How Beautiful We Were

by Imbolo Mbue

  As for the rest of the family, the village’s abhorrence of them had so grown that even Woja Beki’s third wife, Jofi—who used to bounce from hut to hut spreading news about whose husband had looked at whose wife in an unsuitable manner, and which young woman would likely never find a husband if she didn’t change her snobbish attitude, and whose sick child would probably be spared, may the Spirit be thanked—even she, who used to visit grieving mothers to swear by her ancestors that her husband would not rest until he found a way to avenge their children’s deaths, speaking in that shrill voice of hers we so hated as she sat in our mothers’ kitchens with a plump body covered with clothes from Bézam, even she had been banished by the entire village, now that our hatred for her family had been laid bare. The days when she used to beam as she dragged her thick ankles around Kosawa, pretending she didn’t know our mothers rolled their eyes after she left their company, those days ended the night of the village meeting. Now she and her co-wives hid from our wrath behind their brick walls unless it was absolutely necessary to step out.

  Day and night, our mothers monitored the movements of all three of Woja Beki’s wives with a ferocity we’d never seen before. Their viciousness surprised us, considering they did not have the cold hearts of our fathers and they would never have encouraged such a behavior in us, turning our backs on our friends. But we reminded ourselves that they had buried children, and one of our aunts would bury a child four days after the village meeting, the baby she’d held up to show the Pexton men during the meeting. How many children had Woja Beki’s wives buried? None. How many children in that house drank the well water in its pure state? None. In addition to the clean water Gono brought from Bézam, the family had a machine that removed all impurities from the well water on the occasions when they had to drink it. None of us ever saw the purifying machine, and Woja Beki once brought some of our fathers to his house to prove to them that there was no such machine, the story was ridiculous, he was a victim too, but we believed it still, because we knew he and his family cared about protecting themselves only.

  Perhaps our mothers were realizing, as we all were, that no one was coming to save us and we had to save ourselves by whatever means presented itself, including spying on and keeping under arrest people with whom we once shared meals and hugs. Visiting each other in kitchens and on verandas, our mothers spoke freely of the hatred they’d long concealed toward Woja Beki’s wives, Jofi especially. “What makes me angry,” one of our mothers said, “is how I wasted precious hours pretending to like her.”

  Having been warned by Lusaka that all our eyes were on them, and that if they were caught attempting to leave the village the punishment he would inflict on them would be unparalleled, the family curled into themselves, an island surrounded by crocodiles.

  Sometimes, in the evenings, we loitered outside their house, hoping to hear the wives and children crying, but we heard nothing. Their windows and doors remained shut, each wife in her bedroom with her daughters, the sons all in one bedroom, every mother pondering how to save herself and her children when the chance arose. If some of us felt pity for them, we said nothing of it to our friends, for we all knew how essential the measure was to our ultimate victory.

  Bongo

  I sit on the veranda now, forcing my thoughts to stay far away from the burdens that will come with my new role. Thula is visiting a sick friend; she and a couple of her age-mates are probably doing their best to entertain him with ludicrous tales and theories, anything to distract him from the aches in his body. Knowing Thula, she’s likely sitting in silence and nodding to one theory or another that her friends are defending, like the one I once overhead about the ocean, which none of them have ever seen, how it’s bound to dry up someday because of American people like the ones at Pexton, because of all the toxic wastes they’re dumping into rivers which will flow into the ocean and choke it dead.

  Juba is next to me, on Yaya’s lap. Sahel is in the kitchen, making dinner. We’re not the family we used to be before Malabo vanished; we don’t try to be. It’s been over a year, and Yaya and Sahel cry still. But they’re women—they must find a way to wipe their tears and keep on moving. We must all keep on moving. There are seven sick children in our midst now, three of them babies, all likely to recover, according to Sakani, may the Spirit be thanked. Perhaps our newfound hope is sustaining them, a sense that a winnable battle is being fought on their behalf. The air of Kosawa has grown lighter from the collective faith of its people: we know our time for doubt is gone.

