All Our Names

by Mengestu, Dinaw

  “It’s not fair,” Isaac said.

  “What?”

  He pointed out the window to the lake.

  “You have oceans even in the middle of the country.”

  “It’s not an ocean,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “Your lakes are my ocean. My forest is your jungle. America is a world, not a nation.”

  We slowed to a crawl just as Chicago came into view. I had never been in a city anywhere near that size; I had never seen so many cars. I grew anxious thinking about how many people there must have been inside them. I felt like we were driving into something alive, with white gleaming spires on top of its buildings for teeth.

  Every time we came to a complete stop, I turned to Isaac. He was enthralled by the view, as I suspected he would be.

  He pointed to the tallest building we could see through the windshield.

  “That must be the Hancock Center.”

  He reached over and caressed my forearm. I took that as proof he had no idea what I was planning.

  “This will be lovely,” he said.

  ISAAC

  There was no one along the path back to Joseph’s village. I expected that I would find traces of the war—more refugees, soldiers—but it was just as empty as it had been before. When I reached the band of houses that marked the town’s northern border, I heard the lorry engines approaching. Assuming Isaac was still alive, he would be back by now. I didn’t run, but I was desperate to see him again and walked as fast as I could while trying not to give the impression I was fleeing. When I reached the main road of the village, I saw that there were three lorries already parked, halfway in between the bronze fist and the Life Hotel. Dozens of soldiers were crowded into the beds of the first two. There was no crowd to greet them. The entire village had heard the engines and retreated indoors. The only truly communal knowledge was fear, and in this case everyone had the same response.

  The soldiers descended from the back of the lorries; I was alone on the street watching them. The first to exit were clearly tired; they walked slowly and took time to regain their balance after landing, but they could do so on their own. That was true only for the first ones, however. Each group was more injured than the one that preceded it. There were the soldiers with minor wounds, cuts, and bruises across their chests and forearms, followed by those who had at least one limb badly injured—an arm in a sling, a thigh wrapped in bandages. Then, finally, came those who were almost dead, and those who might live but would suffer greatly for what little remained of their lives; all of these had to be carried out.

  The third lorry was parked at the very edge of the road, under a large tree, just where the town began. There were no soldiers standing in the bed, but I could see through the slats part of a hand, a tuft of hair, boots, and patches of camouflage pants and shirts. A swarm of flies hovered over this truck, and I expected soon there would be vultures perched on the tree. I looked for Isaac among the living—the healthy and able-bodied, and then among the injured. I didn’t see him anywhere; I decided that if he was among the heap of dead bodies in the back of the last lorry, I didn’t want to know. I was prepared to accept his death, but not on those terms.

  There is nothing left for me here, I told myself. I didn’t know where I would go, only that I would never see the capital again. I decided to head south along the main road, in the hope that I would be able to pick up a ride to another village. I made it a few feet before two soldiers stopped me. One pointed to the lorry full of corpses. I pretended not to understand what he meant, and was trying to walk away when the other soldier took hold of my arm and pulled me back.

  “Do you think you are special?” he asked me.

  I shook my head no. I recognized him from the hotel. He was one of the soldiers who, under Isaac’s orders, had taken the officer with the bulldog head away.

  “Then why do you think you can leave? We go out there and fight for you, and now you want to leave.” He smiled, as if the problem had nothing to do with the dead but was an issue of manners.

  He turned to the soldiers behind him and pointed to the houses on the other side of the road. Each soldier entered one home and emerged shortly after with all the men or teenage boys inside it. Suddenly I was no longer alone; there must have been at least fifty of us now. The soldier holding my arm pointed to the last lorry.

  “Go,” he said. “And bury them.”

  “Is Isaac in there?” I asked him.

  He squinted his eyes in either confusion or anger; either way, he had no idea who I was talking about. He had never heard of Isaac. He knew him by a different name, as did all the soldiers.

  “The captain,” I said.

  He pushed me forward. I turned around to ask him another question, but he had already moved on; he had his hands around a young man’s neck and was leading him on like a dog.

  The youngest boys were sent to dig the grave while the rest of us formed a chain from the back of the lorry to the ground, where the bodies were stacked one on top of another. I was in the bed with the bodies—the second link in the chain, with a man much older than me whose thin arms were still defined by the muscles of his youth. Like all the other men, he performed his job in silence, without pity and with perhaps even a bit of gratitude that this was all that was being asked of him. He took the legs and I took the arms of each body passed to us, which meant that, whether I wanted to or not, I had to stare into every face to see if it was Isaac.

  After the second body, I stopped paying attention to the features. I looked as long as it took to know whether it was Isaac, and if the body was clearly shorter, taller, or heavier than Isaac, I didn’t look at all. I simply grabbed the stiff arms and passed them to the next pair of hands. After the fifteenth or twentieth, I decided to think of them as a single body named Adam. In my head I said, “You were a brave soldier, Adam.… Your mother and father will miss you.… You should have stayed in your village, Adam.… You had no reason to come here.… You could have gone to school and become a doctor, Adam.” And when I ran out of alternate endings, I simply thought, “Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam,” until we had carried the last body out of the lorry, and I could risk a small breath of relief: though there were more than a hundred Adams, there wasn’t a single Isaac.

