All Our Names (6 page)

Isaac was still conscious, bleeding from his mouth and nose. His face and arms seemed to be swelling as I knelt next to his head.

“What should I do?” I asked him.

He tried to laugh, but his lungs refused.

“This is nothing,” he said. “Go home and pretend this never happened.”

One of the women who worked in the café and two men who took orders from her came to attend to him. She pressed into his ribs, chest, and stomach and placed a damp rag over his forehead. She gestured up with her hand and the men lifted Isaac slowly from his waist and shoulder.

I tried to follow them into the café but Isaac continued to mumble with what little breath he had that I should go home. I
stopped once we reached the door. I was standing next to Isaac’s feet. One step farther back and I wouldn’t have heard him say, “We need you on campus.”

Two weeks passed before I saw Isaac again. I searched for him on campus and in our neighborhood, retracing the routes he was most likely to take. I had only a general sense of where his house should have been, so I wandered through the most obscure corners of our slum in the hope that I might hear his voice out of a window, or see his face in a crowd. At the end of the first week, I began to worry that his injuries were worse than I thought. Later, I felt certain that he had been brought into the café so he could be discreetly finished off, and there was always the fear, present from the beginning, that Isaac had been rounded up and thrown into a prison on a whim, or because of what he had done, and if that was true it was unlikely I would ever see him again.

Near the end of the second week, I thought I saw him lying on a mattress on the floor of a one-room home, naked except for a thin white blanket draped over his waist. I whispered through the open window, “Isaac, Isaac.” When the arm moved, I saw that it wasn’t Isaac. The boy was roughly our age and the same height and weight as Isaac, but with a deformed palate that must have made it hard for him to speak. He looked at me and waved. I waved back. I was so grateful that someone had actually noticed me that I stood there waving for another minute, perhaps much longer. Before Isaac, I had always been content to cast myself as the outsider, because only by such measures, I thought, could you break from the grips of the family and tribe around which you were supposed to order your life. I had ventured far away
from home to live up to that idea without understanding that, inevitably, something had to be paid for it. Every day following Isaac’s absence, I was reminded that without him I made an impact on no one. I was seen, and perhaps occasionally heard, strictly by strangers, and always in passing. I was a much poorer man for this than I had ever thought.

Isaac made a dramatic return to campus on a Monday afternoon. He looked heroic as he walked through the front gates with dark bruises beneath both eyes, a gash across his pointed chin, and a patch of scabs across the right side of his face. He limped gracefully but with force, as if trying to show the damage wasn’t permanent. I watched as every head turned toward him. I knew the injuries were genuine, but still I thought, You’re doing a wonderful job, Isaac. By the time he reached me, there were pockets of students all across the main lawn whispering about him.

Had I not been so uncertain as to where I stood with Isaac, I would have made more of his return. I would have told him that it was good to see him again, that he had been missed.

“So—you’re finally back,” I said. I couldn’t decide if I should hold out my hand.

“Yes,” he said. “I knew this place would be empty without me.”

And we left it there. I followed Isaac toward the center of the campus—to the large, open space where most of the students gathered. When we reached the southwest corner of the square, a spot normally occupied by the only two Angolans on campus, we stopped. Isaac didn’t acknowledge it, but it was obvious he was feeling tired.

“We should sit,” he said.

“There’s a bench over there.” I pointed to a spot far from the center but covered in shade.

“Too far,” Isaac said, and it was then that I caught the distinct wheezing in his breath. He had carried his limp far enough. He leaned gently backward against a young tree that bent slightly against his weight. He eased his way onto the ground and pulled his knees up to his chest.

Throughout the morning, every person who passed us stared at Isaac. There were brutally broken bodies begging on street corners across the city, and most of us hardly noticed them. People stared at Isaac because they assumed he was a student at the university, and therefore they thought they knew how he had earned his injuries. Several days earlier, a large crowd had marched along one of the main boulevards leading up to the presidential palace, demanding some sort of reform. They were allowed to get within a hundred yards of the palace before the tear gas and clubs came out. The first time I heard Isaac connected to that protest was when a young woman walked past us and, without breaking her stride, said, “Our country needs more boys like you.” Many other students waved or said hello to him—even the militant Rhodesians, who didn’t trust anybody.

