I spent most of that April touring water-soaked homes, one house and family at a time. There was a stillness to the destruction that I carried home at the end of each day—a chair turned upside down floating in a kitchen, or a woman standing with her hands on her hips, knee-deep in water, staring at the ruined remains of what had been her children’s bedroom. The rain and sandbagging had stopped days earlier, but the wreck remained, and it was in that wreckage that I found my place. Overnight, I became an agent of recovery. I waded in the mornings through drenched closets and chests of drawers, searching for important documents and mementos that could be salvaged, mainly for families who still didn’t have the heart to do so on their own. In the afternoons and evenings, I pored through stacks of government and insurance forms. I itemized lives, made lists and charts of things lost, from cars, furniture, clothes, and homes to birth certificates, marriage licenses, deeds, wills, and mortgages. I loved what I did. I was hugged and cried on. I had the strength to endure others’ misery, to bear some of it on my own so they wouldn’t have to. Every time people told me, “I don’t know what to do next,” I held their hands and told them that was fine, they didn’t have to, because I did. I made the drive back to Isaac’s apartment three, sometimes four nights a week, on the days when I felt I needed him most. We took hour-long baths together.
“I’m starting to feel like a duck,” I told him. “I’m soaking wet all day, and then I come here to sit in a bath.”
When he opened the door in the evenings, the first thing I said to him was “Quack.” Most evenings I was too tired to talk for long, so he read to me in bed until I fell asleep—never from the same book twice, since most books he finished in a single day. “How do you choose what you’re going to read next?” I asked him.
“Simple,” he said. “I walk down an aisle, close my eyes, and run my hand along the spines. Whatever book is there when I stop is what I read next.”
I believed him at first, but then I saw the university course catalogue lying on the floor next to his bed. He had circled dozens of courses in different departments and was slowly making his way through the partial reading list that was listed next to each class. That was my Isaac at his best.
It was into that private world of ours that Henry stepped in. May was mercifully dry: eighteen straight days of brilliant sunshine, never too warm or humid. I went back to my office at the start of the month, when the bulldozers and construction crews arrived, convinced that, other than the five people who had drowned, nothing had been lost in all that water that could not be replaced. I had done a decent job until then of not counting the months that I had left with Isaac, but the change in season and weather and the return to office life had been so abrupt that all I could see was the end of summer. I skipped over June and July and went straight to the second week in August, when Isaac’s visa was set to expire.
“We’re running out of time,” I told him.
“Let’s try not to think about that,” he said.
“And how do we do that? You’re going to be gone soon, and I still don’t know what I’m going to be left with.” Which I suppose was my way of saying I was done with mystery; its charm had worn thin. What I wanted was a real person to hold on to and eventually miss.
He put his arm around me. “I’m not gone yet,” he said, and with that I relented. A week later, Isaac called me at work to tell me he wanted us to have dinner with Henry, the only friend he had, other than me, in America. Of course, he was far more generous in describing him. His exact words were, “He’s the closest thing I have to a past in this country.”
Isaac claimed that he was the one who invited Henry to join us for dinner, but I’m certain that wasn’t true. Henry was never Isaac’s guest; if anything, Isaac was always his. The barrel-chested, balding, middle-aged man whose shadow I first saw from my car was the same person who had helped bring Isaac to America, the old friend of David’s who had secured his visa and had him placed in our care. No, I don’t believe Isaac invited Henry to dinner so he could meet me. He invited Henry to dinner because Henry wanted to know who the woman lurking outside of the apartment was.
Isaac played it well. For all the precautions we had set in place, from never leaving my car parked overnight in front of his apartment to having fixed times during the day when it was safe for him to call my office, I always wanted more from him. All he had ever told me about his family was that his father was ill, that it had been years since he had last seen them, and that he had five siblings that he knew of, though that didn’t mean there weren’t more by now. “We’re good at having babies,” he said. “Better than the Chinese. If we lose one, we have two more to make up for it. If we ever fought a big war, we’d double our population.” He still wouldn’t give the names of his family, and he had claimed he had no pictures to share. What he had instead was Henry.
“Are we supposed to be just friends?” I asked him. “I don’t want to pretend in front of others.”
“We don’t have to hide,” he said. “He knows about us already.”
I’m sure I protested about the dinner initially, but not hard enough. I doubt I ever said no directly: I did sense the danger of letting someone like Henry into our life, but I was too curious, too desperate to know who Henry was and what he knew, to refuse the opportunity to meet him.
Isaac scheduled the dinner for six o’clock on a Friday. I arrived at five-thirty, and Henry was already there. My first impression when he opened the door was that he looked as if he had gotten fatter in the months since I had last seen him, but I knew I had no honest image of him. I wanted a brutish, crass man; what I got instead was a charmer—a man who took my jacket when I entered the apartment and hung it in the closet as if he were the host, which, for all intents and purposes, he was. We were in Isaac’s apartment, but Henry brought everything to the dinner: the wineglasses on the table, the silver forks and knives, and the real cloth napkins that, in my mother’s house, no occasion was special enough for. The chicken in the oven, he admitted, had been cooked by his wife that afternoon. “All I had to do,” he said, “was throw it in the oven and keep it warm.”
