All Our Names (10 page)

During the thirty-six hours the grounds were occupied, not one sign went up. We had no chants, and the few songs we sang were
those that had been popular in the years just before independence. The revolutionary songs from the late 1950s and 1960s were everyone’s favorites, the songs of our parents and of our childhood, which we might have scorned at one time, but which we sang throughout the night to keep from falling asleep. The generation before us had had their revolution, and look what they had done with it. Over the course of the evening, I heard more than one student say that we were going to finish what our parents had started. There was the standard talk of a new African utopia, of a borderless and free continent. The students from the two opposing communist camps had their arms draped around one another, and at various times draped around Isaac and me as well.

“Look how happy they are,” Isaac whispered to me. I zoomed in on the boys at the end of the chain. They had the clothes and hair that came with privilege, but what I noticed most was the sheer, unrestrained joy that was on all their faces. They seemed incapable of closing their mouths.

It wasn’t until the first traces of sunlight began to emerge that I finally thought to ask Isaac what had happened to bring so many students together like this. None had left, but it was easy to see their resolve weakening. The songs had ended in the middle of the night, and everywhere I turned I saw eyes blighted not just by fatigue but by doubt. The party had gone on long enough for them, and what they sought wasn’t a renewal of their convictions, but a quick and, they hoped, painless exit from them. Isaac was one of the few who showed no signs of wear; it was, after all, his party to begin with.

Before I could think about what I wanted to say to him, I found myself looking up, along with Isaac and the two other boys nearest us, at the trail of smoke that had already peaked and was beginning to make its descent. The one thought I remember
clearly before the canister burst several feet short of us was “I wonder if Isaac is going to tell us to run.” We were among the few who had seen tear gas fired before and knew how to respond. Long before the massing of soldiers around our slum, most protests in the poorest neighborhoods ended this way.

Isaac and I were the only two who moved deliberately in the opposite direction of the wind; the rest of the students simply ran, not knowing what they were up against or what to expect. Isaac had no intention of leading any of them to safety, and so dozens ran with eyes closed through the smoke, running first into one another and then, eventually, into the soldiers, who had pulled out their batons and were whipping the blind as they stumbled out of the mist. Isaac and I held our breath and were clear of the crowd in a few minutes. I followed him through a side door in one of the buildings, maybe the only door near us that wasn’t locked. We climbed to the second floor and, for the second time, I found myself in a classroom at the university—a science lab of six long tables and metal stools that looked directly onto the circle we had just left. From there we watched soldiers dressed in riot gear leisurely whip their way through the crowd. From the students left lying on the ground, a handful of boys were dragged away; two had been standing next to Isaac; both had given long, rambling speeches the previous evening and undoubtedly made targets of themselves as a result.

I waited for Isaac to speak. I expected to him say something about how tragic and terrible it was to see the boys we had just spent the night with beaten and taken away like that; those boys would have expected at least as much from us, but whatever pity I tried to find for them was forced, and I knew the same would have been true for Isaac, who, like me, felt almost grateful to the uniformed men for leveling the differences between our lives in the slums and those on the campus, with each blow they struck.

“It’s about time,” Isaac said. “I was beginning to think they’d never come. I was almost afraid they’d run out of gas.”

“I don’t think that’s possible,” I said. “At least, not anymore.”

I followed him to the windows.

“I heard there was a tank in our neighborhood.”

“No tanks,” I said. “At least not near us.”

“They’ll come,” he said. “It’s not even a question anymore.”

He spoke with the certainty of someone who’d drawn the battle plans himself.

“Where have you been sleeping?” I asked him.

“For the past two days, here.”

“On campus.”

“In this room. Under the table all the way in the back.” Isaac walked to the cupboards that lined one of the walls and pulled from one a thin roll-away mattress and a duffel bag full of clothes so I could see how he’d been living.

“No one uses this room. The lights don’t even work anymore. There are a dozen others like it on campus, but I have a key to this one.”

