She emitted a sudden gut laugh, as if something had got stuck in her throat, and her body quivered. Watching her gave him a strong erotic pang. Her mouth reminded him of Mrs. Kalanda’s: eager, suggestive, packed with a big tongue.
Night had fallen very quickly and the motley congregation was disbanding, with the wrestlers getting dressed, the musicians packing up, the eaters groaning somewhere in the grass and the invited guests leaving amidst waving and cheering. As Bat removed the keys from his pocket, Victoria remarked that she had never seen such a beautiful car. Don’t lie to me, he thought. What about the other XJ10s owned by the generals? Have they never given you a lift?
Inside the car she said that she wanted to see where he lived. He touched her hair, to send a clear message to her, and he was pleased that she did not make any sound or effort to resist him. To test her he swung the car violently and took off at high speed. He waited for her to ask him to slow down, but she said nothing. You must be used to the reckless driving of the soldiers or whoever gives you lifts, he thought to himself. I am impressed.
CAUGHT IN THE HEADLIGHTS, Bat’s house looked like a precious parcel sitting on its wraps. He looked at it again, admiring its spacious garden, the view it commanded and its big windows, very proud that his very first house was not a dim little affair with an iron roof, but this gorgeous edifice. The fact that there was a beautiful woman beside him, awed by his achievements, made the moment very moving.
As they enjoyed a nightcap, sitting on the sofa and looking out on to the garden, and later when they were in bed, Victoria felt something new, as if she was on the threshold of a new beginning. I can feel it in my bones, she said to herself, yes I can. The fact that this rich man has taken the time to please me, instead of just aiming to fuck and ejaculate, roll over and snore, is a good sign. I am surprised by the way I feel because I originally came here to do a job and play a role. I have participated wholeheartedly in the sex, reaching orgasm easily. That is always a sign. My body and mind felt open to him. He could penetrate right through me. For the first time in two years my dream of having a child may be about to be fulfilled.
In the past two years Victoria had slept with many men who had met a bad end, some of whom she had even advised to flee for their lives. Sex had been nothing but an extension of her work, a tool like a gun or a knife. But it felt different now and she wanted it to stay that way. For that to happen she realized that she would have to disobey General Bazooka, who had sent her to track Bat and bring him to a hard fall. As she lay next to Bat, her hatred for the General rose up in her bosom like a wave crashing on the shore. She wanted to get back at him for derailing her life and turning her into a monster. She wanted to turn her life around and leave behind the madness of the State Research Bureau. All I need is a good plan and a way to Bat’s heart, she said to herself.
Victoria was awake to see the day breaking for the first time in many months. She saw the lake and the trees and felt a sense of beauty and a wish to prolong the experience. The lake evoked tender feelings in her and gave her the urge to burst into song. She wanted to share her feelings with Bat but checked herself; it was too early in the game to rhapsodize about the lake or anything else. She watched him going to the bathroom, towel round his waist, his slippers slapping muffledly, and wondered what he was thinking. Does he know who I am? He reminds me of many men who walk unwittingly to their death, to torture, to imprisonment. Instead of the cold detachment I usually feel after completing a job, I feel unhinged, doubtful.
On the way to the city they talked sporadically. He let her know that he had enjoyed himself.
“It can be lonely in such a big house,” she observed, looking out the window at the roadside scenery of market stalls, houses, cyclists and pedestrians going to work.
“I don’t mind,” he said almost absentmindedly.
“Most of your colleagues are married,” she heard herself remark.
“It is a job they do better than me. I don’t have the time to put in the extra hours in addition to my work.”
“Maybe you have not yet met the right woman,” she suggested, wondering if she was pushing things too fast. He said nothing, and she felt a sharp stab of pain in her breast. Was this outright rejection? She had the giddy feeling of being cast back into the sleaze she was trying to escape. She waited for him to say something about the weather, the road, work, or the statues of Amin, in vain. He kept chasing cars, overtaking them and grinning. In the city, he dropped her off at the Ministry of Works headquarters, and as she watched the car disappear, she was gripped by panic. What had felt like the beginning of redemption the night before had now turned into despair. The blades of violence flashed and beckoned maliciously. She felt herself sinking back into the decay she had just emerged from. How am I going to get hold of him again? How long would this have to go on?
Victoria came from a well-to-do family of textile importers. Her mother and father used to work together. They had been good parents, ever generous and attentive to her needs. Sunday used to be the highlight of the week. Everybody in the family would dress smartly and head for church, where her parents had special seats at the front, since they were pillars in the local Protestant community. Her father’s family was well read: there was a doctor and a judge. Her aunts had married powerful men. At school she had suffered from a lack of motivation; it seemed as if there was little to struggle for. Her looks proved to be another distraction, as she believed that she was better than everybody else. She found it hard to apply herself to the duty at hand when her looks fetched her so much attention. Discipline became a problem and it was easy to cheat. Her father urged her to work harder, and she lived with the fear that he would find out that she cheated. In between, she dreamed of wealth, a house in the hills, and holidays abroad.
