How Beautiful We Were(39)

Austin unfolds the letter from his uncle after he returns; I’d already read it to make sure it contained no betrayal. He displays neither shock nor excitement as he reads. I look at my hands and tell myself to be still—trembling hands never won a battle. Lusaka looks at me and nods at me, to tell me that I’m doing well, I’m not failing.



Austin excuses himself after reading the letter. He runs up the wooden stairs again and returns with a book and a pen. He wants to know more, he says. He wants to know every detail, from the day Pexton first arrived in Kosawa to the day the last child died. I speak, and he writes. One question follows another. How many children have died? I try to remember; too many, I tell him. How many do I think? I ask Lusaka and Tunis. We do a quick count, but we cannot come up with the exact number. I tell him Lusaka lost two sons. He looks at Lusaka, who averts his eyes. Tell me about his sons, he says to me. I tell him how Wambi was the best arithmetic student in his class. I tell him about Lusaka’s firstborn son, who, like other mischievous boys in the village, loved to give the family’s dog palm wine and laugh as the dog got disoriented. I tell him Lusaka’s sons were very close and were looking forward to entering young adulthood together and moving from the room they shared with their little brother to the back room of Lusaka’s hut. I do not tell him that his uncle was dying in that same back room a couple of days ago. I only tell him about Woja Beki. I tell him about the size of Woja Beki’s house, and the jobs Woja Beki’s sons have in Bézam. I do not tell him that his uncle is in Woja Beki’s house as we speak, and that I pray his uncle survives whatever is ailing him, for everyone’s sake.

I tell him about Malabo. I tell him how Malabo left Kosawa with his best friend and four other men over a year ago and never came back. You must miss your brother terribly, he says. My brother was a great man, I say; he made me angry, he made me happy, the world will never see the likes of him again. Austin says he’s sorry for my loss, for all of our losses. I nod, realizing how much it still hurts.

He tells me he has no brothers or sisters, but he has cousins whom he’s close to. He ran into one of them earlier in the day, he says. She was running late to an appointment to try on her wedding dress, but she couldn’t resist standing on a street corner to excitedly tell him the latest wedding news, most notably that the wife of a government minister would be in attendance. She said her father should be back in a few days to go to the village and pick up two cows for the feast. Did his uncle gush to us about the upcoming wedding? Austin asks me.



He doesn’t realize what he’s doing. He doesn’t know he just told me something I hadn’t considered—that the families of our captives have not yet reported them missing.

No one is looking for the men.

Their families think they’re still traveling from one village to another.

We have a few days before they’re declared missing and Kosawa and every village they were supposed to visit on their trip comes under suspicion.

I could hug Austin right now—what a revelation for a moment like this. Based on this information, I deduce, we have enough time to return to Kosawa, lead the men into Jakani and Sakani’s hut to erase their memories, and send them on their way. By the time the men return to Bézam, Austin will have written our story and sent it to America.



* * *





THEY LIED TO US WHEN they said that the soldiers would come for us if they didn’t return to Bézam after the village meeting. They lied to us because they could. What means did we have to know the truth? How could we have known that they weren’t scheduled to return to their homes that evening? That their next stop was another village where they would tell the people that change was coming, something the people would wait for—for how long? Until the day a lunatic tells them to walk out of their wide-open prison gates?

Who sent the two soldiers? Perhaps a government person in Lokunja when the men didn’t show up for a planned meeting? Perhaps the overseer at Gardens, because the men were supposed to spend the night in his house but never showed up? But if that were the case, wouldn’t the overseer have alerted the Pexton office in Bézam? Why didn’t he? Perhaps the overseer told someone in the district office but that person didn’t take his concern seriously, thinking the men had decided to abscond from their duties and enjoy some village fun. Is it possible the soldiers believed the story we concocted with Woja Beki? Or could it be that the people in the Bézam office suspect the men are missing but don’t yet want to tell their families, lest the incident turn into an ugly drama? Nothing is inconceivable in this country. I’m not skilled enough to untangle the whos and whys, but one thing is certain: everyone hopes the men are doing their job somewhere, no one thinks they’re in Kosawa, and if the men were to be declared missing, who would think that the people of Kosawa have the audacity to take representatives of Pexton prisoner?



I tell Austin everything except any of this.

Halfway through the questioning, I pull out the lukewarm bottle of water in my bag and take a sip. I need my voice to be steady as I describe the children’s symptoms and the recent oil spills that seeped into the farms of three families. I tell Austin what the big river looks like now, green and flowing sluggishly under layers of toxic waste. I tell him how meager the next harvest is likely to be and how, because of the bad harvests, we use most of what little money we have after paying taxes to buy food in Lokunja.