How Beautiful We Were

by Imbolo Mbue

  Where was Thula? Juba was home with Yaya, but where was Thula? I cried out her name as I ran. Thula, Thula. Only later would I learn that my child had lain on the ground at the village square through it all and acted dead; she had tried to run but had tripped and fallen. Afraid that her legs wouldn’t be able to carry her fast enough, she had stayed still, hoping her death would be quick if they found her out. Only after eleven days of being unable to speak would she tell me that she had opened her eyes to see the soldiers reload their guns as her tears mingled with the blood of the slain around her: an age-mate one of them, a cousin another.

  I ran past the burial ground. Some ran up into the hills. I found a hiding spot behind a tree. Thula, I cried out. The sounds of many others, calling different names, drowned out my voice. We heard more gunshots. We ran farther into the forest.

  But Bongo could not run. Lusaka could not run. Woja Beki could not run.

  The soldiers grabbed all three of them before we could say goodbye. They seized them and freed the Pexton men while we quivered in the forest.

  The Pexton men told them everything; they must have.

  I can imagine the Leader’s face as he told the soldiers of the ordeal he’d been put through. Lusaka was the mastermind, Bongo his lieutenant, Woja Beki the great betrayer. There’s one more, he must have told the soldiers. The crazy one, the lunatic, the brainless idiot. The soldiers went around the village looking for him. Come out, they shouted to Konga. Come out or we’ll hunt down every single person in this village and finish them off. In our hiding places, we dared not breathe. They went into our huts and pointed their guns at the old and the sick. Where’s the madman? they said. Tell us or you’ll die. Yaya, on her bed, said nothing. Juba knelt before them, crying. Please, he said, I don’t know. They went into the next hut, and the next. They came after us in the forest. Fast as they might have been, they couldn’t get us—we knew the forest better, how to disappear in it.

  They grabbed my friend Lulu’s sister, whose limp made it hard for her to run as swiftly as the rest of us. Take us to the madman, they said. Lulu’s sister took them to the school compound, where they found Konga snoring. They hit him in the head with their guns. Wake up. Konga woke up to feel his blood flowing from his crown to his mouth. Austin had trailed them there. Crouching behind a classroom, he took a picture of Konga’s face, dazed; the Leader’s expression, disdainful; he’s pointing at the madman, undoubtedly telling the soldiers, that’s him, that’s him. Austin took a picture of the Leader’s palm pressed hard against Konga’s chest, his nostrils flared, his eyes gleaming with contempt as he all but said, I thought you were untouchable, go ahead, show everyone what will happen to me now that I’ve touched you.

  The soldiers put their dead friends in their truck and took them away along with our men: Bongo, Lusaka, Woja Beki, Konga. When we were certain the truck had left, we started coming out of our hiding places. Some of us collapsed, running down the hills. Thula rose up from among the dead, covered in blood. From the forest and hills we all returned, to cradle our dead. Our wails reached the yonder world when we saw who the dead were, all of them lying around Jakani and Sakani. Eyes open. Mouths open. Blood oozing out of pierced bellies. One of my friends and her only child. A neighbor whose daughter was recovering from a long illness. Thula’s age-mate had a hole in her chest. Children held their dead parents’ heads and wept. Girls fell upon their siblings’ bodies. Mothers buckled in shock; the rest of us held them, drying their tears while we cried, begging them to be strong, even though there was near to zero strength left in any of us.

  The men carried the dead away, two or three men for each body, blood leaving trails from the square to every hut wherein a departed had once lived.

  Jakani and Sakani were the last bodies to be carried away.

  They died next to each other, hand in hand. Inseparable from birth to death, their blood flowed from their heads and down between them, parallel at first, before linking and flowing past their feet, diverging and turning upward, toward their heads, thereafter meeting at the top to encircle them. In that red circle they lay until six men came to carry them away, taking care to ensure that the twins never stopped holding hands.

  We slept nothing that night.

  We needed to wash our dead. And sit with them until their spirits fully left their bodies. Then bury them the next afternoon. How could we make coffins for everyone? We didn’t have enough planks. No one could run to the big market to buy more planks on such a day. Someone said we could bury the children without coffins, but the mothers wailed their dissent—how could they fail their children in life and in death? We had to use bamboos. Coffins made of smooth planks and ragged bamboos. Ugly coffins, but at least our dead had a home in the ground, a semblance of safety before the maggots came.

  Did we sing on that procession to the grave? Maybe others did; I did not.

  From one end of the procession to the other, coffin after coffin sat atop shoulders, twelve in all. Plus the first twin coffin Kosawa ever made. If only I could be free of these memories: The volume of our collective wailing that afternoon. The sight of mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and husbands and wives still wearing clothes stained by the blood of their lost ones. Thula walking behind them, still wearing her bloody clothes too, weeping, her three books in her hands, clutching them as if they were the source of her breath. My cousin Tunis in a daze, his oldest child in one of the coffins, a girl whose first bleed we had just celebrated—what does death gain from such cruelty?

