How Beautiful We Were

by Imbolo Mbue

  “You’re acting as if this problem is yours to solve,” I said to Malabo the night before his departure.

  “Whose problem is it to solve?” he said.

  “Are your children the only ones drinking the water? Why do you have to do the fighting for everyone?”

  “Is that who you think I am, Sahel? The kind of man who sits back and waits for someone else to take action? Is that the man you married?”

  “Juba returned to us,” I cried. “That’s an omen. Can’t you see? It means he’s not going away anytime soon. Nobody dies and comes back only to die again soon after.”

  “How many people have you known who died and came back?”

  I did not respond; we both knew the answer.

  “Juba was the first person in Kosawa in a generation to be brought back to life,” he said, as if I didn’t know. “Of all the sick children, the Spirit chose to spare ours. Why? Have you wondered? Don’t you think we ought to play a bigger role in ending all this, considering how much we’ve been favored? Have you even thought for a second about Juba’s adulthood, how his coming back to life is going to affect him as he gets older?”

  “We’re not talking about when he gets older. We’re talking about now. He’s fine now. Isn’t he?”

  “What about Thula? What about when she too gets sick?”

  “Thula never gets sick. I’ll boil their water for ten hours if I have to. Please, don’t go to Bézam. Cocody is right now begging Bissau not to go with you. Lulu and her family are begging Lobi to stay home. There’s no saying how the government will respond if you show up in their town making demands—that city is full of wicked men.”

  “I don’t understand: how can you not think about the future?”

  “We’re surviving,” I cried. “By the goodness of the Spirit—”

  “You want me to not fight for my children’s future because you’re afraid.”

  “I’m begging you to not make a mistake….I don’t feel good about this….”

  “You’re pregnant. You never feel good about anything while you’re pregnant.”

  “This is not the pregnancy talking.”

  “Sahel, please.”

  What did Malabo ever ask me to do that I didn’t do for him? He said, “Sahel, this is what I want to eat today,” and I cooked it. He said, “Sahel, wear this dress and not that one” and I said, “Of course.” I was following tradition, yes, but between him and me marital rules were useless—my spirit yearned to please his. And then I made a single request to him, and what did he say? He said, No, I won’t do it. He went to Bézam and he failed, and Bongo tried to undo what he’d done and he too failed. Now the people of the Restoration Movement are trying to undo and redo everything.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t know what the outcome of the Restoration Movement’s fight on our behalf will be, but Thula, from the first time she heard them talk, believed that with them by our side, we will prevail over His Excellency and Pexton.

  I noticed the calm that appeared on her face days after the Restoration Movement people first came to visit us, a couple of months after Bongo was taken to Bézam. I could see from the light returning to her eyes that they had convinced her when they promised us that they would help us reclaim and restore our land and water and air. After that meeting, the other children had fought over the sweet things the American man and woman brought, but not Thula; she had picked up the books they brought and taken them home. That day was the day she began living in books and, in effect, living in America.

  Six years later, on the evening after the Sweet One and the Cute One informed her about the invitation from the school in America, she came to me in the kitchen as I was boiling yams and told me again that she’d go, but only if I wanted her to go. I told her she had my blessings to go, only if she wanted to go, only if her spirit was telling her to go. We sat in silence, watching the wood beneath the iron pot turn to crimson coal.

  * * *

  The Sweet One and the Cute One were the ones who brought up the idea that the children of Kosawa would benefit from advanced schooling. They said it would be good for our village and future generations if our older children started attending the school in Lokunja, where the district officials send their children. Upon completing the Kosawa school, rather than the boys picking up spears to hunt and the girls becoming apprentices for their mothers, they would learn things that some of our village schoolteachers didn’t even know. The Restoration Movement men said we could plead with the government to improve our school and send us more qualified teachers, but the government would argue that Kosawa was too small to be deserving of a better school. Given that, the men said, our best chance at preparing our children for a future that might be far from Kosawa was to send them to the superior school that already existed. The Restoration Movement would pay for a bus to take children twelve years old and over to the Lokunja school.

  What did we think? they asked us at the village square.

  Rain had fallen that morning, but the evening was sunny and hot; it was as if we were living through two seasons in one day. The Sweet One and the Cute One were sitting next to our new village head, Sonni, under the mango tree. It had been two years since the massacre; grass had sprouted and covered the heaps beneath which the slaughtered lay.

  Sonni stood up to speak, counting every word in that manner of his that makes me want to pull his tongue and force it to hurry up. He thanked the Restoration Movement men for their offer, saying that it would be good if our children could have better schooling. There would need to be another meeting of the men, he said, for fathers to talk about all this, to gauge everyone’s openness to the idea….But voices of mothers and fathers had already drowned his to say that no additional meeting was necessary, it would never be a good idea for our children to be taken on a bus to a big school in Lokunja every day; such a price could never be worth paying for the sake of further learning. What would be the purpose of the added schooling? We had fallen into the trap of animals: how would the children learning beyond how to read and write and do simple arithmetic cause our captor’s hearts to change so they might look at us and see something of worth? Though we trusted the people from the Restoration Movement, many said, though we were thankful for all they’d done for us, we simply couldn’t hand over our children to strangers in Lokunja. Our eyes wouldn’t be on them over there—if the government could kill them in our presence, what would it do in our absence?

