Come out the twins finally did, holding hands.
* * *
—
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.
* * *
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.
* * *
—
For the next several years, with nothing to do regarding Pexton except wait and hope, our letters to Thula were mostly about ordinary happenings in the village—births, the size of harvests, deaths, spills and cleanups, relocations, silly gossip that our wives insisted we pass on to her—and her letters to us were about new experiences she was having, protest movements that she was involved in, the progression of her studies. In her eighth year away, she informed us that she had started making plans to return home in 1998.
She had finished one level of schooling by then, worked for a couple years, and was in the process of completing the most advanced level of education in her field of study, thanks to a scholarship that allowed her to study and teach. With the date of the completion of her education set, she had started turning her mind even more toward Kosawa, eager to continue the dialogue we’d started with Pexton. She was hopeful she and Mr. Fish would find common ground that would benefit Pexton and us. She was confident, also, that the coming years would be an auspicious time for us to negotiate with Pexton. Apparently, Pexton had had other stains on its reputation in the years since the massacre, one of which happened when an American newspaper exposed maneuvers Pexton was using to avoid paying taxes to the American government. Though Pexton had defended itself against all accusations, they’d realized that their future profits would depend on showing the world more of their moral side. Based on what we’d told Thula about Mr. Fish, she believed that moral side was already revealing itself.