All Our Names

by Mengestu, Dinaw

  Just as I had wanted him to talk, I needed him to stop. I didn’t know it earlier, but this was what had governed our silence—not that we couldn’t understand each other but that we could lay ourselves bare and in the end each find a stranger sitting on the other side.

  I asked him bluntly not to tell me more.

  “I think you’ve told me all I can handle for one night,” I said. “Maybe it’s best if we go to sleep now.”

  “I’m sorry if I upset you,” he said. “That was what I was afraid of.”

  “You haven’t upset me. I just have a lot to think about.”

  • • •

  We both slept poorly. It was hard to be in the same bed and feel incapable of reaching over, and so every time we drew close one of us pulled away, partly out of fear that the other would do so.

  I woke up before sunrise. I picked up my clothes and dressed in the bathroom, and before leaving whispered in Isaac’s ear that I had a lot of work to get to. Only when I was in my car did I remember it was Saturday; even though I had a key to the office, I knew I didn’t want to be there alone. I drove to Bill’s diner, which was the only place open so early on a weekend morning. From across the street, I sat and watched two older men who owned farms just outside of the town center. Many of the best memories I had of my father took place in there, which was the only reason why I returned so often. I knew it was unlikely that I would ever go back now, but this was marginally related to how they had treated Isaac. I would never return because I knew I would be remembered for having brought that man there with me. If Isaac stayed longer, or if we stopped being so private, I wondered what else would die because of him. There was only so much space in a town the size of Laurel; it wouldn’t take long to ruin it.

  Once the sun was fully up, I drove to David’s house. I had been there many times before but never unannounced, even though he insisted that all of us in the office were welcome to drop by anytime, especially if we had something work-related that we needed to talk about. Other than myself, I doubted anyone in our town ever visited David.

  He was on his porch, picking up that morning’s paper, when I arrived. I took it as a sign that I had done the right thing, since the odds were that I would have lost the courage to ring his doorbell. He saw my car approaching; before I parked, he was using his newspaper to wave for me to come in.

  “I won’t ask what brought you here,” he said. “You can tell me as little or as much as you want.”

  Everyone in the office had a similar line, which we used on new clients. It was David who had taught us its possible value. “It leaves the speakers in control of their story,” he said, “and it shows them that our job is to listen, not to judge.”

  He led me into his kitchen; he poured us coffee.

  “You look like you haven’t slept,” he said.

  “I don’t think I did. I woke up very early.”

  “Can I ask what happened?”

  “Nothing happened. We had dinner. We talked.”

  “Let me rephrase that. If I asked you what happened, would you tell me?”

  “I would.”

  “Denise asked me a few weeks ago why you spent so much time with one of your clients. She wouldn’t say who, but of course I knew what she meant. We’re not that different. She says ‘that client.’ I ask you, ‘How’s your friend Dickens?’ You say ‘we’ as much as possible.”

  “You would rather we call him Isaac.”

  “No. I would rather we stopped pretending. I cringe every time I hear you say you’re going to go visit a friend, or that you don’t have any plans for the weekend.”

  “And what difference would it make if I said I was going to see Isaac?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe none. I heard you took him to lunch at Bill’s. Denise and Sharon talked about it every minute you weren’t in the office. I think the consensus was that your heart was in the right place; you just didn’t understand what you were doing. That’s the kindness you get when people have known you since you were born. I was very proud of you when I heard that story.”

  “And now?”

  “And now I think of you sleeping in your car. I think you’re fucked if you can’t say more, even if it’s only to me.”

  “You never gave me a straight answer about why you followed me when you thought I was going to see Isaac.”

  “I told you to use your imagination.”

  “I’ve asked you to do the same.”

  “What do you think would have happened if Denise knew you were having a relationship with Isaac?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s not true. Of course you do. Denise would whisper to Sharon, and Sharon would tell her husband and her sister. You would come to the office and find them whispering, and after a few days, you’d begin to think that it was about you. After a week, you would start to think that people all over town were looking at you strangely. You would notice them trying to look directly past you when you ran into them in the grocery store and on the street. When Christmas came, you would have only half as many cards in your mailbox, and at least once a year, junior-high boys would throw a half-dozen eggs at your window.

