How Beautiful We Were

by Imbolo Mbue

  My new papa had his own dreams for me.

  He believed I was destined to become a great man, which was why, though he wasn’t rich, he sent me to the finest schools. I never told him that I wanted to spend my life drawing—with Thula wedded to her mission, I was my parents’ only chance at a joyful and proud old age, and I longed to give it to them. Papa spent hours helping me with my homework, and when I passed my tests he gave me cash gifts. When the time came for me to get into a career training program, he went to the biggest men he knew in government, seeking help for his gifted son. He couldn’t do it alone, being that he was but one of thousands of small men sitting at the bottom and striving for their sons to get to the top. Mama cooked and assembled baskets of fruits, and Papa took them to these men in their homes, along with bottles of alcohol, goats from the open-air market, and stuffed envelopes. That was how I got into the sole government leadership school in the country.

  During my days at the school, I wrote to Thula about what I was learning, the conversations I was having with my classmates. I told her about all the ways my being in government could help villages like Kosawa. What the country needed was a government made of people like us, those who had suffered the consequences of bad policies and knew how things ought to be. We needed a leader who would put citizens first, place all businesses under state ownership. We needed to direct all funds from exports into the nation’s coffers. If we put in measures to prevent the coffers from being pinched, they would eventually overflow. We would use our abundant wealth for healthcare, for education, jobs creation. There was no reason why citizens should lack when the country had bauxite to the north, oil to the west, timber to the east. With a visionary leader, a prosperous country was possible. Wasn’t it evident, I asked her, that good government was the solution to the ills of our nation? I told her I believed we could do it, our generation. We could be the ones to uplift and equalize, no citizen greater or lesser than another. We could create a beautiful country. But first we had to wait our turn; the older generation’s turn was not over yet. Our current leaders were men for whom the word “change” elicited chuckles, but there wasn’t much we could do to force them and their archaic mentalities out, we had to wait for their eras to end. The past would soon be gone, and the future would be ours to design.

  Thula did not dismiss my hope, though she said it was unlikely a country like ours would transition effortlessly from a wretched government to an upright one. She said our nation did not have the foundation for such a progression, because it lacked a constitution; what every country needed was a declaration made by the people, all the people, about what sort of country they wished to live in so that they could build it together. If you look at countries with a history of stable governments, she wrote, you’ll see that they have solid foundations created by those who came before them. The Americans are standing on a foundation created by their founding fathers. European monarchs created foundations for the kinds of countries their descendants would live in. Who created a foundation for our country? No one. We were different tribes thrown together with no common dream. We were forced to build upon sinking sand, and now we’re crumbling from within.

  * * *

  —

  Despite my sister’s wariness, I harbored hopes during my years at the leadership school for what I would do in government. My classmates were like me, convinced that we would never be corruptible like the older generation, determined to hold steadfast to the ideal that the emphasis on the title “civil servant” should be on the second word.

  It did not take me long to realize, after I began working, that my hopes would not come to be. I could see, even from my first day of balancing budgets, that the past and the future of our country would be identical. Repeatedly, I was told my job was to clean up numbers, not to ask questions about why large sums of money could not be accounted for. When I asked what would happen if the deficit was discovered, I was told that the problem was for another day—my responsibility was to worry about the present.

  I learned, within my first year after leadership school, that political theories and their applications existed in separate realms. And that Thula was right—ours was a country with no foundation upon which a better country could be rebuilt. I slowly began to accept, just like my colleagues, that, ultimately, we had to do whatever suited us best. Only I didn’t know in those days what suited me best. I didn’t know what I really wanted.

  Nubia knew what she wanted—five children who would one day study in America, health and prosperity, happiness for herself, for me, for our families. The country meant nothing to her. What good is this country to anyone? she asked me often. In our school days, I used to argue that the country stood a chance if we gave it a chance. Then I went into government and realized that no one in my office, from my lowest-ranking colleague to my biggest boss, gave the country a chance. They diverted all the money they could into private accounts, took whatever supplies their children needed for school, sent the office driver to chauffeur their wives around town, came to work as late as they could, left as early as they wished, because they deemed themselves entitled. My classmates from the leadership school, when we got together, laughed about the impunity, how much worse it was than they’d expected, but in the best possible way. I refused to join in. For years I worked and collected just my salary because I believed in my sister’s dream, because I believed it only took one upright man to remake the world. But I knew my salary would never afford Nubia and me a life of great comfort. Many nights, I considered the ways in which I was failing my wife and future children for the sake of a better country.

  * * *

  —

  By the time Liberation Day came, I’d spent years helping Thula with her mission, and Nubia had spent many evenings alone at home, because she understood that I longed to support my sister, and nothing was more sacred to her than familial love. She still thought it all futile, Thula’s fight, which was why when I told her, a couple of months after Liberation Day, that I was ready to let Kosawa go, she kissed me and told me she was ready for us to start anew.

