“Anything is possible,” our parents and grandparents reply.
“Our good soldiers think that the Pexton men are responsible men,” Woja Beki continues. “Our dear soldiers think that our Pexton friends wouldn’t eat and laugh and soak up life so much that they’d forget their responsibilities, but when we asked our good soldiers to come up with another theory as to where the men might be, they couldn’t come up with any. The men have to be somewhere, but where? Their car did not have an accident on the way back to Bézam; otherwise, our good soldiers would have seen the battered car. The men didn’t vanish, because it’s not possible for grown men to just vanish, is it?”
“It’s not.”
“Weren’t we all here when their driver turned their car on and started moving it back toward Bézam?”
“We were.”
“Didn’t we all watch with our very own two eyes as the car left Kosawa?”
“We did.”
“So we have nothing more to tell our dear soldiers except the fact that the three Pexton men are somewhere out there, they didn’t vanish into nothing, they’re having themselves a good time, and someday soon, we’re certain, they’ll return to Bézam.”
The Children
HOW WE LAUGHED ON OUR way to school the next morning. All the cracking up we’d done after the soldiers left still wasn’t enough. We needed to dissect every detail—the way they’d looked at Woja Beki after he was done talking; the manner in which they had shrugged and walked back to their car. Did you see the looks on their faces? Aren’t soldiers supposed to be intelligent? Many years from now, we said to one another, the children of Kosawa will compose a song about this first victory that ultimately led to our vanquishing our foes. They’ll skip around in circles, just as we do today when we sing of how our ancestors carved up men from other villages who arrived here lusting over our land.
* * *
—
Our parents had talked about it late into the night, about Woja Beki’s switch to our side. They said he was wise to agree to the deal the men of the village had offered him: help us deceive the soldiers and you’ll get back your freedom. Of course he agreed. After days of sleeping on a bare floor and dreaming of his mattress and pillow, who wouldn’t? And he executed his end of the deal masterfully. But our fathers knew they still couldn’t trust him. They needed to keep him and his family confined to their house. Allowing them to move around the village freely would be a mistake; they would surely escape to Gardens and alert the supervisors. If that happened, it would be a matter of hours before Kosawa was covered in blood.
* * *
—
That morning, we walked to school as we did on all school days, in twos and threes, some of us through relatives’ compounds, others in front of the twins’ hut, and yet others past Old Bata sitting in front of her hut, husbandless and childless, the nightmare of all the girls except our friend Thula, who, on the rare occasion when she had gotten involved in an argument, had made it clear that she found nothing pitiful about having no children.
Those of us who walked in front of the twins’ hut hurried along, as our parents had always warned us to do—to never, absolutely never, look toward the hut, lest our eyes wander inside it and we see things our mouths wouldn’t be able to say. Our parents’ orders notwithstanding, we’d all been tempted to take a peek—the things our parents forbade us from doing were precisely the things we most wanted to do—but none of us had thus far looked inside it, no matter how much our curiosity egged us on, because our parents had told us stories of boys and girls who once looked inside the hut and ended up with round black stones where their eyes had been. Sometimes we dared each other to go near the hut and see if our parents’ tales had any truth to them, but, despite wanting to awe our friends with our bravery, none of us wanted to lose the eyes we so loved.
Though we’d never seen anything inside the hut, some of us had heard noises coming from it—the growl of animals interwoven with the rumble of thunder; babies singing a folk song; pots and pans banging over the sound of people laughing; a woman in labor begging the fetus never to come out; a man passing musical gas. When we told these things to our friends and cousins in other villages, they refused to believe us—their villages had mediums and medicine men but no version of the twins—but we believed each other, for we knew that the twins were capable of deeds many deem impossible.
Even before our parents warned us never to look the twins in the eye, we knew they were to be revered, these men who were born on each side of the rooster’s crow, Jakani before, Sakani after. We couldn’t tell them apart from a distance—they wore the same long gray beard and the same black-and-brown snail shells around their necks—but we could differentiate them if we looked closely enough: Jakani was right-handed, and Sakani was left-handed; Jakani was born with his left eye shut, Sakani with his right eye shut. They were older than our parents, but younger than our grandparents, most of whom were there the day the twins were born. One of our grandfathers told us that the twins’ mother had been in labor for a week, moaning in pain so loudly for seven nights that no one in Kosawa had been able to sleep, not even the insects and birds and animals, all of whom began chirping and tweeting and bleating and barking and oinking collectively every night, their sounds growing wilder until the laboring woman’s screams crescendoed to a peak, at which point the twins came out, looking like average babies except for one closed eye apiece and large heads with a patch of gray hair on their foreheads, patches that would eventually migrate to their chins.