How Beautiful We Were

by Imbolo Mbue

  In the morning I make her eggs and plantains before she goes off to school, but she refuses to eat. I make a dinner of sweet potatoes and pumpkin leaf sauce and she looks at it as if it’s a pile of mud. I sigh and sit on the bench in the parlor. I am tired, the child has wrung me out, I have nothing left with which to break her and remake her. I stand up and, between clenched teeth, tell her that she’s ungrateful and selfish and the most spiteful child ever born to a woman. She stares at me as if I’m an empty vessel making a loud noise, as if my disappointment is no match for her resolve. I’m about to accuse her of having neither scruples nor shame about adding to my anguish when Yaya calls for me. When I go to Yaya, she tells me to please give Thula what she’s asking for.

  * * *

  —

  It was on that day that I began going from hut to hut, trying to convince fathers to allow their children to ride the bus with Thula to the school in Lokunja.

  Over and over, I hear that a girl does not need to ride a bus to get more knowledge than what the village school is offering. I am given a summary of what the government has done to us, what it is still doing to us. I am told, lest I’ve forgotten, that the children of Kosawa are still in danger, that they’re still dying even though the Restoration Movement has shamed Pexton into providing us bottled water for the babies. I am lectured that no one in Kosawa should ever trust the government even if the Sweet One and the Cute One tell us that we can in some instances, that we should never enter a building owned by the government unless we must, and that, even then, we would need to grow eyes in our ears and eyes in the back of our necks; we should never think the government wants anything but our demise—the government is not made up of people with souls and hearts of flesh.

  I listen to all this and more.

  I say, Yes, Papa, to every father, and Yes, Big Papa, to every grandfather.

  They ask me questions and I respond in a manner that suggests I don’t know much about what I’m trying to say. I nod while they speak, limiting eye contact. They have to see how much I revere their wisdom. They want to know why I’m doing this, why I can’t just tell my daughter no. Isn’t it time my daughter learned to understand her choices in life? Why haven’t I advised my daughter that the most important knowledge she will ever need as a woman is how to find contentment with whatever life offers her?

  I cannot argue or defend my choice; I’m not allowed to, for the sake of respect.

  I only tell them that a mother’s love compels me.

  A couple of times, Cocody’s younger cousin Aisha, who’s become like a little sister to me, comes along to help me in my persuasion. Once, when a grandfather tells us that in the olden days women wouldn’t dare walk around the village taking up the precious time of men for the sake of girls, Aisha, with only the slightest hint of humility in her voice, tells the grandfather that in the days to come the world will function the way women want it to. I’m too shocked to laugh.

  After weeks of entering and exiting every hut in Kosawa, four fathers tell me they’ll allow nine of their sons to ride the bus with Thula to Lokunja. None of them share with me the reasons behind their decisions; they simply tell me, when I show up to their huts for a third or fourth time, that I don’t need to repeat myself, their sons will be taking the bus, but not for my daughter’s sake. The rest of the fathers find a reason to avoid me when they see me approaching—Papa just left to go visit his uncle, a child says; he went to the forest to check on his trap, a wife tells me, though it’s dark outside. I sit and wait while children play around me. I force chats with wives I’m not friendly with, women to whom I say little more than a hello around the village. After doing enough of these, I decide nine boys will be plenty to share the bus with Thula.

  On the night I tell Thula that I went earlier in the day to the Restoration Movement’s office in Lokunja and spoke to the Sweet One and the Cute One and they agreed to start sending the bus when the school year ends and the next school year begins, she jumps for joy, wearing the biggest smile she’s worn in years. She runs over to me and hugs me, her thin arms tight around my neck. I hold her close and arrest my tears.

  I think of Malabo.

  That was how she used to hug him, when he walked around with a semi-smile and she was often happy, back when she was just a ticklish toddler, not a soon-to-be woman with thoughts she didn’t share, back when my life was mostly lovely and no heartache was more than I could bear and I strove daily to do what was right, to speak no unkind words, to think no wicked thoughts, so that the Spirit would not, in wrath, wreck me.

  * * *

  The books they gave her at the Lokunja school became her pillow and her blanket, her plate of food and the water that quenched her thirst. By the time I woke up in the morning, she was up, in Bongo’s room, sitting by the lamp, reading as if she lost the books in a dream and woke up to find them. She read while she was putting on her uniform and while she was nibbling on her breakfast. She read as she sat on the school bus to Lokunja.

  In the evening, while she read, I looked at her and wondered what she saw in those books. She seemed to be in a trance while reading; sometimes a tear ran down her cheek. When I asked her what was happening in the books, she told me that it was hard to describe, it was more than she could put into words. When she set a book down and stepped out of the parlor, I looked at the cover. I cannot read, but I still remember my letters from school. I can recognize words like “of” and “the.” One of the books was called P-E-D-A-G-O-G-Y “of the” O-P-P-R-E-S-S-E-D. Another was “The” W-R-E-T-C-H-E-D “of the” E-A-R-T-H. The one she most liked to read was a thin one called “The” C-O-M-M-U-N-I-S-T M-A-N-I-F-E-S-T-O. I once asked her if these were books her teacher wanted her to read, if all the children at her school spent as many hours reading them as she did, and she said that no, these three were Bongo’s, the ones he brought back from his teacher-training program. She could read most of the big words in them now, something her uncle couldn’t.

