Snakepit

by Moses Isegawa

  TAYARI’S COLLEAGUE HAD BEEN arrested with bomb-making equipment at a roadblock not far from the city. The quartet had earlier sworn that if caught, one should fight, hit a soldier in the balls and be shot to death on the spot. That was what happened. The boy had been travelling in the back of a van carrying potatoes and cassava. The soldiers had refused the bribe and insisted on opening the sacks. As the potatoes flooded the ground, the boy saw his life slip away. He grabbed the head of the crouching soldier, raised his knee with all his might, and drove it in the man’s face. The man collapsed with a curse on his bleeding lips, his rifle clattering on the tarmac. The boy reached for it, but before he could get off shots, two soldiers shot him in the chest and he bled to death.

  FOR SOME TIME NOW, cars had stopped exploding.Speculation was that the bombing ring had been crushed or had run out of steam. Bat tried to keep his mind off the events. He was busy sifting data in preparation for the annual budget. For two whole months he put in twelve-hour days and could not find time to return home for lunch as agreed. But after the Marshal had blessed the budget and launched a new million-shilling bank-note, with a picture of him defecating on Europe, the pressure abated. The shortage of petrol continued, and Bat could only afford to return home for lunch once a week as the rations at the ministry were reduced further.

  The people hired to keep an eye on Bat were very delighted with this turn of events. He had thrown them off the track for some time. Energized, they put final touches to their plan.

  On the scheduled day, all the staff stayed away. Babit found herself with no cook, no gardener, no guard. When they were around, she hardly noticed them, because they worked well. Now that they were absent, she missed them. The cook was a widowed middle-aged woman living near the landing point of Katabi. The guard came from the town’s police station. Since the government paid him, she had little to do with him. The gardener was a large man in his forties. He had been injured in a car crash and subsequently had lost his job as porter at the airport. Since then he had been tending gardens and mourning his fall. He was very talkative and sometimes he told her stories. She both pitied and liked him. She sometimes gave him money because he was always broke and wasn’t ashamed to admit it. He was like a sad uncle, dogged by misfortune, unlucky in love. She noticed his absence more than the rest.

  Shortly before nine, she went to the kitchen to decide what to cook. She wanted to prepare Bat’s favourite steamed bananas with fish or meat. She had dry fish in the house but no meat. The prospect of going to town for meat made her change her plan. She decided to cook fish. She soaked it in water to make the flesh tender. She made everything ready for the fire.

  Shortly before ten she went for a bath. It would do her good on this bright sunny day. She filled the tub and slipped in, enjoying herself but keeping in mind not to indulge herself too long because of the cooking. She started dreaming, stretching things out to their blurred edges. Somewhere in the corners of her mind, she thought she heard the sound of a car. Bat never returned home in between leaving for work and lunch. He never forgot things. If this was an exception, she did not mind him finding her in the bath. He would most certainly crack a joke about something or sing at least a few bars of the song which had become their song: “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” If a miracle had happened and he had been given a day off, he might join her, re-creating some of the magic of the Grand Empire Hotel. The cooking could wait. They might drink a glass of red wine or beer in the tub and listen to the birds outside. He was bound to get angry with the staff for staying away without giving notice, as if, before moving in with him, she would protest, she had never cooked, shopped, or cleaned. Things are different now, he would counter sharply.

  She could see the future of their relationship. Bat had the upper hand now, and she loved it. But over the years she would gain more leverage. He had told her that he loved her most of all because he had found her open, not yet embittered or hardened by the world, not yet set in her ways. They would set together like aging doors.

  Suspended halfway between fantasy and reality, she hardly had time to see her visitors. In her eyes the green overalls were just the blurred forms which accompanied a chloroformed patient to unconsciousness, sometimes to oblivion. The visitors were swift, economical. Their scalpels, magnified by her fear, were inflated to the size and brutality of machetes. They towered, hovered, pressed down hard, and applied the speedy efficiency enjoyed by the best in their trade. They disrobed without fuss, cleaned themselves, bagged their garments, and prepared to go. They drank the tea they found in a thermos flask in the kitchen. They washed the cups and the flask and turned them upside down to dry.

