We drove for maybe two, three hundred feet, lurching and stopping the whole way. That was all it took—three blocks—before I knew I was finally seeing the city as I had always imagined it, both from afar and while living there. I had imagined crowds composed of men in suits and women in blue and purple dresses, and here they were, along with the traffic cop in white gloves I added from time to time. Of course, I had seen them all before—I had stood on at least two occasions at the very same intersection we were idling in—but until that moment I had never understood that I was living the fantasy I had built out of books and radio shows. I was too busy being a character to see that.
We often think of the dead as ghosts who have the power to hover indifferently above us. My dreams of life in the capital weren’t so different; in those dreams I floated above life. Riding in that taxi was the same. I had the feeling I was gliding above the city, which was there for me to admire without my having to dirty my hands.
Isaac gave the driver instructions every few blocks. Our route was deliberately circular: we made unnecessary right and left turns when we could have just as easily gone straight. And just when the driver was growing angry, Isaac leaned across the front seat and threw two bills onto his lap. Soon we had come to another part of the city I had never been in before. The houses were new, each hidden behind a concrete wall that left only the roof and a few second-story windows visible. The bigger houses had their gates lined with barbed wire and shards of broken glass, and the last house on that narrow gravel road, where we finally stopped, had two men posted on the roof.
“Welcome home,” Isaac said.
More money was exchanged. I didn’t bother to see how much; it was more than what should have been paid, and I knew it didn’t matter. By the time we opened the doors to the cab, the gates to the house had been dragged open, and from behind them an almost elderly gray-haired man in a dark-blue uniform emerged to take my bags. His face and bearing reminded me of my father, who had been a soldier in the emperor’s army when the Italians attacked. His time in the military had lasted less than a year, and yet, like all the men who served with him, he was left with an unyielding devotion to the rigor of his military days.
That old man saluted Isaac before taking my bags, just as my father would have most likely done in his position. My father’s attachment to those codes had always struck me as foolish and at times embarrassing, but at least he wasn’t alone. There were other loyalists still out there.
Isaac nodded his head in return. We were nothing like them. They were a scarce and dying breed that, had I not been on crutches, I would have again gone running from.
For the next two nights, Isaac and I were the only ones who lived in that house. Guards came and went each evening without speaking to us. Every morning, a young girl with her hair wrapped in a white shawl brought food in a large pot and left it on a gas burner in the kitchen; we all ate from this pot, but who remained and who left, who cooked and watched over us, was never our concern.
In the morning, Isaac helped me from my room on the third floor, my arm draped over his shoulder as we wound our way down the uneven curved stairwell that was the most obvious proof of how quickly the house had been built. We had tea and coffee in the courtyard, next to a stone fountain that each afternoon attracted a steady flock of palm-sized golden birds who splashed and dipped their black beaks into the pool of water as long as no one was nearby. I waited for Isaac to explain to me what I was doing there and how he had become a part of that household himself, but it was clear by the time we had finished our first cup of coffee that he was in no rush to do so. He didn’t want to talk about politics or the people he was involved with. He didn’t want to talk about the money that had sustained him and had paid for my care and now my life, or what he had done to get it. He wanted to talk instead about all the places in the world that he hoped to see someday.
“I’d go to Egypt first,” he said. “I want to see those pyramids. Even if they’re not as great as people say, it was still Africans who made them. And then London, so I could see the queen. There are many things I’d like to ask her.”
He talked about Rome and Paris and New York. He had dreams of Hollywood and movie stars.
“They could use someone like me there,” he said. “I’m a great actor. I could be famous—I’m sure of it.”
I had had similar delusions while bandaged in the hospital. I had thought of America and Europe, but in vague, monumental ways, of towering buildings and white marble memorials. I’d imagined finding a foreign wife here in Africa who would take pity on my broken body, a doctor with blond hair and blue eyes who fell in love with me, though we came from opposite corners of the world and I had nothing to offer besides my poverty. Rescue—that is the true heart behind romance and fairy tale; the spontaneous love that frees us from the tower, hospital bed, or broken world is always only the means to that end.
We knew there wasn’t any chance of leaving that house, much less the capital and country, anytime soon. A large, empty house in which we were free to dream was as close as we were going to come to a different and possibly better life.
For those two days, Isaac and I lived in an increasingly magical world. We spent the bulk of our second day imagining ways we could improve the house. “A pool,” Isaac said. “Right here where we’re sitting. And more grass.”
“The stairs,” I said. “I’d tear them down and make them all the same height.” Isaac wanted to paint the house red. I suggested that gray was more appropriate, and for the next half-hour, we argued about colors. By the time evening came, we were down to wishing for more comfortable beds to sleep on, food that contained more than chunks of fat with a hint of meat attached to the ends—a bit of lamb for Isaac; a piece of chicken, preferably grilled, for myself.
We took our dinner into the courtyard. Isaac made a show of carrying our dinner plates from the kitchen, with a rag draped over one arm, one plate resting on the other. This was as close as we had ever come to eating in a restaurant, and since the impression was good enough, it made for one less thing to long for.
