All Our Names

by Mengestu, Dinaw

  “We should sit,” he said.

  “There’s a bench over there.” I pointed to a spot far from the center but covered in shade.

  “Too far,” Isaac said, and it was then that I caught the distinct wheezing in his breath. He had carried his limp far enough. He leaned gently backward against a young tree that bent slightly against his weight. He eased his way onto the ground and pulled his knees up to his chest.

  Throughout the morning, every person who passed us stared at Isaac. There were brutally broken bodies begging on street corners across the city, and most of us hardly noticed them. People stared at Isaac because they assumed he was a student at the university, and therefore they thought they knew how he had earned his injuries. Several days earlier, a large crowd had marched along one of the main boulevards leading up to the presidential palace, demanding some sort of reform. They were allowed to get within a hundred yards of the palace before the tear gas and clubs came out. The first time I heard Isaac connected to that protest was when a young woman walked past us and, without breaking her stride, said, “Our country needs more boys like you.” Many other students waved or said hello to him—even the militant Rhodesians, who didn’t trust anybody.

  “You’ve become very popular,” I said, “and you haven’t even been around.”

  “I know,” Isaac said. “It’s a shame. I should have had myself beaten earlier. I could have been president by now.”

  I didn’t judge him for letting that misconception spread, but only because I believed the timing of his return was a coincidence.

  Isaac offered little about where he had been and what had happened since the fight at the café. When I asked him, he told me those things didn’t matter. “It’s over,” he said. “I’m here now.” Because I was ashamed for having left him, I was happy to settle for that as an answer.

  • • •

  The weeks after that were calm around the university. One semester ended and a new one began, but for Isaac and me the difference was negligible. We returned to the university in January as if nothing had changed, which was true as long as we remained focused solely on our second lives on campus. There were rumors and a few sparely written stories in the English-language newspapers about more arrests and violence on the edges of the city, which I read and then ignored, as if they were dispatches from a foreign country. Isaac and I continued to spend our days in the center of campus, no longer relegated to the margins, where I felt more comfortable. The attention cast toward Isaac waned but never vanished. It was understood that Isaac could always be found in the same spot, even if no one had yet tried to seek him out. When I suggested to Isaac that we find a quieter, less obvious corner of the campus, he insisted he couldn’t do it. “We’re becoming known,” he said, “Why would we quit now?”

  Each day at dusk we made our way back home. Isaac was still limping, although less noticeably. Walking required his concentration, but I suspected he had to remember to struggle. If he was lying about his injury, I was hardly ready to hold him accountable. His wounds had gotten him somewhere. He was a figure, even if without a name, and I understood his desire to hold on to that until another step on the university’s social ladder had been mounted. Once that was done, I knew he would give up the limp and the bandages; fortunately, he would have the scars. I imagined him pointing to an old wound on his hand or face, and saying, “This one came from the police.” Or, “This one I can’t remember anymore. I have so many on my body.”

  HELEN

  What I feared most for Isaac and me happened that afternoon in the diner. It seemed impossible now for us to move forward, and I assumed after that lunch that if there was any relationship left it would live on in the strictest privacy, late at night and exclusively in his apartment, with all the blinds closed and the lights off. Whatever warmth and affection we had would quickly burn out, until, eventually, we stopped speaking and became bitter strangers. I returned to the office that afternoon with a weight in the center of my chest. I spent hours trying to shake it. I went to the bathroom repeatedly. I drank cup after cup of water. When David asked me how I was feeling, I nearly choked trying to answer him.

  “I think I’m coming down with a cold,” I said.

  He looked me up and down. He claimed to always know when someone was lying to him, “No, you’re not. But go home anyway.”

  I stayed in my bedroom all evening. My mother came to the door twice and asked if I wanted some tea, and then, later, soup. I felt the limits of my life every time she knocked. I fell asleep promising myself greater independence—a home, and then a life, and someday soon a family of my own.

  • • •

  I made it almost two weeks before I called on Isaac. A part of me hoped that, given enough time, he might begin to forget what I looked like, that my chin and nose and eyes might begin to blur with the images of a million other women, and that when that happened the pieces of me that I thought mattered the most to him would be restored. I prepared myself as well for the possibility that we would never recover. I looked in the classified section of the newspaper for an apartment in a different town, a relic of the Westerns I had watched with my father. I checked off the vacancies while whispering to myself, “This town isn’t big enough for the both of us.”

  I shared hints of my plan with my mother, without revealing the reason behind it.

  “I think it’s time I found a place of my own,” I said.

  She sipped her tea and waited until she had placed her cup back on the saucer to respond.

  “Why would you ever want to do that, Helen? Don’t you think we’re doing well together?”

  I was the sole long-term relationship she had. She went to church on Sundays and spent one or two afternoons a week having tea at someone’s house, but those were only the rituals of life, performed faithfully as a substitute for the real thing. Finally, I was worried about becoming her.

