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.
* * *
—
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.
Several men thought we needed to summon the Sweet One and the Cute One to answer for themselves, but many more argued that it would be of no use—why shame them when they were likely only hoping to spare us the bad news? We need to go talk to the overseer directly, one of our fathers said. No one opposed him, nor did we need much debate before agreeing that it was time for us to move on without the Restoration Movement. Though Thula had been back for four years, we had still depended on the representatives to be our intermediary with Mr. Fish, because the Sweet One had suggested to Thula that it would be best if he and the Cute One concluded a promising conversation they already had under way with the overseer, it wouldn’t be a great idea for Thula to start a parallel dialogue. Thula had agreed. But now, given the news, and with Thula having a channel to the biggest Pexton man in the country, the time was right to start doing the discourse differently. At the time Thula met with the managing director, we hadn’t seen the Sweet One and the Cute One in nine months, so it didn’t take us long to come to a consensus that Sonni would ask Thula to lead a delegation to meet with Mr. Fish. She would speak to him in the way she’d learned how to speak to American men while living in their country. We had no better bridge between them and us than her.
* * *
—
We were not part of the delegation sent to Mr. Fish. The elders decided that, because Thula was a woman, the oldest of the village’s able men should accompany her, to give the delegation respectability. We would learn from her, after the visit, that in the absence of an interpreter she and Mr. Fish had chatted freely and at length about their times in New York, laughing when they discovered they’d both loved a particular store that sold old clothes. Thula’s elderly escorts, clueless about the conversation, had laughed too.
Yes, it was true that Pexton had decided to let the courts decide whether it owed Kosawa anything, Mr. Fish told Thula when the time came to discuss the reason for the visit. Pexton had said nothing of this to us because it wasn’t their place to inform us, it was the Restoration Movement’s.
“If I had the power to help Kosawa I would,” Mr. Fish said. “But I don’t. As you well know, this is all in the hands of the legal guys in New York. I did what I could to help broker a temporary deal when I first got here, but I can’t overstep my bounds.”
“We’ve been keeping our end of the deal for years,” Thula said. “Our situation is dire; it’s getting worse by the hour. We can’t wait indefinitely for a court decision.”
There was nothing Pexton could do about speeding the case through the courts, Mr. Fish said. All he could do, personally, was speak to his superior, the managing director; he could ask him to check with New York on the status of the case. Not that that was going to make a difference, but it was worth a try. It might also help if Kosawa was no longer represented by the lawyers for the Restoration Movement, he added.