How Beautiful We Were
Page 27
“Don’t do this for Juba. Do this for you.”
“What about you? I’m not going without you. Will you be happy in Bézam?”
It was then I told her my plan.
* * *
—
You won’t be happy when I tell you where I’m going to, dearest husband, but I must go.
You left that village long ago and came to the place where I was born and made it your home. You told me, often, that my people were more of your people than yours had ever been to you. Why did you leave? I asked you when we first met. You said you never belonged there. I pondered your answer—was not belonging ample reason for a man to visit his ancestral village so seldom? Was your all-consuming sadness the reason for your cutting your relatives off, or a result of it? I didn’t understand why you were so determined to have none of your sons know much about your kin when there was no visible quarrel, no obvious falling-out involving you and your siblings and their children. I asked you repeatedly. Again and again you told me that there was no story to tell.
But there is, my dear husband. There is a story.
Why didn’t you tell it to me?
Why did you choose to bear your pain alone, when you had me to share it with?
How could you not have let me hold you, and weep for you?
* * *
—
My husband’s grand-niece, a woman named Malaika, was the one who told me the story; it was her grandmother who raised my husband after his parents died.
Malaika has been visiting me since Bongo was taken to Bézam. We had never met before my husband’s funeral—she came to it along with his living siblings and several relatives whom my husband hadn’t spoken to in decades. When I asked Malaika why no one in that family ever came to visit us, she said my husband had made it clear that he didn’t want them to have anything to do with his new family. I told her that I understood, and that, now that my husband was no longer around to dictate to us, we could see each other as we pleased. She returned only once after the funeral to visit me, but when she heard about the massacre and Bongo’s arrest, she began coming more often. After they killed Bongo, she came and she slept on the floor next to my bed, alongside other relatives from all eight villages. She helped in feeding me and bathing me; she was the one who made the mixture that allowed me to sleep for a few hours and escape the torment of the realization that my children, both of them, were dead.
One evening, not long ago, she came to visit. Somehow, we started talking about her grandmother, my husband’s sister. Malaika told me that her grandmother, before she died, was desperate to talk to my husband one last time and tell him that she was sorry.
“Sorry for what?” I said.
“For everything that happened,” she replied.
“What everything?”
It was then she told me the story my husband’s sister told her before she died, a story the sister had never told anyone. A medium had told the sister, while she was wasting away with a large mass in her belly, that she needed to tell someone the darkest secret in her stomach in order for death to come, so she had told her granddaughter days before she died. She revealed what happened when my husband was seven years old.
* * *
—
You went to her one evening and told her what an uncle had done to you. How the uncle had asked you to go hunting, and how, once you were both deep in the forest, only bugs and birds in view, under an iroko tree, the uncle had untied his loincloth, spread open his legs, and said his manhood was itchy, could you please itch it for him? When you shook your head and averted your eyes from the swollen organ, he said he couldn’t believe you wouldn’t help him after all the gifts of fruits and nuts he had given you, he hadn’t shown any other boy in the village as much generosity as he had shown you, he thought you were friends, how could you not help him in his time of need? When you started crying, he told you that if you didn’t take the manhood in both hands and start rubbing it, he would leave you alone in the forest for beasts to feast on your flesh. That was how he got you to do to him things a boy should never do to a man.
You sobbed as you told your sister the story.
When you were done speaking, she asked you no questions. She merely told you never to repeat the story to anyone. When her husband, the man you called your father, came back from a family visit, your sister made you repeat the story to him. He too said what your sister had said, that the story must not be told. Not in their lifetimes, not in your lifetime. The uncle who had taken you into the forest was one of the heads of your family. He had two wives and nine children. No one would believe your story. Even if someone believed you, your sister and her husband said, what would they do about it? Would they undo what the uncle had done to you? They believed you, they said, because they knew you were a good child. But they also knew that the uncle was a good man. Whenever there were conflicts between family members, your uncle was the one who resolved them. He was a dear friend of the village head and one of his counselors. The village was what it was, safe and prosperous, because of men like him. Did you want to see the village fall into disarray because he’d done something you did not like? Wasn’t it more important that everyone bore whatever they could for the sake of the family and the village? Your sister’s husband told you to wipe your eyes, show them that you were a strong boy. Look at your body, your sister’s husband said, did the uncle leave any scars? You shook your head. So there’s nothing for you to dwell on, then, your sister said. As soon as you let go of the whole episode, there would be nothing worth talking about.
* * *
—
I pulled my blanket to my face and cried when Malaika was done talking. Even after she left, my tears wouldn’t stop flowing. I wept for my beloved—him as a child, alone in his shame; him as a man, alone in his torment. She sacrificed him, his own sister. Made him suffer for her honor. She sewed up his lips so others would not speak ill of her for allowing him to tear apart the village with a vile tale. I spent days wondering why my husband felt compelled to hide this story, and then it occurred to me: even if he had revealed it in his adult years, how many among us would have believed it, or understood what it was like for him, a grown man, held captive by someone long dead?
