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 t
he 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.
The strange thing was that in the morning nothing was heard of the shooting. Nobody talked about it. They talked about the weather, the fluctuating prices, inflation, but never about guns. It felt like a conspiracy. It was as if the shooting took place inside his head and was only heard by his drugged ears. His wife wasn’t too bothered by it. It was as if she expected drunken or frustrated soldiers to behave that way. The arrival of Bat’s brother did not alleviate Mafuta’s tension. The young man spoke only when spoken to, preferring to maintain silence or go for long walks by himself.
Mafuta’s burden lightened when he accompanied his wife to see Victoria and her child to get any information she might have. He was struck by the woman’s beauty, but he felt there was something hard and dangerous about her. She expressed much grief, but there was something superficial, overdone about it. Is it simply that she has too much energy or is there something wrong with her? Mafuta asked himself as he watched her, irked by the fact that it was rich or powerful men like his in-law who played around with such women. He had expected a spurned woman to be cool, restrained, dignified in her loss. Victoria, on the other hand, looked like a house on fire, barely holding back its zeal to consume itself. Maybe the bastard has a way of bringing hardness, insanity, out of people, Mafuta thought. Victoria’s child kept walking about, pulling things, going off to play, and coming back to interrupt conversation. He wondered what his child would look like.
“I have done my best,” Victoria reported, wiping tears from her eyes. “Friends in high places refused to talk.”
“What friends?” Sister asked eagerly.
“I know some people in high office, you know,” she said almost casually.
“Ministers?” Mafuta said suddenly, attempting to escape neglect.
“A minister, yes. And people who know people. They all don’t know where he is.” Wiping tears clumsily, she cut a scatter-brained figure, quite different from her usual collected self.
“I have been to three different astrologers. They all say different things. I don’t know what to think and what to believe.”
“Do you have enough money to live on?” Sister asked with concern.
“I have a job. I can look after myself. It is love I am without. I love him so much. I miss him,” she said tearfully.
Mafuta was not impressed. A swinger like her had to know better than to get trapped in love. He had seen many of her kind, hard-drinking, night-clubbing types Amin had put out of miniskirts and business. They were good for a night, but a nightmare to live with. Victoria’s house could do with more cleaning. A peek in her inner rooms had revealed chaos: clothes all over the bed, the child’s playthings all over the floor. Could the bastard have let her go because of her carelessness? Or did she make too many sexual demands? Mafuta remembered his princess, how she used to ride him, and how he had felt good about it in the beginning. Wouldn’t be a bad idea if this woman had ridden the bastard like a donkey, he thought, and almost broke out laughing.
“I don’t know much about this woman, but I believe she was a mistake in my brother’s life,” Sister said as they drove away, Victoria waving from the courtyard.
“Why do you say that?” Mafuta said in an almost playful voice, again enjoying being in opposition.
“She calls Babit and threatens her. She openly confesses to seeing astrologers. She claims to be still deeply in love with a man who threw her out long ago.”
“Everybody is using the good offices of astrologers, but because of hypocrisy nobody owns up to it. Your family slaughtered a bull for omens to be read, didn’t they? Such a beautiful woman would hate being replaced. Maybe it made her go over.”
“Somebody has to investigate her.”
“Your brother should have done that before investigating her nakedness,” Mafuta observed, hardly able to hide his glee.
“I am serious.”
“She didn’t make him disappear, did she? Surely not even she could do that.”
“I am not saying that. I used to like her. But women who threaten other women are dangerous. They either believe in evil magic, or physical violence. And those tears . . .”
“Rarely do women admit defeat at the hands of rivals, except for my princess, who cleaned out my house in retaliation before going off and allowing you in. Most women would rather destroy their rivals. Gone are the days when polygamy was a respected institution and rivals had to be tolerated. Nowadays, it is every woman for herself and the Devil for them all.”
“Don’t remind me of your princess.”
“Don’t worry. Let us concentrate on finding your brother. He will sort out his mess afterwards.”
“Yes, you are talking sense.”
VICTORIA HAD BEEN on the trail sounding out people on Bat’s disappearance, but to no avail. General Bazooka had warned everybody not to talk to the “widow,” as he called her, and at best to stop her at the gate. Thus doors kept getting slammed in her face. Former colleagues looked the other way when they saw her. She had been to the headquarters of different security agencies and received the same disheartening treatment. In her desperation she had tried the astrologers. Two omens had been bad, one good. They had robbed her of much of her hope. Her life had started to look futile. If it hadn’t been for her daughter, she would have gone out of her mind.
She woke in the morning with fear in the pit of her stomach, and dressed to go to work with doubt plaguing her mind. She arrived at her office feeling nervous, as if she expected a bullet in the back, and she started sorting papers, useless files. Hers was a dead department, hollowed by the fact that rural roads had not been repaired in ages. She sat in h
er office waiting, she did not know for what, drinking tea, staring out the window at passersby, the trees, at nothing. Her hopes seemed to grow dimmer by the day. She was now afraid that the General would take his revenge and strike back at her. In what way? She didn’t know. She kept thinking about her disappeared father and her failure to find him. She thought about her family and the fact that the General had run them off. She saw him cocking guns, asking her to shoot him. She would gladly shoot him now, for she believed that he had made Bat disappear. And robbed her of her hope. Her escape route. I have to get Bat back, she said out aloud. I have to get Bat back, I have to get Bat back, I have to . . .
Things had changed at the Bureau. It had fallen into the hands of Amin’s tribesmen. She felt that if it hadn’t been for General Bazooka they would have killed her. She wanted to get out. She prayed for a miracle to find Bat and take him away from that other woman. Then I will walk safely into a secure future, she thought. It was still a dream. When frustration got the better of her, she picked up the phone and called Babit. Hearing her hold her breath or begging to be left alone empowered her, made her want to smash the receiver in her face, and erase her from Bat’s life. Calling her barren had at first been a slip of the tongue, but it was now a major weapon. A bazooka. She loved its soul-crushing potency. But why didn’t it drive her out of the house? When she got tired of harassing her, she would leave the dead office and roam the city looking for clues, flimsy leads to turn her into Bat’s saviour. A whore had been the first person to witness Jesus’ resurrection. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if I resurrected Bat out of the morgue?
THE SEARCH for Bat’s body began at midday on a rainy day with Sister, Babit, Tayari, Mafuta, the Professor, and Mr. and Mrs. Kalanda dressed in gumboots and raincoats and looking sombre as stormy weather. Afternoons were most convenient because one was sure that all dumpers had retired for their siesta. Now and then, bodies were dumped during the day, but then by the roadside, not deep in the forest where the group was headed. The “surgeon” the group had hired lived on the blind side of Mabira Forest, where most settlements were. The taxi van which brought the group stopped three kilometres from their final destination. They walked the muddy paths deeper into the forest, the trees above wetting their heads at a monotonous tempo.
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