How Beautiful We Were(59)

When he finally stood up, he told Bongo that he was too stunned and in too much pain to think clearly: this was the stuff of nightmares. He needed to get out of Kosawa as soon as possible. Whatever we’d done, he said, how we thought it was going to help us, now wasn’t the time for him to understand. He began crying again, his shoulders quaking. His uncle was a good man—how could we do this to him? How could Bongo have lied to him? Was it na?ve of him to think Bongo was an honorable man because he’d presented himself as such? It didn’t matter. All he wanted now was for Bongo to take him to Lokunja so that he could arrange for his uncle’s body to be transported to Bézam.

Bongo never got to tell me how he was able to convince Austin to stay, or how he got Austin to agree that it was best his uncle be buried in Kosawa. Austin must have realized that something about his writing our story, and then being in Kosawa right after his uncle’s death, would make the government suspicious of his involvement in our operation; years later, we would learn that not long before Austin arrived in Kosawa, the government had sent him a letter threatening him with expulsion from the country if he didn’t cease writing things His Excellency did not like, and if he didn’t desist from attending clandestine meetings where people talked about how to create “a better country.” I never found out if Austin’s surrender to the idea of his uncle’s being buried in Kosawa was driven by grief, or fear, or a calculation that had nothing to do with Kosawa, because Bongo did not have the time to enlighten me.



On the day he told me the story, the prison guards, without giving any reason, informed all visitors, upon arrival, that they would be allowed only thirty minutes with their loved ones. By the time Bongo finished the food Thula and I had brought for him and got to the middle of the story, the prison guards sounded the bells and commenced barking at the women and children to give their final hugs and gather their bowls and utensils and finish their crying outside. The next time I visited Bongo, we had things more pertinent to discuss—Juba’s nightmares, Yaya’s health, the Restoration Movement’s ongoing battle to free him. He never stopped believing he would be free again. None of them did. None of them imagined, on that afternoon of the Sick One’s burial, that the day would be the last time they would ever see Kosawa.



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AT EVERY PRISON VISIT, WE sat on parallel benches in a room abounding in misery, the wives and children on one side, the prisoners on the other. All around, people spoke in whispers. Woja Beki always sat at one end of our men’s bench, his face puffy and covered with a rash he’d contracted. Who could believe that the man in the dirty brown outfit that all prisoners were made to wear had once worn new American clothes and sauntered around Kosawa, a mighty rooster among sickly chicks? Who could imagine Woja Beki in a brick house upon coming across the crumpled old man? Even his gums and sparse teeth no longer seemed notable in a room of such unqualified destitution.

Lusaka, though he looked not much better than Woja Beki, always spoke in a firm voice, asking his wife and daughters about the farm, telling them never to cry for him, never to let anyone in Bézam see them cry. When the time came for us to say our goodbyes, Lusaka, smiling, always reminded his family to clean the boys’ graves. A man who had once been rare of emotions, a man who awed us in how he kept every sentiment tucked in, had become a man unbound in prison, cheerful as if he were lounging in his parlor and his sons were alive. I wasn’t ever sure whether to believe this new persona—if prison had truly freed him—or if it was all an act for the benefit of his family.



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On my first visit to the prison, which I made with one of my aunts, every woman in the room had jumped up when the guard opened the door to let in the men. I ran to Bongo and held him, feeling the bones that had taken prominence now that much of his flesh had thinned off. He looked worse than I’d feared, more than twice his twenty-eight years. His lively eyes had turned cloudy and shriveled into a permanent squint. After he and I had hugged and cried and hugged and cried some more, we dried our eyes. My aunt led us to the bench, cautioning us that we didn’t want to spend the entire visiting hour standing in one spot crying, and, besides, did we want the other women to take news back home about how suspicious our extended hug had looked and how odd it was that a woman would hug her dead husband’s brother for so long? Bongo had burst out laughing, but quickly stopped, perhaps at the remembrance that said brother was Malabo. I told him about Yaya, after we’d sat down and wiped our eyes again and blown our noses—I told him how Yaya wasn’t eating. He wept. I gave him the food Yaya had made for him. He laughed when he saw that she had put mushrooms in the chicken stew, even though Yaya thought mushrooms were bad for one’s health; she’d done it to give him what little joy she could.

All around the room, I heard wives urging their husbands to eat, eat, there would still be enough leftovers for the coming days. Bongo and Woja Beki and Lusaka always shared their food with each other, and we all made sure to bring a bowl for Konga, though the prison guards never allowed us to see him. We hoped the guards would give him the food, but if evidence had existed that they didn’t give it to him, we wouldn’t have stopped bringing it anyway—Konga was one of us; we couldn’t not try to feed him.



Out of spite, or out of fear, the prison guards kept Konga in a shed at the back of the prison, a structure that used to house the prison dog until it died. Bongo told me that, though all the prisoners lived in one expansive room, eating and sleeping on mats lined from end to end, dressing in each other’s presence after bathing in the prison yard, Konga stayed alone all day and night in this shed, a chain around his neck, chains around his legs, chains around his waist, chains wrapped so tightly he couldn’t do anything but drink water and eat whatever the guards tossed to him if they were moved to be merciful. Their generosity never rose to the level of letting him step outside the shed, not even to feel the warmth of the Bézam sun for a clipped second. It was in the shed that he urinated, and it was there he excreted, in a hole they’d made Bongo and Lusaka dig on the opposite end from where Konga slept on the deceased dog’s blanket.