* * *
THE MAN IN BéZAM, HE’S not a young man, but he’s younger than my husband was when he died. He is the uncle of the Cute One, who is the same age as Sahel.
It was the Cute One who said to Sahel—and I don’t know how it came up—that his uncle was searching for a new wife. The Cute One said his uncle was not a man who liked being alone; his wife had died eighteen months before. The man and his wife never had children—his wife had been unable to keep her pregnancies—but this man had never considered replacing her with a fertile wife. Now she was gone, and the man was alone in his brick house in Bézam, working at a government job.
The Cute One said that his uncle was a good man, and that when they had spoken about his loneliness and his getting a new wife, the first person the Cute One thought of was Sahel, not one of the young women in Bézam. The Cute One told Sahel, in my presence, that he’d seen how well Sahel took care of me, and he knew Sahel would take good care of his uncle too, and his uncle would take good care of her and Juba in return.
Sahel looked angry when the Cute One made the proposal, as if she deserved something better. I didn’t like the way the Cute One said it either: it sounded to me as if he wanted Sahel to move to Bézam to spend a few good years with an old man, followed by many years of cleaning him and feeding him and helping him die. But then I thought about how wonderful those few good years might be for her. Besides, who’s to say the man doesn’t have a decade of vigor left in him? My husband’s hands were strong till the afternoon he felt pain in his chest, and was gone in hours. Even if this Bézam man is gone within a year, Sahel and Juba moving there will keep them safe from what’s surely coming to Kosawa.
* * *
—
Last night, I called Sahel into my bedroom. I asked her for the seventy-seventh time to say yes to the man in Bézam.
“I can’t, Yaya,” she said to me.
“Why?”
“You know I can’t…”
I told her to do it for my sake, and for Juba’s sake, but mostly for her own sake. She sighed. I could see she had been thinking about it.
“At least go with the Cute One to Bézam for one night and see the man for yourself,” I said. “If he’s too old, you can pass him on to me.”
I’d intended for her to laugh at my joke, but she didn’t. “How could the Cute One suggest such a thing to me, knowing I can’t leave you?” she said.
I told her not to blame the Cute One. Men, thinking too highly of their intelligence, sometimes come up with ideas without considering the different sides of what they’re talking about, but there’s no use in our pointing that out to them. Besides, it didn’t matter if the Cute One ought to have been more sensitive in making the suggestion, I said; it was a great proposal.
“If I go—not that I want to—but if I go, will Malabo forgive me?”
“That’s not for you to worry about,” I said. “Leave it to me. I’ll handle him when I see him again. He’ll be older than me in death years, but I’ll still be his mother.”
She chuckled. It was the first time we’d laughed about death. The lightness wouldn’t last, I knew; our tears are still too close by.
“I promised him in my grief,” she said. “I said that if he never returned from Bézam I’d never unite my spirit with another man’s.”
“When Malabo was alive, he told you what to do, what not to do. You obeyed him, because you loved him,” I said. “I sat here and watched you do as he wished, and you were never unhappy about any of it.”
“Making him happy made me happy.”
“Yes, but now he’s gone and you’re still making decisions based on what you think will make him happy in the next world. I’m old and dying, so I can say things now that I would never have said when I was your age. I don’t care if anyone calls me crazy, so I’m going to ask you to tell me, Sahel: When will it end for us women, this doing what we have to do for the sake of husbands alive, husbands dead—when will it end?”
She shrugged, as if to suggest my question was irrelevant.
“Why are you punishing yourself? Because it’s what you’re expected to do?”
“But, Yaya, if Big Papa had left at a younger age, would you have remarried?”
“No,” I said. “And I would have regretted it.”
She was quiet. I knew she believed me; why would I lie, standing at death’s door?