We ate quickly, the same bland mix of rice and withered vegetables that we’d eaten every day. When we finished, Isaac went back for more, but by the time he returned to the kitchen it was too late: the guards had already eaten the rest of the food.
“One last wish,” Isaac said. “It’s a simple one. I think even you’ll have to agree with me. I don’t want to go to bed hungry ever again.”
We raised our glasses of water and made a toast to that.
“To the end of hunger.”
“To the end of hunger.”
Before we went to bed, Isaac told me that tomorrow we had to be at our best: the men who owned the house were going to arrive in the morning.
HELEN
I knew Isaac would be home by the time I reached his apartment. I was already a half-hour later than he expected. I had taken my time walking back to my car, and before parking near his apartment, I circled his neighborhood, looking for the car he had driven off in. I sped down his block in case he saw me through the windows, but I took the other dozen blocks slowly. An older white woman, who must have been one of the last remaining in the neighborhood, was sitting on her porch; she stared at me as I inched past her house, but as soon as she saw my face clearly, I knew she wasn’t worried: I was a young white woman in a used but respectable four-door sedan. I circled that block a second time, for no reason other than that I still hadn’t found Isaac’s car and was reluctant to give up my search until I did; the second time, we waved to each other as I passed.
I admit that, for the first hour, I loved playing detective. I now knew at least one of the reasons why David had followed me from the office. From the moment I saw Isaac get into his car, I had felt an irrepressible urge to smile, run, dance, jump, anything to put the extra energy I felt to use. He wasn’t the only one with secrets anymore; I had my own as well. I was a spy; in the parking lot I had actually lurked in the shadows.
I made a partial list of all my doubts about Isaac. If I had tried to name them all, the harmless fantasy of mystery and intrigue would have broken, and only the fraud would have remained. I played it safe and went for the obvious deceptions. I thought of his abrupt disappearance, his mystery trip across America, his spotless apartment, his car, and the single-page file at the office that revealed practically nothing other than that he existed. Taken together it could mean only one thing—he was a spy, or perhaps working undercover, which meant that the real question wasn’t who he was, but whom he was working for. Was he friend, or foe? I had a hard time deciding. There was something classically romantic about falling for the enemy—the risks were greater, and so were the odds against a happy ending. But I could see a possible happy ending if Isaac was on our side; I could be not only his lover but his confidante, and who could ask for a better cover than a woman like me? Adventure versus romance—not being alone won out every time.
I parked in front of Isaac’s building rather than around the corner, as was my habit. His apartment was on the second floor; all the windows faced the street. I could see the lights in the bedroom, but before going inside, I wanted to see him once more from a safe distance. I turned on the radio. Bob Dylan was singing. I looked up and saw Isaac standing in the window. I turned off the engine and got out of the car. Before crossing the street, I looked up again and saw him staring directly at me. I expected him to smile or at least wave, but there wasn’t a trace of joy on his face. I never made it up to his apartment. I stood on the curb trying to decide whether I should leave; before I could come to a decision, Isaac was in front of me.
“Now is not a good time,” he began saying, but before he could finish he had taken hold of my arm and was leading me back to my car. He was calm, morose. When he took my arm I had the feeling that Isaac was trying to protect me, the same way my father often wrapped his arm around me while we were crossing the street if there was a car anywhere near us. The intention didn’t matter, though; as soon as he grabbed my arm, we both felt the breach, and without thinking, my entire body recoiled.
Isaac tried to apologize: “I’m sorry if I surprised you,” he said.
And I did as well: “You didn’t surprise me. You just never know who’s watching.”
But it was a poor defense. No one was watching. Our fears and prejudices were ingrained deep enough that we didn’t need an audience to enforce them. I had thought there could be nothing worse than our lunch at the diner, but I was wrong. What was worse was being alone in public and, for reasons you were reluctant to admit, feeling frightened because your lover held your arm.
I wonder whether, if before meeting Isaac I had tried to challenge the easy, small-time bigotry that was so common to our daily lives that I noticed it only in its extremes, I might have felt a little less shame that evening. It’s possible that I might have been able to release some of it slowly over the years, like one of those pressure valves that let out enough steam on a constant basis to keep the pipes from bursting. It’s also equally possible that such relief is impossible, that, regardless of what we do, we are tied to all the prejudices in our country and the crimes that come with them. As Isaac turned away from me, I wished that there were some way I could vanish or simply slip out of my skin, keep my flesh but without the exterior that came with it. The shame was so complete that I didn’t notice until Isaac had actually gone through the front door and I had heard it close that while he was outside with me the lights in his living room, specifically the lamp next to the dining-room table—the one I had brought from my own house after he told me that his living room was too dark to read in at night—had been turned on.
ISAAC
On the day the owners of the house arrived, the guards who had spent the past two days half asleep at their posts were up before dawn, raking the gravel in the courtyard. I watched the four of them from my bedroom window as they scraped the ground to reveal the fine red dust that lay beneath. They were meticulous to the point of obsession, running lines over the same few square meters of earth over and over until every bit of gravel was gone.