“Why this room?”

“Because,” he said, “haven’t you noticed, it has the best view.”

That was all Isaac would tell me about how far in advance the protest had been planned. He wanted me to know that it wasn’t an accident, and that if anyone was at the center, it was him. Nothing he said hinted that there were others behind him, but it was clear that he wasn’t alone. The most visible mark of our poverty had always been the state of our clothes; the few pants and shirts we both had were used to begin with, and since we rarely had the means to have them washed, they were that much the worse for wear. The clothes in that duffel bag and the ones Isaac
was wearing, however, had never been touched; a set of white-and-blue shirts were neatly stacked in one corner of the bag, with a set of identical khaki pants like the ones Isaac was wearing next to them; it was the standard uniform for many of the boys at the university. I saw the clothes only briefly, but Isaac knew that their impression on me would last, and that when I left him I would do so wondering who had lavished such attention on him.

We spent the rest of the morning and the afternoon in the abandoned science lab. “You have to wait until it’s safe to leave,” he told me. “No one can see you walk out.”

If he hadn’t said that, I would have asked to stay longer anyway. I felt safe in that room, because Isaac was there and because I had always believed that one of the hidden benefits of being a student at the university was that it gave you a vantage point from which you could gaze upon the world without being injured. I watched the smoke disappear and the soldiers and police pick through the remains left behind by the students. I saw them gather coats, sweaters, and school bags; a red purse was lifted from the ground by one of the soldiers with the barrel of his gun and was swung in circles so the others could see his find. There were maybe a dozen students too injured to move; most sat slumped against trees, and a few lay flat on the ground. I didn’t expect anyone to tend to them, but I stared at them for over an hour just to make sure. The last student who was taken away was a young girl in a black skirt that was cut just above her knees. I told myself she was too short, and her skin the wrong shade of black, to be Patience. The men who carried her away were in uniform. She was the only one I felt genuine, unrestrained pity for: unlike that of the others, her suffering had just begun.

By noon, the campus was completely abandoned except for a few soldiers who patrolled with their guns slung over their backs.

“Did you ever study any science?” Isaac asked me.

I lied and said, “A little in high school.”

Isaac did the same. “Me, too.”

He walked to the large wooden cabinet that stood alone in the back of the room and removed the lock.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I wasn’t the one who broke it.”

The cabinet had once held all the necessary supplies a classroom full of science students would have needed, but the only items left were a pair of plastic goggles and a single row of beakers and test tubes, many of which were slightly cracked and all of which were stained. Isaac took everything out and arranged it on one of the long black tables.

“What do you think we’d need,” he asked, “to make a bomb?”

“Depends what kind,” I said.

“Something simple.”

Hanging on one of the walls was a large laminated chart headed “Periodic Table.” I knew just enough about it to understand that the element in one box combined with the element in another lay at the heart of much of what I saw and touched every day. There had been a young white American teacher in my high school—if I remember correctly, Rich was his name. He had brought one of those charts with him from America, and every day he asked us to pass it around from one person to another so, he said, we could all “feel like we had the world in our hands.” Because he was white and came from America, we took what he said seriously but at the same time believed he was crazy. “Africa is where America sends its crazy people” was the common refrain among us, and we always laughed with each variation of that thought. Each of us knew that, more likely than not, what Rich said was true, and that by extension our ignorance was so vast as to be unfathomable; the only power we had was to make a mockery of what he said.

I took the chart down, and as soon as I laid it on the table I began to strip it of all its meaning.

“We need a bit of Pb, and Fe, and Zr,” I said. I didn’t pretend to know the proper names of any of the elements, and if someone had come along then and tried to tell me, I would have said he had no idea what he was talking about. This was my world, and in this reality I was the one who dictated the terms, and according to me anything Isaac and I wanted could be made into a bomb.