And his sister—I feel so many things toward her, malevolent things, but I also force myself to imagine her suffering. How it must have devastated her to do this to him. How she must have fought with her husband to do something, anything, to which her husband must have told her that nothing could be done. Sacrifices, her husband must have told her, they must be made in life. He must have reminded her that everyone needed to make sacrifices for the sake of their families and villages and countries, to keep them together, to move them forward, to prevent them from falling apart from within.
* * *
—
How I wish you’d told me. How I wish you’d allowed me to keep you company in that darkness. I would have cried with you on the nights when your gloom thickened. I would have understood why you raved and yelled and insulted whenever you thought someone wasn’t rising up and saying what needed to be said, or doing what needed to be done. You fumed at even the most inconsequential of events—an older child taking a younger child’s toys and the adults doing nothing. We thought it was all just a part of your miserable disposition, your inability to simply let the world be the way it was, but now I hear the things you used to say, and I hear them differently. When we reunite, not long from now, I will lay your head upon my bosom and let you curse every form of wickedness for as long as you want. I won’t tell you to stop. I won’t beg you not to get too angry, such is life, these things happen. I won’t tell you to calm down, let it be.
Oh, dear husband, I fear that, like you, Thula walks around consumed by all the ways the world has failed to protect its children. Like you, she seems doomed never to find peace until a new earth is born, one in which all are
accorded the same level of dignity. How I ache for you both—you for the joy you never had, Thula for the disappointment that is surely coming her way. Why was she, of all the children, chosen to be this way? This longing to right all the wrongs she can, where does it come from? Did you, on the nights you visited while she slept, tell her never to accept that which is not the way she believes it ought to be? Please come back and visit her again, dearest husband, and tell her that it’s all right, she can let Kosawa go. Please do it, for Sahel and for Juba.
* * *
—
My beloved and I will be reunited before the rains come, I can tell. I want to fly away on a dry, breezy day. I see his face already—him as a young man again, is he smiling at me? My journey from here to the land of our ancestors will be the fastest there ever was—I won’t stop running until I arrive in that marvelous place and see my husband and children again and join them and my ancestors in blessed oneness with the Spirit for all eternity.
* * *
—
As soon as Sahel is ready to move to Bézam, Malaika will come take me to go live with her; we’ll keep each other company. All three of her daughters have become wives and moved to their marital homes. Her own husband died long ago, and her only son did not make it past childhood, so she’s alone in her hut now, with a bedroom across from hers, empty and waiting for me to move into it.
A gust of energy entered my body today. I may soon be able to take a few steps if I need to, but Malaika assures me I won’t need to do much walking in her hut. She’ll feed me and help me to the bathroom and the veranda, where I’ll breathe the first clean air I’ve breathed in so long I can’t recall. I would have preferred to die here, in this hut my husband built with his own hands, on this bed where we spent the best nights of our lives, but Kosawa might be dead before me, and I want no part of its end. I hope he’ll forgive me for moving to the place of his birth. He left it and said he wanted nothing to do with his people, and for all those years I said we should visit them and introduce the children to them, so they could know their kin, but he said no, and I begged him, and he yelled at me. Now I’m going, after what was stolen from him there, but where else can I go?
The Children
We went to Bézam to welcome her back home, the five of us who were left. Death wasn’t the reason our numbers had decreased once more, and for that we were thankful. Still, we wished, as we rode the bus she had sent us money to hire, that every single one of us who had ever lived could be there the moment she walked toward us, a decade since we last saw her, the thinnest and most quiet of us—who could have imagined she would one day become our leader?
Six years before she returned, we were still seven, but two of our friends later decided to leave for the sake of their families. One of them told us he wanted to be a part of us no more after an evening when we’d gone to set a fire at Gardens. Nothing about that operation had been far from the routine—we had once again outrun a watchman who fired shots in our direction as we disappeared into the darkness—but the next evening, while we were laughing about how close we’d been to our demise, deliberating what actions to take next, this one of us had sighed and said he couldn’t do it any longer. Bravery wasn’t his paramount virtue, clean as his heart was, so we did not try to reason with him. We did not ask him to consider the future when he told us, eyes on the ground, that he couldn’t continue putting himself in such close danger of lying faceup in a coffin, or sitting in a prison, leaving his wife and young children more destitute than they already were. He argued that nothing had changed despite the pipelines we’d damaged, the fires we’d set, the tanks we’d destroyed. None of it had done anything besides force the government to get tougher on lawbreakers and double the capacity of the prison in Lokunja, a prison in which three of us were currently sitting. The three of us who were free gave our friend our blessings to be a part of us no more, thanking him for everything. We told him we couldn’t put an end to the assaults, not until Pexton met our demands, which they appeared willing to do the following month, when they asked the Sweet One to tell us that a new overseer would soon be arriving at Gardens, and the man was eager to start a dialogue with us.
