How Beautiful We Were(99)

Strangers were not the only ones asking her about her plans for her womb.

Our age-mates, the women especially, never ceased to let her know that they could help her find a good husband. Her former relationship with Austin was known to all, evidence that, at the very least, she had desires common to other women. Whenever she visited, in smoky kitchens across the eight villages, in parlors and on verandas, rocking her friends’ children on her lap, she sought to explain to them that she was married to her purpose. What do you mean, you’re married to your purpose? they asked. She couldn’t explain except by saying that she was at peace with the life she had.



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Her vision for the revolution was for it to begin officially on a day we would call Liberation Day. On that day, men and women from towns and villages in our district and surrounding districts would gather in Lokunja. She would invite a newspaperman, the man who had taken over Austin’s job. The newspaperman would take pictures and chronicle the rebirth of our country. If Liberation Day went well, we would have more rallies in other towns and in as many districts as we could, until we were ready for men and women to march in protest on a single day, in every town, in every village, all across the nation, fists clenched up and chanting, until the walls of the regime fell down flat.

She believed it was possible, far-fetched as it seemed. She was aware that it might take more than one revolution, or more than one century, to change our country, but that was no deterrent to her, only a motivation to continue the work the past generation had started so that future generations might complete it and never stop building upon it. She said to us often: America and the prosperous countries in Europe did not become what they are today without generation after generation of people fighting and dying for peace.

During those years of laying the foundation for Liberation Day, our weapons remained hidden. There were occasions when we were tempted to retrieve them and head to Gardens, often on days when Kosawa seemed devoid of joy because of death or worsening sickness or a bad spill. At such times, it appeared morning would never come. Conforming to the darkness around us seemed to be our only choice. Whenever our wives showed us the meager harvest from their farms, whenever we looked at the gas flares and imagined toxins coming for our children, we spent long nights fantasizing about putting holes in laborers’ heads. Our faith became the thinnest of threads, in danger of snapping at any moment, but we hung on to it as hard as we could. We prayed to the Spirit to keep us from falling, because we couldn’t fall; if we hoped to soar again, we couldn’t fall. And for Thula’s sake, we could not bring out the guns. Our day will come, we told each other when we got together late at night to dream while all of Kosawa slept.



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IN BéZAM, THULA TAUGHT AT the government leadership school during the day and, in the evenings, invited her favorite students to her house to talk about revolutions. They were her new Village Meeting, she told us. With them she discussed her favorite books; and to her they swore that they would join in fighting for Kosawa. We were happy that she had devotees in Bézam, but we doubted that these students’ interest in our struggle came from a pure place. None of them came from a village like ours. They had gained entrance into the school by virtue of their connections to powerful men—when did people ever rise up to put an end to their own privilege? Still, the idea of ending the reign of the man whose servants they were about to become, the monster their fathers bowed to during the day and cursed at night, must have been what lured them to Thula.

Three of these students were with her when, four years after her return to the country, she went to meet with Pexton’s managing director for our country, the man whose orders everyone at Gardens and the Pexton head office obeyed. Before the meeting, Thula had submitted countless requests for an audience and made numerous impromptu visits to the Pexton office complex, only to hear that the director was in a meeting, out of the country, or otherwise unavailable—would she like to leave a message?

The day she finally got the chance to meet with him was the day we learned why the Sweet One and the Cute One rarely visited Kosawa anymore, and what the true reason was for the delay in us getting our percentages: Pexton had decided to allow the matter to go to court, hoping to contest the Restoration Movement’s claim that we deserved a percentage of its profits. The case was waiting its turn in an American court. It was bound to make its way slowly from one American court to another. Because the American court system moved at the pace of a corpulent snail, our children would likely be parents before the time came for a judge to listen to both sides and make a final decision.



Pexton’s managing director leaned back in his chair and clasped his fingers behind his head as he told Thula that the Restoration Movement might as well give up on their fight for now: they did not appear to have the funds to wage such a long, costly battle. They already had dozens of open cases against a wide range of corporations and not enough resources to fight every case to completion. It was unlikely Kosawa would ever see its percentages. The director said there was nothing he could do to help us.



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When Thula brought back the news to Kosawa, none of us understood why the Restoration Movement men had withheld the truth from us. Sonni, frail and leaning on his cane, gathered the men of Kosawa in the square and asked us what to do.