All Our Names

by Mengestu, Dinaw

  That was the longest conversation I would ever have with Joseph. He kept his hand on my shoulder the entire time, and after a while I found its gentle pressure reassuring, as if it were part of the force keeping us tied to the ground. By the time he finished talking, we were standing next to the tree in the center of the courtyard, looking back on the house, which meant much to him and nothing to me. I had no conviction I could point to, no house to look back on and say: That is why I am here; this is what I’m willing to fight for. If I understood the intent of Joseph’s story correctly, I had only so much time to change that.

  He shook my hand before leaving. “Make yourself at home,” he said. “Stay as long as you like, but let’s keep this conversation to ourselves.”

  He was gone before I could respond, but my answer was irrelevant to begin with. The ease with which he hardly bothered to distinguish fact from fiction told me that.

  The preparations for Joseph’s war began in earnest that afternoon. I knew from Isaac that something violent was being planned, but that on its own was hardly remarkable. Violent dreams and more plausible violent plans were burning all across the capital, and I assumed this was merely the version I had stumbled into.

  Over the course of a few hours that morning, the scale of Joseph’s maneuvers became evident. Pairs of men arrived in what felt like timed half-hour intervals. By the time Isaac came down and joined me in the courtyard, there were eight new bodies tucked away somewhere in that house, conferring in one of the rooms I implicitly understood were off limits. The presence of so many new faces was the kind of distraction Isaac and I needed. I had worried over how to approach him, and now here was something more extraordinary than his departure from our room in the middle of the night around which we could meet. Men in suits and men in fatigues. Men with pistols fastened at their belts. I should have been thinking of the fighting to come; instead, I was grateful for the distraction it offered.

  “What do you think?” Isaac waved his arm across the courtyard and house as if it were a scenic view that he had made.

  “Who are they?” I asked him.

  He grinned and then threw his arm around me.

  “They are the beginning,” he said. “Very soon there will be many more.”

  The meeting that took place in the house that afternoon was the second-most-important conference in the capital’s history since independence. I had missed the first, but dreaming of the writers who had once gathered at the university had brought me here to begin with. I came for the writers and stayed for the war. The difference wasn’t as great as I would have thought.

  Isaac did his best to narrate the movements for me.

  That man is a colonel in the army.

  He has a gold mine in the south.

  That’s the brother of someone in Parliament.

  I’ve heard he is a general in Tanzania.

  And so it went on, until the entire second floor of the house had been filled with serious men whose guards and valets stood quietly in the living room. When the last guest arrived, the front door was closed; the gate was sealed shut. If Isaac was disappointed at being left outside, he didn’t show it.

  “This feels very familiar,” he said, “like we’ve done it before.”

  “I was thinking the same,” I said. “Do you know what they’re talking about this time?”

  “I can guess,” he said.

  And so could I. In a certain context, it was entirely predictable.

  “What do you think would happen if I went inside?” I asked him.

  Isaac looked around at the various guards stationed around the doors. He pointed to a tall, skinny man whose face was largely hidden behind gold-rimmed sunglasses.

  “He would tell that guy standing next to him to shoot you.”

  I looked closer at both men; it would have meant nothing for them to do that.

  “And what if you tried?”

  “Maybe they would let me in,” he said. “And then, immediately afterward, someone else would shoot you.”

  “And what if I tried to leave?”

  Isaac laughed.

  “Then everyone here would take turns shooting you.”

  He thought about it a second longer.

  “And if that wasn’t enough, they would want to do the same to me next.”

  I didn’t dare ask Isaac what guaranteed his safety. Without intending to, he had made it clear he could do little or nothing to protect mine, and so it was time I found a way to do so on my own.