  “If you think they wouldn’t say anything, though, you’re right. They wouldn’t say a word. It would be rude and un-Christian to do so.

  “I wanted to see you with Isaac for purely selfish reasons. Do you understand now?”

  “I always did. I just wanted to hear you say it. I’ve wondered for the past year why you haven’t left.”

  “I used to go to Mississippi in the summer with my father to visit his grandmother. They considered him a communist because he told them once not to use the word ‘nigger’ around his son. No one listened to him. My great-uncle took me to the black area of town the next day and said my father had some funny ideas in his head that he hoped to save me from.

  “Most of the homes we drove past were nothing more than wooden shacks. I didn’t know people were that poor in this country. ‘Only niggers,’ my great-uncle said, ‘would live like that.’

  “I asked my father why the black people didn’t leave. He said maybe they didn’t believe anything would change, or maybe they were waiting for the world to change around them and they wanted to be home when it did. It was the most eloquent thing he had ever said to me, and I knew he must have asked that same question himself and that was the best answer he could come up with. I would say both reasons are equally true.

  “There’s a spare bedroom upstairs. Why don’t you get some sleep before you decide who to visit next?”

  “And what if someone found out I had slept in the home of two different men in one day?”

  “Will I see you at work on Monday?”

  I didn’t have a plan yet, but I felt certain that was unlikely.

  “I don’t know. But I hope not.”

  ISAAC

  We drove west for several hours before cutting north onto a trail of dirt roads that wound their way through empty green hills and the nameless hamlets that sat at their feet. The sun had begun to set by then, and from the back of the truck I watched as the hills caught all the colors that came with that. It was a beautiful sight, even more so because I was the only one deliberately noticing it. I was in the war, but I no longer belonged to it. I stood and at times sat among a dozen other men who rarely looked at me, even as we were constantly thrown against one another with every rock and bump in the road. I took out the notebook Isaac had given me and tried to think of something to write, but then thought better of it when I saw I was being watched. I drew a crude picture of the hills instead, so I could remember them.

  When our convoy stopped at the checkpoint leading into the village, the soldiers leapt out the back of the truck and took their positions around the sides. The ones in the truck in front of us did the same, leaving me alone to watch as the horizon turned a deep orange more striking than the purple and red shades that had preceded it. From that slightly elevated perch I could see the tips of all the thatch-roo
fed huts in the village—hundreds of them, lined up neatly on either side of the main road, and every one looked as if it were burning.

  Joseph and those closest to him, including Isaac, were the last to leave their cars. They filed out of the two sedans, dressed in identical button-down olive-green uniforms. It was also an impressive sight, no less remarkable than the sunset ending right in front of us. The soldiers manning the checkpoint stepped forward and saluted Joseph. Another lifted the crude metal barrier blocking the road, and with that, the town had either been officially seized or liberated. It was an important moment for Joseph. He had made his move; his army was a real thing now. The same was true for Isaac. He had also become more. He had staked himself to Joseph, and now he stood a few feet behind him. Once everyone was out of the car, he whispered into Joseph’s ear. I quietly applauded. I couldn’t help it; I was proud of Isaac for having made something of himself.

  Joseph led the parade through the center of town. The entire village stood along the sidelines, soldiers flanking the roadside in front of them. His power grew as he walked. It expanded outward to touch every ring surrounding him until it was returned in lesser form to the wildly cheering crowd of men and women singing and applauding his arrival. He walked slowly, turning his head from side to side so that everyone gathered along the road could claim to have seen him. At that pace, it took him nearly an hour to make his way to the town center. In the central square, a bronze fist rose from the ground; it had been erected on the first anniversary of the country’s independence. There, in front of the fist, at the top of the four steps of the district headquarters, Joseph announced the start of the people’s liberation.

