How Beautiful We Were

by Imbolo Mbue

  The judge who made the final verdict did not deny that Pexton had ruined our land, Thula told us when we gathered in the square to hear the news. The judge said it was likely Pexton and our government had colluded to commit countless crimes. But she also agreed with Pexton that American courts had to stay out of the matter and let the courts in our country decide whether Pexton and our government had done us wrong. She said it would be unfortunate if we did not get justice in our country’s court, but America had to respect other countries’ boundaries. What the judge meant by this, Thula explained, was that a man could not go into his neighbor’s house and beat him up just because he didn’t like the way the neighbor was running his household.

  We did not know whom to feel sorry for the most when we heard this—ourselves, or Thula. Our friend’s lips quivered as she spoke, but she would not allow herself to cry. This is not over, she said repeatedly. But we knew it was over. We had lost our last chance at restoration. Filing a lawsuit against the government and Pexton in a Bézam court would be ludicrous. The people who owned those courts were the same people who had given our land to Pexton. The judges who would rule in our lawsuit might be the same ones who had condemned the Four to death. We had no chance at justice there.

  * * *

  Throughout the village that day and the next, it was as if an eternal night had settled and the sun would never come up. We went to our farms, and to the forest, and to the market, but our thoughts were seldom on what our hands were doing, or where our feet were going. Our minds swirled with questions: How could this be? What do we do now?

  With every subsequent visit to Kosawa, Thula seemed to be sinking deeper into the same darkness that had consumed her when her father vanished. She spoke little and she wouldn’t eat, though we offered to make her favorite meals. When the children ran to her, she looked at them blankly. She and the Five sat in the square late into the night, whispering. It was from one of the wives of the Five that we learned that there was even worse news than Thula had told us: Pexton had filed a lawsuit against Kosawa, demanding that Kosawa pay its lawyers, since it was our fault that they’d needed to hire lawyers. If we lost that lawsuit, whatever we owned of worth would go to Pexton.

  Thula told us at a meeting that we had no reason to worry about the lawsuit: no judge would ever place such a punishment on us. Pexton was only doing it to warn those who would dare follow in our footsteps—they didn’t want villagers thinking they could rise against corporations with impunity. “Do you really believe an American judge will side with us and not allow Pexton to take everything we own?” someone shouted. Hadn’t a judge just doomed us to perpertual terror? Thula did not seem to know what she believed; she spoke without conviction. We heard little hope in her voice when she said that she’d had many conversations with her friends in America, friends who still believed in her dream, and she had also spoken to Carlos. They had all reminded her that there were other courts we could take Pexton to, courts in Europe whose jobs were to protect people from their governments. But who among us still trusted courts?

  * * *

  —

  If we were walking around with broken hearts, our friends the Five were sitting in one spot, sharpening machetes in their heads. In the week after Thula told us the news, whenever we happened upon any of them, they had no patience for inconsequential conversations—they were in a hurry to get on to the next phase of Kosawa’s war. Though their zeal for Kosawa always awed us, we never wondered why they were the ones to dedicate their lives to Thula’s ideals. Even as children, they were the most aggrieved of us, the ones who kept count of the number of spills in a given month, the ones who helped their fathers and uncles carry picks and shovels whenever the time came to dig a new grave. Yet they were the ones who rarely cried at the news of a death. We could tell, even then, that their pain was bound to find a violent form of release. As we got older, they bonded closer to each other by virtue of this shared determination to save Kosawa.

  Like us, they’d dreamed of dying in Kosawa after living lives unfettered by toxic matter and the fists of men with no regard for our worth. Unlike us, however, they couldn’t accept that such a destiny might never come to be. We admired their wives, who stayed with them, though we knew, because we were friends with them, that their marriages were full of silence and uncommunicated agony, circumscribed by the worst kind of loneliness.

  If we had known how close they were to an explosion, we would have said something—anything—to prevent it, but how could we have known? In the months after learning of the verdict from America, our hearts were still heavy, but Thula’s visits to the village put little smiles on our faces, even if she was nearly devoid of hope. Most of us had decided to take each day as it came and leave everything to the Spirit. Who knew, Pexton might decide the next day that it had taken all the oil it needed and that the time for it to leave had come. But the Five—they entertained no such fantasies. While we were beginning our long, slow march toward resignation, the Five were making plans.

  * * *

  Thula was in the village the day the Five exploded.

  Nothing about that morning was extraordinary. We sent our children to school. We went to work. Some of us entertained relatives visiting from other villages. A wedding was coming up in a few days—one of our young men was marrying a girl in one of the sibling-villages—and the women of Kosawa busied themselves talking about the newest girl who would be moving to Kosawa. Maybe it wouldn’t be long before all the huts filled up again, they said; may the Spirit be thanked for love that causes blindness.

