by Imbolo Mbue
My uncle Bongo is at the meeting, sitting next to Papa, but he doesn’t offer to join. The moment he and Papa return home, Bongo begins imploring his older brother to reconsider his plan. Bongo is convinced Woja Beki will set a trap for Papa and his team. Some of the men in the team were part of the group that had once conspired to kill Woja Beki for his treachery. Woja Beki knows how much the men detest him for living in a brick house and drinking bottled water from Bézam and wearing new shirts and trousers from America, clothes he claims his sons gave him in appreciation for being a great father, matching outfits he loves to wear as he stands over the coffins of children, spilling water out of his fishlike eyes. But Papa cares little about that—in his desperation to never see his only son breathe his last again, he forges an alliance with a man he despises.
* * *
—
“Think about it, Malabo,” Bongo says the morning of Papa’s departure. We’re all sitting on the veranda. Bongo is facing Papa, who’s staring straight ahead. “Think about who you’re trusting. Gono works for Pexton. His two brothers work for the government. They all work at jobs that supervisors at Pexton helped them get. Why would you trust them? You’ve never liked any of them since we were children. And their father—even the smallest child in Kosawa knows that a truthful word never escapes Woja Beki’s mouth; if he says good morning to you, you go outside and see if the sun is indeed out before you respond. The man is a snake, and you’re going to stay in his son’s house and hope that he’ll help you, even though we all know whose side they’re on?”
“If you have a better idea, why don’t you say it?” Papa says. “Do you know anyone who lives in Bézam? Someone who’ll be willing to take us in and feed us and arrange meetings between us and the—”
“You think you’ll go to Bézam and the government is going to shake your hand and say, ‘Welcome, how can we help you?’ ” Bongo says.
“I’m not going there for a handshake.”
“You’re wasting your time. And causing your family great distress. For what?”
“Is the government a rock, a thing with neither brain nor heart?” Papa yells as he turns to face Bongo. “Is the government not humans like us—people who have children, mothers and fathers who know what it’s like to have a sick child? I sat here and watched my son die and come back to life right in my arms. Did you not see it happen with your very own eyes? If the Spirit had not felt sorry for Sahel and me, Juba would not be sitting here with us today. And what did he die from? From something the government can put an end to. He’s well now, but who can swear to me that he won’t get sick again if he continues drinking this water? What’s so crazy about me going to find someone in the government who I can talk to as father to father?”
“Do not go to Bézam.”
“When you have a wife and children, you’ll learn how to stand up and do what a man needs to do for his family instead of sitting here mouthing nonsense.”
Bongo stands up and goes into the hut.
Yaya sniffles, though I see no tears—her eyes are downturned, she’s too pained to look at her children. “My dear son,” she says to Papa, “I may not be here when you return.”
“There’s nothing for you to worry about, Yaya,” Papa says, his voice having rediscovered its gentleness. “I’ll be gone for ten days at most.”
“When I see your father on the other side, I’ll give him greetings from you. I’ll tell him that you grew up to be a good husband and father. He won’t agree with your abandoning your family to march into a trap with your eyes wide open, but he’ll be proud of you after I tell him how well you and Sahel took care of me.”
“Yaya, please…”
Yaya leans on her cane, pulls herself off the stool, and enters the hut. Mama follows, carrying Juba on her hip, my unborn brother or sister in her belly.
I remain outside with Papa, neither of us speaking, both of us looking at the guava tree as the wind brings down the leaves. The dry season has just ended, heavy rains are on their way. Nights of thunderstorms will soon abound; on one or two mornings, we’ll awaken to the sight of a rainbow. When the next dry season starts, later in the year, it will usher in the year 1980, a year I’m looking forward to because it’s the year I’ll turn ten, my favorite number. On this morning, though, I must act as if I’m four times ten years old, for Papa’s sake, so he feels less alone as he struggles to convince everyone that he needs to do this. I don’t want him to go, but I know he has to do it, for Juba and me.
“Thula,” he says to me after a long minute of us sitting in silence.
“Papa.”
“Make sure, while I’m away…” He sighs. He does not turn to look at me as he tells me to watch over Juba and make sure to listen to Yaya and Mama and Bongo.
“Yes, Papa.”
He tells me he’s counting on me to be strong, especially for Mama—make sure she eats and sleeps well, for her sake and the sake of our unborn.
I nod.
“I don’t want to come back and find that she and Yaya have not been eating because of their anxiety about my return. Bongo is a man—he doesn’t know how to do certain things well, so I’m entrusting this to you. Take very good care of your brother.”
“I’ll do as you say, Papa.”
“Get up and go get ready for school.”
On the walk to school, between lessons, during recess, my friends ask me if it’s true, if my father is really going to lead his group to Bézam, if they’re going to march into the palace of His Excellency and demand that His Excellency remove Pexton from our land or else. I respond to no questions; I want everyone to leave me alone, or to go talk to the children or sisters of the five other men, some of whom also come to me for answers, seeking any assurance I can give that everyone will return home safely, that Bézam wasn’t the vicious jungle of our imagination whence no one ever returned.
