I don’t think we should go into the building just yet, I say. We’ve traveled for close to two days; we’ve taken no baths, and our mouths are unwashed. Tunis agrees—he says we smell like roasted human flesh. I laugh, but Lusaka doesn’t join me. He has never been a man who participates in anything because others do, which is why he’s always been my favorite of my brother’s age-mates. In the evenings of our young-adult days, I struggled not to stare for too long at him when everyone else was loud-talking and laughing and Lusaka, always the contemplative one, observed it all with a smile so faint you could only see it in his eyes. Once, I joked with Malabo that perhaps Lusaka was our father’s real firstborn, not Malabo, and perhaps Thula was Lusaka’s daughter. My brother had laughed and said that in a village as small as ours, founded by brothers who had married sisters, it was only by the mercy of the Spirit that we didn’t all look and act alike.
Looking at Lusaka now, I can see that this mission, this entire struggle, is changing him, forcing him to reveal parts of himself even the most reticent cannot forever hide. I hope he’ll soon be happy, but I’ve spent enough time around grieving parents to know that happiness is no goal of theirs; seeing flickers of light in the darkness that surrounds them will suffice. Perhaps one of Lusaka’s dead sons liked to joke—that may be why he didn’t laugh at the jokes Tunis made on the bus rides to steady our errant minds. Tunis’s best jokes had involved figuring out which fruit a given Kosawa woman’s buttocks best resembled. I’d guffawed when he labeled Sahel’s buttocks a pineapple, and Tunis had laughed too, even though Sahel is his first cousin and like a sister to him.
* * *
—
“Let’s go in,” Lusaka says. “If the newspaperman doesn’t want to help us because we smell bad, we’ll ask Jakani to turn us into flowers next time.”
We head for the door of the building.
There’s a man standing in front of it. He looks ready for a fight, nostrils flared, fists balled, angry about something. I’m not sure what the right thing to say to him is.
“Good afternoon,” I say.
“What do you want?”
“How is your day going? My name is Bongo. My friends and I—”
“Don’t waste my time.”
“I…please, we came to see a newspaperman. His uncle sent us.”
He assesses us from crowns to toes. “You look like village people.” Clearly, it’s polite to be rude in this city. “What business do you have with a newspaperman?”
“We need to deliver a letter to him.”
“Who?”
“The newspaperman. Could you kindly take us to him? His name is Austin.”
“Austin? You’re here for Austin?” His smile is unexpected, crooked and broad, revealing black gums. “Why didn’t you tell me that already? Are you from his mother’s village? He was just telling me the other day about how he still hasn’t gotten a chance to visit his mother’s village.” He opens the door and motions for us to come in. “Wait right there,” he says, pointing to a corner of the empty room. “I’ll go upstairs and get him.”
We’re not from Austin’s mother’s village, but I don’t correct the man, grateful as I am to receive preferential treatment based on someone’s mistaken assumption about me.
Two women around my age enter the room and walk past us without offering any greetings. They’re wearing trousers like men; one of them has short-cropped hair. “So—it’s true what I’ve heard,” Tunis whispers. “There are no real women in Bézam, only men who look like women trying to look like men. Look at their buttocks—no shapes.” Though our hearts are racing as we stand in a strange room awaiting a stranger, Tunis and I cannot resist a giggle. We quickly cut it off when we see the man from the door coming down the stairs with a woman who looks like a man trying to look like a woman. The man from the door nods in our direction, then goes outside to retake his position. We’re left with this person, and I don’t know what the person’s relationship to Austin is.
“Good afternoon, brothers,” the person says in English. “I was told you’re looking for me?”
“I am…We were…” I begin.
I haven’t spoken to a stranger in English in years, not since the time I returned to Kosawa after failing to qualify to be a schoolteacher. This was two years after my father died, after my brother told me that he’d heard at the big market that the government was looking for candidates to be trained to become teachers at village schools being built around the country. I was the kind of young man the government was looking for—I’d excelled in school and could speak English better than every other adult in Kosawa; I still enjoy how it feels on my tongue. My love for the language, though, wasn’t enough to convince me to leave Kosawa to become a schoolteacher in a distant village. But then I’d told Elali about the program, and she had rejoiced at the thought of becoming the wife of a schoolteacher and living in a brick house.