How Beautiful We Were(117)

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 executed. 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.