How Beautiful We Were

they were to be revered, these men who were born on each side of the rooster’s crow, Jakani before, Sakani after. We couldn’t tell them apart from a distance—they wore the same long gray beard and the same black-and-brown snail shells around their necks—but we could differentiate them if we looked closely enough: Jakani was right-handed, and Sakani was left-handed; Jakani was born with his left eye shut, Sakani with his right eye shut. They were older than our parents, but younger than our grandparents, most of whom were there the day the twins were born. One of our grandfathers told us that the twins’ mother had been in labor for a week, moaning in pain so loudly for seven nights that no one in Kosawa had been able to sleep, not even the insects and birds and animals, all of whom began chirping and tweeting and bleating and barking and oinking collectively every night, their sounds growing wilder until the laboring woman’s screams crescendoed to a peak, at which point the twins came out, looking like average babies except for one closed eye apiece and large heads with a patch of gray hair on their foreheads, patches that would eventually migrate to their chins.

Another of our grandfathers told us that, back when he was a little boy, he used to play hiding and seeking with the twins until Jakani began seeing playmates no one else could see and finding things no one had hidden, and Sakani started healing his playmates’ cuts and scrapes with leaves he dashed into the forest to find, chanting healing prayers. A grandmother who died a good death from old age the same day as Wambi once told a couple of our mothers on her veranda, while a few of us lingered around to eavesdrop, that the twins had never shown any interest in women, not even when they were young men with fullness in their trousers. In the best days of their youth, while their age-mates flirted and courted and traveled to other villages to bring back girls who they hoped would give them at least half a dozen children, Jakani and Sakani stayed in their parents’ hut to perfect their crafts, which, after they’d been mastered, brought in the money they used to build their own hut at the edge of the village, where they now lived together.

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Far more than was appropriate, we wondered about what went on inside the twins’ hut. Our mothers wondered too, as must our fathers, though they would never debase themselves to ponder it openly. More than once we heard our mothers saying that it was possible the twins slept on the same bed, Jakani on the right, Sakani on the left, arms around each other. We imagined they were speaking in a parable of sorts, because we knew with certainty that, although men could hug and hold hands with each other, there were certain things men did only with women, things like sharing beds, and lying on top of each other late at night to breathe heavily and cause the bed to squeak, the kind of things that our parents did when they thought we were sleeping, and which we couldn’t wait to do one day, because we could tell from how frequently they did it, and from our fathers’ grunts and our mothers’ muffled moans, that it would be a delightful thing to do.

When we were younger, one of us had woken up at an evil hour with a bladder spilling urine and gone outside to empty it, only to see something she wished she had never seen. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have gone outside alone. We left our huts at night only when accompanied by a sibling, but this one of us had no other sibling besides a little brother, who would have been of no use as a companion, so she’d gone over to her parents’ bed, to wake her mother up, but her parents were not in their bed. This one of us had hurried through the parlor and out the back door, believing she would find her parents outside—perhaps they’d gone out to urinate together—but when she stepped outside, she saw nothing of them. She only heard their moans coming from inside the kitchen. Our friend immediately lost the urge to urinate. She thought about hurrying back to bed, but the part of her made of curiosity had tugged her to look through a hole in the bamboo kitchen wall. In the dim light of a kerosene lamp, she saw it clearly—her parents naked, her mother lying on her back with her legs spread wide and feet high, her father’s head deep between her mother’s thighs. Our friend ran back to her bed and hid under her blanket, her heart loath to slow its pounding, her eyes unable to shut, until her parents returned early in the morning with the blanket on which they’d been lying on the kitchen floor. They took a new blanket from under their bed, climbed into bed, and covered themselves as innocently as if they hadn’t just been doing unspeakable things to each other on the kitchen floor. The next morning, fatigued from struggling to unsee what she’d seen, the one of us had been unable to get up in time for school. When we asked her during recess why her feet appeared to be as weak as grass, she told us about her night, and a few of us told her that we’d seen similar things, and that, whatever she did, she could never tell her parents that she’d seen them, for it would make them ashamed of themselves, and making one’s parents ashamed of themselves was never a good thing.

We believed Jakani and Sakani did no such things; what they felt for each other was more akin to what our parents felt for us than what our parents felt for each other, but we couldn’t know this with total certainty, for the twins were palm