How Beautiful We Were(6)

The Leader beckoned for his men to move closer to him. He whispered at length into their ears. The Round One and the Sick One nodded as he spoke, all of them intermittently looking sideways as they attempted to devise a strategy to retrieve their key, a plan they must have hoped would involve the least amount of debasement.

Seemingly satisfied with their plan and convinced of its strength, they took a step toward Konga, knowing nothing of the curse that would hold them and their descendants captive from that night till eternity. We leaned forward. The Pexton men took two more steps and stood closer to Konga. Konga moved the key to his lips.



“One more step,” he said to them, “and I’ll swallow this key.”

We held our breaths. He would do it. We knew he would. The Pexton men must have recognized this too, because the Sick One staggered, and the Round One’s face grew more spherical, and they suddenly all seemed like children in a dark, deadly forest.

We turned our attention to Woja Beki, who had regained his speech and was now imploring Konga not to bring shame to our village. He begged for a full minute, calling Konga the son of the leopard, owner of a voice more melodic than music, bearer of a brilliance that rivals the sun’s. He reminded Konga of how beloved he was, how blessed we were to have him, what joy there was in Kosawa on the day he was born, what—

The Leader cut him off and told him to stop speaking nonsense; his voice now had not a trace of politesse left. Its pitch rose as he shouted—looking at his underlings, who were still nodding at his every word—that all of this was nonsense, utter nonsense, to which Konga said the Leader needed to clarify exactly what the nonsense was, and the Leader responded that the idea of a madman preventing him, the Honorable Representative of Pexton, from returning home, was the exact definition of nonsense.

Konga doubled over, roaring with laughter. Deep in a trance into which we’d now fallen, we could scarcely move a muscle on our faces. Woja Beki pulled us out of our stupefaction by stepping closer to us and asking, in a quivering voice, if we were going to continue sitting there quietly while Konga insulted our guests—guests who had traveled for many hours to do nothing but assure us that our troubles would soon be over.

No one responded.

“If our honorable guests aren’t back in their office tomorrow morning,” Woja Beki went on, “soldiers will arrive by evening to look for them. I’m promising you, it won’t be pretty when the soldiers arrive. They’re not going to ask us why we did nothing to stop Konga. They won’t be concerned about the fact that Konga is uncontrollable. They’re simply going to mete out our punishment. They’ll slaughter us, every one of us.”



We looked at each other.

“Are you doubting me?” Woja Beki continued. “Wasn’t it only last month that news reached us of how soldiers burned a village to ashes because one of its men split open a tax collector’s head with a machete in anger? Where are the people of that village today? Are they not scattered around, sleeping on the bare floors of their relatives’ huts? Would they say it was worth losing their homes for the sake of one man’s heedlessness? If the soldiers can do it to those people, why won’t they do it to us? This is a country of law and consequences, my dear people: we’ll pay the price if we don’t afford our friends here the respect we’re required to give them. I’m begging you: please, please, don’t let it happen to us. Let it not be that I did not say it. The soldiers won’t care that this was the work of one madman. They’ll put bullets inside all of us, down to the smallest child.”

The men from Pexton nodded, a warning, it seemed, that it was all true.

Our collective sweat could have filled a dry well when our probable fate dawned on us. We knew what guns could do, but we’d never considered death by bullets.

One of our grandfathers stood up and turned to a grinning and swaying Konga. “Please,” he said, “we don’t want soldiers in our village. Please, Konga Wanjika, son of Bantu Wanjika, I’m begging you, give these men their key. Your father was my second cousin, and I’m now speaking to you on his behalf. Don’t bring any more suffering on us. Drop the key on the ground, and I’ll pick it up and give it to them. Go bring their driver from wherever you’ve hidden him. Let us all wish each other a good night and go home.”

We thought Konga would heed the counsel of a man enlightened by age, a man who had lived long and mastered the difference between right and wrong. We thought the madman would remember that it was our duty to obey our elders and revere the words of the wise, a lesson we’d been taught and retaught since we were toddlers. In our cloud of bafflement, we forgot that, with the loss of his sanity, all that he’d been taught since birth had been washed away, diluted and pulled through his ears and out of his brain by that vengeful spirit. We forgot he was more newborn than adult now, possessing no sense of time, no awareness of the past or future, possessing only a faint consciousness of the spirit world from which we all came and to which we would return. We were reminded of how far from sane he was when he slid the key back inside his trousers and started laughing.



* * *



—



“Give him the key,” one of our mothers cried out. The rest of our mothers joined in. Please, they said, we don’t want soldiers coming here. We’re begging you.

“Are you going to sit there and watch a madman invite abominations to your homes?” the Leader said to our fathers and grandfathers sitting at the front of the gathering, looking from one face to the next. “You’re willing to die because of him?”