To get away from the anti-climactic post-nuptial atmosphere, I resorted to drifting, roaming the city, visiting the taxi park, as I had done of old. My favorite spot was now crowded with hawkers behind wooden stalls on which they displayed baby wear, shoes, plastic basins, cheap jewelry, anything. The park was fuller now, with more vans, more travellers, more fortune-tellers, more rat poison sellers, though fewer snake charmers. The snakes and their bosses had returned to the nooks of the Triangle from where they had come.
I went to the pagoda: it had been renovated and sprayed with a cream color. I thought of Lusanani and me, feigning sex and getting whacked by Padlock. I thought about all the madness that had gone on inside those four walls, especially the Miss Singer letter, and I felt both happy and sad. What kind of life had gone on here before Serenity and Padlock moved in? What kind of life were the Indians who now occupied the pagoda leading? It looked as if Serenity and Padlock and their brood had never been here. Hajj Gimbi’s house had suffered the same fate—old memories washed away with new paint and glittering fittings. The little decorative dragons on the awnings seemed to have come alive and guzzled every strand of the past. I left.
An idea that kept me occupied was a plan to rebuild the burial site under the jackfruit tree where I had spent so many childhood hours looking at Mpande Hill. I bought cement and got someone to do the job. We set off. The aqueducts had been built, and vehicles crossed the swamp without drowning. There were more returnees now, but I did not know any of them. They were mostly from the youthful part of the village. Life was boring, to say the least. Accommodations were bad. Food was deficient. Many people ate posho and beans as they waited for their matooke, sweet potatoes, cassava and millet to grow. When I lay down to sleep at night, I felt disconnected, floating like a piece of wood on a lake. I knew that this was my last time here. So many ruins, so little life. I had swallowed the village, its spirit, every worthy bit of it, and my job was to rebuild it elsewhere. I was glad when the builder poured water on the completed cement graves in order to give them a sheen. It was time to leave.
Things took another turn. Many people around the city were dying of Slim. Aunt consoled the bereaved and attended funerals and sometimes organized transport for those who had to be buried in the villages of their birth. One day I overheard a group of market women talking about her. At first, they did not recognize me. When they did, they stopped abruptly and pretended they had been discussing somebody else. “She does not look well … our leader does not look well,” one of them had said time and again, to the mutual agreement of her somber audience. I knew what they meant, though it was hard to accept it. A woman who had got married less than a year ago! I went to visit her with bees buzzing in my ears. To my relief, I did not notice anything different about her. Her skin was still as smooth as ever. She had not lost any weight, and she was in a very good mood. On the second visit, though, I found her in bed with a fever. It had tortured her for a whole week.
“Don’t worry about me, son,” she said, smiling. “I will be all right.”
Had I looked too worried? She was sitting on her bed, a gown over her nightie, a cup in her hand. Her dark tan knee peeping out of the gown looked luscious. She talked about her business plans, the women’s group, her children. She asked me to stop what I was doing and become her business manager. I remembered the man burned by the oil drum at the now defunct Boom-boom Brewery. He had recovered, and nothing had come of his supporters’ threats, but I did not like dealing with workers anymore. I wanted freedom to roam and drift. I did not have to work, thanks to the little fortune I had accumulated. Yet I did not want to disappoint Aunt. She had taken me in during my hour of need: Wasn’t I supposed to help her now that she needed me? Given the fact that I no longer taught at SIMC, Aunt could not understand why I was not taking up her offer. The truth was that I feared being left with a millstone round my neck when she became too sick to supervise her affairs. But how was I to communicate that to her?
“We will discuss it when you become better.”
“I am already feeling better, son,” she said, setting the cup down. She reached for a file lying on the bedside table. Healthy or not, there was so much work to do. She used to say that she wanted to give up politics, yet now she seemed to be sinking deeper and deeper into it. Should I remind her? I resisted the urge.
A few weeks later, I returned and found her in bed. A monstrous pimple had attacked her right cheek, which had swollen to the size of a fist. She looked deformed, tortured, scared. I was chilled to the bone. This whirlwind of a woman seemed embattled. What was the brigadier thinking and saying about all this? She did not mention him, which was strange, but then, she had been independent all her life. This time around, words were hard to find. She seemed to be thinking about what I had to be thinking about her. She told me about the fevers and the paralysis in her neck, which had subsided. “I sweat like a hunter,” she said.
“Have you been to the doctor this week?”
“Yes. He did some blood tests. He told me not to worry.”
The pimple disappeared as mysteriously as it had come; she got well again and started working. People were talking. She had lost some weight, but with good food, she regained it and looked her normal trim self again.
The next attack was around the waist: people called it “the belt of death.” From the waistline up to the middle of the stomach, skin lifted as if burned. It burst and formed blisters and sores. It was one of the ugliest things I had ever seen. I got goose bumps just looking at it, and felt my skin crawling like a string of worms. She could have got help in time, but she was so ashamed of the belt that she decided to treat it with ointment and pills in the hope that it would disappear. It did not. By the time she saw the doctor, it was too late. The doctor could only treat the sores. She could hardly sleep, and when she did, she woke up to discover that cloth had bitten deep into her sores. It was a no-win situation which carried on for weeks on end. She shrunk a little bit more this time. Eventually she got well again and started to work. It was like a game.
