All the Names They Used for God

by Anjali Sachdeva

  “Yes?” she says.

  “I thought that I would start the story in Hell, not Heaven. With the Fallen.”

  Her face remains impassive as a rock.

  “With the Devil,” he says, lowering his voice and raising his eyebrows, vamping for her attention. She smirks before she regains her composure.

  “That is your choice,” she says.

  “He must have been furious.”

  “I have heard.”

  “What else have you heard?”

  She looks steadily into his eyes and picks her words carefully. “Rags and scraps. There is no gospel in Hell.”

  “I would like to hear it anyway,” he says.

  She nods slowly, her whole face relaxing as if she has been holding her breath until this moment. “That is your choice,” she says again. “If you ask me to tell you, then I must.” She seems as though she is speaking to someone else, her voice high and clear, but then it drops back to its regular low rumble and she begins to tell him stories.

  By day’s end they have filled a score of pages, and the angel reads them aloud, her rough voice thrumming with their cadence. When she reaches the last word they look at each other with excitement and dread, to see the apocryphal tale so sharply alive on the paper, crackling with pain and fire and recrimination. In that moment John realizes that for all her world-weariness, her millennia of existence, she is younger than him in one way: She has never known firsthand the consequences of rebellion. He feels suddenly protective of her. Look at me, he thinks. See what happens to dissidents. Listen to the story you are telling. But before he can speak the angel looks up and says a quick, soft word he cannot understand, and then the white light of her presence is snuffed. John sits alone in the darkness, listening to the muted crackle of the logs in the grate, the soughing of the wind outside the house.

  * * *

  —

  That night he sleeps fitfully, falls back to the dark ocean of his old dreams, but the waves that hold him now are rough ones, pitching and heaving as though a great storm approaches. When at last he wakes, he feels as if he has washed up on some distant shore. He opens his eyes, looks to his bedside, and is startled to see a new face looking back at him. This angel sits just as the other did, with parchment and a quill poised upon his lap, but his face is blandly pleasant, and the radiance he emits is more like sunshine than lightning.

  “Hello,” he says, “shall we begin?”

  “Where is she?” John says.

  The angel raises his eyebrows in mild surprise, as though the question were a strange one, even rude. “Called away. Are you ready?”

  John is shaken. He wants to call her back but realizes he does not even know her name. “We were working. I want…We were writing.”

  “Let us move along from there,” the angel says smoothly. There is something inexorable about his soft insistence. “Perhaps, later, you will wish to change that part. Let us write about the glories of Heaven,” he says, and John, stuttering, agrees.

  * * *

  —

  Years pass before the book is finished. When at last it is complete, John asks Andrew to read it back to him. As John listens to the first pages, it is like hearing someone else’s voice—the voice of his own beloved, seditious angel, though he has not seen her again in all these many years. He is moved by the pain and beauty of the lines, but pricked, too, by their blasphemous edge: angels stalking about the Garden like bullies; the Father and Son a pair of sparkling tyrants; and the Devil filled with despair to wring the heart, clothed in beautiful metaphors and adamantine defiance. John hears in the mosaic of the poem all the images he has collected throughout his life, but something else as well—another tone, another thread that speaks in sympathy with his own heart but in a bolder voice. It frightens him; he knows as well as anyone the price of antagonizing kings. He waves Andrew to silence, says to him, “I must make it clear that these are her words.”

  “Whose words? Clear to whom?”

  John shakes his head. He finds himself near tears. “We will fix it. We will give her the credit due to her. It wants an explanatory prologue, or an invocation of the muse. It wants her name upon it.” Even as he says it John asks her forgiveness, for being unwilling to own his complicity in what they have created, to accept his share of the punishment. You ask too much of a sick old man, he thinks, you who will never be sick or old.

  Andrew turns a few pages of the manuscript and the parchment whispers and scrapes against itself. “Whatever you believe is best, John. I cannot think how it could be improved, but who knows a work like its creator?”

  “It must be clear,” John says again, and taking the bell from his bedside table he rings it violently to call the maid, filling the room with its peals.

  “Peace, John, she is coming,” Andrew says, and lays a hand upon his arm. In the quiet that follows John hears the footsteps in the hallway, rapidly approaching, the rustle of her skirts as she brings the inkpot and the quill.

  Abike stands in the doorway of my room and says, “I want to see my parents. Will you come with me?”

  I don’t answer at first. I meet her gaze in the mirror but keep wrapping my skirt. Abike’s parents have moved to Abuja. My family is also in Abuja now. She knows this. Though I have called them and written letters, I haven’t seen my family since Abike and I were captured, eight years ago, when we were just sixteen. She knows this also. It is not a small favor to ask. I finish dressing.

  “All right,” I say.

  * * *

  —

  We hitchhike for two days, take a bus once we reach Karu. On Friday, at dusk, when the National Mosque is just lighting up against the sky, we arrive in the city. I haven’t been to Abuja since I was a child, maybe nine or ten years old, when I came here on a weekend trip with my parents. I peer from the window of the bus at the towering buildings, the sheer volume of people.

