by Imbolo Mbue
No one sings for the baby; our baby never had a life. There is no processional to the burial ground. Just a dozen of us. Our baby’s body is not worth making a coffin for—one of our relatives holds it in her arms, wrapped in a blue sheet.
I promise myself that afternoon that someday I will make Woja Beki and his friends in Bézam pay for what they’ve done to my family. I know nothing about how a girl makes men pay for their crimes, but I have the rest of my life to figure it out.
* * *
—
Later that week, Bongo leaves with three men to search for Papa and the others in Bézam. Before he goes, Yaya falls to her knees. She begs him not to leave her childless, the worse curse that could befall any woman who’s ever carried a child. Bongo promises her that not only will he return, he’ll return with Papa’s body, with or without life in it.
In Bézam, Bongo and the others sit on the steps of government buildings and promise parcels of land and goats to anyone who can offer them useful information. They sleep in an abandoned roadside shack, and from first light to dusk they walk up to anyone with a semblance of friendliness and ask questions, and give descriptions, but they only get headshakes. They roam a city so massive and frenzied it threatens to rip apart and swallow them at every turn. Eight days after their departure, they return empty-handed.
Still, night after night, Mama and Yaya sit on the veranda waiting for Papa, losing more flesh to despair. They take turns being the weaker woman—some nights Yaya feeds Mama with my help; other nights Mama and I feed Yaya. Many nights I feed them both, with Bongo’s help if he’s home. I force myself to eat a banana whenever I can—one of us needs to have a basic level of strength at all times. Only late at night do I consider my own pain, when I hope everyone is sleeping; it is then that I cry, imagining how different our lives would be if our ancestors had picked any other piece of the earth but this one. Images of my dead friends enter and exit my dreams. I think about what our unborn would have looked like if it had been allowed to be a fully formed child entering a kind world, a world where Papa wasn’t gone and my surviving friends and I weren’t spending precious minutes contemplating the day our turn would come to die.
* * *
—
Three months after Papa’s disappearance, the Pexton men arrive for their first meeting with the village. Before their arrival, Woja Beki tells us that we should be thankful to Papa and his group: something they did or said in Bézam must be why Pexton has decided to come speak to us. That makes no sense to me—why would people in Bézam cause Papa to vanish if they wanted to help him?—but I hope the meeting will be fruitful.
Yaya and Mama take a break from their seats on the veranda to attend the meeting, carrying along what shred of faith they have left that, despite Bongo’s futile search, Papa might return alive, even if broken. Ours is the worst kind of mourning—not knowing if the men are dead, how they died, when they died; not knowing if there’s still a chance we can save them. Yaya says this when she cries, that if she could only take her son’s corpse and put it in the ground, then she could at least begin the journey to acceptance. But the men from Pexton offer us no information at the meeting. When one of the missing men’s fathers stands up and implores the Leader to at least confirm to us that the Six are dead, so we can offer sacrifices to the Spirit on their behalf, help hasten their voyage to be with our ancestors, the Leader says that he cannot do that, he’s not allowed to do that, Pexton cannot involve itself with superstitious matters.
For more than a year now, they’ve come to speak to us every eight weeks. On every occasion, Woja Beki dons a linen suit, and the Pexton men tell their old lies using new words. Mama and Yaya cry when it’s over. Kosawa grows weaker. We were all on the verge of resignation until a few hours ago, when Konga took away the men’s car key.
* * *
The weight of my thoughts puts me to sleep toward the end of the night. When I wake up, the first light of day has descended on Kosawa. I had prayed the sun would never rise, but risen it has, and now I too must rise, to face the guns.
Juba is still sleeping next to me, but Mama and Yaya are already up—I hear them whispering with my uncle Bongo in the parlor. When I enter, they stop talking to look at me, Mama feigning a smile. I want to know everything: Are the men of Kosawa ready for the soldiers? What did they spend the night doing? Are there enough machetes?
“I’m not going to school today,” I say.
“Come,” Mama says, stretching out her hand for me to walk to her. I don’t move.
“There’s no need for you to stay home,” Bongo says. “School is going to go on as usual. Nothing’s going to happen to you there.”
“How do you know?”
“Because…everything will be fine, Thula. Just ignore all the things the Pexton men said last night, okay?”
“I can’t ignore it. They meant it. They were serious. Mama, please?”
Mama does not counter Bongo. Her fake smile remains intact.
I glance outside through the door. All is calm. Why aren’t the men running around preparing some sort of defense against the soldiers? Why doesn’t Bongo appear like someone who stayed up all night getting ready for battle? It is evident from his oiled face and his kempt hair that he just took a bath. His machete is lying against a wall, sharpened and glistening at the edges. Am I supposed to trust that his relaxed demeanor is thanks to a conviction that the machete will cut down speeding bullets?