* * *
—
The new overseer came to meet with us within a week of his arrival at Gardens. On one side of him stood his interpreter; on the other side Sonni, the Sweet One, and the Cute One. The interpreter began the meeting by telling us the overseer’s name—Mr. Fish, which made our children giggle and our wives cold-stare them down—the American town in which he was born, the many parts of the world he had traveled to, the years he had spent learning about our country. He said Mr. Fish was eager to start working with us so he could get to know us better and find ways in which we could live in harmony.
Our ears stayed with the interpreter, but our eyes rarely left the overseer’s face. For more than an hour he stood before us, dressed in a wax-print shirt, ignoring the seat reserved for him despite the heat that was flooding his face with sweat. His constant smile gave him the air of a human with an open heart, the kind of heart we rarely saw from overseas or Bézam, the kind Bongo and Lusaka once hoped they would find in the capital.
From the moment this American arrived in Kosawa, having walked from Gardens in the evening of that hot dry-season day—he left behind his car, we later learned, to show us that the distance between us was small—we could tell he was no ordinary oilman. The brightness in his eyes was a balm for our disintegrating spirits.
When he entered the village, waving, young children—some of them ours, none of them acting differently from us when we were that age—peeked at him from behind their mothers’ skirts. Several cried, finding the stranger frightful, never having seen a man with skin and hair so bright. But when our wives tried to take them home, they begged to stay so they could stare for many more minutes at the curious face.
* * *
—
We sat on stools close to the front at that first meeting with Mr. Fish, our older brothers and uncles still in the very first rows, alongside our fathers. Now that we were married, having child after child, we’d become the fathers, and our fathers had become the grandfathers, and our grandfathers had joined the ranks of the ancestors, leaving us to be the ones whose words and deeds would determine the future of the next generation.
Our wives waited with our children under the mango tree. The women did not cry as much as our mothers used to in our childhood, but their faces bore little hope that the simple things that make a life content would be abundant in the lives of their children. Most huts in Kosawa were still full, but there were constant whispers about who might soon be leaving, who couldn’t bear it any longer. Even if children were no longer dying as often as they did when we were younger, they were still getting sick. Pexton was sending less bottled water with each passing year, knowing there was little we could do to make them keep their word. Our air was getting dirtier, despite promises. They spilled their oil on our land with recklessness; we spilled it in vengeance. No new envelopes of cash had touched our hands, not even Sonni’s hands—all we had was more of too little.
* * *
—
The interpreter told us that Mr. Fish had met the previous week with the district officer in Lokunja about releasing our imprisoned friends; the meeting had gone well. No mention was made of the truth about why our friends were in prison—the interpreter said nothing about the fact that the government’s official story was as false as a snake walking on four legs. Our friends weren’t in prison because they’d been caught at the big market without their tax receipts. Their tax receipts had been taken out of their pockets by soldiers who proceeded to rip them up in front of the entire market, their eyes declaring: We did it, what can anyone do to us? What could our friends have done as the soldiers handcuffed them and dumped them in cells? Who in Bézam cared for the truth that our friends had been framed because the soldiers suspected we were b
ehind the attacks on Pexton’s property?
We seethed, but we could say nothing.
At our friends’ trial, no one who’d seen the tax receipts being ripped had been willing to step forward in their defense, so the judge levied a sentence of one year in prison and six months of taxes. We told our friends, as they were being led away by the prison guards while their wives and mothers and daughters cried out for them, that days might be long, but years were seldom slow. Once more, from what little she had, Thula sent us the funds to pay the fines.
* * *
—
During the year our friends were in prison, monthly, sometimes weekly, as often as we could, the rest of us burned a parked car here, dislodged machinery there, sent a letter threatening to kill everyone at Gardens if Pexton did not leave. Twice, we accosted a bus full of laborers on the road between Lokunja and Gardens. Our machetes pointed at them, we demanded all the money they had. We showed them no compassion, though they pleaded, saying Pexton paid them too little, they needed every bit of money for their families—could we find it in our hearts to be merciful to them for the sake of their children? How could we respond to such drivel except with slaps? Pexton’s whores talking about children—nothing disgusted us more.
We made the bus drivers give us the oil from the engine, so we could use it to burn something else owned by Pexton. With raffia bags covering our faces—soiled and oily bills in another bag—we asked the laborers to listen up. We told them that it was time they thought about returning to their villages. We let them know, in case they’d never considered it, that they were our enemies by virtue of eating the scraps off the plates of our enemies. None of them would survive the reckoning coming for Pexton, we warned.