  • • •

  Joseph spent much of his speech listing the crimes and failed promises that had been committed since independence. There was vigorous cheering and constant applause, the lifeblood of a would-be demagogue. The most memorable parts of that speech came near the end, when he spoke of his father and the last time he saw him.

  “He was a humble, simple man. He gave his life to defend and protect you,” Joseph said, “and it is in his memory that I swear to do the same.”

  After he finished, the village’s former leaders were brought handcuffed to the top of the steps, bruised but still able to walk on their own. Joseph pulled out a key and unlocked each of them himself.

  “Our liberation begins with them,” he said.

  All those men were executed in their homes later that evening.

  We took over the town’s only hotel, a dilapidated two-story building with an open, terraced courtyard in the middle and a crudely made wooden sign in the front that read “Life Hotel” in faded, barely legible blue paint. Isaac slept on the top floor of the hotel with Joseph and his inner circle; I slept outside, on the ground, with the other soldiers. When Isaac came downstairs in the morning, he had a rifle slung over his shoulder.

  Every evening for the next three days, a new garrison from a neighboring village arrived. They had either revolted, taking their senior officers captive, or simply switched sides: soldiers one day, rebels the next. Like Joseph and his colonels, all the troops that joined them had greater ties to the north. Isaac stood with Joseph and his colonels at the checkpoint to greet them. On the second day, Isaac led the parade to the town-hall steps; although he still left the speeches to Joseph, he was saluted and attended to with all the respect given to the senior officers in charge. I was free to spend my days wandering the village. I tried to make the most of my solitary strolls, imagining that what I noticed now I would write about later, in the shadows of the hotel courtyard, while the images were still vivid in my mind. I spoke to no one, but I watched how each day—and then, eventually, each hour—the villagers hid more of their belongings, anything the soldiers might consider to be valuable. On the first day, women slipped the silver bracelets off their wrists and necks if they saw any uniformed men ahead. Men stopped to tuck the bills in their pockets below their loose change. After three days of celebratory parades, the men who hadn’t voluntarily joined Joseph’s liberation army moved furtively through the streets, gathering their children around them. The only women I saw outside their homes were middle-aged or elderly. The soldiers had arrived with trucks full of weapons but nothing to eat, and after seventy-two hours they had devoured half of the town. On the third day, one man refused to hand over his last two chickens to a pair of soldiers who had arrived the night before. His chickens were slaughtered in front of him, and then his house was burned to the ground. I was in the hotel courtyard when Joseph heard the news. He ordered the two guilty boys brought to him; by the time they got there, each already had one arm broken. I doubt Joseph intended to punish them further—they were, like almost all the others, poor illiterate boys who by dint of a uniform and a week of training were called soldiers. Joseph was trying to decide their fate when Isaac shouted down from the balcony, “How can we be a people’s army if the people are afraid of us?”

  I looked up at him. I saw him briefly every day but so far had resisted getting too close. He slid past me a half-dozen times daily, and the only thing I had had time to notice was how rigid his posture and walk had become, how easily he seemed to slip into his new role.

  Isaac came down to the courtyard, followed by the two young men who trailed him now everywhere he went.

  “We have to set an example,” he said, “or they will never trust us again. Which one of you set the fire?”

  Those two poor boys looked only at each other. I thought neither of them was going to confess, and I prayed for their sake they wouldn’t, but the taller and probably elder of the pair eventually stepped forward. Isaac pulled a pistol from his belt and shot the boy who had stepped forward once in the head, and then, a few seconds later, after he had time to look honestly at what he had done, the other. I knew then what all that violence had done to him. Life was trivial, and here he was trying to prove it.

  He turned so I could see him holding the pistol near his face; it was the same one he had had when we were in the capital. At least twice he had weighed using it, once in the slum in case we were caught, and then at the house after he had beaten me. I felt grateful to him, while the right leg of the second boy he had shot twitched with the last spasm of life a few feet away from me.

  Isaac ordered the bodies to be laid out on the main road—“so,” he said, “the people know we are here to defend them.”

