All Our Names

by Mengestu, Dinaw

  When I regained consciousness two days later, I was in a hospital run by a Catholic charity, in a large white room with forty other bodies around me and the stench of ammonia and decay mixed together. I had never seen African nuns before, but there they were, all of them the same shade of black, in sparkling white dresses with blue veils covering their hair. None of them were in the room when I first woke up, and in my confusion I screamed, not out of fear or pain, but I think simply to hear my own voice and to know that I was alive.

  Later that afternoon, Isaac came to see me. I was so relieved not to be alone that I didn’t question how he had known I was there. He handed me a black palm-sized notebook. “Something for you to write in until you can leave here,” he said.

  He pulled a chair next to the bed, and finally took off his sunglasses. “So, my friend. Now you know what it feels like.”

  I knew what he meant by that, but it wasn’t true, at least not yet. The men who beat me were driven as much by fear as hate. They had lashed out blindly and left me for dead. Isaac had yet to feel that distinct version of violence, and because I was certain that soon enough he would, and that odds were when he did he wouldn’t survive, I didn’t bother to point out the difference. He offered me his hand as he bent down to kiss my forehead—a gesture that was intended to say that there was more between us now than just friendship. I gripped his hand just as tightly, and even lifted my head to his lips to make sure that he understood that I felt exactly the same way.

  HELEN

  It’s possible that if Isaac had never returned I might have gone on to live a perfectly reasonable, happy life. I would have spent my days with women like Rose, kind, decent old women who, though alone and poor at the end of their lives, were above any cheap, easy pity. Through them and maybe a few dozen others whose lives I managed to make less alone, at least briefly, I could say that I had found a purpose, until, eventually, one day, the tables were turned and it was my turn to play the role of the aged host for the young women assigned to look after me. Isaac came back exactly three weeks after he had left, and when he did, he shut the doors to that world behind him. I visited Rose two more times, and each time stayed less than an hour and was so occupied with my own thoughts that I barely heard a word she said. When I think of Isaac’s return now, I imagine myself sitting in a semi-barren living room with all the windows open, a faint breeze barely rocking the white curtains, when a sudden explosion shatters the windows and blows the curtains apart—my own private little blast, which I was too stupid not to be afraid of.

  Isaac returned bearing gifts, not of apology or remorse but of America, which he said he had finally discovered, and was eager to tell me about. His first morning back, he took a bus to my office and left with the secretary a package that had my name on it. I opened it at my desk and found a box filled with cheap plastic souvenirs, each individually wrapped in a thin sheet of white paper. There was a palm-sized Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building, along with even smaller replicas of the White House, Lincoln Memorial, and Golden Gate Bridge, and a typed letter at the bottom that I memorized.

  Dear Helen

  I had to go away. Here are some of the places that I hope we can go to someday.

  Warm Regards

  Isaac

  I lined the monuments along the edge of my desk. I wasn’t sure how to read them. The letter was curt—the gesture suspiciously grand. The farthest I had ever traveled was to St. Louis with my parents.

  I rearranged the order of the monuments, moving the White House to the center and placing the Golden Gate Bridge right next to it, then trying other combinations: New York and San Francisco; D.C. and New York. I became so absorbed in my made-up geography that I didn’t notice David watching me.

  “What are you doing?” he asked me.

  “Practicing,” I said.

  I handed him the letter that Isaac had sent, hoping he could help me interpret it.

  “Is he serious?” he asked me.

  “Look at the letter. It’s typed. That has to mean something.”

  “Yes, that he didn’t have a pen. That he has a fondness for typewriters. That his handwriting is terrible.”

  He pointed to the monuments on my desk.

  “And he sent you those as well?”

  I was almost too embarrassed to say yes. I waited for David to tell me that Isaac was delusional, but he fingered each of the monuments without lifting them.

  “Who knows, Helen. Maybe your Dickens is on to something,” he said.

  He squeezed my shoulder before turning back to his office. As soon as he was gone, I picked up the phone and called Isaac. He picked up on the fourth ring. I felt my right eye quiver when he said, “Hello.”

  “Isaac.”

  “Helen.”

  “You’re back.”

  “You received my package.”

  “I’m looking at it right now.”

  “Were you surprised?”

  “I didn’t know where you’d gone. You never told me you were leaving.”

  “I didn’t know until the last minute. I will tell you about it.”

  “This evening?”

  “Yes, this evening. If you are available.”

  “I’ll be free after six,” I said.

  I had planned to visit Rose and a young single mother of two whose file I had just opened that afternoon, but at 3 p.m. I was still sitting at my desk. I had spent the hour after hanging up imagining what it would be like to be alone in a room with Isaac again—what his arm next to mine would feel like, what his voice would sound like—and then I started trying to picture us in New York and in San Francisco and D.C. I’d lived in this country my entire life and had never come close to any of those places. All my trips were strictly middle-of-the-road.

  I hadn’t read Isaac’s file since we met. There was hardly anything in it, to begin with: a single loose leaf of paper with his name and date of birth and a brief paragraph stating he was here as a foreign-exchange student. His was the only file like that in our office. Our other clients came with criminal records and hospital records, income-tax reports and psychological evaluations. In comparison, Isaac’s single-page life story had seemed like a blessing when I first saw it.

