How Beautiful We Were Read online

  How Beautiful We Were is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Imbolo Mbue

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Mbue, Imbolo, author.

  Title: How beautiful we were : a novel / by Imbolo Mbue.

  Description: New York : Random House, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019031375 (print) | LCCN 2019031376 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593132425 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593132432 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3613.B84 H69 2020 (print) | LCC PS3613.B84 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019031375

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019031376

  International edition ISBN 9780593229163

  Ebook ISBN 9780593132432

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Susan Turner, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Jaya Miceli

  Cover photograph: Holding Hands_Crystal, © 2015 by Daniel Arsham. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

  ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Thula

  The Children

  Bongo

  The Children

  Sahel

  The Children

  Yaya

  The Children

  Juba

  The Children

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Imbolo Mbue

  About the Author

  The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned.

  —Isaiah 9:2

  We should have known the end was near. How could we not have known? When the sky began to pour acid and rivers began to turn green, we should have known our land would soon be dead. Then again, how could we have known when they didn’t want us to know? When we began to wobble and stagger, tumbling and snapping like feeble little branches, they told us it would soon be over, that we would all be well in no time. They asked us to come to village meetings, to talk about it. They told us we had to trust them.

  We should have spat in their faces, heaped upon them names most befitting—liars, savages, unscrupulous, evil. We should have cursed their mothers and their grandmothers, flung pejoratives upon their fathers, prayed for unspeakable calamities to befall their children. We hated them and we hated their meetings, but we attended all of them. Every eight weeks we went to the village square to listen to them. We were dying. We were helpless. We were afraid. Those meetings were our only chance at salvation.

  We ran home from school on the appointed days, eager to complete our chores so we would miss not one word at the assembly. We fetched water from the well; chased goats and chickens around our compounds into bamboo barns; swept away leaves and twigs scattered across our front yards. We washed iron pots and piles of bowls after dinner; left our huts many minutes before the time the meeting was called for—we wanted to get there before they strode into the square in their fine suits and polished shoes. Our mothers hurried to the square too, as did our fathers. They left their work unfinished in the forest beyond the big river, their palms and bare feet dusted with poisoned earth. The work will be there waiting for us tomorrow, our fathers said to us, but we’ll only have so many opportunities to hear what the men from Pexton have to say. Even when their bodies bore little strength, after hours of toiling beneath a sun both benevolent and cruel, they went to the meetings, because we all had to be at the meetings.

  The only person who did not attend the meetings was Konga, our village madman. Konga, who had no awareness of our suffering and lived without fears of what was and what was to come. He slept in the school compound as we hurried along, snoring and slobbering if he wasn’t tossing, itching, muttering, eyes closed. Trapped as he was, alone in a world in which spirits ruled and men were powerless under their dominion, he knew nothing about Pexton.

  In the square we sat in near silence as the sun left us for the day, oblivious to how the beauty of its descent heightened our anguish. We watched as the Pexton men placed their briefcases on the table our village head, Woja Beki, had set for them. There were always three of them—we called them the Round One (his face was as round as a ball we would have had fun kicking), the Sick One (his suits were oversized, giving him the look of a man dying of a flesh-stealing disease), and the Leader (he did the talking, the other two did the nodding). We mumbled among ourselves as they opened their briefcases and passed sheets of paper among themselves, covering their mouths as they whispered into each other’s ears to ensure they had their lies straight. We had nowhere more important to be so we waited, desperate for good news. We whispered at intervals, wondering what they were thinking whenever they paused to look at us: at our grandfathers and fathers on stools up front, those with dead or dying children in the first row; our grandmothers and mothers behind them, nursing babies into quietude and shooting us glares if we made a wrong sound from under the mango tree. Our young women repeatedly sighed and shook their heads. Our young men, clustered at the back, stood clench-jawed and seething.

  We inhaled, waited, exhaled. We remembered those who had died from diseases with neither names nor cures—our siblings and cousins and friends who had perished from the poison in the water and the poison in the air and the poisoned food growing from the land that lost its purity the day Pexton came drilling. We hoped the men would look into our eyes and feel something for us. We were children, like their children, and we wanted them to recognize that. If they did, it wasn’t apparent in their countenance. They’d come for Pexton, to keep its conscience clean; they hadn’t come for us.

  * * *

  —

  Woja Beki walked up to the front and thanked everyone for coming.

  “My dear people,” he said, exposing the teeth no one wanted to see, “if we don’t ask for what we want, we’ll never get it. If we don’t expunge what’s in our bellies, are we not going to suffer from constipation and die?”