  AT THE SCHEDULED TIME the XJ10 swept into the yard with a flurry and a crunch of pebbles. Bat leapt out, tie eased, two top buttons undone almost in one movement. He filled his lungs, exhaled loudly, and savoured those few seconds when the wind hit his exposed chest. He pushed the door open, called Babit, but the house returned only his own voice to him, spurned. He called again as he dropped the briefcase on the sofa. He walked to the bedroom. He feared every lover’s worst nightmare: finding one’s lover in bed with another; his was of finding her with Tayari. It lasted a few seconds, but it bit deep. The bedroom was empty. Her clothes, a blue gown with red lines at the neck, and a white shift, were neatly folded, the black shoes near the bed polished, waiting. He felt his anticipation, eagerness, cooling and coagulating into something nasty. She knew how precious their appointment was to him; why had she betrayed it? What did she have to say for herself? Was this the beginning of another phase, the revelation of a Babit he had not yet had occasion to see? Why was he so angry? Because he had come to rely on her, and he wanted it to stay that way. Maybe she was sick; who said she would never fall sick?

  He took a few deep breaths and walked out of the bedroom. He saw footprints, large, blurred, pinkish. He called out as he opened the bathroom door. He almost stepped on her head. The torso was in the bath, arms hanging limply on the sides, the wedding ring winking shatteringly in the light.

  He did not know if he cried out or just stared. He did not know if he fainted or vomited. It was just clear that things would never be the same again. He could have phoned. It just never occurred to him. The place seemed grotesquely swollen, with an oppressing smell that seemed to emerge from the bowels of hell. He somehow made it to the police station. It was a miracle that he didn’t kill anybody on the way.

  At first they thought he was insane, the freshest apparition from the windy domain of psychosis blowing through the land. They got to see a few of those per week as part of the job. But this one looked way out on the extreme outer reaches. Had he killed a general, taken his XJ10, and come to brag about it? Had he also killed the general’s wife? Finally, they got through to him, or he got through to them, and the investigative machinery was nudged into motion. They wanted to detain him longer, but they realized that he would be of no help.

  He left and zoomed to the city at an average speed of 160 kilometres an hour. The car was just a green blur steered by self-destruction seeking a quick suicidal release. The soldiers, who were the uncrowned kings of the road, committing every aberration in the book, from pushing cyclists off the tarmac to ignoring speed limits and red lights, sat back and watched in surprise. At the Clock Tower a group of Stingers was escorting a high-ranking officer. Bat drove through them, and before the soldiers could raise their fingers to point and threaten, he was gone. He parked in front of the house, rested his head on the wheel and wondered what to do next. It seemed such a weight to get out and put the tragedy in words. It seemed impossible.

  Mrs. Kalanda remembered seeing him standing in the doorway, drenched in sweat, on the edge of despair, with the look of madness and grief in his eyes. The stoic bureaucrat had died, leaving behind a strange incarnation. He released a number of mangled sounds which spelled out a tragedy, of what calibre and sort, she could not tell. He waded through her questions, went to the cupboard and put a bottle of Scotch to his mouth
. She had to fight him physically to retrieve the remaining quarter. There is no dignified way to grieve, she thought. Grief makes us totter between childishness and beastliness. The saving grace of wisdom and strength comes later when the poison is drained. He lay on the sofa and groaned, a heart-rending spectacle. He was saying at intervals, “I killed her, I killed her.”

  “Why?” she said trying to hold him. “I don’t understand.”

  She went to the phone and called her husband and the Professor. They arrived to find Bat sitting on the sofa. He was somewhat calmer and he told them what had happened, what he had seen.