  I’d traveled across the country with my sister, I’d borne witness to how little was changing despite her zeal, and I’d realized—while some men were heckling Thula at a poorly attended rally in the east—that my Nubia was right all along: our nation was decaying with us inside it, all one could do was abscond with whatever one could. But we’re not absconding, Nubia likes to say, we’re only taking what’s ours; we have the right to do so. She calls herself the Great Bitch, my beloved. She speaks in an American accent and prefers European fashion designers for both of us. For me she’s done whatever a bitch needs to do to get her man what she believes he’s entitled to.

  To move me to the top in the government, she has arranged trysts with young women for my married bosses; she gives the trysters our bed and serves them dinner afterward. She has paid friends of friends in government offices to change my birth certificate so I wouldn’t have to stop working at the mandatory retirement age of fifty-five—why stop working so young when there is wealth begging to be accumulated?

  Together, she and I have amassed riches from payoffs I take after she tells me how much a requested favor is worth. She doesn’t let me settle for anything but the max; she reminds me to stop thinking about fairness. We own lands nationwide given to me as gifts by companies and local rulers seeking my assistance. Our coffers are bloated with funds she helps me channel our way, now that I’m the head of the national taxation office.

  We’ve bought a house for Nubia’s mom and her siblings. We bought a car for her mom, and another car for her albino brother, so he’d no longer have to stay long under the sun waiting for the bus; we got him a high-paying job so young women would overlook his skin color. We bought a gated, two-story house for Mama and Papa, and found a woman to care for Papa now that his old age has become a sickness. We’ve built our own house—seven bedrooms, one for our relatives wh
en they visit, the rest for our children, the first arriving any day now. Mama and Papa picked the baby’s name for us. I cried when I heard it. I rubbed Nubia’s belly that night as I whispered: Malabo Bongo.

  * * *

  —

  Thula came to see Nubia during the month the doctor ordered Nubia to stay in bed. She sat with Nubia till the hour I was to come back from work. She told Nubia that Malabo Bongo would live in a better world, people were awakening to the truth. Thula knew about Nubia’s father; she’d lived longer than Nubia, seen more, and yet she believed still that goodness would triumph. Nubia saw no use in telling her that the world operated under laws Thula could never change, and that our sole obligation was to ourselves, to our happiness and the happiness of the ones we loved. After Thula hugged Nubia to head home and prepare for a trip to Kosawa, Nubia turned around and lay back in bed, in a bedroom bigger than the one she had imagined during the nights she slept in a shed. She gazed at her closet, at clothes I’d bought for her on my last work trip to America, from a store on Madison Avenue. It was then I returned from the office, got into bed, and wrapped my arms around her as, downstairs, our servants prepared our dinner.

  * * *

  —

  Even though our paths have diverged, I still give my sister counsel whenever she asks for it. And she gives me what she can—her acceptance that, though my ways are not hers and hers are no longer mine, we will someday meet at the same place again, a place where my focus on family and her focus on a better country will bring us all contentment. Will that ever happen? Why do humans fight when we all want the same things? What will my child, Malabo Bongo, arrive wanting? Mama says it will be a boy, a happy boy. How I wish for a world abounding in happy boys. We’ve all suffered, I said to my sister. Why choose to keep on suffering? Why not grant yourself more of the world’s pleasures? But Thula doesn’t believe that the world’s pleasures can satisfy her spirit the way her purpose does. She says her purpose in life is to do as she must, even if it means suffering.

  In my mansion, I suffer still.

  I wake up daily before dawn to sit by the window with my drawing book. Sometimes I reread my old, worn copy of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, but most often I sketch images from my dreams, the faces of Papa and Bongo and Yaya. They’re smiling at me always, happy in the next world. Or so I force myself to believe in order to attain what measure of peace is available for me. I’m certain true peace would be mine if I hadn’t become what I once loathed, but I no longer yearn for peace like I once did. I have accepted that, just as I live in the space between the dead and the living, I’ll always be whole outside and broken inside. I have let go of any hopes of ever being free.

  Why won’t Thula let go? I ask this question of Nubia. She has no answer to offer me. We each carry our burden, she says, searching for a place to lay them down—smart bitches know how to carry their burdens with style, and how to lay them down. She said she knew she could lay down her burdens only by returning her mom and brothers and sisters to the life her dad had cost them. Only then could she give the finger to His Excellency and the women who had turned her family away. And she knew she had to stick it to them wearing red stilettos and apparel off the racks of European designers.

