All Our Names (25 page)

I finished just as I reached the entrance to the highway. I was far from crying, but at some point several tears had crawled out from under my eyes. Isaac saw them running down my face. He smudged them against my cheek with his thumb.

“What’s happening?”

I knew what I wanted to say: “I’m letting you go, slowly, in pieces, so it won’t break me.” I told him instead that I was thinking of Rose.

When we reached the highway, I asked Isaac to take out the atlas in the glove box and choose the route. He placed it on his lap and began to survey the country. He was delighted when he found a Cairo, an Athens, a Paris, and a Rome in America. He said we should continue going east, like all the signs suggested.

“This country,” he said. “What don’t you have?”

What we didn’t have, for all that space, were many places where Isaac and I could publicly rest without fear of who was watching us. When we stopped for lunch at a restaurant off the highway, it was impossible not to notice the hostile glares of many of the men dining there alone. They were deaf and blind to
the world until we entered; once they saw us, all they could do was glare over their coffee cups and from under the brims of their hats. No one said anything to us. Our waitress, who must have been near my mother’s age, called us both “dear” and “honey” with the same general affection. Isaac and I were different with each other—not harsh or cold, as we had been during that terrible lunch at Bill’s, just slightly separated by an invisible, but no less real barrier, a chest-high fence that we could still talk and see through rather than a wall that hid us completely from each other. We did our best not to be bothered. We didn’t hold hands, we didn’t touch, but we kept our eyes focused exclusively on each other as we ate our lunch and drank our coffee. At one point, when neither of us had spoken for several minutes, Isaac said, “On the count of three, laugh.” At three, we began to giggle and then cackle, and then laugh with what felt like genuine delight. We left with the better part of us intact.

Before getting back on the highway, I studied the map; my plan had been to drive straight and then turn north, but I decided now we were better off leaving the southern part of the state as soon as possible. Without telling Isaac, I decided we would go north first, and then cut across.

“Chicago,” I said. I thought of Isaac and me at the Knickerbocker Hotel with the ghost of Al Capone. We were the outlaws now.

We reached Chicago shortly before dusk. We drove along the lakeshore. I wanted to find the Knickerbocker Hotel but had no idea how to.

“It’s not fair,” Isaac said.

“What?”

He pointed out the window to the lake.

“You have oceans even in the middle of the country.”

“It’s not an ocean,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “Your lakes are my ocean. My forest is your jungle. America is a world, not a nation.”

We slowed to a crawl just as Chicago came into view. I had never been in a city anywhere near that size; I had never seen so many cars. I grew anxious thinking about how many people there must have been inside them. I felt like we were driving into something alive, with white gleaming spires on top of its buildings for teeth.

Every time we came to a complete stop, I turned to Isaac. He was enthralled by the view, as I suspected he would be.

He pointed to the tallest building we could see through the windshield.

“That must be the Hancock Center.”

He reached over and caressed my forearm. I took that as proof he had no idea what I was planning.

“This will be lovely,” he said.

There was no one along the path back to Joseph’s village. I expected that I would find traces of the war—more refugees, soldiers—but it was just as empty as it had been before. When I reached the band of houses that marked the town’s northern border, I heard the lorry engines approaching. Assuming Isaac was still alive, he would be back by now. I didn’t run, but I was desperate to see him again and walked as fast as I could while trying not to give the impression I was fleeing. When I reached the main road of the village, I saw that there were three lorries already parked, halfway in between the bronze fist and the Life Hotel. Dozens of soldiers were crowded into the beds of the first two. There was no crowd to greet them. The entire village had heard the engines and retreated indoors. The only truly communal knowledge was fear, and in this case everyone had the same response.

The soldiers descended from the back of the lorries; I was alone on the street watching them. The first to exit were clearly tired; they walked slowly and took time to regain their balance after landing, but they could do so on their own. That was true only for the first ones, however. Each group was more injured than the one that preceded it. There were the soldiers with minor wounds, cuts, and bruises across their chests and forearms, followed
by those who had at least one limb badly injured—an arm in a sling, a thigh wrapped in bandages. Then, finally, came those who were almost dead, and those who might live but would suffer greatly for what little remained of their lives; all of these had to be carried out.

The third lorry was parked at the very edge of the road, under a large tree, just where the town began. There were no soldiers standing in the bed, but I could see through the slats part of a hand, a tuft of hair, boots, and patches of camouflage pants and shirts. A swarm of flies hovered over this truck, and I expected soon there would be vultures perched on the tree. I looked for Isaac among the living—the healthy and able-bodied, and then among the injured. I didn’t see him anywhere; I decided that if he was among the heap of dead bodies in the back of the last lorry, I didn’t want to know. I was prepared to accept his death, but not on those terms.

There is nothing left for me here, I told myself. I didn’t know where I would go, only that I would never see the capital again. I decided to head south along the main road, in the hope that I would be able to pick up a ride to another village. I made it a few feet before two soldiers stopped me. One pointed to the lorry full of corpses. I pretended not to understand what he meant, and was trying to walk away when the other soldier took hold of my arm and pulled me back.

“Do you think you are special?” he asked me.

I shook my head no. I recognized him from the hotel. He was one of the soldiers who, under Isaac’s orders, had taken the officer with the bulldog head away.

“Then why do you think you can leave? We go out there and fight for you, and now you want to leave.” He smiled, as if the problem had nothing to do with the dead but was an issue of manners.

He turned to the soldiers behind him and pointed to the houses on the other side of the road. Each soldier entered one home and emerged shortly after with all the men or teenage boys inside it. Suddenly I was no longer alone; there must have been at least fifty of us now. The soldier holding my arm pointed to the last lorry.

“Go,” he said. “And bury them.”