  The Sweet One and the Cute One said that they understood our concerns, but that, though the school was owned by the government, the bus would be owned by the Restoration Movement, paid for by the same American people who had been giving money to the Restoration Movement to help in our fight against Pexton ever since Austin’s story appeared in their newspaper. The representatives said these people who would pay for the bus were the same ones who had given money to fight for the release of Bongo and Konga and Woja Beki and Lusaka—they’d been on our side then and would always be. Still, the voices of dissent rose. If the Sweet One and the Cute One had seen the things we’d seen, several parents shouted, if they had been here on the day of the massacre, they would understand why we now feared even the rustling of leaves.

  * * *

  The possibility of attending a school in Lokunja was what got Thula to start talking more often, three years after Malabo vanished.

  She was still the same girl, saying only what she needed to say, but her anger at the massacre and all that had happened to our family was no longer holding her in chains, or at least the chains had grown looser. Perhaps it was the hope the men from the Restoration Movement brought every time they visited, and the news that the children now had a chance to acquire knowledge that might save us from future suffering. Or it could be that she finally recognized we were all in chains and that her pain was unique but in no way greater than others’, so what choice did we a
ll have but to carry on? She didn’t return to smiling with ease, or laughing like she used to with her father, but her face brightened daily, highlighting the lovely largeness of her eyes.

  Whenever I happened upon her and her friends sitting somewhere in the village, I lingered for a bit to hear if she would laugh, and if she did, a thousand bountiful harvests wouldn’t have made me happier. Without my asking, she started coming to sit by me in the kitchen to help me cook. On days when Yaya needed extra attention because she was having a very bad day—perhaps because one of her sons had visited her in a dream—and I had to roll her over repeatedly for a better position or wipe her face because she couldn’t stop crying, Thula cooked for the family. It nearly made me laugh whenever she reminded me to eat, considering how little she ate—no more than half the food on her plate, often less, despite my pleas for her to eat more.

  I worried about her weight. I worried about the fact that her bleeding hadn’t started though she had reached the age for it. I worried that her friends’ breasts had grown past the size of oranges and hers weren’t up to that of a cashew. The competition for men with potential to make great husbands was fierce in all the eight villages, and Thula was at the age when girls needed to start sending signals and flaunting whatever wares they had. Her friends already had buttocks that men gaped at; beside them, Thula looked like a child trailing her mother and aunts. Malabo loved to boast that, with her sublime eyes and abundant smiles, his daughter was going to grow up to become the most beautiful woman the eight villages had ever seen. He said it even when Thula proved herself incapable of gaining weight. As a father, he could be blinded to certain things, but as a mother, I had a duty to stay attuned to all the challenges my daughter would encounter. Stunning as her face was, I could tell that her thinness and flatness, coupled with her impenetrable nature, would lessen her in the eyes of wife-seeking men.

  When I lamented to Cocody and Lulu about this, they laughed and asked me why I couldn’t carry today’s load today and take on tomorrow’s load when I got there. Couldn’t I see it was pointless to agonize about Thula’s breasts and bleeding when my only choice in the matter was to wait for them to arrive when her body was ready? “Have you ever met a woman who has not bled and has no breasts?” Lulu asked me, laughing. Why was I wasting time thinking about the moment when Thula would see her first blood and run to me for comfort? What made me think she would even tell me when it happened? Cocody and Lulu, daughters to mothers and mothers to daughters, understood why all these things mattered, but they preferred to use their minds for things other than imagining, as I often did, the celebration of a daughter’s first bleed—the happy evening when our older female relatives and friends would gather to give Thula an account of all the wonders in store for her now that she was a woman. I smiled whenever I pictured her face, caught between dread and confusion, as the women whispered to her that, in the hands of the right man, the pleasure would more than make up for the pain, and that, the sweeter the pleasure that accompanied the conception, the greater the pain at the child’s delivery, and wasn’t that one of the most wonderful things about being a woman?

  One evening, in Lulu’s kitchen, while Thula and a friend were watching Yaya, Cocody and Lulu told me about the evenings after their first bleed, when their mothers had called the women of Kosawa to celebrate them. We laughed as they reminisced about the women, most long gone, who told stories from their journeys through womanhood, stories that they must have passed back and forth in smoky kitchens but which they just had to share again, for they relished telling them over and over: accounts of how they had spat into their husband’s soups in moments of spite, and how they knew which position to use to conceive a girl, and which to use for a boy, and how they’d faked illnesses when they didn’t feel like cooking and their husbands had served the children fruit for dinner, and if only their husbands knew how many steps ahead their wives always were, but what use was that cleverness for the wives who discovered from a foe or a friend that their husbands had visited a woman’s bed in another village? What could a wife do besides sigh and carry on after she confronts her husband and his response is that none of it is true, why was she asking questions, leave him alone. The stories never lacked for flavor, Lulu said, and they made her at once proud and furious to have been born a woman.