  We were returning to the burial ground only a day after leaving it, no longer wondering what our punishment would be for what we’d done to the Sick One. We buried our dead side by side, paying little attention to who owned which plot. We placed the coffins in the earth and asked the Spirit for forgiveness for where we’d gone wrong—surely, we’d gone wrong somewhere; surely, we’d brought this upon ourselves. If not us, then our ancestors—which one of them had committed the wrong that doomed us?

  We did not think we would have any tears left by the time we got to Jakani and Sakani’s coffin, but that day we learned that within us lies an ocean. The twins lay side by side in their coffin, their hands still clasped, in the largest coffin our village had ever made. They would walk together to the other land. We would have no one to cure our ailments or intercede with the Spirit on our behalf, not for many years, not until a new spirit child was born unto us; who knew if, who knew when, that would ever come to be?

  Austin took pictures of everything: The bullet holes in the dead as they were being washed. The twins’ clasped hands. Parents kneeling by their children in parlors for a final goodbye before the sealing of the coffins. Thirteen coffins waiting in front of thirteen freshly dug holes. Children clinging to their parents’ coffin before they were lowered into the ground, begging them to please don’t go, please come back.

  Our families from the other seven villages ran to us when they heard of the news. They came a day after the burials. Austin captured their faces when they went to the square and saw red patches of land where the earth had drunk the blood of our people.

  * * *

  Austin went back to Bézam two days after the funeral and returned in a truck with his uncle’s eldest son and other relatives. The men dug up the Sick One so he could go rest in the land of his ancestors. Austin had a message for us from Bongo; a friend of his in the government had helped him get into the prison to check on Bongo. When Austin came to the hut and told us that Bongo was alive and hopeful of his freedom, Yaya’s tears flowed in silence; she ate for the first time since Bongo’s arrest. We’d been certain that the soldiers had taken the Four to a place where they’d be handed the worst possible death, but Austin told us to eat well and sleep well and try not to worry, Bongo would be home again before long. He looked into Yaya’s eyes as he spoke, Yaya’s hands in his. Though Yaya did not understand his words, she understood his countenance of certainty.<
br />
  Austin called a quick meeting of the families of all the captured men and told us to be strong—help was coming soon. The moment his pictures appeared in the newspaper in America, our story would be news there, and Pexton would be put to shame.

  He was right. Two months after the massacre, the Sweet One and the Cute One, along with the man from the neighboring country and the man and woman from America, arrived for that first meeting.

  The Sweet One and the Cute One—we can never forget their goodness. How they kept coming to visit the families of the dead and the imprisoned. How they sat in silence in every hut, knowing that no words could accomplish what their presence had. When we cried they looked to the ground, and when we offered them food they ate it.

  Their dedication convinced us that the day of our restoration was nigh.

  * * *

  Thousands of people in America read our story. Hundreds called the Restoration Movement office in Great City to find out how they could help us. That is what we learned, based on the report the American man and woman brought during that first meeting. Mothers called, crying, after they read about our children. Young people marched around Pexton’s office, shouting: Shame on you, Pexton; shame on you, murderers. We were no longer alone. Many stopped buying oil from Pexton. Money flowed to the Restoration Movement for our salvation. People who had seen Austin’s pictures told other people, and those other people passed the story to their friends and neighbors. The Sweet One told us that the American people were like us, they passed stories from mouth to mouth, and that our story was spreading faster than a fire set off by a dry-season spill.

  Pexton swore they had nothing to do with the massacre, but Austin’s story in the newspaper had pictures of documents that proved their alliance with His Excellency. The more Pexton tried to argue that their business relationship with His Excellency did not mean that they endorsed the slaughter of peace-seeking people, the more people believed our story and the more money poured in for our salvation.

  The Restoration Movement would use some of the money to cover all expenses related to getting our men out of prison, the Sweet One told us. They would allocate part of it to pay for a bus to take us to Bézam every three weeks to visit our prisoners. After their release, the Restoration Movement would use the rest of the money to hire the best American lawyers to fight Pexton until it met our demands. We cried our first tears of relief during those meetings, though so mingled was our hope with our sorrow that we couldn’t exhale.

  * * *

  —

  The Sweet One and the Cute One took us to Bézam every three weeks, as promised. Yaya, with her last bit of strength, went to the kitchen on every one of the early mornings before the trip to supervise the food I was cooking for Bongo. We packed for him fried meat and smoked chicken, things our relatives in other villages had brought to us, to share in our suffering. We packed fruits we had dried under the sun, so he could eat them when he ran out of his leftovers.

  The trip took one day, since we didn’t have to change buses. Sometimes on the ride, the Cute One read letters American people had written to us, willing us to be strong, reminding us that our battle was theirs too. He showed us pictures children there had drawn for us. One of them was of a little man and a big man, the little man standing and smiling while the big man was tumbling because the little man had sent his little spear into the neck of the big man. The Cute One told us that the child’s teacher had taught him in school that, every so often, little men do triumph. We forced ourselves to smile: we had learned no such thing in school, it had never been so in our lives.

