All Our Names

by Mengestu, Dinaw

  “Where should we go next?” he asked me.

  It was obvious. He had his tower; I had my lake. I pointed straight ahead to it. The city masked its size with trees, and an expressway and more buildings, so that from where we stood the lake looked kiddie-sized in comparison with what we had seen in the car.

  “I should tell you now, I don’t know how to swim,” he said.

  “Don’t worry,” I told him, “part of my job is to save you from drowning.”

  We followed a party of young couples to the end of Michigan Avenue. They were carrying blankets and a picnic basket, and were dressed in sandals, shorts, and lightly patterned summer dresses.

  “They’re just like us,” I said, “except we’re better dressed.”

  I said it out loud, but I wasn’t speaking to Isaac. I was testing out certain truths and seeing how they held up when they were no longer private.

  We descended into the foot tunnel that led underneath Lakeshore Drive and onto the waterfront. There must have been at least three dozen of us in the tunnel—a two-way parade, with the overwhelming majority heading away from the lake. One of the pastel-clad men in front of us roared to hear his echo, and, for no reason other than that we could, we all began to join him, his friends first, until everyone in front of me and behind me, including Isaac, was roaring as we walked. We turned toward each other and roared. We looked up to the ceiling and roared at the cars passing over us. We roared at the people walking back to the city, and they roared back; then, as we neared the end of the tunnel, I roared at the distance opening up before me, at the trees, and then at the beach and lake. I could hear my voice—distinct and, according to Isaac, much more ferocious than all the rest.

  “Another thing I love about you,” he said once we were out, “your voice.”

  We walked down the tree-lined path that curved back toward the road before abruptly turning straight to the beach and lake. I had seen the beach from the car, but this was going to be the first time I actually stepped foot on one, and I wanted to make the most of the seconds leading up to it. When the view cleared and the sidewalk ended in a burst of sand, I realized I was wrong to have been so anxious in the car. There was nothing to be afraid of. The city simply paused at the water’s edge. It ran alongside the lake for many more miles.

  I tried to find a way to say that to Isaac, stopping him just before we reached the sand.

  “It doesn’t end as abruptly as I thought,” I said.

  I pointed north, to the buildings that continued along the shore. Isaac humored me. He took in the view and pretended that we were talking about architecture.

  “Yes,” he said. “The city is much larger than it appears.”

  He put his arm around me and tried to lead me onto the sand.

  “I read somewhere it’s bad luck to walk on a beach with your shoes on.”

  I made that up, but I had every right to: the common sayings and kitchen wisdom I had grown up with weren’t enough. We sat down and pulled off our shoes and socks and buried our feet in the sand, which was harder and colder than I had expected.

  “It’s nothing like the Hancock,” I said.

  I pointed to the ground so he would know what I was talking about.

  I wanted to say something about finding the opposite of what you expected.

  “You mean the sand?”

  “I thought it would be soft, and gold, maybe white. I thought you could sleep on it, but you can’t. It’s too hard. It’s not the right color.”

  “Are you disappointed?”

  “No. More like deceived.”

  It was a poor choice of words, given our history.

  “I am sorry to hear you say that.”

  “Not all deceptions are bad,” I added.

  He gave a weak half-smile and turned his attention to the sand. He scooped up a handful and rolled it around on his palm.

  “What was in your suitcase?” he asked me.

  I remembered that he had carried it to the car and must have known as soon as he lifted it that it was almost empty. It was time now to explain why I wanted us to come here.

  “You know why I wanted to come to Chicago with you?”

  “I can guess.”

  “I thought I had a plan. I thought if I was the one who took you away from Laurel you would see there was no point in going back. You’d want to stay here, and I would help you do that.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then I would promise to come back and visit, but eventually you wouldn’t need me to. You’d make a life on your own here, which was what I was supposed to help you do in the first place.”

  “You did more than that.”

  “I don’t know if that’s true. There’s only so much room in a town like ours. Helping you leave seemed better than watching us fall apart inside it.”

  “I would not let that happen.”

  “But maybe I would. Or maybe I’m afraid there is nothing we could do to stop it.”

  He placed his foot over mine and pressed them both into the sand.

  “I am afraid for us all the time,” he said. “I see the men at the other end of the beach and I worry that soon they will start to walk toward us. I worry—when you leave my house, when you come to it—that someone you know will see you. Until very recently, I worried about what you thought when you woke up. I worried about what I would think when you were asleep. I imagine things much worse than I would want to live with. That is why I packed everything, like you told me to.”

  “Because you wanted to leave.”

  “No. Not because I wanted to. When Henry taught me how to drive, he said it was so I could leave Laurel when I was ready to. On the day my visa expired, he said, I could drive myself to the airport, park the car, and disappear, or I could keep the car for as long as I needed, and leave when I was ready. ‘I don’t want you to feel trapped there,’ he said. ‘That might be just as bad as anything you’ve gone through.’ That was when I told him I had met you. He was careful. All he said was to be honest with you, and to keep myself grounded, which I didn’t understand. I thought he meant I should not leave the country with you, and so I promised him I would stay grounded. I thought, ‘Why would we leave America when there is so much to see here?’ which was when I decided to buy you those souvenirs. I showed them to Henry before I mailed them. He said, ‘God bless you if you make it to one of those places.’

