How Beautiful We Were(107)

Together with the Five and her Village Meeting students, she held a rally in a town outside Bézam, exhorting people to join her in being the fire that would burn down the regime in the voting booth. She spent her vacation time that year, the entire month she was off, doing similar events around the country. But her party would never take root outside the western part of the country. At some stops in the north and the east, no more than a dozen people attended. Imitators were springing up nationwide, many hoping to gain a popularity as large as hers and use it to enrich themselves. In Bézam and throughout the southeast, few people dared to align themselves publicly with her for fear of His Excellency. The eyes of other tribes were also opening; they wanted one of their own to be their leader, a man with a familiar name, not a woman they barely knew. Wasn’t it time every tribe started looking out for itself? they wondered. My sister tried to argue against such thinking. She tried to contend that the country might be made up of dozens of tribes but it was still one nation, a garden with flowers of assorted shapes and colors and fragrances, in unison forming an exquisite beauty. Few listened—unity seemed too vulgar a notion.



Mama and I worried for her daily. Sometimes I slipped cash into her driver’s pocket when she was leaving for a trip. “She’s my only sister,” I said. “Please, watch over her.” The driver nodded. He had seven daughters; worry was all his wife did.

I teared up in fear, with pride, whenever I watched her in front of an audience, telling them to dream with her. We traveled with her as often as we could—Mama, our new papa, my girlfriend and I. A couple of her friends from America visited; others sent cards with encouragements. She was a dove forging through a fire, burning yet soaring.



* * *





CARLOS AND HIS TEAM OF three arrived in Bézam a couple of years after Liberation Day. He told Thula, right at the airport, that there was something he’d been dying to tell her but he wanted to say it in person. He’d recently bumped into an old friend who worked at the Justice Department and told the friend about his Pexton lawsuit. The friend had confided in him that the Justice Department had a file on Pexton; they’d been gathering evidence on them since the massacre, evidence that showed Pexton breaking American laws by giving bribes to foreign officials. The department hoped to bring charges against them under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. What this meant, Carlos said, was that if the department won, the judge might force Pexton to make restitutions to Kosawa.



When Thula repeated this, while our family was having dinner with Carlos and his team in Mama and Papa’s house, we all cheered.

It was a long shot, Carlos cautioned—the odds of Kosawa’s getting anything out of it were minuscule—to which Thula, her face illuminated with euphoria, said, “You never know; impossibilities happen, that’s the great beauty of life.” We toasted that night as we ate pepper soup with goat meat, and land snails in tomato sauce with rice.

After dinner, while everyone else watched American sitcoms on our parents’ television, I sat with Carlos on the porch to finish our beers and catch the late-night Bézam breeze.

“I can’t remember the last time I saw so many stars,” the lawyer said, looking up.

“You can move here and see them every night,” I said.

He chuckled. “I’m not cut out for this kind of life,” he said.

Clearly, I wanted to say, glancing at him. If someone had told me that he’d just walked out of a movie, I would have believed it, considering his flawless profile and heavy stubble, an overwrought handsomeness highlighted by his sleek hair. He had an expensive-looking watch on his wrist, and a wedding band on his finger, though from the way he looked at my sister, and the number of times he complimented her during dinner and leaned over to rub her shoulders, it was evident to me he’d gladly forget his vows if Thula gave him a chance. He would find out, if he tried, that neither he nor any man alive stood a chance with Thula while Austin still lived. One story from Thula about an experience she and Austin once had would be enough to tell him that his cause was lost.

“I know you don’t need to hear it from me,” I said, “but I still want to thank you for taking this case. Kosawa means everything to my sister.”



“My uncle told me,” he said.

“Professor Martinez?”

He nodded. “He can’t stop talking about his star student who is going to change her country. We’re sitting together at family dinner—him, my parents, the whole family—and he says, ‘Hey, Carlos, what do you say about helping this village?’ And everyone starts talking about all the terrible things happening in the world, and how I could do something about it—‘Come on, Carlos, just help this one poor village.’?”

“So you’re here because your family pressured you?”

He laughed. “Of course not,” he said. “Defending the big guys is what I enjoy doing, but I thought I’d fight for the little guys for once, do something different. It’ll make my parents happy. My dad drove cabs fourteen hours a day so my siblings and I could go to college, and when I got into law school he told their friends that I was going to become a lawyer to put bad guys in prison. I don’t ever intend to make a career out of that, but at least, the day Kosawa wins, my parents can show the news clipping to their friends.”