Bongo had closed his eyes and shaken his head ruefully after telling me all this.
As they were departing Bézam the evening after meeting with Austin, Bongo went on, he and Tunis snickered, whispering and elbowing each other once the bus was safely out of the city. Could the Spirit have been more benevolent in making their trip so seamless? At that same moment, back in Kosawa, the Sick One was a day away from death. Beside him, Woja Beki was praying. In the bus, to the right of Bongo and Tunis, Austin slept next to Lusaka, the American’s head against the window, his face tranquil.
By the time the group arrived in Gardens, the Sick One’s grave had been dug.
Sonni went to meet them before they entered the village; a child had spotted them approaching, a man of fair skin among them. Sonni pulled Bongo and Lusaka aside and told them everything. Right there, by a dried tree trunk, along the path that connects our huts to the Pexton oil wells, Bongo sat Austin down and told him the whole truth.
Austin had laughed at first, Bongo told me. He thought Bongo was making a tale to amuse him. It couldn’t possibly be true that he’d taken a bus with people he’d just met to a remote village only to learn that the people had his uncle’s remains. But when he went with the men to Woja Beki’s house and saw his uncle’s body, he had screamed and dropped to his knees beside the mat on which the corpse lay. He had taken his uncle’s hand and wept into it, saying: I don’t understand, I can’t believe this, what happened? Bongo said his cry bore the agony of a child realizing that the world was not going to fall into place for him. Everyone left the parlor so he could mourn in private.
When he came out of the room, red-eyed and runny-nosed, he walked out through the corridor to the backyard. Bongo followed him, but he said he needed to be alone. He found a rock behind Woja Beki’s wives’ kitchen and sat there, crying softly. Woja Beki’s first wife brought him a plate of peanut sauce and rice; he didn’t touch it.
When he finally stood up, he told Bongo that he was too stunned and in too much pain to think clearly: this was the stuff of nightmares. He needed to get out of Kosawa as soon as possible. Whatever we’d done, he said, how we thought it was going to help us, now wasn’t the time for him to understand. He began crying again, his shoulders quaking. His uncle was a good man—how could we do this to him? How could Bongo have lied to him? Was it na?ve of him to think Bongo was an honorable man because he’d presented himself as such? It didn’t matter. All he wanted now was for Bongo to take him to Lokunja so that he could arrange for his uncle’s body to be transported to Bézam.
Bongo never got to tell me how he was able to convince Austin to stay, or how he got Austin to agree that it was best his uncle be buried in Kosawa. Austin must have realized that something about his writing our story, and then being in Kosawa right after his uncle’s death, would make the government suspicious of his involvement in our operation; years later, we would learn that not long before Austin arrived in Kosawa, the government had sent him a letter threatening him with expulsion from the country if he didn’t cease writing things His Excellency did not like, and if he didn’t desist from attending clandestine meetings where people talked about how to create “a better country.” I never found out if Austin’s surrender to the idea of his uncle’s being buried in Kosawa was driven by grief, or fear, or a calculation that had nothing to do with Kosawa, because Bongo did not have the time to enlighten me.
On the day he told me the story, the prison guards, without giving any reason, informed all visitors, upon arrival, that they would be allowed only thirty minutes with their loved ones. By the time Bongo finished the food Thula and I had brought for him and got to the middle of the story, the prison guards sounded the bells and commenced barking at the women and children to give their final hugs and gather their bowls and utensils and finish their crying outside. The next time I visited Bongo, we had things more pertinent to discuss—Juba’s nightmares, Yaya’s health, the Restoration Movement’s ongoing battle to free him. He never stopped believing he would be free again. None of them did. None of them imagined, on that afternoon of the Sick One’s burial, that the day would be the last time they would ever see Kosawa.
* * *
AT EVERY PRISON VISIT, WE sat on parallel benches in a room abounding in misery, the wives and children on one side, the prisoners on the other. All around, people spoke in whispers. Woja Beki always sat at one end of our men’s bench, his face puffy and covered with a rash he’d contracted. Who could believe that the man in the dirty brown outfit that all prisoners were made to wear had once worn new American clothes and sauntered around Kosawa, a mighty rooster among sickly chicks? Who could imagine Woja Beki in a brick house upon coming across the crumpled old man? Even his gums and sparse teeth no longer seemed notable in a room of such unqualified destitution.