  We did not respond; we cared nothing for what he had to say. We knew he was one of them. We’d known for years that though he was our leader, descended from the same ancestors as us, we no longer meant anything to him. Pexton had bought his cooperation and he had, in turn, sold our future to them. We’d seen with our own eyes, heard with our own ears, how Pexton was fattening his wives and giving his sons jobs in the capital and handing him envelopes of cash. Our fathers and grandfathers had confronted him, after the evidence had become impossible to dismiss, but he had beseeched them to trust him, telling them he had a plan: everything he was doing was to help us reclaim our land. He had shed two cups of tears and swore by the Spirit that he hated Pexton as much as we did, wasn’t it obvious? Our young men had conspired to kill him, but our old men found out about the plan and pleaded with them to spare him. We’ve already had too many deaths, our old men said; we’ve used up too many burial plots.

  Woja Beki continued looking at us, dreadf
ul gums still exposed. We wished we didn’t have to look at them, but there could be no avoidance. They were the first thing we saw whenever we looked at his face: gums as black as the night’s most evil hour, streaked with pink of various shades; tilting brown teeth, wide spaces between.

  “My very dear people,” he went on, “even a sheep knows how to tell its master what it wants. That’s why we’ve gathered here again, to resume this discourse. We thank the kind representatives from Pexton for coming back to talk to us. Messengers are good, but why should we use them if we can talk to each other with our own mouths? There’s been a lot of misunderstanding, but I hope this meeting will bring us closer to a resolution of our mutual suffering. I hope that after this evening we and Pexton can continue moving in the direction of becoming good friends. Friendship is a great thing, isn’t it?”

  We knew we would never call them friends, but some of us nodded.

  In the glow of the fading sun our village looked almost beautiful, our faces almost free of anguish. Our grandfathers and grandmothers appeared serene, but we knew they weren’t—they’d seen much, and yet they’d never seen anything like this.

  “We’ll now hear from Mr. Honorable Representative of Pexton, all the way from Bézam to speak to us again,” Woja Beki said, before returning to his seat.

  The Leader rose up, walked toward us, and stood in the center of the square.

  For several seconds, he stared at us, his head angled, his smile so strenuously earnest we wondered if he was admiring a radiance we’d never been told we had. We waited for him to say something that would make us burst into song and dance. We wanted him to tell us that Pexton had decided to leave and take the diseases with them.

  His smile broadened, narrowed, landed on our faces, scanning our stillness. Seemingly satisfied, he began speaking. He was happy to be back in Kosawa on this fine day, he said. What a lovely evening it was, with the half-moon in the distance, such a perfect breeze, was that the sound of sparrows singing in one accord? What a gorgeous village. He wanted to thank us for coming. It was great to see everyone again. Incredible how many precious children Kosawa has. We had to believe him that the people at headquarters were sad about what was happening to us. They were all working hard to resolve this issue so everyone could be healthy and happy again. He spoke slowly, his smile constant, as if he was about to deliver the good news we so yearned for.

  We barely blinked as we watched him, listening to lies we’d heard before. Lies about how the people who controlled Pexton cared about us. Lies about how the big men in the government of His Excellency cared about us. Lies about how hundreds of people in the capital had asked him to relay their condolences to us. “They mourn with you at the news of every death,” he said. “It’ll be over soon. It’s time your suffering ended, isn’t it?”

  The Round One and the Sick One nodded.

  “Pexton and the government are your friends,” the Leader said. “Even on your worst day, remember that we’re thinking about you in Bézam and working hard for you.”

  Our mothers and fathers wanted him to offer specifics on exactly when our air and water and land would be clean again. “Do you know how many children we’ve buried?” a father shouted. His name was Lusaka—he had buried two sons. We had been to both of the boys’ funerals and wept over their bodies, darker than they’d been in life and adorned with white shirts soon to merge with their flesh.

  Lusaka’s departed younger son, Wambi, was our age-mate and classmate.

  Two years had passed since Wambi died, but we thought about him still—he was the smartest boy in arithmetic, and the quietest one too, except for when he coughed. We’d been alive for centuries combined, and yet we’d never heard anyone cough the way he did. When the cough hit, his eyes watered, his back hunched out, he had to hold on to something to steady himself. It was sad to watch, pitiful but funny in the way a heavyset man falling on his buttocks amused us. Doesn’t your father know the path to the medicine man’s hut? we would say to him, laughing the careless laugh of healthy children. We knew not that some of us would soon start coughing too. How could we have imagined such a thing would happen to us? That several of us would develop raspy coughs and rashes and fevers that would persist until our deaths? Please stay away from us with that ugly cough of yours, we’d said to Wambi. But it wasn’t just an ugly cough, we would later find out. The dirty air had gotten stuck in his lungs. Slowly, the poison spread through his body and turned into something else. Before we knew it, Wambi was dead.