  I decided on Thursday, when the second week of not seeing each other was almost over, that I would drop by Isaac’s house. I was going to make a joke, something along the lines of “Are you hungry? I know a great little diner that has the best omelets in town.” We’d laugh and then fall into each other’s arms, and, in the weeks afterward, find ways of mocking what had happened until it eventually became one of those stories that couples use to remind themselves of the obstacles they had overcome and the distance they had traveled. Isaac never gave me that chance, however. He came unannounced to my office early Friday morning, and I knew when I saw him sitting with his legs crossed and a tabloid magazine that was at least two years old spread across his lap that it wasn’t an accident that he had come to me first. He knew, whether by instinct or by careful thought, that I was one or two days away from doing the same, and that, had I been able to do so, some of the power in our relationship might have tipped in my favor.

  I’d never felt afraid of him before, but seeing him in that chair that morning I was reminded of how little I knew about him, and for a few seconds I considered turning around and running away. I told myself I was worried about what my coworkers would think if they came through the door and saw us so awkwardly arranged, that there was something valid to that logic made it easier to believe that was the real reason I found it hard to stand there.

  I tried my best to give off an air of professional detachment.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Did we have an appointment scheduled for today?”

  If David had heard me, he would have said I was a terrible actress. My attempt at sounding detached was a bad cliché of the wounded-lover role I was trying so hard to avoid.

  “No,” Isaac said. “We did not have an appointment scheduled for today. I came for personal reasons.”

  Who speaks like that? I wanted to yell this at him until he gave me an honest answer. It wasn’t just his words but the tone that came with them. If he sounded like a character from Dickens, it was because he had decided that was what proper English sounded like. I didn’t hear his real voice until the very e
nd of our relationship, in the months just before he was supposed to leave. It began with a slip—he called me “love” instead of Helen. “Love,” he said, “come here,” and he extended his arms to me, knowing I would meet him. He rarely ever called me Helen again. Instead of asking if I wanted to stay the night, he’d simply say, “So what now, love?” while squeezing my hand or pressing his body against mine.

  But before getting to that point, I had to convince myself that whatever Isaac said next was true. When he said, “I came here because I was concerned about you. I wanted to make sure you were all right,” I focused strictly on the words; despite their restraint, they were enough to move me. He didn’t say that he missed me or cared about me; I added that for him. I told myself the only reason he hadn’t said as much was that he lacked the confidence to do so, not the heart.

  “Are you happy to see me?” he asked. “Should I have not come?”

  “Of course I’m happy,” I told him.

  And I genuinely was.

  Isaac left the office immediately afterward. He looked to make sure no one was watching before kissing me as softly as possible on the cheek. I wished he’d had an old bowler hat he could have put on before walking out the door, something to match the antiquated way we had made up. For the next two weeks, I left work early and went to his apartment. In the beginning, we hardly talked before moving to the bedroom. The first two times, he acted as if he was surprised I had come at all.

  “You’re here,” he said.

  “I got lost on my way home,” I told him.

  “Follow me,” he said. “I have a map somewhere in my bedroom.”

  We needed disguises. One day it was a map; the next, I pretended I had come in search of a glass of water.

  “Water?” he said.

  “Tomorrow I promise to do better.”

  We didn’t know where all the cracks and fault lines between us lay, and so we said little, in order to avoid them. Once we were in the bedroom, we rushed through our clothes. Kissing was an afterthought. It wasn’t until he was inside me that I felt I could look at him closely. We spent hours in bed each night, testing the range of what could be said. We’d fall asleep, and then one of us would wake up and immediately climb on top of the other, as if desperately trying to make a point that hadn’t yet been touched upon or that needed repeating. By the time I left, it was always well after midnight—six to eight hours would have passed, during which I might have said no more than a few hundred words, not one of which had any special meaning. Once I returned home, on the way up to my bedroom, I’d stop outside my mother’s room, at the opposite end of the long hallway lined with pictures taken more than two decades ago. Even before they separated, the only thing my parents had that resembled a relationship was the fact that they slept in the same bed. I remembered trying to sleep with them as a child and finding that I felt more alone lying between them than I did in my own room.

  I hadn’t stood outside their bedroom door since I was a teenager, trying to sneak out of the house. I used to press my ear against the door and count to fifty before deciding it was safe to go. Gradually, that number was whittled down to thirty, and then ten, until I was finally certain that I would never hear anything coming out of that room.

  The first five nights I came home late from Isaac’s apartment, I found myself pitying my mother for the cold and virtually barren life she had shared with my father. I thought the kindest thing I could do for her would be to crawl into her bed and press my body against hers, so she would know how much comfort could be found in being held while you slept. If I did this, maybe some trace of that affection would linger on in her room after I left.

  As I said, though, those feelings only lasted for five nights. By the sixth, I couldn’t remember what had made me carry on like that. I left Isaac’s apartment knowing that we were sleeping with each other not to draw closer but to try and rid ourselves of a desire we both thought we would be better off without. After he came, I’d try to get him back inside me, and when that failed, I told him, “Don’t sleep. I can wait.” I left thinking I had had enough of him, only to realize, before reaching home, that I felt emptier now than I had before I saw him.