  I read his file two more times, and each time came up with a part of his past that appeared to be deliberately missing. There was no month or date of birth, only a year. His place of birth was listed only as Africa, with no country or city. The only solid fact was his name, Isaac Mabira, but even that was no longer substantial: any name could have filled that slot, and nothing would have changed.

  I left my office a few hours earlier than I had planned and decided to take a drive through town—or, to be more precise, past all the places where Isaac and I had spent time together. I drove past the diner, and then the Goodwill store where we’d picked out his couch and kitchen table, the post office, the grocery store. That was the bulk of what we had; I had forgotten how poor we were as a couple. I tried my best to draw a solid image of Isaac, first alone, and then together with me, and when that wasn’t enough, I drove to the university and parked near the library, where I hoped the memory of him on his first day in Laurel would remind me of who Isaac “really” was when I wasn’t a part of the picture.

  The campus had gone back to what it had been during my freshman year—a clean, calm, and ordered sanctuary of semi-Gothic buildings and great towering trees that even when bare had given me a measure of solace. There were no protests on the lawns or banners draped from the windows, as there had been during the past two years. A few weeks just before I graduated, guardsmen and riot police had been stationed outside of all the main buildings; there were days when the entire campus had been closed off and traces of tear gas could be seen from blocks away. I had watched that on television, from the safety of my mother’s living room, convinced that I was missing out on something important, but now I thought maybe I hadn’t missed anything at all. The students that I could see from my car seemed content with what lif
e had given them, and there was no trace of any of the anger that only a few years earlier had seemed so important. One war had ended; that was enough for now.

  I watched five black students settle on the library steps in a semicircle, with the boys two steps above and the girls fanned out beneath them. Had Isaac been younger, I still couldn’t have pictured him among that crowd. They were, for all their mystery to me, no different from the other students sprawled out on the steps, confident in their aimlessness, convinced that the future would provide. There was never the slightest trace of such cool confidence in Isaac. He told me once that he’d accepted the fact that there was no place in the world where he felt fully at ease. “When I lived with my parents, I used to take long walks by myself, even when I was very young and was forbidden from doing so. I couldn’t help it. I was restless. I always felt out of place. I didn’t know it was permanent, though. I thought eventually I would find a house or a street that seemed to have been made just for me. I think I have walked more miles than just about any man I know, and I have learned that if I were to walk every day for the rest of my life, I would never find such a place. That is nothing to be sad about. Many people have it worse. They dream of belonging to a place that will never have them. I made that mistake once.”

  I didn’t feel sorry for him when he told me that, but, watching those students, I did think that, if it were possible to grant the small measure of entitlement that was theirs to others, then that would be worth fighting for. I didn’t have the words to explain it at the time, but as soon as the thought crossed my mind, I knew it was wrong. There wasn’t a protest in the world that could have done that for them. The right to claim their small share of this country had always been theirs; they knew that long before the rest of us. I wondered if the same would ever be true for someone like Isaac.

  I decided to make a tour of the campus before returning to my car. I expected to feel a bit of nostalgia for my college days, but instead I had the feeling I was walking past the perfectly manicured lawns, with their wilting tulips, and the roughly carved stone buildings for only the second time in my life. The first had been with my head down, and although I had taken my time, over four years I never thought to look up and really notice what surrounded me. It wasn’t nostalgia but regret that guided me through the campus that afternoon. All that time lost—not to have done more, but to have seen better.

  I was thinking of the dozens of afternoons I had spent sitting on the lawn as a student when I noticed a man slowly walking down the steps of the science building. I could only see the back of his head, but that was enough to know that it was Isaac.

  I followed him to the campus parking lot. He had a slow, dreamy walk. Classes across the university were ending, so it was easy to hide among the students, but even if the campus had been empty, Isaac would never have seen me. His gaze wasn’t fixed so much as it was indifferent to anything that wasn’t immediately in front of him. He walked to the rear of the lot to a dark-blue sedan parked in a numbered space. He took a set of keys out of his coat pocket, unlocked the door, and got behind the wheel. I didn’t believe he would actually drive away. For months I had driven him around the city since he had no car and, according to him, had never learned to drive. “You Americans amaze me,” he said. “Tell me the truth. Are you born with your cars?”

  He turned on the ignition, adjusted the rear and side mirrors, and slowly reversed out of the space. I knew that I had been lied to, but I couldn’t help smiling. Whatever he was playing at, it was a wonderful performance. I had to admit that.

  ISAAC

  I left the hospital on a Sunday, and Isaac was there waiting for me. He had thrown what few belongings I had into a pair of grain sacks and was standing in the parking lot with them, and that was how I knew I was also homeless. The other patients in the hospital were fed and had their wounds dressed and cleaned by their family. Mothers, wives, and children brought lunch, dinner, and extra gauze to change the bandages, while a few other men, who, like myself, had no one to tend to them, looked on in longing. I had learned from watching those patients that even if I did have a place to sleep it was hardly a home, and after Isaac’s visit, I was confident that when I left I wouldn’t have that. If Isaac knew I had been beaten, then everyone who lived in our corner of the city did as well, and there was no explanation in the world that could convince a group of people already in fear that a broken and beaten stranger like myself wouldn’t bring more trouble into their lives. My landlord, Thomas, was a kind, generous man even with his bad habits and many flaws, and he had taken me in though no one knew me. Had he let me return, I knew it wouldn’t have been for more than a few days.

