Dinaw Mengestu - All Our Names

Had I not been so uncertain as to where I stood with Isaac, I would have made more of his return. I would have told him that it was good to see him again, that he had been missed.

“So — you’re finally back,” I said. I couldn’t decide if I should hold out my hand.

“Yes,” he said. “I knew this place would be empty without me.”

And we left it there. I followed Isaac toward the center of the campus — to the large, open space where most of the students gathered. When we reached the southwest corner of the square, a spot normally occupied by the only two Angolans on campus, we stopped. Isaac didn’t acknowledge it, but it was obvious he was feeling tired.

“We should sit,” he said.

“There’s a bench over there.” I pointed to a spot far from the center but covered in shade.

“Too far,” Isaac said, and it was then that I caught the distinct wheezing in his breath. He had carried his limp far enough. He leaned gently backward against a young tree that bent slightly against his weight. He eased his way onto the ground and pulled his knees up to his chest.

Throughout the morning, every person who passed us stared at Isaac. There were brutally broken bodies begging on street corners across the city, and most of us hardly noticed them. People stared at Isaac because they assumed he was a student at the university, and therefore they thought they knew how he had earned his injuries. Several days earlier, a large crowd had marched along one of the main boulevards leading up to the presidential palace, demanding some sort of reform. They were allowed to get within a hundred yards of the palace before the tear gas and clubs came out. The first time I heard Isaac connected to that protest was when a young woman walked past us and, without breaking her stride, said, “Our country needs more boys like you.” Many other students waved or said hello to him — even the militant Rhodesians, who didn’t trust anybody.

“You’ve become very popular,” I said, “and you haven’t even been around.”

“I know,” Isaac said. “It’s a shame. I should have had myself beaten earlier. I could have been president by now.”

I didn’t judge him for letting that misconception spread, but only because I believed the timing of his return was a coincidence.

Isaac offered little about where he had been and what had happened since the fight at the café. When I asked him, he told me those things didn’t matter. “It’s over,” he said. “I’m here now.” Because I was ashamed for having left him, I was happy to settle for that as an answer.

• • •

The weeks after that were calm around the university. One semester ended and a new one began, but for Isaac and me the difference was negligible. We returned to the university in January as if nothing had changed, which was true as long as we remained focused solely on our second lives on campus. There were rumors and a few sparely written stories in the English-language newspapers about more arrests and violence on the edges of the city, which I read and then ignored, as if they were dispatches from a foreign country. Isaac and I continued to spend our days in the center of campus, no longer relegated to the margins, where I felt more comfortable. The attention cast toward Isaac waned but never vanished. It was understood that Isaac could always be found in the same spot, even if no one had yet tried to seek him out. When I suggested to Isaac that we find a quieter, less obvious corner of the campus, he insisted he couldn’t do it. “We’re becoming known,” he said, “Why would we quit now?”

Each day at dusk we made our way back home. Isaac was still limping, although less noticeably. Walking required his concentration, but I suspected he had to remember to struggle. If he was lying about his injury, I was hardly ready to hold him accountable. His wounds had gotten him somewhere. He was a figure, even if without a name, and I understood his desire to hold on to that until another step on the university’s social ladder had been mounted. Once that was done, I knew he would give up the limp and the bandages; fortunately, he would have the scars. I imagined him pointing to an old wound on his hand or face, and saying, “This one came from the police.” Or, “This one I can’t remember anymore. I have so many on my body.”

What I feared most for Isaac and me happened that afternoon in the diner. It seemed impossible now for us to move forward, and I assumed after that lunch that if there was any relationship left it would live on in the strictest privacy, late at night and exclusively in his apartment, with all the blinds closed and the lights off. Whatever warmth and affection we had would quickly burn out, until, eventually, we stopped speaking and became bitter strangers. I returned to the office that afternoon with a weight in the center of my chest. I spent hours trying to shake it. I went to the bathroom repeatedly. I drank cup after cup of water. When David asked me how I was feeling, I nearly choked trying to answer him.

“I think I’m coming down with a cold,” I said.

He looked me up and down. He claimed to always know when someone was lying to him, “No, you’re not. But go home anyway.”

I stayed in my bedroom all evening. My mother came to the door twice and asked if I wanted some tea, and then, later, soup. I felt the limits of my life every time she knocked. I fell asleep promising myself greater independence — a home, and then a life, and someday soon a family of my own.

• • •

I made it almost two weeks before I called on Isaac. A part of me hoped that, given enough time, he might begin to forget what I looked like, that my chin and nose and eyes might begin to blur with the images of a million other women, and that when that happened the pieces of me that I thought mattered the most to him would be restored. I prepared myself as well for the possibility that we would never recover. I looked in the classified section of the newspaper for an apartment in a different town, a relic of the Westerns I had watched with my father. I checked off the vacancies while whispering to myself, “This town isn’t big enough for the both of us.”

I shared hints of my plan with my mother, without revealing the reason behind it.

“I think it’s time I found a place of my own,” I said.

She sipped her tea and waited until she had placed her cup back on the saucer to respond.

“Why would you ever want to do that, Helen? Don’t you think we’re doing well together?”

I was the sole long-term relationship she had. She went to church on Sundays and spent one or two afternoons a week having tea at someone’s house, but those were only the rituals of life, performed faithfully as a substitute for the real thing. Finally, I was worried about becoming her.

I decided on Thursday, when the second week of not seeing each other was almost over, that I would drop by Isaac’s house. I was going to make a joke, something along the lines of “Are you hungry? I know a great little diner that has the best omelets in town.” We’d laugh and then fall into each other’s arms, and, in the weeks afterward, find ways of mocking what had happened until it eventually became one of those stories that couples use to remind themselves of the obstacles they had overcome and the distance they had traveled. Isaac never gave me that chance, however. He came unannounced to my office early Friday morning, and I knew when I saw him sitting with his legs crossed and a tabloid magazine that was at least two years old spread across his lap that it wasn’t an accident that he had come to me first. He knew, whether by instinct or by careful thought, that I was one or two days away from doing the same, and that, had I been able to do so, some of the power in our relationship might have tipped in my favor.