All Our Names

by Mengestu, Dinaw

  What I needed next were new targets. The first one that came to mind was the most obvious, and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before. A week after our defeat at the post office, I called Isaac from my office and said I wanted to take him out to lunch.

  “To lunch?”

  “Yes,” I said, “for lunch. I’m tired of eating at my desk alone.”

  I chose the same diner my father had gone to every morning, and where as a child I had joined him on Saturday afternoons. It was the only place in Laurel that I associated exclusively with him. I had been going there for years, on my own and with friends and co-workers, but those other occasions were mere intrusions on the central event, a semi-regular father-daughter lunch that had lasted for two years and that had ended in one of those booths with my father promising to visit every week once he moved out. A month went by before I saw him again. I stopped worrying, and then, with more time, caring if he returned. Gradually, my memories of him were distilled into a single fluid image of a man confined to a booth, or counter, with thick sideburns and occasionally a soft mustache that moved when he spoke, which wasn’t often.

  The diner was never officially segregated, but I couldn’t remember anyone who wasn’t white eating there, either. In this case it was etiquette, and not a sign, that served as the cover for our division. Before I left to pick up Isaac, I wrote down on a piece of paper in case I forgot it later: “We have every right to be here.”

  We arrived shortly after noon, when I knew the restaurant would be crowded. Isaac said he could meet me there, but I insisted on picking him up so everyone could see us walk in together. The lunch counter was already full. Of the half-dozen men sitting there, I knew three by name and the others were familiar. Bill, whose chest and forearms were known throughout Laurel for the strong black hair that sprouted from them, was leaning over the counter smiling halfheartedly at everyone who came and left. My father used to tell me to be careful with my food when Bill stood over us. “He sheds,” he told me, “like a dog.”

  In the scripted version that had played in my head during the five-minute drive from Isaac’s apartment to the restaurant, the entire diner fell silent as soon as we entered. All eyes turned toward us, and we ignored them. We didn’t hold hands—that would have been too provocative—but we did pause to look at each other with what I thought of as an abundance of affection. In the version we lived, no one stopped talking. Bill saw me as soon as I walked in and pointed to a table in the middle of the diner. Isaac followed me, but I was so focused on making it to the table that I never stopped to notice if anyone was staring at him. We took our seats. When I picked up my menu as a cover so I could look around the room, I realized no one had noticed yet how remarkable we were.

  Isaac saw my gaze wandering. “Why are we here?” he asked me.

  I looked around the room again. I thought I saw Bill and two of the men at the counter staring in our general direction.

  “No particular reason,” I told him. “I just wanted to get out.”

  I asked Isaac what he had done all day.

  “I was at the library,” he said.

  He described the book on contemporary American architecture he had been reading. I told him twice that it sounded very interesting. “Fascinating,” I said, “what they can build these days.” Chitchat. Simple conversation. When Isaac put his hand on the table, I took his pinky and index finger in mine. I held them for two, maybe three seconds while looking at the menu. I used a strand of loose hair as an excuse to let go.

  Our waitress came and took our order. I ordered the fried chicken; Isaac pointed to the Denver omelet and let me order for him.

  After our waitress left, I turned my attention back to the counter. I wanted to tell Isaac what my father had said about Bill, but he was no longer there; with him gone, the men at the counter stopped pretending they weren’t staring at us.

  I tried to ignore them, but then our waitress came back empty-handed, and I felt certain that if I looked over again at them I’d see them smiling. She was young, fresh out of high school. Had I been younger, I would have known who she was. She had a kind, round face and wore her dark-brown hair in a bun. She leaned over and whispered to us, “Bill wants to know if you would like to take your food with you.” She was doing her best to be kind.

  Isaac understood immediately what was happening, and, in the same breath, knew how to respond. Before I could answer, he told her, “No. We would rather eat here”—polite yet determined. She nodded her head; she had no idea what else she could do. Isaac pursed his lips and waited until she had returned to the kitchen before turning his attention to me.

  “Do you come here frequently?” he asked.

  I nodded yes, then changed my mind and said, “No, not really.”

  “Which one is it?”

  “I used to come here when I was younger,” I said, “but I don’t that often anymore.” It was true: the diner was a few blocks away from my office, but I went there once a month, at most.

  “We should go,” I said.

  Isaac hadn’t stopped staring at me since the waitress left. I was tempted to confess my reasons for bringing him, but I realized I didn’t have to. The best intentions didn’t change what was obvious: I should have known better.

  “I’m not going to run,” he said. “I’m going to eat my lunch.”

  Briefly, I felt bold again. I saw myself adding this lunch to my column of victories once I returned to the office. If we made it through this, then perhaps there was nothing in the world that we couldn’t conquer, from post offices to movie theaters and the all-too-perilous family dinner at home. I was imagining what my mother would say if Isaac were to show up one Sunday evening, when his lunch arrived. The same waitress brought it, although this time she didn’t look at either of us. Her embarrassment was evident. Isaac’s omelet was on a stack of thin paper plates barely large enough to hold the food. A plastic fork and knife had been wrapped in a napkin and placed on top, a strangely delicate touch that she must have been responsible for. He unwrapped the knife and fork and placed the palm-sized napkin on his lap.

