All Our Names

by Mengestu, Dinaw

  He gave generously to the university, supposedly from his own pocket. His portrait hung randomly throughout the campus, and for a time it was rumored that the university would be renamed in his honor. For years the patronage kept the students content. They held on to their socialist, Pan-African dream, while ignoring the corruption and violence that touched the rest of the capital, for as long as they could. By the time Isaac and I arrived on campus, the dream had proved rotten and was cast to the side. Among the students there were warring parties split along thin ideological lines. It was Isaac who taught me how to divide the students spread across the lawn in a state of constant protest into two camps: the real revolutionaries and the campus frauds.

  “All the battles aren’t equal,” he said. “If you are going to be a writer, you have to be able to know the difference between the boys who come in chauffeured cars and the ones who fought to be here.”

  I didn’t tell him the difference was irrelevant to me. I belonged to neither camp and had no interest in choosing. Some students wanted war and revolution, while others pretended to out of their own self-interest. Either way there was a place for outsiders like me as long as I watched safely on the sidelines, but if I wanted to do so, Isaac was right, I had to learn to see like him.

  As we walked across the campus, Isaac pointed to various student camps and asked what I thought of that person, or that group. “Is that a real revolutionary?”

  Our game started poorly. More than half the time, he claimed I was wrong. After a dozen attempts, I asked him what made him so certain he was always right.

  “You know how you can tell who they really are?” he said.

  He knelt down and took off one of his shoes and wiggled his dirty toes in the air. He held the shoe, which like my own was covered in dust and had been repaired so many times there was hardly anything left of the sole

  “Look at the shoes. Anyone who walks to campus has shoes as ruined as ours.”

  For several days, we lay on the grass and pointed out all the polished shoes that passed us. It took a day before I no longer saw the students as a general, uniform mass. They were a part of the same campus body but it was fractured into dozens of discrete parts that were loosely connected and rarely touched. Once I understood that, I knew what to look for when I studied the students. After two days I told Isaac, “I don’t have to see the shoes. I can tell by the way they stand.” I pointed to packs of boys on the other side of the campus and said, “Chauffeured car,” and according to Isaac, I was always right. Privilege lifted the head, focused the eyes. I knew that before I came to the capital and had assumed there were better rules at the university. After several days of watching, Isaac decided it was time to do more than point.

  “We should introduce ourselves to them,” he said.

  He didn’t bother to explain why. He stood up, and as he walked away from the corner of the campus that I had begun to think of as ours, he turned back to say, “This won’t take long.”

  Isaac had taught me how to notice, but not watch. As he drew close to a group of three handsomely dressed boys standing almost within earshot of us, I briefly turned away, both embarrassed and afraid of what would happen next. When I looked up, he was already on his way back to me.

  “What did you say to them?” I asked him.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Then why are they staring at you?”

  “Maybe they didn’t understand my question?”

  “Which was?”

  “I asked them if they had enough room in their fathers’ cars for all of us.”

  That was the start of Isaac’s revolution, although neither of us knew it at the time. He posed variations of the same question to randomly selected groups of boys for a week. He called it his “interrogation.” He would say to me, “I’m going to interrogate those boys over there.” Or, “Who should I interrogate today?” And before I could respond he was off.

  After the second or third time, I learned to watch without turning away. I saw that the risk of embarrassment and possibly even pain was necessary to the performance. He was pushed, threatened, laughed, and spat at, and, regardless, he returned to me with only a slightly dampened version of the confident glare he wore when he left. He could do so in part because he knew I was there watching, a witness rather than a mere spectator.

  Isaac’s “interrogations” ended once it became obvious that enough students knew what to expect when they saw him coming for them.

  “I’ve learned something important,” he said after he declared the end to his questioning. “All of the rich boys are named Alex. If they tell you something different, don’t believe them. Trust me—their real name is Alex.”

  That same afternoon, he began to wave at any student who bore obvious signs of wealth, while calling out, “Hello, Alex. Very nice to see you again.” Or, “Alex, where have you been? Say hello to your friend Alex for me.”

  It was an easy game for me to join him in. I followed him around campus yelling hello to the privileged boys; occasionally, when feeling bold, we approached a pair with our hands outstretched, and greeted them in unison as Alex.

  By the time they realized they were being mocked, we had walked away. If they yelled for us to return, we never acknowledged them. Isaac kept his stride, while I had to concentrate not to stumble.

  The only students on campus we admired were the ones who, like us, failed to hide the not-so-subtle marks of poverty. When I wasn’t with Isaac, I made a careful study of how they held their heads, if they looked down before speaking, and if close enough, what they said, what their voices sounded like when they spoke.

