by Jessica Yu
As the siren faded, the traffic loosened. Driving toward the descending sun, Osman risked pressing on his window button. The glass obediently lowered. He pressed on the gas, and cool wind flowed into the car like a bath.
“I’ve never seen people cry like that before,” the young man said, his voice full of wonder. “Tears of joy. I thought that was just something in the movies. I didn’t think that people did that in real life. But now I have seen it with my own eyes.”
The Boy with Seven Names, Part Seven
Mugerwa Junior Godfrey Victor Mananga Adams Muwanguzi
Out of habit, Gladys surveyed the policewomen as they emerged from the vehicle parked on the driveway of Early Learning School. Three of the five were not in uniform. Arguably their skirts and sandals were acceptable, given that the occasion was a party. But it pleased Gladys to see her colleagues from Kawempe Police, Officer Carol Kushemererwa, head of the Child and Family Protection Unit, and Officer Harriet, dressed in proper attire, from their military-style caps to their shiny black shoes.
Gladys pointed her chin at the colorful flats worn by one of the nonuniformed officers. “Today we have designer police,” she teased. In truth she would have been satisfied if they were all wearing gomesi and high heels.
All five of the women were CPS officers who had worked with her on her children’s cases. Awaiting resettlement, some of Gladys’s children had lived at police stations for weeks or months. Douglas, Deborah, Rose, Trevor, Ezra—all had depended on the kindness of these officers for many of their basic needs. These women had offered them food, found them clothing, given them baths, and greeted them in the mornings.
Even after settling at the school, the children often inquired about the officers they had gotten to know. Tiny Rose had grown attached to her “aunties” at Kawempe Police, particularly Officer Carol, whose easy manner belied her high rank. But the officers were busy and transportation was expensive, so they had not visited the children. Until today.
Gladys had called each officer to coax and cajole, invoking the children’s long-awaited birthday celebration as a reason to reunite. After all, who did not enjoy a party?
THE CHILDREN SLOWLY approached the cluster of visitors. Some of their smiles were hesitant, the glances sidelong, as though they feared the officers would not remember them.
“Deborah! Rose!” The women began singing out names, allotting some of them extra syllables. “Faith-ee! Doug-a-las!”
Rose grabbed Officer Carol’s hand. Deborah slipped under Harriet’s arm, winning the officer’s gap-toothed smile. It seemed every child was searching for a handhold, trying to board the moving train. Only Trevor stood back on the veranda, a distracted frown on his face, as though the noise of the party were interfering with his recollection of a lost tune.
“Come, Agnes, I want a pho-to!” Gladys called.
Director Agnes’s arrival sparked a flurry of introductions. Although the police were partners in assisting the children, not all of them had actually met the school director. It was important to Gladys that these officers shake the hand of the one for whom those “temporary placements” became permanent.
Gladys pointed out Ezra, Deborah, Douglas, Rose, and Trevor. “All these are Kawempe products.”
“Kawempe Police is the winner!” quipped Agnes. “They have the most!”
Within moments everyone was joking and talking so animatedly that photographing the group proved about as easy as catching butterflies with a spoon.
Someone tugged on Gladys’s arm. She looked down to see the pink-spotted hand of her boy with many names—Mugerwa Junior Godfrey Victor Mananga Adams. After Agnes had given him his seventh name, Muwanguzi, or “victory,” he was now Muwanguzi Victor, or as Agnes and Gladys joked, Winner Winner.
Victor was grinning at her. She had seen that round face hardened by pain, or at other times submerged in emotion like a stone dropped into deep water. But today the face was open and present, like that of a much younger child.
“How are you?” Gladys asked, her hands on his shoulders.
“I am good,” he said. “I slept so well, Auntie.”
“Eh! Yes?”
“Yes. I dreamed that my mother came for me and took me home.”
“Ahhh!” Her cry was as sharp and triumphant as the blast of a trumpet. “He had a dream that the mother took him home!”