  “Let’s have a night out,” I say. “We’ll do our visiting tomorrow.”

  “Sure,” says Abike. Her relief tells in her shoulders. “Where do we start?”

  We start at the Hilton. We are still in our country clothes, the same worn clothes we garden and market and fetch water in, and small ridges of dried mud fall from our shoes onto the polished floor of the lobby as we enter.

  “Do you want to do it, or should I?” Abike says.

  “As you like.”

  She nods and heads to the reception desk. The man working the counter is wearing a black suit and a crisp white shirt and has the haughtiness so common among people who serve the rich for a living, as if they are superior just from being near other people’s money. From across the room he has been scowling at us, with our dirty, rumpled clothes, but when Abike approaches and leans toward him, he becomes nervous.

  “We’d like to check in,” she says in English. “The name is Okonkwo.”

  He searches the computer for a moment. “I’m sorry, madam. I don’t see anything under that name for tonight.”

  Abike frowns. “What kind of service is this? We’ve had reservations for months.”

  The man taps at the keyboard weakly. “No, I’m very sorry.”

  “Well, don’t you have anything? Is the hotel full?”

  “We have some rooms on the ninth floor with two queen beds.”

  “That’s fine. But we’re very upset. You should let us have it for free.”

  A family of white tourists has stepped into line behind us, a fat mother and father and two skinny teenage girls wearing torn jeans and pouts. The receptionist shifts uncomfortably from foot to foot and looks away, but Abike snaps her fingers and he turns back to her. One of the teenagers giggles, but the man shows no sign that he’s heard her. He is eyeing Abike as though she is a dog and he is a cornered rat.

  I’ve seen this face many times before, on many men. This man is used to difficult people,
rich people, demanding foreigners. He is used to coolly and politely declining unreasonable requests, but this time he finds he can’t do it. He looks as though he would like to cry. Abike taps her finger slowly against the stone counter and for a moment even I believe I can hear the click of manicured nails, though I’m looking at the blunt tips of her fingers. She’s very good.

  “I can’t,” he pleads. “I’m not allowed to give rooms for free.”

  “Really?” Abike’s displeasure rolls out in waves. She sets one fingertip lightly on the cuff of his suit and he flinches. Another employee comes to ask him a question, but he doesn’t seem to hear her.

  “We would really like that room,” Abike says, and lets the silence accumulate between the two of them like a growing weight.

  “Well, it’s our mistake,” the man says at last. He puts two key cards in a paper sleeve and hands them to Abike.

  “Thank you,” she says. She smiles at him and he smiles back idiotically. His relief is overwhelming him; he’s so grateful that he has been able to give her what she wants. He nods his head eagerly and she turns to me and picks up her duffel. The tourist family stares at us as if we are museum exhibits, and Abike’s eyes are laughing as we head to the elevator.

  * * *

  Abike and I weren’t close before we were kidnapped, but we come from the same village. She was the kind of girl who could be your best friend one minute and ridicule you without mercy the next. She thought she was special because she had cousins in Chicago who sent her tattered American magazines with articles about sex, and because during our lunch break at school she always put on more makeup than anyone’s mother would allow and rolled up her uniform skirt until her thighs showed. So, of course, all the boys looked at her like she was a goddess when we sat outside, and somehow the teachers never caught her at it. Away from school she was always prim and proper. If she passed my family in the street, she would say in her prissy English, “Hello, Mrs. Layeni, Mr. Layeni. I hope you are well,” and when she had gone my mother would say, “See? What a fine girl she is. So polite.”

  We were at church when the soldiers came, a group of us helping the Sunday school teacher get ready for her class. Abike was setting the Bibles on the desks. My phone chimed, and I saw it was a text from my mother, who knew I was in Sunday school, who knew I was not even supposed to be looking at my phone. The message said, “Come home now now.” As I was staring at it, the phone began to ring, and then the door crashed open.

  At first we thought the men were government soldiers, that it was some kind of emergency and we were going to be evacuated. Then one of them walked up to Mrs. Adeyemi and shot her in the face. We all screamed and tried to run, but there was another man blocking the door. The soldier who had shot our teacher looked at her body on the floor and kicked it.

  “That’s what you get for poisoning these girls’ minds,” he said.

  I thought, Why is he talking to her when she’s already dead? I had thoughts like that the whole day, very rational thoughts, like my brain was trying to throw weight on the other side of a scale against all the madness that was happening around me.

  The men told us to go outside. We found trucks waiting, filled with girls our age and with more soldiers. The men took our phones and any money we had. They pointed with their guns and said, “Get in.”

  We rode for hours while the daylight faded into dusk, onto smaller and smaller roads, until we were moving through the forest. You could hear night birds and monkeys all around, calling to each other.

