How Beautiful We Were(23)

When we were younger, one of us had woken up at an evil hour with a bladder spilling urine and gone outside to empty it, only to see something she wished she had never seen. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have gone outside alone. We left our huts at night only when accompanied by a sibling, but this one of us had no other sibling besides a little brother, who would have been of no use as a companion, so she’d gone over to her parents’ bed, to wake her mother up, but her parents were not in their bed. This one of us had hurried through the parlor and out the back door, believing she would find her parents outside—perhaps they’d gone out to urinate together—but when she stepped outside, she saw nothing of them. She only heard their moans coming from inside the kitchen. Our friend immediately lost the urge to urinate. She thought about hurrying back to bed, but the part of her made of curiosity had tugged her to look through a hole in the bamboo kitchen wall. In the dim light of a kerosene lamp, she saw it clearly—her parents naked, her mother lying on her back with her legs spread wide and feet high, her father’s head deep between her mother’s thighs. Our friend ran back to her bed and hid under her blanket, her heart loath to slow its pounding, her eyes unable to shut, until her parents returned early in the morning with the blanket on which they’d been lying on the kitchen floor. They took a new blanket from under their bed, climbed into bed, and covered themselves as innocently as if they hadn’t just been doing unspeakable things to each other on the kitchen floor. The next morning, fatigued from struggling to unsee what she’d seen, the one of us had been unable to get up in time for school. When we asked her during recess why her feet appeared to be as weak as grass, she told us about her night, and a few of us told her that we’d seen similar things, and that, whatever she did, she could never tell her parents that she’d seen them, for it would make them ashamed of themselves, and making one’s parents ashamed of themselves was never a good thing.



We believed Jakani and Sakani did no such things; what they felt for each other was more akin to what our parents felt for us than what our parents felt for each other, but we couldn’t know this with total certainty, for the twins were palm nuts that could never be cracked open. They did and said nothing besides what they needed to do or say to bring us healing and peace. On the occasions when they took someone into their hut because a ritual couldn’t take place anywhere else, they wiped away all memory, so that the person exited the hut with no awareness of what he or she had seen or done. That, we were convinced, was what happened to our fathers right after the village meeting.



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Much as the men of Kosawa recognized the danger the twins’ hut posed, there was no better place for them to go to prepare for a potential confrontation with soldiers. It is likely that, in those hours after the village meeting, some of our fathers cowered when the twins told them to enter the hut, while the rest of them urged the frightened ones to stand tall and be men. Or maybe Jakani chanted a solo that made everyone file in like ants marching at their leader’s command. Ultimately, all of the men must have entered the hut, which was why Kosawa was quiet after we returned to our huts. Inside the twins’ hut, we believed, Sakani gave the men a pre-battle potion to drink, to erase their anxiety and fortify their minds. We imagined that Jakani asked them to kneel in the center of the hut before calling upon the Spirit to possess them with a fearlessness so all-consuming they would overcome our enemies as utterly as the light overcomes darkness at dawn.



The men walked out of the hut in the morning with no memory of what had been done to them; we know this because our fathers’ memories of the previous day were still intact, but none of them could recall what they’d done from late that night to the dawn of the next day. It was thus evident to all of Kosawa that, with the power bestowed upon him by the Spirit, Jakani had reached into the men’s brains and turned off their memories. He must have restarted them only when the men were at a safe distance from his hut, after they’d left the confines of where the spirit and human worlds intersect. Our fathers, if they’d been aware of what the twins were doing to them, wouldn’t have complained, knowing that everything the twins did was for the good of Kosawa. They would have been thankful that, in briefly shutting down their consciousness, Jakani had protected them from coming face-to-face with the Spirit, an experience no mortal could survive.



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We had as good a time in class that morning as we’d had in months. When Teacher Penda lectured on the government, we tried not to laugh as he stressed that it was made of the country’s most intelligent men. At the end of the lecture, one of us asked him to tell us more about His Excellency—what made His Excellency such a great president? Teacher Penda told us to list some traits a person needs in order to be a good leader. We called out several—friendly, kind, funny, respectful. Teacher Penda told us that His Excellency had all of these traits and more. His Excellency was the smartest man in the world, he said; not many countries were blessed to have a president like ours. We did not argue; we’d lived long enough to know he was simply saying what he was paid to say.



When he wasn’t saying what he needed to say, Teacher Penda told us many truths. By the time we were eight, we knew more about where our oil was heading than our grandparents and their parents ever did. We knew because Teacher Penda taught us about America—how people there lived in big brick houses, and how they loved to mash their potatoes before eating them with objects called “ferks.” He taught us how to speak English, though we could never speak it as well as the American overseer at Gardens. Sometimes we used English words when we played, saying things like “who cares,” and “absolutely not,” and “holy shit,” to impress one another.