by Imbolo Mbue
And, indeed, it happened so. In our delight at the news, we poured libations to our ancestors. We regarded the coming fortune as atonement for the centuries of pain and devastation upon which we’d built our lives. We prayed that Pexton would forever soar.
* * *
I tried to tell my husband, years later, that he was right when he said all those things, that I should have been the one person not to make him feel as if he was a madman for having a singular opinion. He didn’t want to hear it. He was angry still, because no one was noticing what was obvious to him: that Woja Beki was going to betray Kosawa. How did he figure it out even then? What about the young woja so differed from Woja Bewa—his father and our previous woja—whom my husband had trusted? Was it because, even as a boy, Woja Beki’s affected pleasantness was discomfiting? My husband refused to attend the celebration of Woja Beki’s marriage to his second wife, convinced that our village head was already in the process of swapping our blood for oil money. How could he have seen, even then, that our deliberate blindness would someday cost us everything?
What would he say now if I were to tell him how much this has cost me?
* * *
—
Would you still love me, dearest husband, if I told you that our sons are both dead, gone in part because we dismissed your words? Would you turn your back on me, or dry my tears for me? What would you do if I told you that there’s no grave for our sons, because they were killed and tossed aside to rot like garbage, your own flesh and blood?
I don’t need to tell—you know already, our children are with you.
They’ve told you by now what happened to them in Bézam.
You know better than I do the things that were done to them in that city of brutes. Things I do not let my mind dare conjure. Dreadful things I would never have imagined would befall them in those nights when I cradled them and shushed them back to sleep, beautiful as they were, life’s most perfect creations.
You are together there. I am alone here. The worst kind of curse that could befall a woman happened to me. Do you cry for me from over there? Do you wish death would be merciful to me and hurry up?
* * *
—
I yearn to join my husband and sons, but Sahel doesn’t want me to and I don’t want to leave her just yet. I hope to stay with her until someone comes to take her away from this hut. Someone may be coming soon. A Bézam man. He wants to take her to Bézam. I’ve told her to go. I’ve begged her. She has cried and said she can’t ever leave me, she can’t leave behind what she had with Malabo. I tell her she must; this village, it’s dying. I want her to take my grandson and go to Bézam—take far away from here the only person left to carry the Nangi name and make sure that my husband’s bloodline does not disappear.
The day before Thula left for America, she, Sahel, Juba, and I spent all day in my bedroom, entertaining relatives and friends who weren’t sure they’d be in the village to give her a final hug before she stepped onto the bus. Between visitors, we sat in silence, trying not to think about the meaning of the next day. In the evening, Sahel brought the dining table from the parlor into my room and we all ate our dinner from the same bowls. Juba slept on the bed with me that night, and Sahel and Thula slept on a mat across from us. When the bus arrived the next afternoon, before leaving with Sahel and Juba for the airport, Thula came and knelt by my bed. She said, “Yaya, when I come back I’ll do everything to make sure Kosawa is back to the way it was in your childhood.”
My poor, sweet child.
I wanted to tell her, no, please, don’t worry about Kosawa, we have to let Kosawa go. But I could see in her eyes that she wouldn’t let it go. Determination is her name; never have I seen her resolve broken. Even as a baby, no matter how hungry she was, she would push away everything until she got exactly the food she wanted. As a little girl, if she didn’t want to wear a certain dress, she would fold her arms to prevent her mother from putting it on her. Many parents would have beaten that willpower out of her, but Malabo refused to; he said children should be allowed to be the way the Spirit created them to be. So all I could do on her departure day was lay my hands on her head. I prayed for the Spirit to bless her and keep her, watch over her comings and goings, now and forever.
* * *
—
Everyone said that Thula was a replica of my husband, his face on a girl’s head. My husband’s eyes shone whenever he heard this—he wanted the world never to forget that she was his. I still recall the day of her birth, the moment I brought her out of the room and handed her to Malabo, who passed her to his father. Has one human ever looked at another with more wonder? Whenever he held her, even when she cried, his pride was laid bare. He reserved for her most of the few smiles he was willing to give to the world.
I remember one night when I woke up and went outside to use the toilet—Thula was just past four months then. I heard the start of her cry as I approached the toilet, but I didn’t hurry back, though she cried on; I figured Sahel had picked her up and was changing her soiled napkins. When I got back to our room, though, it was my husband who had her. He was singing softly to her. He’d figured out that Sahel and Malabo were not in their room—they were married people; it was never our place to ask them why they liked leaving the hut to go wherever they went in the darkest hour of night—so he had gone into the room and picked up the baby. I sat down next to him on the bed, and he continued singing until Thula quieted down. Her eyes soon became heavy, and she went back to sleep. My husband wiped away her tears. He rose and took her back to her sleeping basket at the base of Sahel and Malabo’s bed. He didn’t need to, but he stood there watching over her for close to an hour, until Sahel and Malabo returned home.
