How Beautiful We Were(50)

One evening, about a year after Malabo disappeared, Tunis came to check on me and found me sitting alone on the veranda, staring into nothing. He sat next to me and whispered in my ear that he’d heard some men in the big market talking about my buttocks; the men had said that my buttocks looked like a sweet pineapple. I slapped his head in jest, though I wish it were true, so I could go search for the men, pick one of them, bring him to my hut, and unleash my lust.

With my cousin sitting next to me and making me laugh, I spent little time wondering what happened to Malabo. After Tunis went home, I wondered all night how Malabo had died. If I had a grave to sit on and cry I would do so, to soak up whatever solace is present atop the mound under which a beloved lies. But the dust with which my husband’s flesh was formed has already merged with the Bézam soil. Or maybe a river there took his blood away. Perhaps his burnt bones were long ago blown away by a cruel gust. I’ll never know. I speak to him daily, often when I’m outdoors, hoping that birds flying toward Bézam will take my words with them, and even if my words aren’t what he wishes to hear, the sound of my voice will cause him to be less alone. Perhaps he’s not alone anymore. Perhaps Bongo is with him, brothers for life and in death.



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THE AFTERNOON WE RETURNED FROM Bézam without Bongo, Thula went straight to Bongo’s bed and curled up under his old clothes. She remained there all day and all night. She did not answer when her friends came and knocked on the door, begging her to open it because they wanted to be with her and comfort her. She did not come out when relatives started arriving to wail with us in the parlor and tell us to be strong. She was not there when my aunts did the unbearable duty of telling Yaya what had happened in Bézam. Thula was not there when we held Yaya’s hands as she was told that Bongo was dead.

I’d collapsed not from my grief, but from seeing Yaya’s devastation at the news, the way she started shivering and hyperventilating as if life was leaving her. I couldn’t bear to watch; the Spirit has no right to punish a good woman this much in one lifetime.

Thula wasn’t there when the women revived me and I opened my eyes to see that Yaya was no longer Yaya, just a breathing object awaiting death. Thula remained alone in Bongo’s bedroom, lying on the sheets we hadn’t changed since the day they took him to Bézam. She avoided us, as if her grief and ours were parallel rivers.

After that first day stuck in a gloomy fog, when I’d gathered whatever strength I could, I sent a message for my cousin Tunis to come help me break down the door to the back room so we could get Thula out—I couldn’t let her stay in there with no food or water. Tunis came over and called out to Thula to please unlock the door so he wouldn’t have to break in. Thula stayed on the bed and ignored us. Tunis found a way to open the door without causing much damage and left. Quietly, I entered the room.

I found her lying under Bongo’s clothes, her face tear-stained.

She was clutching to her chest the book Bongo used to read to her, the one about a place called Nubia, that place Bongo loved to talk about: Did we know that in Nubia women were as powerful as men? he liked to say to Malabo and me on the veranda, at which Malabo would give him a blank stare and I’d laugh and ask him to tell me more.



I knelt by the bed and pleaded with Thula to get out of the room. She turned her face to the wall. I told her we needed to preserve the room in the event Bongo’s spirit wanted to roam there for a while before beginning its journey to be with the ancestors. She ignored me. “You’re too young to sleep here alone,” I said, still kneeling by the bed. No reaction. I told her that as a girl she couldn’t make the back room her bedroom; Bongo could do so because young men can handle the danger of sleeping in a room with a separate entrance. Still no reaction from her. I stood up. Letting go of the tenderness in my voice, I told her I would no longer put up with her insolence; I hadn’t killed her father or her uncle, my patience with her wasn’t going to last forever. Still she made no effort to rise. My cautions turned to threats. “I’ll never let you back in the hut if you don’t come in right now,” I said. I could have been speaking to a rock. Determined to get a response, I yanked her off the bed. It was then I noticed how wet the pillow was, drenched with her tears.

What could I do? Our parlor was full of women sitting on the floor around Yaya, singing to her in her numb state; I didn’t want to announce to them that Thula was compounding my grief by defying me. So I went into my bedroom and closed the door and window. In the darkness, I sat on the bed and bowed my head. I asked the Spirit to tell me where I’d gone wrong. I wanted to know where all of us, as a people, had gone astray. Surely, our ancestors had committed an offense, and their punishment was being visited upon us, for no hut in Kosawa had been spared this desolation wrought upon us. I wept for Bongo, I cursed Malabo. I wish I didn’t detest my husband for dooming me to a life of being solely responsible for a broken girl and a lost boy and an old woman, all of them laying upon my back their anger and grief, with no one to bear mine but me, because it had to be so.

I screamed into my pillow. I told Malabo I wish I’d married Neba in my village, the first man who’d asked me to be his wife. I wish I hadn’t told my mother to tell Neba that she couldn’t accept any gifts from him because another man had already requested her permission to marry me. I’d joked and laughed about the lie with my friends, because I believed that I’d someday find a man I wanted who wanted me too; I was confident that waiting for this man would be worthwhile. And he was worthwhile, my husband, my dream, who with a semi-smile brought low the clouds and laid them for me to walk on, who with a single touch left me floating face downward on the stillest, cleanest water, everything about him so worth the damnation of being born. In our youth and freedom, our exhilaration seemed as if it would last forever. Look where my lie landed me.