The Last King of Scotland (1998) (31 page)

I looked up. There was something stunned and child-like in his face.

“No, I wouldn’t want to kill you, Doctor Nicholas. I thought you wanted to kill me. But I know you wouldn’t. I won’t take vengeance on silliness.”

I remained on the floor, panting like a dog, as Amin put the little gun back in his pocket. He walked over to the escritoire, and pulled open a drawer. I could see myself in the mirrors – crouched, panting, panting – and behind me the ranks of bookshelves.

“I am sorry to have frightened you,” Amin said, coming back over. “The fact is, my good friend, that I have heard from my intelligence operatives in the State Research Bureau that you have been engaged in activities against the state. According to this report…”

He waved a pink piece of paper in the air above me.

“…which was written by my good friend Major Weir, who has sadly had to go now – you have been told to give me bad drugs by the government of her Majesty the Queen.”

“I…” I croaked, confused.
Weir?
I thought of his limp and his turkey-wattle neck, the insistent buzz of the radio-controlled helicopter.

“There is no need to deny it. I know everything, you see. Including this I know – that you are too good a doctor, and love Idi Amin Dada too much to do this thing.”

“That’s true,” I said. “I wouldn’t do it, you know that I wouldn’t doit.”

“So,” he said, a cunning look coming into his eyes, “they did ask you, then?”

“I refused,” I said. “It is not right.”

“Good,” he said, and walked over to the escritoire and sat down.

“Good,” he repeated, reaching into the desk. “Because then I am able to forgive you this other matter.”

He held up the black notebook in which I had been writing my journal. I looked up at him in horror. I had forgotten about it while he had been threatening me with the gun, and now a new wave of fear surged through me. There was silence for a moment in the room, as he turned the pages. I feverishly ran over in my mind what was in there.

“You are a very good writer,” he said, after a while. “I can see that plain. But when I talked to you about my journey to become head of state of Uganda, I did not know you would be writing these things down in a book.”

“It’s just a journal,” I said. “Like a diary.”

“You are a very clever man,” he said. “But I do not like what you write here about my mother. Her name was Fanta, not Pepsi Cola. And what you write about my fourth wife is insulting. You should know that I am a sexual lion and that I have fathered over fifty children in Uganda and all over the world. If you continue to write things like this, you will be dead. Straight. From now on we will have radio-cassette and press button. Whenever you write, you will take the words from my mouth. Exactly. Because the mouth is the home of words.”

He turned over a few more pages. I prayed again that I had not noted in detail any connection with Kay. I didn’t think I had, but I was not in a state to remember.

And then Amin said something that threw me totally. “Now, this is very important. This fellow, Waziri, noted here. You say he was your friend?”

“Well,” I said, thinking rapidly where this was leading. “He worked at the clinic in Mbarara.”

Amin fixed his eyes on me. “He was not a good doctor – and thus I do not think he could be your friend. Because he is not my friend, and if he is not my friend, he cannot be your friend. It is true?”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

Amin got to his feet, walked round the desk and pulled me up.

“Follow me,” he commanded. “I have something very important to show you.”

He walked over to the bookshelves and pushed against one of them. A dark space came where one stack of the leather volumes went in on itself. He pushed again. The stack swung in farther, revealing a long, damp passageway, dimly lit with strip lights. There were pools of water on the concrete floor, and all around a smell of dead and standing air.

Amin turned to me, his eyes gleaming avidly. “Come,” he said.

There was no question of my refusing to do as he said. I followed his burly figure as it ducked through the entrance, and went down some steps. My pace fell in with his, splashing through the water. I felt an oppressive sense of dread.

We walked on, the braid on Amin’s shoulders flashing as he passed under the lights. My heart beat painfully again (medically, I suspected I was tachycardic, running at over ioo bpm). The echoes of our footsteps sounded in the tunnel – and then another sound came.

Two sounds. The first was a thump thump thump, reminiscent of the women pounding millet back in Mbarara. With its slow relentlessness, it mocked my sore-speeding heart. The other sound was more disturbing still – a faint yet piercing scream, or howl. I’d only once heard anything like it before, when I’d come across a weasel caught in a snare in the pine woods above Fossiemuir. I felt my bowels loosen.

