How Beautiful We Were

by Imbolo Mbue

  Everyone I’d met from my father’s ancestral village swore to me that his sister and her husband had treated him as if he came out of his sister’s womb, but my father, who had cut off his birth family from his life before Malabo and I were born, insisted that their fair treatment of him suggested nothing. He said they’d only been good to him because he was an orphan whom they had no choice but to be responsible for, someone they’d helped so their village wouldn’t think poorly of them for having abandoned their own kin—why should he be appreciative of that? Malabo and I ought to be thankful for what we had, he often said, living the life we were born to live, unlike what he had in his early years, growing up without the comfort of belonging, walking around a village where people didn’t bother to whisper when telling each other that there were few sadder ways for a child to begin life than the way his had, why wouldn’t such a child be unsmiling?

  I remember evenings on the veranda, sitting and waiting for bedtime, Malabo telling Yaya and me stories to make us laugh, because if we didn’t laugh we would have nothing to do but contemplate our bleak home and our inability to refashion it. How could we think of much else with my father’s melancholia in our midst? How else could we handle his worst days, when his never-ending sadness and bad temper converged and he couldn’t eat, couldn’t do anything but lie in bed for most of the day while other men went to work, and then, after rising, in shame, bark at us for daring to breathe? Once, in my adolescence, in my attempt to understand Malabo so I could be more like him, I asked him if he enjoyed the things he did for others, like going hunting with our father even though he was old enough to avoid the company of a man who sucked dry the joy of others, or visiting Old Bata, our neighbor whom no one cared to be around unless they had to—wouldn’t it be easier for him if he only did the things he had to do? Malabo had laughed and said that if everyone only did what they ought to do, who would do the things no one thought they had to do? What did enjoyment have to do with duty?

  Marriage and fatherhood only made my brother more of what he was.

  I can’t forget one night in particular when we were in the village square, having a good time with our friends, the moon brilliant and self-assured, the sky jam-packed with stars, everyone passing around dried ecstatic mushrooms rolled up in plantain leaves, smoking and laughing louder as we got higher, bliss almost as good as a woman’s thighs—a visitor would have thought we’d never heard the name Pexton—it was then that Malabo suggested that we stop laughing so loudly, we might awaken the children sleeping in the huts nearby. Don’t worry, the children have grown accustomed to sleeping with our laughter by now, one of our friends said, to which Malabo retorted: Wouldn’t it be better if the children had a choice in the matter? This was back when Sahel was pregnant with Thula. When Thula arrived, Malabo took a break from smoking during our gatherings in the square so he could be of use to his wife when he returned home, which made us laugh even harder—what help could a man possibly offer a woman with a baby?

  Despite my father’s failings, Malabo gave him the greatest gift of his life on the day Thula was born, undoubtedly the happiest day of both of their lives. Something about seeing his bloodline extend by another generation, something about holding the child of his child in his arms, a girl, something about it all brought upon my father the deepest and longest, though fleeting, moments of respite he would have from his melancholia. Yaya says that is why Thula was constantly smiling as a baby and a little girl: the first thing she saw in life was a smile her grandfather had long been saving for her.

  Our hut never knew joy the way it did in the months following Thula’s birth—my father cradling her and not wanting to give her to Sahel or Yaya even when Thula cried; Malabo and I going out at night to laugh and joke with our friends in the square, my brother merrier than any of us even without smoking, laughing the loudest now that his life had been completed by marriage and fatherhood.

  After we buried my father, when Thula was six, Malabo became our family head; that was when he became a new man. In a quest to be the father his father never was, the kind of father whose first thought in the morning, and last thought at night, was the happiness of his family, Malabo decided to use his authority to tell us what to do, how to be. He dictated what was best for me, for all of us. Telling me which girls never to bring to the hut again: why waste the girl’s time, she wasn’t what he envisioned me marrying. He wanted us to live his idea of a happy family, which meant that we had to do as he said, understand that his wisdom surpassed ours. He was determined, also, to give Thula the innocent delights our father’s melancholia had deprived us of in our childhood. Yaya and Sahel rarely complained—it was their duty to obey him—but me? I was a man too; I wanted to be listened to. But Malabo didn’t believe my opinions mattered—he was older than me, he’d become family head by virtue of being firstborn, so all major decisions were his alone to make. He wanted to go to Bézam, he was going: that was final. His downfall came in believing that, because he loved his family, everything he did for them was justified. Now he and our father are dead. That I’m now the head of our crumbling household is more than I can bear, but I must, otherwise of what import were their lives?

  * * *

  We arrive in Bézam after a day and a half. We get off at the congested chaos of a bus stop in the center of the city, the letter for the newspaperman in my bag. I read the directions Kumbum gave me on how to get to his nephew’s office and Tunis guides us as we cross streets, make rights and lefts, cars honking ahead of and behind us, dust flying into our eyes, people speaking in unfamiliar languages, the sun at its highest and draining us of what little energy we have left. We snacked on the bus rides, but long periods of sitting have weakened our legs, so we walk slowly and apart, so as not to call attention to ourselves—we don’t know who might be watching us. When we get to the end of the directions, after an hour of walking, there’s no office, just an empty patch of land.

