How Beautiful We Were(82)

Before Sonni was done saying this, Sahel had jumped off her stool.

“What are you talking about?” she said.

Sonni seemed taken aback, as if he’d only made the simplest of requests.

“How dare you suggest Thula has anything to do with that?” Sahel said.

“Everyone in this village knows it, Sahel,” Sonni replied.

“Shut up.”

If someone had told me Sahel had such rage in her I would never have believed it, but I saw it that evening. It was as if she was finally ready to scream out her pain for the world to hear. Her eyes alone could have sliced open Sonni from the top of his head to the part where his thighs join. She was pointing, pumping her fist, yelling, telling Sonni to get out of her hut, never come back into it if his intention was to accuse her daughter instead of recognizing his own uselessness as a village head. Sonni was too stupid and blind to see what his son was doing, too weak to do anything about it, and he thought it easier to blame Thula. Thula was not the problem. Sonni was the problem.

Sonni stood up and quietly walked out of the hut.

The Sweet One followed him.

It was then that Sahel sat down and wept.

Watching her, I knew I could never tell her that I agree with Sonni; that, like everyone else, I believe Thula has a hand in Kosawa’s new wave of woes. The entire village knows that Thula sometimes sends money to her friends through the Sweet One. She sends us money too, whatever little she saves from working at school, which isn’t a lot in America but a great deal to us. Sahel never keeps all of the money—there are too many people in Kosawa who need it. That may be why nobody ever talks about Thula’s role in the destructions around her mother. But Sahel has to know it. A mother knows her child, even an enigmatic one. If Sahel refuses to believe the whispers, it’s only because certain truths are too bitter to swallow.



Sonni hasn’t come to visit me since that day, but Manga, having recovered from a recent fall, came two days ago to see how I was feeling. He didn’t ask me if it’s true that Sahel swore she would never speak to Sonni again. If he’d asked, I would have told him that Sahel’s anger wasn’t at Sonni, or at anyone among us. I would have told him that Sahel is angry because there’s nothing else a woman in her position can feel besides fury. Which was why, that evening, I begged her once more to move to Bézam.



* * *





THE MAN IN BéZAM, HE’S not a young man, but he’s younger than my husband was when he died. He is the uncle of the Cute One, who is the same age as Sahel.

It was the Cute One who said to Sahel—and I don’t know how it came up—that his uncle was searching for a new wife. The Cute One said his uncle was not a man who liked being alone; his wife had died eighteen months before. The man and his wife never had children—his wife had been unable to keep her pregnancies—but this man had never considered replacing her with a fertile wife. Now she was gone, and the man was alone in his brick house in Bézam, working at a government job.

The Cute One said that his uncle was a good man, and that when they had spoken about his loneliness and his getting a new wife, the first person the Cute One thought of was Sahel, not one of the young women in Bézam. The Cute One told Sahel, in my presence, that he’d seen how well Sahel took care of me, and he knew Sahel would take good care of his uncle too, and his uncle would take good care of her and Juba in return.



Sahel looked angry when the Cute One made the proposal, as if she deserved something better. I didn’t like the way the Cute One said it either: it sounded to me as if he wanted Sahel to move to Bézam to spend a few good years with an old man, followed by many years of cleaning him and feeding him and helping him die. But then I thought about how wonderful those few good years might be for her. Besides, who’s to say the man doesn’t have a decade of vigor left in him? My husband’s hands were strong till the afternoon he felt pain in his chest, and was gone in hours. Even if this Bézam man is gone within a year, Sahel and Juba moving there will keep them safe from what’s surely coming to Kosawa.



* * *



—

Last night, I called Sahel into my bedroom. I asked her for the seventy-seventh time to say yes to the man in Bézam.

“I can’t, Yaya,” she said to me.

“Why?”

“You know I can’t….”

I told her to do it for my sake, and for Juba’s sake, but mostly for her own sake. She sighed. I could see she had been thinking about it.

“At least go with the Cute One to Bézam for one night and see the man for yourself,” I said. “If he’s too old, you can pass him on to me.”

I’d intended for her to laugh at my joke, but she didn’t. “How could the Cute One suggest such a thing to me, knowing I can’t leave you?” she said.

I told her not to blame the Cute One. Men, thinking too highly of their intelligence, sometimes come up with ideas without considering the different sides of what they’re talking about, but there’s no use in our pointing that out to them. Besides, it didn’t matter if the Cute One ought to have been more sensitive in making the suggestion, I said; it was a great proposal.

“If I go—not that I want to—but if I go, will Malabo forgive me?”