All Our Names (20 page)

“I promise I won’t leave abruptly,” he said, but I never sincerely believed he would keep that promise, and so it meant little to hear him say it.

“I know that already,” I lied, “but that’s not what I want to hear.”

He reached out to put his hand on my shoulder but I moved farther away before he could touch me. The last thing I wanted was to be comforted. I got out of the bed. I saw my clothes lying on the floor and tried to think of something he could say that would make me leave.

“Henry said I would know better than he did where you would go next, but that isn’t true. I don’t know any more than he does. What was the point of having this dinner?”

“I wanted you to meet. So did Henry.”

“That’s because he knows nothing about you. He doesn’t even know where you’re from. How is that possible?”

“He never wanted to know more.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“When he met me at the airport, the first thing Henry asked me was ‘Who are you?’ He had a picture of my friend Isaac in his wallet—the same Isaac who died the night you came to my house. I told him the truth right then: The Isaac he was expecting was in a village in northern Uganda. He gave me his passport and visa so I could come here, because he never wanted to. I told him I became Isaac as soon as I stepped on the plane.”

“And who were you before that?”

“That’s what Henry didn’t want to know. He said the less he knew about me the better, in case something happened.”

“I’m not Henry.”

“I know.”

“Then why do you treat me like I am?”

He gathered the sheets around him. I wondered if I had actually hurt him, or if he was simply pretending to be wounded.

“I spent two days with Henry before I came here. We drove from the airport in Chicago to his house in St. Louis, where he said he would figure out what to do with me next. He had doubts about the story I had told him, and he said he would have me arrested and deported if he found out I was lying. I understood why he would say that. He had spent enough time in Africa to know there was no limit to what someone would do to leave. People risked their lives every day to get out. It was nothing to kill or steal from someone for the same reason.

“He made phone calls to find his friend Joseph. It was Joseph who had asked Henry to bring Isaac here. He thought if he could get him to America Isaac would be safe until the war was over. Early the first morning, someone from the British Embassy in Kampala called to say that Joseph was most likely dead, and that he and his army were rumored to be responsible for several massacres in the north of the country. I was sleeping on the couch
when Henry received the call. He slammed the phone on the table. I thought he was pretending to be angry. He asked me what I knew about Joseph. I told him the truth. I said Joseph was dead.

“He sat down in a chair across from me. ‘When will you people learn?’ he said. ‘Do you enjoy killing each other?’

“I admit I had had the same thought before. I saw many people killed, as if it were nothing. I thought at times that our lives were worthless, but, hearing Henry, I knew that we were both wrong. No one needs to learn how to kill, but it took the foreigners who came to Africa to show us that it meant nothing to do so. Henry’s friend Joseph had many people killed before he died. I think now he had only done what the British had taught him.

“I said something similar to Henry: ‘What do you think your friend Joseph learned to do in England, while he was with men like you?’

“He was surprised I had answered his question. I was afraid I had offended him, but then Henry smiled and said, ‘You know what? You’re probably right.’

“There was another phone call from the British Embassy, later that afternoon. The Isaac that Henry was looking for was a colonel or captain in the same army that Joseph had once led. They were hoping to surrender, but not to the government—they wanted to surrender to the British. Isaac was one of three who signed the letter asking for their help. That was all Henry would tell me.

“After he hung up the phone, we sat silent for a long time. I thought of my friend, who was alive but was unlikely to live much longer, while Henry debated what to do with me next.

“After almost an hour had passed, Henry said, ‘I don’t want to know anything else about you before you came here. As far as I’m concerned, you were born this morning, and your name is Isaac. That’s the most I can do for you.’

“We began to like each other immediately after that. I was no longer a problem to be solved. He had no one to save or feel guilty toward, He asked me what I did in my spare time. I had never heard that expression. ‘What do you do for fun?’ he said.

“I told him I read Dickens. He loved that. He said he thought my accent sounded vaguely British. ‘Dickens was the only good thing to have come out of England in a hundred years,’ he said. Later that evening, he gave me advice about how to live in America. He told me not to stare at white people, to say ‘sir’ if I was stopped by the police, and to live as quietly as possible.

“ ‘This is a hard part of the country to have come to,’ he said. ‘You might wish you hadn’t.’

“ ‘I will be fine,’ I told him. ‘I will live as if I am not really here.’

“When you and I became close, I still believed that was true. I thought the less I said the better.”

“For you or for me?”

“For both of us.”

“David said you must have done something terrible in your previous life to tell me so little about yourself. I never told him that I had doubts about your name. He would have begged me never to see you again if I had, which is probably why I never told him. I don’t understand how you can live like this. My whole life is here, and if I left I’d probably always think of myself as Helen from Laurel.”

“I understand. I had the same once, and I did my best to escape it. When I was born, I had thirteen names. Each name was from a different generation, beginning with my father and going back from him. I was the first one in our village to have thirteen names. Our family was considered blessed to have such a history. Everyone in our family had been born and died on that land. We fed it with our bodies longer than any other, and it was assumed I would do the same, and so would my children. I knew from a
very young age, though, that I would never want that. I felt as if I had been born into a prison. We had one horse and a mule, which my father and I used to ride through the fields. It was beautiful land that had not changed in hundreds of years. We used oxen to plow it, and I knew if I stayed there my life would be no different from theirs. I begged my father to send me away to school, but he said my mother would never forgive him if he did, so I made my own plans to leave. I must have been thirteen or fourteen at the time. I never had many friends, and I had even fewer as I grew older. I was secretly preparing for my departure. I gave myself different names, which I copied into a notebook that I later burned. I practiced my English on the back of a mule and read what few books we had dozens, maybe hundreds of times.