FUNDS DONATED FOR the party allowed for some transportation costs, a few modest party favors for the kids, and a proper feast for lunch: matoke, groundnut sauce, rice, posho, greens, and enough goat for even the last person in the line. The children served the police officers, who oohed and aahed as they accepted the heaping plates and balanced them carefully on their laps as one would a baby.
Afterward the students, staff, and visitors filed into a classroom that had been prepared specially for the birthday celebration of Gladys’s ten children. The students sat at the desks, three or four to a bench. The officers and teachers sat against the chalkboard. In between stretched a long wooden table upon which had been arranged a white cloth, a vase of fatigued yellow daisies, a few bottles of water and soda, and a rectangular metal pan containing a round cake. Although the children had just eaten lunch, they found it hard not to stare at it: two thick disks covered with chocolate, each layer as solid as a grindstone.
After an opening prayer and a few songs, Agnes announced, “We are here to celebrate the birthdays of Masembe Trevor, Faith, Rose, Deborah, Ezra, Evelyn, Victor, Katamba, Jeremiah, and Douglas. They are celebrating on this day all of their birthdays. Maybe someone wants to say something. Stand up, you can say something.” There was a shy pause.
“Eh, Deborah is standing,” Gladys said, pointing.
All eyes turned to the compact figure in the pink plaid sundress. “I want to thank God for Aunt Gladys and all the members who are sitting in front,” Deborah said in her clear, sweet voice. “Because if they were not there, I couldn’t be where I am now.”
One by one the birthday children said a few words, most speaking so quietly the crowd did not know when they had finished.
“Who has not said anything?” Agnes asked, walking among the desks.
“Trevor? Can you say anything?” The boy had trouble communicating, but Gladys did not want to ignore him.
There was a long silence as Trevor examined his desk. His mind seemed more remote than ever. These days it seemed that when he was not fighting, he was wandering off. Even the cook at the school was no longer willing to take him into her house. Several times her whole family had been forced to roam the streets, asking the local chairmen of various villages, “Have you seen this boy?” only to find Trevor kicking his football around somewhere, without a care in the world.
Agnes broke the awkward moment by rubbing the boy’s head and speaking for him. “He says, ‘Thank you so much for coming. He is happy. His favorite game is football!’”
Who was left? Gladys scanned the group, her gaze landing on Victor. “What happened to the policeman? There was one who wanted to be a policeman. Can he say something here?”
Victor smiled and rose to his feet as though he had been waiting to be asked. He shifted slightly from side to side as he spoke, but his voice was surprisingly strong and confident. “My name is Muwanguzi Victor. I thank God, I am very happy. I joined my rela—, my rela—”
“Relatives,” Agnes prompted.
“—my relatives. My father and my mother who had abandoned me. I thank God for that, that—that Aunt Gladys took me there. And changed my life.” He wagged his head as though struck by the truth of these last four words. A hint of a smile crossed his face, then he sat abruptly and covered his eyes with a scarred pink hand.
Gentle applause filled the room. “So humble,” Gladys murmured.
Victor tilted his red, brimming eyes to the ceiling. But when Agnes put an arm around him, he gave up and let the tears spill.
The five policewomen sighed and clucked and smiled. This was why Gladys had wanted them to come to the
party. To witness how these children appreciated what had been done on their behalf. Nothing that was given to them—not even a word of greeting—went to waste.
IN THE END there were no candles on the cake. The logistics of designated candle extinguishment aside, the expense seemed unnecessary. After everyone sang “Happy Birthday,” Ezra held the handle of a long kitchen knife, and the other nine children placed a hand somewhere on top of his or on his wrist. Ten hands pressed the blade into the formidable cake, which was nearly as tall as it was wide.
The cake disappeared within minutes, leaving only chocolatey traces on the children’s lips and cheeks to indicate that it had ever existed. Agnes, who had baked it, received compliments on her creation with ironic pride. Who said that a dentist could not also bake a deliciously sweet cake?
