by Imbolo Mbue
“I get the feeling he’s ready to retire, considering his health issues,” Austin says. “But he’s got a family, and jobs like his don’t come easy.”
I don’t know what he means by “come easy,” but out of respect I can’t ignore anything he says either, so I nod with my head bowed. When I raise my head, I meet his eyes. State your mission, Bongo, I tell myself. Now.
“Our village is dealing with a bad situation, Austin. That is why we came to see you,” I say. “Your uncle thinks that you can help us, so he wrote this letter. He wants us to tell you that, please, can you help us?”
I’m sweating as I say this. I urge myself to plant my feet firmly on the ground. Whatever you do, don’t falter. Stay upright. My mind collapses still: What if there are soldiers in the building? What if they’re hiding somewhere upstairs? I won’t be surprised if they walk out any minute now and take me to wherever they took my brother.
“Would you like some water?” Austin asks. My discomfort is obvious. I shake my head, even though I’m thirsty. I can’t be so reckless as to ask too much of him.
“Let’s have a seat,” he says. He starts walking toward a corner of the room where there’s a round table and three metal chairs. He tells us to sit on the chairs, then hurries up the wooden stairs and brings a fourth chair. While he’s gone, we say nothing to each other. My shirt is soaked. Sweat is running down Tunis’s and Lusaka’s faces. Tunis starts biting his fingernails. We’re about to share our story with a newspaperman.
Austin unfolds the letter from his uncle after he returns; I’d already read it to make sure it contained no betrayal. He displays neither shock nor excitement as he reads. I look at my hands and tell myself to be still—trembling hands never won a battle. Lusaka looks at me and nods at me, to tell me that I’m doing well, I’m not failing.
Austin excuses himself after reading the letter. He runs up the wooden stairs again and returns with a book and a pen. He wants to know more, he says. He wants to know every detail, from the day Pexton first arrived in Kosawa to the day the last child died. I speak, and he writes. One question follows another. How many children have died? I try to remember; too many, I tell him. How many do I think? I ask Lusaka and Tunis. We do a quick count, but we cannot come up with the exact number. I tell him Lusaka lost two sons. He looks at Lusaka, who averts his eyes. Tell me about his sons, he says to me. I tell him how Wambi was the best arithmetic student in his class. I tell him about Lusaka’s firstborn son, who, like other mischievous boys in the village, loved to give the family’s dog palm wine and laugh as the dog got disoriented. I tell him Lusaka’s sons were very close and were looking forward to entering young adulthood together and moving from the room they shared with their little brother to the back room of Lusaka’s hut. I do not tell him that his uncle was dying in that same back room a couple of days ago. I only tell him about Woja Beki. I tell him about the size of Woja Beki’s house, and the jobs Woja Beki’s sons have in Bézam. I do not tell him that his uncle is in Woja Beki’s house as we speak, and that I pray his uncle survives whatever is ailing him, for everyone’s sake.
I tell him about Malabo. I tell him how Malabo left Kosawa with his best friend and four other men over a year ago and never came back. You must miss your brother terribly, he says. My brother was a great man, I say; he made me angry, he made me happy, the world will never see the likes of him again. Austin says he’s sorry for my loss, for all of our losses. I nod, realizing how much it still hurts.
He tells me he has no brothers or sisters, but he has cousins whom he’s close to. He ran into one of them earlier in the day, he says. She was running late to an appointment to try on her wedding dress, but she couldn’t resist standing on a street corner to excitedly tell him the latest wedding news, most notably that the wife of a government minister would be in attendance. She said her father should be back in a few days to go to the village and pick up two cows for the feast. Did his uncle gush to us about the upcoming wedding? Austin asks me.
He doesn’t realize what he’s doing. He doesn’t know he just told me something I hadn’t considered—that the families of our captives have not yet reported them missing.
No one is looking for the men.
Their families think they’re still traveling from one village to another.
We have a few days before they’re declared missing and Kosawa and every village they were supposed to visit on their trip comes under suspicion.
I could hug Austin right now—what a revelation for a moment like this. Based on this information, I deduce, we have enough time to return to Kosawa, lead the men into Jakani and Sakani’s hut to erase their memories, and send them on their way. By the time the men return to Bézam, Austin will have written our story and sent it to America.
* * *
They lied to us when they said that the soldiers would come for us if they didn’t return to Bézam after the village meeting. They lied to us because they could. What means did we have to know the truth? How could we have known that they weren’t scheduled to return to their homes that evening? That their next stop was another village where they would tell the people that change was coming, something the people would wait for—for how long? Until the day a lunatic tells them to walk out of their wide-open prison gates?
