Snakepit (17 page)

“I am too old to live in a foreign land,” she would say firmly.

“But you are only forty, my dear. How can you say that?”

“I am not a nomad by nature, Bob.”

“We can go to Rhodesia.”

“And live among those racist farmers?”

“Or to South Africa. You have never seen such a beautiful country.”

“The blacks will kill you.”

“South America is perfect. Beautiful weather, wine, luxury.”

“Next you are going to suggest the Caribbeans.”

“Yes, nobody gives a damn over there. Nobody will bother you.”

“We will see, Bob,” she would say in a conciliatory tone that did not mean she had changed her mind, “but don't tell Amin of your travel plans.”

“Are you crazy, woman?”

Ashes had a cageful of parrots. He and his wife enjoyed hearing them curse, sing, whistle. His favourite, a green one with red spots, he had christened General Fart. To entertain his wife, he would dress in a pirate outfit imported from Britain—eyepatch, scarf and all—and play with General Fart.

Sometimes he would look at the lake and momentarily visualize his escape route. He planned to slip away as noiselessly as he had arrived. Did Dr. Ali also prophesy my escape? he would think amusedly.

SISTER FINALLY MANAGED to get away. She cleaned the utensils, scrubbed the floor and closed the house, leaving a message behind for Mafuta. It was with a heavy heart that she began the journey. She felt the burden of leadership slipping onto her shoulders, heavy like lead, hot like a disc saw in action. She was going to have to keep everybody hopeful. As the car took her away from the place she had come to love, it felt as if she would not return. Harder than leaving was keeping the load of secrets gnawing away inside her.

Her brother's money made her think of Saudi Arabia, a fabled land spouting oil and oozing with billions of dollars. That some of it had found its way into her brother's pocket could only be good news. She herself would never touch anybody's money, but she had nothing against people fighting their way out of poverty, as long as they did not take from defenceless people. It struck her again that maybe he was dead. If so, her life would change very quickly; Mafuta's too. She did not know if she could handle it.

She now realized how wise she had been to resist expensive gifts from him.

“Sister, I have never given you anything of value, something to reflect what you mean to me.”

“I have you. If you are alive, I am rich,” she had replied.

“I know, but unexpressed love and appreciation go mouldy.”

“Not if there is sincerity. Take care of your wife; Mafuta will take care of me. If anything happens to him, I can always turn to you. You are my insurance and that is enough for me.”

“The offer still stands.”

“I appreciate it.”

Bat had looked disappointed.

She arrived safely. People had gathered at her parents' home. Relatives, friends, strangers. Her brother Tayari had broken the news to them the day before and had forestalled everybody by bringing an astrologer from the city and a bull. He had killed the bull and the astrologer had read the omens, which had been favourable. There was the smell of roasting and cooking meat in the compound as the people regaled themselves on the meat. Some staunch Catholics and Protestants were still offended that an astrologer, an agent of the Devil, had been called in instead of priests. They refused to touch the meat, saying that it was unholy.

Sister was surprised by Tayari's action; she felt outsmarted. Her friends had suggested consulting an astrologer, but she had not made up her mind. She took her brother aside and asked him what had happened.

“You say that the omens were good.”

“Yes, they were,” Tayari said pensively.

“Did he say what is going to happen next?”

“Nobody can, except God, I mean Dr. Ali. I decided to do it just to get it out of the way. I knew that many people were thinking about it but were afraid to take action.”

“What did Father say?”

“Under the circumstances he would kiss the man's feet if he said that Bat was returning home tomorrow.”

“Where did you get the money?”

“From the fireworks displays. I also have other sources.”

“I am very proud of you.”

“Thank you, Sister.”

Sister did not have to do much; Tayari had taken over the show. She returned home the next morning. Mafuta had arrived the night before and was in a bad mood. They almost had a row. He wanted her to listen to his story first before burdening him with her worries. She maintained that her brother's life was in mortal danger. He agreed but said that he had missed her and needed some attention. He had had a difficult fortnight. He had bought cattle, sold it, but the buyer had tried to cheat him. He had spent the week trying to get his money.