  We pushed all of the bodies into the long shallow grave on the other side of the tree, facing away from the village. We took turns shoveling the earth back. When we were finished, the only priest in the village was brought from his house to say a prayer over the grave. He was a short, stout man dressed in black with a purple collar. He said his prayer without any devotion, as if he had either long ago lost his faith or didn’t believe those men were entitled to share in it. Either way, when he was done, so were we. The soldiers who had been guarding us walked away as if they had finished watching a street performance that had only mildly held their interest to begin with. I thought I was done as well, and was going to continue walking south, as I had originally planned; but the second of the two soldiers, the one who had only pointed to the lorry without speaking, told me that the colonel was waiting for me in the hotel. I followed him into the courtyard, which was full of injured men lying on the ground, their open wounds festering in the sun. The soldier pointed up to the northwest corner of the balcony.

  “Colonel,” he said.

  I was more relieved than surprised to find Isaac with his hands on the railing looking down at me. He was a colonel, a captain, or why not a general? Surviving was enough to have earned him that. We waved to each other—a simple thing that felt extraordinary, and I wished that we could have held that gesture for just a while longer, the way families and lovers did at bus stations and airports, whether someone was coming or going.

  Isaac motioned with his hand for me to come up and join him. After a morning spent working on a mass grave, I felt I needed to stand on solid ground to make sure that I wasn’t sinking, too.
I showed him the bloodstained palms of my hands, and waved for him to come to me.

  The only source of water in the hotel was a manual pump in the rear of the courtyard. Isaac met me there as I was filling a small bucket to wash myself with. He handed me a bar of soap, and the first thing he said to me was “Be careful with that. It might be the only one left in the hotel.”

  Before I dipped my hands into the water, Isaac told me to wait.

  “Your hair is filthy,” he said. “Lean forward.”

  I leaned my head next to the bucket, and Isaac poured water from a plastic pitcher over my head, then rubbed the soap deep into my scalp before rinsing it again.

  “Now hold out your hands,” he said. I stretched out my arms with my palms facing up. He laughed. “This isn’t Europe,” he said. “How much water do you think we have?”

  He cupped my palms for me and slowly poured a handful of water into them so I could rinse off the blood before properly washing them. By the time I finished, there was a line of men waiting behind me. “Give me a few minutes,” Isaac said.

  I stepped to the side so the next man could take my place. Isaac washed his hands and hair as well. He did the same for a dozen men, until that last bar of soap was reduced to a nub no larger than the tip of a finger. He took what was left of the soap and rubbed it into his own hands until it had completely dissolved, and then rubbed his hands over his face. He washed himself with what little water was left in the bucket, and when he was finished, there were still streaks of soap along his right cheek.

  “How do I look?” he asked me.

  “Tired,” I said. “And you missed a spot.”

  He rubbed the side of his face with his lapel, which was the one part of his uniform that didn’t have an obvious coat of dirt on it.

  “I was worried that you would come back here,” he said.

  “Where else was I going to go?”

  “It didn’t matter; any other place would have been better.”

  “I wasn’t planning on staying long.”

  “Good. By tomorrow morning, there won’t be much left.”

  Isaac took three fingers of my right hand in his. We walked out of the courtyard like that, and continued to hold hands until we reached the tree behind which the dead soldiers were buried.

  “Why were they buried here?” I asked him.

  He nodded to the hotel across the street. “The soldiers wanted it. They said their souls would never sleep after what they did if we buried them in the other village, and maybe they’re right.”

  He saw me staring past him toward the grave, but he mistook my concern for pity.

  “Don’t feel bad for them,” he said. “At least you helped bury them.”

  He walked to the other side of the tree and stood on top of the grave. I thought he was going to spit on it, but instead he dug the heel of his right boot into the mound of earth as deep as he could.

  “What happened?” I asked him.

  He pretended to ignore the question, focusing his efforts on pressing his foot deeper into the ground. After several minutes, he finally responded. “Why would you want to know more?”

  I didn’t have an answer, so I chose the one I thought he would want to hear. I pulled out the notebook he had given me. So far, I had filled six pages—four with a map, two more with half-finished sentences—but only I knew that.

  “If you’re going to write something, write something nice,” he said. “Something that will make people happy. No one needs to read this.”

  He began to dig with his other foot. I let him do so for several minutes before interrupting to ask him the same question again: “What happened?” Or maybe the second time I said, “Tell me what happened.” Either way, it wasn’t the right question. The “what” was obvious. What I didn’t know was what Isaac had done.

  He kicked a mound of dirt into my hair without looking up at me. I took a few steps back, but that still didn’t feel far enough, so I walked around his left side until I was standing several feet directly behind him. I tried again.

  “Did you kill anyone?” I asked him.