  Isaac had other campus heroes as well. Of all the would-be revolutionaries, there was one group he never mocked. They were from Rhodesia—independence was still years away. No one on campus had a more powerful cause, which took the form of a single white banner unfurled each morning that read: AFRICA IS NOT FREE UNTIL WE ALL ARE. Isaac had introduced himself to them, when I was not around to see it.

  “They’re from Rhodesia,” he told me, “but don’t use that word around them. If you say ‘Rhodesia’ they’ll tell you no such place exists. One boy told me that if I wanted to find Rhodesia I’d have to live inside of a white man’s head. I like them, but they don’t trust anyone.”

  That was as close as he could come to admitting that they had not taken him seriously. He continued to watch them, but I never saw him so much as wave to them or look in their direction.

  The real star of the campus for Isaac, and many others, however, was virtually invisible. He was supposed to be tall, young, handsome, and well read and wore only olive-green pants and shirts. Isaac claimed to have seen him from afar as he was leaving the campus. He said he was certain he was either Congolese or Rwandan. “He’s tall and serious like a Rwandan,” he said, “but it’s the Congolese who know how to fight. Maybe he’s both.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t exist,” I said. “Maybe he lives only in the black man’s head.”

  There was an article in the campus newspaper with the outline of a head and a series of quotes from students who claimed he was a myth. The next week, messages written in black marker began to appear on the buildings and supposedly in the classrooms as well. The most famous of them, which every student knew by heart, read simply:

  Marx was a great man, and now he’s dead.

  Lenin was a great man, and now he’s dead.

  I have to admit, I’m not feeling so well myself.

  Isaac loved that. “That man is something special,” he said over and over. He said it was proof that there were still real revolutionaries around, “not only rich boys waiting to be government ministers.”

  The day after that message appeared, we scoured the campus in search of others. We found six more that day, five the next. On the third, every one had been painted over and replaced with a handwritten poster that said: “It Is a Crime Against the Country to Deface Our University Walls.”

  “Soon,” Isaac said, “everythin
g will be a Crime Against the Country.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told him, “but it’s already a crime to say that.”

  He held out his arms to be arrested.

  “We should start practicing for this,” he said.

  The following Monday, Isaac arrived on campus with a dozen fliers he had made, using stolen paper and markers. When I asked him where the paper came from, he clasped my shoulder and said, “Sometimes revolutionaries have to take what they need. Some take food, and guns. I take paper.”

  We christened that afternoon the start of our paper revolution.

  “Our first act of war,” Isaac said, “is to hang these up where everyone can see them.”

  The fliers contained a new list of Crimes Against the Country.

  “Why should they be the only ones who get to say stupid things?” he said.

  That first flier listed four.

  It is a Crime Against the Country to fail to report any Crimes committed Against the Country.

  It is a Crime Against the Country not to know what is a Crime Against the Country.

  It is a Crime Against the Country to ask what is a Crime Against the Country.

  It is a Crime Against the Country to think or say there are too many Crimes Against the Country.

  Isaac watched as I read and admired his work.

  “I’m no poet like you,” he said. “Just a poor comedian.”

  “We need one more,” I said.

  Isaac handed me his marker.

  I wrote the fifth and final crime on each of the fliers before showing it to him:

  It is a Crime Against the Country to read this.

  He put his arm around my shoulder and kissed the top of my head.

  “Together,” he said, “we’re remarkable.”

  We waited for midday, when the university shut down until the hottest part of the afternoon had passed, and then quickly posted the fliers on the entrances to the main buildings on campus. Isaac signed each one after we had taped it to the door: “The Paper Revolution Has Begun.”

  When we finished, I suggested we go home. I still thought like someone afraid of ruining his chances of becoming a student.

  Isaac shook his head no. “They’ll be gone by the end of the day, and we’ll have missed out on all the fun.”

  Over the course of that afternoon, we stood outside of every building, Isaac right next to the doors, me a few feet behind him. It was better than we had hoped. A small rotating crowd of students hovered around each entrance. At one point someone tried to take one of the fliers down, but he was quickly pushed to the back of the crowd.

  The next morning, when we returned to campus, the fliers and the paper revolution were all the students could talk about.

  HELEN

  I knew my time with Isaac was temporary. His visa granted him one year, and we never discussed the possibility of extending it. I did, despite my best efforts to stay grounded, sometimes imagine that one day we’d drive together to City Hall, nicely dressed, carrying simple silver bands picked up from the town’s largest general store in our pockets, so that we could declare our marriage in front of a judge, in the hope that by doing so we would be able to make something permanent, a shared life which, as the saying goes, no man or woman could tear asunder. I imagined us living on a large farm, far away from any town and family, with only chickens and acres of corn for company.

  “How would you feel about living on a farm?” I asked him.

  “That depends. Are you there with me?”

  “Maybe if you were good, I’d come visit you on the weekends.”