  Thula was excited about the wedding too. It was the first time she looked happy in the months since the verdict—seeing her eyes aglow again was like stepping out of a smoky kitchen. She and Sonni and two of the Five attended a meeting at the district office in Lokunja in the afternoon, the details of which Sonni was going to tell us at the next village meeting. Thula had dinner with the wife and children of the one of the Five in whose hut she always stayed. After dinner she helped the children with their homework. She laughed hard when one of them read to her an essay about why every country ought to be like America—it sounded like a place where everyone had everything. Thula went to bed smiling. The truth about what happened after that, we’ll never know.

  * * *

  —

  We believe the Five woke Thula up and told her that they had Mr. Fish and his wife.

  We don’t know when the Five left Kosawa to go to Gardens and kidnap Mr. Fish and his wife. The Five were in the village in the morning: we saw a couple of them leaving to go hunting. We saw them in the evening, sitting on their verandas or visiting relatives. They must have left for Gardens after most of the village was asleep.

  How great was Thula’s disappointment and shock when she found out?

  What did she say? What could she have said?

  Did she attempt to stay out of it, wanting nothing to do with a crime? Did the Five command her to join them, or else? They wouldn’t have. They revered her. But Thula would never have wanted to leave Mr. Fish and his wife at the mercy of angry gunmen. Mr. Fish was an oilman, but we did not hate him; he had never been unkind to us. Thula respected and appreciated him for what he’d tried to do. It seemed to sadden him that he derived his livelihood from our suffering—and Thula, though her meetings with him were heated, believed he truly wanted Pexton and Kosawa to reconcile. We all wished he could do more than say that the decision about the cleanup of our land and waters rested with headquarters in New York, but Thula would never have wanted him dead.

  * * *

  —

  Mr. Fish and his wife were in Thula’s family’s hut for three days, and we did not know it. Sahel had given the hut’s key to Thula, and Thula kept it in the care of one of the Five, so she could open the hut whenever she wanted to be in it. She couldn’t have imagined that the Five would open it one night and put Mr. Fish and his wife there. What did Thula say t
o the Americans when, likely still wearing her sleeping clothes, she entered her family’s hut that night and saw them? Did she offer the couple her mother and father’s room, in which she had installed a bed and table and chair? Did she take the Five aside and plead with them to take the Americans back to Gardens? Did she truly write those ransom letters, or did the Five write them and sign them with her name? Thula’s handwriting was made up of tightly packed, slender letters; the handwriting in the letter the government released was chunky and spacious.

  The morning after the Five kidnapped the Americans, the wife in whose hut Thula was staying woke up and prepared breakfast. When she went into Thula’s room and found the bed empty, her husband told her not to be alarmed, Thula had been stirred to wake up before dawn and do some writing. Thula needed to be alone for some time in her family’s hut, he added. The husband took all of Thula’s belongings from their hut to the Nangis’ hut, along with extra kerosene, supposedly for Thula’s lamp. His wife understood—it wasn’t surprising for Thula, during her visits to Kosawa, to open her family’s hut and spend time alone in there, writing in her notebooks.

  We imagine Thula and Mrs. Fish chatted about New York during those three days as they waited for the two ransom letters to be delivered to Lokunja and Gardens and for the government and Pexton to make their move. Thula would have felt the need to keep the mood in the hut cordial so the Americans would not be in a permanent state of fright. No matter what their state was, we’re confident they were well fed, because the wives of the Five set aside meals for their husbands every day, which their husbands took to the Nangi family’s hut, saying something had come up, they needed to eat with their friends while they discussed it. The wives had shrugged; they’d heard that too many times. In those three days, Thula did not come out of the hut. It must have been the decision of the Five. She would have wanted to come out at the end of the day if she could—she loved sitting with her women friends and their children on verandas in the evenings.

  While Mr. Fish and his wife were in the hut, the Five must have taken turns guarding them, likely two at a time, guns in hand. The rest of them carried on around us so we would not suspect that anything was awry. And we never suspected; nothing seemed peculiar; their manners were ordinary. We did not notice when they went to Gardens and Lokunja to drop off the ransom letters the government claims Thula wrote.

  * * *

  —

  Pexton wanted to heed the letters’ warning that soldiers be kept out of the negotiations. It wanted its man and his wife free to return to their children in America, it wanted no more blood on its hands, Pexton had not come to our country to get involved in our lunacy and carnage. We heard that His Excellency’s men in Bézam told the Pexton men that the decision was not Pexton’s to make: His Excellency did not take take orders, particularly from women. They say Pexton’s leader in New York called His Excellency and asked again that soldiers not be sent to Kosawa, Pexton would give the kidnappers whatever they wanted. Some say Pexton’s leader warned His Excellency that, if he sent the soldiers and there was bloodshed, Pexton would have to cease doing business with our country—Pexton held the highest regard for all human life. His Excellency is said to have laughed and told Pexton’s leader to stop wasting his time with stupid bluffs.

  Pexton, having no choice, sent its men along with the soldiers.

  * * *

  —

  They arrived in a truck and parked it at the entrance to our village. Seeing them, we began spilling out of our huts, confused, not daring to go too close. We held our children’s hands, though we did not need to worry about their getting close—they’d been born with a fear of soldiers, they knew from birth what men with guns could do to them.

