Four days after the attack, amidst a cloud of speculation, Fr. Mindi announced, rather triumphantly, that he had caught the culprits. The staff was divided. Mindi wanted three bully boys expelled with immediate effect. Others wanted the boys punished but given a chance to continue with their education. The skeptics questioned the manner of the discovery, because they found it too plausible: somebody commits a crime, names are anonymously given on a piece of paper and heads roll.
Lwendo and his classmates were in an uproar. They went around saying that a Bushman was responsible for betraying the trio to the staff. There were threats against the Bushman and vows to squeeze them till they squealed, but when one of the trio was expelled and the other two were suspended for a fortnight, the furor died down.
So much for justice. I never succeeded in finding out who the smart Bushman was who had punished the bullies by saddling them with responsibility for the crime. I didn’t mind either. My neighbor in the dorm said that I often laughed in my sleep.
Books took over. It was bound to happen anyway. Life was too regimented and too boring. Sports were dull, picking up their only blast of annual excitement during inter-house competitions. The dominance of church activities and liturgy was generally asphyxiating. As others caved in to total submission or to sporadic fits of bravado, I turned to books. I was intrigued by the secret universe under the dust-laden covers and thrilled by the endless morsels one could extract from the most unlikely volumes. Between some very dull covers were the most spectacular wars, adventures, murders, love affairs and characters, whole terrae incognitae to explore.
Given the faking, the pretense and the fear that stool pigeons were lurking everywhere, collecting news, marking every critical word one said, books offered a reliable escape route into a safer reality crammed with fantasy and ideas.
As in most dictatorships, secular books were unpopular in the seminary; they were considered subversive. Good seminarians distrusted such books, because they contained demons that made you critical of the good fathers and of Mother Church. They made you rebellious and arrogant, deaf to your vocation. They gave you a mind of your own and made you ask the wrong questions.
I remembered World War II and the men Grandpa had conscripted. I spent days looking through war records to see if the local contribution had been recorded. All I learned was that Africans had died in that war. There was nothing specific about the Ugandan contribution to the effort. The slaughter of tens of millions of people in Europe just nineteen years after the end of World War I, plus the deaths of the twenty million who had succumbed to the Spanish flu soon after, apparently did not include blacks and seemed another of the whitewashed versions of modern civilization sold to us here. It was as lopsided as the gloss the Church put on the carnage of the Crusades, and on all the other Church wars right up to our own Religious Wars at the turn of the century.
Fr. Kaanders gradually began to make sense to me. He had spent a good part of his youth fighting polygamy to uphold standards he believed were universal and crucial, and had ended up almost dead from exhaustion and sleeping sickness. It was while in the grip of death that he had realized the forlornness of his attempts, the stupidity of his sacrifice and the impracticability of putting the clock forward thousands of hours. Wisely, he decided to freeze the clock and let time take care of itself. I would do the same. I would embrace death in a timeless hold, look it in the face and turn it into an ally. I was delighted. I ruminated on my discovery for days.
It was on one such woolgathering day that Fr. Mindi caught me reading during prayer time. In fact, the bell had just rung. The boys had just started marching to the chapel, and I think he was smarting to get somebody. I hadn’t moved quickly enough or shown any sign that I would. He had already put the painting job behind him and had reverted to spying and stalking around the compound with a vengeance, as if to say he would not be forced to change by a bunch of snotty boys. Now he stood before me, the cassock making him look taller than he really was.
At the end of the morning I went to his office for my punishment. Music was playing in his cozy little office, the pop sound fluttering in the background like butterflies on a windowpane. I thought about Sr. Bison and wondered whether this was the music he played as she made her maddening fucking sounds. All the furniture was in good order, covered with clean cloths to avoid staining. I lay down to take my punishment. The hairy carpet tickled my fingers and took me back to the infernal carpet at the pagoda.