“You’ve become very popular,” I said, “and you haven’t even been around.”

“I know,” Isaac said. “It’s a shame. I should have had myself beaten earlier. I could have been president by now.”

I didn’t judge him for letting that misconception spread, but only because I believed the timing of his return was a coincidence.

Isaac offered little about where he had been and what had happened since the fight at the café. When I asked him, he told me those things didn’t matter. “It’s over,” he said. “I’m here now.” Because I was ashamed for having left him, I was happy to settle for that as an answer.

• • •

The weeks after that were calm around the university. One semester ended and a new one began, but for Isaac and me the difference was negligible. We returned to the university in January as if nothing had changed, which was true as long as we remained focused solely on our second lives on campus. There were rumors and a few sparely written stories in the English-language newspapers about more arrests and violence on the edges of the city, which I read and then ignored, as if they were dispatches from a foreign country. Isaac and I continued to spend our days in the center of campus, no longer relegated to the margins, where I felt more comfortable. The attention cast toward Isaac waned but never vanished. It was understood that Isaac could always be found in the same spot, even if no one had yet tried to seek him out. When I suggested to Isaac that we find a quieter, less obvious corner of the campus, he insisted he couldn’t do it. “We’re becoming known,” he said, “Why would we quit now?”

Each day at dusk we made our way back home. Isaac was still limping, although less noticeably. Walking required his concentration, but I suspected he had to remember to struggle. If he was lying about his injury, I was hardly ready to hold him accountable. His wounds had gotten him somewhere. He was a figure, even if without a name, and I understood his desire to hold on to that until another step on the university’s social ladder had been mounted. Once that was done, I knew he would give up the limp and the bandages; fortunately, he would have the scars. I imagined him pointing to an old wound on his hand or face, and saying, “This one came from the police.” Or, “This one I can’t remember anymore. I have so many on my body.”

What I feared most for Isaac and me happened that afternoon in the diner. It seemed impossible now for us to move forward, and I assumed after that lunch that if there was any relationship left it would live on in the strictest privacy, late at night and exclusively in his apartment, with all the blinds closed and the lights off. Whatever warmth and affection we had would quickly burn out, until, eventually, we stopped speaking and became bitter strangers. I returned to the office that afternoon with a weight in the center of my chest. I spent hours trying to shake it. I went to the bathroom repeatedly. I drank cup after cup of water. When David asked me how I was feeling, I nearly choked trying to answer him.

“I think I’m coming down with a cold,” I said.

He looked me up and down. He claimed to always know when someone was lying to him, “No, you’re not. But go home anyway.”

I stayed in my bedroom all evening. My mother came to the door twice and asked if I wanted some tea, and then, later, soup. I felt the limits of my life every time she knocked. I fell asleep promising myself greater independence—a home, and then a life, and someday soon a family of my own.

• • •

I made it almost two weeks before I called on Isaac. A part of me hoped that, given enough time, he might begin to forget what I looked like, that my chin and nose and eyes might begin to blur with the images of a million other women, and that when that happened the pieces of me that I thought mattered the most to him would be restored. I prepared myself as well for the possibility that we would never recover. I looked in the classified section of the newspaper for an apartment in a different town, a relic of the Westerns I had watched with my father. I checked off the vacancies while whispering to myself, “This town isn’t big enough for the both of us.”

I shared hints of my plan with my mother, without revealing the reason behind it.

“I think it’s time I found a place of my own,” I said.

She sipped her tea and waited until she had placed her cup back on the saucer to respond.

“Why would you ever want to do that, Helen? Don’t you think we’re doing well together?”

I was the sole long-term relationship she had. She went to church on Sundays and spent one or two afternoons a week having tea at someone’s house, but those were only the rituals of life, performed faithfully as a substitute for the real thing. Finally, I was worried about becoming her.