“Aunt Gladys has done for us a birthday!” Agnes announced, and everyone cheered.
Gladys cheered too, with relief. The birthdays were taken care of for the year.
But how many children would stand around the cake next year? Twelve? Fifteen? How thin could one cut the slices? She needed the garden project to start producing. This cake would not be getting any larger.
It was on this point that her thoughts pivoted to Zam. Given the young woman’s dynamic commitment to the project, she had expected things to take off. Instead, after those first industrious days, progress had stalled. Thefts continued unabated. Bush went uncleared. The foundation of the house was found to have been filled with tree trunks, not the compacted gravel Gladys had paid for.
Zam was quick to point the finger at Kiviri, an easy scapegoat. Sure, the landlord often spoke in a voice calibrated for maximum speed and volume, like a born-again preacher recording a mobile-money ad. But he was a businessman, and he had been fairer than expected in his dealings with Gladys and Esther.
Anyway, how could Zam hold anyone else responsible for duties that belonged to her? Trees went unplanted. Seedlings dried up for lack of water. Fertilizer was purchased but not applied. There was no yield to sell.
Perhaps the girl was in over her head. Or perhaps she was not taking the job seriously. “You have the right person,” Mike had declared, and Gladys had agreed. But something was wrong, and soon she would have to deal with it.
Not today, though. Not with this room filled with darting children and dancing balloons. An occasion like this was all too rare, and she wanted to enjoy it.
SOMETIMES SHE OPENED her computer and scrolled through her photo library. It contained photos of all her children, marking the day she found this one, the place where she picked up that one. This boy had been hungry for a week; that girl had needed urgent medical care. What miserable expressions they had presented to her camera.
Seeing them pose for pictures today, it was a different story. These ones were happy, healthy, safe. Some she had known for years, like Ezra, and some were new, like Victor. They had come from all over, from Fort Portal to Kibuku. Now there was even one from Karamoja. You never know, she thought, chuckling to herself. Maybe one day I will come across a Dinka!
Gladys watched Victor, her Karamojong son, marveling at his transformation. It brought to mind the way a fish, dazed and inert at the bottom of a bucket, could spring back to life in the water. That was Victor, swimming along as though nothing had happened. He batted a green balloon at Douglas; he giggled with Faith when the balloon popped. Now he sat looking at nothing, moving a candy from one side of his mouth to the other. The look itself was a triumph. It was a look of simple distraction, not suppressed anxiety or stoicism. No longer was that face the battlefield upon which he fought to control his emotions. It was open land.
The boy had recovered his family. He had friends, a school, and a safe place to live. The name he had arrived at was exactly right. Winner Winner.
A Day at the Beach
WHERE ARE MY RELATIVES?
Since Kawempe Police Station received Rose Nabulime about three years ago, her relatives have not shown up. Information obtained by the Police indicates that her mother died when the girl was only one year old . . . Police appeal to her relatives to call to enable her to re-unite with her family.
Though disconnected from their parents, many of Gladys’s kids at Early Learning School had relatives who knew where they were: an auntie or uncle, a grandparent, a stepmother. If a child had any connections to family, she also had a link to a village somewhere. A place to which she could return.
Little Rose had no such family ties—save one. “When are you going to take me to see my father? I want to see him,” she would ask, pestering Gladys, after putting in her requests for sugar and soap and clothes and toothpaste and pencils and notebooks. “And pocket money. And some eats. Please, Auntie Gladys?”
If the dik-dik was the most delicate of antelopes, Rose was the human dik-dik: tiny, fragile, wide-eyed. Her limbs were thin, like young bamboo stalks, her forearms and calves no thicker than her wrists and ankles. Her impish smile popped up at the slightest prompt, a reflex response to eye contact or the sounds of others’ greetings.
Rose’s age was a topic of some debate. In Agnes’s professional opinion as a dentist, the girl’s teeth marked her age at around eleven. Rose claimed she was nine. To visitors, she looked six.
