All Our Names (2 page)

Isaac waited for the speech to end. The final words, “This is our university,” were followed by a brief applause. Everything back then was supposed to be ours. The city, this country, Africa—they were there for the taking, and, at least in that regard, our approach to the future was no different from that of the Englishmen who preceded us. Many of the young boys who were students at the university would later prove the point as they stuffed themselves with their country’s wealth.

Once the crowd had thinned, Isaac made his move. He loped. His shoulders descended and rose with each step, almost feral in movement. I felt hunted. I thought, “He’s coming for me,” and though I knew there was no physical injury at stake, I was right in assuming there was something at risk. He stood next to me for a few seconds before he said, “We should go somewhere and talk.”

That sort of conspiratorial language came naturally to him. Over the next few months, I heard him say things such as “We should talk in private,” or “Let’s talk someplace else.” Isaac was gifted at making you feel special.

I nodded my head in agreement. I was victim to his maneuvers from the beginning, instantly folded into his reality, which, for the first time since I came to the capital, gave me the feeling there was at least one place I belonged.

We walked until we were far away from the campus, in a part of the city I had never been in before. Isaac talked the entire time. He had his own version of history—half fact, half myth—which he was eager to share. He began each of his stories with “Did you know,” which was his equivalent of “Once upon a time.”

“Did you know,” he said, “until a decade ago no Africans were allowed to live near the university. This is where the British were planning on building a new palace for the king. If they had lost World War II, they were going to move all the English people here,
and this part of the city was going to be just for them. They were going to make everything look like London so they wouldn’t feel so bad about losing. They were going to build a big wall around it and then change all the maps so that it looked like London was in Africa, but every time they started building the wall, someone would blow it up. That’s how the war for independence started.”

I listened, knowing that Isaac’s main intention was to amuse. Whether or not I believed him didn’t matter, as long as I was seduced. We stopped at a café on a street lined with single-story tin-roofed stores selling jeans, T-shirts, and brightly patterned ankle-length dresses. There were similar streets all over the city and across the continent. What made this one unique were the four-story concrete buildings that had recently sprung up in pairs every hundred feet. They had been built quickly, and poorly, to house the private businesses that were supposed to come sweeping into the capital. Their vacancy seemed more meaningful than the crowds and the dozens of other stores standing in their shadows, although it was impossible to know if it was because the empty buildings spoke of the imminent future, or its failure to materialize.

I pointed to a pair with blacked-out windows across the street from us. “And who is supposed to live there?” I asked him.

He stretched out his arms. “Those aren’t buildings,” he said. “Look how ugly they are. Soon everything in the capital will look like that. That’s the government’s secret plan. We built them to keep the British from ever wanting to come back.”

He put one finger to his lip. “This is just between us, of course.”

“Of course,” I said. I didn’t know yet when he expected me to take him seriously.

We took a table outside. Isaac ordered tea for us. When it came, slightly cooler than he wanted, he sent it back and demanded another. He wanted me to be impressed by his ability to command:
in this case, a slightly warmer cup of hot water. When the issue with the tea was settled, he crossed his legs, leaned back in his chair, and said, “So—you go to the university, too.”

“Yes,” I told him.

“Every day?”

“Every day.”

It wasn’t until that second exchange that we were certain we were talking about the same thing. Isaac’s face softened. He dropped the constant, half-forced grin he had been wearing since we met.

“My grandfather wanted me to study medicine,” he continued. “But I have other plans of my own.”

“Then what will you study?”

“This is Africa,” he said. “There’s only one thing to study.”

He waited for me to respond. After several dramatic seconds he sighed and said, “Politics. That’s all we have here.”

I hadn’t learned to speak with such false though convincing authority. When Isaac asked me what I planned to study, I had to gather my courage before I could respond.

“Literature,” I told him.

He slapped the table with his hand.

“That’s perfect,” he said. “You look like a professor. What kind of literature will you study?”