  “Do you mind if I start? I hate eggs when they’re cold.”

  He spoke so calmly I assumed he was joking, and I suppose to some degree he was. I tried to laugh—ha-ha—but then he cut his omelet into seven even pieces before taking the first bite. He chewed slowly. With every bite I was reminded that we were no longer, if ever, on the same side.

  He had finished his omelet by the time my order arrived on the standard cream-colored plates used for everyone other than Isaac. The waitress tried to walk away quickly, but I grabbed her wrist and told her I wanted to cancel my order. “Tell Bill that I don’t want to eat here.”

  The poor child—she was struggling not to cry. We didn’t make it any easier on her.

  “Leave the plate,” Isaac said to her. “We’re going to stay and eat it.”

  She hurried back to the kitchen. I stared at the plate of chicken and mashed potatoes and blinked twice, childishly hoping I could make it vanish.

  “Please,” I said to him, “let’s leave now.”

  He shook his head no.

  “Not until we both finish our lunch,” he said. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  If that was his way of settling the score, then I thought I could play along just as well. For the next ten minutes, I slowly took my food apart. With my first halfhearted stab into the chicken, all the momentum was gone; there was nothing we could change. I felt a regression back to my mother’s kitchen table, where I had spent many nights and afternoons laboring to finish a meal that my father had never shown up for and that my mother had refused. I had always known that there was something cruel in her insistence that I eat every bite on my plate while my father’s food grew cold next to me. She needed a victim besides herself, and when I finally looked up at Isaac after a few minutes and saw him smiling at me, I knew there was something slightly cruel lurking in his gaze.

  I was too
busy creating a new story to linger on that thought. In this story, Isaac and I were still heroes. The fact that we chose to sit there and linger when every part of me wanted to run was proof of the sacrifices we were willing to make.

  When we left the restaurant and were back in the car, he said to me, “Now you know. This is how they break you, slowly, in pieces.”

  ISAAC

  Isaac wanted to celebrate the paper revolution’s first victory. “Very soon,” he said, “the whole campus will know who we are. After that we’ll be famous.” We felt that we were getting somewhere, that we were more than just idle spectators of campus life and more than just friends. We formed a team, and our opposition was anyone who wasn’t us.

  Isaac suggested I choose a poet’s name. “You’re no longer just the Professor,” he said. “It’s time you moved on to something new. Choose someone famous, but not too famous.”

  I chose Langston.

  “He’s a poet?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” I told him, “a great one,” although I had never read anything by him, and wasn’t even certain that he was a poet. I knew that he had attended that conference of writers at the university, and that I had instantly felt attached to his name.

  To celebrate our rise, Isaac suggested we go to the Café Flamingo, which was then the most popular of all the cafés that sat along the winding, tree-lined road leading up to the campus. The students who spent time in those cafés had a reputation for ordering lavishly. They commanded pastries, teas, and coffee like mini-sovereigns and then later fought over who would pay. Normally, Isaac and I would have been embarrassed to sit in one of those cafés for hours with only enough money to order tea, but Isaac was feeling victorious, and there was nothing that could shame him.

  “That’s where we belong,” he said, “in one of those expensive cafés with the rest of the students. Years from now, they will say, ‘That is where Isaac and Langston the Poet Professor met.’ ”

  The owners of the Café Flamingo were rumored to be multiple things: Lebanese businessmen; distant cousins of the president, or one of his close allies. No one knew for sure, and it was better to believe that the café, and those who dined there, were in proximity to some form of power. The truth, as I learned later, was more simple and complex. The café had been opened by a French-American couple who fled the country after independence. The two middle-aged African women who worked there day in and day out were not the help, but the wives of the two brothers who had legally claimed the café as their own after its abandonment, and who for years had run the place as if it were their own. They did so, however, not as businessmen but as loyal friends and followers of a young man who had just returned to the capital after years of exile in England.

  On the afternoon when Isaac and I decided to stop at the Flamingo, a pair of the marabou storks that hung lazily around the city were perched on the ground just in front of the café, staring at the four plastic flamingos that had been nailed into the dirt just outside the front door. They stretched their wings and cast their shadows over the plastic birds, and when nothing happened they began to fly slowly away. Those birds were harmless, but their elongated, pointed beaks suggested nature or time had denuded them; their ugly bald heads made them look like masters of prey. One of the students sitting outside on the plastic lawn chairs threw a spoon in their direction, and you could see, even though they were already almost a foot in the air, that they were afraid. They flapped their wings faster until they found refuge on the roof of a building across the street.

  Whether any of the students noticed Isaac and me take our seats outside is hard to say. We aroused only the mildest curiosity. Had we walked off, no one would have thought of us again, but Isaac didn’t want it to be that way, and so it wasn’t. He chose a table next to a group of boys who had their wide, butterfly-collared shirts exposed to reveal the gold underneath. Two spoke with genuine English accents, different in register from the fraudulent ones often heard around the campus. All of them wore freshly polished shoes.

