Abyssinian Chronicles (71 page)

In the village that got wiped away by the war, men would have called her a bucket: she was so loose, there was simply no traction at all. It was pure robbery. She was like a tantalizing jackfruit that, when cut open, is found to be watery, spoiled, sour. As a former midwife’s assistant-cum-mascot, I knew what had happened: after the birth of the brats that looked at us from the photos, the woman had not bothered to be sewn up, probably with an eye to exploiting her condition.

I had learned my lesson: prostitution was a business where the packaging was better than the goods, and being ripped off was part and parcel of the trade. More annoying still was the fact that the white men I saw emerging from these cages wore the satisfied looks of money well spent. What was their secret? Either they knew the secret of telling buckets from wholesome whores, or they were built like zebras, or maybe they just buggered their buys. I remembered the soldier women and the silence I had kept about the attack. There was a possibility that these white men were getting ripped off but felt too ashamed to admit it. I left in a huff.

I returned after two months. I wanted to make sure. I tried a whore who seemed to wear the sun on her head and the Virgin Mary’s alabaster complexion on her face. Were these women using too much lubricant? No. It was the fucking dildoes, spiked plastic cacti on which they sat during practice sessions in this red-lighted desert of theirs. I had had enough of these greased tombs in which men buried their doomed treasures in exchange for the pleasures of a pissoir. White men had been in the business for ages; I left them to navigate the cesspools of the flesh market.

The news of the demise of the despots reached me in the ghetto during the chilly silver days of winter. It was a severe winter, and the old heater could not chase the chill away from Keema’s large house. We wrapped ourselves in thick clothes and waited for the freeze to grind to its end.

Padlock and Serenity were seventies people, and the eighties, with the guerrilla war, the turbulence and the changes of government, had left them feeling bewildered. It made them realize that the cancer was not all Amin’s doing, and, forced to look further, they felt their sense of optimism flagging. The idea of a strong man holding the roof on the house had made sense to Padlock; didn’t the pope do the same
thing? However, with Amin’s departure and the escalation of the killings, the bickering among Coalition members and ultimately the advent of a weak and murderous Obote II government, the despots were attacked by the locusts of pessimism and indifference.

It was during the depth of his suffering that Serenity came up with the only political statement he ever made. He said that Uganda was a land of false bottoms where under every abyss there was another one waiting to ensnare people, and that the historians had made a mistake: Abyssinia was not the ancient land of Ethiopia, but modern Uganda. Buoyed by intermittent bouts of optimism, he would go over his statement, looking for ways to improve it and make it attractive enough for ambitious politicians to pick up, for he believed that the time had come to change the name Uganda to Abyssinia.

Serenity lived in the exaggerated fear that his crimes would be unearthed, as though he were among the mass murderers and torturers who had escaped with Amin and Obote II. He would spend hours staring into the distance, working out how to cover his tracks, what to tell arresting detectives, what to deny. He thought about writing down his exploits in a story that took place in the legendary land of Abyssinia, changing the names of the characters, but he balked at the idea that some clever detective might dig into it and finally make him confess to the fraud at the center of the story. The other reason he refused to write an account of his crimes was that his opening lines sounded pitiably inadequate when compared with the tone, rhythm and power of the best of the novels on his shelves. He could not bear the idea of making a fool of himself in front of knowledgeable readers.

Serenity told Nakibuka on many occasions that he was afraid of the future. This was at the height of the guerrilla war, when government propaganda claimed that the guerrillas were just a bunch of fanatic Communist maniacs out to kill people, take their land and nationalize everything. The message sounded familiar, and having been spread by skillful government agents, not soldiers, it seemed plausible as well. In the sixties, the Church had been part of the anti-Communist campaign, to the extent of saying that the Communists routinely nationalized people’s wives along with other property and that they had to be fought in a holy war. Serenity bought the anti-guerrilla
line for a short time at the height of his despair: the war was not going anywhere, people were dying, and he believed that negotiations were the best way out of the quagmire. At one point, he no longer cared who won—both sides were killing people, and the situation looked very grim—he just wanted them to stop fighting, and when rumors had it that the guerrillas were defeated, he was happy. Then he heard that they had instead migrated to western Uganda, captured towns and divided the country in two, and he gave up; he realized that he did not understand what was going on. He stopped listening to the news and the rumors. He resigned his post at the trade union and disappeared out of the limelight. He followed Hajj Gimbi’s advice and bought cattle, hiring a herdsman to look after them. Padlock’s job was to supervise the man and make sure that he did not steal or dilute the milk or keep the animals hungry or thirsty.

On weekends, Hajj Gimbi and Serenity compared notes on cattle. They no longer talked about politics. Hajj Gimbi had given up on politics, because he could not trust the current players; he adopted a wait-and-see attitude. Serenity was not too fond of the animals, especially when they broke the fence at night and went out and ate other people’s crops and he had to pay fines and apologize to angry neighbors, but he knew that they were a good investment.

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.