him. I was eleven at the time. On the day Samuel and Elsa moved into a new apartment, Samuel gave me my own key. Elsa put her hands on my shoulders and insisted I come and go as I please.

“You don’t have to call, Mamushia. You act just like it’s your own house. You understand me. You’re like a son to us.”

Among family and friends, I had always been known simply by my nickname, Mamush. It was what my mother called me; it was what my grandmother had uttered over the phone on the few occasions we spoke before she died. When Elsa or Samuel said it, however, they always added an extra syllable of affection at the end—so that Ma-mu-sh became Mamushi-ia. Or Mamush-eeaa. During the first year of their marriage, the three of us practiced what it would be like to be an all-American family without ever mentioning the reasons why we would never be. On the nights my mother worked late, Elsa picked me up from school and fed me in their home.

“What do you like to eat, Mamushia? Hot dogs? You want me to make you?”

I spent the summer months after their wedding reading novels at an empty table in the back of the restaurant where Elsa worked. If my mother had any doubts about the amount of time I spent with Samuel and Elsa, she kept them to herself with one exception. “I don’t want you going there unless Elsa is at home,” she said. “If she isn’t, you come back right away. Do you understand?”

Even though we all lived in the same Maryland suburb, it still took two buses and at least thirty minutes to get to Samuel and Elsa’s—a circuitous route through a poorly planned maze of apartment complexes strangely isolated from one another, as if someone had drawn circles on a map and said these people will live here, and these here, and never shall they meet. Once I arrived at Samuel and Elsa’s apartment, I was free to stay as long as I wanted so long as there were no deviations along the way.

“You get on and then off the bus. You don’t talk to anyone you don’t know unless they’re Ethiopian.”

That was my mother’s second rule and the only one that I followed. The other—to never spend time with Samuel alone in their apartment—was broken the same day I agreed to it. My mother knew that, just as she knew there was little she could have said to stop me. I was attached to Samuel, who, in my mind, had magically arrived one day and, as a result, seemed just as likely to suddenly disappear. I had studied him carefully when he slept on our couch and suspected, even after I was old enough to know better, that he was secretly capable of walking through walls and appearing on the other side.

For the first two years of Samuel and Elsa’s marriage, Samuel was a model husband and potential father. He slipped money into my hands whenever my mother told him not to and was quick to praise me in front of anyone who might have wondered what my mother was doing in America with a child and no husband to claim him. While working, he texted Elsa multiple times a day to tell her two things: where he was and that he loved her.

“I’m on Sixteenth Street. I’m going to stop at the store by the church to get injera and then thank God for bringing you to me.”

“Do you know who I think about when there’s traffic?”

He continued sending those messages to Elsa even after it became clear that he wasn’t sitting in traffic or on his way to any grocery store or church. By the time I was in high school, I had grown accustomed to seeing him nod off at the kitchen table and knew better than to knock on his bedroom door when it was closed. On the afternoons Samuel stayed in bed, or on the evenings he came home hours later than expected, Elsa pointed to Samuel’s anxiety about money, bills, family in Ethiopia, fighting in the north of the country, unpaid taxes, interest rates on his credit card, debts that he was unlikely ever to pay off as an excuse for his behavior.

“Try and understand, Mamush, how much stress he’s under,” she said, to which I always replied, “I do.”

It wasn’t until Samuel came home one evening high on something that made him angry and paranoid and said I had no reason for spending so much time in his home that Elsa and I stopped pretending that was true. By that point I was only a couple of months away from moving to New York to start college. It was from that detached position that I watched Samuel pace around his living room, muttering about the various threats people like me posed to him, knowing that when I left that evening, it would be easy for me never to return.

The next day Elsa called to apologize and to tell me how important it was that I stay in touch after I left. It was the first and only time she referred to what was happening to Samuel as a “sickness,” one that came and went at different times of the year like a cold that had to be endured until it was over.

“Samuel’s going to miss you,” she said. “It’s very good for him to see you. You understand he isn’t himself these days. He’s sick. He’s in pain all the time. His back. His hands.”

She listed the pills he had been taking for pain and sleep, while ignoring the bottles of scotch under the couch and whatever it was he kept hidden in the glove compartment of his taxi. At the end she added, “You know, Mamush, he’s like a father to you,” hoping it might move me to see him before I left.

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