  * * *

  Thula entered my room four days after the Sweet One and the Cute One suggested the Lokunja school. “Mama,” she said to me as I was folding clothes on the bed, “I’d like to take the bus to the school in Lokunja.”

  “No,” I said. She turned around and left.

  The next morning, she came to me in the kitchen after she had bathed and put on her blue uniform.

  “Mama, please,” she said. “I really want to go to the school in Lokunja.”

  I continued frying her eggs; I said nothing.

  After the eggs were ready, I put them on a plate alongside some fried plantains. I handed it to her and told her to go eat on the table in the parlor, away from the smoke.

  She left, and I plated Juba’s breakfast and brought it to him on the table, just as he was about to finish putting on his blue shirt and khaki shorts. I watched them eat, like I did every morning—Thula eating four slices of plantain and a couple bites of eggs; Juba eating all of his food plus Thula’s leftovers. After they were done, they went into Yaya’s room, to hug her goodbye. Yaya didn’t sit up from her lying position; only her mouth moved as she told them to make sure to obey their teachers. They nodded, left Yaya’s room and hugged me before heading off, Thula holding Juba’s hand and walking only as fast as her little brother’s legs could take him. He still needed her protection. He only started going to school after Bongo died and their great-uncle Manga went to the school and begged the headmaster to allow Juba to start in the middle of the term because, though his age-mates were still running around naked, Juba’s right hand could go around his head and touch his left ear, evidence his brain was large enough for school.

  I checked on Yaya after the children were out of my sight. I brought her a pot to spit in, or urinate, or excrete, whatever she needed to do. I still do this daily. Some days she cannot sit up to use the pot, so I lay a plastic sheet under her buttocks and place a cloth over the plastic so she can excrete lying down, after which I clean and dry her.

  If her feces has a smell, I don’t smell it. She’s my mother. Whatever suffering she has to bear, I bear it with her. Until the day she leaves me, or tells me to leave her, I am hers and she is mine. She has lost all her teeth, so I mince her meat, and chew her cocoyams before putting them in her mouth, the same way she once chewed food before putting it in the mouths of my husband and my children. When she needs to cry, I sit on her bed and we cry together. I wipe her eyes and I beg her to stop crying—while she cries, I too must, I can’t let her cry alone. Other times we just let our tears silently roll until we run dry. We mourn the men we’ve loved and lost, and, some moments after, we imagine the beautiful day when we will reunite with them in the land beyond.

  * * *

  —

  A week after Thula first heard about the school in Lokunja, she comes to me again to beg me to let her go there. I’m sitting on the veranda; one of my aunts has just left after a visit. Thula comes and sits next to me. She asks me if I can talk to the Cute One and the Sweet One on her behalf, let them know that she loves their idea of the village children attending a better school. I sigh and turn my face away. She changes seats so she can look into my eyes.

  “Mama, please,” she says.

  “You really want to go to this school?” I ask her.

  She nods.

  I tell her I’ll sleep and think on it. I wake up the next morning worrying for her.

  From the day she was born, she’s wanted what she’s wanted. If Thula wanted to see her father before going to sleep, her eyes wouldn’t shut until he returned from smoking with his friends in the square. I remember
one evening, when she was five, I told her that Malabo had gone to visit a sick friend in another village and would not be back till the next day, so she could come sleep with me in the bed. When nighttime came, I couldn’t find her. Yaya and I were about to panic when Bongo ran out of the hut and returned minutes later dragging Thula—he had found her on the path to Gardens, planning to catch the bus to go spend the night with her father, wherever he was.

  * * *

  —

  I call her into my bedroom after she returns from school and ask her to sit next to me on the bed. I tell her that I understand why she wants to go to the better school—having more knowledge could never be a bad thing—but that going to Lokunja would not be good for her. I tell her how tiring it would be to take a bus for an hour every morning, an hour every afternoon. She says she would be fine doing it. I remind her that her friends would not be there in the new school, most will likely be married in no more than four, five years. And if she were to go to school in Lokunja, a town where we have no family, if something were to happen to her, who would bring us the news? She asks me what I think might happen to her there. When I don’t tell her about all of the horrid possibilities that circulate in my head every day, all the ways in which life could conspire to take my children away from me and leave me empty-handed, she tells me that I can’t think of anything because there’s nothing that could happen to her there that won’t happen here. “Who will you share the bus with every day?” I ask her. “No mother or father in Kosawa is going to allow their child to go to that school.” Did she expect the Restoration Movement to send a bus for her alone?

  She leaves my bedroom, returns to Bongo’s room, gets on the bed, and turns her face to the wall. She does not rise when Juba stands at the door and asks her to take a look at what he’s drawn—does she like it? Juba enters the room, pokes her in the ribs jokingly, to force a reaction. She does not turn, not even to glance at the drawing and tell him he’s done well. Juba pokes her once more, shrugs, and returns to the parlor to draw something else.