Together, she and I have amassed riches from payoffs I take after she tells me how much a requested favor is worth. She doesn’t let me settle for anything but the max; she reminds me to stop thinking about fairness. We own lands nationwide given to me as gifts by companies and local rulers seeking my assistance. Our coffers are bloated with funds she helps me channel our way, now that I’m the head of the national taxation office.
We’ve bought a house for Nubia’s mom and her siblings. We bought a car for her mom, and another car for her albino brother, so he’d no longer have to stay long under the sun waiting for the bus; we got him a high-paying job so young women would overlook his skin color. We bought a gated, two-story house for Mama and Papa, and found a woman to care for Papa now that his old age has become a sickness. We’ve built our own house—seven bedrooms, one for our relatives when they visit, the rest for our children, the first arriving any day now. Mama and Papa picked the baby’s name for us. I cried when I heard it. I rubbed Nubia’s belly that night as I whispered: Malabo Bongo.
* * *
—
Thula came to see Nubia during the month the doctor ordered Nubia to stay in bed. She sat with Nubia till the hour I was to come back from work. She told Nubia that Malabo Bongo would live in a better world, people were awakening to the truth. Thula knew about Nubia’s father; she’d lived longer than Nubia, seen more, and yet she believed still that goodness would triumph. Nubia saw no use in telling her that the world operated under laws Thula could never change, and that our sole obligation was to ourselves, to our happiness and the happiness of the ones we loved. After Thula hugged Nubia to head home and prepare for a trip to Kosawa, Nubia turned around and lay back in bed, in a bedroom bigger than the one she had imagined during the nights she slept in a shed. She gazed at her closet, at clothes I’d bought for her on my last work trip to America, from a store on Madison Avenue. It was then I returned from the office, got into bed, and wrapped my arms around her as, downstairs, our servants prepared our dinner.
* * *
—
Even though our paths have diverged, I still give my sister counsel whenever she asks for it. And she gives me what she can—her acceptance that, though my ways are not hers and hers are no longer mine, we will someday meet at the same place again, a place where my focus on family and her focus on a better country will bring us all contentment. Will that ever happen? Why do humans fight when we all want the same things? What will my child, Malabo Bongo, arrive wanting? Mama says it will be a boy, a happy boy. How I wish for a world abounding in happy boys. We’ve all suffered, I said to my sister. Why choose to keep on suffering? Why not grant yourself more of the world’s pleasures? But Thula doesn’t believe that the world’s pleasures can satisfy her spirit the way her purpose does. She says her purpose in life is to do as she must, even if it means suffering.
In my mansion, I suffer still.
I wake up daily before dawn to sit by the window with my drawing book. Sometimes I reread my old, worn copy of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, but most often I sketch images from my dreams, the faces of Papa and Bongo and Yaya. They’re smiling at me always, happy in the next world. Or so I force myself to believe in order to attain what measure of peace is available for me. I’m certain true peace would be mine if I hadn’t become what I once loathed, but I no longer yearn for peace like I once did. I have accepted that, just as I live in the space between the dead and the living, I’ll always be whole outside and broken inside. I have let go of any hopes of ever being free.
Why won’t Thula let go? I ask this question of Nubia. She has no answer to offer me. We each carry our burden, she says, searching for a place to lay them down—smart bitches know how to carry their burdens with style, and how to lay them down. She said she knew she could lay down her burdens only by returning her mom and brothers and sisters to the life her dad had cost them. Only then could she give the finger to His Excellency and the women who had turned her family away. And she knew she had to stick it to them wearing red stilettos and apparel off the racks of European designers.
* * *
YEARS AGO, WHEN NUBIA HAD just become my girl, I found out that the father of one of her friends was the Leader of the team Kosawa had held captive. Nubia and I went to the man’s house once. I shook his hand, we exchanged words, but I did not mention that I had been there that night at the village meeting, and that afternoon when the soldiers rescued him and slaughtered my friends and relatives. I told Nubia about it after we left the house, but asked her never to tell her friend. It was then that Nubia told me the story of how the Leader’s wife and two oldest children had died, eleven months before he started coming to the village meetings. She told me about how the car in which the wife and children were traveling had fallen into a river. The bridge under them had collapsed; government men responsible for maintaining it had misallocated the funds for the repair of the bridge, putting it in their own bank accounts. Some of them had been the Leader’s friends, people he had laughed and drunk with. They consoled the Leader at the wake as his children and wife lay side by side in matching coffins, dressed in white. The Leader, when he returned to work after the funeral, stopped thinking about the right things to do for the sake of others. He thought only about his surviving children.