* * *
—
I pulled my blanket to my face and cried when Malaika was done talking. Even after she left, my tears wouldn’t stop flowing. I wept for my beloved—him as a child, alone in his shame; him as a man, alone in his torment. She sacrificed him, his own sister. Made him suffer for her honor. She sewed up his lips so others would not speak ill of her for allowing him to tear apart the village with a vile tale. I spent days wondering why my husband felt compelled to hide this story, and then it occurred to me: even if he had revealed it in his adult years, how many among us would have believed it, or understood what it was like for him, a grown man, held captive by someone long dead?
And his sister—I feel so many things toward her, malevolent things, but I also force myself to imagine her suffering. How it must have devastated her to do this to him. How she must have fought with her husband to do something, anything, to which her husband must have told her that nothing could be done. Sacrifices, her husband must have told her, they must be made in life. He must have reminded her that everyone needed to make sacrifices for the sake of their families and villages and countries, to keep them together, to move them forward, to prevent them from falling apart from within.
* * *
—
How I wish you’d told me. How I wish you’d allowed me to keep you company in that darkness. I would have cried with you on the nights when your gloom thickened. I would have understood why you raved and yelled and insulted whenever you thought someone wasn’t rising up and saying what needed to be said, or doing what needed to be done. You fumed at even the most inconsequential of events—an older child taking a younger child’s toys and the adults doing nothing. We thought it was all just a part of your miserable disposition, your inability to simply let the world be the way it was, but now I hear the things you used to say, and I hear them differently. When we reunite, not long from now, I will lay your head upon my bosom and let you curse every form of wickedness for as long as you want. I won’t tell you to stop. I won’t beg you not to get too angry, such is life, these things happen. I won’t tell you to calm down, let it be.
Oh, dear husband, I fear that, like you, Thula walks around consumed by all the ways the world has failed to protect its children. Like you, she seems doomed never to find peace until a new earth is born, one in which all are accorded the same level of dignity. How I ache for you both—you for the joy you never had, Thula for the disappointment that is surely coming her way. Why was she, of all the children, chosen to be this way? This longing to right all the wrongs she can, where does it come from? Did you, on the nights you visited while she slept, tell her never to accept that which is not the way she believes it ought to be? Please come back and visit her again, dearest husband, and tell her that it’s all right, she can let Kosawa go. Please do it, for Sahel and for Juba.
* * *
—
My beloved and I will be reunited before the rains come, I can tell. I want to fly away on a dry, breezy day. I see his face already—him as a young man again, is he smiling at me? My journey from here to the land of our ancestors will be the fastest there ever was—I won’t stop running until I arrive in that marvelous place and see my husband and children again and join them and my ancestors in blessed oneness with the Spirit for all eternity.
* * *
—
As soon as Sahel is ready to move to Bézam, Malaika will come take me to go live with her; we’ll keep each other company. All three of her daughters have become wives and moved to their marital homes. Her own husband died long ago, and her only son did not make it past childhood, so she’s alone in her hut now, with a bedroom across from hers, empty and waiting for me to move into it.
A gust of energy entered my body today. I may soon be able to take a few steps if I need to, but Malaika assures me I won’t need to do much walking in her hut. She’ll feed me and help me to the bathroom and the veranda, where I’ll breathe the first clean air I’ve breathed in so long I can’t recall. I would have preferred to die here, in this hut my husband built with his own hands, on this bed where we spent the best nights of our lives, but Kosawa might be dead before me, and I want no part of its end. I hope he’ll forgive me for moving to the place of his birth. He left it and said he wanted nothing to do with his people, and for all those years I said we should visit them and introduce the children to them, so they could know their kin, but he said no, and I begged him, and he yelled at me. Now I’m going, after what was stolen from him there, but where else can I go?