Then an incident to do with her parents’ business turned her life upside down. Customs officials found a box of rifles in a container of imported fabric. Her parents knew nothing about the guns. Her father was arrested, interrogated, and imprisoned. Expensive lawyers failed to secure his release and the business suffered. Letters of credit were withdrawn. Her mother was threatened and she finally closed the business, with the belief that they would reopen as soon as her husband was freed, since he knew no failure. He never got out and the family had to move. Victoria was devastated. She fell into the company of bold but aimless girls, who went out with older men who drove Boomerangs and Euphorias, and had money to spare and appetites to satisfy. One such man took her virginity. She enjoyed the money but hated the wrinkles and the paunches and her self-hatred grew.
In the midst of her pain and confusion, she met Colonel Bazooka. She waved down his Boomerang one day and was surprised to see a soldier in a crisp, medal-festooned uniform. She was struck by the lean, disciplined, affluent air he had, and she could see that he was different from other men she knew. He was a northerner to begin with, a creature of people’s fears and prejudices.
He liked her youth, her looks, her boldness and her spoiled manner. She was a southern dream. He was used to picking these girls up, but there was something about this one, a connection they made somewhere in the gut or the brain. Under her brittle shield of boldness was aimlessness, a yearning to be led and moulded. The defencelessness, the emptiness, and the loss showed behind the eyes. The head of the Armed Robbery Cracking Unit never failed to read the signs. He had a highly developed sixth sense, which was the very reason why he was still alive. The affair went on for months, and the more he feigned disinterest, the more she surrendered to him. Her mother finally found out about them. Ground to a pulp by worry, she handled it in the way she knew best. She issued an ultimatum. Drop the soldier or cease to be part of the family, she said.
“How could you do this to us? How could you do that to your father? A soldier! A northerner! Have you no sense of who you are?”
Victoria replied that there was no longer any family since her father’s disappearance. She further made the naïve mistake of betraying her mother to
her lover, and the head of the Armed Robbery Cracking Unit exploded with anger.
“Who does she think she is? Doesn’t she know who the boss is in this city?”
“Don’t take any notice of her, please,” she begged, down on her knees.
“Your people are living too far back in the past. We, the military, are the new royalty, the kings and princes. We do what we want. Your people should get that into their thick heads. The very same people who sold out to the British and let their king and their chiefs lead them to oblivion, but still have the nerve to feel superior! I will teach them a lesson.”
“Please don’t do anything to her, I beg you.”
“Are you telling me what to do? You! Are you like the rest of your family?”
“No, I am not. I just don’t want anything to happen to them,” she said with tears streaming down her face.
“Get out of my sight before I cuff you,” he roared, his eyes popping out of his head.
Something did eventually happen to Victoria’s family. They were attacked by men in civilian clothes driving an unmarked Euphoria. They were beaten, stripped of every penny, made to beg for their lives and warned to leave the city as soon as possible. They disappeared in the maze of villages in the countryside and never returned.
Colonel Bazooka took Victoria and there she was, confused as children of privilege are when deserted by fortune, defenceless in a hostile world without a road map or course of action. He found it thrilling to roll brats like her in the gutters that they believed destiny had spared them from and set apart for the others. He had done it time and again and it still felt good. At this juncture he revealed that he was happily married to a tribes-woman with whom he had three beautiful children. She was deeply hurt as, no matter what she did, a good Protestant girl eventually got married to a man in a monogamous relationship, as concubinage was both sinful and sacrilegious. Her confusion and guilt came out in the urge to compete, to be what he wanted her to be, in the hope that she would supplant the first wife, whom she imagined to be old and worn out. What she did not know was that there was no competition. Wife Number One was unassailable. Queen to all latecomers, she got first priority in everything.
For a time they lived in a senior army quarter. On weekends they would go out to drink, as he enjoyed showing her off. During the week she kept house, which she did badly due to lack of experience. The food got burned and she cut her fingers and she did not know how long to cook the meat or how to wash clothes properly. He realized that violence would not achieve anything and he hired help.
He had a plan worked out for her. If she conceived, he would keep her as a second wife to bear him children with some southern blood in them. If she remained barren, he would enroll her in the State Research Bureau and use her as a decoy. He would only have to anger her to unleash the beast inside. A beautiful decoy would do wonders trapping rampant southern subversives.
To start with, he began to reveal to her what he did. He told her about army operations to curb robbery. He told her the number of people he had killed, how interrogation and extraction of information proceeded. He frightened the hell out of her because till then she had a black-and-white picture of good and evil wherein she believed deep down that bad people were totally bad and good people totally good.
After a year without her conceiving, his patience ran out. He had risen higher and was now in charge of the South-western Region, and his sense of power had reached mammoth proportions. He took her to different towns, and she saw how both civilians and soldiers respected and feared him. There was something mesmerizing about his demeanour. He was like a god, an apparition, a natural phenomenon. He enjoyed the adulation, and in his good moments he said that she had brought him good luck. In his bad moments, however, he accused her of being barren. He asked her if she was doing it intentionally so as not to have a child with a northerner.
“I need a child before I die. I have many enemies. I want to make sure that when the moment comes, I have a successor. There are big plans ahead with very bad odds. I don’t want them to proceed before you are pregnant.”
