Tunis does not turn around. We do the rest of our walk in silence.
* * *
WE TAKE THE FIRST BUS from Gardens just as the laborers are finishing their breakfast, and the second bus leaves Lokunja at noonday. From there, two more rides on crowded buses with little moving air. I take window seats every time and look at trees rushing past as I think about those childhood days, long gone, when Kosawa was far from untainted but abundant in carefreeness, when children had few worries, when I had Malabo.
He always had his age-mates, my brother, and I had mine—we kicked balls and climbed trees in separate corners of the village—but my favorite days were the days when our groups played together and I could watch him kick balls the farthest, climb trees the highest; even if it weren’t so, it was so to me, because he was my older brother, so tall and strong, no one could ever be better than him. Whenever we went into the forest with the other boys to search for bush plums, he made sure I walked in front of him. Not just me, but also the little boys who had no big brothers—someone had to mind them, and if no one did, it was up to Malabo. Yaya said it was because he was a firstborn child, that firstborn children are innately responsible, though she could offer no explanation for all the firstborns in the village who continued playing with their friends while their siblings cried in a corner.
Malabo wanted everyone to feel safe. He was eager to protect me and desperate to make Yaya happy. Whenever our father, in his moments of fury, kicked away his dinner, Malabo would always be the one to pick it up so Yaya wouldn’t have to.
You know that’s how he is, Yaya always said with a shrug whenever I went to her to complain about my father’s uncontrollable anger; you know he’s not good at being happy. But why? I would ask. Because he was born that way, Bongo—that’s why. But how come everyone else in the village smiles and he’s the only person who never smiles? Because he’s the way he is; why should he pretend he’s like everyone else? Doesn’t he get tired of being miserable year after year? I wanted to know. Was it a curse? All Yaya could tell me was that my father’s sorrows began when he was still in his mother’s womb—a relative with whom his father had a land dispute had turned into a python and strangled his father to death. Weeks later, his mother, still in mourning, had died while giving birth to him. With no mother or father alive, his older sister had taken him to her hut and raised him as one of her children. His sister breastfed him alongside her own baby and put him to sleep on her bed, she and her husband nestling both babies so neither child would wake up at night alone and afraid in their new, confounding world.
Everyone I’d met from my father’s ancestral village swore to me that his sister and her husband had treated him as if he came out of his sister’s womb, but my father, who had cut off his birth family from his life before Malabo and I were born, insisted that their fair treatment of him suggested nothing. He said they’d only been good to him because he was an orphan whom they had no choice but to be responsible for, someone they’d helped so their village wouldn’t think poorly of them for having abandoned their own kin—why should he be appreciative of that? Malabo and I ought to be thankful for what we had, he often said, living the life we were born to live, unlike what he had in his early years, growing up without the comfort of belonging, walking around a village where people didn’t bother to whisper when telling each other that there were few sadder ways for a child to begin life than the way his had, why wouldn’t such a child be unsmiling?
I remember evenings on the veranda, sitting and waiting for bedtime, Malabo telling Yaya and me stories to make us laugh, because if we didn’t laugh we would have nothing to do but contemplate our bleak home and our inability to refashion it. How could we think of much else with my father’s melancholia in our midst? How else could we handle his worst days, when his never-ending sadness and bad temper converged and he couldn’t eat, couldn’t do anything but lie in bed for most of the day while other men went to work, and then, after rising, in shame, bark at us for daring to breathe? Once, in my adolescence, in my attempt to understand Malabo so I could be more like him, I asked him if he enjoyed the things he did for others, like going hunting with our father even though he was old enough to avoid the company of a man who sucked dry the joy of others, or visiting Old Bata, our neighbor whom no one cared to be around unless they had to—wouldn’t it be easier for him if he only did the things he had to do? Malabo had laughed and said that if everyone only did what they ought to do, who would do the things no one thought they had to do? What did enjoyment have to do with duty?