by Jessica Yu
Kin must be brought back home for final rest. How could Mike not be tortured by the thought of his father discarded in an unmarked patch of earth overrun by weeds and litter? Pedestrians treading over it, unaware that beneath their feet lay the body of a man who had defended so many others, a man missed by a boy who sat on a rock for six years, waiting for his father to come home?
THROUGH GLADYS’S WINDOW, this stretch of night seemed especially dense. The headlights penetrated only a few feet into the blackness. Beyond the highway, the shadowy shapes of buildings and trees and huts were amorphous and scattered, nothing adding up to anything nameable like a town or a garden or a forest. Everything out there seemed on its own.
Alex and Mike. Though more than four decades separated them, they bore similar scars. Like Mike, Alex had a father buried in a place he could not visit. The stoneworkers had left Alex’s father’s body somewhere near the quarry. The boy had not had a chance to say goodbye.
Like Mike, Alex bore guilt over his mother’s suffering. After his mother’s death, he had wept for many days. Perhaps he was tortured by those last, terrible moments, by his failure to wrestle his mother’s spirit back into her body. His sisters had only stared at their crying brother. Insulated by youth, they could not yet fathom a well deep enough to feed that stream of tears.
“With your story, Mike, I really have realized why Alex can’t smile.”
“I’m telling you, that boy—when you tell him to smile, he just can’t understand it. It’s like his face is going to get torn. His smile has been wiped out of his system,” Mike said, slicing the air with one lean hand. “After what happened to my family, I couldn’t see how to smile, you know? I had so much anger for Amin’s soldiers. When they had checkpoints going into Kampala, when they turned everyone out of the bus, they would always single me out. Because of the look on my face, out of the whole line of people, they would pick me. And they would traumatize me.”
“My goodness.” Gladys sighed. “You understand better what Alex is going through, because what you went through is double what he has experienced.”
Big-hearted Mike, whose grin was so radiant it could charge a mobile phone, had once worn a face like Alex’s. Gladys recognized that face now. It was the face of a child who has not forgotten anything.
FOR YOUNG MIKE, the nightmare had continued on other fronts. As a result of family infighting, he and his siblings were split up among an uncle’s several wives.
“The moment that we kids were not together, I just could not think. I had one brother here, one brother there. I spent all my time moving from place to place to go check on them. They were starving. You see, each of those wives had her own children, and they were minding their own children’s welfare, so my siblings were not fed.”
A matatu stopped short in front of the Volvo. Mike braked hard, muttering under his breath. Traffic stood at a standstill, the vehicles puttering listlessly in the dark.
“My father was a highly placed person. When he was declared dead, it was going from glory to rags, you understand?” He raised a hand up to the roof, then let it drop to the seat. “In the flip of a page, we were suddenly down there. So deep, so instantly. My siblings were being persecuted, and I just couldn’t concentrate. Each time I thought about their situation, I would be crying. My brothers and I decided we would move out together. So I had to get a job. I worked as a truck loader, carrying a whole load of matoke. Because I didn’t want us to be split up.”
“Ah-hah,” said Gladys. “And when you got all your siblings out, your mind got settled.”
“Very settled. All four of us were crowded in one small room. One of my brothers started drinking recklessly, but all the same, we were together. You know? All of us felt, like, whew! We felt we are someone.” He chuckled abruptly. “You know kamongo, that fried fish? For the poor people.”
The women nodded. Kamongo, a slimy, salamander-like creature, thrived in swamps and lake bottoms.
“In Idi Amin’s time you would have to be the lowest of the low to eat that fish. In the evening we would go and buy that kamongo, about three pieces or so, and then get yams and cassava and boil them. The four of us ate, and you know, we felt happy with ourselves.”
“And you felt it was delicious,” said Gladys.
“Yes.” Mike laughed.
“That’s how it works. You find it delicious and you enjoy the meal. Just because you are together now.”
“Yes!”
