How Beautiful We Were(83)

“That’s not for you to worry about,” I said. “Leave it to me. I’ll handle him when I see him again. He’ll be older than me in death years, but I’ll still be his mother.”



She chuckled. It was the first time we’d laughed about death. The lightness wouldn’t last, I knew; our tears are still too close by.

“I promised him in my grief,” she said. “I said that if he never returned from Bézam I’d never unite my spirit with another man’s.”

“When Malabo was alive, he told you what to do, what not to do. You obeyed him, because you loved him,” I said. “I sat here and watched you do as he wished, and you were never unhappy about any of it.”

“Making him happy made me happy.”

“Yes, but now he’s gone and you’re still making decisions based on what you think will make him happy in the next world. I’m old and dying, so I can say things now that I would never have said when I was your age. I don’t care if anyone calls me crazy, so I’m going to ask you to tell me, Sahel: When will it end for us women, this doing what we have to do for the sake of husbands alive, husbands dead—when will it end?”

She shrugged, as if to suggest my question was irrelevant.

“Why are you punishing yourself? Because it’s what you’re expected to do?”

“But, Yaya, if Big Papa had left at a younger age, would you have remarried?”

“No,” I said. “And I would have regretted it.”

She was quiet. I knew she believed me; why would I lie, standing at death’s door?

“I hate Bézam, I hate government people, but this man sounds like a good man,” she said. “And I think Juba would be happy to have a new father.”

“Don’t do this for Juba. Do this for you.”

“What about you? I’m not going without you. Will you be happy in Bézam?”

It was then I told her my plan.



* * *



—



You won’t be happy when I tell you where I’m going to, dearest husband, but I must go.

You left that village long ago and came to the place where I was born and made it your home. You told me, often, that my people were more of your people than yours had ever been to you. Why did you leave? I asked you when we first met. You said you never belonged there. I pondered your answer—was not belonging ample reason for a man to visit his ancestral village so seldom? Was your all-consuming sadness the reason for your cutting your relatives off, or a result of it? I didn’t understand why you were so determined to have none of your sons know much about your kin when there was no visible quarrel, no obvious falling-out involving you and your siblings and their children. I asked you repeatedly. Again and again you told me that there was no story to tell.

But there is, my dear husband. There is a story.

Why didn’t you tell it to me?

Why did you choose to bear your pain alone, when you had me to share it with?

How could you not have let me hold you, and weep for you?



* * *



—

My husband’s grand-niece, a woman named Malaika, was the one who told me the story; it was her grandmother who raised my husband after his parents died.

Malaika has been visiting me since Bongo was taken to Bézam. We had never met before my husband’s funeral—she came to it along with his living siblings and several relatives whom my husband hadn’t spoken to in decades. When I asked Malaika why no one in that family ever came to visit us, she said my husband had made it clear that he didn’t want them to have anything to do with his new family. I told her that I understood, and that, now that my husband was no longer around to dictate to us, we could see each other as we pleased. She returned only once after the funeral to visit me, but when she heard about the massacre and Bongo’s arrest, she began coming more often. After they killed Bongo, she came and she slept on the floor next to my bed, alongside other relatives from all eight villages. She helped in feeding me and bathing me; she was the one who made the mixture that allowed me to sleep for a few hours and escape the torment of the realization that my children, both of them, were dead.



One evening, not long ago, she came to visit. Somehow, we started talking about her grandmother, my husband’s sister. Malaika told me that her grandmother, before she died, was desperate to talk to my husband one last time and tell him that she was sorry.

“Sorry for what?” I said.

“For everything that happened,” she replied.

“What everything?”

It was then she told me the story my husband’s sister told her before she died, a story the sister had never told anyone. A medium had told the sister, while she was wasting away with a large mass in her belly, that she needed to tell someone the darkest secret in her stomach in order for death to come, so she had told her granddaughter days before she died. She revealed what happened when my husband was seven years old.



* * *



—

You went to her one evening and told her what an uncle had done to you. How the uncle had asked you to go hunting, and how, once you were both deep in the forest, only bugs and birds in view, under an iroko tree, the uncle had untied his loincloth, spread open his legs, and said his manhood was itchy, could you please itch it for him? When you shook your head and averted your eyes from the swollen organ, he said he couldn’t believe you wouldn’t help him after all the gifts of fruits and nuts he had given you, he hadn’t shown any other boy in the village as much generosity as he had shown you, he thought you were friends, how could you not help him in his time of need? When you started crying, he told you that if you didn’t take the manhood in both hands and start rubbing it, he would leave you alone in the forest for beasts to feast on your flesh. That was how he got you to do to him things a boy should never do to a man.