What could I do? Our parlor was full of women sitting on the floor around Yaya, singing to her in her numb state; I didn’t want to announce to them that Thula was compounding my grief by defying me. So I went into my bedroom and closed the door and window. In the darkness, I sat on the bed and bowed my head. I asked the Spirit to tell me where I’d gone wrong. I wanted to know where all of us, as a people, had gone astray. Surely, our ancestors had committed an offense, and their punishment was being visited upon us, for no hut in Kosawa had been spared this desolation wrought upon us. I wept for Bongo, I cursed Malabo. I wish I didn’t detest my husband for dooming me to a life of being solely responsible for a broken girl and a lost boy and an old woman, all of them laying upon my back their anger and grief, with no one to bear mine but me, because it had to be so.
I screamed into my pillow. I told Malabo I wish I’d married Neba in my village, the first man who’d asked me to be his wife. I wish I hadn’t told my mother to tell Neba that she couldn’t accept any gifts from him because another man had already requested her permission to marry me. I’d joked and laughed about the lie with my friends, because I believed that I’d someday find a man I wanted who wanted me too; I was confident that waiting for this man would be worthwhile. And he was worthwhile, my husband, my dream, who with a semi-smile brought low the clouds and laid them for me to walk on, who with a single touch left me floating face downward on the stillest, cleanest water, everything about him so worth the damnation of being born. In our youth and freedom, our exhilaration seemed as if it would last forever. Look where my lie landed me.
Before drying my eyes and rising, I told Malabo that I hoped his journey from this world to the next would take a hundred eternities so that he would forever be alone, never with us, never with his ancestors. I cursed him for choosing me only to make me pay for his foolhardiness, for loving me only to pass me off to a life I loathe, for giving me everything I ever wanted only to leave me wishing I’d never prayed for the things I got.
* * *
—
For most of the nights since the day Malabo refused to heed my advice and left for Bézam, sleep has lost its battle against my fidgety mind. I pass the hours waiting for the roosters to tell me it’s dawn so I can find respite from my regrets and ruminations. The past is past, and yet I can’t stop thinking that I could have stopped him if I were a better woman, a better wife, a better mother, a more persuasive person.
I try not to punish myself with such thoughts, but I can’t stop counting all the sorrows that have befallen our family because Malabo did not listen to me. I list them, from the moment I began feeling the pain in my belly though it was too early in my pregnancy for me to feel such pain, to the moment, a week later, when the baby came out and I screamed and closed my eyes because I did not want to see it, to the afternoon when the soldiers arrived with guns and I saw a wickedness worse than I’d ever imagined possible, to the evening we returned to Kosawa from Bézam with Bongo’s death notice.
“You’re acting as if this problem is yours to solve,” I said to Malabo the night before his departure.
“Whose problem is it to solve?” he said.
“Are your children the only ones drinking the water? Why do you have to do the fighting for everyone?”
“Is that who you think I am, Sahel? The kind of man who sits back and waits for someone else to take action? Is that the man you married?”
“Juba returned to us,” I cried. “That’s an omen. Can’t you see? It means he’s not going away anytime soon. Nobody dies and comes back only to die again soon after.”
“How many people have you known who died and came back?”
I did not respond; we both knew the answer.
“Juba was the first person in Kosawa in a generation to be brought back to life,” he said, as if I didn’t know. “Of all the sick children, the Spirit chose to spare ours. Why? Have you wondered? Don’t you think we ought to play a bigger role in ending all this, considering how much we’ve been favored? Have you even thought for a second about Juba’s adulthood, how his coming back to life is going to affect him as he gets older?”
“We’re not talking about when he gets older. We’re talking about now. He’s fine now. Isn’t he?”
“What about Thula? What about when she too gets sick?”
“Thula never gets sick. I’ll boil their water for ten hours if I have to. Please, don’t go to Bézam. Cocody is right now begging Bissau not to go with you. Lulu and her family are begging Lobi to stay home. There’s no saying how the government will respond if you show up in their town making demands—that city is full of wicked men.”