  I still stopped outside my mother’s bedroom that night, and every night after for the next week, but it wasn’t out of pity. Each time I stood in front of the door, I wanted to throw it open so I could stand at the foot of her bed and, as she dragged herself out of sleep, tell her in intimate detail how I’d spent my evening with Isaac, from the time I walked into his apartment and silently undressed in his bedroom, until the moment I left while he was sleeping, or at least pretending to. And if when I finished she asked why I was telling her this, I’d say, “So you can see how much we resemble one another.”

  ISAAC

  It wasn’t long before students began to join Isaac and me at our tree in the center of campus. They had heard rumors about Isaac and knew nothing about me, but regardless our daily vigil on the grass had made us familiar, comforting figures to gather around. We had no obvious politics, and, compared with many of the other students, who squatted on the grass under banners of Lenin and maps of a borderless Africa, we seemed innocent, if not harmless. The only marker we had to distinguish us was a sign that Isaac posted on the tree behind us every day we were there: “What Crimes Against the Country have you committed today?”

  The sign, as he saw it, was an invitation for the entire campus to join our paper revolution, since, according to him, “everyone has a crime to confess.”

  On either side of us were two opposing camps of student communists. Each day they unfurled signs announcing the People’s Revolution and the Communist Utopia. Their portraits of Marx and Lenin grew larger every week. They yelled insults at each other from their separate camps—rarely in English, the language of the capitalists.

  “You know what they fight over?” Isaac said. “Posters—who has the bigger flag.”

  Isaac claimed that, unlike the other student radicals and revolutionaries, he had no agenda. “We are a true democracy,” he said. “The paper revolution is for everyone.”

  I assumed that the story of our paper revolution was already forgotten, and that Isaac’s crude sign was a poor attempt to recapture some of the glory of that afternoon. The day Isaac hung his sign, however, students came. Whether it was out of curiosity or boredom didn’t matter. Even the ones who knew nothing about him did exactly what he wanted: they played the game; they sat down and stayed long enough to confess.

  The first students who came to Isaac were cousins. Their names were Patience and Hope, and they were dressed in matching pleated gray skirts that took the risk of being cut almost an inch above the knee.

  “Sit,” he told them, and then he gestured with his hand toward me. “This is my friend Langston the Professor, the future Emperor of Ethiopia.” Before they had the time to question what they were doing, he said, “Now, tell me, what crimes against our country have you committed today?”

  Neither was timid, and Isaac was perfectly at ease; I was the one who, in the company of women my own age, wanted to run.

  Patience, whose mouth bristled with clean, hard white teeth, spoke first. “Does sitting here count as a crime?” she asked.

  Isaac smiled. “Yes,” he said, “it definitely does.”

  He turned to Hope, who was leaning against her cousin. “And you,” he said. “If you’re related, then that makes you guilty as well.”

  They laughed. They had come to be amused, and Isaac had charmed them. He didn’t try for more than that. After they had played their role, he asked where they were from and what they were studying. Both were majoring in economics; they were born and raised in the capital.

  “Economics,” Isaac said, “that’s very good,” but I knew that, like me, he had only a vague understanding of what that meant: money, who had it and who didn’t. As Patience and Hope walked away, Isaac told them not to forget to say goodbye to the future emperor. Only Patience acknowledged me: “Goodbye, E
mperor,” she said. By the time I thought to respond, she was too far away to hear me. Isaac watched me follow her with my eyes.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “She’ll be back.”

  Patience and Hope were just the beginning. More students came and introduced themselves to Isaac so he could ask them what crimes they had committed that day. One boy confessed to stealing money from his father, to which Isaac responded: “Stealing is not a crime in this country. Not stealing, however, is a terrible thing.” All the boys and girls close enough to hear that made sure everyone saw them laugh. When they were gone, Isaac whispered to me: “Did you see who laughed the hardest?” I hadn’t, and I doubt he had, either, but I knew the answer.

  “The boys with the polished shoes,” I said.

  “That’s right. It was Alex.”

  If students didn’t know what to say, he adjusted the rules of his game. He helped them invent their crimes. He borrowed from the president’s daily radio broadcasts, which for months had been long, rambling diatribes against all the enemies of the country, from the Europeans and Americans to the Africans who were secretly working with them.

  “Have you ever been an imperialist?” he asked them. “Have you ever tried to colonize a country?” “Do you listen to British Radio?” “Do you know who the Queen of England is?” “Have you ever been friends with a European?” “Have you ever wanted to go to America?”

  Over the course of a few weeks, Isaac’s confessions drew hundreds of students, and of those, a few dozen returned consistently. On most days, those of us gathered under the tree did so simply to be in the company of others. There was comfort, even a certain amount of joy, in finding one another in the grass and in seeing others join us. We were two, then five and ten, sometimes as many as twenty. Most of us didn’t know one another’s names or ages or reasons for being there, and that was fine, because silence isn’t the same when it’s shared. Its sad and lonely sides are shunted off. We were content just to be there, and had nothing else ever come out of it, I’m certain I would have regarded those moments as some of the most memorable of my life.