  “Head on the bathroom floor!” everyone exclaimed at once. Even in a country tormented by lunatics, even to a group that had trekked to the forest to search for him among the dead, this was gut-wrenching. It was personal in every way. They huddled together, grieving, and tried to make plans. There were people to inform, people who would be hurt by the news. Bat took on the biggest burden: he decided to be the one to inform Babit’s family. Mrs. Kalanda wanted to do it, but he refused.

  “It is my responsibility.”

  He went with the Professor because he came from the same area as Babit. Also because Bat needed company in case something went wrong on the road. The journey was uneventful. The two men looked grimly in front of them. The Professor had lost a brother. He thought he had a good idea about what his friend was going through. Tired of supporting his sickly wife and getting little in the way of pleasure out of her, he had wished death on her on a number of occasions, but now he believed he had never meant it. The idea of finding her with her head chopped off made him shiver.

  Inside the endless Mabira Forest the speedometer shot madly forward. Everything seemed to darken, as if sealed in a green cloth thick as canvas. The Professor prayed that no suicidal cow cross the road, and no mad soldiers place impromptu roadblocks on the tarmac.

  “I shouldn’t have let you drive! Jesus,” he moaned. “Do you want to kill us?”

  It was the way the car entered the compound that told people that something had gone terribly wrong. And when the duo emerged looking like they had been exhumed from a landslide, the parents knew that the claws of grief had gripped the family. Bat broke the news slowly, steadily, each word having the effect of cutting, scalding. They all watched him, and for a delayed moment it was as though he were speaking about a disaster averted at the last moment by the intervention of a miracle. But the claws gripped tighter and people’s faces crumbled, their lips disfigured with the heaviness of their sorrow. Bat would have paid any amount of money to be elsewhere, even in prison. He asked them for their forgiveness for “killing your daughter who was so dear to me.” His father-in-law patted him on the back, as if to say everyone would apportion the blame according to their judgement.

  “It is those soldiers; that curse walking this land like an eternal plague. As soon as they attacked the palace and forced the king into exile, I knew that this country would never have peace again,” his mother-in-law declared.

  “What should the son of man do about those animals?” somebody said, intoning a general sense of helplessness.

  “They are not animals as we know them. They are beasts, demented creatures,” another elaborated.

  It was generally assumed that the State Research Bureau or the Public Safety Unit or the Eunuchs or thugs from the armed forces were responsible. Criticism was not often aimed directly at the Marshal’s doorstep, for obvious reasons, but now people talked freely. Grief had given them recklessness.

  The cautious ones ended the tirade by asking when the body could be collected for burial. The Professor talked about the post-mortem, the ongoing investigations, the delays that might crop up. Somebody asked if the head would be sewn on the trunk again and received only dirty looks. Another wanted to know whether the freezers in the morgue worked, for, the last they wanted was to bury Babit with flies in her wake. Bat looked on with bowed head, waiting for the tempest to pass.

  The police investigations were fast and furious, chiefly because the wife of an important man was on the slab, and partly because of the curious fact that none of the house staff had been around at the time of the murder. The policeman had reported sick, and had been sick for the past few days. Due to a shortage of staff his replacement had arrived after the murder. The detectives concentrated on the gardener and the cook. The former could not be quickly located, but the latter was at home. As soon as she saw the police cars, she knew that there was big trouble or tragedy in the air. The nasty stares from the detectives chilled her. Police brutality was common. The caning of prisoners or of children delivered by despairing parents into police hands was standard procedure. A policeman was like a lion; he was a friend only when sated or out of the way. The woman babbled in fear.

  “The gardener told me that we had been given a day off. I did not ask him why. He had to know because he talked a lot with the late Mrs. Katanga . . . I don’t know anybody who might have wanted to kill her. She had no enemies. The only person who did not like her was Victoria, the woman with whom Mr. Katanga has a child. She used to threaten her on the phone . . . Apart from her I know nobody who might have liked to harm her . . .”

