All Our Names (7 page)

I hadn’t stood outside their bedroom door since I was a teenager, trying to sneak out of the house. I used to press my ear against the door and count to fifty before deciding it was safe to go. Gradually, that number was whittled down to thirty, and then ten, until I was finally certain that I would never hear anything coming out of that room.

The first five nights I came home late from Isaac’s apartment, I found myself pitying my mother for the cold and virtually barren life she had shared with my father. I thought the kindest thing I could do for her would be to crawl into her bed and press my body against hers, so she would know how much comfort could be found in being held while you slept. If I did this, maybe some trace of that affection would linger on in her room after I left.

As I said, though, those feelings only lasted for five nights. By the sixth, I couldn’t remember what had made me carry on like that. I left Isaac’s apartment knowing that we were sleeping with each other not to draw closer but to try and rid ourselves of a desire we both thought we would be better off without. After he came, I’d try to get him back inside me, and when that failed, I told him, “Don’t sleep. I can wait.” I left thinking I had had enough of him, only to realize, before reaching home, that I felt emptier now than I had before I saw him.

I still stopped outside my mother’s bedroom that night, and every night after for the next week, but it wasn’t out of pity. Each time I stood in front of the door, I wanted to throw it open so I could stand at the foot of her bed and, as she dragged herself out of sleep, tell her in intimate detail how I’d spent my evening with Isaac, from the time I walked into his apartment and silently undressed in his bedroom, until the moment I left while he was sleeping, or at least pretending to. And if when I finished she asked why I was telling her this, I’d say, “So you can see how much we resemble one another.”

It wasn’t long before students began to join Isaac and me at our tree in the center of campus. They had heard rumors about Isaac and knew nothing about me, but regardless our daily vigil on the grass had made us familiar, comforting figures to gather around. We had no obvious politics, and, compared with many of the other students, who squatted on the grass under banners of Lenin and maps of a borderless Africa, we seemed innocent, if not harmless. The only marker we had to distinguish us was a sign that Isaac posted on the tree behind us every day we were there: “What Crimes Against the Country have you committed today?”

The sign, as he saw it, was an invitation for the entire campus to join our paper revolution, since, according to him, “everyone has a crime to confess.”

On either side of us were two opposing camps of student communists. Each day they unfurled signs announcing the People’s Revolution and the Communist Utopia. Their portraits of Marx and Lenin grew larger every week. They yelled insults at each other from their separate camps—rarely in English, the language of the capitalists.

“You know what they fight over?” Isaac said. “Posters—who has the bigger flag.”

Isaac claimed that, unlike the other student radicals and revolutionaries, he had no agenda. “We are a true democracy,” he said. “The paper revolution is for everyone.”

I assumed that the story of our paper revolution was already forgotten, and that Isaac’s crude sign was a poor attempt to recapture some of the glory of that afternoon. The day Isaac hung his sign, however, students came. Whether it was out of curiosity or boredom didn’t matter. Even the ones who knew nothing about him did exactly what he wanted: they played the game; they sat down and stayed long enough to confess.

The first students who came to Isaac were cousins. Their names were Patience and Hope, and they were dressed in matching pleated gray skirts that took the risk of being cut almost an inch above the knee.

“Sit,” he told them, and then he gestured with his hand toward me. “This is my friend Langston the Professor, the future Emperor of Ethiopia.” Before they had the time to question what they were doing, he said, “Now, tell me, what crimes against our country have you committed today?”

Neither was timid, and Isaac was perfectly at ease; I was the one who, in the company of women my own age, wanted to run.

Patience, whose mouth bristled with clean, hard white teeth, spoke first. “Does sitting here count as a crime?” she asked.

Isaac smiled. “Yes,” he said, “it definitely does.”

He turned to Hope, who was leaning against her cousin. “And you,” he said. “If you’re related, then that makes you guilty as well.”