Isaac made for the blackboard; there was no chalk to write with, so he pulled a marker from his pocket and wrote everything I said on the board in immaculate script, so clean that no one would have to guess what the letters were. He made his own additions to everything I said. He threw in plus signs, added parentheses and even fractions as he saw fit. By the time we were finished, half of the board was almost completely full of equations that only we could decipher.

We pretended we were making a bomb; I won’t try to dismiss the subtext of violence that came with that, but there was also a naïveté and childishness behind our imagining as well. It was as close as we could come to claiming innocence—for what happened that morning, and for what would surely come next.

I left Isaac late that night. We spent hours in the dark rather than light any candles, out of fear that someone might see our shadows in the windows; the only light we had came from the thin sliver of a moon, which by the time I left was barely visible. Even then, just to be careful, Isaac had insisted that we pass the entire evening sitting under the desks so that neither of us could accidentally stand up or stretch an arm just high enough to be seen by someone watching from the building opposite us. When Isaac
gave me instructions for leaving, he had his knees curled up to his chest and both arms wrapped around his legs, as if he were trying to remind his body that even if it wanted to leave as well, it didn’t have the right to.

“You should run when you leave the campus,” he told me. “Don’t stop running until you’re far away, when you can get off the main roads. They can’t patrol the side streets in those jeeps—the roads are too bad—and if you see one, you can outrun it. If you get stopped before then, tell them you were at the Churchill hotel—a lot of soldiers go to see the girls there. And then tell them that all you have left now is ten pounds.”

Isaac handed me the money along with a little loose change from his pocket. Two weeks ago, that would have been a fortune for both of us.

“You won’t even have to offer them the money. They’ll just take it, and as soon as they do, start walking away. Don’t look back, and don’t say anything to them. Wait until you get to a small road, and then, once you turn the corner, run—and this time don’t stop until you’re home. I’d tell you to stay here, but I have to leave early in the morning, and there’ll be problems if you’re here alone.

“No one knows who you are, and from now on, if anyone asks, give them a name that’s easy to remember. Tell them it’s John, or William.”

I listened to Isaac’s instructions, but I can’t say that I really believed anything he said until I had left him and was standing alone in the middle of the campus, a few feet from the tear-gas canisters deliberately left behind by the guards. Until then, I had had the distinct feeling that he was playing a role that had been cast for him, and that the same was happening to me. I kept thinking that any moment now Isaac was going to say “Stop,”
and the lights in the classroom were going to come on, and we would both be able to stand up and walk away.

I would have embarrassed him had I asked him to come with me, and so the only thing I said to him before leaving was “Are you going to be okay here?”

“Of course I am,” he told me. “I have everything planned out.”

I left just as Isaac told me to. As soon as I opened the door and touched ground, I ran, promising myself I wouldn’t stop even if I felt safe. On the other side of the campus gates were two jeeps facing in opposite directions. I saw them while I still had time to turn around, but where would I have gone? As frightened as I was, I also felt relief, knowing that whatever path I cut across the city, even if it led to prison, I would be the one who chose it. And so I didn’t hesitate at the gates, and it wasn’t until I was at the very bottom of the hill that the university was built on that I turned to see if I was being pursued. The only other creature on the street was a stray dog with an injured hip that forced it to run crooked. The jeeps hadn’t moved; though at the time I credited it to my good fortune and courage, I later learned it had nothing to do with either.

For the next several days, I hardly left my room. My landlord, Thomas, came by twice a day to see if I was ill, but it was obvious he was worried that maybe I was being hunted. I heard him whispering rather than shouting to his friends, and his shadow seemed to be permanently fixed outside my one window. I left once every afternoon so I could walk to one of the main avenues to read the newspaper headlines that were spread across the sidewalk on all the busy streets across the capital. If you had the money, you could pay a few cents to read one of the papers in private before laying it
down again. One paper might have been skimmed a dozen times before someone finally paid half-price to take it home, granting everybody, even the poorest among us, just enough information to take a position, however misinformed.