Hajj Gimbi had resigned his job at the bank and concentrated all his efforts in the village. What he feared most was being linked to Amin’s notorious State Research Bureau because he had had friends there. Hajj had come to the conclusion that the best hiding place for a Muslim was deep in the village, away from all the hustle and bustle of the city and its temptations. The new guerrilla government was strict, and he wanted to be away from where someone might finger him for one reason or other. News of anti-corruption units had spread. They allegedly looked into fraud and corruption, but did not specify how many years back they went in their investigations or what they would do with the culprits. Nothing much came of the anti-corruption units, but they scared those with a past like Hajj Gimbi’s. Together, the two men watched as the Indians returned: first the industrialists, and then the small traders. They marvelled at the way history wrote, erased and rewrote itself. Both men were estranged from what was going on in the city. It was apparently being repossessed by pre-Independence forces. It was painful to ponder the fact that things were moving in circles. Hajj Gimbi had more immediate worries anyway; he was having trouble keeping his family together. Lusanani, still the favorite wife, had run away on two separate occasions, and he was afraid that the next time round, she might not return. The move to the village had not pleased her, and she was secretly trying to find herself a place in the city.
The disappearance of the old village and the oozing of the houses into the swamps had hit Serenity hard. The day he returned to his father’s house and found it gone, he lost his center. He felt as though a vital part of him had been stolen. He felt unstable, as if walking on one leg. As long as his father’s house had been there to hate, he had been fine; now that it was gone, he felt bad about the disappearance of the past, the killings, the lootings and the bombings. He got depressed quite often, and Nakibuka did her best to keep his spirits up. He worried about himself and Padlock: the mud that always sucked at his feet during difficult moments made him giddy, and now he feared that he might lose his leg, or legs, like his uncle, who left his in Burma. The memory of washing the man’s soft stump filled his mind with horror. His uncle had vanished one day without telling anyone where he was going, and he had never returned. Serenity feared that he might share the same fate. His uncle had told him once that they had a special bond, which he did not divulge. What made it even more eerie was the fact that those were the first and last words anyone heard the man say after World War II. Serenity never told anyone about it. He had nightmares when the man disappeared, but they stopped after some time. Now, after many, many years, they returned and disordered his sleep with blood-curdling images. He would see his uncle fighting and killing many white people; he would see him helping howling, blood-soaked comrades; he would see him getting shot to bits; he would see him lie still as though dead and then suddenly sit up and call his comrades; he would see him dressed up for a wedding without a bride, and then see him eaten by thick mists; he would see him smiling at him and thanking him for washing the remains of his amputated leg, and then see him fix the worm-filled leg onto the stump and walk away happily. The man came to him differently each time, and he could not understand why he haunted him. Nakibuka’s assurances that his uncle loved him did not help. He would wake up feeling bad, and sometimes the mood stayed with him for the whole day.
Padlock was laboring under the strain of a vicious menopause, which had begun prematurely. The monstrous bleedings I had dreamed of long ago in the pagoda, when she came to me as Jesus on the cross, had become a permanent fixture in her life. They sapped her strength and left her feeling beaten up most of the time. She never complained about her cross, but each week it seemed to become heavier. Her worst fear was to bleed to death and be found by one of her sons in a pool of her own blood. She could not bear the thought of her sons seeing her that way. She had taken precautions by forbidding them to ever enter her bedroom, which was hers alone now, since she and Serenity slept in separate rooms. She washed her clothes at night and dried them in her room. She was still commander-in-chief of her home, but she somehow felt that the days of her reign were numbered. It was just a gut feeling, but it kept her thinking about the future. She was happy that she had raised all her children well and sent them to school. The rest she knew God would take care of.
The developments in the country did not interest her in the least: God’s people always survived. She felt happy with the choices she had made in life, and felt that, given another chance, she would go down the same road again. The moments of relief, when she had no pain, gave her a foretaste of what she believed heaven to be like; she lived them with the intensity of a martyr about to die for the faith. The evenings were her favorite time: she would go out and look at the cows in the kraal, smell the cow dung and watch the big animals chewing their cud while they swatted flies with their long tails. She would examine their bellies and teats and check for ticks. She would order the herdsman to collect a heap of cow dung and light it with hot coals, ostensibly to keep flies away, but in reality for her enjoyment. The white odoriferous smoke reminded her of church incense, the acrid smell of holy mass. She would stand at the edge of the kraal like a statue and wait for the winds to blow the smoke her way. She would inhale very deeply and feel life creeping back, burning from head to toe like a bolt of lightning connecting heaven to earth. At such moments, she felt anchored at the center of the universe, holding things in place.
Shortly after my departure for Holland, Padlock decided to take a long break, the first in her married life. She wanted to enjoy the serenity of her parental home and the solace of the parish church of her childhood and youth. Her brother Mbale was shocked by the degree of his sister’s deterioration. In her eyes was the bottomless expression of holy sorrow he had seen only in the faces of Italian madonnas. It reminded him of the days after her expulsion from the convent. Had she come back to lock herself in her parental house and starve herself to death in one last spurt of religious fervor? The house was not in use at the time. The iron roof had aged, and Mbale had to organize a group of villagers to clean it and make it habitable. He sent one of his daughters to look after her aunt, because Padlock refused to live with him.