  “This place is full of Alexes,” I said to him.

  “I know,” he said. “That’s why we came here.”

  Isaac clapped loudly to get the waitress’s attention. The boys stopped their discussion and turned toward him. They immediately saw us for the poor village boys that we were.

  They started laughing at us in unison. A boy in a blue-and-white shirt stood and began to clap slowly while looking directly at us. The rest followed: some stood, a few sat, but all of them except one man were clapping and mocking us. The students sitting inside looked out the window to watch. Even though they didn’t know why, I’m sure they understood we were being humiliated.

  Poor Isaac. He was outsized and outnumbered, but I didn’t know him well enough to understand that this made no difference to him.

  “Don’t get up,” he said. “I know how to handle this.”

  And so I sat while he made his way toward them. It was a slower, more tempered version of his usual lope. He paused mid-stride, bent down, and briefly grazed the ground with his right hand. No one other than me noticed he had picked something up. When he was a few meters away from the boys, who were applauding and looking directly at him as if he were merely the shell of a man, the form without the beating heart, he turned back to see if I was watching. I was; I had worked hard not to turn away.

  Isaac took two more long strides, during which he aimed, wound his arm, and released the rock he had been carrying into the mouth of the boy in the blue-and-white shirt. The applause stopped in time to hear the bones in the boy’s jaw crack.

  Isaac was taken down quickly. He held his ground as three, maybe four boys roughly the same size as him charged. I kept my eyes focused on him long enough to know that he made no attempt to run, and then I stopped looking. He was punched and kicked for several minutes. I heard the blows land. The beating would have lasted much longer had those boys not been ordered to stop by the older man who had been sitting near, but not exactly with them. When I turned back, the man had his arm around two of their shoulders and was walking them out of the café.

  Isaac was still conscious, bleeding from his mouth and nose. His face and arms seemed to be swelling as I knelt next to his head.

  “What should I do?” I asked him.

  He tried to laugh, but his lungs refused.

  “This is nothing,” he said. “Go home and pretend this never happened.”

  One of the women who worked in the café and two men who took orders from her came to attend to him. She pressed into his ribs, chest, and stomach and placed a damp rag over his forehead. She gestured up with her hand and the men lifted Isaac slowly from his waist and shoulder.

  I tried to follow them into the café but Isaac continued to mumble with what little breath he had that I should go home. I stopped once we reached the door. I was standing next to Isaac’s feet. One step farther back and I wouldn’t have heard him say, “We need you on campus.”

  Two weeks passed before I saw Isaac again. I searched for him on campus and in our neighborhood, retracing the routes he was most likely to take. I had only a general sense of where his house should have been, so I wandered through the most obscure corners of our slum in the hope that I might hear his voice out of a window, or see his face in a crowd. At the end of the first week, I began to worry that his injuries were worse than I thought. Later, I felt certain that he had been brought into the café so he could be discreetly finished off, and there was always the fear, present from the beginning, that Isaac had been rounded up and thrown into a prison on a whim, or because of what he had done, and if that was true it was unlikely I would ever see him again.

  Near the end of the second week, I thought I saw him lying on a mattress on the floor of a one-room home, naked except for a thin white blanket draped over his waist. I whispered through the open window, “Isaac, Isaac.” When the arm moved, I saw that it wasn’t Isaac. The boy was roughly our age and the same height and weight as Isaac, but with a deformed palate th
at must have made it hard for him to speak. He looked at me and waved. I waved back. I was so grateful that someone had actually noticed me that I stood there waving for another minute, perhaps much longer. Before Isaac, I had always been content to cast myself as the outsider, because only by such measures, I thought, could you break from the grips of the family and tribe around which you were supposed to order your life. I had ventured far away from home to live up to that idea without understanding that, inevitably, something had to be paid for it. Every day following Isaac’s absence, I was reminded that without him I made an impact on no one. I was seen, and perhaps occasionally heard, strictly by strangers, and always in passing. I was a much poorer man for this than I had ever thought.

  Isaac made a dramatic return to campus on a Monday afternoon. He looked heroic as he walked through the front gates with dark bruises beneath both eyes, a gash across his pointed chin, and a patch of scabs across the right side of his face. He limped gracefully but with force, as if trying to show the damage wasn’t permanent. I watched as every head turned toward him. I knew the injuries were genuine, but still I thought, You’re doing a wonderful job, Isaac. By the time he reached me, there were pockets of students all across the main lawn whispering about him.

  Had I not been so uncertain as to where I stood with Isaac, I would have made more of his return. I would have told him that it was good to see him again, that he had been missed.

  “So—you’re finally back,” I said. I couldn’t decide if I should hold out my hand.

  “Yes,” he said. “I knew this place would be empty without me.”

  And we left it there. I followed Isaac toward the center of the campus—to the large, open space where most of the students gathered. When we reached the southwest corner of the square, a spot normally occupied by the only two Angolans on campus, we stopped. Isaac didn’t acknowledge it, but it was obvious he was feeling tired.