He looks at me half-smiling, his head tilted; he resembles Papa more than ever. Speaking in the deep voice they share, he tells me that there was a lot about last night that, as a child, I’d misunderstood. He says there isn’t going to be any battle because soldiers are not coming to kill anyone. Yes, the Pexton men had uttered the words I heard, but the men did not mean that the soldiers would slaughter anyone. What the Leader meant was that the soldiers would slaughter the disagreement between Pexton and us and put an end to it all. The soldiers will be coming, that’s certain, but only to have a conversation with the men of the village. Nothing more. Which is why all the children must go to school—the adults will stay home to await the soldiers.
Mama, with a genuine-sounding chuckle, adds that by the time I return home from school, the episode will be nothing more than a story I’ll one day tell my grandchildren.
* * *
—
I don’t believe Bongo and Mama, but I don’t know what to say. I can’t argue with them—I don’t have the right to argue with my elders even if I believe they’re not telling me the truth. I look at Yaya, hoping she’ll say something wise to ease my perplexity, but words aren’t my grandmother’s favorite gift for her family at times like this—silence is.
I leave to fetch water at the well. I’m not going to school, I tell myself. I’ll pretend to have a stomachache.
On my way to the well, I see some friends; it is clear from their faces that their parents just told them something similar to what Bongo said to me.
Like me, my friends are children born in 1970. We are boys and girls, age-mates and classmates. We crawled together and toddled together and now we walk together. Sometimes the girls play separately from the boys, and other times we play together, and fight each other, and when we’re done crying and tattling on each other to mothers who sigh and ignore us, we return to being friends, because we’ll never belong with another group of age-mates the way we belong with ours. I have a few girl age-mates I’m closer to than to the others; it’s two of them I see as I approach the well. They agree with me that there are things the adults are not telling us. But they’re going to school. Apparently, everyone is going to school despite everything. “Think about it, Thula,” one of my friends says. “Would our parents send us to school if they believed we’d be killed there?”
* * *
—
Fatigued from my restless night, I fall asleep in class even before
Teacher Penda is done with the first arithmetic problem. Most of my classmates do too. When Teacher Penda asks us what is going on, why we all look so tired, we chirp in unison that nothing is wrong, nothing whatsoever, we’re just focused on listening to him. We know our parents wouldn’t want us telling a government man that they’ve taken our village head and three of Pexton’s men captive. One of my classmates almost says it, stammering something about a long village meeting the previous night, but the rest of us shoot him a glare so sharp we’re surprised he doesn’t end up one-eyed, like Jakani and Sakani. After this, we’re all afraid that we might inadvertently tell Teacher Penda what the village has done and in so doing put our lives in greater danger. The fear keeps us alert for the rest of the day and forces us to answer every question, so that our teacher will suspect nothing.
I like Teacher Penda, even if he’s a government man. Like the other six teachers at our school, he lives with Pexton’s laborers at Gardens, in a brick house covered with an aluminum roof, one of many benefits to being a government man. Unlike every other government man we’ve ever met or heard our parents talk about, though, Teacher Penda is kind to us. He gives us only knowledge, which isn’t a poisonous thing. But we know that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t betray Kosawa for the sake of money. He’s not one of us—he’s from a village on the other side of the country, a place where, he loves to tell us, a woman can marry three husbands if her beauty is too great for one man to bear. We’ve never asked him if he has a wife and children in his village—such questions are not for one to ask another—but we like him enough that we invite him to our family weddings and birth celebrations, which he attends only if we’re good students.
* * *
—
I return home from school that afternoon to learn from Mama that the soldiers did not arrive as expected, but the adults are not concerned, they know the soldiers will come, they’re prepared for them whenever they do arrive. The gleeful manner in which Mama says that makes me lose my skepticism; I become convinced that all will be well.
Mama tells me that she has prepared my favorite meal—fried ripe plantains and beans with smoked pig feet. Across Kosawa, mothers have prepared special meals for their families, as if the simple day deserved celebration. They’ve cooked rice and smoked-goat stew; leafy greens steamed with palm oil and mushrooms; boiled yams to go with okra sauce and bushmeat. The meals are made from ingredients both pure and adulterated, some from our dying farms and emptying barns, most bought at the big market, paid for with a portion of whatever the women earn from selling the animals their men kill in the forest. Some dishes are made possible by the benevolence of relatives with fertile lands who live in other villages, aunts and grandmothers and cousins many times removed who occasionally visit and offer us foods they still have in abundance. So delicious are the meals that we think little of sickness and death as we eat on our parlor floors. I give Juba some of my food when he starts eyeing my plate after licking his with his tongue. Some of my friends have bigger stomachs than I do, and their parents have many mouths to feed, so they and their siblings fight over the right to lick the sauce at the bottom of the cooking pot; oftentimes they quarrel so much their mothers intervene and draw a line in the pot with their fingers, giving each child a section to lick.
After we’re done eating, my friends and I wash our families’ plates and pots—a quick chore for many, considering there’s not much left to clean after all the licking. The rest of our chores that evening are more enjoyable than they’ve ever been: chickens and goats meekly take their sleeping spots in barns; the leaves and twigs we sweep in our front yards gather in perfect piles, which we transport to our backyards so they can crumble over time and merge with worms to serve as nourishment for our sickly soil.