  Those three books were her closest friends. She loved her schoolbooks too—once, I overheard her telling Juba a story from one of them, about a young woman in Europe who commanded a bad man to cut another man’s flesh in a way that no blood would spill, and the bad man couldn’t do it. When Juba said the young woman sounded crazy, Thula said she didn’t think so—when she grew up she wanted to be like that young woman.

  She still went to visit her friends, a book in one hand.

  Older boys lingered around them, and Thula would sometimes converse and smile, but she did not put down her books. It was as if she was trying to send a message to the boys: If you want to get to me, you must prove yourself worthy of my putting down my book for you. Even as an early adolescent, you could see on her face that she found it all to be a sort of debasement, this desperation to be found worthy by a man whose brain was no match for hers. Sometimes I thought she would prove me wrong and be the first of her friends to get married—a woman who’s uninterested is often the one men want. On quiet days, I amused myself by fantasizing about men arriving in Kosawa to fight for her. She knew she was beautiful, because Malabo told her so every day, and I saw no sign that she shared my worries about the burden of her size. Perhaps she wanted a man to run after her and offer pigs and goats for her hand, just like girls the world over dream. Whatever it was she wanted as far as marriage was concerned, she didn’t say. All she allowed us to see was her and her books, loving each other. There was no semblance of sadness on her face during the hours she spent doing schoolwork, or reading while her friends giggled and ogled at shirtless young men. Perhaps her books sang lullabies to her at night after she put them on Bongo’s bed, right on the pillow, next to her head.

  * * *

  It was in Thula’s fourth year of school that my young friend Aisha came to tell me that a date had been set for her to marry a man from one of the brother-villages. She had just turned eighteen and was in no rush to leave Kosawa, but her soon-to-
be husband, on the brink of thirty, couldn’t wait any longer to bring her home. She told me the news with no joy, as if she hadn’t just achieved something spectacular.

  “Try not to wear that long face when everyone is dancing and singing to celebrate your marriage, okay?” I said to her as we sat in my kitchen.

  “Stop sounding like my mother,” she said. “I didn’t come here to get the same nonsense I get from her. I wish I could just run and hide until this whole thing is over.”

  “What whole thing?”

  “The thing where you all dance and take me to his hut, he climbs on me, I give him children, he dies, the children grow up and have their own lives, and I’m free again.”

  “May the Spirit shut its ears to that wicked prayer,” I said. “How could you call a curse upon yourself by wishing for the best days of your life to quickly pass you by?”

  “Best days of my life? What part of serving others from morning to night every day for the rest of my life is going to be so wonderful?”

  “Please, enough with your woe-is-woman song. You’re not a child anymore.”

  Aisha scoffed. “You must be feeling very wonderful-is-woman these days, with the Cute One whispering cute things in your ear,” she said.

  “What?” I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or to scold her for her disrespect. “Me and the Cute One—”

  “Please, just stop it, Sahel, it’s too late to pretend. I’ve seen you and him flirting.”

  “Me?”

  “From the way he smiles at you I can tell you’ve shown him your moves.”

  I started laughing in confusion, which must have made her think she had cornered me, because she said, “I knew it….I can’t believe it—”

  “Aisha, you’re speaking rubbish,” I said amid my laughter. “That mind of yours—I hope your husband tames it. The Cute One? Don’t make me vomit. The very idea—disgusting.”

  “Right. But tell me one thing only, Sahel: where do you and him prefer to do it? In the barn, or deep in the forest so you can moan as loud—”

  “Get out of my kitchen right now before I kill you with my cooking spoon,” I said, raising the spoon as she ran off laughing.

  * * *

  —

  The morning after my conversation with Aisha, I woke up thinking about the Cute One. I thought about him all day, wondering what he looked like naked. If someone had told me when I first met him that I would someday lust for him, I would have wept in shame. I’d never flirted with him—what Aisha said was her attempt to switch the conversation from her impending wedding—but now that Aisha had put the idea in my head, I started thinking: why not him? He was nowhere as handsome as Malabo, and his large belly carried the threat of suffocating me, but his hands were massive and his buttocks firm. Most important, his wife was in Bézam. She’d never know. I’d never wake up in the morning to find an angry woman on my veranda, demanding answers.

  By the third day after my conversation with Aisha, knowing that the Sweet One and the Cute One would come to my hut to check Thula’s schoolwork during their next scheduled visit, I picked out the outfit I would wear for the Cute One. I chose a dress I reserved for trips to the big market. I told Lulu I’d need to redo my hair in eight days. My breasts were no longer what they were when I flaunted them for Malabo years ago, so I stitched my sole brassiere to make it smaller and give my bosom maximum elevation.