Who sent the two soldiers? Perhaps a government person in Lokunja when the men didn’t show up for a planned meeting? Perhaps the overseer at Gardens, because the men were supposed to spend the night in his house but never showed up? But if that were the case, wouldn’t the overseer have alerted the Pexton office in Bézam? Why didn’t he? Perhaps the overseer told someone in the district office but that person didn’t take his concern seriously, thinking the men had decided to abscond from their duties and enjoy some village fun. Is it possible the soldiers believed the story we concocted with Woja Beki? Or could it be that the people in the Bézam office suspect the men are missing but don’t yet want to tell their families, lest the incident turn into an ugly drama? Nothing is inconceivable in this country. I’m not skilled enough to untangle the whos and whys, but one thing is certain: everyone hopes the men are doing their job somewhere, no one thinks they’re in Kosawa, and if the men were to be declared missing, who would think that the people of Kosawa have the audacity to take representatives of Pexton prisoner?
I tell Austin everything except any of this.
Halfway through the questioning, I pull out the lukewarm bottle of water in my bag and take a sip. I need my voice to be steady as I describe the children’s symptoms and the recent oil spills that seeped into the farms of three families. I tell Austin what the big river looks like now, green and flowing sluggishly under layers of toxic waste. I tell him how meager the next harvest is likely to be and how, because of the bad harvests, we use most of what little money we have after paying taxes to buy food in Lokunja.
When I’m done talking and Austin is done writing, he informs me that he’ll write the story tonight and send it to America first thing in the morning. His friends in the newspaper office there will do some research to make sure that, in the absence of evidence, our story can be substantiated by known facts. They might also try to talk to the Pexton people in America, to hear their side of the story, but, knowing what their response will likely be, the people in the newspaper office might decide to print only Kosawa’s side of the story and tell Pexton’s side separately if they so choose. Ultimately, Austin says, the decision on whether or not the story will be printed will be made by the big men at his newspaper. All he can do is write the best story he can and hope that everything flows smoothly and the story he writes is deemed worthy to be printed. If that happens, the American people might be able to read about us in a matter of days.
I look at him. I cannot speak. I have only thoughts. I’m thinking that the impossible just happened: Our story might be read across the ocean. We will be unknown no more. We will have names. Kosawa will be identified. Our departed
children will be heard of—how long before salvation arrives for the children who are still holding on?
I repeat to Tunis and Lusaka everything Austin has said. They cannot believe we just found a champion in someone who wants nothing from us. No baskets of gifts. No kneeling. No pleading. No promises of land.
“When are you going back to your village?” Austin asks me.
I tell him we came to Bézam only to see him; now that we’ve seen him, we’ll be leaving right away. We’ll get on the first of four buses in the next couple of hours.
“Can you stay till tomorrow evening?” he asks.
He wants to write the story soonest, send it to his people, and make himself available in the event they want to publish it immediately and need him to do more work on it. Then he’d like to come with us to see Kosawa. He’ll bring his camera and take as many pictures as he can, because with pictures he’ll be able to write a second, more in-depth story. He wishes he had a place for us to sleep tonight, but he lives with a friend in a small space. I tell him not to worry. We’ll sleep at the bus stop and be here to meet him tomorrow. We’ll sleep on a pile of garbage if we must, for a chance to reclaim our land.
The Children
We didn’t know he was dying. Never would we have called him the Sick One if we’d been aware of how infirm he was—half dead, in fact. We’d been sick, we’d seen our brothers and sisters and friends get sick; nothing about it was worth mocking. We only gave him that name because we could think of no better name for a man whose body offered us passing chances at superiority, and we needed it, as a salve for our heartache.
We were playing in our compounds when we heard that a meeting of the men needed to take place immediately. Our mothers looked at our fathers, seeking an explanation for the urgency, but they got nothing. After our fathers had left for the square, we tried to ask our mothers what they thought might be going on, but they scolded us to hurry along and start our evening chores. We were sleeping by the time our fathers returned home. The next morning, on our way to school, was when we learned from our older siblings, who were discussing it with each other, that the Sick One was sick and Lusaka and Bongo and Tunis had gone to Bézam to look for medicine for him.
We had no jokes to make about the Sick One that day—we wished on him every bit of health within the grasp of men. We would even give him some of our health, we agreed, if he promised to return it. All day in class, we daydreamed that Sakani had made a potion for the Sick One, and that it was flowing in his veins, crushing his disease. When we returned home, though, we overheard the women saying that Sakani had refused to go to Woja Beki’s house to treat the Sick One.
Why would Sakani refuse to treat a sick man? He was our healer and deliverer from all physical manifestations of malicious spirits; he may have failed in saving our departed friends and brothers and sisters, but with those of us still living he had succeeded. He had lowered our fevers and made ointment for our rashes, given us cough remedies squeezed from leaves, cleaned out poison that had accumulated and was causing pain in our ears. He healed children from villages where the medicine men were mere mortals claiming to be something more—men born in single births, on ordinary days, after routine labors, nothing about them notable. Sakani could heal any sick person except those who the Spirit told him had run out of their allotted time, and even for these dying ones, he offered relief from what might have been an excruciating exit—he gave them a potion that allowed them to go softly and tenderly, unaware they were bidding farewell to this world.
From what we overheard, our men had stood outside Sakani’s hut and called for him to come help the captive. He’d appeared at the door and, in as few words as he was willing to waste, told them that he wouldn’t do it. We couldn’t understand his decision, much as we pondered. Was it because his duty was to heal us, not our enemies? Was that the direction the Spirit gave him when he received his powers at birth? Like his brother, he never explained himself—his ways were not our ways, nor his thoughts our thoughts.