With chores finished, and approaching twilight turning the air blue, we hurry out to play. Across compounds, friends and siblings start hiding and seeking, kicking balls of plantain leaves and rubber, everyone enjoying a hopefulness we’d feared we’d lost.
I’m happier than I’ve been since Papa vanished over a year ago. I don’t know if a dialogue between the adults and the soldiers will bring Papa home, but I trust our men will take a stand that will force Pexton to do more than send us useless representatives.
Sitting with three friends on one of their verandas and watching a couple other friends jumping rope, I laugh as one of them keeps tripping on herself. When my friends stop playing and start arguing about one thing or another, I smile and listen. I’ve never found the need to use words unless I must. Papa says it’s because I was born with four eyes and four ears and a quarter of a mouth better suited for smiling than for talking. On this evening, I have even less need for words, and I can’t stop grinning, overwhelmed as I am with love for my village and its people. I listen to the laughter of my friends, and watch young men heading to the square to laze and linger and smoke mushrooms—the breeze is perfect for such an activity—and I can think of no better place to have been born in than Kosawa.
* * *
—
The next morning, while eating breakfast, I ask Mama if there’s a plan for what the village will do with the captives, and Mama tells me that Bongo and Lusaka and the rest of the men are going to have a meeting later in the day to map a strategy, what to do if the soldiers don’t soon arrive. My friends and I wonder, on our walk to school, and during recess, what the strategy might be. Would our men kill the captives? I hope they kill Woja Beki first, give him the worst possible death for betraying his own.
After my afternoon chores, I go to the square to meet my friends, and we take turns doing each other’s hair under the mango tree. Again, I let them do the talking. Sometimes they yell at each other, because one friend wants to be heard above another, what they have to say is just too important, which confuses me because listening is far more enjoyable than fighting to be heard. Papa is the only one I ever truly yearned to talk to, because our conversations were like the rustling of leaves, slow and gentle, followed by silence. Now that he’s gone, I prefer to spend more time alone in my head, pondering why the world is the way it is, wondering if the Spirit will one day decide to redesign it.
* * *
On the third day of the Pexton men’s captivity, Yaya is taking a nap, and I’m sitting with Mama and Juba in the parlor. We are eating when we hear it, the sound of an engine over the noise of our chewing, something chugging down the narrow road from Gardens.
It’s a sound neither loud nor bothersome, but it needn’t be to be noticeable, because ours is a small village, too little for noises of certain sorts to find hiding places. Even with the oil field nearby, cars seldom arrive in Kosawa, for there is nothing past us, nothing but trees and grass as far as one can travel, which is why the sound of an approaching vehicle is enough to make us pause and change the direction of conversations, speculating on who’s in the car and what they’ve come for.
The food in my mouth turns to garbage.
I look at Mama. Don’t just sit there, I want to scream at her. Stand up. Lock the doors. Lock the windows. Do the triple knot you did the night of the meeting.
Yaya ambles out of her bedroom. She looks at us and walks to the veranda. We all stand up and follow her outside, palm oil from my food dripping down my fingers.
* * *
—
The men of Kosawa are coming out of their huts. They have nothing in their hands as they move toward the car—no machetes, no spears. Bongo is probably at Lusaka’s hut, likely discussing the minutiae of the anticipated conversation with the soldiers. But shouldn’t a conversation with soldiers involve weapons? I’m tempted to ask one of our neighbors this as he rushes to the square. I want to tell him that he’s forgetting something—he and the other men can’t go out to meet soldiers empty-handed even if they’re hoping for a polite conversation—but as more men come rushing past our hut toward the square without weapons, none of them with the countenance of men
about to collide with their doom, some of them chatting and laughing with one another, slapping each other’s backs and rubbing their own bellies to show how well their wives had just fed them, I decide a new form of madness has descended upon the men of Kosawa.
What did Jakani and Sakani do to them right after the village meeting? The twins were supposed to prepare them for the soldiers’ arrival and everything that would ensue, but it seems that, somehow, whatever ritual they did had the reverse effect.
Mama and the other mothers step off their verandas after the men disappear from sight. They whisper, holding toddlers by the hand, babies on their hips and backs. In silence, they start walking toward the square. Though confused, we children follow our mothers, for, surely, they wouldn’t ever lead us to doom. We walk in twos and in threes. I inhale, I exhale, half unable, half unwilling to envision the scene we’ll find at the square.
* * *
—
The soldiers are out of their car by the time we arrive. They survey us as we approach. They assess the mango tree under which Konga isn’t napping. Where is Konga? I’d asked Mama, but she’d said that no one knows; no one has seen him since the night of the village meeting. He had sent around word for all the men of the village to meet him in front of Jakani and Sakani’s hut, but he never showed up there, leaving the twins to preside over the rest of whatever happened that night, things we’ll never know.