Gladys pounded a fist on the windowsill like a judge wielding a gavel. “My decision is now right. This has been running in my mind. And now I’ve heard everything from the experience of Mike. And I was right. You can’t separate Alex and his sisters. You can’t. If you want them to overcome all the trauma they’ve had, they must be together. To give support to one another. That’s why those kids don’t like to play with others, they just want to stay together.”
Her words tumbled out now. “I can’t buy what Freddy is telling me. Freddy will think he is doing Alex a favor by giving him out to a very rich family in America, so that they send him to expensive schools, give him land, or whatever he’s talking of. But I tell you, people, it would hurt Alex so, so, so, so badly! Alex will arrive in America, they will drive him in big, posh cars, but he will not be happy. You will have a very disappointed couple that will wonder: ‘Look at this African. We have done everything for him, but Alex doesn’t appreciate it. The boy is always gloomy, the face is gloomy.’ Alex has been through too much. And his sisters need him.”
Mike jumped in belligerently. “If you want those kids, take the three. If you can’t take the three, leave them. Don’t even think about it!”
“And you know what? I thank you, Mike, because your story has given me more satisfaction that Alex can still go through with the life. Yes! I’m sure that boy will be determined to go through. I don’t expect him to give up. He may be like Mike, who went to load matoke in the name of assisting his siblings.”
Mike laughed. “I’ve done everything under the sun, I tell you.”
Gladys continued to refer to him in the third person, as though recounting the tale to another. “Mike did not want his siblings to suffer being divided among those other families. No! As he tells it, they didn’t have money, he didn’t have a good job. But they were together, and their minds got settled!”
Having reached loud and jubilant agreement, the companions relaxed. Gladys reached down into the footwell for the kavera containing the snacks. The plastic sack made its way around the car, adding to the journey’s theme of meager meals: burned cake, fried kamongo, a carton of biscuits. The carton made its way from passenger to passenger until it was empty.
THE TRAFFIC GREW thick as they entered the heart of Kampala. That was the thing about a long story told in a traveling car: at its end, one found oneself in a different place from where the story began. Around them people milled about the city, walking and hawking and haggling and chatting and begging and loitering as though it were the middle of the day.
One question lingered. How had Mike thawed the anger that had frozen his expression for so long? The young man had vowed to punish those responsible for his father’s death. What had come of his thirst for retaliation?
Heading toward the taxi park, Mike delivered the epilogue.
After he had learned his father’s fate from the four men who had survived Mutukula Prison, the target of his revenge narrowed to one man: Major Mududu, the officer responsible for killing the fifteen hundred prisoners, including Mike’s father.
“After Amin’s overthrow, this Mududu was sent to prison to await trial. I was twenty-one, I had finished my army training, and now I was going to deal with this man. You know how young guys watch too many war movies . . .”
“Like Rambo,” said Gladys.
“Yes, like Rambo today.” Mike nodded. “Well, I went to the High Court every day with a bunch of kids, all armed to the teeth. With grenades, with guns, waiting for this Mududu to come out of the bus for his appea
rance at court, so that we can attack him.” There was a matter-of-factness to Mike’s tone that erased any doubt of his ability to carry out such a plan. “I fantasized about cutting off every one of his fingers and then killing him. Even when I was practicing shooting at the range I was seeing that man’s face.
“I didn’t know when his trial would begin, so I went to the court every day. For six months. Each time I watched to see if Mududu was getting off the bus, my adrenaline would be so high, my heart pumping so hard. I wondered how many other people I might have to shoot to get to him.
“Every day for six months I imagined killing this man. As it went on and on, I realized I was becoming sick from this head trip. So I called the contract off. I told my friends, ‘I think I’m giving up on the revenge.’ They said ‘No! You must kill this guy!’ They called me yellow, said I was a disgrace to my father’s body. But I realized, if I don’t stop, I will live in such bitterness I will never survive the void I feel inside.”
“Eventually you would have run mad,” Gladys agreed. That’s what revenge was: a fire that kept you warm, then burned down your house.
