How Beautiful We Were(14)

Yaya leans on her cane, pulls herself off the stool, and enters the hut. Mama follows, carrying Juba on her hip, my unborn brother or sister in her belly.

I remain outside with Papa, neither of us speaking, both of us looking at the guava tree as the wind brings down the leaves. The dry season has just ended, heavy rains are on their way. Nights of thunderstorms will soon abound; on one or two mornings, we’ll awaken to the sight of a rainbow. When the next dry season starts, later in the year, it will usher in the year 1980, a year I’m looking forward to because it’s the year I’ll turn ten, my favorite number. On this morning, though, I must act as if I’m four times ten years old, for Papa’s sake, so he feels less alone as he struggles to convince everyone that he needs to do this. I don’t want him to go, but I know he has to do it, for Juba and me.

“Thula,” he says to me after a long minute of us sitting in silence.

“Papa.”

“Make sure, while I’m away…” He sighs. He does not turn to look at me as he tells me to watch over Juba and make sure to listen to Yaya and Mama and Bongo.

“Yes, Papa.”

He tells me he’s counting on me to be strong, especially for Mama—make sure she eats and sleeps well, for her sake and the sake of our unborn.

I nod.

“I don’t want to come back and find that she and Yaya have not been eating because of their anxiety about my return. Bongo is a man—he doesn’t know how to do certain things well, so I’m entrusting this to you. Take very good care of your brother.”

“I’ll do as you say, Papa.”

“Get up and go get ready for school.”

On the walk to school, between lessons, during recess, my friends ask me if it’s true, if my father is really going to lead his group to Bézam, if they’re going to march into the palace of His Excellency and demand that His Excellency remove Pexton from our land or else. I respond to no questions; I want everyone to leave me alone, or to go talk to the children or sisters of the five other men, some of whom also come to me for answers, seeking any assurance I can give that everyone will return home safely, that Bézam wasn’t the vicious jungle of our imagination whence no one ever returned.



* * *





PAPA IS GONE BY THE time I return home from school.

I say nothing to Mama and Yaya besides greetings. I go into the bedroom and lie on my mat with my school uniform still on. I cover my head with my blanket and try to imagine life in a perfect world, but all I see is Papa’s face. He and his group probably caught the bus at Gardens not long after I left for school, to begin the journey that would require them to change buses at least twice before arriving in Bézam a day and a half later. Mama calls for me to come eat, but I don’t respond. I have no interest in food.

Bongo doesn’t go out that evening to sit with his friends at the square. Mama goes to bed early. I rise and go to the veranda to sit with Juba and Yaya. We’re all thinking of Papa, wondering what he’s doing at the moment. We ask the Spirit to be with him. I think of his advice that I never forget how it feels to be a child when I grow up. I want to keep my promise to him, but I also want to forget I ever lived through such anguish.

We begin counting down the days, desperate for them to hurry to ten, which they refuse to. Day One takes a thousand years to get to Day Two, which takes three thousand to get to Day Three. Roosters won’t announce a new dawn quickly enough, shadows won’t lengthen at a generous speed. We spend every second with our ears searching for sounds of a return, scrutinizing noises from every direction, saying nothing beyond what is necessary, afraid we might utter a word that would put the others in even greater distress. The minutes and hours remain reluctant to leave us, though we beseech them to fly away. When the sun begins its descent, it appears to take a prolonged pause with every drop, to mock us, surely, for there is nothing here for it to take so long to admire, this ordinary view it has seen every evening since the day the Spirit created earth.



We visit the families of the other men. Mama goes to see her friend Cocody, the wife of Bissau, Papa’s best friend—their two husbands are in Bézam, they’re two anxious wives. Mama and Cocody talk in sad tones about their fruitless search for sleep every night. Another friend of Mama’s, Lulu, comes to visit us; her brother, Lobi, went with Papa. Mama tells Lulu she’s sorry for Papa’s role in her family’s pain, and Lulu asks Mama why is it that women feel they have to apologize for their men’s failings—when was the last time a woman was the source of her village’s suffering? Lulu’s voice is not as loud as it often is, but she still pushes her tongue through the gap between her front teeth every time she speaks, the same gap her brother has, which makes me wonder what happens to the gap between people’s teeth when they die. But no one has died. Has anyone died?



* * *



—

On the tenth day, I wake up early, sweep away the guava leaves in the front yard, and burn them at the back of the hut. I hurry home after school and dare not leave the veranda. I force myself to breathe. We all sit on the veranda, saying nothing to one another, our emotions warped and ineffable, our eyes dry from alertness. We wait till the darkness gets so thick we can scarcely see the torment on each other’s faces.

Papa does not return.