  If the Cute One was surprised to see me so radiant when he stepped into my hut, he did an excellent job of showing it. His eyes widened. He couldn’t stop looking at me and smiling. When he asked me about the occasion I was dressed for, I told him that life was the occasion. He laughed louder than I’d ever heard him laugh. He seemed to notice my teeth for the first time when I smiled—he stared at them, the way Malabo once did. It thrilled me to do this again, falling all over myself for a man to see me. While the Sweet One checked Thula’s homework, I sat on a bench next to the Cute One in Yaya’s room, pretending to touch him by accident as he asked Yaya questions about her health, and as she responded to his questions with short phrases about how she had no new complaints, every old person should be so lucky as to have someone like me. I smiled at Yaya’s words, not because I needed to hear the praise, but because I hoped the Cute One would realize that I would take care of him too, in whatever way he wanted me to.

  When he left that day without asking to see me in private, I did not fret. Nor did I fret the next time, or the time after. I didn’t always dress up for him, but I could tell, from how he smiled at me, that it wouldn’t be long before we made our first arrangement.

  * * *

  —

  I could not read Thula’s report cards, but I attended every parent-teacher meeting, always the lone mother in attendance on behalf of a girl. Her teachers told me every time what great intelligence she had, what a hardworking student she was, the best they’d ever had.

  Everything I heard about her passion for knowledge, all the evaluations I got of her report cards, made me happy, because it made her happy. Still, I was aware of what a waste all her reading would amount to in Kosawa. All the hours spent doing homework—what good would it be after she finished her schooling at seventeen and became even more peculiar, an eagle among domestic animals? One of her teachers once said she could go to Bézam and attend a higher school so she could get a job with the government. I was not sure whether to spit in this man’s face or to heap upon him every curse for suggesting that my daughter become a servant for the same people who killed her father. But then the Sweet One and the Cute One came to me at the beginning of her fifth and final year at Lokunja with the letter from the American school, and even though I still don’t understand how going to America will help her after she returns to grow old alone in Kosawa, I agreed to hand her to them, because knowledge is what she seeks, and knowledge is what they’ll give her there.

  I worry for her every day and night. What if she needs me and I’m not there to help her? What did I think I was doing, letting a child of seventeen go alone to America? Will I ever see her again? When will I see her again? The Sweet One said how long she stays in America will depend on her, on how much schooling she wants to get before she returns home. I dream of her homecoming. I tell myself not to worry, and then I worry even more. I can’t stop worrying for my children. But if I were to spend ten thousand years worrying about all that could happen to them, what difference would it make?

  * * *

  —

  Aisha got married not long before Thula left for America. How I danced that day. I couldn’t remember the last time I so enjoyed myself. I was up before the rooster’s crow to make breakfast for Yaya and the children, after which I hurried to Aisha’s family’s hut to join the women of Kosawa in cooking. We sang as we sliced vegetables, swapped stories as we diced and fried. At some point, one of Aisha’s uncles brought his drum, and the preliminary dancing began, women twirling buttocks and mincing spices to the right, grating cocoyams and stamping feet to the left. From the corner of my eye I saw Thula, peeling plantains in a circle of friends—even she who didn’t love to dance was swinging her tiny hips in delight. By the time we returned home to take our baths and dress up I was tired, but my fatigue disappeared when Aisha was led out of her hut, veiled and clothed in white.

  In front of all of Kosawa and her relatives from the sibling-villages, her father asked her if he should accept the bride price that had been offered for her hand. “Remember,” he said, “once I eat these animals and drink these bottles of wine, I cannot return them. That means you cannot come to me and say you no longer want to be married to this man. Once you go with him, there’s no coming back. Do still you want to go?” When Aisha, in a soft voice, said, “Yes, Papa,” her husband stood up and pulled off her veil, and we all shouted for joy. We danced till the dust rose to the sky. We ate and we sang and we danced some more, till the moon appeared and Aisha left Kosawa, never to
return.

  * * *

  —

  By then, I’d spent close to a year waiting for the Cute One to do more than smile at me. I’d moved from dressing up for him to offering him and the Sweet One food, meals I made with the Cute One’s enjoyment in mind. For my efforts, all I got was words of profound gratitude. Still, I persisted. Only after a random conversation, during which he mentioned his wife’s name three times, did I decide to pour water on the fires of my yearning. I decided it was time to stop flirting with the Cute One and all the men I laughed too loudly with whenever their wives’ backs were turned. I decided I could no longer be a part of the shameless competition—I would live with my plight for the rest of my days. I asked Malabo to forgive me for the infidelity of my thoughts and promised him I would be only his until we meet again.

  I told Aisha this a few days before her marriage celebration, while we were lounging on my bed on a rainy evening. I told her to cherish these days when she had a man to herself, her own man, not another woman’s she’d stolen. I told her to protect her man, because potential man-stealers like me abounded. She laughed, and sighed, before saying that it really was about time women started marrying each other. When I tried to laugh, she told me she wasn’t joking. She asked me to think about it, think about what bliss would envelop Kosawa if all the husbandless women like me met in barns at night and paired off and did to each other what we no longer had husbands to do to us.