We entered a chamber. It had several partitioned walls and alcoves. In one of the latter was a cubicle with glass sides, and filled with electronic equipment. Shifting in the glass, the dials and LED levels flickered in the dim light.

Amin crossed to the other side of the chamber and looked through a spyhole in the wall. Then he pressed a button and a big metal door slid open.

“Kila mlango kwa ufunguo wake,” he said, grinning back at me. “Every door has its own key.”

A fetid smell heaved into me. On the other side was the entrance to another corridor, where two bright red fire extinguishers hung like sentinels. They brushed Amin’s thighs as he passed through in front of me. The noises were suddenly very loud: whimpers, moans, outright yells from the very throat of pain. A row of barred doors stretched down one side of the corridor, the walls of which were smudged and crumbling. The stench, the heat, the sounds – alone they would have been horrific, together they were almost unbearable.

I blenched, and I blench from the page as I write – those sights I glimpsed as Amin led me past those cells – it takes…an almost physical effort to realize them, so deeply have I hidden them in my mind. So deeply have I hidden –

In the first cell, a man was threshing about in a barrel of water, his wrists tied clumsily to the sides with rope. In the second, a man was curled up on the concrete floor. Two soldiers were striking him with thick leather straps. In the corner of the third lay the corpse of a boy, his leg shattered, a sledge-hammer leaning against the wall beside him. There was blood everywhere and fragments of bone, scattered about like chips of chalk in the puddles.

In the fourth cell were three women. They stood there naked and shivering, huddled together as a soldier walked round them, prodding them with a baton. It was a desperate sight, filling me with feelings of outrage and revulsion – but I was too scared to do anything.

I was transfixed for a moment, and then flung myself against the wall opposite the windows. I crouched on the floor. Amin reached down and gripped me hard by the upper arm.

“Come on,” he said, “don’t linger here, it is not natural. I want you to see the medical wing. There is a doctor there I’d like you to meet. He is a friend of yours.”

He led me beyond the cells, into a room full of beds. They were fully made up, and spotlessly clean. If it hadn’t been for the overpowering smell of rotten flesh that pervaded the whole building, you would have thought you were in a new, or recently overhauled hospital.

All the beds were empty except one, which was surrounded by a group of soldiers – maybe about ten, perhaps more.

“Is this your friend?” Amin said to me. “Is this man your colleague?”

The man on the bed was Waziri.

His head was bent down where a rope, also tied to his ankles, pulled at it. He looked up at me, as best he could with the fibre rope pressing into the flesh of his neck, his eyes full of terror. For a second, it was as if he was trying to speak: but his mouth was stuffed with a piece of rough plastic. The hard tough plastic of a fertilizer bag had been bent over several times and forced between his teeth.

Waziri moaned through the gag, spittle and blood running from the side of his mouth. I began to feel unsteady on my feet.

“This man,” Amin said, clapping me on the shoulder, “has done bad. He has associated himself with counter-state guerrillas from Tanzania and Rwanda under the leadership of Obote. He has been fighting me in the Ruwenzoris, operating out of Kabale. You have done bad also to be his friend.”

“I have done nothing,” I whispered, backing away from the hellish scene.

But I couldn’t. The soldiers were crowding behind me, pressing into me.

“You should know this, doctor,” Amin said. “When two men fight, one wins. You must not be disobeying me.”

Then he pointed at Waziri on the bed and said just one word. The word was ‘kalasi’.

One of the soldiers produced a knife with a white bone handle. It looked like an ordinary kitchen bread knife. I glanced at Amin; his face was as fixed and solid as that of a statue, his eyes locked on the man on the bed.

Waziri, seeing the knife, started blinking feverishly. With his neck and ankles still trussed, he tried to roll back into himself like a hedgehog. But by then the soldiers were already on him, pushing past me, pushing past Amin even and crowding round the bed. They dragged him on to the floor. One put a boot on his head. Our eyes met at that exact moment, and Waziri’s blinked again, and then all was obscured by the mass of camouflage swooping over him. I heard a gurgling sound and then I caught a glimpse of his bare torso – that, and the long, hideous blade shuttling back and forth.

