How Beautiful We Were(31)

The Leader, for the entire time he has been in the back room, has refused to stand up and walk to the toilet. So resolute is he in displaying his superiority that he’s been rejecting most of his food and surviving on the residues of whatever lofty lunch he ate before arriving in Kosawa. It becomes evident to me, as I look at him, that his bitterness and pitiful haughtiness must be the result of years of holding on to vast amounts of odious matter in every bit of his body.

“Good evening, Leader,” I say to him. He does not respond.

Lusaka and the elders add their greetings to mine; they get no response either.

The Sick One moans. I move close to him and inspect him. He’s lying on the ground. His shirt is soaked with sweat; he’s shivering. The driver, with his bound hands, is struggling to wipe the sweat on the Sick One’s forehead. The Round One is sitting away from the Sick One, still fully dressed in his suit. He looks into my eyes, expecting me to say something to him, but I say nothing. Everyone hates the Leader most, but ever since the first village meeting, something about the Round One utterly irks me.

I stoop next to the Sick One and ask him how he’s feeling.

“Please, help me,” he says. “I don’t want to die here.”

“What are you sick with? Does anything hurt?”

He turns his face away. Is he ashamed to say what is ailing him?

“What’s your name?” I ask him.

“Kumbum.”

“Honorable Mr. Kumbum, my name is Bongo. I want to—”

“I’m not an honorable anything,” Kumbum replies. “I’m a sick man….Please, I need to go home….My daughter is getting married in two weeks, there’s a lot of preparation that still needs to get done, I need to go help my wife, please….”

“What’s your daughter’s name?” I ask.

“Mimi,” he says. “My first child.” He sighs. “I’ve been waiting and hoping that the soldiers will come for us. But they won’t. It’s been nine days since you put us here. They’re clearly searching for us in the wrong places; they’re never going to think to start looking in people’s back rooms. I need to go home. I’ll tell you whatever—”



“You’ll tell him nothing,” the Leader says.

Lusaka joins me in stooping next to Kumbum. He feels the sick man’s forehead and pulls his hand back. It is evident from Lusaka’s eyes that Kumbum is warmer than he was earlier in the day. Lusaka moves to a sitting position and tucks his legs under himself. I switch from stooping to sitting like him. Manga and Pondo do the same, and we’re all sitting on the ground now, facing Kumbum. We’re looking at him panting and sweating, and, we hope, not dying in front of us. The Round One stares at us as if we’re a spectacle. If only I could gouge out his eyes and bury them inside his fat body.

“Kumbum,” Lusaka says, softly, “we’d love for you to go home and get ready for your daughter Mimi’s wedding. We don’t want you to die here.”

“It’s true,” I add. “As soon as you give us the names of the big men in Bézam, anyone who you think we could persuade to—”

“Please, don’t make me laugh,” the driver says. I turn to him, surprised. I want to ask him who he thinks he is to interrupt our conversation and make us the object of his ridicule, but a man is dying in front of us, and his death might essentially be our death, so, rather than rebuke the driver, I ask, “Why would we make you laugh?”

“Because you’re talking like people who were dropped from the sky and landed in this country only yesterday,” he says. “No one in Bézam cares about villagers like you, okay? Absolutely no one in the government. No one at Pexton. No one whatsoever.”

We know this may be the case, but we don’t believe in such absolutes. What sense is there in having total certainty that something is one way and no other way? Who has lived through all the years the earth has existed and seen all possibilities? Though, from the way the driver is talking, one would think that many things in life are absolute and we simply do not possess the intellect to recognize that.



“Do you understand what might happen after these representatives give you the names and you go to Bézam and plead on behalf of your children?” the driver continues.

Yes, I understand what might happen, because my brother went to Bézam and never came back, I want to say to him. Yes, we might go to Bézam and never come back—does that mean we should never go?

“What might happen?” I ask him.

He shakes his head and breaks into a derisive laugh reminiscent of the Leader’s. He laughs long enough that he starts coughing. As if they’d rehearsed it, Kumbum starts coughing too. Their coughs—one dry, one with a trace of phlegm at the end—go on until Lusaka runs to his wife’s kitchen and returns with two cups of water. The driver drinks all of his; Kumbum takes a sip when Lusaka brings the cup to his lips.

“What Tonka is trying to tell you,” Kumbum says, panting at every word, “is that when you get to Bézam, no matter what you say there, people will just laugh at you.”

“We’re not stupid,” Lusaka says. “We know Bézam is where evil has built its house and where it raises its children. But we also know that good men live there, it’s impossible for it not to be so. We’re simply asking you to direct us to a few of them.”