How Beautiful We Were(22)

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Our parents had talked about it late into the night, about Woja Beki’s switch to our side. They said he was wise to agree to the deal the men of the village had offered him: help us deceive the soldiers and you’ll get back your freedom. Of course he agreed. After days of sleeping on a bare floor and dreaming of his mattress and pillow, who wouldn’t? And he executed his end of the deal masterfully. But our fathers knew they still couldn’t trust him. They needed to keep him and his family confined to their house. Allowing them to move around the village freely would be a mistake; they would surely escape to Gardens and alert the supervisors. If that happened, it would be a matter of hours before Kosawa was covered in blood.



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That morning, we walked to school as we did on all school days, in twos and threes, some of us through relatives’ compounds, others in front of the twins’ hut, and yet others past Old Bata sitting in front of her hut, husbandless and childless, the nightmare of all the girls except our friend Thula, who, on the rare occasion when she had gotten involved in an argument, had made it clear that she found nothing pitiful about having no children.

Those of us who walked in front of the twins’ hut hurried along, as our parents had always warned us to do—to never, absolutely never, look toward the hut, lest our eyes wander inside it and we see things our mouths wouldn’t be able to say. Our parents’ orders notwithstanding, we’d all been tempted to take a peek—the things our parents forbade us from doing were precisely the things we most wanted to do—but none of us had thus far looked inside it, no matter how much our curiosity egged us on, because our parents had told us stories of boys and girls who once looked inside the hut and ended up with round black stones where their eyes had been. Sometimes we dared each other to go near the hut and see if our parents’ tales had any truth to them, but, despite wanting to awe our friends with our bravery, none of us wanted to lose the eyes we so loved.

Though we’d never seen anything inside the hut, some of us had heard noises coming from it—the growl of animals interwoven with the rumble of thunder; babies singing a folk song; pots and pans banging over the sound of people laughing; a woman in labor begging the fetus never to come out; a man passing musical gas. When we told these things to our friends and cousins in other villages, they refused to believe us—their villages had mediums and medicine men but no version of the twins—but we believed each other, for we knew that the twins were capable of deeds many deem impossible.



Even before our parents warned us never to look the twins in the eye, we knew they were to be revered, these men who were born on each side of the rooster’s crow, Jakani before, Sakani after. We couldn’t tell them apart from a distance—they wore the same long gray beard and the same black-and-brown snail shells around their necks—but we could differentiate them if we looked closely enough: Jakani was right-handed, and Sakani was left-handed; Jakani was born with his left eye shut, Sakani with his right eye shut. They were older than our parents, but younger than our grandparents, most of whom were there the day the twins were born. One of our grandfathers told us that the twins’ mother had been in labor for a week, moaning in pain so loudly for seven nights that no one in Kosawa had been able to sleep, not even the insects and birds and animals, all of whom began chirping and tweeting and bleating and barking and oinking collectively every night, their sounds growing wilder until the laboring woman’s screams crescendoed to a peak, at which point the twins came out, looking like average babies except for one closed eye apiece and large heads with a patch of gray hair on their foreheads, patches that would eventually migrate to their chins.

Another of our grandfathers told us that, back when he was a little boy, he used to play hiding and seeking with the twins until Jakani began seeing playmates no one else could see and finding things no one had hidden, and Sakani started healing his playmates’ cuts and scrapes with leaves he dashed into the forest to find, chanting healing prayers. A grandmother who died a good death from old age the same day as Wambi once told a couple of our mothers on her veranda, while a few of us lingered around to eavesdrop, that the twins had never shown any interest in women, not even when they were young men with fullness in their trousers. In the best days of their youth, while their age-mates flirted and courted and traveled to other villages to bring back girls who they hoped would give them at least half a dozen children, Jakani and Sakani stayed in their parents’ hut to perfect their crafts, which, after they’d been mastered, brought in the money they used to build their own hut at the edge of the village, where they now lived together.



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Far more than was appropriate, we wondered about what went on inside the twins’ hut. Our mothers wondered too, as must our fathers, though they would never debase themselves to ponder it openly. More than once we heard our mothers saying that it was possible the twins slept on the same bed, Jakani on the right, Sakani on the left, arms around each other. We imagined they were speaking in a parable of sorts, because we knew with certainty that, although men could hug and hold hands with each other, there were certain things men did only with women, things like sharing beds, and lying on top of each other late at night to breathe heavily and cause the bed to squeak, the kind of things that our parents did when they thought we were sleeping, and which we couldn’t wait to do one day, because we could tell from how frequently they did it, and from our fathers’ grunts and our mothers’ muffled moans, that it would be a delightful thing to do.