How Beautiful We Were(89)

IT WAS WHILE WE WERE waiting that one of us was awakened one night by the groans of his pregnant wife. She did not respond when he asked her what was wrong. Her eyes were wide open, though her mouth was tightly shut. Our friend hurried to his mother’s room and roused her. When his mother also failed in imploring his wife to open her mouth, our friend ran to get the womb doctor, who, with one touch of the belly, said that the baby was coming. The womb doctor touched the belly again, and corrected herself: the babies were coming. His mother began boiling water. Our friend pulled his spear from under his bed and started sharpening it on the veranda, eager to go hunting when the sun rose, grateful for the chance to be far from his hut when his wife finally opened her mouth.

He thought about his babies throughout the day in the forest, and we ridiculed his sudden inability to engage in conversation. On our way home, he imagined, as we all did, that when he returned the babies would be there and it would be a long night of drinking in his hut. But the babies hadn’t arrived when we returned. By dusk, his wife’s silence had turned to groans, grunts by the next morning, shrieks by the time he returned from the forest the next evening. It was then we realized, even before a medium arrived from the first of the five sister-villages to confirm it, that Jakani and Sakani were returning.



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We don’t know why the twins chose the womb of our friend’s wife over the wombs of all the other fertile young women of Kosawa, though we imagined it had something to do with the fact that she was copiously busted and extra wide of hips. Those hips were not of much help, however, as the babies elbowed and kicked and pressed in an attempt to clear a path through her to re-enter our world. The volume of her cries was evidence that the discomfort she was in was not one a body made of flesh was meant to sustain. Just as one of our grandfathers had told us was the case when Jakani and Sakani last arrived, the woman stayed in labor for seven days and nights, her pain rising daily, so that by the fourth night no one in Kosawa could sleep, not the crickets or the birds or the beasts of Kosawa, not any creature with a singing voice, most of whom joined the laboring woman after every sunset, a whimpering chorus around her anguished cries, which came accompanied with her blood spilling, dripping off the mattress and forming the shape of a face as it touched the earth, the shape of Jakani’s and Sakani’s faces in the days when they went around healing and interceding for us.



Come out the twins finally did, holding hands.



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We’d never doubted that they would return to us—extraordinary humans never stay dead, not as long as the world continues to need the likes of them—but we were awed nonetheless that they’d indeed returned, and that our years of living without a channel to the ancestors were over. At last, we could return to experiencing the fullness of the Spirit in our midst. It would take them some time to start healing and interceding for us, we knew, but as we filed through the hut to see them, all the men, women, and children in Kosawa awaiting their turns, we felt healed by their mere presence; a sense of wholeness descending upon us, courtesy of the hope they’d brought to grant us.

A week after their birth, their father told us that he wouldn’t be able to join us if we decided to revive our battle against Pexton; that was how our numbers decreased to five. Our friend said that he needed to dedicate himself to guiding the twins to becoming the men they were born to be. We did not try to convince him otherwise, though we knew that the twins, whom he had renamed Bamako and Cotonou, wouldn’t need guidance from their human father, for they were born ready to be what they’d been created to be; they could grow up to be nothing else. Still, we gave our friend our blessings to be one of us no more, knowing that his burden as the father of children living in two worlds would be one he would need all of his strength for. Someday, a descendant of ours might have to shoulder the duty, for it was certain that the twins would keep on returning as long as men lived on earth, and that, no matter how they died, they would return together. Generations before our time, they’d lived in another place, but now they were in our midst, because a woman whose womb they’d chosen to be carried in on one of their returns had married a man from Kosawa. Here they were now, ours, we hoped, forever.



Nightly, we contemplated this in the village square, shaking our heads at the wonder of it all. Not even bullets had been able to end their lives. We talked about the time in the not-too-far future when people from other villages would start arriving on the bus in search of wisdom and healing from the best medium and medicine man in the area. Aware of the truth that Kosawa could one day become a beacon of light in the darkness of our nation, we affirmed our resolve to stay in it even if everyone else fled.



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WE TOLD THULA OF THE twin’s return in a letter. We told her of how their hands had never been separated, not even at the moment they re-entered the world. They’d died hand in hand, thus returned hand in hand, and it appeared they would live out this return hand in hand, for they slept as such, and crawled as such, and when guests arrived to visit them, they had to carry both of them at once, careful not to separate their hands, because everyone had agreed that their hands should never be separated until they decided to separate the hands themselves.

In her reply, Thula told us that she’d shared the good news with her friends in New York City and they’d been confused: they couldn’t understand how Jakani and Sakani could return after being buried. She had lacked words to explain it to them, she said; unless people had lived in our world and seen the things we had seen with their very own eyes, they could never understand how weak the laws of nature truly were.