I got my three on “government meat.” The memory of my painting job anesthetized me totally. I was struck by the fact that this man had learned nothing. He was knowledge itself, thus ineducable. I thanked him for punishing me with a docile, contrite look on my face. His eyes lit up.
“Good boy. You are very quiet, very humble, and you never cause trouble. I am sure that one day you will make a very good priest.” I could hardly believe what was coming out of the mouth of this Urban University alumnus, but I politely said, “Thank you, Father.”
The main topic of conversation among us was still food: it was becoming worse. The posho was half-cooked, or simply bad, made as it was from wormy maize flour bought in bulk and stored for too long. The beans were weevilled and hardly responded to the cajoling of boiler fire. They remained hard and indigestible, and made us fart like hippos. The staff constantly complained about ill-mannered boys who farted in church, in class and in the hallways. Served them right. Truancy increased, and the price of black-market pawpaws, sugarcane and pancakes skyrocketed.
The drought came, turned the grass from green to gold, terrorized our water supply and made the smuggling in of foodstuffs a little easier. As we trekked the one kilometer down to the seminary well with our buckets, basins and jerry cans, the experts slipped into the bushes to meet waiting vendors. Some smuggled the contraband home inside their water containers. Others hid the stuff in secret places and fetched it during supper time or night study. That was how the unlucky ones fell into Fr. Mindi’s net.
There were two expulsions, one from Sing-Sing, one from Mecca. They were accompanied by a plethora of curses aimed at Fr. Mindi. There were idle threats to beat him up and set fire to the garage in order to punish the whole staff. Nothing of the kind happened, despite the genuine belief that all our suffering was the main responsibility of Fr. Mindi, the seminary bursar, embezzler and torturer.
Since the finances of the seminary were a mystery to me, my main concern was to discourage Fr. Mindi from spying and persecuting black-market food traffickers. If he stopped getting in our way, well, I felt we could let him do his own thing, but the man was like a demon, driven with the blind insistence of a psychopath. The only way to deal with him was on his own terms.
For a librarian, stalking a priest was as simple as pie. The library was at the end of the office block. I could always go along the offices and see which priest was in or out. I was free to go to the fathers’ residences, even those behind the offices, in fictitious pursuit of Fr. Kaanders. I knew for sure that Mindi’s favorite spying hour was from nine to ten in the evening, when every seminarian had to be in class for the night study. It was actually the safest time to tackle him, with little chance of unexpected intervention.
There was a network of paths through the football fields behind Sing-Sing which led to idle, overgrown seminary land, all the way down the valley, into the forest, up to the main road and the villages beyond. The main road was one kilometer away; one part of it led to Jinja Diocese, the theater of Kaanders’ old nightmares, the other to Kampala Archdiocese, under whose wing the seminary was. Fr. Mindi had worked in the archdiocese for six years before getting posted here. He had had less trouble from archdiocesan polygamists, who, unlike their die-hard counterparts in Jinja Diocese, kept quiet about their second or third wives. His scourge had been bold women who, fired by his good looks and his football prowess, openly solicited him.
Now, in the midst of the drought, Mindi was always out, enjoying the cool night air while waiting for his prey. These
nocturnal walks reminded him of parish work, which had entailed waking up at night to go and give last sacraments to dying parishioners. Fr. Mindi was fiercely proud of his profession, and he firmly believed that priesthood was the noblest profession on earth. He had more or less worked out the next ten years of his career. He envisaged four more years here, after which he would return to the parish, grow maize and beans to sell and make enough money to live a comfortable life independent of parish funds. In his spare time, he would coach the parish football team and drive it slowly to the top of the interparish league. He regularly fantasized about his shambas, watching the maize grow and the bean leaves turn from green to gold. He dreamed of bumper crops and rich financial rewards.