  I watched his right leg take a long swing back and then abruptly stop just before it hit the ground.

  “That’s a stupid question,” he said. “If you want to know, you should ask how many.”

  “How many?”

  “No. ‘How many people did you kill?’ ”

  “How many people did you kill?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “More than I can count. Too many.”

  I waited for him to turn around, but he didn’t. He kept his gaze firmly fixed on the tree in front of him as he made a few more stabs into the ground.

  “Ask me how we killed them,” he said.

  “How did you kill them?”

  “We didn’t shoot them.”

  “You cut them.”

  “Yes. We beat them. We burned them. We had no bullets left. Ask me if we buried them.”

  “Did you bury them?”

  “No. We left them for the vultures and dogs. And then we ran back here so we wouldn’t have to look at what we had done.”

  His right foot was buried past his ankle. I understood now why he was doing that.

  “How deep is this hole?” he asked me.

  “Not very deep,” I said.

  He pulled his foot out of the ground and shook the dirt from his shoes.

  “Good,” he said. “It’s already more than they deserve.”

  HELEN

  We set our sights on the Hancock Center and aimed straight for it. Isaac watched the city through my window, while I found it hard not to stare at the lake out of his. This was still the Midwest, but it didn’t have the hard, firm earth that was supposed to come with it. The city ended abruptly, rather than trailing off into open fields like Laurel. This bothered me. I knew Isaac didn’t see it that way, so I kept silent as we traced our way along the shoreline, past the center of the city, and around a tight bend. I followed the heaviest traffic onto Michigan Avenue, where we met the Hancock Center head-on. Isaac leaned against the dashboard to get a better look. It was all wonderful to him. He saw the great possibilities buildings like that promised, especially to men like him, who had no idea what it meant to scale them.

  We parked three blocks away from the tower he admired so much. Once we were out of the car, I told him to lead the way.

  “This is your parade,” I said. He smiled. He had no idea what that meant. “It’s my turn to follow you now,” I explained.

  Neither of us knew where we were. We had only the Hancock to orient us, and so of course Isaac retraced our route back to it. “I want to touch it,” he said, as if this was a confession of a desire he was embarrassed about. I imagined a surface slick and oily against my hand, one that would linger for a long time.

  “Then let’s touch it,” I said.

  The distance on foot was greater than I thought. The blocks were long. The sidewalks were more like roads, wide and crowded; it felt dangerous to walk down them. While Isaac looked up, I watched the faces that passed us. We weren’t holding hands, but we were standing close to each other. When Isaac caught something that fascinated him, he turned to me so I could share it with him. There were gargoyles, moldings, spires, and strange etchings on the sides of buildings, all of which could be seen if you walked with your head turned up. It wasn’t just buildings, though. There was an antique red roadster parked across the street that he wanted me to see, and a fountain; every beggar we passed demanded his attention, but not his curiosity. I looked wherever he told me and just as quickly looked to see the reaction of whoever was near us. As far as I could tell, no one had noticed us. I thought this was what it felt like to be invisible, but when I subtracted Isaac I realized that, until he came along, this was how I had always felt. Not invisible, but a natural part of the background, entitled to all the privileges that came with ownership.

  We stopped in front of the Hancock. Isaac wanted to see it from multiple angles, so we crossed the
street, moved to various corners, and craned our necks to stare up the shiny black exterior.

  “It is amazing,” he said.

  The awe was genuine. I wanted to know how he sustained it. We stood near the main entrance and rubbed our hands against the exterior. It was warm, polished; I wanted to say it was softer than I expected.

  “Should we go inside?”

  He shook his head.

  “We can’t appreciate it from in there,” he said.

  Isaac took my hand.

  “Let’s walk,” he said.

  We hesitated, looking at our hands, not each other, then gathered our strength and moved forward. We walked. It didn’t feel like a victory over anything, but I was proud and, to an equal degree, scared. After walking one block like that, I was grateful for the feeling of his hand in mine, and even for the anxiety that came with it. After two more blocks, the gratitude had turned to sorrow that we hadn’t had this sooner. All this time, I thought, we’ve been at best only half of what was possible.

  I wished my mother could have seen us. I wished David were watching from around the corner.

  “Are you okay?”

  I wasn’t crying, but the view ahead was blurred.

  “I’m great. Wonderful,” I said.

  I squeezed his hand hard. He locked his fingers around mine. As long as we continued walking, I was certain that nothing could break us.

  The light ahead turned red just as we reached the intersection. We slowed, and as soon as we came to a stop, a crowd formed around us. We were at the front of the pack, which was better than being in the middle, but still we were exposed. I noticed right away that the man next to Isaac and the woman standing closest to me were staring at us, and of course they weren’t alone. I kept my head up without looking at anyone long enough to read their expressions. I knew what was there—anger, pity, contempt, maybe even envy—but I was convinced that there must have also been a touch of wonder, maybe even awe at the sight of us.

  When the light turned green, Isaac held me back so we were the last to cross.