Those seven solid hours of flight were like purgatory; I felt like a soul hovering above its bleeding corpse, caught between the shreds of the man I had been and the vague outline of the man I wanted to become. I thought I was free. The tyrants, the family, the wars, all past joys and pains, everything was receding, burying itself behind the jagged skyline of old experience, where I wanted it all to stay forever more. I felt weightless, giddy with the confounding dimensions of new freedom. The liquor penetrated my system and augmented the lack of gravitational pull and my frightening ebullience. I felt magical powers coursing through me, and I believed I could do anything. I closed my eyes, and the last quarter-century sank deeper into the sarcophagus of volitional amnesia. I erased myself from its annals, hell-bent on believing that I had played no part in it, and that it had all been just a figment of someone’s diabolical imagination. Before I fell asleep, I dreamed of the plane exploding, mincing the little that remained of a fading past and sprinkling the dust in the clouds, which would burst into rain and wash our chopped remains over oceans and strange lands.
Eventually, the liquor wore off, and consciousness seeped back. I reoccupied my body, repossessed my faculties and looked outside. The sky over Brussels was dusky, the airport blazing like a ship caught in a blizzard, calling attention to itself by flickering multi-colored lights. My kingdom was wrapped in somber mists and a terrifying beauty. It was a magic grotto gaudily lighted like a thousand Christmas trees.
The countless souls filing through it in a somnambulistic trance emphasized the magic. This alien world was one gargantuan foe I would have to vanquish if I was to get my way. The enormity of the task made my gait that little bit heavier. Cold sweat ran down my back and I swallowed hard as the familiar individuals from the cabin melted into the crowd. I tried to look for friendly faces, eager to save the crumbling strands of the communion of our airplane, but everyone seemed wrapped up in thought, dealing with a hundred and one things.
Dazzled by the light, I groggily walked about the grotto to see if there were any gifts dangling from the Christmas trees, tokens of the salvation I was seeking. I went to the duty-free shops to look at the watches, the cameras, the jewelry. Trapped in a glaring white light akin to burning magnesium, the gizmos breathed the harsh air of aggressive marketing and lay under the pressures of their short life span. To buy one such article on my former teacher’s salary, I would have had to work for five years. I stumbled away from the snakepit, my tail between my legs. People floated past in a relentless surge, the tapping of their feet a hymn to the gods of itinerancy.
The plane that was to take us to Amsterdam was small. Day was breaking, the mist eaten by a cold light that revealed hundreds of cars, many waiting planes and busy airport personnel.
The most memorable sight that morning was the bird’s-eye view of the polders, green blocks of reclaimed land resembling carefully made drawings on a chart. The grotto in which I found myself was even bigger; it was suffused with a dull golden light and armed with more tunnels than a magician’s diabolical maze.
Two Action II workers picked me up at the other end of the airport: I felt like I was being vomited from the lukewarm comfort of a leviathan’s belly into the cold waters of an accursed sea. The man had small green eyes in a slab face, a cropped beard, a soft voice and large, clumsy hands. The woman had ash-gray eyes, a snub nose and a long mouth in a horsey face. They were very enthusiastic about my visit, and the good work they were doing. For the moment, I thought I was in safe hands. They asked me about the journey, the situation in Uganda, my prediction of the country’s future, the welfare of their colleagues and many other things.
The man fixed his eyes on the road, mouth ajar, and sometimes nodded but said nothing. The sea of cars floated past us, buildings loomed up and highways dived in and out of the landscape. We penetrated the city of Amsterdam in a cold sunlight that did nothing to warm the chilly air, which razored through fabric like a knife through butter.
I was installed in a small hotel opposite Central Station, and from my window I could see thousands of people pouring out of the station gate. They reminded me of the crowds at the taxi park in Kampala. Cars, trams, buses and trains rumbled on in a ceaseless hubbub that was occasionally penetrated by the roar of a monster motorcycle. Old, thin-faced buildings with gables mounted on them like magic triangles lined the canals in the grim manner of eighteenth-century soldiers awaiting another looming battle.