* * *
Papa is gone by the time I return home from school.
I say nothing to Mama and Yaya besides greetings. I go into the bedroom and lie on my mat with my school uniform still on. I cover my head with my blanket and try to imagine life in a perfect world, but all I see is Papa’s face. He and his group probably caught the bus at Gardens not long after I left for school, to begin the journey that would require them to change buses at least twice before arriving in Bézam a day and a half later. Mama calls for me to come eat, but I don’t respond. I have no interest in food.
Bongo doesn’t go out that evening to sit with his friends at the square. Mama goes to bed early. I rise and go to the veranda to sit with Juba and Yaya. We’re all thinking of Papa, wondering what he’s doing at the moment. We ask the Spirit to be with him. I think of his advice that I never forget how it feels to be a child when I grow up. I want to keep my promise to him, but I also want to forget I ever lived through such anguish.
We begin counting down the days, desperate for them to hurry to ten, which they refuse to. Day One takes a thousand years to get to Day Two, which takes three thousand to get to Day Three. Roosters won’t announce a new dawn quickly enough, shadows won’t lengthen at a generous speed. We spend every second with our ears searching for sounds of a return, scrutinizing noises from every direction, saying nothing beyond what is necessary, afraid we might utter a word that would put the others in even greater distress. The minutes and hours remain reluctant to leave us, though we beseech them to fly away. When the sun begins its descent, it appears to take a prolonged pause with every drop, to mock us, surely, for there is nothing here for it to take so long to admire, this ordinary view it has seen every evening since the day the Spirit created earth.
We visit the families of the other men. Mama goes to see her friend Cocody, the wife of Bissau, Papa’s best friend—their two husbands are in Bézam, they’re two anxious wives. Mama and Cocody talk in sad tones about their fruitless search for sleep every night. Another friend
of Mama’s, Lulu, comes to visit us; her brother, Lobi, went with Papa. Mama tells Lulu she’s sorry for Papa’s role in her family’s pain, and Lulu asks Mama why is it that women feel they have to apologize for their men’s failings—when was the last time a woman was the source of her village’s suffering? Lulu’s voice is not as loud as it often is, but she still pushes her tongue through the gap between her front teeth every time she speaks, the same gap her brother has, which makes me wonder what happens to the gap between people’s teeth when they die. But no one has died. Has anyone died?
* * *
—
On the tenth day, I wake up early, sweep away the guava leaves in the front yard, and burn them at the back of the hut. I hurry home after school and dare not leave the veranda. I force myself to breathe. We all sit on the veranda, saying nothing to one another, our emotions warped and ineffable, our eyes dry from alertness. We wait till the darkness gets so thick we can scarcely see the torment on each other’s faces.
Papa does not return.
On the eleventh evening, Mama and Bongo take turns sleeping and sitting outside until the sun rises and the dew dries. The next night, I cry in the darkness, begging Papa not to leave me, to please hurry back home to me. In the morning, Mama rises up with bloodshot eyes. She walks to Gardens and takes the bus to Lokunja, to the big market. She returns with fresh produce and kills two of our chickens. She makes a meal of grilled chicken and boiled green plantains with eggplant and tomato sauce on the side, Papa’s favorite—she’d had a dream in which Papa returned and asked for something to eat. When Papa does not return, Mama offers the food to those who come to tell us that Papa is surely on his way back, shaking their heads sadly as they rip off meat from bones with their teeth and lick their fingers before asking for a cup of water to wash down the meal.
By the fifteenth morning, Yaya can barely climb out of bed. Mama wipes her down because getting to the bathroom is too long a walk—first age attacked her legs, now heartache is finishing the job. More neighbors and relatives arrive to comfort us in the following days. Bongo visits the families of the other men to assure them that, though hope might be frail, everyone has to do whatever they can to stay strong. At school I avoid all eyes. I sit alone during recess, having no need for hollow words of comfort.
Twenty days come and go, twenty nights of nightmares.
Worse than the waiting is the punishing nature of time, its ruthless inflexibility. Our appetites disappear before us. What sort of news should we prepare ourselves for?
* * *
—
Woja Beki’s son Gono arrives from Bézam on the thirtieth day.
I’m returning home from school when I see the car he hired in Lokunja dropping him off. I hurry home to alert everyone. We all run to Woja Beki’s house, Mama holding her belly, Juba on my back. Even Yaya, who has barely eaten in days, picks up her cane and hauls what little is left of her body. Because, surely, it has to be good news. Or not the worst of news, at the very least. Gono hasn’t returned with a carful of dead men, so it must be that Gono came to tell us why Papa’s return has been delayed.
But Gono does not know where Papa is.