“I tell you, if you do not move on, you will have so much pain. You don’t have to forget. But you have to be able to move on.” Mike shrugged. “So I said, ‘To hell with it. I’m not going to hunt him anymore. I will let this be.’ I closed that chapter, and I quit the army. And I felt peace with myself.”
Outside, Nakasero street market came into view. Weary fruit vendors knelt on mats battened down by perfect pyramids of oranges or tomatoes or avocados as big as human heads. Shoppers gathered around the candlelit altars of produce like worshippers.
“Does he still live?” Gladys asked.
“Mududu? Yes.” The officer was an old man now, spent and faded, lingering on a sugar plantation somewhere. “But I don’t want to look for him. I just want him to live with his own conscience. There is nothing worse than having a terrible conscience. That, you can’t eradicate.”
“Ah-hah,” Gladys voiced in assent. Surely the nightmares of the guilty were worse than those of the weary.
THEY ARRIVED AT the glowing perimeter of the taxi park. Rows of light-bulb vendors rimmed the sea of white-topped minibuses. Lo-fi pop music blasted from both sides of the street, colliding inside the Volvo. Boda bodas weaved through lanes, passengers blithely texting, cell-phone screens glowing blue. Mike navigated the stream of vehicles and bodies and pulled to the curb.
“I think it was a good day,” said Gladys.
“Thank you so much, Gladys.” Mike checked his mirrors for traffic as the women exited from the car. “Safe journey.”
He watched Gladys and Esther cross to the park, where they would board a taxi and ride another couple of hours back to their home in Entebbe. There Gladys would sleep for a few hours before rising to take the long ride back into Kampala again. The lengths to which this woman would go to help complete strangers—it amazed him.
That young boy, Alex, could not know that the course of his life had taken a turn for the better today. That he had someone watching over him, and over his family.
Mike steered back into the street, away from the memories of his past, away from the young man who had once believed that guns and grenades could restore equilibrium to an upturned world. If you lived long enough, you discovered that a steady hand, not a fist, kept things from spinning out of control. You didn’t need a Rambo. You needed a Gladys.
The Boy with Seven Names, Part One
Mugerwa Junior
I WANT TO QUIT THE STREET
Mugerwa Junior, 11, cannot remember his parents’ names, their home, or how long he has been on the street. He remembers going to ease himself on the day he arrived in Kampala with his parents and failing to trace them thereafter. He resorted to washing dishes at food kiosks as his means of survival. Now he says he feels tired. He turned himself in to Old Kampala Police.
“Hello, Rebecca.” It was Sunday evening. Gladys had just finished a long day of reporting out in the field, and by all rights she should be sitting down to her first proper meal. But she had answered her phone, knowing that Officer Araba of the Child and Family Protection Unit of Old Kampala Police would not be calling to chitchat.
“I’ve been meaning to call you about a situation,” Rebecca began, with uncharacteristic hesitation. “But I am not sure how we can discuss it.” A situation like this could be troublesome if it was leaked to the papers, she explained. Some might accuse the police involved of negligence. Including Rebecca’s boss.
Like Gladys, Rebecca was tall, stout, and staunchly professional. She returned calls promptly, and she always wore her uniform while on duty. Gladys appreciated officers who did not wear street clothes to work, since this made for poor photographs. When she ran a picture with a story about a lost child, how were her readers supposed to know that the lady in the dress was a policewoman and not some relative or bystander? But Rebecca wore her police cap even on the hottest days.
While Rebecca and Gladys cooperated on children’s cases, their responsibilities to their respective jobs sometimes placed them at odds. A year before, Gladys had written an article about how abandoned children at Old Kampala Police Station were engaging in illicit activity. A lucky kid might find a space to sleep under the office counter, but most sought shelter in the wrecked cars behind the station. In the rusted husk of a minibus, a twelve-year-old girl had had sex with three boys who promised to buy her a chapati and a soda, and she feared she might be pregnant or infected with HIV.
The story put Rebecca in a difficult position, but as a fellow professional, Gladys felt compelled to report on the situation. The article was embarrassing for Old Kampala; communication with the media was temporarily strained.
