How Beautiful We Were(45)

They told me the name of this great city, but I lost it right after it hit my ears, and on their next visit, a week later, they told me again, but my tongue couldn’t hold on to it well. Every time I tried to say it, it plopped off my lips, so when people started asking me to tell them the name, I decided it was better not to struggle, better to tell them that she was going to a place called Great City. When I told the Sweet One and the Cute One of this name, they laughed and said that it was a more fitting name than the city’s real name.

We told her the news together.

I let the Sweet One talk. He told her that the Restoration Movement had spoken to schools in America and asked them to help our village by educating our children, and one of the schools had said yes, they would be glad to educate one of our children. The school and the Restoration Movement had looked at the report cards of all the children, and no one had needed to be convinced that she was the one the school should bring to America. Her countenance did not change as the Sweet One spoke. When he was done, she thanked him and the Cute One, but said no, she couldn’t go, she did not want to leave me and Juba and Yaya, not at a time when we needed to be together. Then she turned to me and said that if I wanted her to go she would go, but I should think about what I wanted for myself, not what I wanted for her, she only wanted my happiness. She walked out of the parlor when she was done speaking. I knew she needed to cry—it was clear in the way she’d spoken, in how she’d kept her eyes down, that she wanted to go. She yearned, desperately, to better understand the world, but she didn’t want to leave us.



The Sweet One and the Cute One made more visits after that, to help us with the preparation for her journey. We decided to tell no one in the village, not even Yaya or Juba, until she had gone to Bézam—with the Sweet One, under the pretense of representing Kosawa in a reading competition—and had all the right papers she needed to travel, and until we had a date for her departure. We knew she would tell no one, because the weight of the journey was severe, and the more she carried in her heart, the less she spoke.



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MY MOTHER ALWAYS CAUTIONED ME against dwelling on the past and the future. What happened will never unhappen, she liked to say; what is to happen will happen—better you focus on what’s happening in front of you. But on evenings like this, when I find myself sitting alone on the veranda—Yaya and Juba in the hut; Thula in America for several months now; my friends and cousins busy with their own concerns—I hear no other voices except those of the past and the future. They sit on either side of me, fighting over my mind. Remember what happened, the past says. Consider what might happen, the future says. The past always wins, because what it says is true—what happened lives within me, it surrounds me, ever present. I cannot trust the future and its uncertainty.



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I see the past in Juba’s eyes, the blankness that appeared within hours after the massacre. He can’t unsee what he saw. None of us can. He can’t unhear the sound of those guns. None of us ever will. He’s a child present but gone, so young in age, so battered in spirit. I hear his brokenness when he asks me to tell him: Do I think his father will ever return? What did Bongo do wrong? Could we please leave Kosawa? He’s scared because he’s the last male left in our family—Big Papa is gone, Malabo is gone, and now Bongo too—how long before it’s his turn? Would Jakani bring him back a second time if he died again? he asks. I hear his anguish when he tells me that he wishes he could understand all that has happened to our family. I’ve done my best to explain what I can; I’ve told him that too many things in life cannot be reconciled, though I wish for his sake that it weren’t so.



He asks me to buy him drawing books and crayons every time I go to the big market. Morning, afternoon, evening, there’s no way of knowing when he’ll feel an urge to draw. He has filled a dozen books with pictures. He draws things I don’t understand—a man’s face with features scattered all over, mouth on the forehead, nose on his cheekbone; fishes and trees in the sky, standing in the place of clouds; the sun and the stars falling down. I ask him why he draws that way, why he can’t draw things the way they are. He says he doesn’t know. He can’t explain, but I know it’s grief.

I see his heartache when he goes to Yaya’s bed and lies next to her. He’s eleven, an age by which every boy in the village has gotten rid of his yearning for affection, busy as they are preparing for their rite of passage into manhood, but Juba is not ashamed to tell his friends that he’d rather not come with them to make new slingshots so they can go bird hunting, he’d rather spend the afternoon with his grandmother. I hear him say it and I know it’s the pain. I see it in how eager he is to help me feed Yaya, how he rushes to fetch a cup of water for her, how gentle he is when we roll her from her side to her back at least four times a day so she doesn’t get infected with bedsores. I hear it when he asks me if Yaya will ever walk again, why her legs stopped functioning the day we returned from Bézam with the news. I tell him that heartbreak is the worst malady.



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FOR THE FIVE YEARS BEFORE Thula left, I woke up every school morning and fried eggs for her and Juba, two eggs each. No one in Kosawa eats eggs on a regular basis—chickens lay eggs only so often, and it’s best to leave the egg to one day become a chicken and feed an entire family than to break it and barely fill one stomach—but I made sure my children ate eggs, because Malabo believed they were good for the body, and he wanted me to feed them to his children as often as I could. During those five years, I bought the eggs in the big market, using the money the people from the Restoration Movement gave us. It was the money Pexton gave, after the Restoration Movement fought them on our behalf.