“I stayed years longer than I had hoped to. There was a drought; we became even poorer. I began to believe the best part of my life had been spent dreaming. We heard rumors of soldiers revolting in the south of the country, but it meant nothing where we lived. Then men who weren’t soldiers, who were the same age as me but had gone to university, began to visit our village. They held meetings that no one attended. Eventually, they came to our house and asked us if we thought it was fair that we should be so poor while the rulers of the country lived like kings in Addis Ababa. They promised us a socialist revolution, and asked me to come with them. The next day, my father said it was time for me to leave.

“ ‘I don’t want you to stay here,’ he said. ‘If your brothers were older, I would send them with you.’

“He believed something terrible was going to happen to the country soon, and I suspect he is right. It hasn’t happened yet, but I doubt it will be much longer now.

“When I left, he held me for a very long time. He used to call
me Bird when I was a child. He said I lived high in the sky, far above everyone else.

“ ‘You’ll come back,’ he said.

“ ‘Of course,’ I told him.

“I thought he was going to tell me to write. Instead, he kissed me four times, twice on each cheek.

“ ‘No, my little bird,’ he said. ‘I know you won’t.’

“I went to Addis Ababa, and then took buses to Kenya and Uganda. I was no one when I arrived in Kampala; it was exactly what I wanted.”

That was the first night of Joseph’s war. The small arms hidden in the wheelbarrow ended up in the hands of the seven boys I had been confined with. Shortly after Isaac and I left the house, they began to kill the soldiers patrolling the neighborhood, one at a time. Those boys had the advantage at the beginning: It was their home. They knew where to hide and where to shoot from.

The soldiers fired back recklessly, blindly, in multiple directions at once. For every one that was hit, hundreds of shots were fired in return, not just down the streets but through windows, doors, and walls, regardless of who might be on the other side of them. Most of the dead died during that first hour, but Isaac and I weren’t concerned with them. We listened to the fighting from a corner of the living room least likely to catch a stray bullet. Once there was a lull, we turned on each other.

I began with what I thought was the most pressing question: “How long were you at the house?”

“Twenty minutes,” he said, “maybe less.”

“And what would have happened if you hadn’t come?”

“How can I know that?” he said. “I did come.”

“Why?”

“Why did I come?”

“Yes.”

“I was worried.”

“Did Joseph tell you to?”

“He was concerned as well.”

“That’s not what I asked you.”

“What do you want me to say? I’m here.”

We ended on a loop. I had my doubts, every one of which Isaac could reject simply by pointing out that he was there, and I was alive, and both of us were in danger. He was carrying a gun of his own now—a black pistol with a snub nose, clipped to his belt. When we finished arguing, we had the fighting to return to. The silence had gone on too long; Isaac was growing restless.

“They can’t all be dead already,” he said.

A few seconds later, we heard a single shot. We were both relieved, although for different reasons. I thought I saw Isaac whisper, “Thank God,” but it could have also been “My God,” or “Oh God.” Regardless, the heavy firing that followed was a good thing.

Isaac taught me how to read the fighting. The automatic weapons belonged to the government; the rifles were ours. “Our boys are more careful,” he said. They were roaming the streets and roofs alone, or in pairs. They waited until they had an easy shot and then fired once, twice at most, before running off to another spot.

“Aren’t they too young?” I asked him.

He laughed.

“They were in uniform until this morning,” he said.

We knew when the first boy was killed because the soldiers started shouting. They cheered and fired into the air, and most likely again at the body. They did the same when the second died, a few minutes later, although this time a low, steady chant followed. The third wasn’t killed until an hour later—a small miracle,
given that soldiers from all across the capital had poured into the neighborhood and were occupying almost every corner. We saw the vague outlines of their forms running past the house. That was when Isaac took his pistol out and placed it on the floor next to him. The fighting needed to start again. As long as those four boys were hiding, everyone in the slum was vulnerable. We heard screams and shots from far away. These quickly became regular. Isaac whispered into my ear, “They’re going door to door now.”

I wanted to ask him if that was part of the plan, but I knew he would have said yes. The plan was to make war; anything that followed was part of it.

Had the remaining boys not found a house from which to stage a final attack, we would never have made it through the night. Doors were breaking all across the neighborhood, and it was only a matter of time before the soldiers made it to ours. The retreat, as it turned out, was deliberate: draw a large force into a narrow space, and then inflict as much damage as possible.

The boys from Joseph’s army made their final stand within shouting distance of where we were hiding. They fired all at once, and continued to do so for as long as they could—dozens of shots in only a few seconds, and not a single one wasted. The barrage that followed must have leveled the house, and most likely the ones next to it. All the soldiers in the area converged on that spot and fired their weapons, if only to claim they had been a part of the battle. By the time they finished, there was enough light in the sky to make the road clearly visible.

“It’s finished. We should leave now,” Isaac said. I didn’t agree or disagree. I was grateful to be alive; I was happy to follow orders.

We didn’t see the old man or his wife before we left, although Isaac did leave a small offering of money for them on the floor. I
expected the streets to be empty, but within minutes of leaving the house we came across groups of older women and packs of young boys, scouring the neighborhood for anything that had been abandoned or that could be honestly carried off, from shell casings to large pieces of broken glass. The first bullet-riddled body we saw was of a middle-aged man whose shoes had already been lifted from him. Other bodies were being carried off in wheelbarrows by sisters and wives so they could be put properly to rest.

We took the most obscure roads back to Joseph’s house, steering wide of the city center and the hundreds of soldiers called up to protect it. We headed north for as long as we could before cutting west, straight through the old neighborhood where Isaac and I had once lived. Neither of us said anything to acknowledge this.

It was late in the afternoon by the time we finally neared Joseph’s house.

“Eight hours,” Isaac said. “You couldn’t have found a shorter route.”

“Not without another map,” I told him.