  A Pexton man in a black suit spoke into a bullhorn. “We hear you have our people,” he said. “Bring them out now and we’ll give you whatever you want.”

  It was early evening. Panic arose. We did not understand what he meant.

  Who was in the village? Laborers? Supervisors? Why would Pexton workers be in Kosawa? No one thought it could be Mr. Fish. Only later did we realize that none of the Five had come out of their huts when the truck entered the village.

  A soldier took the bullhorn. “Everyone get out of your huts and put your hands up right now,” he said. “Come out before we start shooting.”

  Thula must have heard them. Did she consider leaving the hut with her hands up? She knew what the government would do if she did. She knew the soldiers wouldn’t simply free the Americans and tell the Five never to do it again. Versed in the ways of Bézam, she knew what their punishments would be: a short prison sentence for her, execution for her friends. She must have known the Five wouldn’t go down easy.

  * * *

  —

  Standing before the soldiers, we saw it coming. Another massacre. Except this time we were warned. Sonni, barely any eyesight left, cane in one hand, walked close to the truck and asked the men, “Can you tell us what’s happening? Who are you looking for?”

  The soldier with the bullhorn said, “I’ll say it one more time: everyone, get whatever you need and clear this village immediately.”

  We ran into our huts and began packing up whatever we could.

  We yelled at our wives to stop crying, screamed at our children to put on their shoes. The sick and the old forgot how to be slow. On their mother’s backs, tired babies whimpered and yawned; their hunger would have to wait. We threw items into baskets and raffia bags. Some of us packed too much, others too little. We all thought of something that we might need but had no time to search for: the soldier had given us five minutes.

  We half-ran to Gardens, our provisions on our heads.

  Under the skies we laid our blankets, behind the laborers’ houses. Some of the laborers offered us water as they asked us questions we had no answers for; others looked at us askance, not knowing what to make of us. We were nothing to them, much as they were nothing to us, merely beings with whom we shared space.

  We slept like animals that night, at the mercy of nature. No moon revealed itself, as if we were undeserving of light. The children, afraid to play, stayed by our sides. We shared with each other what food we’d packed. We felt rocks beneath our heads when we lay down to sleep. We heard gunshots in the distance, those of us who had stayed awake. We’d figured by then that it had to do with Thula and the Five, but out in the open, we dared not speak of it. Even that night, we knew we would never sleep in our huts again.

  * * *

  In the morning the buses from Gardens took us to Lokunja, and from there we made our way to relatives across the other seven villages, searching for refuge, so weary we could scarcely see our paths. We heard the news before we arrived in our new villages. We heard it from those who had come out to watch us lumbering. They told us that the Five were dead. Four soldiers were dead. Mr. Fish and his wife were dead. Thula was dead.

  * * *

  —

  The story the world would hear about the last days of Kosawa was of how Thula and the Five, with guns in their hands, went to Gardens, sneaked past multiple guards, stormed into Mr. Fish’s house, went into his bedroom, and kidnapped him and his wife, who was visiting from America. The government would tell of how Thula and the Five blindfolded Mr. Fish and his wife as they pleaded for mercy, and how they brought them to Kosawa. They wouldn’t say how come no one at Gardens raised an alarm. They wouldn’t wonder, as we did, if Mr. Fish and his wife came to Kosawa of their own volition. They would show one of the letters Thula wrote to Pexton saying we’d waited for too long. They would underline the section where Thula wrote that if a delegation did not arrive on foot from Gardens to negotiate, Mr. Fish and his wife would be killed and their bodies thrown into the big river. They would underline, also, the line where Thula wrote that if soldiers showed up instead of negotiators, the captives would be stripped naked, gagged, and whipped, before being execute
d. In stories written in newspapers here and abroad, they said she was a radical, they called her the Fire Lady.

  No one will ever convince us that these stories are true.

  Our Thula was angry, but she’d long lost her capacity for hatred. When some of our younger brothers started stealing from Pexton, breaking pipelines and filling buckets with crude so they could sell it in distant markets, Thula decried it all at a meeting, telling us we must be what we wanted our enemies to be. But the Five—we could be convinced they did what the government claimed. The American judge gave them permission to.

  Only after their deaths did we learn that they were behind the phantom killings.

  We had thought it could be the case—we’d discussed it in low voices, lest the trees be agents of the government—but we had no evidence that they owned guns, and how could we imagine that our friends had become murderers as insidious as our enemies? The wives of the Five, they suffered the worst in their wondering. But what right did they have to ask their husbands if they were killers? What marriage could ever survive such doubt of the other’s decency? Like us, the wives decided to believe rumors of vengeful spirits. Whenever soldiers came to our villages to harass confessions out of us—something they continued doing years after the phantom killings stopped—the wives made up whatever lies they needed to make up for their husbands’ sakes. They spent many evenings when their husbands were not at home visiting each other to commiserate; they told their children that their absent fathers would one day start spending more time at home, they would give them the attention they so craved, all would soon be well.