But the freeze thawed between Gladys and Rebecca, as it always did. And now, again, the policewoman was appealing for the journalist’s discretion as well as her assistance. Gladys made no promises about the former, but Rebecca sorely needed the latter.
Rebecca took a breath and delivered the bad news. There had been an accident at the station. A fire. Some boys had suffered burns. One was a street kid who had been hanging around the station for weeks. His name was Mugerwa Junior.
Of course Gladys remembered him. He was the boy with the bloodshot eyes who had told her he had been on his own for years. She had interviewed him at the station three weeks ago. While the length of his homelessness was notable, the boy’s circumstances were not unusual for a street kid. She ran his profile and photo in her column, but no one responded. No parents, no relatives made contact with Old Kampala Police. Gladys ran the profile a second time; again nothing happened.
Mugerwa Junior’s intention to quit the street was a positive sign, but Gladys had been reluctant to get involved in his case. Street boys lived lawless lives, and many places would not accept them. She had proposed Amahoro Home. The facility was a bleak, rundown compound, but if Junior wanted to sleep under a roof, he would find one there.
No one had followed up on Gladys’s suggestion that the boy be taken to Amahoro. And now he had been burned. At the police station.
“How is it that this boy ends up being here for almost an entire month,” Gladys demanded, her voice rising like a sudden storm, “and no one has resettled him? And how did he get burned? These are children. They were not cooking. Where was the fire coming from? I want you to tell me! What were you doing with him? What kind of police are you?”
“It was not me! I didn’t even know about it,” protested Rebecca.
“That child is under your care! How can you not know about it? Those kids are your responsibility! Tell me how such a thing happened!”
Withering under the assault, Rebecca stammered out the details. Three boys who had been hanging out at the station had been performing small tasks for some of the police on staff. An officer had sent them to burn some trash behind the station. Tossed into the rubbish pile were exhibits from past cases, including some tins filled with chemicals used in counterfeiting.
The tins exploded in the fire, burning all three of the boys. Two of the boys had families that retrieved them, but the third was the lost boy, Mugerwa Junior.
The fire had occurred on Friday. Two days ago. “And he has received no medical care?” Gladys’s outrage funneled into Rebecca’s ear, searing like sunlight through a lens. “How can adults not be able to dispose of chemicals you know nothing about, and make kids do it? How do you allow police to do this to children? Someone must be held responsible!”
Rebecca was not happy about the situation. Of course the boy required medical attention, but some were concerned that the doctors might ask questions. They would want to know what burned him, and under what circumstances. So the boy had languished at the station, untreated.
“No! That’s wrong!” Gladys insisted. “Of course the doctors are entitled to know the answers. They want to give proper medicine!”
For a few minutes Gladys hammered Rebecca for information, and then the two hung up. There was nothing more to do but to wait for the morning, when Gladys would be able to see the boy’s situation for herself.
GLADYS’S MONDAY SCHEDULE was typically full, so she was disappointed to discover that Rebecca was not present when Mike delivered her and Esther to Old Kampala Station. As Rebecca was the officer responsible for the children at the station, it would be harder to push forward Mugerwa Junior’s case without her there.
Gladys walked around the compound of faded yellow buildings. Some male officers leaned against the guard hut, chatting and laughing. A woman and her half-dozen small children sat by a bush, sharing the meager shade with a resting goat.
Gladys found Junior waiting on a bench outside of the Child Protection Unit building. He was a dark boy with rounded features: a moon face, a soft hill of a brow, full lips forming a perfect circle of a mouth. But it was difficult to pay attention to such subtleties today. Gladys’s eyes were drawn to the terrible ruptures of skin along his right arm and hand and across his cheek, chin, lips, and neck. His swollen forearm and hand looked wrapped in tree bark, the amber-colored pus weeping forth like sap. The skin on his face had already started to split in places, exposing raw pink flesh underneath. The boy wore a girl’s polka-dotted camisole dress trimmed with lace, the feminine garment adding a touch of humiliation to his plight.