All Our Names

by Mengestu, Dinaw

  By the time Isaac brought the radio down, he had heard the speech several times. He had his favorite moments already: the sunset-to-sunrise curfew, the declaration of a state of emergency. After each one, he punched the table.

  “The only real difference now,” he said, “is that it is official. Now they do not have to pretend to have a reason to shoot you.”

  I didn’t understand his enthusiasm, but I didn’t fear it, either. I laughed when he did and smiled when I thought I should. I grew confident as I watched him. My feelings about what was happening didn’t change; I had none that I was comfortable with, so as soon as possible I adopted Isaac’s as my own.

  “They are scared,” I said.

  I felt better saying that.

  “More like terrified,” Isaac responded.

  “They’re finished.”

  “It’ll be over very soon now,” he said.

  After a brief silence, the president’s address began again. I wanted to listen to it once more, to see if it was the exact same recording, or if perhaps there weren’t multiple versions of the same words, inflected differently, the better to match the various moods of all those listening: a recording to instill fear, and one to bring comfort; one for the morning, and others for the afternoon and evening, with perhaps a softer, slower version that could be played throughout the night.

  We listened to it a second time. Halfway through, I was convinced that Isaac and I had been wrong to speak so boldly about the government’s demise—it was we who were finished. But then there was a slight pause in the speech that I hadn’t heard the first two times—a second, or maybe only a fraction of a second, but long enough to create the image of a man sitting alone in a room rereading the same words out loud—and just like that, I returned to thinking it would be over soon. The government would fall, and we, or someone like us, would rise.

  Joseph came downstairs just as it was ending. I was grateful to see him; I didn’t want to listen any longer. Left on my own, I could find too many ways of reading what was happening. With Joseph present, there was only one.

  He picked the radio up from the table and turned it off. It was the same shade of gray as the suit he was wearing. I wondered if that was a coincidence, or if Isaac had chosen Joseph’s suit for him.

  “This is an important day for us,” Joseph said. “We have to act quickly now.”

  He held his hand out to me; I bowed my head before shaking it. I was part of the “we” now.

  “How are you with maps?” he asked me.

  Isaac put his arm over my shoulder. “He’s a genius,” he said. “He can do anything.”

  • • •

  Joseph had multiple offices throughout the house, and each one served a different purpose. He spoke to his guards in one room; he worked quietly alone in another. He left us for one on the ground floor, with instructions to wait in the living room or in the courtyard. We opted for the courtyard; we wanted to see who was going to come to the house that day. Isaac predicted more dignitaries—ministers, businessmen.

  “He has many powerful friends who will support him now,” he said.

  We stood under our tree and waited for the procession to begin again; a half-hour later, we sat down. Noon came and went, and still not a single car had come to the house. The guards paced around the door and the roof; the maids hung sheets to dry behind the house. One and then two hours passed. It was too hot to sit outside, but Isaac insisted we stay where we were. “Something will happen,” he said, and he was right. Minutes later, one of the guards who rarely left Joseph’s side approached us. We both stood up as soon as we saw him. We couldn’t see most of his face because of the large sunglasses he always wore, even inside the house, but I suspected that seeing us stand at attention, not out of respect but fear, pleased him.

  He spoke to Isaac; when he finished, he handed him an envelope and made his way straight back to the house. I knew the envelope was for me by the way Isaac held it. He was hesitant to hand it over, but I wanted him to know that what happened to me next was no longer up to him to decide.

  “It’s fine,” I told him.

  He gave me the envelope.

  “Joseph wants you to learn it,” he said.

  The “it” was an intricately hand-drawn map of a section of the capital I had never been in before. The dozens of narrow winding paths suggested a slum similar to the one Isaac and I had lived in, but several times larger.

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But you don’t have long. It’ll be dark in a few hours.”

  I was given a room on the second floor to study in. It was empty except for a thin, narrow mattress pressed underneath the window. I looked outside; there was an obstructed view onto the one road that led to the house. I knelt down on the mattress and, with my finger for a gun, pretended to take aim at the invaders coming for us.

  It took what was left of the afternoon for me to memorize the map. There were thirty-four different paths, and a dozen smaller offshoots that abruptly ended. I memorized them by imagining myself walking along each one, and when I had walked them all once, I returned to them a second, and then a third time. But now I wasn’t just walking the streets; I was living among them. I invented a second life for those roads. There was a street where my girlfriend lived, another that I walked down every Friday afternoon on my way home from work. I had family members—brothers, aunts, grandparents—that I visited regularly, scattered throughout the neighborhood. By the time Isaac came to tell me Joseph was waiting downstairs, I could close my eyes and see not only the map but the faces and the interiors of the lives and homes that I had made up.

  Joseph’s explanation of what he wanted me to do was kept to as few words as possible. I preferred it that way. He asked if I had memorized the map. I told him I knew it by heart. He took the map from me and said he hoped that was true. “You can’t look lost,” he said. “You have to look like you belong.” I assured him that I wouldn’t look lost, that I knew those streets as well as anyone who lived there. He told me he needed me to make a delivery. “We have things here in this house,” he said, “that need to be moved.” A car would be coming soon to bring me to the outskirts of the neighborhood. After that, I would have to go on foot, disguised as a fruit vendor. A wheelbarrow had been prepared. All I had to do was bring it to a particular house before sunset and the curfew went into effect. I would have to wait until the next morning to return.