The Six arrived safely in Bézam two days after they left the village, Gono tells us. He was expecting them, because his father had sent him a message through the district office, so he went to the bus stop to meet them. He hugged them and took them to his house, where his wife fed them her special cocoyam porridge with smoked porcupine, and gave them mats to sleep on in the living room. His wife served them potatoes and fried eggs for breakfast, and then the men got on a bus with him to go to the government office, their bellies filled, their eyes bright as they gaped at quick-walking, fast-talking crowds, cars as far as they could see, houses sitting atop other houses, some structures so high they had to lift up their heads to see the roofs.
“I left them in the children-affairs office to meet with two directors of health I’d arranged for them to talk to—I’d been thinking that if the government could send some medicine to Kosawa, that might help,” Gono says. “Then I went to my office, came back to get them two hours later, but they weren’t there.”
Our gazes upon him are cold as he speaks, standing in his father’s parlor, encircled by us, the fathers and mothers and wives and children and brothers and sisters of six most likely dead men. The rest of the village is outside, wondering about the fate of their cousins and nephews and friends and neighbors.
“You went to get them after their meeting and you didn’t find them because they had vanished like dust, is that what you’re telling us?” Bissau’s father asks.
Gono nods.
“Vanished how?” Bongo asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Do not lie to us,” Bissau’s wife, Cocody, shouts. She is pregnant, her belly bigger than Mama’s.
“I swear it’s the truth. The directors in the children-affairs office said they met with them, then sent them on their way. I thought they’d be waiting for me in front of the building, but I went all around the building, over and over, and I couldn’t find them.”
“You sold them to the government,” a missing man’s brother yells.
“I’d never—” Gono cries.
“You killed them,” a voice behind me shouts.
“Kill my own friends? Why?”
“Grown men don’t get lost.”
“They don’t. That’s why…that’s why this situation…I just don’t understand….”
“Tell us the truth, Gono,” a mother cries. “Please, tell us the whole truth.”
“I swear to you all on every last ancestor,” Gono says, bending to swipe his index finger on the floor, lick the dust on the finger, and point it to the sky, “I swear upon all that I am that the government people promised me our brothers left their office alive.”
Wives and daughters and mothers begin wailing, their voices flying through the double doors of Woja Beki’s house, over the apple trees in his compound, along the path that leads to Gardens, through the supervisors’ offices and the school Pexton built for the children there, past their clinic, into the meeting hall where the laborers gather on many evenings to reminisce about the distant homes they left behind to work for Pexton, onto the vast, grassless field on which stand structures of metal spewing fire and smoke, and down into the wells, where they become one with the oil.
I sit against the wall with my brother on my lap, watching my mother cry, her hand on her belly. I yearn to dry her tears, but I yearn even more never to see her tears again. Mama’s crying has known no pause since the ten-day mark—so much does she cry that Yaya warns her that the baby will be born withered up if she doesn’t do a better job of holding on to her liquids. But then, when Mama stops crying, Yaya begins, singing a woeful, discordant solo about the fate of a child born to a dead father, and then Mama is back to crying, and it’s then I walk out of the room, because none of that is of any use to me; I’m better off spending my time thinking about the chances that Papa is alive, the odds that he’ll stay alive until I’m old enough to go to Bézam and rescue him, bring him home, hear him laugh, watch him make Mama happy and teach Juba how to be a man.
“My dear sisters and children, are these tears necessary?” Woja Beki says, rising from his sofa. “Are there any corpses in front of us? What are we crying for? We don’t know the full story yet, but Gono and I will get to the bottom of all this, I assure you.”
Looking at Woja Beki’s face, I wonder why he was ever born, considering there’s an infinite host of unborn begging to be born, considering most of the unborn would be decent people if given a chance at life. Why does the Spirit keep on cursing the world with the existence of the likes of Woja Beki? I hate him for how he lied to Papa, and how he has no shame about lying to us, how he can look at us in our despair and fling untruths at us, rubbing pepper and scorching embers into the very wounds he inflict
ed.
I hate how, because of him, two days after the meeting in his house, Mama’s grief pushes out our unborn before it is ready for this world. Mama screams when she sees the baby—its body is so small it fits in her palms—and her friends implore her to be strong, to let go, to bear her burdens like a woman. No one tells Mama that there’ll soon be another baby—without Papa sleeping next to her, Mama will never have another baby.
Yaya barely has a voice left to cry with as we walk to the burial ground to bury the baby on top of my grandfather Big Papa. It doesn’t seem that long ago when we walked this same path and crossed the small river to bury Big Papa. I still remember his casket at the front of the processional, balanced on the shoulders of Papa and Bongo and four other men, behind them Mama pregnant with Juba and holding my hand, three women holding Yaya, reminding her of how blessed she was to have shared decades with her husband, the rest of the village behind us, singing: All lives must end, may your life never end.