After that first day stuck in a gloomy fog, when I’d gathered whatever strength I could, I sent a message for my cousin Tunis to come help me break down the door to the back room so we could get Thula out—I couldn’t let her stay in there with no food or water. Tunis came over and called out to Thula to please unlock the door so he wouldn’t have to break in. Thula stayed on the bed and ignored us. Tunis found a way to open the door without causing much damage and left. Quietly, I entered the room.
I found her lying under Bongo’s clothes, her face tear-stained.
She was clutching to her chest the book Bongo used to read to her, the one about a place called Nubia, that place Bongo loved to talk about: Did we know that in Nubia women were as powerful as men? he liked to say to Malabo and me on the veranda, at which Malabo would give him a blank stare and I’d laugh and ask him to tell me more.
I knelt by the bed and pleaded with Thula to get out of the room. She turned her face to the wall. I told her we needed to preserve the room in the event Bongo’s spirit wanted to roam there for a while before beginning its journey to be with the ancestors. She ignored me. “You’re too young to sleep here alone,” I said, still kneeling by the bed. No reaction. I told her that as a girl she couldn’t make the back room her bedroom; Bongo could do so because young men can handle the danger of sleeping in a room with a separate entrance. Still no reaction from her. I stood up. Letting go of the tenderness in my voice, I told her I would no longer put up with her insolence; I hadn’t killed her father or her uncle, my patience with her wasn’t going to last forever. Still she made no effort to rise. My cautions turned to threats. “I’ll never let you back in the hut if you don’t come in right now,” I said. I could have been speaking to a rock. Determined to get a response, I yanked her off the bed. It was then I noticed how wet the pillow was, drenched with her tears.
What could I do? Our parlor was full of women sitting on the floor around Yaya, singing to her in her numb state; I didn’t want to announce to them that Thula was compounding my grief by defying me. So I went into my bedroom and closed the door and window. In the darkness, I sat on the bed and bowed my head. I asked the Spirit to tell me where I’d gone wrong. I wanted to know where all of us, as a people, had gone astray. Surely, our ancestors had committed an offense, and their punishment was being visited upon us, for no hut in Kosawa had been spared this desolation wrought upon us. I wept for Bongo, I cursed Malabo. I wish I didn’t detest my husband for dooming me to a life of being solely responsible for a broken girl and a lost boy and an old woman, all of them laying upon my back their anger and grief, with no one to bear mine but me, because it had to be so.
I screamed into my pillow. I told Malabo I wish I’d married Neba in my village, the first man who’d asked me to be his wife. I wish I hadn’t told my mother to tell Neba that she couldn’t accept any gifts from him because another man had already requested her permission to marry me. I’d joked and laughed about the lie with my friends, because I believed that I’d someday find a man I wanted who wanted me too; I was confident that waiting for this man would be worthwhile. And he was worthwhile, my husband, my dream, who with a semi-smile brought low the clouds and laid them for me to walk on, who with a single touch left me floating face downward on the stillest, cleanest water, everything about him so worth the damnation of being born. In our youth and freedom, our exhilaration seemed as if it would last forever. Look where my lie landed me.
Before drying my eyes and rising, I told Malabo that I hoped his journey from this world to the next would take a hundred eternities so that he would forever be alone, never with us, never with his ancestors. I cursed him for choosing me only to make me pay for his foolhardiness, for loving me only to pass me off to a life I loathe, for giving me everything I ever wanted only to leave me wishing I’d never prayed for the things I got.
—
For most of the nights since the day Malabo refused to heed my advice and left for Bézam, sleep has lost its battle against my fidgety mind. I pass the hours waiting for the roosters to tell me it’s dawn so I can find respite from my regrets and ruminations. The past is past, and yet I can’t stop thinking that I could have stopped him if I were a better woman, a better wife, a better mother, a more persuasive person.
I try not to punish myself with such thoughts, but I can’t stop counting all the sorrows that have befallen our family because Malabo did not listen to me. I list them, from the moment I began feeling the pain in my belly though it was too early in my pregnancy for me to feel such pain, to the moment, a week later, when the baby came out and I screamed and closed my eyes because I did not want to see it, to the afternoon when the soldiers arrived with guns and I saw a wickedness worse than
