—
By the time Liberation Day came, I’d spent years helping Thula with her mission, and Nubia had spent many evenings alone at home, because she understood that I longed to support my sister, and nothing was more sacred to her than familial love. She still thought it all futile, Thula’s fight, which was why when I told her, a couple of months after Liberation Day, that I was ready to let Kosawa go, she kissed me and told me she was ready for us to start anew.
I’d traveled across the country with my sister, I’d borne witness to how little was changing despite her zeal, and I’d realized—while some men were heckling Thula at a poorly attended rally in the east—that my Nubia was right all along: our nation was decaying with us inside it, all one could do was abscond with whatever one could. But we’re not absconding, Nubia likes to say, we’re only taking what’s ours; we have the right to do so. She calls herself the Great Bitch, my beloved. She speaks in an American accent and prefers European fashion designers for both of us. For me she’s done whatever a bitch needs to do to get her man what she believes he’s entitled to.
To move me to the top in the government, she has arranged trysts with young women for my married bosses; she gives the trysters our bed and serves them dinner afterward. She has paid friends of friends in government offices to change my birth certificate so I wouldn’t have to stop working at the mandatory retirement age of fifty-five—why stop working so young when there is wealth begging to be accumulated?
Together, she and I have amassed riches from payoffs I take after she tells me how much a requested favor is worth. She doesn’t let me settle for anything but the max; she reminds me to stop thinking about fairness. We own lands nationwide given to me as gifts by companies and local rulers seeking my assistance. Our coffers are bloated with funds she helps me channel our way, now that I’m the head of the national taxation office.
We’ve bought a house for Nubia’s mom and her siblings. We bought a car for her mom, and another car for her albino brother, so he’d no longer have to stay long under the sun waiting for the bus; we got him a high-paying job so young women would overlook his skin color. We bought a gated, two-story house for Mama and Papa, and found a woman to care for Papa now that his old age has become a sickness. We’ve built our own house—seven bedrooms, one for our relatives when they visit, the rest for our children, the first arriving any day now. Mama and Papa picked the baby’s name for us. I cried when I heard it. I rubbed Nubia’s belly that night as I whispered: Malabo Bongo.
—
Thula came to see Nubia during the month the doctor ordered Nubia to stay in bed. She sat with Nubia till the hour I was to come back from work. She told Nubia that Malabo Bongo would live in a better world, people were awakening to the truth. Thula knew about Nubia’s father; she’d lived longer than Nubia, seen more, and yet she believed still that goodness would triumph. Nubia saw no use in telling her that the world operated under laws Thula could never change, and that our sole obligation was to ourselves, to our happiness and the happiness of the ones we loved. After Thula hugged Nubia to head home and prepare for a trip to Kosawa, Nubia turned around and lay back in bed, in a bedroom bigger than the one she had imagined during the nights she slept in a shed. She gazed at her closet, at clothes I’d bought for her on my last work trip to America, from a store on Madison Avenue. It was then I returned from the office, got into bed, and wrapped my arms around her as, downstairs, our servants prepared our dinner.
—
Even though our paths have diverged, I still give my sister counsel whenever she asks for it. And she gives me what she can—her acceptance that, though my ways are not hers and hers are no longer mine, we will someday meet at the same place again, a place where my focus on family and her focus on a better country will bring us all contentment. Will that ever happen? Why do humans fight when we all want the same things? What will my child, Malabo Bongo, arrive wanting? Mama says it will be a boy, a happy boy. How I wish for a world abounding in happy boys. We’ve all suffered, I said to my sister. Why choose to keep on suffering? Why not grant yourself more of the world’s pleasures? But Thula doesn’t believe that the world’s pleasures can satisfy her spirit the way her purpose does. She says her purpose in life is to do as she must, even if it means suffering.
In my mansion, I suffer still.
I wake up daily before dawn to sit by the window with my drawing book. Sometimes I reread my old, worn copy of
