The Sweet One and the Cute One said that they understood our concerns, but that, though the school was owned by the government, the bus would be owned by the Restoration Movement, paid for by the same American people who had been giving money to the Restoration Movement to help in our fight against Pexton ever since Austin’s story appeared in their newspaper. The representatives said these people who would pay for the bus were the same ones who had given money to fight for the release of Bongo and Konga and Woja Beki and Lusaka—they’d been on our side then and would always be. Still, the voices of dissent rose. If the Sweet One and the Cute One had seen the things we’d seen, several parents shouted, if they had been here on the day of the massacre, they would understand why we now feared even the rustling of leaves.
* * *
THE POSSIBILITY OF ATTENDING A school in Lokunja was what got Thula to start talking more often, three years after Malabo vanished.
She was still the same girl, saying only what she needed to say, but her anger at the massacre and all that had happened to our family was no longer holding her in chains, or at least the chains had grown looser. Perhaps it was the hope the men from the Restoration Movement brought every time they visited, and the news that the children now had a chance to acquire knowledge that might save us from future suffering. Or it could be that she finally recognized we were all in chains and that her pain was unique but in no way greater than others’， so what choice did we all have but to carry on? She didn’t return to smiling with ease, or laughing like she used to with her father, but her face brightened daily, highlighting the lovely largeness of her eyes.
Whenever I happened upon her and her friends sitting somewhere in the village, I lingered for a bit to hear if she would laugh, and if she did, a thousand bountiful harvests wouldn’t have made me happier. Without my asking, she started coming to sit by me in the kitchen to help me cook. On days when Yaya needed extra attention because she was having a very bad day—perhaps because one of her sons had visited her in a dream—and I had to roll her over repeatedly for a better position or wipe her face because she couldn’t stop crying, Thula cooked for the family. It nearly made me laugh whenever she reminded me to eat, considering how little she ate—no more than half the food on her plate, often less, despite my pleas for her to eat more.
I worried about her weight. I worried about the fact that her bleeding hadn’t started though she had reached the age for it. I worried that her friends’ breasts had grown past the size of oranges and hers weren’t up to that of a cashew. The competition for men with potential to make great husbands was fierce in all the eight villages, and Thula was at the age when girls needed to start sending signals and flaunting whatever wares they had. Her friends already had buttocks that men gaped at; beside them, Thula looked like a child trailing her mother and aunts. Malabo loved to boast that, with her sublime eyes and abundant smiles, his daughter was going to grow up to become the most beautiful woman the eight villages had ever seen. He said it even when Thula proved herself incapable of gaining weight. As a father, he could be blinded to certain things, but as a mother, I had a duty to stay attuned to all the challenges my daughter would encounter. Stunning as her face was, I could tell that her thinness and flatness, coupled with her impenetrable nature, would lessen her in the eyes of wife-seeking men.
When I lamented to Cocody and Lulu about this, they laughed and asked me why I couldn’t carry today’s load today and take on tomorrow’s load when I got there. Couldn’t I see it was pointless to agonize about Thula’s breasts and bleeding when my only choice in the matter was to wait for them to arrive when her body was ready? “Have you ever met a woman who has not bled and has no breasts?” Lulu asked me, laughing. Why was I wasting time thinking about the moment when Thula would see her first blood and run to me for comfort? What made me think she would even tell me when it happened? Cocody and Lulu, daughters to mothers and mothers to daughters, understood why all these things mattered, but they preferred to use their minds for things other than imagining, as I often did, the celebration of a daughter’s first bleed—the happy evening when our older female relatives and friends would gather to give Thula an account of all the wonders in store for her now that she was a woman. I smiled whenever I pictured her face, caught between dread and confusion, as the women whispered to her that, in the hands of the right man, the pleasure would more than make up for the pain, and that, the sweeter the pleasure that accompanied the conception, the greater the pain at the child’s delivery, and wasn’t that one of the most wonderful things about being a woman?