All Our Names (16 page)

“It must be difficult being so far away,” I added, but what I really wanted to say was that I was worried for him and for us. Nothing traveled better than death. Grief thrived in isolation, and I was afraid of being all that Isaac had.

“He did not have to die,” he said.

“Maybe not,” I offered, “but there’s nothing you can do to change that now.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Then tell me.”

“He could have left. He could have been here.”

I squeezed his hand. I looked at him tenderly. I didn’t believe him; it was the standard refrain of mourning: He could have… She would have… If only…

“What was his name?”

Isaac turned his attention to the window. It was pitch-black outside, but even if it hadn’t been, there was nothing to see other than flat, vacant farmland stripped clean at the start of winter.

I repeated the question: “I asked you what his name was.”

Minutes passed. I counted to twenty and back. I began to imagine what I would do if he refused to acknowledge me: pull onto the shoulder and demand a response before driving any farther; scream; slam on the brakes.

“He loved nicknames,” he said. “He had at least a dozen for me, but I only ever called him Isaac.”

When I came downstairs in the morning, Joseph was standing near the front door, talking to the guards as they rearranged the furniture in the living room. I saw him when I was halfway down the steps and thought immediately of going back to my room to wait for Isaac to wake up, but I was afraid that if Joseph saw me retreat he would find it suspicious; if anything caused me concern, it was drawing attention to myself. I was a stranger in that house. Other than Isaac, no one would care if I disappeared. My life story since coming to the capital consisted of standing on the sidelines, and I could have continued to do so had I not seen Isaac leave our room in the middle of the night.

Joseph waved me over to him. He had traded in his suit for a pair of dark-khaki pants and a white shirt that had his initials, J.M., embroidered on the pocket. It was a small extravagance, nothing compared with the gold watches and necklaces that other wealthy men indulged in. He wasn’t one of the true revolutionaries that Isaac and I had admired on campus, but he wasn’t a privileged fraud, either. He was special. He belonged to a class entirely his own.

We shook hands while furniture was moved around us; he gripped my shoulder with what seemed to be genuine affection.

“Did you sleep well?” he asked me.

“Yes. I was exhausted. I was asleep minutes after I reached my bed.”

He laughed. I couldn’t decide if he did so because he knew I was lying.

“And Isaac? I haven’t seen him this morning.”

“He was sleeping when I left.”

He pretended to be disappointed, shaking his head, but it was obvious he didn’t mean it. He motioned with his hand for me to follow him outside. The morning was brilliant, cloudless, sun-drenched, and too bright for normal eyes. I had to keep my head bent toward the ground as Joseph spoke.

“I would like to speak honestly,” he began, but even with one hand over my brow I could hardly bear to look up at him.

“Isaac wants to keep you near him, so he would never tell you this, but you can leave. You are under no obligation to remain here. If you leave, you should go somewhere very far from here. You should leave the country. Go back home to your family. I’m sure you know this already, but this city is a bad place for young men like you. If you remain here, with us, it will only get worse. I can have someone drive you to a town near the border; Isaac can accompany you the whole way, and then, who knows, after all this is over, perhaps you can return to join him.”

He spoke with what seemed like genuine concern, and even remorse, as if it pained him to suggest I was better off leaving. For that reason alone, I didn’t believe him. Such attention was more than I deserved, and I had come to believe that the only thing worse than being ignored was the suspicion that you were being watched closely.

“I would like to stay,” I told him.

He said something to one of the guards moving the furniture. The guard bowed in response, and I wondered if Joseph had demanded that type of servility or if it was given to him freely.

He moved a few inches closer to me.

“Do you know why?” he asked me.

I pretended not to understand the question and just stared at my shoes, hoping he wouldn’t ask it again. When he did, I asked him, “Do I know what?”

“Is it because of your friend or because you have nowhere else to go that you want to stay?”

He put a hand on my shoulder. I wanted to give a bold, definitive response—the type that came easily to Isaac—but none came to mind. A few seconds passed before Joseph leaned in and answered his question for me:

“It’s both,” he said, “and that’s fine for now.”