It was not just her size that made Rose appear so young. Gladys’s observation was that Rose was intellectually underdeveloped. Her thinking was often illogical, and touched with a whimsy more appropriate to a toddler. For instance, well before the joint birthday party, Rose had a tendency to announce her birthday. The first time there were no gifts for her, only congratulations and a bit of fuss. But the girl enjoyed it so much that she declared her birthday would occur again the next week. This imaginary calendar had amused Gladys and Agnes. At such a rate, Rose would out-age them before year’s end.
The child craved attention and demanded her share. If Faith or Deborah held Gladys’s right hand, Rose would hurry to grab her left. She kept an accountant’s tally of hugs and treats and favors given to others. “I saw you gave Ezra two thousand shillings, but you gave me only five hundred,” she would report to Gladys in her playful, singsong voice. “And you brought a hankie for Faith. Can you bring me a hankie too?”
And so, after Deborah’s successful reunion with her family, there was no ducking Rose’s pleas to see her father.
“Okay, Rose,” Gladys said, relenting. “We will try.”
ON THE MORNING of the journey, Rose bathed before donning her school uniform, a cotton jumper with red pinstripes and a sailor collar. She ran to take Gladys’s hand, trailed by an untied sash, her rail-thin body a clapper in the bell of her loose dress. Her clean, shiny face glowed with excitement.
As the taxi puttered its way out of Entebbe, Rose gazed at Lake Victoria through the window. How free and open it was, the water stretching out as far as the eye could see.
Rose loved the beach. It was the one place on earth that was only for fun. Aunt Agnes had taken them there. How she and her friends had played and kicked up the water! But she did not want to stop at the lake. Today was her turn to go on an adventure that was all her own.
Gladys’s view of the day was more clouded. She could not refuse Rose’s request, but did the child have any grasp of what might be in store? In most cases, reunion with family members brought a measure of closure. In Rose’s case, it might be a painful reopening.
Gladys had met Rose almost two years before, at Kawempe Police Station. The year before that the child had been living with her father after her mother’s death from AIDS. One day a neighbor noticed that Rose was limping, evidently in pain. After she was found to be bleeding between her legs, the police arrested her father for rape.
Since then Rose’s father had been in Luzira Prison, waiting for the High Court to hear his case. Gladys’s intention in taking the girl to Luzira was not so much to reunite her with her father as to find other family connections through him. The girl did not have a single known relative aside from her father. Surely there was someone ou
t there who would want to know of her existence. And a child had a right to know her family.
Gladys did not know if they would be allowed to see Rose’s father at Luzira. They could easily be made to wait for hours or turned away altogether. And there was no guarantee that the father would offer any assistance. After his arrest, he reportedly claimed to know nothing of Rose’s mother’s family and could give no information about his own kin.
Gladys did not believe it. An African man with no relatives? No way. He had to know someone. If she could look the man in the eye and ask him herself, maybe he would speak. After this time of being alone in prison, could he not understand that his child was alone as well?
There were no relatives to take Rose in after her father’s arrest, so the girl had spent weeks living in the shipping container at Kawempe Police Station before being shifted to a crowded juvenile facility. After she had languished there for an entire year, Gladys had decided that enough was enough. Again she had begged Agnes to take in one more child at Early Learning School.
Early Learning was the first school Rose had attended. She reveled in the place, in the belonging. She had friends, teachers, and her beloved Auntie Agnes. Her friends had their own beds, and so did Rose. When they ate, Rose ate. When they bathed, Rose bathed. And when her friends went off with Gladys to see their relatives, she wanted that too.
IN KAMPALA, MIKE met them with his Volvo. “Today Auntie Gladys is taking me to see my father,” Rose announced, settling into the back seat. “And I will see my friends at Kawempe Police. I will see Auntie Carol and Auntie Florence and Auntie Harriet. I will see all the friends . . .”