I decided on Thursday, when the second week of not seeing each other was almost over, that I would drop by Isaac’s house. I was going to make a joke, something along the lines of “Are you hungry? I know a great little diner that has the best omelets in town.” We’d laugh and then fall into each other’s arms, and, in
the weeks afterward, find ways of mocking what had happened until it eventually became one of those stories that couples use to remind themselves of the obstacles they had overcome and the distance they had traveled. Isaac never gave me that chance, however. He came unannounced to my office early Friday morning, and I knew when I saw him sitting with his legs crossed and a tabloid magazine that was at least two years old spread across his lap that it wasn’t an accident that he had come to me first. He knew, whether by instinct or by careful thought, that I was one or two days away from doing the same, and that, had I been able to do so, some of the power in our relationship might have tipped in my favor.

I’d never felt afraid of him before, but seeing him in that chair that morning I was reminded of how little I knew about him, and for a few seconds I considered turning around and running away. I told myself I was worried about what my coworkers would think if they came through the door and saw us so awkwardly arranged, that there was something valid to that logic made it easier to believe that was the real reason I found it hard to stand there.

I tried my best to give off an air of professional detachment.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Did we have an appointment scheduled for today?”

If David had heard me, he would have said I was a terrible actress. My attempt at sounding detached was a bad cliché of the wounded-lover role I was trying so hard to avoid.

“No,” Isaac said. “We did not have an appointment scheduled for today. I came for personal reasons.”

Who speaks like that? I wanted to yell this at him until he gave me an honest answer. It wasn’t just his words but the tone that came with them. If he sounded like a character from Dickens, it was because he had decided that was what proper English sounded like. I didn’t hear his real voice until the very end of our
relationship, in the months just before he was supposed to leave. It began with a slip—he called me “love” instead of Helen. “Love,” he said, “come here,” and he extended his arms to me, knowing I would meet him. He rarely ever called me Helen again. Instead of asking if I wanted to stay the night, he’d simply say, “So what now, love?” while squeezing my hand or pressing his body against mine.

But before getting to that point, I had to convince myself that whatever Isaac said next was true. When he said, “I came here because I was concerned about you. I wanted to make sure you were all right,” I focused strictly on the words; despite their restraint, they were enough to move me. He didn’t say that he missed me or cared about me; I added that for him. I told myself the only reason he hadn’t said as much was that he lacked the confidence to do so, not the heart.

“Are you happy to see me?” he asked. “Should I have not come?”

“Of course I’m happy,” I told him.

And I genuinely was.

Isaac left the office immediately afterward. He looked to make sure no one was watching before kissing me as softly as possible on the cheek. I wished he’d had an old bowler hat he could have put on before walking out the door, something to match the antiquated way we had made up. For the next two weeks, I left work early and went to his apartment. In the beginning, we hardly talked before moving to the bedroom. The first two times, he acted as if he was surprised I had come at all.

“You’re here,” he said.

“I got lost on my way home,” I told him.

“Follow me,” he said. “I have a map somewhere in my bedroom.”

We needed disguises. One day it was a map; the next, I pretended I had come in search of a glass of water.

“Water?” he said.

“Tomorrow I promise to do better.”

We didn’t know where all the cracks and fault lines between us lay, and so we said little, in order to avoid them. Once we were in the bedroom, we rushed through our clothes. Kissing was an afterthought. It wasn’t until he was inside me that I felt I could look at him closely. We spent hours in bed each night, testing the range of what could be said. We’d fall asleep, and then one of us would wake up and immediately climb on top of the other, as if desperately trying to make a point that hadn’t yet been touched upon or that needed repeating. By the time I left, it was always well after midnight—six to eight hours would have passed, during which I might have said no more than a few hundred words, not one of which had any special meaning. Once I returned home, on the way up to my bedroom, I’d stop outside my mother’s room, at the opposite end of the long hallway lined with pictures taken more than two decades ago. Even before they separated, the only thing my parents had that resembled a relationship was the fact that they slept in the same bed. I remembered trying to sleep with them as a child and finding that I felt more alone lying between them than I did in my own room.