  We sit on the ground in silence, sweating. Did the Sick One just dupe us? How could we have been such fools to trust him? From their faces, I imagine Lusaka and Tunis are thinking likewise. How could we have trusted a Bézam man to help us? Before I can say anything, Lusaka stands up and rushes across the street to a drinking spot. He speaks to a man sitting and holding a beer under an umbrella, and he returns to us smiling; the office is not far from here, he says.

  We cross an alley, go down a street, and find ourselves in front of a building as high as twelve huts stacked. It matches the description Kumbum wrote down. The first part of our mission complete, we scrape our brows with our index fingers and wipe the perspiration on our trousers. Tunis looks up at the building and asks why people in Bézam make their buildings so tall: Do they want to live in the sky? Are they afraid of something biting them on the ground? Lusaka and I say nothing in response.

  I don’t think we should go into the building just yet, I say. We’ve traveled for close to two days; we’ve taken no baths, and our mouths are unwashed. Tunis agrees—he says we smell like roasted human flesh. I laugh, but Lusaka doesn’t join me. He has never been a man who participates in anything because others do, which is why he’s always been my favorite of my brother’s age-mates. In the evenings of our young-adult days, I struggled not to stare for too long at him when everyone else was loud-talking and laughing and Lusaka, always the contemplative one, observed it all with a smile so faint you could only see it in his eyes. Once, I joked with Malabo that perhaps Lusaka was our father’s real firstborn, not Malabo, and perhaps Thula was Lusaka’s daughter. My brother had laughed and said that in a village as small as ours, founded by brothers who had married sisters, it was only by the mercy of the Spirit that we didn’t all look and act alike.

  Looking at Lusaka now, I can see that this mission, this entire struggle, is changing him, forcing him to reveal parts of himself even the most reticent cannot forever hide. I hope he’ll soon be happy, but I’ve spent enough time around grieving parents to
know that happiness is no goal of theirs; seeing flickers of light in the darkness that surrounds them will suffice. Perhaps one of Lusaka’s dead sons liked to joke—that may be why he didn’t laugh at the jokes Tunis made on the bus rides to steady our errant minds. Tunis’s best jokes had involved figuring out which fruit a given Kosawa woman’s buttocks best resembled. I’d guffawed when he labeled Sahel’s buttocks a pineapple, and Tunis had laughed too, even though Sahel is his first cousin and like a sister to him.

  * * *

  —

  “Let’s go in,” Lusaka says. “If the newspaperman doesn’t want to help us because we smell bad, we’ll ask Jakani to turn us into flowers next time.”

  We head for the door of the building.

  There’s a man standing in front of it. He looks ready for a fight, nostrils flared, fists balled, angry about something. I’m not sure what the right thing to say to him is.

  “Good afternoon,” I say.

  “What do you want?”

  “How is your day going? My name is Bongo. My friends and I—”

  “Don’t waste my time.”

  “I…please, we came to see a newspaperman. His uncle sent us.”

  He assesses us from crowns to toes. “You look like village people.” Clearly, it’s polite to be rude in this city. “What business do you have with a newspaperman?”

  “We need to deliver a letter to him.”

  “Who?”

  “The newspaperman. Could you kindly take us to him? His name is Austin.”

  “Austin? You’re here for Austin?” His smile is unexpected, crooked and broad, revealing black gums. “Why didn’t you tell me that already? Are you from his mother’s village? He was just telling me the other day about how he still hasn’t gotten a chance to visit his mother’s village.” He opens the door and motions for us to come in. “Wait right there,” he says, pointing to a corner of the empty room. “I’ll go upstairs and get him.”

  We’re not from Austin’s mother’s village, but I don’t correct the man, grateful as I am to receive preferential treatment based on someone’s mistaken assumption about me.

  Two women around my age enter the room and walk past us without offering any greetings. They’re wearing trousers like men; one of them has short-cropped hair. “So—it’s true what I’ve heard,” Tunis whispers. “There are no real women in Bézam, only men who look like women trying to look like men. Look at their buttocks—no shapes.” Though our hearts are racing as we stand in a strange room awaiting a stranger, Tunis and I cannot resist a giggle. We quickly cut it off when we see the man from the door coming down the stairs with a woman who looks like a man trying to look like a woman. The man from the door nods in our direction, then goes outside to retake his position. We’re left with this person, and I don’t know what the person’s relationship to Austin is.

  “Good afternoon, brothers,” the person says in English. “I was told you’re looking for me?”

  “I am…We were…” I begin.