Early every other morning, Padlock would wake up and walk to the parish church, four kilometers away, and hear mass and receive holy communion. She took the way via the hills behind the house where, as a little girl, she used to go and hunt for grasshoppers in March and November. The rolling hills, sometimes shrouded in morning mist, reminded her of Golgotha and of the Passion of Jesus. It calmed her to imagine herself back in Jerusalem, walking where Jesus had walked. Feeling the dew on her legs as the grass touched her feet, and the wet mist in her face, made her imagine she was at the center of the universe. At such times, there was no pain, even if the secret disease was at its peak; only peace, serenity, the wish to stay in the hills forever. At such moments, she felt reinvigorated and could not understand why many people believed she was unhappy. She felt the most indescribable contentment coursing through her, and when Mbale tried to dissuade her from taking the hard way via the hills, she just smiled condescendingly at him. He got the message. He also dropped the idea of giving her a chaperone or somebody to take her on a bicycle.
Mbale was not the only person to find Padlock a changed person. People in the village remarked about how laconic she had become, how old she looked, how hardened she came across, like an old, mad nun. The sound of music or voices came to her quite frequently now. People would see her look up as if attempting to frighten off predatory birds, and wonder what was going on inside her head. “She is mad,” they said to themselves. Padlock had kept the secret of the music and the voices from everyone. Serenity had long noticed that there was something wrong with his wife, but she would not tell him what was ailing her. And she did not tell Mbale or any of the other villagers what she was hearing. Eventually, everyone let her be, especially because she was not throwing stones at people or eating butterflies or excreta.
The power and pitch of the music had intensified over time, making Padlock feel as if she were inside a musical tornado or at a crowded conference where everyone talked at the same time, at maximum volume. When the music and the voices subsided, she would say her rosary and do her chores. In the meantime, Mbale went to Kasawo to get her opinion of her sister. Kasawo, who was doing well in her little town and had not seen Padlock in a long time, came to see her at their parental home. She was not taken aback by either Padlock’s appearance or her behavior. She was sure that her elder sister had always been like that: living in her own world. She dominated the conversation, because Padlock was not in the mood to talk and seemed strangely absent. Kasawo made it a point not to mention the late Aunt Lwandeka, or other victims of the plague. She talked only about how good life was at her place. Her business was doing well, she had a man and her eyes were firmly fixed on the future. Just before she left, early the following morning, she invited her sister to visit her. Padlock was going for mass and never understood what Kasawo was jabbering about. However, she smiled dryly, almost maliciously. Her eyes glinted as she saw Kasawo’s big body disappear in the mist on the way to the main road to catch the morning bus. She wished she could force her to go to mass with her. How she would have liked to drag her sister up the steaming hills and down the dewy valleys at breakneck speed and fling her broken, sinning body at the doorstep of the church of their youth! How proud she would have been to break and deliver her to the Lord on a plate and hear her full-throated entreaties for God’s forgiveness! But now Kasawo was going back to her godless life, and she might go the way Lwandeka did: to damnation. Damnation, damnation, damnation … Obsessed with her only remaining sister, Padlock lost her way in the hills for the first time and arrived at the parish just before mass ended.
On her last day, with her prematurely gray head shaking like a ball of cotton in the wind, Padlock went to investigate why the orchestra was playing non-stop and with such intensity. She heard the crushing and tearing and hammering and banging and donging of things, and mixed in the cacophony were what sounded like the painful screams of a torture chamber in full swing. She left her room in a temper. When she stepped outside into the courtyard and looked at the forest in the distance, her legs buckled with holy fright: before her was the altar of St. Peter’s Basilica, above which doves hovered for a minute or so before dropping out of sight in blinding white arcs. There were so many doves that the whole sky looked white.
In the beginning, there had been a locust attack, and then the post-pilgrimage storm. Now there was the miracle of the celestial doves, come to wash evil from the forest and the village. The music crescendoed to a wailing wind’s pitch with breaking sticks, cracking iron roofs and splitting trees in the foreground. Then she heard the unbearable rustle of millions of locusts, and the sky filled with the violins of dropping doves.
It was almost ten o’clock in the morning. A sweet, toothless sunshine, golden to the eye and pleasant on the skin, was shining and flirting with the senses. Farmers were already in the garden with backs bent as they dug with hoes, which kept rising and falling to a deliberate no-nonsense rhythm. They worked inside the shambas, a distance from the path. Padlock could see them, but they could not see her. Now and then, the voice of a child lying on a bundle of banana leaves near the diggers came to her and resurrected the image of her dozen offspring. The diggers were busy tilling the land and planting or preparing to plant beans, maize, cassava, potatoes, tomatoes and greens. The children were either helping their parents in the garden or already at school.
