How Beautiful We Were(101)

In every town and village we visited, though men and women our age and older looked at her in befuddlement, the young people were enthralled. They came to sit with her, to hear her talk about her vision. She amused them with her stringy hair and how she sat with her legs crossed, as if she were an eminent man. They were curious about what she had seen and learned in America. Why would anyone travel to America and return to this ugly country? they asked her. The question always made her smile. Don’t you want our country to one day be as great as America? she would respond. She did not need to lecture them on the assured gloominess of their future under His Excellency. She did not need to tell them about how, much like their parents, they would have little ownership of their lives because the country wasn’t theirs and would never be, not when one man controlled it. What she needed to tell them, what few outside the capital knew, was that His Excellency, aging and anxious, had recently been growing even more ruthless.



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Thula heard the talks around Bézam, about how His Excellency could sense the end of his reign was near—that was why he showed no mercy to friends and enemies alike. He had survived multiple coups, and executed all those who had plotted his demise, yet his enemies were still plentiful. Which was why he reshuffled his Cabinet every two years, sending former subordinates to prison for the slightest grievance lest they start having ideas. The prison where the Four had been held now contained the same men who had facilitated their entry there. Around Bézam, rumors circulated about how the president never slept in his bed, how he never told anyone where he was sleeping, lest a coup arise in the middle of the night: the first coup he survived had been orchestrated by the captain of the presidential guard. What worried him most, people claimed, was that he had no way of knowing all who hated him—Bézam was full of vultures masquerading as doves.

The entire city worshipped at his shrine, sang his praises at the annual celebration of his ascendance, and yet virtually every one of those worshippers longed to see him dead. He trusted not even his cook, according to the stories, which was why the cook had to bring a member of his own family to taste every meal in His Excellency’s presence before His Excellency would eat it. His most obsequious Cabinet member, with the backing of a European government that wanted no more ties with a lunatic, had plotted his death, schemed to have his plane shot down in a manner that would look like a crash; the scheming went on while His Excellency’s daughter was getting ready to marry the son of this Cabinet member. His Excellency had found out about the plot days before the wedding. The Cabinet member’s immediate execution had taken place on the busiest intersection of Bézam, hundreds watching at noontime, everyone afraid to cry.

At the next celebration of his reign, while soldiers and government workers and schoolchildren of all ages stood at attention, sweating on a scorching afternoon, His Excellency gave a speech christening himself the father of the nation, the lion whose mere presence causes all creatures to lie prostrate. Anyone planning to kill him was attempting to hurt his children by rendering them fatherless, he said. Their punishment would be singular. They would be sliced and stewed and served to him in a silver bowl.



You rise up against me, he declared, and you’ll never rise again.



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SIX YEARS AFTER THULA’S RETURN home, we had yet to set a date for Liberation Day. We still went on trips to inform and awaken, traveling to some places multiple times, but few people, outside of packs of intrigued youths, showed strong interest in our cause. Our time will come, Thula said to us as we drove back to Kosawa enervated, but her words did little to assuage our doubts and our fears that nothing would ever change.

There were months when we visited no villages, our belief in the mission floundering wildly, but hers never did—she was born a missionary for fairness and could live as nothing but a believer. Her earnings from her job, whatever she didn’t spend on her expenses and on her mother and her new father, went to helping her friends and relatives care for their children, and funding our travels. She bought books for our children, and let the little ones climb into her car and honk the horn on the steering wheel. Never forget that it’s for them we’re doing everything, she told us. When we asked her how long we’d keep at it before giving up on the revolution dream, she said: We’ve planted seeds in minds, the seeds are bound to germinate and spread; we only need to be patient, people will awaken. When she said such things—often, as we sat in one of our parlors, pondering all that had come to pass since Konga asked us to rise—she seemed a new version of herself. A soft aura of madness encircled her, as if something of Konga’s now lived within her.



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Our guns might have remained hidden in the forest forever, awaiting Thula’s blessing for us to use them, if one of us hadn’t returned from visiting a relative in another village to find his son dead.

We could not say if this child died of Pexton’s poison—he didn’t have a cough or a high fever, but he had been vomiting for two days. What we could say was that he might have been spared if Pexton’s poison hadn’t caused the herbs used to cure stomach ailments to wither. We could say, without equivocation, that Pexton killed him the day our soil became too toxic to sustain the medicinal herbs that once grew in abundance.