  When he finished, he asked if I was certain I wanted to do this. “It is your decision,” he said.

  I was confident I had nothing to lose. I was tired of being aimless.

  “I’m positive,” I told him.

  The car arrived exactly when Joseph said it would: “It’ll be here in ten minutes,” he told me, and ten minutes later, a heavily dented and mud-stained white pickup truck was pulling into the courtyard. There wasn’t much time left before sunset, and so we moved quickly. Joseph spoke to the driver; the wheelbarrow and its contents were loaded into the back, and I followed behind them. We were ready to leave after a few minutes, and would have done so had Isaac not insisted on coming along. He came to the truck bed, where I was sitting, and had begun to climb in when Joseph shouted at him to stop. Isaac stood on the bumper longer than I expected, and it’s possible he might have even joined me had one of the guards not pulled him off. As soon as he was down, the car reversed quickly out the gates and onto the road, and the last image I had of Isaac was of him standing with his head bent in front of Joseph.

  The first five minutes were a difficult ride. I was almost thrown from the bed of the truck twice as we jostled our way along narrow back roads until we were far enough from the house to turn safely onto one of the main avenues. Traffic was light at that hour; as we picked up speed, I relaxed my grip on the rails and inhaled the warm air. We stopped at the traffic circle on Independence Boulevard just long enough for me to jump out and unload the wheelbarrow. There was less than a half-hour before the curfew went into eff
ect, and the sidewalks and streets were crowded with people either rushing home or standing idle on the corners before being forced indoors. I slipped into that mass undetected. It was better than I expected. I knew exactly where I was, almost as if I were home.

  I wound my wheelbarrow through the dirty, rutted narrow paths where my imaginary friends and cousins lived. The neighborhood was exactly how I had pictured it—all brown and gray, with every function of life, from the shit in the latrines to the sleep, sex, and fights of the bedroom, squeezed together. Loud voices and strong smells rose from every corner. When I came upon the house marked on the map—a single-story concrete home, identical to the ones next to it except for a faded Bob Marley poster in the window—I felt disappointed that I didn’t have an excuse to keep walking longer.

  As soon as I stopped in front of the house, the door opened. Several pairs of hands reached through and grabbed me by the neck and arms. I knew better than to shout, but I still tried to fight my way free. I swung my arms and legs; a powerful forearm wrapped itself around my neck and squeezed; another took hold of my legs and lifted me off the ground. I looked for the wheelbarrow, but it was already gone. That was how I knew I was in the right house.

  I was carried into a room in the back. There were bunk beds lined against the wall, and a cot in the middle, but I was dropped on the floor. I was knocked unconscious. When I came to, I saw that I wasn’t alone in the room. There were seven other boys in there, all of whom looked to be teenagers. Four were sitting on the bottom beds, while the other three sat in the corner and smoked. There was no window and only one dim light in the corner, so the room was rich with smoke thick enough almost to mask the other odors. One boy pointed to a cut above my brow, which had begun to bleed. He said something in a language I had never heard, and when I responded in English that I didn’t understand, everyone laughed. I stood up. I turned to the door; poor homes rarely had locks, and my plan was to run as quickly as possible out into the street and find a place to hide. I never made it to the handle. All seven boys pulled at me, and when I was down, two stood in front of the door. They were as kind as they could be about it. They shook their heads and said no many times over, as if they were scolding a young child or a pet that didn’t know its boundaries. I wasn’t allowed to stand up again. I was given a bottom bunk in the corner. The walls were thin—on the other side, I could hear older voices shouting. I wanted to believe only the best outcomes were possible. I tried not to think of dying, but that, of course, was the easiest way of ensuring that it was all I could think about. There were occasional pauses in the shouting, signs that a conclusion was near. I closed my eyes and prayed that the door wouldn’t open until dawn. When it did, ten minutes or maybe an hour later, my eyes were still closed, but I knew it was Isaac’s voice telling me to stand. “We need to leave quickly,” he said.

  I followed the back of his head out of the house. I didn’t look at the boys gathered around me or at any of the men in the other room. We slid quietly out the front door, and I heard a lock click behind us.

  “Now it’s your turn to get us out of here,” he said. My map returned. I saw the exit I had charted earlier in my head and did my best to follow it, but nearly all the homes and stores had gone dark. Occasionally, a candle in a window gave off enough light so I could see the curve ahead, but by and large I was walking blindly. We were the only people on the road; the curfew had been in effect for hours. We turned left in what I hoped was the right direction. We made it a few hundred yards before we heard boots marching toward us, and then a familiar voice coming from a radio. We paused just long enough to hear the president’s speech from that morning growing louder as it approached us.