  I haven’t spoken to a stranger in English in years, not since the time I returned to Kosawa after failing to qualify to be a schoolteacher. This was two years after my father died, after my brother told me that he’d heard at the big market that the government was looking for candidates to be trained to become teachers at village schools being built around the country. I was the kind of young man the government was looking for—I’d excelled in school and could speak English better than every other adult in Kosawa; I still enjoy how it feels on my tongue. My love for the language, though, wasn’t enough to convince me to leave Kosawa to become a schoolteacher in a distant village. But then I’d told Elali about the program, and she had rejoiced at the thought of becoming the wife of a schoolteacher and living in a brick house.

  I soon found myself excited about the possibility too.

  I would get to move away from my brother who never liked Elali, because he thought she laughed like a woman without discretion, which he said was telling. He claimed he’d heard from a credible source that Elali was the kind of girl who would spread her legs for any man offering something of worth. According to his source, Elali had been with at least seven men before me. I did not speak to Malabo for days after he said all this to me. He had voiced his disapproval of every girl I’d brought home since our father died—he thought me too focused on superficial traits—and now I’d finally found a woman profound in every way and he’d rejected her too. Elali wept when I asked her if Malabo’s tale was true. She asked me, between tears, if I believed the story. Of course I didn’t. I loved her. It was for her sake that I applied to the training program, and rejoiced when I was accepted. Weeks later, I moved to a town on the other side of the country, only to fail my qualification exams at the end of the yearlong training, which meant I couldn’t be a teacher, I was free to return to Kosawa and carry on as a hunter.

  I returned home with nothing but humiliation, my bamboo suitcase, and four books I’d found in front of the program office one evening. I made the books mine after no one came forward to claim ownership of them; they had probably been left behind by a member of some European delegation that had visited the program to assess it.

  The books now sit on a wooden stool in my room, reminding me of how far I traveled, only to return home. They’re replete with big words that don’t resemble English, so I’ve read only one of them, a picture book about a place called Nubia that existed before many places on earth, a lost kingdom that had worship-worthy women called Nubian princesses. I used to read the book to Thula, before she decided to stop coming to my bed in the morning and curling up against me, but mostly I read it to Elali, my Nubian princess. She didn’t leave me after I returned, but she never let go of her dream of living in a brick house. A Pexton laborer made her dream come true.

  * * *

  —

  All the English words I know desert me. I cannot figure out the polite way to ask this person in front of me if he or she is a man or a woman. The person has long hair, matted into stringy bits and running down both sides of a pretty oval face bearing a straight nose; his or her skin is light and smooth, testifying to an easy childhood in a place where the sun is tender. I cannot make a determination based on the person’s clothing, since in this city women wear trousers and men wear blouses. I decide she must be a woman—what I’m hearing isn’t the voice of a man, though it isn’t quite the voice of a woman either.

  “Please, forgive me,” I say in English, hoping my enunciation is clear. “I am just confused because we are looking for a man; his name is Austin.”

  The person chuckles and says, “I’m Austin.”

  “Oh, Mr. Austin, please, I am so sorry. Please, I was just confused….” I’m about to drop to my knees to ask for forgiveness for my insult, but he grabs my shoulder before I reach the ground, smiling. “Common mistake here,” he says. “Don’t worry about it. And, please, call me Austin. Did you say you have a letter for me?”

  “Yes, from your uncle,” I say as I pull the letter out of my bag.

  “My uncle?” He looks surprised. “How do you know my uncle?”

  “He came to our village, to help us.”

  “Oh, right, of course, for his job. Is he still there?”

  “He was…” I hope he doesn’t notice the fright in my eyes as my tongue goes heavy in my mouth. How do I answer such a question? How many lies must I tell before this is over?

  “When did he leave?” The letter is in his hands, but he’s looking at me.

  “I…I don’t remember….”

  Why is he asking all these questions? Is he truly a newspaperman, or someone the Sick One hopes will figure something out and turn us over to the government?

  “Was your village one of the first ones he and his team visited?” he asks. “I really don’t know much about what he does, except that he goes on a tour of villages.”

  �
��Yes…one of the first,” I say. “He stopped in our village, and then he left to go to another village.” My heart pounds hard with every word I utter. I fear he will ask me more specific questions. He glances at Lusaka and Tunis as he speaks, but they don’t understand much of what he’s saying, and in their discomfort they’re scarcely blinking, leaving me responsible for presenting a relaxed appearance for us all.

  I convince myself that Austin is asking all these questions because American people love to initiate light, meaningless conversations when they meet someone for the first time, so the person will like them and give them what they want; I read it somewhere. Austin doesn’t need to know about what we’ve done to his uncle because there’s nothing for him to know. No Pexton men are being held captive in Kosawa, I say repeatedly to myself. I convince myself I’ve never been inside the back room of Lusaka’s hut, and even if I were there, I didn’t see anything besides a pile of firewood in a corner.