  I look at Yaya. Her cheeks seem to have sunk farther into her face now that she’s lost most of her teeth. She appears calm, as if she hadn’t started the day with a cry for her firstborn. When my father died, she began each day with a cry for one month; with my brother, it’s conceivable she’ll start her day with a cry for the rest of her life. May she never shed a tear for me. She’s rocking Juba, who’s four and too old to be rocked. Both Juba and Yaya show no signs of wanting their physical closeness to end. Malabo never liked it—he often asked Yaya to end it—but has such love ever been successfully curtailed? I know Yaya wants to rock a child of mine too, but she asks me no questions about when I’ll get a wife. I know she wants me to forget Elali, choose another girl from the sibling villages, any of those jostling to be selected, but she doesn’t say this to me. She says nothing, in the way mothers say everything while saying nothing.

  * * *

  —

  A relative passes in front of our hut and wishes us a good evening. We wish him the same. I notice two of Lusaka’s daughters walking toward us. The older one is tall, her body at the junction where slender meets fleshy. She’s beautiful. I’m surprised by my sudden assessment of her. I hope it means I’m forgetting Elali. I should forget Elali. Another man goes between her thighs every night, and it’s his name she moans, not mine. But it was my name she’d promised me she would say for the rest of her life—she promised me that a hundred times, from the first night in my bedroom till the day she sat next to a laborer on the bus from Gardens. She was never mine again after that day.

  Lusaka’s older daughter gets closer to us. I can’t imagine her thighs are anywhere near as slender and firm as Elali’s, but they’re probably fine enough thighs she’ll someday use well on a man. Something about the way she moves makes me want to start searching for a replacement for Elali, find a body I can lay claim to and grab and fondle as I wish, but I have no time for a courtship dance right now. There have been a few women since Elali got married—one of them allowed me to do to her something I’d never been bold enough to ask Elali to let me do—but the women did no more than keep me from ripping off my groin when hunger for a naked body turned my brain into sludge.

  Lusaka’s daughter sways onward, looking everywhere but my face. Her body is ripe for babies. Dead babies. I try not to think of dead babies. Do they realize it, the little girls of Kosawa, when they spend hours assembling babies of sticks and stalks with flowers for eyes, when they name and rock and sing to these things in an effort to preview their destiny as mothers—do they realize that their wish, if it were to come true, would be inevitable death? Shouldn’t we remind them always that birth happens only so death may prevail? Was an awareness of this the reason why I never saw Thula partake in those games when she was younger, why she only looked on, brows twisted, while her friends doted on their creations, oblivious to death lurking close by?

  I remember when a friend of Thula’s brought her baby brother over. Thula sat with the friend and the baby and two other friends to the side of our hut. Not knowing I was watching, one of the girls lifted her dress and brought the baby to her empty chest, to experience the sensation of a baby breastfeeding on her. I could see the delight on the girl’s face as the baby sucked whatever was there. The other girls giggled. On Thula’s face was written: I’d rather die than be subjected to such an ordeal. That baby is still with us, having survived a long illness. But I really must th
ink nothing of such things now. Better I think of the wife I’ll someday have—heavy-breasted and smooth-skinned, never lacking for joy as she keeps the hut perfect, keeps me happy—how delicious her thighs will be. I know I’ll have to aim for lesser thighs than Elali’s, those limbs that held me tight and guided me as I explored the deepest hinterlands of the lush Republic of Elali.

  * * *

  —

  “Good evening, Yaya. Good evening, Bongo,” Lusaka’s daughter says, suddenly standing in front of me. Her younger sister is beside her, a far lesser beauty in the making. I feel for the girl already—she’ll soon find out that she is bound to someday be no more than a man’s third or fourth choice.

  Yaya nods at the sisters, smiling weakly. She continues rocking Juba.

  “How’s your father?” I ask them.

  “Bongo, Papa wants you to come over immediately,” the beauty says. Her teeth are small, as white as clouds that carry no threat.

  “Bongo, did you hear what Wanja is saying?” Yaya says.

  “Yes, yes,” I say, realizing I’d been staring at her for too long. “Your father wants me to come?”

