All Our Names

by Mengestu, Dinaw

  The protests that had begun at the start of the semester turned violent at the same time Isaac’s confessions were making him a celebrity on campus. When we returned home one evening, we heard how, in another shanty village that neither of us had ever been to, tires had been cast around the necks of four soldiers who had come to arrest someone. After a few minutes of watching the soldiers struggle to free themselves, someone doused the tires with gasoline and set them ablaze. The smell and their cries were said to have been so strong that no one stayed to watch them die; they were left to smolder for almost an hour, with the extra shame of having no one there to witness their torture. The next day, the neighborhood was cordoned off, and for twenty-four hours no one who lived there was allowed to leave. A few days later, several people were shot while walking too close to the palace gates as part of a supposed plot to kill the president. The proof came in the arrests of the dead people’s family and friends, who filled in the script when they confessed to the conspiracy that had been invented for them. And so, even though our neighborhood was quiet, everyone who lived around us felt vulnerable. If tomorrow it was decided that your neighbor, whom you had known your whole life, was trying to undermine the government, then the only thing you could say was “Yes, I had suspected that might be possible all along.”

  Isaac and I did our best to ignore what was happening. While we were walking home from the campus, I asked what he thought about the soldiers who had been burned; rather than respond, he took my wrist and asked if I was making any progress with Patience, who for the past four days had joined our crowd for an hour after lunch.

  “I’m taking my time,” I told him.

  “Maybe you should try for Hope instead.”

  We spent the rest of our walk making crude, childish jokes about which was better, patience or hope. We should have been too old to talk like that, but we were at heart village boys, ignorant and immature about love in any form. Isaac and I never talked about the old relationships we may have had, and we never mentioned our desire for love or sex, which could be bought easily in almost every neighborhood in the capital. We avoided such conversations for the same reasons we avoided talking about the dead soldiers, the heavily armed patrols, and the pickup trucks that now sat, day and night, filled with bored, armed men, on the edges of every poor neighborhood in the capital. We were afraid of what would come next.

  Up on the hill where the university and the neighborhoods that bordered it sat, little had changed. Isaac took down his sign in March. “I think it’s gone on long enough,” he said. He had earned the respect of the communists on both sides of us. Students waved or said hello as they passed. When he took down the sign, I asked if he knew what he was going to do next.

  “I do.”

  • • •

  He leaned against his tree and crossed his legs as if preparing to nap. “I’m going to enjoy this for as long as it lasts.”

  The hours we spent on campus followed us home at the end of the day. For weeks we were only visitors in our real lives, and even then we were terrible tourists, purposefully blind to the plainclothesmen who watched all the houses with notebooks in their hands, deaf to the evening shouts around us. I knew it wouldn’t last long. My landlord, Thomas, came to my room one evening and told me to pay attention at night, especially when I was supposed to be sleeping. “Rest in the day,” he said. “Keep your eyes open at night. I tell this to everyone.” But I knew it was me he was worried about. I was a foreigner. I had no ties to any of the local or even distant tribes. I played on the grass in the afternoon with Isaac, and then worried late at night. It was always in times of trouble that those on the outside suffered most, and though I never shared any of my fears with Isaac, I was terrified someone would realize that if I was killed or injured, if I abruptly disappeared, there would be no one to answer to. I imagined my neighbors and Thomas—who when drunk said I was like a son to him, though we knew little about each other—pointing to my room and saying, “Take him. He’s behind the trouble. And no one will know.”

  As it turned out, it was Isaac who was cast out into the street first. Not long after the soldiers were burned, the friends of his father whom he had been living with told him they could no longer afford to keep him there.

  “They told me they don’t have enough space for another person,” he said. That was on the first night of his homelessness, when he came and knocked on the walls outside my room sometime after midnight, looking for a place to sleep. Because it was night, Isaac knew better than to say more, in case someone was listening or I turned out to be the type that was easily frightened. Isaac made a bed on the floor out of the clothes he had brought with him. One of us often fell asleep for a half-hour or less while on campus. Whoever was awake sat guard; in most cases, I was the one who slept. Those brief naps had become the best sleep I got, because it was daytime and because I knew Isaac was next to me and wouldn’t leave unless I awoke. I turned onto my side so I could see his outline on the floor.

  “I know you’re tired,” he said. “Don’t worry. Nothing is going to happen. Get some sleep.”

  I tried to sound as confident as he did. “I’m not worried,” I said, but it was obvious I was scared and had been for many days.

  “You’re an emperor,” he told me. “King of kings. No harm can come to you.”

  I listened to him breathe. I counted his breaths. I doubt I made it to a hundred before I was asleep. I didn’t wake up until late the next morning, and by then he was gone.