  My friend Naomi was next to me and she said, “We should jump out now, Promise. They might not even notice. We could hide in the leaves and they’d never find us in the dark.” I nodded, but neither of us jumped. I had never been anywhere this remote, and the wildness of the place terrified me. If I had known what the next few years would be like, I would have jumped even if I could see a lion waiting in the shadows, but back then I was still hoping we would get to go home. Abike was in the same truck with us, crying and sniffling until finally one of the men said, “Shut up back there,” and she was quiet. Later she told me she thought we would all be killed, that they would douse us in gasoline and set us on fire. I don’t know where she got that idea. We had never heard of any such thing happening to anyone. But in a way she was not wrong; parts of us would be burned away forever.

  * * *

  Our room at the Hilton overlooks the pool, its cool blue water undulating against the stifling blackness of the surrounding night. We take showers and ransack the minibar. Abike pulls a red dress and a pair of high heels from her duffel and starts steaming the dress with the iron. My dress is black and stretched too tight to wrinkle. We share a lipstick and look at ourselves in the mirror.

  “My mother would shit herself,” says Abike at last.

  “Let’s go,” I say.

  We walk down the street until we find a disco, packed with tourists and the girls who flock to tourists. We dance for an hour and then go to the bar to cool down. There are two girls chatting up some white men, Americans or maybe Brits. The girls have their long hair blown straight and look like they’ve been injecting themselves with some chemical to make their skin lighter. They pass a cigarette back and forth between them.

  I stand too close to the nearest man. He looks up, surprised, but when I tap the bar with my finger he smiles at me and asks if I’d like a drink. I tell him I would. The party girls scowl. They can’t understand how these men can even be looking at us, with our dark skin and our close-cropped hair. I smile at them; it’s a look women anywhere recognize from other women, a dangerous shark look. They shrink back against each other and sullenly sip their drinks. Abike gulps a shot of vodka and orders another. I turn to the man beside me.

  “Give me some money,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Money,” I say louder.

  “You want another drink?”

  “No.” I hold his gaze and breathe deeply. The noise of the club disappears. The angry stares of the party girls dissolve at the edge of my vision. All I can see is this man, and all he can see is me. “Not for a drink. Not for anything. Just give it to me.”

  He doesn’t reply, but he fumbles in his pocket, takes some bills, and presses them into my hand. I slip them into my purse without looking, and blink. The music roars back to life. The party girls are gone, and Abike is sliding from her barstool, saying something I can’t hear and pulling me toward the ladies’ room.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, we get dressed to see our mothers. Abike has a green-and-yellow dress. The smell of our house is still lingering in the folds of the cotton; she pulls it over her head and begins to wind her gele around her temples while I put on my own dress, red and blue. We pleat our geles and pin them so we are crowned just so. Again we look at each other in the mirror. Abike nods. Already I’m beginning to feel uncomfortable. When we look like this it’s too easy to see those girls we were—young, happy, helpless. These are the clothes our mothers would have dressed us in for holidays if we had finished growing up with them. We would have found them old-fashioned and complained that we wanted Western dresses. But now that we can dress as we please, we are more determined than ever to meet our parents in costumes they will find acceptable, to look something like the women they would have wanted us to grow into.

  We go to Abike’s parents’ apartment first. Unlike me, she has visited before, so she has some idea what to expect. We stand in the lobby of their building and she stares at the elevator doors with an expression I can’t read. At last I reach out and push the button to go up. “There are worse things,” I tell her, and she laughs and steps into the elevator. When she is gone, I go outside and get in a taxi to find my own family’s place.

  * * *

  The first day after we were kidnapped, we stayed in the forest, and the men made us pray all day long. They did not give u
s food, and only enough water to keep our tongues moving. Their camp had a tall post that showed which direction Mecca was in, and we had to kneel facing it while a man named Bashir shouted out all the names they used for God, and commanded us to repeat them: the Compassionate, the Merciful, the Controller, the Strong, the Abaser, the Avenger, the Forgiver…Ninety-nine words that were foreign and clumsy in our mouths. While we prayed, Bashir paced back and forth. If he thought someone was not saying the words correctly or not paying attention, he hit her with a stick or shouted in her face until she cried. We were so afraid of him then, as if being shouted at was something to fear.

  Then we began to learn the long list of things that were haram, forbidden. Praying to Jesus: haram. Uncovering your head: haram. Laughing: haram. Whispering to the other girls: haram. Looking a man directly in the eyes: haram. Unless he told you to, and then: halal, permitted. Unless he didn’t like the way you looked at him, and then, of course, you had to be punished.

  They had a lot of punishments. If they were feeling lazy they would just slap you, or threaten to kill you. They would threaten to kill you for anything—too much spice in the food you had cooked, not keeping the camp clean enough, not smiling enough or smiling too much. But that was just when they couldn’t be bothered to try harder. There was one girl who offered herself to one of the soldiers, thinking he would protect her. So he enjoyed her, but then he pulled her out into the middle of the camp, still naked, and shouted for the other men to come and witness what a brazen whore she was. They took turns beating her until you could not even recognize her face. She died three days later. And things like this happened all the time: to girls who tried to run, girls who were “defiant” or “shameless.” After a while, you put your effort into learning not to see them while you looked right at them, into singing songs in your head so you didn’t hear them scream.