They laughed. They had come to be amused, and Isaac had charmed them. He didn’t try for more than that. After they had played their role, he asked where they were from and what they were studying. Both were majoring in economics; they were born and raised in the capital.

“Economics,” Isaac said, “that’s very good,” but I knew that, like me, he had only a vague understanding of what that meant: money, who had it and who didn’t. As Patience and Hope walked away, Isaac told them not to forget to say goodbye to the future emperor. Only Patience acknowledged me: “Goodbye, Emperor,” she said. By the time I thought to respond, she was too far away to hear me. Isaac watched me follow her with my eyes.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “She’ll be back.”

Patience and Hope were just the beginning. More students came and introduced themselves to Isaac so he could ask them what crimes they had committed that day. One boy confessed to stealing money from his father, to which Isaac responded: “Stealing is not a crime in this country. Not stealing, however, is a terrible thing.” All the boys and girls close enough to hear that made sure everyone saw them laugh. When they were gone, Isaac whispered to me: “Did you see who laughed the hardest?” I hadn’t, and I doubt he had, either, but I knew the answer.

“The boys with the polished shoes,” I said.

“That’s right. It was Alex.”

If students didn’t know what to say, he adjusted the rules of his game. He helped them invent their crimes. He borrowed from the president’s daily radio broadcasts, which for months had been long, rambling diatribes against all the enemies of the country, from the Europeans and Americans to the Africans who were secretly working with them.

“Have you ever been an imperialist?” he asked them. “Have you ever tried to colonize a country?” “Do you listen to British Radio?” “Do you know who the Queen of England is?” “Have you ever been friends with a European?” “Have you ever wanted to go to America?”

Over the course of a few weeks, Isaac’s confessions drew hundreds of students, and of those, a few dozen returned consistently.
On most days, those of us gathered under the tree did so simply to be in the company of others. There was comfort, even a certain amount of joy, in finding one another in the grass and in seeing others join us. We were two, then five and ten, sometimes as many as twenty. Most of us didn’t know one another’s names or ages or reasons for being there, and that was fine, because silence isn’t the same when it’s shared. Its sad and lonely sides are shunted off. We were content just to be there, and had nothing else ever come out of it, I’m certain I would have regarded those moments as some of the most memorable of my life.

The protests that had begun at the start of the semester turned violent at the same time Isaac’s confessions were making him a celebrity on campus. When we returned home one evening, we heard how, in another shanty village that neither of us had ever been to, tires had been cast around the necks of four soldiers who had come to arrest someone. After a few minutes of watching the soldiers struggle to free themselves, someone doused the tires with gasoline and set them ablaze. The smell and their cries were said to have been so strong that no one stayed to watch them die; they were left to smolder for almost an hour, with the extra shame of having no one there to witness their torture. The next day, the neighborhood was cordoned off, and for twenty-four hours no one who lived there was allowed to leave. A few days later, several people were shot while walking too close to the palace gates as part of a supposed plot to kill the president. The proof came in the arrests of the dead people’s family and friends, who filled in the script when they confessed to the conspiracy that had been invented for them. And so, even though our neighborhood was quiet, everyone who lived around us felt vulnerable. If tomorrow it was decided that your neighbor, whom you had known your
whole life, was trying to undermine the government, then the only thing you could say was “Yes, I had suspected that might be possible all along.”

Isaac and I did our best to ignore what was happening. While we were walking home from the campus, I asked what he thought about the soldiers who had been burned; rather than respond, he took my wrist and asked if I was making any progress with Patience, who for the past four days had joined our crowd for an hour after lunch.

“I’m taking my time,” I told him.

“Maybe you should try for Hope instead.”

We spent the rest of our walk making crude, childish jokes about which was better, patience or hope. We should have been too old to talk like that, but we were at heart village boys, ignorant and immature about love in any form. Isaac and I never talked about the old relationships we may have had, and we never mentioned our desire for love or sex, which could be bought easily in almost every neighborhood in the capital. We avoided such conversations for the same reasons we avoided talking about the dead soldiers, the heavily armed patrols, and the pickup trucks that now sat, day and night, filled with bored, armed men, on the edges of every poor neighborhood in the capital. We were afraid of what would come next.