  THE GARDENER WAS FOUND late that evening. “Somebody with a State Research Bureau identity card told me to inform the cook to stay away, because he said that there were investigations scheduled for the day, regarding Mr. Katanga’s work, and they wanted nobody around . . .”

  The remaining question was: where was this Victoria?

  TAYARI APPEARED THAT NIGHT. He sent an emissary, who asked Bat to go to the lake and wait for him. As Bat walked through the trees to the lake, he felt the urge to escape the place. It seemed to ring with Babit’s death, like a cave that multiplied the sound, bouncing it against its walls. The lake stretched out in front of him. He looked at its dark-grey skin caught in the moonless night and felt disgusted by its indifference, its perpetuity. It was as if Babit had never visited it, loved it. Nothing seemed to matter to it. He stood in one spot, shivering, wishing to go somewhere very far away, a place Babit had never been. Maybe to the islands to catch parrots and fish. He hated the house with its history of British governors, its pomp, its indifference to time. The last governor had abandoned it and built a bigger house, the current State House. Maybe the others before him had also suffered disasters in its walls, uncharted miseries written in their tombs. He wanted to leave this town and forget it all. He wanted it encircled by water and swallowed whole, with its airport, and the roads Babit had walked. He wanted it reduced to a memory, a flicker in somebody’s mind.

  “Brother,” a voice said to him, “I am extremely sorry about what happened. Maybe if I had taken more care of you, this would not have occurred.”

  “I doubt that even you could have changed things,” Bat replied hoarsely.

  “I happen to know where Victoria is.”

  “You do?” The words seemed to echo endlessly.

  “She is in Bombo. Do you have a message for her?”

  “I want her to stay out of my life forever.”

  “I can plant a device in her house—of course, when the girl is out.”

  “We don’t know whether she is the one responsible.”

  “It is crystal-clear. There is nobody else who hated Babit that much. The work was too clinical to have been unplanned. She is responsible. I bet my arm she is guilty.”

  “I don’t want anything to do with bombs,” Bat said, feeling extremely weary.

  “Do you want her dead in another fashion? Just give me the word.”

  “I don’t want to kill her.”

  “You don’t! Do you want that creature to remain eating and breathing after what it did to your wife?”

  “I don’t want anybody’s death on my conscience.”

  “The responsibility would be mine, big brother. I would do it as a favour, a show of gratitude. You have helped my group and the country so much.”

  “I can’t kill my daughter’s mother.”
/>   “But she has killed all the children Babit would have produced. Aren’t you mad about that?”

  “Yes, I am. But killing is not my line of business.”

  “Give me her legs. I will put her in a wheelchair for you.”

  “Listen to yourself, brother. You talk like those men you are fighting.”

  “I can’t allow injustice to go unpunished. It is the very reason why this country is still dominated by soldiers. Everybody is afraid to do a thing against them. I have done something, and I am sure that it has helped.”

  “I never gave you money to make bombs,” Bat mumbled weakly.

  “The radio could not work. Those thugs have no respect for words. They respect dynamite. And fire. They are looking for me, but before they get me, I will put many in hospital.”

  “Where does all this violence come from?”

  “I decided to offer myself to the nation. To die for the cause. It is a vocation, like priesthood. You are lucky that I am here itching to avenge my sister-in-law’s death.”

  “Don’t touch even a hair on Victoria’s head. The law will deal with her.”

  “Do you believe that? Do you really believe that, big brother? Is that Cambridge University talking or utter resignation?”

  “The law will take care of her. That is how we do it. Babit was not a violent person. Nobody is going to die in her name.”

  Tayari threw his hands in the air with frustration. If he could, he would have thrown his brother on the ground and punched his face or made him eat wet sand. “The law! There is no law in this country, except the gun. The bigger the better. Soldiers have the licence to kill. I take that licence in my hands and I want to use it.”