By the time he died, Thula was a girl, no longer a baby in need of being sung to and watched over, and yet my husband’s spirit returned on many nights to sit by her bed. Malabo had put a little bed in my room after his father’s funeral, so Thula could spend nights with me on occasion. Whenever Thula slept in my room, my husband returned. He wore a yellow shirt every time, his skin as smooth as if it had never combated elements. The anguished look he’d carried for most of his days in our world was gone; his new demeanor was of serenity beyond any I’d ever seen. He left in the morning, before the rooster’s crow, and I spent the day eagerly waiting for Sahel to ask me if Thula could come sleep in my room again. Sometimes Sahel asked me and I agreed but Thula refused to comply, wanting to be in her parents’ bedroom. I never pushed for it to happen—I wanted my husband to come for a visit only when life designed it to be so, not because I’d manipulated it to placate my longing to see my beloved’s face. Sahel was pregnant with Juba at that time, and I knew that after the baby’s birth my husband would stop coming, since the spirit of the newly arrived and the spirit of the recently departed cannot dwell in the same space, coming from and heading to lands at opposite ends of time. As Sahel’s belly grew, I found it hard to sleep each time he visited, not wanting to close my eyes and miss a thing. I couldn’t have enough of the joy on his face as he watched Thula, or the tranquillity that enveloped him, evidence to me that he was finally free.
The day Juba was born, I cried as I held him. Everyone thought my tears were for gratitude—one man gone, another come to replace him—but I alone knew why.
* * *
People asked me often, in the early years of our marriage, why I’d married him. How could I be happy with an unhappy person? Wasn’t it tiring to always feel as if I needed to give him reasons to be happy? Wasn’t it a burden, striving to be cheerful for both of us?
I gave them one response only: I saw in him things no one else could see.
To them he was cursed—dead father before birth, dead mother at birth, joyless spirit—but to me he was that bird sitting alone on a separate tree branch, singing a different song. How could such a bird be anything but beautiful? I remember the first days of our marriage, when
it was just the two of us in this hut. He said to me only the things that had to be said, preferring the sound of silence. We could sit on the veranda for hours without saying a word to each other and I would feel as if I’d had the most enchanting conversation. Only with him did I come to realize how much noise there is in the world, and how marvelous it is not to be a part of it. In those days, his display of anger was muted; it was after he became a father that his temper began to run short. It seemed to me that there was something about having children to protect, little ones for whom he had to do everything in his power so no harm would befall them, something about making them happy when he couldn’t make himself happy, something about doing all that in a world that to him was perpetually covered in darkness—there was just something about it all that was too much for him to bear, and he simply couldn’t.
Malabo hated it when his father threw on the floor the food I had cooked because he wasn’t in the mood for that particular dish, or it was too spicy, or not spicy enough, whatever it was that he had to complain about that day. Malabo insisted that I never pick up the food, that I let him do it for me; it was his way of atoning for his father. Whenever Malabo came to sit with me after such an episode, he’d ask me why I allowed his father to treat me like that. Wasn’t I afraid that one day he would raise his hand and hit me? Never, I told him; your father’s battles are with himself, not with me or anyone in this world. I always let him know that his father was suffering more than all of us combined. I did not tell Malabo much else, because a child need not be privy to the intricacies of his parents’ relationship. I did not tell him how, lying in bed, my husband often pulled me close, held my hand, and asked me to look into his eyes as he thanked me for everything I’d ever done for him, and all the loads I daily took on for his sake and the sake of the children. I told Malabo nothing about how, on nights after his father had railed against my food, or a missing shirt, or a friend of mine who came for a visit and stayed for too long, he told me that he was sorry, and asked if I could forgive him. How long did it take for him to hurt me again? And yet I loved him still. And yet I pray the Spirit to take me to be with him.
* * *
—
How many people have I loved and buried? I wouldn’t dare count. Which do you think is worse, to be the first to die or the last? You got the best of it, dear husband—you left after your parents and before your children. How many humans will be so favored? Yet I am thankful that I’m the one living with this sorrow—better me than you. Sometimes I try to imagine what your days would be like if our sons and I were gone and you were here alone. I wouldn’t rest easy in the next world knowing this. You can rest easy for me. I take comfort in the fact that Sahel needs me, that she begs me to stay for a while longer.
Days come and go and I can no longer tell you how soon before the rains return. Juba doesn’t come to lie on my bed anymore. Thula is overseas. Sahel hardly leaves the hut now, afraid I’ll die in her absence. I want to live for her, and I want to die to set her free. How can death be so sinister and stupid, devouring children and leaving old people begging for their end? If it’s flesh the grave is hungry for, why not take those who offer themselves and spare the ones eager to drink up more life? Isn’t flesh as good as flesh?