  “I understood then what he meant by grounded. I sent the package anyway. I hoped to tell him someday he was wrong—that we had made it further than he expected—but it’s okay if that never happens. We are here. We have gone far.”

  “That’s what I tell my clients in counseling. I tell them, as long as they’ve done the best they can, they have nothing to apologize for. I say that when they feel guilty or they’re grieving.”

  “You don’t have to feel either.”

  “Right now I feel both.”

  Isaac stood. He took my hands and pulled me up.

  “We haven’t walked on the beach yet,” he said. “We came this far. It would be a shame not to.”

  The view from the beach was a smaller deception. When I imagined my first walk on one, I pictured a sun setting in the water, but it was the opposite. The sun had already disappeared directly behind us, and we were left with its remains—purple clouds and streaks of orphaned light that did nothing for the water, which looked cold and gray, but made the sky a beautiful place to want to linger in.

  We walked to the edge of the sand. There was a soft, shy quality in the way the water barely touched the shore before retreating.

  “Is this a better view for you?”

  “This is closer to home,” I said. “I’m used to flat. I like to know what’s in front of me.”

  Isaac laughed, a genuine, full-bodied one that had him throwing his head back.

  “You speak in circles,” he said. It was my turn now to be confused. I assumed that was part of the pleasure for him.

  “It’s a bad translatio
n. It’s what my father would say about someone who does not speak directly. They say the clouds are darker when they mean they are tired, or hungry, or lonely.”

  “And what do I mean?”

  It was a simply question, with an obvious answer. Like most, I wanted to know what came next. Before I met Isaac, I more or less always did.

  “It would be bad luck to tell you,” he said.

  “Are you making that up?”

  “Yes.”

  I picked up his hand and began to swing it—gently at first, but then he joined in, and soon our arms were sailing over our heads. We were like birds, but instead of wings we had arms flapping. I knew what we needed to do, whether we stayed in the city or returned to Laurel. We had to invent new rules, phrases, and axioms to live by.

  We swung our arms until our shoulders began to hurt. I don’t know how much time went by. It was dark when Isaac asked me what we were doing.

  I looked at my feet, and then his. I looked farther down the beach and saw the couples we had followed into the tunnel and, beyond them, the men that Isaac had been watching since we arrived.

  “No one can touch us,” I said.

  Isaac squeezed my hand.

  My plan was wrong. There was an alternate ending that I had been too afraid to consider.

  “I won’t leave you here alone,” I said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I won’t be afraid as long as you are with me.”

  I saw myself driving back to Laurel, alone, in a couple of days, and returning to Chicago with suitcases and one or two of those boxes I had hidden away in the basement.

  I started to swing our arms again, gently, and then with greater and greater force. I swung them high over our heads, as if we were declaring victory, which I know now we were. We had won and would fight to keep doing so.

  As I held our arms in the air, Isaac asked me again: “What are we doing?”

  I went back to swinging.

  “Don’t you see,” I told him. “We’re taking off. We’re finally becoming ungrounded.”

  ISAAC

  Isaac and I left the grave, and because I assumed we didn’t have much time left, I took his hand as he stepped down and held on to it as we walked—a habit that had never formed between us in the capital, even though all the young men we had known did so with friends who meant much less to them. I let him lead us off the main road, onto one of the winding footpaths crowded with homes on both sides. At any moment I expected him to stop and abruptly say goodbye, just as he had before, except this time there wouldn’t be a donkey to see me off, and I would go in any direction he wanted me to without arguing.

  The paths were deserted. This part of the village was a smaller, more permanent version of the shantytown Isaac and I had met in—the same tight trails with rivulets of fetid water pooling out of them. I had learned my way through such neighborhoods by the voices and smells that came from certain corners. A latrine, a house crowded with children, one that smelled always of food were street signs. I had never been in such close quarters and had nothing to smell. I tried to say something about this to Isaac:

  “Where did everyone go?” I said.

  He looked around as if he were just now noticing there were no signs of life.

  “I like it like this,” he said. “It’s very …” We walked for several moments before he found the word he was looking for. “… peaceful.”

  The path we were on gradually curved onto a wider red dirt road that ran along the back end of the town. It was the old market road—built with the village long before there were cars or colonists. I had been on that road twice since we arrived, once by accident, the second time by choice. On both occasions, I had spent the better part of the morning and all of the afternoon watching as the crowd peaked and ebbed according to the village’s particular rhythm. There were thousands of markets like that one across Africa, which was what I wanted to be reminded of when I came the second time. Standing near a vegetable stall, I had written in the first blank page I opened to, “There are hundreds of places exactly like this.” I knew I didn’t really believe that, but I felt better having put those words down. Now that the tightly packed wooden stalls where slabs of meat had hung, and the rugs and mats from which the women sold their vegetables and spare goods were gone, I regretted those words.