She knew that he was being difficult because he did not like Bat. He had gotten the news the previous night and gone out to drink. He had felt happy that his enemy had bitten the dust. Maybe now he had learned what it felt like not to be accepted. Maybe he would learn some humility, some manners, some respect, some consideration. It was only at the end of the evening, replete with beer and meat, that he had admitted that it could have happened to anybody.

It surprised him that a day later he still could not resist showing resentment to his wife. He had thought about it, planned to be nice, but when he saw her lumbering home, he felt angry. Angry that she had not been home to receive him.

“It is terrible news,” he finally conceded. “What do you want me to do?”

“Accompany me to Kampala.”

“All right,” he said grudgingly, thinking about the cost. Spending so much on a person he did not like. He did not say it out loud, but she sensed it in his tone of voice, in the way he brooded. If she hadn't been pregnant, he would have prolonged the fight.

The atmosphere in the house and on the bus could have done with some cheer. It looked and felt grey. Everything was so different from what they were used to, for they usually enjoyed each other's company. Maybe he missed the big meals she cooked him, the little things she slid his way. He definitely did not like competition, and was already worried that the baby might come between them and usurp his position. The little bastard might get some of Bat's characteristics and that would be a disaster. Then he would have to doubly assert his authority.

Mafuta was irritated by having to meet Bat's rich and more educated friends. He resented them and the way they made him feel. There was the Professor: he would be preaching and paying attention to Sister. These people did not seem to see him or did not know how to talk to him, the intruder who took their friend's sister away from the circles she should have joined as a permanent member, by marriage to one of their colleagues. The Kalandas had the ways of the newly rich. They had subtle means of flaunting their class, little references to artists, painters, foreign places, as if saying, If you don't know so-and-so, or this or that place, you are a peasant with grime under your nails. Such subtlety annoyed him. Mrs. Kalanda had her sisters in Kenya and in Britain and the things they sent her. He had heard it all before at his wedding; he knew he was going to hear it again, swaddled in new words or shamelessly displayed in the old ones. These days it seemed that the quickest way to rise in status or class was to go abroad; the interesting thing was that those left behind, family or friends, all rose with you. “I have a brother in America, a sister in Australia, they are leading such a wonderful life,” some fool would chirp boastfully at you, as if he had won the lottery or been made a minister.

Mafuta had put on his best clothes, well ironed by his wife; he had put on his best black shoes, polished to a shine with his very own hands. But Bat's friends were probably going to be talking about Italian shoes, English clothes, as if Drapers were still on Kampala Road, as if in the bygone days everyone had access to chic shops and the goods they sold. Now he felt happy that Amin had chased the Indian and British merchants away. It has not made everybody equal, but it has removed the alluring, unattainable goods from the public's eye, and whoever wants them has to take the trouble to go to London, which most people can't afford to do, Mafuta thought with some satisfaction. The soldiers are in power, flaunting their wealth, but it is transient and they lack style, which makes few jealous of them.

Mafuta had grown up with no materialistic instincts, and he still did not care very much, but when in good company he did not want to feel locked out. It made his bulk feel cumbersome, like a heap of stones, with his heart palpitating inside like a fisted frog. It seemed he had been too optimistic in going into old-fashioned town-planning in the fifties, when it looked as if the country was going to expand its modern tentacles aggressively. But then again, he hadn't had the grades for medicine or economics. Why was he brooding over spilt milk? Because some Cambridge-educated bastard had refused to accept him? Because he did not fit in with the bastard's friends? Because he sold cattle?

Brooding at such a time seemed ridiculous. He felt a little bit guilty. He wondered why it never bothered his wife that she did not know some of the things the Kalandas went on about. They had accepted her because of her brother. They even felt protective of her.

“We are going first to the Kalandas . . .” his wife was saying.