  The conference on the second floor broke before lunch. The orderly procession entering the house turned into a struggle to leave it. Armed guards fought to get their charges through the gate; I assumed this meant that things had gone poorly for Joseph and his movement, but just as the first group was leaving, he appeared in the doorway, beaming, and suddenly there was a second rush back to the front door to shake his hand goodbye. I noticed deference similar to the bow the guard had given him that morning, but now it came from privileged and powerful men who nodded their heads discreetly, as if catching sight of stains on their shoes that had appeared that instant.

  “That’s it?” I asked Isaac. “It’s over already.”

  “Joseph is very efficient,” he said. “He lived in England.”

  Efficiency was only half the equation, however. There was a desperation not to be seen together outside for too long, even if it was in the courtyard of the house they had just met in. No one trusted even semi-private spaces; it was windowless rooms or nothing at all. I wondered somewhat romantically if that was how the writers who had met in the capital had felt—not wanted or hunted, but like outlaws.

  Mere minutes after the last man left, three pickup trucks carrying loads draped under brownish-gray tarps pulled quickly into the courtyard. They had been waiting nearby for the congregation to vanish before entering. Isaac was right: England had made Joseph efficient. Isaac whispered into my ear, “Joseph wants you to see this.”

  I could feel Joseph watching us from the doorway; knowing he was watching me gave me something to do.

  Two men left each truck and set about untying the tarps. I had made no assumptions about what was underneath; I was so busy acting I didn’t know how to feel about the crates of unripe bananas and yams that lay in the trucks.

  “Food for an army?” I asked Isaac.

  “Something like that,” he said.

  The men threw the boxes of food onto the ground; no one was troubled about the broken boxes or the damage done to the food. The piles of bananas and yams stood taller than me when, finally, the men reached the second load, buried beneath. They unloaded these crates carefully, one at a time, in teams of two, straight from the back of the trucks to the living room, where they were lined up in perfect rows. When there was only one box left, Joseph came out from the doorway and motioned with his hand for the lid to be opened. I couldn’t see the contents from where we stood. I had to wait for Joseph to dig in and pull out a body-length strip of bullets. He held it up as if it were a prize catch plucked from the sea, but it didn’t look like a fish, or even a snake gone limp. It looked like hundreds of metal casings clipped together. He held it up, I believe, specifically for me to see.

  After the food was hoisted back into the truck beds, no one, not Isaac or Joseph or any of the guards, ever said that we were sitting on a large cache of weapons, enough to wipe out our neighborhood, a village, or to make at least a semi-valiant last stand if we were attacked. The closest we came to acknowledging the contents of those crates was later that evening, after the pickup trucks had left, blankets had been thrown over the crates, and the furniture moved back into place to hide it all. One of the guards carried in a crate of Kenyan beer. Joseph personally handed everyone a bottle.

  “What should we toast to?” Isaac asked. I expected Joseph to say something like liberation, or freedom, or to our future victory, but he knew how trite and conventional that sounded. He raised his bottle and looked at everyone in the room. “We don’t toast to anyth
ing,” he said. “This isn’t a celebration. We’re trying to end the nightmare this nation has become.” We drank our beer, one after another. When Joseph left the room, Isaac whispered to me, “Maybe instead of guns we should have gotten him an alarm clock.” I raised my bottle to Isaac and said, “To never oversleeping.” Our bottles clinked just as Joseph came back in. I was afraid he would be angry to see us toast, but he was a light drinker, and the three beers he had quickly downed had softened his mood. He came over and put his arms around both our shoulders and said, “Be careful—tomorrow is an important day. I can’t have either of you lying in bed all day.”

  “Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’m going to be Isaac’s alarm clock.”

  We had to avoid looking at each other to keep from laughing. Briefly, it felt like we were back at the university in the months before the protests, when our most pressing concern was how to keep our mock revolution going. Enough time hadn’t passed for us to be nostalgic, but there it was. That period in our lives was officially over, and if there was anything I wanted to toast, it was that.

  Joseph squeezed our shoulders affectionately. “I have to sit,” he said. “My body has grown weary.”

