How Beautiful We Were(109)

Papa made sure Mama’s purse was never light. He gave her all she would need to keep the house clean, the food abundant, and retain for herself enough cash to travel to other parts of the city and laugh with women from her area, women she had overheard chatting in the market not in any of the lingua francas of our country but in the language unique to Kosawa and its sibling-villages. That sufficed as a basis for friendships.



After her visits to friends, Mama got off buses stuffed with brash city people to find Papa waiting for her, his trophy, in the living room. He stood up every time to kiss her, his eyes aglow. Even though his hair was gray, he could still lift her, which made her giggle as he carried her to the bedroom, telling me to go to sleep as he shut their door.



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ALONE IN MY BEDROOM, I thought about the night I had returned from the dead. I lost something that night; I don’t know what. I gained something; I don’t know what. I remember everything about the journey except what I lost and gained. My old papa handed me to Mama after my eyes opened. He needed to hurry to the back of the hut to hide his tears—he couldn’t contain his pain. Mama held me as she cried from relief. Yaya cried. Thula cried. They caressed me, asked me how I was feeling. I gave them no response as I looked around the parlor, searching for the thing I’d brought back from the forest yonder. I wanted to tell Mama about another thing, the thing I’d left behind, but I couldn’t recall dropping anything before jumping over the river everlasting. It seemed plausible that I’d traveled with nothing but my body and returned with nothing but my body. Yet even now, decades after that day, I twitch and sweat in my sleep, searching. During the day, I’m overcome with worry, a suffocating urge to look for it, this thing I brought back. It has to be somewhere, the thing I lost, what was it? How could I live without it? I’ve accepted, after years of pondering, that I’ll always be dead and alive, both and neither.

I wanted to ask my old papa to help me understand what happened that day, how Jakani managed to find me and guide me back home—Papa had a way of making the inexplicable logical—but he left for Bézam soon after I returned. I honor his sacrifice, dying so I might live long, but I wish I’d told him before he left that if Jakani hadn’t called me back I would have gladly continued walking toward the ancestors. I’d beheld their hilltop city, glimmering in the distance, and I was eager to get there.



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As a child with few friends, a burdened mother, an oft-distant sister, a broken grandmother, I watched life carry on around me after Papa and Bongo died. In a corner of the parlor, I sat and filled notebooks with drawings. The urge to draw came upon me not long after I returned to life. I’d never drawn before, but one evening I picked up Thula’s pencil and a piece of paper. Images took form as my hand moved over the page. After the massacre, I felt no urge to cry, only to draw what I’d seen.

I wish I could spend my life drawing and painting the world around me.

Were it not for the duties love has placed upon me, I would find a way to move to Europe, where my favorite artists are from, and see what sort of life would avail itself to me. Only when I sit down to draw do I find answers to my questions, answers language cannot relay. Only in my illustrations does it make sense to me, what happened in Kosawa, the absurdities of humanity. It is my sole escape from the senselessness of existence, rendering the world as I see it. A world where real turns surreal before my eyes—that is how I began experiencing life the day I returned. At work, a colleague’s head morphs into glass while we’re chatting. A book flies off my shelf and burns in the air. A crown descends on Mama’s head. My beloved’s skin turns translucent, I see her blood flowing. None of it frightens me, though I developed a fever the first time it happened, when Woja Beki was speaking at a village meeting and his tongue turned into a dog’s tail. These days it happens at random, but when I close my eyes and attend to my breath, all is real again. I can tell no one, not even Mama and Papa, not even the woman I love—they might consider me deluded. I accept it as the price I have to pay for two lives.



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My best nights of sleep in my adult life were the four nights before my sister returned from America. I was finally ready to tell someone about my affliction, and it could only be Thula, the one who had fed and bathed me after our father vanished and our mother could do nothing but mourn for him and the baby who had died in her womb.

I imagined Thula would laugh at my confession and tell me that my condition was ordinary, all humans lived in a land between life and death, the world was just too chaotic for most people to notice. Perhaps she wouldn’t say anything. It wouldn’t matter. I just wanted to sit beside her again at the dining table and finish her leftovers. I wanted her to recount to me the conversations she used to have with our old papa about the whys of the world. I wanted to walk next to her, in awe of her singularity, like I used to in Kosawa.

I still remember our embrace at the airport the day she returned.

She looked at my bearded face, laughed, and said: Hey, what happened to my handsome little brother? It was for Mama and me that she left Austin and America. For Kosawa, yes, but for her family too. It was for us she took the job teaching at the government leadership school, though she had rejected their offer time after time, wanting nothing to do with people she deemed soulless. The government persisted, promising her she would have the freedom to teach whatever classes she wished—brains like hers were rare, and the sciences she’d studied would be vital to the well-being of the future children of the republic. They offered her a car and a driver and more money than she would ever need, money Kosawa needed, money her movement would need.