“I know,” he said rather loudly, with a touch of unfriendliness.

The city looked hospitable when he had money to milk from it, cows to offload at a profit. Now it looked desolate, as if half its occupants had died, as if the remnants were combatting ghoulish fevers. Soldiers were joyriding down the streets in open Stinger jeeps, guns and bums sticking out. State Research Bureau boys were prominently displaying bell-bottom trousers wide as tents, platform shoes high as ladders, silver sunglasses shiny as chrome and walkie-talkies bulky as phone booths. Looking at them, spectral as scorched trees and menacing as bee-stung bulldogs, one might get the impression that an arrest was taking place every minute, the country locked in a spastic daze. They made this look like another city, compared with the earlier Kampala— accursed, dirty, haunted.

In the villages where he had just been, these boys were absent. Cattle farmers went about their business seemingly oblivious to the crisis in the city. Stepping from the horizon-kissed grasslands into urban filth, violence, uncertainty, was to step into a broken, alien world. But they were two thinly joined worlds, flying the same flag, using the same inflated currency, ruled by the same scum. To most villagers Marshal Amin was a spectre floating on rumour, occasionally projecting from a feeble radio speaker, never seen, never touched. Mafuta started feeling that he had made the right decision. Living in this atmosphere was not conducive to one's health, sanity, equilibrium. How he now itched to go back to the cattle trail, where a heap of dung meant that cows were in the vicinity. Here they were in the city, chasing a trail of human dung, but without the certainty that there was a human being, living or dead, at the end of it.

The stay at the Kalandas' was as agonizing as he had imagined. The two women went off to another room and talked for ages. He studied the pictures on the wall, the furniture, the trees outside, till he gave up. Meanwhile, Mr. Kalanda arrived and they struck up a conversation. There were no new developments. Contacts had been made far and wide, but nobody seemed to have seen Bat on the fateful day or afterwards. There was a conspiracy of silence at the ministry, which nobody had managed to crack. The car had been sighted at the Nile Perch Hotel, but the police were holding it as evidence.

At long last Sister emerged and announced that she had been trying to call Bat's friend in London. A politician with an unpronounceable name.

“What is he going to do? He is in London, and we are here trapped in the mire,” Mafuta said irritably, getting more and more wound up and drawing looks of disapproval from the formidable Mrs. Kalanda. He had heard of the fellow, another Cambridge product. Amin has little respect for such foreigners and rightly so, Mafuta thought with some relief. He had jerked them around like dolls on a string on many occasions. This one too seemed destined for the same treatment, if he had the time to invest in the venture.

“Every possible avenue has to be explored,” Mr. Kalanda said diplomatically. He knew that the two in-laws did not get along; he did not want to make things worse.

“Right,” Mafuta said grudgingly, redundancy biting at him.

It was agreed that if there were no new developments in the next few days, they would have to start searching dumping sites.

“Are we going to wade in the ooze and turn the remains over ourselves?” Mafuta said, feeling sick and beginning to enjoy his position as outsider, asking the hard questions or at least making his hosts think, or explain things which did not need much explanation.

“There are people paid to do that. They know all the places. They are called surgeons,” Mrs. Kalanda explained, using a superior tone, as if talking to a wayward child.

“Let us hire one and get going,” Mafuta said, using the same tone and noticing that Mrs. Kalanda was more worked up about the disappearance than even his wife.

“We have to wait for Tayari and Babit to join us,” Sister explained to no one in particular, tears appearing in her eyes and voice.

Mafuta's opinion of the city was not improved by the nightly shooting sprees. They would begin with single shots, as if somebody were alerting his comrades to get ready to party, and deteriorate into rapid volleys coming from all directions. The hours after midnight were the worst; it felt like a fire was raging over the city, and houses and people were exploding. The mind wandered to war, past and future. It stumbled onto the armed robbers who had terrorized the city at the end of the sixties, before the army put them down. It stumbled on all kinds of real and imaginary situations in which the gun was used to victimize unarmed people.