* * *
—
I worry for Sahel, her loneliness. We are now two women without husbands, singing songs of mourning on moonless nights. But me, when I turn around to go to sleep, the empty space beside me does not despair me as much as it does her. How can she, in her prime years, have no one to warm her? Did Malabo worry about her future, or just his children’s? Now she has to spend her nights alone, never to be held by a man again.
But why?
Who made this law? Did our forefathers allow our foremothers a say when they designed our tradition? Why must Sahel’s destiny be of selflessness and sacrifice? Because she has me. Because she has Juba. Because she has Malabo’s memory. Because she’s allowed one man per lifetime. She accepts it. She says she has to. But I don’t have to. I won’t accept it. Let other women do as tradition dictates; I won’t let her join them.
I won’t stop asking her to move to Bézam. Thula is far away. I’m dying. What is she staying here for? Her friend Cocody has moved to the second of the five sister-villages; Cocody’s brother came and took her and her children away after her youngest child got so sick he almost died. Before she left, Cocody came to tell us goodbye, crying. She wanted to leave but she didn’t want to leave. Sahel cried only after Cocody left. They’d been each other’s everything after their husbands died: bringing each other food, taking care of each other’s children, wiping each other’s tears. But Sahel has other friends here. Lulu came over last night and made us laugh with a story about how her son came home from school in Lokunja and said that his teacher told them that our ancestors used to be monkeys—what other crazy things do those overseas books have to say about us?
Sahel has her cousin Tunis too. He comes often to split her firewood and help her dig holes to plant yams and plantains in her small backyard farm (she won’t leave me to go to her farm in the forest). She also has her aunts and younger cousins, but her sisters—we never see them. Ever since her second sister was caught in bed with the husband of her oldest sister, her family has not known harmony or the joy of togetherness. Sahel was only a little girl when all this happened, but that didn’t stop her from getting caught in it, since she was living with their mother. Their mother had refused to take sides with either of her feuding children, and it wasn’t long before they all stopped speaking to each other for a jumble of reasons no one outside their family could untangle.
My husband was still alive when Sahel’s mother died. He told her, while she wept, that she shouldn’t fear, his family would always be her family, she would never be in need of people with whom she could have a total sense of belonging. But her mother was her strongest link to her village, and Sahel knew that, with her mother’s death, the life she once had would exist only as fragments in her memory. If she were to wonder whether something had truly happened, there’d be no one to answer her questions, no one to talk to about the way things were. These days she sees her sisters only when she goes to a celebration in another village. None of them came here after what happened to Malabo and Bongo. She heard that two of them have reconciled but neither they, nor the others, to mourn or to rejoice, come to visit. Who will she have left here after her aunts are gone and her female cousins have settled into their own lives?
* * *
I never imagined that the situation in Kosawa would get worse in my final days, but it has. This past year, soldiers have arrived in the village more times than I can count. They go from hut to hut asking questions, searching for those responsible for the destruction of Pexton’s property. When they come here, Sahel lets them check under my bed to make sure no one is hiding there. They don’t believe that no one capable of sneaking around at night to burn and destroy lives in our hut.
The first time it happened, we had woken up to hear that a building at Gardens had been burned to the ground. We were not sad to hear the news, and it never occurred to us that the fire might have something to do with Kosawa. Weeks later, a pipeline exploded over the big river. I heard people rushing to see it for themselves. Sonni went to Gardens and begged the supervisor to send men to fix it before the riverbanks overflowed. The laborers closed it, but not because of us—we later learned that they had a new overseer who did not want a drop of Pexton’s oil to go to waste.
A few days after this happened, a supervisor came to talk to Sonni. My brother, Manga, came to visit me after the supervisor met with his son. Manga said the supervisor believed our children were behind the recent fire and explosion. I shook my head. No, I told my brother. Not the children of Kosawa—they’re not those kinds of children. Not long after that evening, a friend came to visit me. She had lost her remaining two teeth since I last saw her, but she could still speak a hundred
words to my one. She told me that the gossip going around the village was that Sonni’s wife had seen their son leaving their hut late one night, and that the next morning there had been another fire at Gardens. Someone from Gardens reported seeing Sonni’s son there, though the boy denied it and said he was in bed all night. That is how we began to suspect that these children, born the same year as Thula, were the ones burning and breaking at Gardens.
* * *
—
The American overseer sent word that he wanted Sonni to come see him.
Sonni went to Gardens with the two men who have been helping us, our Bézam friends, the Sweet One and the Cute One. They went to the overseer’s house, which stands a far distance from the houses of the laborers and the supervisors.