Free All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu

their backs. Someone from inside our circle noted out loud for all to hear, including the guards standing near us: “There is nothing more restless than men in power.”
    Our gathering was broken up on a Friday afternoon at the start of April, after all the classes had ended. Our numbers thatFriday were no larger than they had been the week before: we were twenty or thirty at most. The only difference was that we huddled closer together. When four campus guards in their shabby blue uniforms, wielding their worn wooden nightsticks, surrounded us, more than a minute must have passed before any of us thought to run. We felt safe the closer we were to one another, and each of us was reluctant to give that up.
    The guards waited until they were certain they had our attention before they began to swing. To their credit, they aimed for the padded parts of our bodies, and all the women who were with us were left alone. Imagine four angry mothers trying to paddle a classroom of running children and you have a sense of what that afternoon looked like. We ran, but often enough circled back to pick up a book that had been left on the grass, or to grab someone’s arm to lead him away while a guard chased after him, swinging mildly at his back.
    The only one among us who didn’t run was Isaac. When I looked for him, he was just standing up, his arms at his sides so his entire body was fully exposed. A few minutes passed before one of the guards noticed him. He was the perfect image of defiance, with his arms folded over his chest and his legs slightly spread apart. They’re going to bash his head in, I thought. Seconds later came the crack of wood meeting bone.
    The guards left Isaac where he fell. When I came back, ten minutes later, he was already gone. I walked to the tree where I had last seen him and searched the grass for proof that he had been there—an impression of a body pressed into the grass, a few flecks of blood—but there was nothing. I waited for one hour, and then two, knowing he wouldn’t return, but hoping that perhaps hemight see me and know that this time I hadn’t abandoned him. I had tried my best to stand ground; failing that, I became a one-man vigil.
    I waited each night for Isaac to knock on my window; I would have taken him in without hesitation, but I was afraid as well that he would ask. Every day, new checkpoints were erected in the city, and within days it was impossible to penetrate the cluster of shacks that ringed our neighborhood and the two surrounding it without showing your official ID. Every coming and going, except those through obscure back routes that wound through half-burnt piles of trash and open latrine pits, eventually had a checkpoint where young men logged into notebooks the names and occupations of everyone who passed. No bureaucracy in the country until then had ever worked properly. Years could be lost in search of a birth certificate, driver’s license, or passport. It was easy to be invisible in a city that had clearly stretched its limits and was bursting at its seams. The daily records of names, entries, and departures signaled the end of that.
    I assumed Isaac had chosen to keep his distance. I imagined that, after recovering on a bed in a stranger’s apartment, he had walked to our neighborhood and taken note of the checkpoints and the blue-and-gray fatigues of the presidential guard. Then he would turn his head in the other direction, to hide the bruises that covered his face, and walk farther and farther north, past the last of the slums, until he reached a corner of the city that was barely inhabited and that until a few years earlier had been a village of a dozen thatch-roofed huts. If I wanted to believe that, then I could also just as easily imagine Isaac walking until he hadabandoned the city altogether, stopping after he had traveled well beyond the reach of the president’s powers, to a village that had been touched slightly by the British and not at all by the