By the time he died, Thula was a girl, no longer a baby in need of being sung to and watched over, and yet my husband’s spirit returned on many nights to sit by her bed. Malabo had put a little bed in my room after his father’s funeral, so Thula could spend nights with me on occasion. Whenever Thula slept in my room, my husband returned. He wore a yellow shirt every time, his skin as smooth as if it had never combated elements. The anguished look he’d carried for most of his days in our world was gone; his new demeanor was of serenity beyond any I’d ever seen. He left in the morning, before the rooster’s crow, and I spent the day eagerly waiting for Sahel to ask me if Thula could come sleep in my room again. Sometimes Sahel asked me and I agreed but Thula refused to comply, wanting to be in her parents’ bedroom. I never pushed for it to happen—I wanted my husband to come for a visit only when life designed it to be so, not because I’d manipulated it to placate my longing to see my beloved’s face. Sahel was pregnant with Juba at that time, and I knew that after the baby’s birth my husband would stop coming, since the spirit of the newly arrived and the spirit of the recently departed cannot dwell in the same space, coming from and heading to lands at opposite ends of time. As Sahel’s belly grew, I found it hard to sleep each time he visited, not wanting to close my eyes and miss a thing. I couldn’t have enough of the joy on his face as he watched Thula, or the tranquillity that enveloped him, evidence to me that he was finally free.
The day Juba was born, I cried as I held him. Everyone thought my tears were for gratitude—one man gone, another come to replace him—but I alone knew why.
* * *
PEOPLE ASKED ME OFTEN, IN the early years of our marriage, why I’d married him. How could I be happy with an unhappy person? Wasn’t it tiring to always feel as if I needed to give him reasons to be happy? Wasn’t it a burden, striving to be cheerful for both of us?
I gave them one response only: I saw in him things no one else could see.
To them he was cursed—dead father before birth, dead mother at birth, joyless spirit—but to me he was that bird sitting alone on a separate tree branch, singing a different song. How could such a bird be anything but beautiful? I remember the first days of our marriage, when it was just the two of us in this hut. He said to me only the things that had to be said, preferring the sound of silence. We could sit on the veranda for hours without saying a word to each other and I would feel as if I’d had the most enchanting conversation. Only with him did I come to realize how much noise there is in the world, and how marvelous it is not to be a part of it. In those days, his display of anger was muted; it was after he became a father that his temper began to run short. It seemed to me that there was something about having children to protect, little ones for whom he had to do everything in his power so no harm would befall them, something about making them happy when he couldn’t make himself happy, something about doing all that in a world that to him was perpetually covered in darkness—there was just something about it all that was too much for him to bear, and he simply couldn’t.
Malabo hated it when his father threw on the floor the food I had cooked because he wasn’t in the mood for that particular dish, or it was too spicy, or not spicy enough, whatever it was that he had to complain about that day. Malabo insisted that I never pick up the food, that I let him do it for me; it was his way of atoning for his father. Whenever Malabo came to sit with me after such an episode, he’d ask me why I allowed his father to treat me like that. Wasn’t I afraid that one day he would raise his hand and hit me? Never, I told him; your father’s battles are with himself, not with me or anyone in this world. I always let him know that his father was suffering more than all of us combined. I did not tell Malabo much else, because a child need not be privy to the intricacies of his parents’ relationship. I did not tell him how, lying in bed, my husband often pulled me close, held my hand, and asked me to look into his eyes as he thanked me for everything I’d ever done for him, and all the loads I daily took on for his sake and the sake of the children. I told Malabo nothing about how, on nights after his father had railed against my food, or a missing shirt, or a friend of mine who came for a visit and stayed for too long, he told me that he was sorry, and asked if I could forgive him. How long did it take for him to hurt me again? And yet I loved him still. And yet I pray the Spirit to take me to be with him.
* * *
—
How many people have I loved and buried? I wouldn’t dare count. Which do you think is worse, to be the first to die or the last? You got the best of it, dear husband—you left after your parents and before your children. How many humans will be so favored? Yet I am thankful that I’m the one living with this sorrow—better me than you. Sometimes I try to imagine what your days would be like if our sons and I were gone and you were here alone. I wouldn’t rest easy in the next world knowing this. You can rest easy for me. I take comfort in the fact that Sahel needs me, that she begs me to stay for a while longer.