  We could barely sing him a farewell song as we stood around his coffin, our tears drowning the words. Some of our fathers had to carry us home from the burial ground, faint as we were. Within five months of Wambi’s death, two of us would be dead. Those of us who survived feared our death was close; we were certain we’d be the next, though sometimes we feared we’d be the last—all our age-mates would be dead and we’d have no friends our size with whom we could stick out our tongues and taste raindrops, no one to play with in the square, or fight with over the right to the juiciest mangoes.

  We thought about our departed friends whenever we developed fevers or someone coughed around us. We feared someone in our homes would catch this sickness that had arrived like a thief in the dark and was now hovering outside every hut, waiting for its chance to enter. We worried for our entire families, though the disease preferred the bodies of children. We feared the first person to catch it in our huts would pass it on to another person, and the second person would pass it on to someone else, and before long our entire family would contract it and die, one after another, or maybe all at once, but most likely one after another, from the oldest to the youngest, in which case we might be the last to die, after we’d buried everyone. Our anxieties kept us awake at night.

  We hated that we went to bed in fear and woke up in fear, all day long breathed fear in and out. Our mothers and fathers told us to have no worries for the Spirit would guide and protect us, but their words brought us no comfort—the Spirit had protected the other children and what had become of them? Still, we nodded whenever our parents made their assurances—our fathers as we bade them good night; our mothers in the morning if we woke up crying over a bad dream—for we knew they lied only to keep us calm, so we would have no nightmares, so we would wake up rested and run to school after breakfast, carefree and merry as we ought to be. We were reminded of our parents’ lies whenever there was a new death, sometimes in our huts, sometimes in the hut next to ours, sometimes children younger than us, babies and toddlers, children who had barely tasted life, always children we knew. We were young, but we knew death to be impartial.

  * * *

  —

  Please, you must do something, one of our aunts cried to the Leader, her baby limp in her arms. It was the poison—the baby was too pure for the filth in the village well’s water, the toxins that had seeped into it from Pexton’s field. One of our fathers asked if Pexton could in the meantime send us clean water, at least for the youngest children. The Leader shook his head; he’d heard this question before. He took a deep breath as he prepared to give his standard response: Pexton was not in the business of providing water, but out of concern for us he would talk to people at headquarters, they’d take our request to the government office in charge of water supply and hear what they had to say. Didn’t the Leader give this same response last time? a grandfather asked. How long does it take for messages to move from office to office in Bézam? A very long time, the Leader replied.

  Some of our mothers began crying. We wished we could dry their tears.

  Our young men started shouting. We’ll march to Bézam and burn down your headquarters, they said. We’ll hurt you the same way you’re hurting us.

  The Pexton men simply smiled in response. They knew the young men wouldn’t do it—we all knew that His Excellency would have our young men exterminated if they dared harm Pexton and our village would only be left
further enfeebled.

  We’d seen it happen already.

  Early the previous year, we had watched as a group of six men set out for Bézam, water and dried food packed in their raffia bags. Led by the father of one of us—the one of us named Thula—the group promised the village that they would return with nothing less than a guarantee from the government and Pexton that our land would be restored to what it was before Pexton arrived. Day after day, we waited alongside our friend Thula for the return of her father and the other men, all of whom were our neighbors and relatives, three of whom had sick children. When they did not return after ten days, we began fearing that they’d been imprisoned. Or worse. A second group of men traveled to Bézam to search for and bring home the Six, but they came back empty-handed. Months later, the Pexton men arrived for their first meeting with the village. When our elders asked the Leader at that initial meeting where he thought our vanished men might be, he told them that he knew nothing, Pexton did not involve itself with the whereabouts of the citizens of our country, unless, of course, they were its workers.

  On that evening in October of 1980, still smiling, the Leader reminded us once more that Pexton was our friend, and that, though we had to make sacrifices, someday we’d look back and be proud that Pexton had taken an interest in our land.

  He asked if we had any more questions.

  We did not. Whatever hope we’d had at the onset of that meeting had flown away and taken with it our last words. With a final smile, he thanked us for coming. The Round One and the Sick One began packing up their briefcases. Their driver was waiting by our school in a black Land Rover, ready to take them back to Bézam, to their homes and lives overflowing with clean necessities and superfluities we could never conjure.