  When it came to more domestic fantasies, however, we fell apart. The distance between what we had and what we wanted was too obvious if we dreamed close to home.

  I remember taking him to the post office once so he could mail a letter to his mother. While we stood in line to buy stamps, I asked him what her name was. He looked up as if he no longer knew the answer to that question, or had lost the right to answer it.

  “Her name doesn’t matter,” he said. “Everyone only calls her Imaye. It means ‘Mother.’ ”

  When we reached the teller, Isaac handed me the envelope. He was shy speaking in front of strangers, so I was the one who asked how many stamps were needed to mail the letter. While we waited, I tried to pronounce her name the same way he had. I said out loud: “Im-e-ya… Im-a-yu.”

  “Not even close,” he said.

  He pronounced it once more so I could hear how far off I was, and finally, after failing two more times, I laughed and said, “Forget it. When we meet, I’ll just call her Mother.”

  He became silent. What I had said bothered him. I didn’t know him well enough yet to understand why, but I felt the distance expanding between us. We paid for the stamps and left the post office, and it wasn’t until we were alone in the car that he told me what he was thinking.

  “It doesn’t do us any good to talk about things that will never happen,” he said.

  I promised myself I would never ask him about his family again, and by and large I stayed true to that. I thought as well, however, that if we couldn’t have a future, I could at least try to make the most of our present. We were running out of errands and chores to complete, and it was time, I told him, we moved on to something else.

  “We’re going to have to find other things to do,” I said, “except go to the grocery store.”

  “What would you like?”

  I thought of all the possible options open to us. I thought of what normal couples did. They went to the movies, dinner. They invited friends over on the weekend. They had beach vacations. I knew we couldn’t get away with any of that, so I told Isaac, “I don’t know. But I’ll come up with something.”

  I decided over breakfast with my mother that certain risks had to be taken if Isaac and I were going to have any sort of life together. I didn’t make this decision lightly. She asked me that morning, while setting the table, “Do you have a new friend, Helen?” She was dependent on gentle phrasing; that was the register we carried on all our conversations in: “Would you like to help me with the shopping this weekend, Helen? Do you think it’s time we changed the curtains in the living room, Helen?”

  I always responded in kind.

  “No one that I know of,” I said. “But I promise to keep looking.”

  The last time she had asked that question was shortly after I began working with David. I spoke of him often around the house, and if there was anyone I spent the weekends and evenings with, it was him. She asked me repeatedly if David was a special friend—a hope abruptly relinquished once she met him. Telling her about Isaac wouldn’t have brought her any comfort.

  David was the only one who had suspected, and even he was quietly alarmed by the suggestion.

  When we were alone, in his office, he had said, “I hope you know what you’re doing with your Dickens.” It wasn’t a reproach; I had the feeling he found saying those words embarrassing. I nodded and tried to make it all seem lighthearted.

  “Of course I know,” I said. “I’m a professional at this.”

  We weren’t divided like the South and had nothing to do with any of the large cities in the North. We were exactly what geography had made us: middle of the road, never bitterly segregated, but with lines dividing black from white all over town, whether in neighborhoods, churches, schools, or parks. We lived semi-peacefully apart, like a married couple in separate wings of a large house. That was the image I had in mind during breakfast when I decided something different had to be done. Change! It seemed to be everywhere except Laurel.

  I set my sights low. Incremental progress was my philosophy. We didn’t have to be heroes. There had been enough of those already, and in many ways, I reasoned, Isaac and I had already picked up the fight; we just hadn’t known that was what we were doing. I made a list of all the places we had gone to in the three months since we’d met: the grocery store, the mall, post office, bank, Goodwill. I thought of them while sitting at my desk and tr
ied to remember if any obvious signs of affection had passed between us. I came up with a crude value system to measure each trip by.

  1) Shopping for food: After sex and children, what could be more intimate in America than choosing what kind of meat to cook? The grocery store was the first place in our town that I knew for certain we had conquered. We went once, sometimes twice a week. We laughed in the aisles, took turns pushing the cart. I gave him cooking lessons at the meat counter. Those were all important victories.

  2) The post office: I had to admit that had been a terrible loss, and because it was a government office I felt I had to weigh the defeat a bit more. One post-office defeat was the equivalent of two grocery-store victories. Mail was dangerous, personal letters especially. They pointed to great distances and old, mysterious lives I knew nothing about. There were tellers instead of clerks, forms that had to be filled. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to win in a place like that.

  3) Anything else that was related to shopping: furniture, plates, cutlery—we had chosen all that together, right under the skeptical eye of the clerks. Had Isaac and I touched each other once, I would have said we dealt an important blow against segregation, but I had to be honest. I knew we had never touched except by accident, so I had to temper the victory with the knowledge that we could have done better.