  A notice was published in all the newspapers that morning, warning people not to gather in large numbers. It took the top spot on every front page, under headlines such as “Government Warns of Increasing Risks in Public Gatherings.” The risks were never named, but in case people failed to understand the story’s true intent, there was a quote from the army declaring, “Our heightened security measures would make it unwise for those looking to disturb the peace and tranquility of our city to show their faces outside.” Had the article simply stated what its authors knew to be true, something along the lines of “Mass arrests and torture have been planned” or, more simply, “Leave now,” a lot of time and an unknown number of lives could have been saved. Instead, there were several days of random beatings and arrests of young men across the capital before a mass retreat indoors began. By the end of the week, wedding parties were being held inside; the few open fields used for football games sat empty; funerals were no longer accompanied by long lines of mourners who were unafraid to wail and rend their garments in public.

  When I saw Isaac on campus again, I asked him where he was living. He told me that he was staying with someone far away from our neighborhood and that I shouldn’t worry. “I have friends who have given me a place,” he said.

  I went to campus daily, to see him but also simply to breathe easier, to walk, sit, and read without fear. I knew that this wouldn’t be true for much longer; the noose cast over the city would find its way up the hill, regardless of how many ministers’ children were at the university. I’m sure Isaac knew that, too, and why, in the days following the headlines, the number of students who gathered around him began to grow rapidly. The police who patrolled the campus had taken note of our numbers and begun to linger around the edge of our group. They looked nervous, suspicious as they circled us with their batons slung over their backs. Someone from inside our circle noted out loud for all to hear, including the guards standing near us: “There is nothing more restless than men in power.”

  Our gathering was broken up on a Friday afternoon at the start of April, after all the classes had ended. Our numbers that Friday were no larger than they had been the week before: we were twenty or thirty at most. The only difference was that we huddled closer together. When four campus guards in their shabby blue uniforms, wielding their worn wooden nightsticks, surrounded us, more than a minute must have passed before any of us thought to run. We felt safe the closer we were to one another, and each of us was reluctant to give that up.

&nbs
p; The guards waited until they were certain they had our attention before they began to swing. To their credit, they aimed for the padded parts of our bodies, and all the women who were with us were left alone. Imagine four angry mothers trying to paddle a classroom of running children and you have a sense of what that afternoon looked like. We ran, but often enough circled back to pick up a book that had been left on the grass, or to grab someone’s arm to lead him away while a guard chased after him, swinging mildly at his back.

  The only one among us who didn’t run was Isaac. When I looked for him, he was just standing up, his arms at his sides so his entire body was fully exposed. A few minutes passed before one of the guards noticed him. He was the perfect image of defiance, with his arms folded over his chest and his legs slightly spread apart. They’re going to bash his head in, I thought. Seconds later came the crack of wood meeting bone.

  The guards left Isaac where he fell. When I came back, ten minutes later, he was already gone. I walked to the tree where I had last seen him and searched the grass for proof that he had been there—an impression of a body pressed into the grass, a few flecks of blood—but there was nothing. I waited for one hour, and then two, knowing he wouldn’t return, but hoping that perhaps he might see me and know that this time I hadn’t abandoned him. I had tried my best to stand ground; failing that, I became a one-man vigil.

  I waited each night for Isaac to knock on my window; I would have taken him in without hesitation, but I was afraid as well that he would ask. Every day, new checkpoints were erected in the city, and within days it was impossible to penetrate the cluster of shacks that ringed our neighborhood and the two surrounding it without showing your official ID. Every coming and going, except those through obscure back routes that wound through half-burnt piles of trash and open latrine pits, eventually had a checkpoint where young men logged into notebooks the names and occupations of everyone who passed. No bureaucracy in the country until then had ever worked properly. Years could be lost in search of a birth certificate, driver’s license, or passport. It was easy to be invisible in a city that had clearly stretched its limits and was bursting at its seams. The daily records of names, entries, and departures signaled the end of that.

  I assumed Isaac had chosen to keep his distance. I imagined that, after recovering on a bed in a stranger’s apartment, he had walked to our neighborhood and taken note of the checkpoints and the blue-and-gray fatigues of the presidential guard. Then he would turn his head in the other direction, to hide the bruises that covered his face, and walk farther and farther north, past the last of the slums, until he reached a corner of the city that was barely inhabited and that until a few years earlier had been a village of a dozen thatch-roofed huts. If I wanted to believe that, then I could also just as easily imagine Isaac walking until he had abandoned the city altogether, stopping after he had traveled well beyond the reach of the president’s powers, to a village that had been touched slightly by the British and not at all by the new government. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit this was exactly what I hoped Isaac had done, as much for his sake as mine. Each day I didn’t hear from him, I was more convinced he was lost to me. I didn’t have the heart or courage to imagine him in prison, much less dead; I thought of him simply as lost, one of the millions across the world who one day vanished and could therefore rise again.