  Isaac took hold of my sleeve and pulled me toward a small blue house a few feet ahead of us that had its front door slightly ajar. He guided me inside and closed the door hard behind him. Sitting on the floor of the house a few feet from us were an elderly man and a young woman, huddled around a single bowl and a candle they had deliberately kept as far away from the center of the room as possible.

  For all their obvious terror, neither said a word after we entered. They stared at me, at Isaac, and then at the floor rather than at each other, as if they had long since come to terms with the fact that on any given evening men could burst into their house and do something terrible to them. There’s no honest measure for the toll that sort of knowledge takes, whether the scale is the breadth of a single room or an entire city.

  Isaac did his best to comfort them. He crouched in front of the old man and, in the same tender voice I had heard him use with the beggar outside of the hospital, said, “Papa. Don’t worry.” He spoke to him for several more minutes in Kiswahili, the old man occasionally clicking his tongue in passive approval; eventually, Isaac stood up and told me, “We’re going to stay here for the night.”

  “We can’t leave before then?”

  Isaac shook his head. He looked down at the young woman, who, I saw now, was practically just a child. She stood up slowly. It was only when she put one hand under her stomach that I realized she was pregnant.

  “If we’re all still here in the morning,” Isaac said, “we will be lucky.”

  The girl disappeared into a room in the back. Isaac said congratulations to the old man, who for the first time smiled. He held out his right hand and for each finger uttered a few words before turning up and offering a prayer to his God.

  “This is his fifth child,” Isaac said. “Two are dead, and two he hasn’t heard from in years. This one, he says, he hopes God will let him keep.”

  The man stood with what seemed to be his last remnant of strength. I had seen him poorly as well, thinking he was simply older when it turned out he was almost elderly. The years were evident in his feet—in the nearly nailless, bald toes and the shriveled skin that encased them. He made his way to the back room to join his child-wife. I had an image of the two of them lying together side by side on a mattress on the floor, an image that didn’t inspire anger, as I would have thought, so much as pity for them, and, by extension, for us as well.

  Isaac and I were standing in the middle of the room, which was bare except for a pair of wooden stools, a lone prayer mat in the corner, and a long hard wooden bench against the back wall, when we heard the first shot, followed by rounds of automatic fire. I was the only who looked around for a place to hide. Isaac didn’t so much as twitch.

  “Take a seat,” he said. “We have a long night ahead of us.”

  HELEN

  Isaac promised he would do his best to tell me what I wanted to know.

  “I promise I won’t leave abruptly,” he said, but I never sincerely believed he would keep that promise, and so it meant little to hear him say it.

  “I know that already,” I lied, “but that’s not what I want to hear.”

  He reached out to put his hand on my shoulder but I moved farther away before he could touch me. The last thing I wanted was to be comforted. I got out of the bed. I saw my clothes lying on the floor and tried to think of something he could say that would make me leave.

  “Henry said I would know better than he did where you would go next, but that isn’t true. I don’t know any more than he does. What was the point of having this dinner?”

  “I wanted you to meet. So did Henry.”

  “That’s because he knows nothing about you. He doesn’t even know where you’re from. How is that possible?”

  “He never wanted to know more.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “When he met me at the airport, the first thing Henry asked me was ‘Who are you?’ He had a picture of my friend Isaac in his wallet—the same Isaac who died the night you came to my house. I told him the truth right then: The Isaac he was expecting was in a village in northern Uganda. He gave me his passport and visa so I could come here, because he never wanted to. I told him I became Isaac as soon as I stepped on the plane.”

  “And who were you before that?”

  “That’s
what Henry didn’t want to know. He said the less he knew about me the better, in case something happened.”

  “I’m not Henry.”

  “I know.”

  “Then why do you treat me like I am?”

  He gathered the sheets around him. I wondered if I had actually hurt him, or if he was simply pretending to be wounded.

  “I spent two days with Henry before I came here. We drove from the airport in Chicago to his house in St. Louis, where he said he would figure out what to do with me next. He had doubts about the story I had told him, and he said he would have me arrested and deported if he found out I was lying. I understood why he would say that. He had spent enough time in Africa to know there was no limit to what someone would do to leave. People risked their lives every day to get out. It was nothing to kill or steal from someone for the same reason.

  “He made phone calls to find his friend Joseph. It was Joseph who had asked Henry to bring Isaac here. He thought if he could get him to America Isaac would be safe until the war was over. Early the first morning, someone from the British Embassy in Kampala called to say that Joseph was most likely dead, and that he and his army were rumored to be responsible for several massacres in the north of the country. I was sleeping on the couch when Henry received the call. He slammed the phone on the table. I thought he was pretending to be angry. He asked me what I knew about Joseph. I told him the truth. I said Joseph was dead.

  “He sat down in a chair across from me. ‘When will you people learn?’ he said. ‘Do you enjoy killing each other?’

  “I admit I had had the same thought before. I saw many people killed, as if it were nothing. I thought at times that our lives were worthless, but, hearing Henry, I knew that we were both wrong. No one needs to learn how to kill, but it took the foreigners who came to Africa to show us that it meant nothing to do so. Henry’s friend Joseph had many people killed before he died. I think now he had only done what the British had taught him.