Padlock found herself alone on the path. She turned off into the bushes leading to the forest of dropping doves, walking through the man-high elephant grass in a daze. She moved reverently, like somebody approaching holy ground. The elephant grass gave way to shorter grass interspersed with little umbrella-shaped trees. The forest was only meters away, the holy spectacle enticingly within reach. Her chest boiled with the feeling that she was not alone. Distracted by the egrets, she had not seen the mighty buffalo, over which the birds fussed whenever the ants inside his nose and head tickled his brain and made him shudder. The buffalo was extremely happy to receive her. He had been wounded days before by hunters who, in their inexperience, had failed to catch up with him and finish him off. Crazed with contained rage and energized by the discovery of a soulmate, the buffalo charged at Padlock from under the little tree where he had been waiting in ambush.
With consummate ease, he picked her up, tossed her into the air and made her fly upside down like the Korean trapeze artists she had seen many years ago on the Toshiba. Bushy ground rushed madly toward her. Falling and screaming, she landed with both shoulders on the gigantic marmorean horns, feet in the air like St. Peter on the cross. The buffalo took off at great speed, tearing through the singing, wailing, weeping bushes, a flock of egrets in his wake. As they penetrated the forest the undergrowth clawed at her. The foliage looked so green, the air smelled so heavy, her body felt as light as a child angel’s wing. She was back in the clouds, headed for Rome and the Holy Land.
They arrived at a clearing in the middle of the forest, dark because of the wall of giant trees which cut off much of the sun. The buffalo tossed her into the air, and she sprawled in the dewy grass; then it ran to one end of the clearing and, taking off at high speed, tore to the other end. The dank air vibrated with hoof-chopped clods and the thunder of its breath. Everything—the sky, the trees, the undergrowth, the ground—seemed to quiver and shudder under the assault. After sixty-three sprints, the buffalo collapsed on the tiny remains of its companion and rubbed slowly with its enormous belly. It made seven more such dashings and rubbings. After the last dash, it fell so heavily that it did not rise: there was nothing more to rub into the ground. It died of massive exhaustion and heart failure. The November rains, which the farmers had been waiting for, came the same day and started erasing the hoof marks with torrents that almost washed away the freshly planted crops. After the rains, the grasshoppers came, and the whole area quivered with efforts to catch this flying delicacy.
The girl who helped Padlock around the house came from school to find her aunt gone. She immediately knew that something was wrong. The fireplace was cold. The food she had left on the fire stones for her aunt to cook was cold. The girl was hungrier than usual and was hammered by the feeling that trouble was in the air. Had her aunt collapsed somewhere? Had she lost her way in the hills? Had she gone to the well and got carried away by the water? She already missed her. She had not liked her aunt at first sight, but had grown fond of her. She had got used to the strict but fair ways of the older woman. There was something sadly likeable about her. There was something oddly impressive about her determination. To a young girl, there was something amazing about the total independence from everything that the woman enjoyed. She seemed to have an unlimited capacity for reflection, meditation, prayer, or whatever she did during those long stretches of uninterrupted silence when she seemed totally cut off from this world. With tears in her eyes, the girl rushed to her father’s house to inform him of her aunt’s disappearance. She somehow expected to find Padlock there, talking or listening to her father, or even lying down with fatigue. She willed her to be there. She prayed to God that she be there.
Mbale received the news with a wooden face, his only betrayal of emotion the slight drop of his mouth and the furrows that appeared on his forehead. He went round the village asking about his sister. He ended up at the parish church, where nobody had seen her that day. He walked back to the village through the hills, which were quivering under the assault of grasshopper catchers. Nobody seemed to remember seeing her that day, or any other day for that matter. Many said they believed she had returned to her home long ago. Mbale organized a big search in the area, but no one thought of going to the forest. They checked wells, water holes and ditches to make sure that she was not lying somewhere waiting for help.
In the meantime, Serenity got the news. He arrived in the torrents of rain, looking li
ke a chick fished out of a pool of crude oil. Plagued by the failure to locate his father in 1979, he suffered from a massive lack of confidence. Memories of his one-legged uncle filled his head. Had all those dreams about the man come to this? Was it his wife, and not him, who was supposed to share the one-legged man’s fate? He felt momentarily relieved. Then he thought about the children and decided that he had to find his wife. She must be somewhere in this village. He pictured her back in the days before the wedding. He remembered their first meeting. He remembered the wedding ceremony, and the preparations, and the big day itself. The woman had to be found. The enormity of the task made him shudder. He knew that it would take a miracle to find a person who never got lost in all her life. Nakibuka joined the search party, but she could bring no new insight to the task. The evenings were the hardest. Exhausted, wet, sad faces gathered round the fire, which was not a funeral wake because a body had not been found, and not a bonfire because of the uncertainty that clung to the air. Days ground into weeks with the tortured sloth of an old steam engine. In the midst of the gloom, somebody suggested searching the forest. Serenity was vehemently opposed to the idea—the woman could not be there—but the forest was attacked the next day all the same.
There were no clues as to Padlock’s whereabouts. The tiny threads which had clung to undergrowth and thorns as she rode the buffalo had been washed away. The river of trees and its mysteries made Serenity tremble. The darkness, the wetness and his fear of the forest made him wish he could turn back. He felt like somebody walking to his own death, somebody about to be swallowed by wells of boiling mud after being crushed by the gigantic trees.
Abyssinian Chronicles Page 55