My euphoria lasted only till the following morning: flies had ambushed my new paradise. And like Dr. Ssali, Aunt Tiida’s husband, who had to deal with the terrorism of those terrible creatures with a raw circumcision wound, I found myself fighting a war on two or more fronts. The irony of travelling in luxury, only to arrive and not only confront flies but also have to recount fly-bejewelled tragedies on the first day of work, was not lost on me. The harsh anti-climax gave me nervous diarrhea. The worst in international beggary, image pillage and necrophilic exploitation waited for my seal of approval. Pictures of children more dead than alive, with flies in their eyes, on their mouths, in their nostrils, on their clothes, ambushed me. The loud pleas for help festooning their heads like demonic halos completely deflated my ego. I found myself trembling and in need of a stiff drink.
My opinion of my hosts took a U-turn. The crassness of the propaganda said volumes about both them and their audience. I was in the midst of pirates far more cold-blooded than I was, and I felt the need to revise and jettison much of my old knowledge. I tried to place myself in the shoes of their so-called donors. If somebody came to me with those pictures, especially the ones with children twisted like constipated chicks, I would have asked them why they had waited that long to act. But then the business was run on expedience and was meant not to prevent but to patch up festering wounds, with flimsy, pus-soaked bandages. I had made the mistake of coming at the end of the feeding frenzy which had peaked in the eighties, when fund-raising organizations wielded powers of life and death over nameless millions and did whatever was necessary to extract money from the calculated indifference of the wealthy West. They not only targeted geriatrics, but also spread the shrapnel over a wide field, hitting the constituency they believed had to be rubbed with shit and flies before releasing a dollar here, a dime there. The caustic magnesium burst of Reaganomics and Thatcherite liberalism had penetrated deep into the aid cartels and empires, and finding myself in its residual glare did my eyes and my sensibilities no good.
The cartels and the sharks of the aid industry had fed to surfeit and at the same time nailed their backs against the wall. The indifferent had become super-indifferent, numbed by the necrophilia, the fly-bejewelled beggary and the grandiloquent appeals to crippled magnanimity. Some sharks had, in the meantime, put two and two together and were trying to inject a humane element into their necrophilia and fly-flaunting extravaganzas. I felt that it was the duty of my hosts and their colleagues to rectify what they had demolished. Yet I did not feel in any way inclined or obligated to lend them a hand. I enjoyed the spite of not telling them that I was taking no further part in their plans. They showed me the fund-raising schedule, packed with activity like a tin of beans. I was scheduled to make twenty speaking appearances and do a dozen newspaper interviews. I endorsed it all, and even thanked them for caring so much about the faceless millions. I called them the Good Samaritans, and they blushed; the irony was not totally lost on them.
Back in my hotel room, I buried my face in the pillow and screamed. How could anyone expect me to sell Aunt Lwandeka down the road? It was not the dead children that had impelled me to withdraw. It was the picture of a young skeletal woman, set with huge letters—screaming, begging, nightmare messages—that had taken the will out of me. In the picture, she was lying on a mat, her cadaverous face upturned, her eyes swimming in mucusy holes, her knees rudely exposed, her stick limbs a perfect picture of a slow, torture-ridden death. The money this cadaver would raise would trickle down to the continent, and then it would double back in the fo
rm of international debt servicing and repayment. So the continent was like Aunt in her last days: the little sustenance that went in via the mouth oozed out of the rectum. I now wished Lwendo had squeezed the pedophile very hard and kicked other aid organizations in the groin. These were not essentially evil people, at least not comparable to some of our murderers ranging free in these climes, but they were keeping bad company, company I no longer wanted to be part of, even for a day longer.
