I nodded, averting my eyes from his, which were aglow with gentleness.
I asked him if he’d left our country of his own volition or if he’d been forced to flee. He told me his uncle’s death and the massacre still haunted him, but he would have remained in our country given the chance—he loved its people. The decision to leave or stay, though, wasn’t his. Two weeks after pictures of the massacre appeared in his newspaper in America, soldiers arrived at his door to escort him to the airport. They told him that His Excellency did not want in his country any newspaperman who made up fake stories—doing so meant that Austin was His Excellency’s enemy, and thus the enemy of his people. Austin would have been glad to tell me more that night, I could see, but I knew I would meet him again, so I didn’t ask if that meant he could never return to our country again. Besides, he had to leave to meet someone for a story. So we had another hug, and he held my hand as we walked out of the building onto the street, letting go only at the last moment. Watching him walk away, I couldn’t decide whether he’d held my hand because he had a history with Bongo, or because the Sweet One had asked him to watch over me, or because he wanted to, for his sake, not for anyone else’s.
We’ve seen each other twice since that day—he’s come to visit me at school. We mostly talk about Kosawa and about how he wishes he could have done more for us. Not since my evenings on our veranda with my father have I sat down and spent so much time with someone else pondering life’s whys. He and I will be seeing each other next month. He’ll take me to this place called Brooklyn—I hear I can find food as good as ours there, I’m desperate for a tasty meal. But for now, what I’m eager to do is to return to the Village Meeting. I want to meet someone, a man who spoke at the previous meeting. This man, named Maxim, said something that opened my eyes, something I must tell you.
Maxim was the last person to speak at the meeting. He was an old man, around the age of our grandfathers—he’d needed a chair to sit on while onstage because his legs wouldn’t allow him to stand for long. There were over one hundred of us in that room, and none of us had made a sound as Maxim told the story of when he was a young man in a poor, cold country in Europe, how he and a group of his friends had burned down a government office building. He told us how they took oil and matches and just burned the whole thing down. His eyes lit up as he recounted the magnificence of the flame and smoke rising on that dark, frigid night. No one ever found out it was them. Months later, they went to another government office and ripped up documents and broke cabinets and sprayed paint all over. Afterward, they sat down on the floor of the office and drank alcohol. Then they urinated on the tables and chairs, laughing. Maxim laughed when he said this last part, and we all burst out laughing too, and clapping. We didn’t stop clapping until he told us that it wasn’t long before the government figured out who was responsible. The government arrested him and his friends; they spent a year in prison. That year was the proudest of his life, he said, because instead of sitting and talking and waiting for someone to do something, he’d done what he could. He’d done what he believed he had to. He’d shown those bastards that he could fight back, and that as long as he had breath in him, he would never stop fighting back.
You should have been there at that moment to see this man’s pride, his fearlessness, how in awe of it we all were. We stood up and clapped for so long the sound of it must have echoed all the way to the west end of the universe. My eyes welled up. Was Maxim’s message for me? For us? I remember all the times when I listened to you talking about it in the village square, saying we ought to hurt Pexton. I didn’t agree with you then. Burning a building seemed so futile. Even burning ten buildings seemed futile. Pexton could rebuild Gardens in a day. But perhaps the point isn’t for us to hurt them in a manner from which they’ll never recover. Perhaps the point is merely to let them know that we’re here. And we’re angry.
Yesterday my friends and I were discussing Maxim’s story in my bedroom. There were six of us, and only one person agreed with me that destroying our enemy’s property could lead to anything good. It’s just not effective, was the consensus. I argued that we can’t decide based on the notion of effectiveness—how can we know that a strategy won’t prove itself worthwhile generations after being deemed a failure? Our duty is to do what we can now. That is what Sonni and the elders are too blinded by fear to see. Waiting for the Restoration Movement to free us is safe but cowardly. I admit that the more I think about it, the more the idea of damaging someone else’s property leaves me uneasy. But my father used to say we can’t do only what we’re at