“All of it,” I said, and here, for once, I spoke with a bit of confidence, because I believed in what I said. Many of the writers who attended that conference had already begun to make themselves scarce by the time Isaac and I had that conversation: several were already reported to be in exile in America; others were rumored to be dead or working for a corrupt government. But I still dreamed of joining their ranks nonetheless.

When I met Isaac, I was almost what my mother would have called “a woman of a certain age.” That in her mind made me vulnerable, though I never felt that way, not even as a child growing up in a house where it would have been much easier to be a boy. My mother was a whisperer. She spoke in soft tones, in case my father was upset or had entered one of his dark moods, a habit which she continued after he had left. We lived in a quiet, semi-rural Midwestern town, and decorum for her was everything. What mattered most was that the cracks that came with a family were neatly covered up, so that no one knew when you were struggling to pay the mortgage, or that your marriage was over long before the divorce papers were signed. I think she expected that I would speak like her—and maybe when I was very small I did, but my instincts tell me that, more likely than not, this was never the case. I could never have been a whisperer. I liked my voice too much. I rarely read a book in silence. I wanted to hear every story out loud, so I often read alone in our backyard, which was large enough that if I yelled the story at the top of my voice, no one in the house closest to us could hear me. I read out there in the winter, when the tree branches sagged with ice
and the few chickens we owned had to be brought into the basement so they wouldn’t freeze to death. When I was older, and the grass was almost knee-high because no one bothered to tend to it anymore, I went back there with a book in my hand simply to scream.

That Isaac said he didn’t mind if I raised my voice was the first thing I liked about him. I had driven nearly three hours, across multiple county lines and one state line, to pick him up as a favor to my boss, David, who had explained to me earlier that morning that, although, yes, tending to foreigners, regardless of where they came from, wasn’t a normal part of our jobs, he had made an exception for Isaac as a favor to an old friend, and now it was my turn to do the same.

I was happy to take Isaac on. I had been a social worker for five years and was convinced I had already spent all the good will I had for my country’s poor, tired, and dispossessed, whether they were black, white, old, fresh from prison, or just out of a shelter. Even the veterans, some of whom I had gone to high school with, left me at the end of a routine thirty-minute home visit desperate to leave, as if their anguish was contagious. I had lost too much of the heart and all the faith needed to stay afloat in a job where every human encounter felt like an anvil strung around my neck just when I thought I was nearing the shore. We were, on our business cards and letterhead, the Lutheran Relief Services, but there hadn’t been any religious affiliation—not since the last Lutheran church for a hundred miles shut down at the start of World War II and all of its parishioners were rechristened as Methodists.

It was common among the four of us in the office to say that not only were we not Lutheran, but we didn’t really provide any
services, either. We had always run on a shoestring budget, and that string was nipped an inch or two each year as our government grants dried up, leaving us with little more than a dwindling supply of good intentions and promises of better years to come. David said it first and most often: “We should change our name to ‘Relief.’ That way, when someone asks what you do, you can say, ‘I work for Relief.’ And if they ask you relief from what, just tell them, ‘Does it really matter?’ ”

Mildly bitter sarcasm was David’s preferred brand of humor. He claimed it was a countermeasure to the earnestness that supposedly came with our jobs.

I knew little about Isaac before I met him, except that he was from somewhere in Africa, that his English was most likely poor, and that the old friend of David’s had arranged a student visa in order for him to come here because his life may or may not have been in danger. I wasn’t supposed to be his social worker so much as his chaperone into Middle America—his personal tour guide of our town’s shopping malls, grocery stores, banks, and bureaucracies. And Isaac was going to be, for at least one year, my guaranteed Relief. He was, in my original plans, my option out of at least some of our dire weekly budget meetings and the minimum of two hospital visits a month; last and most important, he secured my right to refuse to take on any new clients who were terminally ill. I had been to twenty-two funerals the year before, and though most were strangers to me when they passed, I felt certain my heart couldn’t take much more.