“Is Isaac in there?” I asked him.

He squinted his eyes in either confusion or anger; either way, he had no idea who I was talking about. He had never heard of Isaac. He knew him by a different name, as did all the soldiers.

“The captain,” I said.

He pushed me forward. I turned around to ask him another question, but he had already moved on; he had his hands around a young man’s neck and was leading him on like a dog.

The youngest boys were sent to dig the grave while the rest of us formed a chain from the back of the lorry to the ground, where the bodies were stacked one on top of another. I was in the bed with the bodies—the second link in the chain, with a man much older than me whose thin arms were still defined by the muscles of his youth. Like all the other men, he performed his job in silence, without pity and with perhaps even a bit of gratitude that this was all that was being asked of him. He took the legs and I took the arms of each body passed to us, which meant that, whether I wanted to or not, I had to stare into every face to see if it was Isaac.

After the second body, I stopped paying attention to the features. I looked as long as it took to know whether it was Isaac, and if the body was clearly shorter, taller, or heavier than Isaac, I didn’t look at all. I simply grabbed the stiff arms and passed them to the next pair of hands. After the fifteenth or twentieth, I decided to think of them as a single body named Adam. In my
head I said, “You were a brave soldier, Adam.… Your mother and father will miss you.… You should have stayed in your village, Adam.… You had no reason to come here.… You could have gone to school and become a doctor, Adam.” And when I ran out of alternate endings, I simply thought, “Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam,” until we had carried the last body out of the lorry, and I could risk a small breath of relief: though there were more than a hundred Adams, there wasn’t a single Isaac.

We pushed all of the bodies into the long shallow grave on the other side of the tree, facing away from the village. We took turns shoveling the earth back. When we were finished, the only priest in the village was brought from his house to say a prayer over the grave. He was a short, stout man dressed in black with a purple collar. He said his prayer without any devotion, as if he had either long ago lost his faith or didn’t believe those men were entitled to share in it. Either way, when he was done, so were we. The soldiers who had been guarding us walked away as if they had finished watching a street performance that had only mildly held their interest to begin with. I thought I was done as well, and was going to continue walking south, as I had originally planned; but the second of the two soldiers, the one who had only pointed to the lorry without speaking, told me that the colonel was waiting for me in the hotel. I followed him into the courtyard, which was full of injured men lying on the ground, their open wounds festering in the sun. The soldier pointed up to the northwest corner of the balcony.

“Colonel,” he said.

I was more relieved than surprised to find Isaac with his hands on the railing looking down at me. He was a colonel, a captain, or why not a general? Surviving was enough to have earned him
that. We waved to each other—a simple thing that felt extraordinary, and I wished that we could have held that gesture for just a while longer, the way families and lovers did at bus stations and airports, whether someone was coming or going.

Isaac motioned with his hand for me to come up and join him. After a morning spent working on a mass grave, I felt I needed to stand on solid ground to make sure that I wasn’t sinking, too. I showed him the bloodstained palms of my hands, and waved for him to come to me.

The only source of water in the hotel was a manual pump in the rear of the courtyard. Isaac met me there as I was filling a small bucket to wash myself with. He handed me a bar of soap, and the first thing he said to me was “Be careful with that. It might be the only one left in the hotel.”

Before I dipped my hands into the water, Isaac told me to wait.

“Your hair is filthy,” he said. “Lean forward.”

I leaned my head next to the bucket, and Isaac poured water from a plastic pitcher over my head, then rubbed the soap deep into my scalp before rinsing it again.

“Now hold out your hands,” he said. I stretched out my arms with my palms facing up. He laughed. “This isn’t Europe,” he said. “How much water do you think we have?”

He cupped my palms for me and slowly poured a handful of water into them so I could rinse off the blood before properly washing them. By the time I finished, there was a line of men waiting behind me. “Give me a few minutes,” Isaac said.

I stepped to the side so the next man could take my place. Isaac washed his hands and hair as well. He did the same for a dozen men, until that last bar of soap was reduced to a nub no larger than the tip of a finger. He took what was left of the soap and rubbed it into his own hands until it had completely dissolved, and then rubbed his hands over his face. He washed himself with
what little water was left in the bucket, and when he was finished, there were still streaks of soap along his right cheek.

“How do I look?” he asked me.

“Tired,” I said. “And you missed a spot.”

He rubbed the side of his face with his lapel, which was the one part of his uniform that didn’t have an obvious coat of dirt on it.

“I was worried that you would come back here,” he said.

“Where else was I going to go?”

“It didn’t matter; any other place would have been better.”

“I wasn’t planning on staying long.”

“Good. By tomorrow morning, there won’t be much left.”

Isaac took three fingers of my right hand in his. We walked out of the courtyard like that, and continued to hold hands until we reached the tree behind which the dead soldiers were buried.

“Why were they buried here?” I asked him.

He nodded to the hotel across the street. “The soldiers wanted it. They said their souls would never sleep after what they did if we buried them in the other village, and maybe they’re right.”

He saw me staring past him toward the grave, but he mistook my concern for pity.

“Don’t feel bad for them,” he said. “At least you helped bury them.”

He walked to the other side of the tree and stood on top of the grave. I thought he was going to spit on it, but instead he dug the heel of his right boot into the mound of earth as deep as he could.

“What happened?” I asked him.

He pretended to ignore the question, focusing his efforts on pressing his foot deeper into the ground. After several minutes, he finally responded. “Why would you want to know more?”

I didn’t have an answer, so I chose the one I thought he would want to hear. I pulled out the notebook he had given me. So
far, I had filled six pages—four with a map, two more with half-finished sentences—but only I knew that.

“If you’re going to write something, write something nice,” he said. “Something that will make people happy. No one needs to read this.”