This wasn’t a threat, or a warning, but a precursor to both. He squeezed my shoulder while describing how the house had been built.

“My grandfather used to own this land,” he said. “ ‘Own’ isn’t the right word, since everything back then technically belonged to the British and could be taken away, but he had paid and signed for it when nothing was here. He thought that when independence came no one would want to live in the city anymore. He said the capital was built for the white people, and once they left, people would want to return to the land and live as their ancestors had. It was a silly and brilliant idea at the same time. When independence came, he was already dead, and there were more people in the capital than ever before. My father sold this land one plot at a time; it was suddenly fashionable for the rich to want to live away from the center of the city, and like that we became very rich. He built this house for his mistress to live in. She’s an old woman now. She returned
to her village to die there in peace, and now she is the only one who knows we are here. If the government knew this house belonged to my father, they would have taken it for themselves by now.”

That was the longest conversation I would ever have with Joseph. He kept his hand on my shoulder the entire time, and after a while I found its gentle pressure reassuring, as if it were part of the force keeping us tied to the ground. By the time he finished talking, we were standing next to the tree in the center of the courtyard, looking back on the house, which meant much to him and nothing to me. I had no conviction I could point to, no house to look back on and say: That is why I am here; this is what I’m willing to fight for. If I understood the intent of Joseph’s story correctly, I had only so much time to change that.

He shook my hand before leaving. “Make yourself at home,” he said. “Stay as long as you like, but let’s keep this conversation to ourselves.”

He was gone before I could respond, but my answer was irrelevant to begin with. The ease with which he hardly bothered to distinguish fact from fiction told me that.

The preparations for Joseph’s war began in earnest that afternoon. I knew from Isaac that something violent was being planned, but that on its own was hardly remarkable. Violent dreams and more plausible violent plans were burning all across the capital, and I assumed this was merely the version I had stumbled into.

Over the course of a few hours that morning, the scale of Joseph’s maneuvers became evident. Pairs of men arrived in what felt like timed half-hour intervals. By the time Isaac came down and joined me in the courtyard, there were eight new bodies tucked away somewhere in that house, conferring in one of the
rooms I implicitly understood were off limits. The presence of so many new faces was the kind of distraction Isaac and I needed. I had worried over how to approach him, and now here was something more extraordinary than his departure from our room in the middle of the night around which we could meet. Men in suits and men in fatigues. Men with pistols fastened at their belts. I should have been thinking of the fighting to come; instead, I was grateful for the distraction it offered.

“What do you think?” Isaac waved his arm across the courtyard and house as if it were a scenic view that he had made.

“Who are they?” I asked him.

He grinned and then threw his arm around me.

“They are the beginning,” he said. “Very soon there will be many more.”

The meeting that took place in the house that afternoon was the second-most-important conference in the capital’s history since independence. I had missed the first, but dreaming of the writers who had once gathered at the university had brought me here to begin with. I came for the writers and stayed for the war. The difference wasn’t as great as I would have thought.

Isaac did his best to narrate the movements for me.

That man is a colonel in the army.

He has a gold mine in the south.

That’s the brother of someone in Parliament.

I’ve heard he is a general in Tanzania.

And so it went on, until the entire second floor of the house had been filled with serious men whose guards and valets stood quietly in the living room. When the last guest arrived, the front door
was closed; the gate was sealed shut. If Isaac was disappointed at being left outside, he didn’t show it.

“This feels very familiar,” he said, “like we’ve done it before.”

“I was thinking the same,” I said. “Do you know what they’re talking about this time?”

“I can guess,” he said.

And so could I. In a certain context, it was entirely predictable.

“What do you think would happen if I went inside?” I asked him.

Isaac looked around at the various guards stationed around the doors. He pointed to a tall, skinny man whose face was largely hidden behind gold-rimmed sunglasses.

“He would tell that guy standing next to him to shoot you.”

I looked closer at both men; it would have meant nothing for them to do that.

“And what if you tried?”