Up on the hill where the university and the neighborhoods that bordered it sat, little had changed. Isaac took down his sign in March. “I think it’s gone on long enough,” he said. He had earned the respect of the communists on both sides of us. Students waved or said hello as they passed. When he took down the sign, I asked if he knew what he was going to do next.

“I do.”

• • •

He leaned against his tree and crossed his legs as if preparing to nap. “I’m going to enjoy this for as long as it lasts.”

The hours we spent on campus followed us home at the end of the day. For weeks we were only visitors in our real lives, and even then we were terrible tourists, purposefully blind to the plainclothesmen who watched all the houses with notebooks in their hands, deaf to the evening shouts around us. I knew it wouldn’t last long. My landlord, Thomas, came to my room one evening and told me to pay attention at night, especially when I was supposed to be sleeping. “Rest in the day,” he said. “Keep your eyes open at night. I tell this to everyone.” But I knew it was me he was worried about. I was a foreigner. I had no ties to any of the local or even distant tribes. I played on the grass in the afternoon with Isaac, and then worried late at night. It was always in times of trouble that those on the outside suffered most, and though I never shared any of my fears with Isaac, I was terrified someone would realize that if I was killed or injured, if I abruptly disappeared, there would be no one to answer to. I imagined my neighbors and Thomas—who when drunk said I was like a son to him, though we knew little about each other—pointing to my room and saying, “Take him. He’s behind the trouble. And no one will know.”

As it turned out, it was Isaac who was cast out into the street first. Not long after the soldiers were burned, the friends of his father whom he had been living with told him they could no longer afford to keep him there.

“They told me they don’t have enough space for another person,” he said. That was on the first night of his homelessness, when he came and knocked on the walls outside my room sometime
after midnight, looking for a place to sleep. Because it was night, Isaac knew better than to say more, in case someone was listening or I turned out to be the type that was easily frightened. Isaac made a bed on the floor out of the clothes he had brought with him. One of us often fell asleep for a half-hour or less while on campus. Whoever was awake sat guard; in most cases, I was the one who slept. Those brief naps had become the best sleep I got, because it was daytime and because I knew Isaac was next to me and wouldn’t leave unless I awoke. I turned onto my side so I could see his outline on the floor.

“I know you’re tired,” he said. “Don’t worry. Nothing is going to happen. Get some sleep.”

I tried to sound as confident as he did. “I’m not worried,” I said, but it was obvious I was scared and had been for many days.

“You’re an emperor,” he told me. “King of kings. No harm can come to you.”

I listened to him breathe. I counted his breaths. I doubt I made it to a hundred before I was asleep. I didn’t wake up until late the next morning, and by then he was gone.

A notice was published in all the newspapers that morning, warning people not to gather in large numbers. It took the top spot on every front page, under headlines such as “Government Warns of Increasing Risks in Public Gatherings.” The risks were never named, but in case people failed to understand the story’s true intent, there was a quote from the army declaring, “Our heightened security measures would make it unwise for those looking to disturb the peace and tranquility of our city to show their faces outside.” Had the article simply stated what its authors knew to be true, something along the lines of “Mass arrests and
torture have been planned” or, more simply, “Leave now,” a lot of time and an unknown number of lives could have been saved. Instead, there were several days of random beatings and arrests of young men across the capital before a mass retreat indoors began. By the end of the week, wedding parties were being held inside; the few open fields used for football games sat empty; funerals were no longer accompanied by long lines of mourners who were unafraid to wail and rend their garments in public.

When I saw Isaac on campus again, I asked him where he was living. He told me that he was staying with someone far away from our neighborhood and that I shouldn’t worry. “I have friends who have given me a place,” he said.