  As I walked toward Isaac, I felt nothing for the tiny room that had been lost. I moved slowly, one strained step at a time, and as I did so I thought of my mother and father and all my younger siblings, who were growing into strangers. After countless nights of deliberately trying not to think of them, I now felt a distant and detached affection that I knew I could carry harmlessly. They were gone, and whether I would ever see them again no longer troubled me. My world was weightless, more so than I had ever thought it could be. I owned practically nothing and was obligated to no one; I felt more alive than I ever had before.

  Isaac and I met on the edge of the parking lot. There were cripples and beggars, each limited to a few square feet of space they must have staked out long in advance, given how meager and yet precious that ground was; in the center were a handful of wasted old men who looked as if they had chosen that spot to die. In a few weeks there would be dozens more like them, except they wouldn’t be old. They would be as young as Isaac and I were, and they’d be struggling to hold on to what little life they had left, but there would be no one to save them: the hospital by then would be full of men, women, and boys just as wounded and desperate not to die.

  One of those crippled men reached Isaac the same time I did. He carried himself on a single wooden crutch, as weathered and thin as the deformed leg he dragged behind him. He spoke to Isaac in Kiswahili. Before he could extend his hand, Isaac pulled from his pocket a bundle of bills that looked as if they had been printed that day and handed him one from the middle. The man tried to prostrate himself before Isaac, but Isaac grabbed him by the elbow just as he was trying to bend his one good leg and in English said to him, “Please don’t, Grandfather,” with a tenderness rarely heard from men of any age. Before I left the hospital, one of the nuns had come to my bed to thank me for money that had been given in my name. “We don’t ask our patients to pay for their care,” she said, “since most are too poor to do so, but we’re always grateful to those who can.” She said she and the other nuns would pray for me, and as a sign of their gratitude she pressed into my palm a white plastic rosary. I hadn’t known what to do with it, but I felt ashamed, and so I quickly put it in my pocket, where it would have remained for days, until the shame had passed and I could throw it away. Now I took it out and handed it to Isaac. He was far from being a saint, but there was more decency and kindness in him than I had assumed, traits that both of us were learning to suppress.

  He held the rosary up with one finger.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “A nurse gave it to me to say thank you.”

  He folded the beads into his pocket. “I’m not the one they should thank,” he said. He took a few steps back from me.

  “You look good. I’m going to call you Ali from now on.”

  “I’ve been exercising.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Now that you’re here, okay. I was afraid I was going to have to walk home alone.”

  “You’re out of a home,” he said.

  “I can see. Did he say why? Does he know I haven’t done anything?”

  “I thought you knew by now that doesn’t matter. The prisons are full of people who say the same thing: I’m innocent, I have done nothing, I was just on my way to work. It’s stupid to talk like that. You know what your landlord to
ld me when I came looking for you?”

  “That I’m not much of a fighter.”

  “Everyone knew that already. He said that you’re in trouble with the government. That you came here to cause trouble. When I went back and said you were in the hospital, I don’t think he believed me. I went there to bring you some clothes, and he gave me these bags.”

  “Did you pack them?”

  “He never gave me the chance. He wouldn’t let me inside. He said he was sorry. He has enough problems and his family to think about.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I told him if he wanted to protect his family he should turn himself in to the police right now. ‘Why should I go to prison?’ he said. ‘It’s you who are causing all these problems.’ ”

  “And?”

  “Nothing. He was angry. He wanted to hit me. He was scared; he knew I was right. That was the best thing I could do for him. Maybe he’ll be smart now and hide a little money where only his wife can find it. Or he’ll see what’s happening and he’ll pack up his family in the middle of the night and return to his village.”

  Isaac picked up my bags and began walking toward the road.

  “I have nowhere to go,” I said.

  I remember thinking I had expressed a rare honesty in that statement, but that was hardly the case. With Isaac near me, I may not have known where I was going, but there was always a destination waiting.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I have everything taken care of.”

  I had never seen the capital from the inside of a car. Like most, I made my way by foot or, on occasion, an overcrowded bus that stretched the limits of how close you could stand to someone before feeling violated. The small blue-shelled, white-roofed taxis, even the most dilapidated ones, belonged only to the rich and to the white. The taxis stood in long lines outside of the capital’s two largest hotels, day and night; for the drivers, all it took was a couple of good fares to make the hours of waiting worthwhile. If I did have the money for a ride, what driver, seeing me on the side of the road, would have believed I could afford it? I came from the wrong caste, and money alone couldn’t buy my way out of it. Once we reached the road, Isaac raised his hand, and a taxi parked outside a café a block away came directly to us. I looked to Isaac for an explanation, but then I understood. I saw what the cabdriver saw—a young, confident man whose clothes and spotless shoes were the telltale signs of at least moderate wealth.