I watched them for at least half an hour, waiting for them to slacken their pace, to turn their rakes to the side and make meaningless observations that, bit by bit, would devour the time; but they remained committed to their task for as long as I watched them. At first I thought they did so because they were grateful finally to have something to do, but then I leaned my head out the window and saw Isaac standing against the sole tree in the courtyard, watching them, his legs crossed, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He was, without effort, the perfect vision of an overlord, a man who wielded his power casually, as if it had always been his right to do so.
I took my time getting dressed. My injuries had healed enough for me to take the stairs on my own, but I still missed having Isaac there to lean on. As soon as I stepped outside, I understood what all that tedious raking had been for. A wide, sweeping arc of nearly polished earth leading from the gate to the front door had been cleared to make a red carpet of dirt that looked like a half-drawn heart; this gave the house a dignity I would have thought impossible had I not seen it myself. I had to admire what Isaac had done. He yelled out to me from his tree, “Look at what we’ve done.” The pride wasn’t his alone—there was more than enough to go around. The guards stopped raking and looked at him with admiration and gratitude as well.
Isaac clapped his hands, and one of the guards brought a chair to the tree for me to sit on.
“We don’t have much time,” he said. “They’ll be here in a few hours.”
I had vague notions of who “they” were, and the images I did have were borrowed from the glimpses of powerful men I had experienced in my life. The men I pictured wore gold-rimmed sunglasses and had hefty stomachs they were proud of. They wore matching loose pants and button-down shirts, and the oldest or wealthiest of the group carried a walking stick topped by a shiny gold handle. I had seen those men on numerous occasions, stepping out of their cars in the capital. They may have been businessmen, army men, or government ministers. Street spectators like myself never knew and were too afraid to ask. Their mystery was a part of their power, and even though I was in that house with Isaac, the same rules of hierarchy applied.
When the courtyard was finished, the guards began work on the rest of the grounds. They gathered the fallen leaves and emptied the dirty water from the fountain. The young girl with the white headscarf who brought us our meals appeared, with two other girls her age. When I saw those girls, who couldn’t have been older than sixteen or seventeen, a harsh, sarcastic voice in my head said, “There is your Hope and Patience.” They spent the morning and afternoon carting buckets of water from the kitchen in the back and later scrubbing the floors on their knees, while Isaac watched. I wanted to know what their names were but avoided getting too close to them; every time I caught a fleeting glimpse of either, I thought, Patience is on her knees, or Hope is out back looking for water.
Isaac asked only one thing of me: “You have to look your best today,” he said. “Go to my room and change.”
He pointed to the sling that I still wore on my right arm to keep my ribs from moving too much.
“Do you need that?” he asked me.
And suddenly I was also desperate to impress and to be rewarded.
“Are you joking?” I said. I slipped my arm out of the sling and did my best to raise it above my head. The pain was far greater than I had expected. “I never needed it.”
He smiled. He gave my injured arm a gentle pat. He didn’t say it, but I felt that I had made him proud.
By midafternoon, all the preparations that Isaac had been able to think of had been made. The house shone, and every half-hour or so the grounds were swept again so that they were as spotless as they had been that morning. There was nothing left to do but wait.
“They’ll be here by three or four p.m. at the latest,” Isaac said. In anticipation, Isaac had the guards and girls who had spent t
he morning cleaning and cooking line up in two perfect rows outside the front door. They held their place for at least an hour; at three, when no one had arrived, Isaac had them line up parallel to the house instead. He kept them there for a few minutes before deciding that it was all wrong.
“It’s unacceptable,” he said. “Look at them. They look like they just came off the streets.”
He took the guards apart one at a time. He began with their shoes, spitting on each one.
“This isn’t a slum,” he said. He took the scarves off the girls’ heads and gave them to the guards so they could polish their shoes with them. When they were done with their shoes, Isaac pointed to the dirt on their faces. He grabbed the youngest of the guards—a man who was still at least a decade older than him—by his ear. “You must be deaf,” he said. “Look at your ear.” Isaac took the same scarf the man had used to wash his shoes and stuffed it into his ear, and when that wasn’t enough, he began to shine his forehead and cheeks with the scarf.
I watched Isaac’s nervous, irrational rage unfold from the sidelines. I told myself that if he did the same to the girls I’d protest, but he exhausted whatever violence he had in him on those men, and I suspect that I knew he would do so all along, which was why I felt free to set those terms to begin with.
Fortunately, we had night on our side. As soon as the light began to dim, Isaac relaxed. He knew we wouldn’t have to wait much longer; no one wanted to be on the road at night, not even the soldiers who patrolled the streets. If you were far from home at dusk, nothing in the world seemed crueler than a setting sun, especially if it was a stunning one, with thin vestiges of purple and red clouds streaked around it. Beauty at times like that was a reminder of nature’s—or, for the faithful, God’s—indifference. The greater the splendor, the more terrible the absence and terror that came with it. I remember the sun that evening as being more remarkable than most, but only because there were ten of us safely grouped together to admire it. We all felt touched by its grace, to different degrees and for different reasons.
All Our Names Page 10