  We reached Bézam in the early mornings. No matter how tired we were upon our arrival at the prison, the sight of our men, and the realization that they were still alive, strengthened us. We slept on the bus ride back to the village, exhausted in every way.

  * * *

  The last time I saw Bongo, he wasn’t feeling well.

  Just a cold, he said, but his eyes told a different story. He ate little of his food. Please, eat more, I said; otherwise, I’ll worry, and I’ll tell Yaya and she’ll worry too. He forced a smile, knowing I wouldn’t ever add to Yaya’s suffering by telling her of his condition. I pleaded with him, scooped it up for him, but he wouldn’t eat. Beside us, Lusaka listened to his wife telling him a story. Lusaka’s daughter tried to make conversation with Bongo, asking him how he had slept, but Bongo avoided her eyes, which surprised me, Bongo never having been one to be shy around girls. Farther down the bench, Gono took notes while Woja Beki spoke between coughs. We had heard that Gono was running a separate endeavor to free his father—in addition to the one the Restoration Movement was running—but we had no way of knowing if it was true, or if it was true that Gono had angrily quit his job at Pexton after Pexton told him that they couldn’t do anything to help him get his father out of prison. We also heard that Gono and his mother were no longer speaking to his two other brothers who worked for the government, because the brothers had refused to quit their jobs to show solidarity with their father. The brothers had supposedly said that they had families to feed, and Woja Beki had neither reprimanded nor frowned on his sons for their choice: everything he’d done was for his family too. We believed these rumors, though we had no way of confirming them—Jofi, Woja Beki’s third wife, who had been our source of intelligence about that family, had fled Kosawa with her children the day after the massacre.

  * * *

  —

  “Yaya will never survive if anything happens to you,” I said to Bongo.

  He held my hand and promised me nothing would happen to him. In that brief moment, I heard Malabo saying those same words. “I’ll be all right,” Bongo said, and Cocody, sitting next to me, nodded. Things were moving well, he reminded me; the Cute One had said that His Excellency had promised to set a date for the trial as soon as possible. He wiped his eyes and forced another smile. Tell Yaya not to worry, he said.

  On the day the Sweet One and the Cute One told us that a trial date had been set, we rejoiced. We prayed the Four would get sagacious judges before whom they would prove their innocence. If any of them had committed a crime, then all of Kosawa had committed a crime, and we would pay for our crime as one people. We would never allow our own to suffer singularly for our collective deeds.

  The elders decided to send a delegation to the trial, to serve as witnesses for the Four and argue that we had all seized the Pexton men, and we had all held them captive, and we had all killed the Sick One, and we had all stood by and watched as Jakani and Sakani thrust spears into the four soldiers. We would accept any sentence. We would ask only that it be fair, that the crimes of those who had pushed us into our transgressions be considered first if those who judged us were to call themselves just.

  * * *

  The trial date was set almost a year to the day after the massacre. We took this as an omen from the Spirit that this cycle of dry months and rainy months in which we’d nearly run out of tears would soon be over. We’d had other years of suffering more than we thought ourselves capable of bearing, and we knew more tough years lay ahead, but this year that had almost made us believe we were objects masquerading as humans—how desperately we wanted it gone. Despite comporting ourselves for decades, despite never resorting to beastly deeds, we hadn’t succeeded in persuading our tormentors that we were people deserving of the privilege of living our lives as we wished. But the trial—it could give us a major chance to convince them to rethink us, get to know us for who we are, and in the process find us worthy of reclaiming the pleasure of quiet existence we’d lost.

  We woke up that morning and put on our best clothes.

  On the way to Bézam, we beseeched the Spirit for mercy, and thanked the Spirit for promising us justice in unspoken ways. Thula came with me—I wanted never to forget the moment when she and Bongo walked out of that prison, hand in hand, smiling.

  When we got to the courthouse, a gu
ard met us in front. He led us through a corridor and showed us an empty room in which to sit.

  He left the room and shut the door.

  We sat there in silence: Thula and I; Lusaka’s wife, two of his daughters, and his sole surviving son; Gono and Woja Beki’s two remaining wives and four of his younger children; five elders to speak for Kosawa. The guard hadn’t permitted the Sweet One to enter the courthouse, saying that for circumstances like this only one representative was allowed to come inside the building. The Sweet One had wanted to protest, but the Cute One told him to go back to the office and to report to Great City what was going on.

  In the bare room we sat, dreading the verdict and desperate for it to arrive.

  We avoided each other’s eyes, our hopes so fragile we dared not break them with a whisper. But we couldn’t stay quiet forever. We were just starting to converse in low tones, wondering if the trial would be held in that waiting room, when the door opened and a different guard walked in. Without a word, he handed the Cute One a letter and hurried out of the room. The Cute One read the letter. His hands shook as he held it. He dashed out of the room. We soon heard him shouting at the guard. The guard shouted back at him, but their words were indistinct to us from the other side of the walls.

  We looked at each other.

  “What’s going on, Mama?” Thula asked me.