My first thought when I saw Isaac was that he was taller and looked healthier than I expected. From there, I worked my way
backward to two assumptions I wasn’t aware of possessing: the first that Africans were short, and the second that even the ones who flew all the way to a small college town in the middle of America would probably show signs of illness or malnutrition. My second thought—or third, depending on how you counted it—was that “he wasn’t bad-looking.” I said those same words to myself as a test to measure their sincerity. I felt my little Midwestern world tremble just a bit under the weight of them.

Isaac and I had known each other for less than an hour when he told me he didn’t mind if I sometimes shouted; I had already apologized for being late to meet him, and for failing to have a sign with his name on it when I arrived. Later, in the car, I apologized for driving too fast, and then, once we arrived in town, I apologized for my voice.

“I’m sorry if I talk too loud,” I said. It was the only apology I had repeatedly sworn over the past ten years never to make again. The frequency with which I broke that promise never softened the disappointment I felt immediately afterward.

“You don’t have to apologize for everything,” he told me. “Talk as loud as you want. It’s easier to understand you.”

I couldn’t hug Isaac or thank him for his attempt at humor without making us feel awkward, but I wanted him to know that I wasn’t normally so easily moved, that I was a woman of joy and laughter. I tried my best to give him an animated, lively description of our town.

“It’s pronounced ‘Laurel,’ like the flower,” but I suspected that wasn’t entirely correct, so I pointed to the hulking brick factory, which, other than a grain silo, was the tallest object on the horizon.

“That used to be a bomb factory,” I said. There were rumors that it would be converted into the state’s largest shopping mall, but I wasn’t sure he knew what a mall was, so I left that out.

We drove past gas stations and fast-food restaurants clustered together every quarter-mile with nothing yet built in between them. I tried to think of something else interesting to say. I pointed to a gas station and said, “Fifteen years ago, that used to be a pig farm.” A second later, I worried that maybe he didn’t know what a pig farm was, or that maybe he thought I was bragging about our town’s pig farms to someone who had just come from a country where there were no farms, or pigs. I had to bite my cheek to keep from apologizing. When we reached the old, charming main street that used to be the heart of the town, I asked him if there was anything he’d like to see before I took him to his apartment.

“Thank you for asking,” he said. “I would like to see the university if it isn’t too much trouble.”

I looked at his hands. He had his hands palm-down on his thighs, with his back perfectly straight like a schoolboy trying to prove he was on his best behavior. I thought, Now I know what it means to be frightened stiff.

We made a quick tour of the southern half of the campus. It wasn’t the largest or most prestigious university in the state, but I always suspected it was the most beautiful. Like everyone, Isaac was impressed by the trees—hundred-year-old oaks that, especially in August, seemed more essential to the idea of the university than any of the buildings. I felt a surge of nostalgia every time I came there, and offered to take him to the library. “I would appreciate that,” he said.

We were standing in the main reading room—a wide, grand hall that a professor of mine had described as a terrible clash of
Midwestern and classical taste—when I decided that, for Isaac’s sake, I’d had enough of his formal politeness. He’d been staring silently for several minutes at the wood-paneled walls lined with leather books and supported by marble columns, all of which stood on top of a thick green carpet that could have been found in any one of a hundred living rooms in town. He looked down before he stepped onto the carpet, and I could almost hear him wondering if he should take his shoes off. He was still staring at the walls in awe when I shouted to him, “How do you like America?”—not quite at the top of my voice, but definitely somewhere near it.

There were two weeks until the start of the semester, so the library was nearly empty. The few people there all turned to stare at us, and I could see a librarian on the other side of the hall slowly making her way toward me. As she did so, Isaac walked out of the room and then the library without saying a word. I began to prepare yet another series of apologies—to him, to the librarian, and, if I lost Isaac, to David. I waited until the librarian had almost reached me, before following Isaac out: to run after him, in our town, at that time, would have given the wrong impression.