  * * *

  Years ago, when Nubia had just become my girl, I found out that the father of one of her friends was the Leader of the team Kosawa had held captive. Nubia and I went to the man’s house once. I shook his hand, we exchanged words, but I did not mention that I had been there that night at the village meeting, and that afternoon when the soldiers rescued him and slaughtered my friends and relatives. I told Nubia about it after we left the house, but asked her never to tell her friend. It was then that Nubia told me the story of how the Leader’s wife and two oldest children had died, eleven months before he started coming to the village meetings. She told me about how the car in which the wife and children were traveling had fallen into a river. The bridge under them had collapsed; government men responsible for maintaining it had misallocated the funds for the repair of the bridge, putting it in their own bank accounts. Some of them had been the Leader’s friends, people he had laughed and drunk with. They consoled the Leader at the wake as his children and wife lay side by side in matching coffins, dressed in white. The Leader, when he returned to work after the funeral, stopped thinking about the right things to do for the sake of others. He thought only about his surviving children.

  He worked hard for them, to send them to America, convinced that there was no hope for our country, a country cursed at its birth, beyond salvation. He traveled to villages, doing his work for Pexton, parroting what he was paid to parrot. Whenever he returned home, he hugged his children, ironed their clothes, fried eggs for their breakfast every morning. He never remarried, choosing to cook for his children and clean the house himself. Nubia’s friend told her about how, one evening, she’d entered her father’s bedroom to see him lying on the floor, weeping, clutching a photo of her and her surviving sister.

  I’d sighed after Nubia recounted this, and she’d asked me why I’d sighed. I told her that on all sides the dead were too many—on the side of the vanquished, on the side of the victors, on the side of those who’d never chosen sides. What good were sides? Who could ever hail themselves triumphant while they still lived? Perhaps someday, I added, after all the dead have been counted, there will be one number for the living to ponder, though the number will never tell the full story of what has been lost.

  * * *

  —

  I thought about that conversation last night.

  I thought about Kosawa. How much longer will it remain standing? Mama reminds me that our people carry the blood of the leopard, but she seems to forget that leopards are disappearing; few remain in our part of the world. It’s been twelve years since Thula returned, five since Liberation Day, yet the village remains poisoned.

  I watched on the news the other day how Pexton’s profit has increased by double digits from last quarter. His Excellency is expected to appoint a new Cabinet next week. He finally allowed our nation’s first presidential elections last year; his European backers had insisted on it, saying he needed to demonstrate that he cherished the ideals of democracy. Opposition parties formed overnight to contest. Thula dismissed it all as a charade. No one was surprised when the results were announced.

  Earlier this year, Carlos called Thula with the news that the Justice Department would not be indicting Pexton under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Thula did not tell me why when she informed me; she barely wanted to talk about it. Carlos had hoped that an indictment by the department would bring publicity to the village’s pending lawsuit based on the Alien Tort Statute and force Pexton to make a settlement—an ideal scenario, since Carlos did not think that the village stood a good chance at trial. And Pexton had indeed gone to Carlos with an offer, but Carlos did not consider it to be enough. No longer in danger of a Justice Department indictment, Pexton took all talks of a settlement off the table. Kosawa’s only chance at restoration now rests on a judge’s decision.

  My sister is approaching forty. The toll of the struggle is finally visible on her face—soft lines are appearing on it, her cheekbones are protruding. Seldom do I call upon the Spirit, but last night, as I thought about Kosawa, my journey from there to here, and everything in between, I prayed for my sister, and for all who still live in our birthplace.

  The Children

  We are the age-mates of Thula and the Five, the ones who had long ago moved on from the group and gone silent. This part of the story can only be told by us.

  Some of us were still in Kosawa the day we learned of the judge’s verdict, but many of us had left by then. We had left for new husbands, for our families, for no longer wanting to hear relatives rebuke us about our complicity in the deaths of our children, the same words we would later heap on our family and friends who remained in Kosawa. We had built new huts,
had children, leased lands from relatives on which to farm.

  * * *

  —

  Those of us who remained in Kosawa did so with pride.

  Our enemies underestimated the depth of our resolve. They never appreciated to what extent we would go to protect that which our ancestors had passed down to us.

  When we had begun marching, all they did was send soldiers to observe and report. The reports must have said our actions were harmless, because they let us be. What could marchers do to a regime? Did raised voices ever bring down a system? When Thula got a newspaperman to spread news of our movement overseas, when she took delegations from villages burned down by soldiers to meet with big men in ministries, the people in Bézam sighed. The woman was a nuisance. They never threatened to take away her job if she didn’t stop. When she taught her students things the government didn’t wish its future leaders to be taught, they ignored her, leaving her to do as she pleased—American-educated women were sometimes hard to control. They would have preferred she teach only what she was paid to teach, but they had to grant her the leeway; her educational accomplishments were matchless. Standing before rapt students, she flung insults at His Excellency, at his senseless cronies, their ineptitude, their shameless disregard for morality. The government yawned when they heard about her Village Meeting in her government-provided house. They said: What can one angry woman do?

  * * *

  —

  One angry woman did everything, and she failed.

  Did she cry alone in her house the day the lawyer from America called with the news that we would not be getting justice from an American court? Or did she go to her parents’ house for a hug? Did she wish she had chosen Austin over Kosawa?