  He took a seat on the couch and had one of the guards bring him another beer. I imagined him feeling nostalgic for his own college days in London, which would have explained why he spoke like that.

  “That’s how he talks when he’s been drinking,” Isaac said.

  Before drinking again, Joseph crossed his legs and stretched his left arm over the cushions. He took a long look around the room—not at the people, but at the furniture and bare walls, the windows and door. He looked up at the ceiling and said in a voice just loud enough for Isaac and me to make out, “I hope I don’t blow myself up sitting here.”

  HELEN

  I took the first exit off the highway, onto a narrow two-lane road, then drove for another half-mile or so before pulling over. I had expected some sort of shock to seize me, and had left the highway in anticipation of that, but now that we were on an unlit country road, I realized it wasn’t going to happen. There was no shock or surprise waiting: I had known all along that there was something fraudulent about the man sitting next to me; the only real surprise was how he came to tell me.

  I left the engine on. I needed to feel like we were still moving.

  “Do you want to tell me the rest?” I asked him.

  He finally turned to me. It was almost pitch-black in the car, and the only thing I could see clearly was the outline of his nose and traces of his eyes.

  “I can,” he said.

  “But you would rather not?”

  “I’m not sure how to answer that.”

  I swung the car around and headed back to the highway, but I reached over and took his hand briefly in mine. He had lost enough for one night; I didn’t want him to risk losing us as well, and there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t if he told me more.

  “Where are we going?” he asked me.

  “Wherever you want,” I said.

  “Can we go somewhere and sleep? Without going back.”

  I chose the first motel we came across, two exits away, on the outskirts of a town I had never heard of. I didn’t have the slightest fear that anyone I knew would see me, but Isaac insisted on sliding to the bottom of his seat as I pulled into the parking lot.

  “Even if they don’t know you,” he said, “they still might not like what they see.”

  I didn’t say it, but he was right. He understood this about America more intimately than I did.

  The motel was half a city block long and two stories high. When I remember it, I think of it as being forcibly conscripted from some generic B-movie about a couple on the run, a place where transients and criminals go to hide.

  I asked for a room on the ground floor, on the far end of the motel if possible. There were only two other cars in the parking lot, so both my wishes were granted. Our room number was 102—the exact number of students in my high-school graduating class. I took that as a good sign, and every time I returned to that motel, with Isaac, I always asked if room 102 was available. On almost every occasion, it was. The few times it wasn’t, I made sure to avoid seeing who came and went, or what noises were being made on the other side of the blue door, so I could hold on to the fantasy that the room was exclusively ours.

  Isaac and I had the whole night ahead of us, and so, for once, we took our time. We kissed just on the other side of the door until our legs were tired, and then fell onto the bed; in another first, Isaac was the one to undress me. I had assumed that passion and speed were the same: the faster you flung and thrust, the more desire; maybe the difference between fucking and making love isn’t just a question of the heart but of the hands as well. Lovers fumble all the time—especially in winter, through all the layers. It’s a comedy of hands first, and then heads caught in sweaters and undershirts, and then shoes that stubbornly refuse to come off. If you can bear that with more than just an awkward grin, with a renewed desire, then a nearly vacant motel off the highway may feel like a sacred place at that moment, and for many years afterward.

  We finished just as we had begun, unashamed and nearly laughing. We had left the lights on and could finally see each other with our eyes, not just our hands, and for what felt like hours all we did was stare at each other’s bodies.

  “What were you thinking about,” Isaac asked me, “when you were sitting outside, watching my apartment? Did you think I had another woman? Another Helen who looked like you?”

  I thought about what I could safely tell him. I looked him in the eyes; his grief was still with him. Unlike many men, Isaac was never a wall; he could only block so much. When he tried to hide his emotions, they leaked out on the sides. At his strongest, he was a cardboard box: it didn’t take much to figure out what was inside. That made it so much easier to forgive and love him, and when the time came, that much harder to let go.