  “Yes, please, he wants you to come right now. He says it’s very important.”

  I nod and stand up but I find no need to hurry. I don’t imagine that what Lusaka wants to talk about is of great consequence. We’ve secured the captives; they’re going nowhere until we say so. We’ve deflected the soldiers. Woja Beki and his family are under surveillance. We have in place a plan for what we’ll do at every stage till it’s over.

  I go to my bedroom and pull a shirt from the top of the pile of clothes on my bed—Sahel washed and ironed them today. My brother did well for us all by marrying a dutiful woman like Sahel, a woman who never complains but does as a good wife must do for her family. Maybe Lusaka’s daughter will soon take over the washing and ironing of my clothes. I smile at myself, enjoying this new direction of my thoughts.

  I walk behind Lusaka’s daughter on our way to their hut. I marvel at her buttocks, gently sloped and dense, but my eyes must leave them more often than I’d like: I must acknowledge friends and relatives as I pass them sitting on their verandas. I tell everyone who calls me over that I can’t stop to chat, nothing’s the matter, all will be well.

  * * *

  —

  I never wished to be a part of such an operation. I had hoped that the instigators of our misery would learn that it’s possible to cater to their own happiness while leaving us the space for contentment, but in a world where many believe their happiness is tied to the unhappiness of others, what choice did we have?

  When Konga showed up that night at the village meeting brandishing the Pexton men’s key, I was at first aghast at his tactic and manners. I was thinking what my friends were thinking: Is this the right way to get what we want? Wouldn’t it be best for us to wait for a better time to do this, perhaps a day in the future after we’d mapped out a step-by-step strategy rather than initiating a spontaneous rebellion based on a mysterious whim? I still can’t say how I persuaded myself to obey the orders of someone who wields no power over the words coming out of his mouth, but the words were the ones we needed to hear that evening. I needed to hear them. My brother had said them to me, and I’d refused to listen to him. I’d let him travel to Bézam without my support on a journey where he could have benefited from my faith and counsel. I couldn’t let him down again.

  After my friends and I had dragged away and dumped the Pexton men and Woja Beki in a corner of Lusaka’s parlor, Woja Beki cried out, upon hearing Konga tell us to bind their hands and feet and throw them in the back room, “Konga Wanjika, son of Bantu Wanjika, what did I ever do to you to deserve such treatment…?”

  I say similar words whenever I look at a mother collapsed in grief beside a dead child: Enemies of Kosawa, what did we ever do to you to deserve such treatment?

  Many nights I lie in bed and imagine myself turning into a fan, blowing away the air over Kosawa, driving it past the hills behind Gardens, dumping it where strong winds will take it afar and bring back to us good air. I picture myself a wall that stretches from the sky to the inner core of the earth, allowing no pipelines to pass through, no poison to flow into our water. I want to give the children simple things. Clean water. Clean air. Clean food. Let them soil it if they like it dirty—how dare anyone refuse them this right?

  * * *

  I am neither Kosawa’s best hunter nor farmer, and I won’t be an elder for decades. Yet, after the soldiers left, the men of my village chose me to be their leader.

  Lusaka stood in front of our gathering that evening and declared that we needed a new, fearless leader. An age-mate of my brother’s named Tunis offered his services, but nobody was enthused about anointing him—passionate as he is, he enjoys a good laugh far too much, and he has newborn twin daughters at home, a life change certain to do nothing to make a man manlier. My cousin Sonni offered too; his father, my uncle Manga, agreed that his son, wise since birth, would make a great leader. But someone shouted that it wasn’t right for a father to nominate his son. An argument was about to ensue over who had the right to nominate whom when Lusaka raised his hand to ask for silence. In the same spot where he’d asked us to take the Pexton men to his hut, he told everyone that he believed I should be the leader. He said no one present had done more for Kosawa in the past year. Several men nodded. No one stood up to counter him.