“Maybe they would let me in,” he said. “And then, immediately afterward, someone else would shoot you.”

“And what if I tried to leave?”

Isaac laughed.

“Then everyone here would take turns shooting you.”

He thought about it a second longer.

“And if that wasn’t enough, they would want to do the same to me next.”

I didn’t dare ask Isaac what guaranteed his safety. Without intending to, he had made it clear he could do little or nothing to protect mine, and so it was time I found a way to do so on my own.

The conference on the second floor broke before lunch. The orderly procession entering the house turned into a struggle to leave it. Armed guards fought to get their charges through the gate; I assumed this meant that things had gone poorly for Joseph and his movement, but just as the first group was leaving, he appeared in the doorway, beaming, and suddenly there was a second rush back to the front door to shake his hand goodbye. I noticed deference similar to the bow the guard had given him that morning, but now it came from privileged and powerful men who nodded their heads discreetly, as if catching sight of stains on their shoes that had appeared that instant.

“That’s it?” I asked Isaac. “It’s over already.”

“Joseph is very efficient,” he said. “He lived in England.”

Efficiency was only half the equation, however. There was a desperation not to be seen together outside for too long, even if it was in the courtyard of the house they had just met in. No one trusted even semi-private spaces; it was windowless rooms or nothing at all. I wondered somewhat romantically if that was how the writers who had met in the capital had felt—not wanted or hunted, but like outlaws.

Mere minutes after the last man left, three pickup trucks carrying loads draped under brownish-gray tarps pulled quickly into the courtyard. They had been waiting nearby for the congregation to vanish before entering. Isaac was right: England had made Joseph efficient. Isaac whispered into my ear, “Joseph wants you to see this.”

I could feel Joseph watching us from the doorway; knowing he was watching me gave me something to do.

Two men left each truck and set about untying the tarps. I
had made no assumptions about what was underneath; I was so busy acting I didn’t know how to feel about the crates of unripe bananas and yams that lay in the trucks.

“Food for an army?” I asked Isaac.

“Something like that,” he said.

The men threw the boxes of food onto the ground; no one was troubled about the broken boxes or the damage done to the food. The piles of bananas and yams stood taller than me when, finally, the men reached the second load, buried beneath. They unloaded these crates carefully, one at a time, in teams of two, straight from the back of the trucks to the living room, where they were lined up in perfect rows. When there was only one box left, Joseph came out from the doorway and motioned with his hand for the lid to be opened. I couldn’t see the contents from where we stood. I had to wait for Joseph to dig in and pull out a body-length strip of bullets. He held it up as if it were a prize catch plucked from the sea, but it didn’t look like a fish, or even a snake gone limp. It looked like hundreds of metal casings clipped together. He held it up, I believe, specifically for me to see.

After the food was hoisted back into the truck beds, no one, not Isaac or Joseph or any of the guards, ever said that we were sitting on a large cache of weapons, enough to wipe out our neighborhood, a village, or to make at least a semi-valiant last stand if we were attacked. The closest we came to acknowledging the contents of those crates was later that evening, after the pickup trucks had left, blankets had been thrown over the crates, and the furniture moved back into place to hide it all. One of the guards carried in a crate of Kenyan beer. Joseph personally handed everyone a bottle.

“What should we toast to?” Isaac asked. I expected Joseph to say something like liberation, or freedom, or to our future victory, but he knew how trite and conventional that sounded. He raised his bottle and looked at everyone in the room. “We don’t toast to anything,” he said. “This isn’t a celebration. We’re trying to end the nightmare this nation has become.” We drank our beer, one after another. When Joseph left the room, Isaac whispered to me, “Maybe instead of guns we should have gotten him an alarm clock.” I raised my bottle to Isaac and said, “To never oversleeping.” Our bottles clinked just as Joseph came back in. I was afraid he would be angry to see us toast, but he was a light drinker, and the three beers he had quickly downed had softened his mood. He came over and put his arms around both our shoulders and said, “Be careful—tomorrow is an important day. I can’t have either of you lying in bed all day.”