The gynaecologist found nothing wrong with her. The Colonel started having violent outbursts, wearing her down to a frazzle. He made her confess to earlier affairs and said that her earlier looseness made her barren. He started using military tactics to intimidate and control her. He would ask for tea and then smash the cup against the wall saying it had been dirty. He tinkered with guns, putting the barrel in his mouth and firing empty chambers. She would plead and cry and beg, but he would ignore her and continue firing away. When she was almost out of her mind, he would open the clip and drop the only bullet on the floor. Sometimes he asked her to pull the trigger when the gun was in his mouth.
“Do you mean to say that you have never thought of killing me?” he would roar. He would go on till he had forced a confession out of her and then say, “If you kill me, my soldiers will burn the whole town to the ground.”
He would take a rifle and start shooting in the back garden till the whole place smelled of gunpowder and was filled with smoke. He would enter the house and spit on the barrel to show how hot it had become. He pressured her till she reached snapping point, ready to do anything to improve the situation. Then he announced his plans to her, saying: “I saw the killer instinct in you the first time I saw you. You are going to make a perfect decoy. You are going to rise to the top of the Bureau. Everybody is going to bow down to you. The Bureau needs beauties like you. It is too full of ugly men and unsightly women. Hold your position and they will eat your shit. If you show them fear, they will make you eat theirs, and you don’t want that to happen. Every time you feel afraid, think about your father. Avenge him.” Afterwards his mood would change and he would cuddle and tickle her. Through her tears she would start laughing, grateful that the danger had passed.
After the coup of 1971 he took her to a training camp where she stayed for months and they tried to break her down and reprogramme her. They began by shaving off her hair, burning her clothes on a bonfire and giving her military fatigues. Her name was replaced by a number. They verbally abused her, the word “turd” being one of the softer varieties of insult they hurled at her. They exhausted her body and mind with tough military drills till she felt like fainting. Food was deplorable, accommodation even worse. Trainees were made to sleep in holes for days, to camp in bushes. They chanted Amin’s praise songs like mantras for hours on end, and they were made to pledge undying love and loyalty to him. At the end of the course they took the oath of obedience and allegiance at a graduation parade attended by army officers and the State Research Bureau’s bigwigs, and were let loose on the world.
If Victoria thought she would get off lightly, she was wrong. Her first assignment was to frame a woman doctor, accusing her of supplying drugs to dissidents. She knew that it was a test to see if she could do in a fellow southerner. By taking the oath she had already crossed the line, and all she had to do now was to bury her conscience, that feeble agitator, under an avalanche of rage. One evening they attacked the woman who was going to die “while attempting to escape.” She and her two children were made to lie on the floor. She was then dragged to the bedroom, made to cough up every cent and valuable item, and was shot. For Victoria there was a burst of fear, then euphoria. There was a flashback to her days of victimhood and a feeling of freedom and of being above both divine and human law. The sweetness of unreason drowned out any feelings of guilt. The woman’s body stopped twitching and groaning; silence descended like a curtain; the gun smoke drifted; the drug wore off slowly. The partial deafness Victoria felt was a salient reminder that something had happened. Now and then the blast of the guns seemed to be banging in her head like trapped thunderclaps.
The Colonel, shortly afterwards promoted to major-general, was delighted and took her back to the city. He found her a job with the Ministry of Works. As lovers, they were finished, although he still kept an eye on her. Victoria endured periods of personal hell: diarrhoea
, black-outs, searing pains, flashbacks. She tried to erase it all with alcohol, in vain. She realized that the General had used her and then cut her loose. She wanted somebody to talk to but could not trust anyone. She thought about running away, but where could she hide? The General’s spies were everywhere and if caught she would most certainly be killed.
As the situation deteriorated, she pined for somebody to love. Her failure to save her father still dogged her. She wanted a man to reassure her that she was still human. She was tired of not being able to hold on to anything of value. She wanted a child although she doubted whether it would happen. Certainly not with the intellectuals, traders and bureaucrats she was sent to lure to death or destruction. The more she thought about it all, the more she believed that Bat was her godsent deliverer.
BY RISING to the heights many had expected him to attain, Bat had become a force in his family. He attracted visits from relatives who travelled to the city in search of jobs, loans, recommendations and connections. He did all he could to deal with this new popularity. He thought about investing money and using the profits to help such people and about involving his brother and sister in the scheme. But when he approached them, he met with disappointment. His sister was too busy with her nursing job to take on any other responsibility, and his brother had no interest in a regular job. He earned his living by exploding fireworks at wedding feasts and, when he felt like it, he repaired cars and nursed dreams of participating in the East African Safari Rally. Bat tried to talk to him but failed to change his mind. He felt angry with and afraid for his young brother. He finally scrapped the project, having reached the conclusion that business did not run in the family.
Not long after, he received the news that his sister had found a suitor. It struck him that she had grown up and was no longer a girl to be protected and told what to do. The news seemed to ambush him, and when she came to inform him in person, he found it hard to be genuinely cheerful. The fact that the suitor was a former clerk turned town planner left him reeling.
Snakepit Page 3