∗

When I came to, I was in one of the cells, lying on a truckle-bed. I looked at the concrete floor and breezeblock walls. There were smears of brown everywhere: blood or faeces, it was impossible to tell.

I didn’t know how long I had been in there. They had taken my watch from me. There was no natural light, just a bare bulb. The mattress was solid as a board and smelt strongly of urine, so I took it off and lay directly on the springs.

Shortly after I had done this, the door clanged open and a soldier came in. He had those ritual, one-eleven scars on his face – similar to Major Mabuse’s, but longer – and was carrying a tin plate of matooke. He shouted at me angrily in Swahili when he saw the mattress on the floor, and then switched into English.

“You filthy British,” he said. “You come here to take our sisters and then you throw our beds on the floor. Pick or you die!”

I struggled up from the bed and made a half-hearted attempt to lift the mattress on to it. The soldier let out a burst of Swahili, then squatted down and slid the plate of matooke across the floor. As he closed the heavy door behind him, I took one look at the steaming grey mash and started to retch.

I don’t remember much else…I’ve blocked it out. They only kept me there for a single night, I worked out later. I was delirious with fear for most of it. At one point, however, I remember hearing muffled rifle fire from outside; at another, whispered voices from the cell next door, to which two men had just been consigned. I listened to them talking:

“You have heard what happened to Felix Aswa?”

“No. How did it go with him? I was for running to my house when I heard the shooting in our quarter…Then they got me and took me into a car secretly.”

“They did not act secretly with him. They just grabbed him and shot him. And then they cut off his head with a panga. In broad daylight.”

“His head?”

“Yes, and then they took the head and made it drink from a cup. And they called the wife of Felix and said, Look, here is the head of your husband taking tea.”

“That is how it is in our country now.”

“And then they took the head to places unknown.”

I was about to call out to them when I heard the key sound in the lock of my own cell. The door opened and the soldier who had brought me the food entered.

“You, muzungu. Come with me. We are going to give you these.” He touched his cheek.

I looked up at him, not understanding. Then he patted the one-eleven scars on his cheek again, and smiled. The breath went out of my lungs. He came over and pulled me up by the arm. I struggled and shouted as he dragged me out into the corridor.

He stopped and smiled again, and then started laughing, pushing me in the ribs.

“Yee ssebo! It’s OK, it’s OK. I am joking. Eh, you, muzungu. Now, take off your clothes!”

I did as he said, trembling, and then he thrust me into a shower room. Still not sure whether he was joking about the scarification, I slumped against the wall under the cold water for something like twenty minutes.

When I came out, Wasswa was standing there, with a towel and some new clothes over his arm. I was so relieved to see his familiar face that at first I couldn’t speak.

“Are you OK, doctor?” he said, handing me the towel. “You have been a very foolish man to write about President Amin in that way and to plan subversive activities with Britain against Uganda.”

“Why have I been kept like this?” I mumbled. “I have done nothing.”

“You are very lucky that President Amin has given you clemency. He wants to see you right away.”

Once I had dressed, we went back into the corridor. I caught a glimpse through the bars of the two men I had heard speaking, one old, wearing traditional clothes, the other middle-aged, in a suit and tie. They looked up at me, surprised, as we passed.

“Please,” the younger one shouted, “help us. My name is Edward Epunau. I am an honest businessman.”

I stopped in my tracks, wanting to go back.

“Come on,” said Wasswa. “There is nothing you can do.”

“Help us!”

Wasswa took my arm. We walked up the corridor, past the other cells. I tried to ignore the now more muted sounds of their inmates, keeping my eyes firmly on the floor. I couldn’t bear to see those things again. We went between the two fire extinguishers.

The Minister pressed a concealed button. Part of the wall slid away, to reveal the chamber through which I had passed the previous night. In a corner I could see the glass cubicle, where the steaming electronics hissed and warbled like something living. I also noticed, stupefied as I was, that the door was plaster on the cell side – you wouldn’t have known it was there – and metal on the chamber side.