His current thoughts, however, were rudely interrupted by sounds emanating from the other side of the pine fence, a stone’s throw away from the acacia trees. He heard a hiss and wondered whether it was a snake. The second hiss was human, deliberate, insolent. This was something new: truants always ran away from him and never drew his attention. Who could this person be? The night watchman, whom he had chastised for letting his car get vandalized? Yes, he had even threatened the man with dismissal if he did not stop sleeping instead of keeping watch. The next sound was a dog whistle. Somebody was whistling at him as though he were a dog! He was nobody’s dog. Not here, not even in Italy. He stopped and weighed the temptation to jump over the fence and tackle this bastard from the air in one lithe move. Much to his surprise, the whistler shook a pine tree to make his position clear. Having decided to jump, Fr. Mindi moved closer. He raised his head above the fence to see what was really going on, and to make sure there was a safe landing. He sensed the obnoxious stench too late.
“Oh, my God!” he said as the two-day-old parcel burst open in his face. A wet slapping sound suffocated the second and longer exclamation. A soggy mass covered his face, then dripped down his throat, the front of his shirt and on to his trousers. Instinctively, his hand went to his face and got messed up. He plucked pine needles and frantically rubbed his face and clothes. He ran wildly to the back of the chapel and all the way to the refectory, but the aluminum water tanks were empty. He careered downhill to the piggery and used the drinking water in the pig troughs to wash. The stench would not go away. He tried to vomit, but only strings of bile dropped from his mouth. He went up the hill again and finally sneaked into his bedroom via the back door. The stench filled the room. He sprayed himself and the room with deodorant and went about cleaning the mess properly.
Fr. Mindi wasn’t the first dictator to be blinded by his own sense of unquestionable power into making the wrong diagnosis of a critical situation. He could not break through the membrane of despotic outrage to come to the root of the problem. He believed that the attack was an act of hate, which was wrong. It was a lesson in not striking out in anger. The attack had been coldly calculated and executed, the way proper punishment should be, but swollen with his sense of power and self-righteousness, Mindi could not see that. His priestly oils kept his vision glazed and served to infuse him with paranoia. He firmly believed that a mad seminarian was out to kill him. He remembered the shock of his father’s poisoning. His body had turned soot-black in death. Fr. Mindi could now see it floating in front of his eyes, black shit oozing out of its rear. The idea came to him that death by poisoning might be a hereditary curse cast onto his family by some unknown individual. If so, he was next in line. This really shook him up. He was not ready to die so miserably. He suddenly felt very exposed, very unsafe. For the first time since his return from Rome and his ordination, he felt that he could not win. How was he supposed to fight this faceless enemy? How was he supposed to tell his fellow brothers in the priesthood what had happened to him? And what would they make of it? Were they training psychos or diocesan priests?
Fr. Mindi reported in sick for a few days, and ultimately left the campus for a week. There were rumors that he had an ulcer; later ones claimed that he had asked for a transfer. He returned to the seminary looking sick, hardly able to drum up even a brittle arrogance. He hated the boys. He hated the seminary. He hated his secret tormentor. Boys remarked that he had stopped spying and prowling. Another rumor circulated that he had purchased three huge dogs to bolster the security of the seminary. The most interesting part of all this was that nobody knew why the bursar-cum-discipline master had decided to neglect his responsibilities. The whole turnaround was so unexpected that nobody dared celebrate openly. There was a feeling that his withdrawal was a trick, a ruse to draw rule-breakers out, but why had the bursar taken to travelling so much? Why was he staying in his office most of the time when he was around? Why was he no longer attending communal mass? The boys smelled a rat.
Censorship was firmly in place. Our letters were opened and read before we received them. When we wrote letters, we put them in unsealed envelopes for the rector to read before he sealed and posted them. We were allowed to write letters only on the weekend, and it was against the rules to post them ourselves.
One evening, I got a message that the rector wanted to see me. My heart palpitated. Was the game up? Had somebody really seen me executing the second attack? For sure I did not care about the seminary, but I did not want to be dismissed mid-term. I wanted to go at the end of the year after taking the national certificate examinations. Ah, Lusanani might have written. If so, what was I going to tell the rector? What clever lie was going to save me? Trepidation took over.