  When I returned to campus, after a week, it was obvious that the days of banners, posters, and speeches were over. I knew, as soon as I passed through the front gates of the university and saw at least a hundred students sitting shoulder to shoulder, back to back, on the same grounds where Isaac and I had often sat, that the only thing left of the campus I had known was the buildings. The students had conquered that piece of land, and their huddled mass was proof of the lengths to which they were willing to go to defend it. Something was smoldering along the edges of the circle, but it was impossible to tell what had been burned from my angle; there were too many soldiers and police for me to take in the entire scene. The best thing for me was to turn around and exit through the front gates; this was not my fight and not why I had come here. Had I left, though, I could never have confirmed the suspicion I had had from the moment I entered the campus that somewhere in that crowd, not on the edges but certainly in the very center, I’d find Isaac, smiling, looking happier than I had ever seen him before.

  HELEN

  I didn’t know how long Isaac and I could continue to sleep together while barely speaking. Our silence had begun as the easiest way to avoid any further damage, and had turned into a source of pain in itself. If I asked Isaac how his day had been, he never responded with more than a six-word answer: “It was fine,” “It was nothing special,” “I read most of the day.” I filled in some of the empty spaces with trivial stories about my day—the gas-station attendant who took fifteen minutes to fill my tank, the ongoing feud between Denise and David in the office—when what I really wanted was to ask him, “What are you thinking? What goes through your mind when I show up at your apartment each evening?” I was too afraid of the answer to do that. Isaac was too kind to say anything cruel, but he wasn’t above remaining silent, and so I avoided the short but difficult questions I needed answers to. I saw our cowardice and didn’t know how to make it stop.

  I did my best to avoid David at work: he would see the darkening half-circles under my eyes and without any effort extract a confession from me. I arrived at work later than normal, when I knew he was locked in his office, and left early in the afternoon for what I claimed to be home visits. I drove along the outskirts of our town, close to where Isaac lived, and where many of my clients did as well. I parked near churches and playgrounds and slept with the windows rolled up and doors locked. I managed to keep that going for a week before David left a note on my desk that said, “I see you,” with an arrow pointing to his office. Sharon and Denise had already left for the day, and normally those were my favorite hours in the office. David would emerge from the back and, left to ourselves, we’d roll two chairs into the middle of the office and run through the increasingly diminishing parts of our lives that had nothing to do with work. David had come to our town for college from an even smaller town at the very southern tip of the state and, unlike most who moved here, never left. We bonded over our entrapment.

  “This was the biggest city I had ever been in,” he had told me. “I was afraid of coming here: all those people, and hardly any cows. I didn’t think I would ever get used to it. And then I was afraid of what would happen to me if I left.” That was eighteen years ago. Since then, David had bought a house near the university. Every year, he made it a touch nicer. He stripped and repainted the exterior, added a large brass handle to the front door, new railings on the porch, and, finally, a hedge fence around what had been a barren front yard. Such attentions by a middle-aged single man didn’t go unnoticed. I knew the rumors, and David did as well. We joked occasionally about getting married.

  “My mother would be happy,” I said.

  “Mine would probably die from a heart attack. The relief would be too much for her.”

  “I’d have to quit my job.”

  David shook his head.

  “No, no, no,” he said. “You can keep the job. That way we don’t have to talk to each other at home, like a real married couple.”

  When I walked into David’s office, he was hanging up the phone. In his college photos, he was skinny to the point of looking malnourished. The job had filled him in. Since he became the director, he rarely had to leave the office anymore. “I get fatter every day I come in here,” he said, and now he barely fit comfortably behind his desk, all his girth gathered around his midsection like an inner tube that I imagined him someday slipping out of.

  “You wanted to see me,” I said.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “What gave you that impression?”

  I took the note he had taped to my desk and slapped it onto my forehead.

  “Just a hunch,” I said.

  He
scratched his head. Looked up at the ceiling.

  “I remember now,” he said. “I wanted to ask you if you were ever going to come back to work.”

  “I’m here every day,” I said.

  He looked down at his tie.

  “I saw you sleeping in your car yesterday afternoon. You didn’t notice I was in my car when you left the office, so I followed you. I thought you were going to see your Dickens, but instead you just pulled onto the side of the road and fell asleep. I stayed parked behind you for over an hour. I was worried someone would rob you. That’s not the neighborhood for someone like you to fall asleep in.”

  I was too ashamed to be angry. I was on the verge of apologizing, and once I did I imagined I would confess the entire story of my relationship with Isaac. I just had one question to ask him before doing so:

  “Why did you follow me?”

  “I told you,” he said.

  “No. You said you thought I was going to see my Dickens. But that doesn’t explain why you followed me.”

  He finally looked up. I had caught him in something better than a lie.

  “Why I would follow you?”

  He repeated the question, although this time he was posing it only to himself. I saw a smirk pass over his face as he tried to answer it.

  “Why would I follow you? You of all people, Helen, should be able to guess an answer to that.”

  David and I had that conversation on a Friday. Before leaving, I told him that I would try not to disappear from the office again. He kissed me goodbye on the forehead.

  “Don’t try too hard,” he said.

  I didn’t see Isaac that evening or over the weekend. On Monday, I came into the office early and spent four hours on the phone, checking in on old clients, and the next three hours writing reports on the conversations I’d just had. I left the office an hour early. Before doing so, I knocked on David’s door.