The fevers returned in full force. They made her shiver and her teeth chatter. Her sweat soaked through the sheets to the bottom of the mattress. Her skin was like a sieve, letting go of the fluids she took in. She shrunk more visibly now. Diarrhea came, burned sores in her rectum and never let go. By this time, her urine had become a mixture of red and yellow.
“Don’t cry for me,” she said one day. “Take care of yourself and your brothers.”
Matters moved from bad to worse. She refused to go to the hospital. All the shames of her past gushed back. She became a sinner earning her rightful punishment for straying and rebelling for so long. She became so ashamed of herself that she could hardly bear to look in the mirror. She hated the burden of her fame and influence. When she locked the door to her room, the whole world invaded. She could see some people laughing at her, some sympathizing, some pitying her, some totally indifferent. All the people she had worked with at the market, in the movement, in the war, were there. Her parents and brothers and sisters never left her side. As the first person in the family to catch the plague, she could not bear the shame.
The brigadier took her away for some time and hired nurses to look after her, but she felt like a fish out of water; she wanted to return to her house. She was brought back one night, and she did not leave the house again. The house stank with the heat of fever and the fumes of green-black diarrhea when she became too weak to wash her things. At the same time, she refused all help. When the few people she wanted to see dropped in, she loaded the air with bottled perfumes and hot incense, and from behind the curtain, she said firmly that everything was fine. The fire in her bowels and the talons in her flesh were nothing compared with the raging inferno in her brain. She could no longer bear to look at her children: she felt she had betrayed and shamed and stigmatized them forever. She would hear them moving round the house, handling pans with great care, running the tap as quietly as possible, and burn with sorrow.
She no longer prepared their food for fear that she might revolt them or pass on to them her horrible disease. She wished they could bang the pans and break the cups and run the taps full blast and play loud music. She wished they could piss on their beds and shit in front of her and vomit in her lap as of old. But now only her stenches rattled the roof and terrorized the ventilators. Now the children tiptoed round the house as though a leopard were lurking behind the cupboard. These new changes made her burn with the caustic fires of regret. In her chosen solitude, she wished she had been conventional and malleable enough to marry early and lead an obscure life and meet a banal death. She would close her eyes and wish she were the Virgin Mary flying to heaven without leaving a trace of her life on earth. She passionately wanted to erase herself from the face of the earth, from the annals of the village, from the heads of all who knew her. She could see her grave next to the refurbished ones of her parents, and wished she could just disappear through the roof and strike everyone dumb with disbelief. She was haunted by the feeling that she had let everyone down. All the evils of guilt the parish priest and her parents had inculcated in her invaded and smothered her in their sulfurous blaze.
The next time I went to see her, she refused to open the door. She had already sent the children to their fathers. She was determined to go through her last days on her own. From behind closed doors and curtains, she said that I should understand. She wanted me to remain with a certain image of her: “Son, I am a skeleton out of the Church’s devil books.”
“I don’t mind even if you looked like the Devil himself.”
“I never did anything right,” she said dryly.
“You have helped countless people. You fought for freedom, for common good. You sacrificed yourself in many ways. What more could you have done?”
“All that does not matter, son.”
“It is what really matters. Am I hearing you, or is it somebody else speaking?”
“Maybe I am losing my mind, son.”
“I am going to get an axe and break this door down. I have already contacted your best friend, Teopista. She is going to help you personally. First we have to take you to the doctor.”
She did not object to this woman; she had come from the same village, and both families knew each other well.
“No, I am not going back to the doctor. Not with all those people watching.”
“They are going to die one day; why do you worry so much about them? We will cover you up and walk you to the car.”
I kept remembering the red-ink-patch day and my belief that Padlock was bleeding to death. The thought that Aunt was oozing to death almost paralyzed me. Why wasn’t she blaming anyone? She believed she was responsible for everything. Looking at all this misery, Dad’s family history of dying violent deaths seemed glorious. It seemed more meaningful than this diabolical, slow disintegration of everything one has been. Faced with the decomposition of beauty, the eclipsing of good memories, the trashing of fortitude and the disintegration of dignity in a pool of futile suffering, any other death seemed better than this torture rack of poisoned afflictions.
It was total mayhem. Padlock and all the rest of the family arrived in force. Padlock looked haunted by her own prophecy. She firmly believed that God had spoken through her, although the physical deterioration of her sister shocked her. Kasawo was moved too, but she was more interested in what was going to become of Aunt’s business affairs. She started interrogating me about a hundred and one things. She seemed to believe that I had plundered Aunt’s safe, bank account and treasure box. I did not like it, but the fight had been taken out of me. I bent with the wind. I wanted to extract myself from the whole grisly situation, but first I had to see this through.