“You look scared,” the rector said before I could even open my mouth. “Did you do something wrong?”
“No, Father, but …”
“But what?” He was in a talkative mood tonight despite all the paperwork strewn on his desk. There was a pile of open letters, and I wondered why this man was going through our mail. Did he really believe that it was wrong for boys of our age to communicate with girls? Did he really believe that ordained virgins made the best priests? What did those people in Rome think they were doing, giving such directives? Here was a man approaching middle age, quite a likeable fellow with a good sense of humor, reading our mail like a dirty old man in search of cheap titillation. He always told us funny little stories, and we liked him for that. Now I wondered whether he did not garner some ideas from our letters. “Have you got something on your conscience?” he asked, dramatically raising his brows.
“Don’t we all?” I bravely said. “I lied to somebody yesterday. I took a new exercise book from his desk and used it without telling him. He asked who had taken his book, and I said I did not know. I replaced the book in the evening, but I could not confess to him what I had done because of his temper.” This was pure bullshit, but plausible bullshit in our situation. This was the kind of calculated lie we told in the confessional. We usually first discussed among ourselves the kinds of sins to confess: lying, calling others names, using other people’s things without permission … Now I was looking for an opening, baiting him with my putative frankness.
“How do you like your job in the library?”
Relieved, but also aware that he was looking for an opening, I said, “I like it very much. My grades have improved greatly since taking the job.”
“Any problems?”
“Sometimes we cannot trace who steals our books.”
“Have you done your best to plug all the holes?”
“The most annoying thing is when some boys steal books borrowed by others.”
“I guess you hear a lot of things in the library.”
“Sometimes.”
“Did you hear about the terrible thing that happened to Fr. Mindi?”
“Yes, the vandalization of his car was a shame to all of us aspiring to become priests.”
“I did not mean that. I meant what happened to him recently.”
“No. Yes. I heard he has got an ulcer.”
“Didn’t you hear about the attack?”
“No, Father. What attack?”
“Haven’t you heard anybody talking about it?”
“No, everyone
is talking about the ulcer and how the bursar must be working too hard.”
“I am not talking about ulcers. I am talking about a physical attack.”
“No, Father, I haven’t heard anything to that effect. Fathers are above such things.”
“In our day, lawbreakers used to brag about their exploits. That was how they got caught. Are you sure that you have heard nobody bragging about teaching Fr. Mindi a lesson? Don’t think I am not aware that some boys don’t like the bursar.”
“I have not heard anything, Father. But I am sure the culprits will get caught. Last time the net got them. This time too they will not escape.”
The rector seemed to think that my answers were too glib. He also knew that I knew that he did not know who had carried out the attack. He resented the fact that he could do nothing to extract a clean confession from me or from anybody else.
“If you hear anything, come and tell me. This kind of appalling behavior cannot be allowed to go on. The seminary cannot be allowed to degenerate into anarchy like some secular school. This is in your interests too. If priests get attacked, seminarians will be attacked as well. And if such people escape, what kind of priests will they make? Who would want to serve in the same parish with them?”
I wanted to say that every newcomer had been the subject of physical attacks for a whole year, and had been forced to jerk off at two or three in the morning at one time or other when the priests were in bed enjoying wet dreams. I wanted to say that maybe a priest getting attacked was just a case of chickens coming home to roost. I was aware that I could not say that without getting expelled. I pitied the man for underestimating me. I was nobody’s stool pigeon.
“Oh, some other matter,” he said, showing me the letter I had written to Aunt Lwandeka. “Why did you seal this letter? Is it a bad letter?”
“No, Father. I just forgot. I must have been absentminded at the time. The addressee is my maternal aunt. There is nothing bad or secretive in the letter.”
Abyssinian Chronicles Page 26