I packed my bags the same night. I went down to a phone booth outside the hotel and made a call to the ghetto. As the phone rang on the other side, my heart raced. I was banishing myself from a hostile Eden. As the phone rang I could hear flies buzzing, jumping off the pictures awaiting my fund-raising saliva in the morning and colliding with each other. The vision of blue-green flies and the small black ones colonizing carrion, shit and putrescence filled the booth with a cadaverous stench and made me nauseated. Alas, I had left nothing behind. I had buried nothing in the clouds. I had brought it all with me, coded secretly, gnawing away in the dark like the virus that had killed Aunt Lwandeka. I felt beleaguered, encumbered, enervated. I was too aware of the whiteness of the people around me, on the streets, in the buildings facing Central Station, in the bistros on the Damrak, everywhere. I wanted to find my feet, and to put the horror of the flies behind me. I felt the money in my pocket. How much worse did it feel out here if one was penniless? Or if one had to scrape it off the floor? Or if one had to sit out one’s hell in detention camps awaiting acceptance or rejection following pleas for political asylum? As I ruminated on this somebody said, “Aallo?” Yes, it was the flat, Lugandanized English of our people. I felt like jumping up and knocking myself out on the booth ceiling. Little Uganda, that cocoon of Ugandans in exile, was calling right in the heart of white Holland! This was what returning Indians must have felt when talking to people in Gujarati or Urdu in the middle of Kampala.
“Osiibye otya nnyabo?” (How are you, madam?)
“Bulungi ssebo” (All right, sir), the voice replied. How sweet it sounded in the cold night air! And what a relief to know that Action II had given me real addresses! The rest of the conversation, and the introductions, and the inquiries about where I could rent a room for some time, occurred in a dream. I could already see the flushed faces of my hosts on discovering that I had disappeared, especially since they hadn’t a clue that I hated what they did, and how they did it. I left the booth laughing, the taste of revenge burning like liquor in my breast, the prospect of staying with people from my country lending wings to my limbs. Outside the hotel, the canals were gleaming with multi-colored light emanating from the windows and the streetlamps stationed along the banks. The dark, glittering water was moving, wriggling like a serpent pinned at both ends. I had pinned mine, and I felt invincible.
The map of the metro track that chiselled through the sprawling ghetto looked like the letter Y or a broken rosary, the beads forming the sprawling ghetto. In summer, the sight of the towering buildings is softened by the lush green of the roadside vegetation: flowering bushes, trees and grass that lead the way from the steel track. In winter, the trees are stricken bare like fleshless limbs, the sky as gray as the concrete in its brutal upward thrust. I arrived in summer, and the green bewitched me, coloring my first impression of the place. I emerged from the metro, bags in hand, and surveyed the vista—the hulking buildings, the trees along the paved roads and the walkways. It was not bad, at least not as bad as the word “ghetto” had first intimated. There were groups of youths in baggy clothes with canvas shoes and baseball caps turned back to front standing along the metro station, under the culverts and beside the buildings like soldiers contemplating an advancing war. I was excited as I walked past them. I kept thinking that these should have been my students at Sam Igat Memorial College. But what kind of students?
My destination was a few hundred meters from the metro station, reached via graffiti-strewn culverts that doubled as a drug market at night, a square that was used as a flea market on Wednesdays, grocery shops in long, reclining buildings, and a police station housed in a squat, box-like structure. The high-rises, behemoths that could house anywhere from eight to fifteen hundred souls, were configured in large compounds named after the alphabet. The biggest ones were divided into three or more sections, built in semi-circular formation. From now on, the center of my life was going to be Compound E in the behemoth called Eekhoorn.
In 1966, when Grandpa was suffering at the hands of goons during the height of the state of emergency, Amsterdam’s ghetto, conceived as a garden of Eden, was being built to house people from Holland’s colonial past: Antilleans and Surinamese. Covered walkways connecting the main structures to garages were constructed, paths were paved, pipe water and flush toilets installed; and the apartment buildings oozed the arrogance of newness. The Garden was carved into parks, which rubbed shoulders with highways, metro lines and bridges and sprouted large bushes which burst with flowers in spring and summer. Towering above the bushes were trees that called to mind forests on the South American mainland, from where the majority of the immigrants would come. On summer evenings, the smell of flowers filled the paths, and one could hear the last birds singing and insects preparing for the night.