  I never imagined there was so much blood in the human head. I spent the rest of the afternoon watching it dry in the sun, reminding myself that I wasn’t the one who had killed them.

  That evening, Joseph held a party in the courtyard of the Life Hotel. He spent lavishly for the town in the hours before the party. He summoned everyone to the hotel who had given to the liberation and paid them in cash for what they had lost. He sat in the center of the hotel courtyard in what must have been the only plush chair in the village while a line of women and men stood waiting with their hands out. Once paid, everyone bowed. The man whose chickens had been killed and house burned was paid twice their value. By nightfall, half of the village was either in the courtyard or standing outside begging to be let in. Every half-hour, the crowd chanted, “Mabira, Mabira,” just as they had when we first arrived. I expected to see Joseph playing to the crowd, but once the last person had been paid off, he spent the rest of the evening huddled in a corner with his bodyguards and colonels. It was only after they left the courtyard that Isaac came to talk to me. He had spent the past several hours standing near Joseph, drinking a clear bathroom-brewed liquor out of a glass jar. He was drunk, but not to the degree he wanted to be.

  He squeezed my face with his free hand and examined my left and right eyes; both were still bruised but no longer swollen.

  “You heal quickly,” he said.

  “I’m tougher than you think,” I told him.

  “That’s probably true. I doubt I even hurt you.”

  “I hardly felt a thing,” I said.

  He had a pair of gold tas
sels hanging from his shoulders. I reached out to touch them.

  “So you’re a big man now.”

  “Yes. And so are half the men here. We were given promotions tonight. We’ve been saluting each other all evening. You want to be an officer?”

  He pulled the pistol from his belt.

  “You see that man over there with a mustache.”

  He pointed his gun in the direction of a heavyset military man with several rows of medals and buttons pinned to his chest.

  “Shoot him,” Isaac said, “and I’ll make you a lieutenant.”

  As we stood there looking at him, four men led him away. He was smiling and holding a beer in his hand when he stood up, but then he seemed to understand he wasn’t coming back to join the party. I expected him to fight; he was clearly a powerful man, well built, with a large head buffered on both sides by bulldogtype jowls, but he had been in the military long enough to understand the futility and extra pain of doing so. He was led out of the hotel. That was just the beginning, however. Every ten minutes for the next hour, another man of rank was escorted out. After the sixth one, I asked Isaac if he could tell me what they had done.

  He shrugged his shoulders. The alcohol had finally taken its toll.

  “Then why take them?”

  “They’ve been with the army too long. Certain people are convinced they can’t be trusted.”

  After the seventh was taken away, he excused himself.

  “I’m sorry. I have to go,” he said.

  He left the hotel with his two guards. He tried hard to walk straight but failed, which was fine—he didn’t have far to go. Shortly after he left the courtyard, seven shots were fired. There was a brief silence across the hotel; it lasted for less than a minute after the last shot. Then the party really picked up. More beer and liquor were brought in. The soldiers drank and sang. Nine men had died; it finally felt like a real war had begun.

  HELEN

  I checked my watch when I reached Isaac’s apartment; two hours had passed since I’d left. I didn’t bother to knock or ring the doorbell. I let myself in. As soon as I entered, I noticed what a poor job he had done of cleaning the dining area the night before. My crumpled napkin, which had fallen onto my chair, was still there. There were bits of food on the edges of the table where Henry had sat, and a dark-orange spot on the white-tiled floor. I made a quick tour of the kitchen. The garbage can was nearly full with the scraps from last night’s dinner, and inside the refrigerator, sitting alone on a plate in the center of the middle rack, was the rest of the chicken. One plate, two glasses, and a fork sat unwashed in the sink. I smiled; in my rush to leave that morning, I had missed them. It wasn’t as large a mess as I had once hoped for, but it was close enough to count as proof of life—this time not just Isaac’s, but ours together. I promised myself that before the end of the day I would call David and tell him I was wrong: “We’re not fucked, at least not completely,” I would say.