I came to dinner prepared to extract some vital kernel of fact about Isaac, but I was the one who spent the bulk of the dinner revealing myself. Henry asked me about my job, its joys and pitfalls. Those were his exact words. “Isaac tells me you’re a social worker,” he said. “I’m sure people ask you all the time to tell them about the joys and pitfalls that come with a job like that.”
I was rarely asked to describe my job. David had told me never to tell any man I wanted to date what I did for a living. “Say you’re a teacher, or a secretary. Men are afraid of women who seem better than them.”
Henry had spoken with a wide-eyed earnest stare that gave the impression that whatever I had to say was of the utmost importance and the only way I could disappoint him was if I failed to say more. He was flattering me. I knew that, but after a while I didn’t care.
“You really want to know?” I asked him.
“I do,” he said. “Maybe in my own way I once tried to do the same.”
“That’s why you worked in Africa?”
“No. That’s why I stayed long after I should have left.”
We carried on like that for more than an hour, just the two of us, as if Isaac weren’t even there. The more I talked, the more intently Henry listened, so that by the end I found myself seeking his approval. When I said, “What we need in our town is more people like Isaac,” it was to Henry and not Isaac I was speaking.
Henry told me snippets about his career in Africa, enough to make me feel that he had also shared some part of himself. When I asked what it was like being a diplomat, he gave me one of those seemingly sincere, deep-hearted laughs that are supposed to imply humility.
“ ‘Diplomat’ sounds much more exciting. To be honest, I was an old-fashioned government bureaucrat. I started off stamping visas in Tanzania. I hated it. Not the job, but the country. I used to say staying out o
f Africa was the smartest thing America ever did. I went there because I thought it would be the easiest way to get to Europe someday, but then independence came, and suddenly Africa seemed like the most interesting place to be. The French and British and Belgians were running out as fast as they could, and we became the biggest players in town. When I was moved to Kenya, I could pick up the phone and get the president on the line. I sat in hotels and gave lectures on democracy and our constitution. After a while, I didn’t want to leave. When I’d come back to D.C., I’d tell my bosses that we could do more than just try to keep the Russians out. I thought we could get the whole continent on our side, if only we had the right leaders. That’s when I was moved to London. When I asked my boss why, he told me I’d lost sight of our larger objective. No one in Kansas cares about what happens in Africa, he told me. I’d gotten carried away, which was a diplomatic way of saying I’d gone native.
“I met some of the most interesting people from the continent in London, though, including our mutual acquaintance Joseph. I suppose we should be thanking him for getting our friend Isaac here. He was the most remarkable person I met in London, and probably the only real friend I had.
“They wouldn’t let coloreds into the club where all the diplomats drank, so we used to drink at the pub across the street. I had met his father in Kenya. He told me his son was studying in London, so I promised to buy him lunch if he looked me up. Of course he did. Africans always do. They love anyone who they think has power. I liked Joseph as soon as we met. On the outside, he was formal like an Englishman, but he disliked them as much as I did.
“We drank at that bar two, three times a week for almost two years. A bit more often after his father died. At least once a week, Joseph would say, ‘Henry, do you think if I were president they would let me into your club?’ He didn’t care about the club. It was the lies that it was built on that made him angry. ‘They kill us and say it’s adventure. If I raise my voice to a white man in London, someone will look at me as if I were an animal.’
“From time to time, at the end of the night he would cross the street and demand to be let into the club. I heard him say to the doorman, ‘You should put bars on the windows. Everyone inside is a criminal.’
“I thought he would be president of his country someday. But Isaac can tell you better than I can how wrong I was.”
Henry said more than he had expected. He began to grow cold, distant, as he retreated into other memories. I asked the only question I could think of:
“Did you like London?”
“No,” he said. “I hated it. I was at a dinner one evening when someone asked me what I thought about taking back the colonies. I knew who he was—the minister of something or other—but I couldn’t help myself. I said only little people on a little island would talk like that. He pretended to laugh. He said, ‘Only an American would use the word “little” twice as an adjective in the same sentence.’ I said, ‘You’re right. How about “Only tiny, ignorant people on a miserable little island would talk like that”?’ I thought he was going to hit me. But you know what he said? ‘This is the best dinner conversation I’ve ever had with an American.’ We spent the rest of the night insulting each other. I was told the next day to stay clear of any official events. Six months later, I was reassigned to a consulate office in Canada. That’s when I decided to quit.”
When dinner was over and Isaac was in the kitchen, clearing the plates, Henry leaned over his side of the table and motioned for me to do the same. “Thank you for coming to dinner tonight,” he said. “Isaac is lucky to have met you. I was worried about what would happen to him here. He’s adjusted well. I think, wherever he goes next, he’ll be fine.”