Dream realized, the Garden was peopled with dusky former colonials, who walked among the trees that hid the forbidden fruit and the grass that housed the serpent which would poison the whole dream. Akin to God, the Dreamer withdrew, and the Garden was invaded by addictive weeds and the vicious serpents of disillusionment, isolation and legalized crime in the true spirit of prime-time capitalism. Mountains of reports on the proliferation of crime, drugs and unemployment piled up in the government offices, but because it was all inside the secluded Garden, not much was done. After all, the soothing waters of welfare benefits were still flowing over the blaze, and the children attended school, and policing was mild. There was freedom of movement from the ex-colonies to the Garden, and everybody was free to do whatever they wanted, in the true spirit of democracy. “A reasonable balance” and “It could have been worse” were the mottos gracing the walls of the government offices. Indeed.
As I entered the ghetto I saw black men, women and children entering and emerging from the behemoths, going about the normal business of everyday life. I couldn’t help but smile. The shop attendants in the groceries were mostly black, Caribbean or African, with a sprinkling of Indians and whites. My new home had been recently painted a cream color with red strips on the sides, and it looked fine. The corridors inside were huge and long and windy, and some nooks ran with stale piss. Officially, eight hundred people resided in this behemoth, but unofficial figures ran up to fifteen hundred. Nobody knew exactly how many people lived here. I liked the idea of anonymity, the air of low-key lawlessness and the fantasy touch of the Wild West. I was feeling inviolable: bad things could happen here, but not to me. I had washed my robes in the blood of the bitter wars I had been through and felt that the lukewarm violence of the ghetto would not touch me. Here I could live a quiet life, responsible for and to nobody, and if I got tired of it, maybe I would return to Uganda.
My new home was a four-bedroom flat on the seventh floor. My landlady, Keema, was a thirty-two-year-old woman who had left Uganda and her moldy marriage and gone to Kenya before arriving here on a tourist visa almost ten years ago. Her network of old friends had helped her find work, accommodations and solace, and when her period of illegality ended, she got a Dutch passport and collected her three children. In this flat lived about ten people, most of them coming and going at odd times. When I arrived, there were six regulars. I rented the smallest bedroom, which was next to the sitting room and faced the toilet and bathroom. At night, the sitting room doubled as a bedroom for those who were passing through or had just arrived or had stayed over after a party. The only lesson my landlady seemed to have learned in life was never to turn people away. The place was a clearinghouse for those in transit to Britain, a hub for Ugandan exiles in the country an
d a party zone where birthdays, Christmases and all manner of obscure feasts were organized, because, unlike her friends’ white neighborhoods, the ghetto had no noise limit. Here you could blast your stereo and put the television on at such a volume that the furniture vibrated. If a neighbor was disturbed by noise, all he could do was to return the favor by organizing a party and making as much noise as possible. Police never looked into such matters. In fact, the white policemen never left their box-like structure at night. There were flat wardens in each building who were deputized. And favoring a laissez-faire mode of policing, they kept out of people’s hair as much as possible. If burglars struck at night, you had to hold on, hoping that the wardens would come in time to lend a hand. If you got held up by rough youths or some deranged junkie, you had to rely on your own resources. If you were stalked or terrorized by shadowy characters, you had to work out your own defense system. Consequently, quite a few people here carried knives.
Keema’s house was a popular place. There was always somebody coming and going. The kitchen was going at all hours, and the toilet seemed to flush non-stop, the gurgling cistern making noises reminiscent of Uncle Kawayida’s turkeys. The children attended school, and when they returned, they did their homework and went out to play. My landlady did not see them until evening, because she worked in a greenhouse outside Amsterdam and sometimes returned home late. She always arrived dog-tired and irritable, and if she found a cup broken or a misdemeanor committed, then she would explode into the tension-breaking rages of stressed parenthood.
Abyssinian Chronicles Page 52