In her last days, Aunt dreamed and talked many times about snakes. She would scream that her bed was full of snakes, and that a big snake had entered her mouth and was swallowing her intestines. Her helper would stroke her and reassure her that there were no snakes anywhere in the house. It was painful to watch. The woman I had once desired, spied on through a keyhole and felt protective about had gone, leaving behind a skeleton barely covered by rubbery skin. Her eyes were floating partridge eggs. Her nose had shrunken; her lips had tightened like rubber bands around her mouth. The neck was gone, the vertebrae protruding. The arms and legs had dried up. The kneecap was like a stone balancing precariously on high, gale-whipped ground. She jabbered a lot about snakes, but when she recovered from her delirium, she told cheerful stories in a squeaky, scratching voice. She had become a smiling skeleton, a talking bundle of bones. I remembered the skulls on fruit stands I had seen soon after the guerrilla war. They had been removed and taken away by government workers, some for burial, some for preservation in a museum of national history. For me, they had all been dumped inside Aunt’s house, and she was fighting their legacy with the forced demonic smile of the tortured living dead.
On the last day, her friend Teopista took me aside and asked me to fetch a priest. I refused. What was the use? The woman had undergone her purgatory and hell here. If anything, she was a saint who could do without frocked platitudes. But I finally caved in. In the meantime, the brigadier came with some of his relatives. He looked embattled; they looked vengeful. The priest came. In his black clothes, he looked like an undertaker, or a gangster after a painful point-blank execution. The bundle of bones was buried by multitudes. The burial ceremony and its aftermath remained one blur of ungummed images. Aunt Lwandeka had got it right: “Nobody got born thrice.” The virus had denied her a third chance.
Lwendo came to my aid. “You need to go somewhere and sort yourself out, man,” he insisted. “Go to Britain or America for a long holiday. You can afford it.”
“I don’t know anybody there.”
“There are many Ugandans there. Some of our old schoolmates are already there. Go and meet them.”
“No, I want to stay here.” The brigadier had offered me a job on top of pledging to settle his late wife’s business affairs personally.
“You have to go. You look more dead than alive. You are so absentminded that I am afraid a car will knock you down one of these days.”
“No, no, don’t exaggerate.” I knew he was right.
Help came from unexpected quarters. There was a Dutch aid organization called Action II which had landed in trouble over child pornography. A government official had found controversial pornographic material in the house of one of the aid workers, along with pictures of orphaned children taken while they were swimming naked in Lake Victoria. The man who made the scoop concluded that the aid worker was a pedophile who must have come to this country to indulge his perverted tastes. He recommended that the group be deported. Lwendo, who knew a few people who mattered, got wind of the affair and stepped in. Serious negotiations took place. Money changed hands. Even then it seemed the organization was going to be closed down as an example to others.
In the end, the deportation order was cancelled. Lwendo invited me to accompany him to the city that day. The man handling the case was Cane. He looked tall, big, sluggish. He drank a lot. He had maneuvered his way into the civil service and landed in different government offices.
“Been to the north yet?” I said, for lack of better words. A chasm separated us, and my salivary libation did not seem to improve things.
“No. Too much fighting,” he said laconically.
“Things are improving. We both went there about a year ago,” Lwendo explained.
“So you did see where I came from, eh!” he said pensively. He was an important man and seemed to be weighed down by his responsibilities. Too much work, too little pay. I knew all about it. The occasional big bribe always ended up drained by long-standing debts and commitments.
“Sure I did,” I replied. I would have liked to remind him of his sex lessons and the erections he used to get in order to embarrass female teachers, but he looked too old to be interested. The terror of hard female teachers excused himself. His secretary had tapped on his desk m
eaningfully.
“Hard-bargaining bastard,” Lwendo said as we descended the Crested Towers building. “Almost broke the balls of those Dutch fuckers.”
Action II had worked briefly in southeast Amsterdam, or the so-called Bijlmermeer, which was a sprawling black ghetto on the fringes of the great city. They told us that there were many illegal immigrants there, a few Ugandans among them. They offered to give me a few connections, a few addresses, but I had no interest in becoming an illegal immigrant. I wanted to go on holiday and come back.
“You can go there and meet people who speak your language,” one Action II worker said. He offered to make travel arrangements for me, including supplying the invitation letter needed for a visa. In return for their troubles, I could fund-raise for them for a fortnight. I would get free accommodations and food. The deal was done.
The aid workers kept their word. All parties needed each other: they wanted Lwendo close to them, and me to fund-raise for them. I got invited to Holland by their parent organization. Within two months, I was on a plane to Amsterdam.
BOOK SEVEN
GHETTOBLASTER
GETTING ON THE PLANE was one of the best things that had happened to me in years. I travelled first class, a bait used by my sponsors to inflate my ego and make me fund-raise as if the destiny of the whole African continent depended on it. I studied the golden liquid in the four-sided liquor bottle and wished that my own brew had been good enough for bottling and export, in which case I would have been going to Europe as a businessman. In my jean suit and canvas shoes, I did not look business-like. I was turned out like a rebel on a vague mission, which I was. Already I felt I would need all my rebel credentials to get by: I was on my own. Lwendo would have been handy here—together we would have done better—but he had stayed behind to supervise his carpentry workshop, to enjoy the peace he had fought for and to await the arrival of his first child.
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