  “What was I thinking about?” I said. “Many things, and all of them were about you.”

  What followed next was the start of a brief golden phase for Isaac and me, a winter and then a spring of long, almost nightly embraces, not cut short simply because it was after midnight. We called each other several times over the course of any given day, just to say what was obvious: that the night before had been marvelous, the days spent apart were too long, and there wasn’t an hour that passed when we didn’t think of each other. We spent the first weekend in December wrapped in blankets that we carried from the bed to the couch. Isaac said it reminded him of winters back home. “We love blankets in our family,” he said. “I think that’s one of the things I miss most. Seeing my mother or grandmother wrapped in a blanket anytime there was rain. They had blankets for winter and summer, and when I was little I’d try to hide under the blankets when they walked.”

  I stood naked on his bed while he showed me how to wrap a blanket over my shoulders and around my neck so my arms were still free to flap around. I raised my hands over my head and looked in the mirror.

  “You think I can fly?” I asked him.

  “Of course,” he said.

  I flapped my arms, then ran, jumped off the bed, and landed in his. I forced Isaac to turn around so I could see us together in the mirror.

  “If you’re a bird,” I said, “then together we make a penguin.”

  When my mother asked where I was spending my nights, I did my best to tell her the truth. “I’ve met someone,” I said.

  I had come home early that morning and had hoped to leave before she woke up, but she knew my new routine and was waiting for me in the living room when I came downstairs with my coat already halfway on.

  “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” she asked me. “Don’t you think I worry about you?”

  She was troubled, hurt. It wasn’t a reproach, but I took it as one.

  “You never asked,” I said.

  “How can I, if I never see you? Who is this person?”

  I preten
ded to struggle with the sleeves of my coat. What could I tell her? I didn’t know his real name, but I knew him to be a kind, decent man, none of which would matter if she knew where he was from. I wanted to spare us both the disappointment.

  “I’m going to be late,” I said.

  Though she wasn’t standing in my way, she stepped slightly to the side so I would know I was free to go. The last thing she said to me before I left was “This isn’t like you, Helen.”

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “I know.”

  We barely spoke for the next few weeks, and when we did, it was never about where I went or whom I spent my time with. She missed me; she let me know that in her own quiet way. She left a new dress on my bed, a necklace of hers that I had loved as a child, all while I was away from home. When we saw each other in the mornings, she told me about the water stains on the bathroom ceiling, the lunch she had had last week, and I said nothing about Isaac.

  If it had only been Isaac and me, I’d like to think we could have gone on like that until the day he was supposed to leave; and it’s possible, if we had done so, that might have been enough so we could have tried to settle into a life together, maybe in one of those hippie enclaves in San Francisco, or in the chaos of a big city where no one’s interest in us ran that deep. Isaac and I spent New Year’s Eve drinking white wine in our motel room off the highway, and an entire Valentine Sunday in that room with a box of grocery-store heart-shaped chocolates and red and pink carnations. In April, it started raining hard a few days after Easter and didn’t stop until almost two weeks later, by which point half a dozen towns along the river were covered in more than a foot of water. It was the type of natural disaster I would normally have wanted nothing to do with, given the scale and seemingly endless complications that came with it—from the vanished homes, to the devastated crops and factories forced to close—but when David asked if anyone wanted to go down and volunteer with another relief agency, I was the first to raise my hand. I thought I had lost the heart to take on that type of work, but I hadn’t. I had simply let the muscles go slack. What I didn’t know until then was that loving someone and feeling loved in return was the best exercise for the heart, the strength training needed to do more than simply make it through life. When I told Isaac I was going to work in the flooded towns that we had both seen on the news each night, he asked if the work wouldn’t be too difficult. He imagined me carrying sandbags along a levee. “Of course it will be hard,” I told him. I flexed both my arms. “Feel that,” I said. He squeezed my biceps. “You’re the strongest woman in the world,” he said, which was exactly how I felt when I was with him.