  I wanted to stand and say the same about him, but he spoke without pause, giving me no space to slide my words between his. The reasons were many why he wanted me to lead, he said. I’d participated in digging a grave for every child who had died in the past two years. (About this he was wrong—after Elali told me she no longer loved me, I’d sat in my bedroom and stared at the wall a full day, disregarding Malabo’s pleas that I eat, ignoring the wails coming from a hut where a nine-month-old boy had gone to sleep and never woken up. I hadn’t gone to that baby’s funeral or cared to know his name.)

  Lusaka said I’d orchestrated the search for the vanished men in Bézam (I’d indeed assembled the search party and led the way around Bézam, but I’d done it not for Kosawa, but for my brother and my family). He added, incorrectly, that I’d been among the first to step forward when Konga called for volunteers to drag away the Pexton men (I was at the back of the pack of young men who went to the front). When, on that night of the village meeting, as per Konga’s order, I arrived in front of the twins’ hut and realized that some of the men of Kosawa weren’t there, Lusaka continued—pointing at all of the cowards, their faces turned away—I’d gone to their huts and dragged them from beneath their wives’ skirts, but not before telling their wives and children what the men were: cowering, wet chickens; phonies undeserving of the good in their lives (I’d said no such things. I’d only told the men that they had to come with me, though I now wish I’d insulted them inside their huts—no able man who sits at home while other men go to fight and die for his family is deserving of the honor of being called a man).

  “Bongo was the one who negotiated with Woja Beki before the soldiers’ visit,” Lusaka said, which was true, though he was there too, along with two elders. But he was right—I was the one who told Woja Beki that Kosawa’s future rested on his choosing a side and sticking with it: he could either choose his people or choose their enemies. He had chosen us, even if only for that afternoon. The soldiers had left, convinced that the Pexton men were not in our village. The battle was just beginning, but we were winning.

  “Aren’t we winning?” Lusaka asked the assembly of men.

  “We are,” they replied.

  “Won’t we keep winning?”

  “We will.”

  “Yes, we will,” he said. “And we can thank Bongo for that.”

  * * *

  —

  Every morning I ask the Spirit to grant me reasons to be grateful. I pray for protection
upon my brother’s children. Juba has nightmares from which he wakes up sweating, and Thula, ever since I returned from Bézam empty-handed, doesn’t have much to say to me—I failed her father, I failed her. I long for the days when she was a little girl who would come into my bedroom at dawn, slip into my bed, and tuck her hands inside my shirt. Sometimes I’d tickle her just to hear her laugh. I loved watching her prominent, round eyes get wider. It was evident even then, by her heart-shaped lips, and her lengthy eyelashes, that she would grow up to be a beauty. She’s now on the cusp of that, though with her thin frame it’s unlikely hers will be the kind of body men in Kosawa will crave. The fact that she curls further into herself as she gets older, smiling at intervals but revealing nothing about her inner being, makes me worry she’ll grow up to be too mysterious and her wondrous face will go to waste. Her father was inscrutable too; they did not share much of a physical resemblance, but her mind was a replica of his. Numerous were the evenings they spent chatting and laughing on the veranda. Now that he’s gone, I worry she has closed herself off because she wants to share her thoughts with him and him only. She may not go around saying it, but she’s angry with all those who colluded to rob her of her father. Alas, what can she do about her anger? There are moments when she’s reading a schoolbook and she appears ordinary, but with every day added to the number of days Malabo has been gone, she speaks less and her anger reveals more of itself in the weakness of her smiles, which she’s more likely to give while she’s listening to her friends than when she’s sitting in a hut in which her father no longer lives.

  If she were any other girl, I would merely wish that the Spirit mend her heart and free her of the agony she bears, but she’s my brother’s child. Without knowing the future—without knowing when I’ll finish this work Malabo started and turn my energy toward finding a wife to bear me children—she might be the closest I’ll have to a daughter for a while. That is why I want, desperately, as impossible as it seems, for her to grow up to be an unshackled woman, so that I may tell my brother, when we meet again, that though I’d failed at saving him from whoever felled him, I hadn’t failed in keeping his children safe by doing everything I could so they could grow up in a clean Kosawa.