How Beautiful We Were(26)

Day and night, our mothers monitored the movements of all three of Woja Beki’s wives with a ferocity we’d never seen before. Their viciousness surprised us, considering they did not have the cold hearts of our fathers and they would never have encouraged such a behavior in us, turning our backs on our friends. But we reminded ourselves that they had buried children, and one of our aunts would bury a child four days after the village meeting, the baby she’d held up to show the Pexton men during the meeting. How many children had Woja Beki’s wives buried? None. How many children in that house drank the well water in its pure state? None. In addition to the clean water Gono brought from Bézam, the family had a machine that removed all impurities from the well water on the occasions when they had to drink it. None of us ever saw the purifying machine, and Woja Beki once brought some of our fathers to his house to prove to them that there was no such machine, the story was ridiculous, he was a victim too, but we believed it still, because we knew he and his family cared about protecting themselves only.

Perhaps our mothers were realizing, as we all were, that no one was coming to save us and we had to save ourselves by whatever means presented itself, including spying on and keeping under arrest people with whom we once shared meals and hugs. Visiting each other in kitchens and on verandas, our mothers spoke freely of the hatred they’d long concealed toward Woja Beki’s wives, Jofi especially. “What makes me angry,” one of our mothers said, “is how I wasted precious hours pretending to like her.”



Having been warned by Lusaka that all our eyes were on them, and that if they were caught attempting to leave the village the punishment he would inflict on them would be unparalleled, the family curled into themselves, an island surrounded by crocodiles.

Sometimes, in the evenings, we loitered outside their house, hoping to hear the wives and children crying, but we heard nothing. Their windows and doors remained shut, each wife in her bedroom with her daughters, the sons all in one bedroom, every mother pondering how to save herself and her children when the chance arose. If some of us felt pity for them, we said nothing of it to our friends, for we all knew how essential the measure was to our ultimate victory.





Bongo





I SIT ON THE VERANDA now, forcing my thoughts to stay far away from the burdens that will come with my new role. Thula is visiting a sick friend; she and a couple of her age-mates are probably doing their best to entertain him with ludicrous tales and theories, anything to distract him from the aches in his body. Knowing Thula, she’s likely sitting in silence and nodding to one theory or another that her friends are defending, like the one I once overhead about the ocean, which none of them have ever seen, how it’s bound to dry up someday because of American people like the ones at Pexton, because of all the toxic wastes they’re dumping into rivers which will flow into the ocean and choke it dead.

Juba is next to me, on Yaya’s lap. Sahel is in the kitchen, making dinner. We’re not the family we used to be before Malabo vanished; we don’t try to be. It’s been over a year, and Yaya and Sahel cry still. But they’re women—they must find a way to wipe their tears and keep on moving. We must all keep on moving. There are seven sick children in our midst now, three of them babies, all likely to recover, according to Sakani, may the Spirit be thanked. Perhaps our newfound hope is sustaining them, a sense that a winnable battle is being fought on their behalf. The air of Kosawa has grown lighter from the collective faith of its people: we know our time for doubt is gone.



I look at Yaya. Her cheeks seem to have sunk farther into her face now that she’s lost most of her teeth. She appears calm, as if she hadn’t started the day with a cry for her firstborn. When my father died, she began each day with a cry for one month; with my brother, it’s conceivable she’ll start her day with a cry for the rest of her life. May she never shed a tear for me. She’s rocking Juba, who’s four and too old to be rocked. Both Juba and Yaya show no signs of wanting their physical closeness to end. Malabo never liked it—he often asked Yaya to end it—but has such love ever been successfully curtailed? I know Yaya wants to rock a child of mine too, but she asks me no questions about when I’ll get a wife. I know she wants me to forget Elali, choose another girl from the sibling villages, any of those jostling to be selected, but she doesn’t say this to me. She says nothing, in the way mothers say everything while saying nothing.



* * *



—

A relative passes in front of our hut and wishes us a good evening. We wish him the same. I notice two of Lusaka’s daughters walking toward us. The older one is tall, her body at the junction where slender meets fleshy. She’s beautiful. I’m surprised by my sudden assessment of her. I hope it means I’m forgetting Elali. I should forget Elali. Another man goes between her thighs every night, and it’s his name she moans, not mine. But it was my name she’d promised me she would say for the rest of her life—she promised me that a hundred times, from the first night in my bedroom till the day she sat next to a laborer on the bus from Gardens. She was never mine again after that day.

Lusaka’s older daughter gets closer to us. I can’t imagine her thighs are anywhere near as slender and firm as Elali’s, but they’re probably fine enough thighs she’ll someday use well on a man. Something about the way she moves makes me want to start searching for a replacement for Elali, find a body I can lay claim to and grab and fondle as I wish, but I have no time for a courtship dance right now. There have been a few women since Elali got married—one of them allowed me to do to her something I’d never been bold enough to ask Elali to let me do—but the women did no more than keep me from ripping off my groin when hunger for a naked body turned my brain into sludge.