“And where is he going?” I asked him.
He turned to see if Isaac was looking at us.
“I helped get him here,” he said. “What he does next is up to him. After what he’s gone through, I doubt he’ll ever go back. I’m not even sure where ‘back’ would be for him. You probably know more than I do.”
I tried to play along. I didn’t know more, but I was afraid Henry would think less of me if I said that, so I smiled and leaned back in my chair as if I were trying to keep a secret close to my chest.
By the time Isaac returned to the table, I felt slightly lightheaded. All the holes that I had allowed to exist between us were finally catching up with me. Isaac offered us coffee and dessert; I tapped the floor hard with both feet just to feel something solid beneath me, while Henry graciously declined both.
“I have a long drive back,” he said. “I’m glad we had a chance to do this.”
He came to where I was sitting and put his hands on my shoulders, as if he knew the last thing I wanted was to stand up.
“If you’re ever in St. Louis, Helen, look me up.” I promised I would. At the time, I thought I would do so first thing in the morning.
Isaac insisted on cleaning up. He said I looked tired and should go to bed, but I wanted to watch him when he thought I wasn’t looking. I could read my mother’s mood by the way she did the dishes. When she was sad, she spent minutes washing and drying each plate before setting it on the rack; that was how Isaac washed the plates that evening.
Later that night, in bed, my hands and then my entire body began to shake; Isaac wrapped his arm around me.
“What’s wrong?” he asked me.
“I’m freezing,” I said.
All evening the apartment had been uncomfortably warm, despite having the windows open in every room. As soon as I said I was freezing, I felt a genuine chill run through my spine, one strong enough to raise the hair on my arms. Isaac tried to comfort me, pressing in close to share his warmth, but the chill was still there. I closed my eyes and told myself to think of hot—not the feeling but the word, in big bold red letters as bright as a warning sign. Just like that, the goose bumps vanished, and I could feel again the humid, almost tropical air of the apartment. Isaac left the bedroom to get another blanket. When he came back, he asked me if there was anything else he could do.
“Yes,” I told him. “Promise me you won’t just disappear one day,” and then, after I felt certain I knew what I really wanted to say, I added, “We’ve gone on like this long enough. You owe me more.”
ISAAC
The next morning, there was an explosion near the center of the capital, followed, that afternoon and evening, by sporadic gunfire in four different neighborhoods. Those attacks had nothing to do with Joseph or his men. I knew because I watched the trail of smoke rising from the center of the capital with him and Isaac from a window on the third floor. Isaac asked Joseph if he knew who was responsible for the blasts and the shooting that followed. Joseph said he didn’t know and didn’t want to find out. “They have nothing to do with us,” he said. “They are amateurs.”
That evening, on the radio, we learned that the amateurs had punched a hole in the post office. They thought it was an important building because of the flag flying outside. Nothing was reported about the shootings.
“They died for nothing,” Isaac said. Joseph disagreed.
“Everything is important,” he said. “It makes the government look weak. It inspires others to follow.”
Joseph wasn’t looking in my direction when he said that, but I felt his words were aimed at me. Was I inspired? I didn’t know yet, but I knew I wanted to be. I was the first one in bed that evening, and the first one awake the next morning. I could honestly claim ignorance of what might have happened during the hours in between.
Not knowing if Isaac had left the room in the middle of the night made the morning easier. Of the half-dozen books I had owned, Isaac had managed to rescue only one from my room. The loss was negligible. I knew the lost books almost by heart, and the same was true for the one with me. I took my copy of Great Expectations into the courtyard and sat near the tree. I didn’t read the book so much as I recited it; I could have gone minutes without looking down at the page and not lost a word, just as I knew my father and
uncles must have done with the stories they told me and their own children. The stories were lifeless until they made something out of them, and that was what I did that morning. London was now Kampala; Pip, a poor African orphan wandering the streets of the capital.
The silence that morning lasted until the sun was up and I could smell the onions the maid was cooking in the kitchen. I was just beginning to think of what moves I could make that day to convince Joseph I belonged here when I heard clapping and cheering suddenly erupt from the top floor of the house. The noise alarmed me, perhaps because it had been weeks since I’d heard anything like it, and I worried what it meant until Isaac’s head burst through a window (the room we shared didn’t look onto the courtyard).
“Come to the living room now,” he said. “You have to listen to the radio.”
We met at the bottom of the stairs. Isaac was wearing a dark-purple shirt I had never seen before. He placed the radio on the table in the living room and turned it up loud enough so that everyone in the house, from the maids in the kitchen to the guards at the gate and on the roof, could hear. The president’s morning address was playing on a loop with nothing else allowed to interfere. His voice, as he spoke of the threats to the nation, the attacks on the state, and the emergency measures, from curfews to shoot-on-site orders, was certainly calm. I remember he said that we were all children of the revolution that had liberated Africa and that, as our president, he was determined that we remain free.
All Our Names Page 14