Visiting each other before dinner that evening, we discussed a new detail we’d learned: when young men had arrived at Woja Beki’s house with the Sick One on the back of one of them, Woja Beki had a bowl of soup ready for the invalid. We heard Woja Beki had assisted the young men in placing the Sick One on his sofa. He’d taken off the Sick One’s socks so his toes might breathe, and unbuttoned his shirt so that air could flow into his chest. One of us mentioned that she’d heard from her sister, whose best friend was a cousin of one of Woja Beki’s daughters, that Woja Beki had spent all night at the Sick One’s side, rejecting his wives’ pleas that he take a rest while they kept watch.
* * *
—
We felt for Woja Beki the more we learned about how well he took care of the Sick One: holding a bucket under his mouth for every vomit, wiping him down with a cold cloth when his temperature rose. We knew he was diligent not because he had any experience caring for a sick man—none of our fathers knew how to care for their sick selves, never mind the sick selves of others—but because he understood what would happen to Kosawa if the Sick One were to die our hostage. We heard the women whispering about it, that Woja Beki could have escaped Kosawa if he wanted to, that if he’d sat down with his family to plot their freedom, they could have found a way to get one of his sons to run to Gardens—surely, there had to be a moment in the deepest hour of night when all the eyes set to monitor them were shut. Once he got to Gardens, the son would have been able to send a message to officials in Lokunja or to Bézam. The government would have sent soldiers to rescue the Pexton men and return Woja Beki to his rightful place.
Our fathers joked about how they’d shrunk him from a leopard to a rabbit, but we knew that couldn’t be the sole reason why he’d become so abased. We hadn’t seen him since the day he misled the soldiers, but we imagined he was flashing his teeth less, contemplating his love of Kosawa more, a love that years ago evaporated somewhere in his brick house, or was subsumed by the basket of cash we hear sits under his bed, only to return the first night he spent on the floor of Lusaka’s back room. This renewed love for Kosawa was at his core now; it was evident in actions driven by a cognizance that his title would be worth nothing if he were reinstated as the head of a village of slaughtered men and grieving widows and dying children. We’d never considered Woja Beki a wise man, but his behavior after his release from Lusaka’s hut was the opposite of foolish.
When we asked our older siblings if they agreed with us, they said that, yes, Woja Beki had opened his door to the Sick One because he wanted to be one of us again. They said that days spent isolated in his house, sitting by himself on his sofa—the clock above his head ticking, no one coming to visit, no one for him to visit—had forced him to consider his ways and admit that no amount of wealth was worth the indignity of being an outcast in his own village. A couple of our uncles, though, when we asked them what they thought of this theory, had laughed and said we shouldn’t be fooled: Woja Beki had no capacity for such wisdom, he was still a snake. Who knew what he would do or say if the government were ever to find out about what the village had done to the Pexton men?
* * *
—
The government would never find out from any of us, that much was certain—we had sworn an unbreakable oath. The night after our fathers allowed Woja Beki to return home, they assembled our families in our parlors and brought out the umbilical cord bundle. Taking turns, we held it, this clump of our umbilical cords and those of our siblings and our fathers and their siblings and our paternal grandfathers and their siblings and relatives, all the way back to the time when our ancestors first established our bloodline in a valley wherein a big and a small river flowed. The umbilical cords, shriveled and reeking, had turned black and brown through the years and generations, but with every addition to the bundle it appeared even more alive, binding us more tightly to our past and our future. We knew what it signified—th
e essence of our existence. To hold it and make a declaration was to be aware that our words would walk with us for the rest of our days. Which was why our fathers only brought it out when there was an oath to be made whose keeping would determine the course of our families’ future.
On that night, we all took turns holding the bundle and swearing by all it represents. We swore we would never tell anyone about what our fathers had done. We promised we would say nothing to any relative or friend visiting the village. If we were to leave the village to go to the big market, or to visit one distant relative or another in any of the five sister-villages or two brother-villages, we would have nothing to offer them except a smile and conversations about anything but Pexton. If asked about the latest news from Kosawa, we would respond that all was well, except for the usual sorrows, a new illness here, another death there, but of course life intersperses suffering with joys, so there was also this upcoming wedding, and that birth celebration scheduled for next month. We would never tell anyone anything about the captivity until someday in the far future, when the story had spread because it could no longer be contained, the same way a pregnancy was bound to be revealed no matter how well garments had hidden it in the early months; by then, all would be well with us, and the story’s revelation would be of little consequence. And if we had to be the ones to tell it, the story we would tell—only if we absolutely had to—would be a story of how our fathers did what the Spirit had commanded them to do.
With the bundles in our hands, we asked the Spirit to curse us in the worst possible ways if we were to break the oath and, in so doing, bring calamity upon our families and our village. If we were girls, our wombs would close up and we would be childless, worthless women for the rest of our days. If we were boys, our strength and manhood would desert us; we’d be the most woeful things that had ever walked this earth.