  I looked for traces of life accidentally left behind—a piece of fruit, a rotting stub of flesh—but everything had been stripped bare and then carefully picked over.

  Isaac released my hand. He began to walk among the abandoned stalls, all of which were stained with blood at the base, knocking on every other one as if he suspected that someone was hiding inside.

  “Joseph promised us a big feast when we came back. He said we would conquer the town in hours and then return as heroes and eat until there was nothing left.”

  He knocked on two more doors.

  “He was right about the nothing,” he said.

  “Where is he now?”

  Isaac pointed to the last pair of stalls.

  “Maybe he’s hiding in one of them,” he said.

  I thought that was Isaac’s way of saying Joseph was dead. I must have looked relieved at the thought, because just as quickly he added, “He’s fine. He will be here soon.”

  It hurt him to say that. He didn’t cringe, but a part of him recoiled. He picked up my hand and locked my three middle fingers in his.

  “I want to show you something,” he said.

  We walked to the end of the market road; as it climbed, it curved slightly to the right, growing increasingly narrow, until, eventually, it connected back to the paved road that joined the bronze fist to the Life Hotel. We could hear the soldiers before we saw them. We stopped short of where the two roads merged. Isaac whispered into my ear, “Take a look around the corner.” He waited in the shadow of one of the houses while I slipped my head around the bend. Gathered around the fist were all the soldiers I had seen getting off the lorry earlier that morning. They were sitting in a circle; the soldier who had told me to bury the bodies stood next to the fist, talking quietly but passionately, his right hand clenched as he spoke. I described the scene to Isaac, and then waited for an explanation.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “They are doing exactly what they said they would.”

  “This is what you wanted me to see.”

  He took my hand again.

  “No. What I want to show you is much better.”

  We walked back toward the market. When we reached the last stalls, Isaac led us in between them onto a path that was barely visible and looked as if it led directly into the bush. Waist-high grass gave way to a dense pocket of trees. I expected Isaac to tell me that my only option was to take my chances in the wild, like the refugees I had seen that morning, but just as abruptly as the forest began, it ended. Before us was a wide, circular clearing, at least a hundred feet in diameter, in the center of which was a single-story house, made of concrete and wood and painted white on all four sides.

  Isaac unlocked the front door, which was carved with signs and symbols that most likely were never intended to be put on a door; he used a lone key he had hidden in his shoe. He led me inside. All the windows were shuttered, but light flooded the main room through the skylights that lined the ceiling. There was no furniture. The floors were made of the same wood as the door and the beams on the roof; even with the dust, they shone.

  “This is what you wanted to show me?”

  “This is only part of it,” he said.

  He walked to the center of the main room, knelt down, and wiped a bit of dust with his finger.

  “Joseph had floors like this in his home in Kampala,” he said. “I wish you could have seen it. He had a woman who scrubbed it every day on her knees. He told me the wood came from a tree in Brazil. I asked him where Brazil was. I had heard of it, but I thought maybe it was in Africa. He showed me where it was on a map, and promised someday we would go there together.

&nb
sp; “This is not the same wood,” he said. “He used the trees outside. The floors in Kampala were made of mahogany.”

  Isaac led me on a tour of the other rooms, which branched off from the main room into two separate wings. Each room was virtually identical—wooden floors, white walls, windows that looked onto the back—but they had all been assigned different functions that distinguished them even when empty. Isaac named each one.

  This was going to be the dining room.

  This was for the servants.

  This was the kitchen.

  This was the library.

  He did the same with the other wing of the house, except now he lingered a bit longer on each room we passed.

  “These were the guest rooms,” he said. “Joseph has little family left, but he has many friends all over the world. In Europe. Even in America.”

  The next room was Joseph’s. We didn’t enter: we stood in the doorway, as if afraid of disturbing someone sleeping inside.

  “He wanted the smallest bedroom in the house. I asked him why build a house with so many rooms if you have such a small one for yourself. He said I shouldn’t think of them just as rooms. Each one was a different part of his life. He had a room for work, for friends, for guests, and one to be alone in.”

  We continued to the last one, which was larger than Joseph’s, and which was the brightest of all the rooms, with light coming in on three sides through the slats in the shutters. This time, Isaac entered. When he reached the center, he said, “And Joseph promised me this was going to be my room.”

  He took a few seconds to consider what he had said before turning to face me.

  “You understand what I am telling you?”

  I said yes without pausing to consider if it was true. Only later would I understand that Isaac wasn’t confessing; he was telling me how much he was about to lose.

  He began to make a slow tour of the room.

  “Joseph wants me to go study in America. He’s made all the arrangements. He says I could come back in a year and it will be safe—the fighting will be over. He knows he can’t win, but he thinks the British will make it end, and they will make him vice-president or prime minister. He says this is the future of democracy in Africa. He thinks it will only be a matter of time until he becomes president, and then he can do whatever he wants. None of it is true, though. He will never be president. There will never be a house with enough rooms for us to live in.