by Jessica Yu
Finally Gladys could stand it no longer. “Please,” she urged John Bosco, “explain to her in your language what is happening, so that she can understand.”
Keeping her eyes covered by the collar of her dress, Marcy allowed her father to sit her on his knee. He began to whisper to her.
“I only get to see my brother for a few hours,” the girl burst out suddenly, her words broken and hoarse. “And I lose him again?”
For the first time since he had entered the room, her father looked at a loss. “She thought her brother would be coming home with her,” he explained. “She is worried that he will be taken away forever.”
After some words of reassurance, Marcy’s tears subsided. John Bosco sensed the visit’s end. “If I could fly out of here and be with you, I would,” he said wistfully. “But I can’t.”
“It is unfortunate that you are in this place,” Gladys commented. “You must pray that it will not be for long.”
“I am not a robber,” John Bosco said. “I did not kill anyone, but maybe I am here because of my conduct. God willing, I will be free and I can rejoin this new family.” His chuckle returned. “But if the devil is here, maybe I will not be there.” He looked appealingly to Gladys and Officer Rebecca. One could imagine that such a look had been applied to other women, under very different circumstances. “Please, you are my new family now. Do not forget about me.”
Gladys offered him a benevolent smile. “We just hope that when you get out of this place, you will now be able to be a part of your son’s life again, as he has not had the benefit of a father for all these years.”
Junior embraced his father one more time as the group was ushered out. “Be good. Grow up to be great,” the man said, patting the boy’s head. “Discipline.”
The visitors reached the door at the end of the dark hallway. The heat outside hit them like a wall.
“Come back to see me,” Captain John Bosco called, watching them dissolve in the sunlight.
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON by the time Osman pulled up in front of a small café. As usual there had been no time to eat, and Gladys was worried about the children. Junior had taken breakfast at school, but it was likely that his mother and her two daughters had not eaten anything that day.
Osman took a seat facing the street in order to keep an eye on the Volvo and its three temptingly broken windows. The older kids plunged into the piles of rice and chips on their plates, and Rebecca shared a mound of rice and gravy with little Mary Faith. Loud, pulsing dancehall music bounced off the café’s red walls.
Gladys was keen to restart the interview. The conduct of mother and daughter at the military barracks, the silence and the crying, had surprised her. To get to the bottom of the matter, she had to trace the family threads to a point much further back than the separation between mother and son. A story like that of Mugerwa Junior Godfrey Victor Mananga Adams did not spin out from one bad break or one poor decision. No way. Many factors must have conspired to create this tangle.
After getting some food into their stomachs, the women pulled their chairs closer together and began to talk. Rebecca’s voice was clear, her gaze direct. Away from the tense atmosphere of the barracks, she was a different person. Her fragility now fell away, revealing the stone inside the bruised fruit. It quickly became apparent that someone born into her kind of misery could not have survived on mere luck.
WHEN REBECCA WAS a baby of crawling age and her brother a newborn, her mother had tied both infants into a bag and tossed it into the river. Some fishermen retrieved the bag and saved the children. But the mother was gone.
Unfortunately, Rebecca’s father proved unwilling to provide for his stranded children. These babies would simply have to depend on the mercy of his other wives, of which he had many.
“How many women?” Gladys inquired. “Like four?”
“No, more than that,” Rebecca corrected. She named a fifth, a sixth, then a—
“Okay, please stop counting. I fear you will get up to ten.” Gladys snorted. “And how many children?”
Rebecca counted nearly twenty before Gladys cut her off. It was clear that the welfare of two babies whose mother was not even around would not rank high on this man’s list of priorities.
“Your father never catered for you?”
“Not even to buy a pencil,” Rebecca said with emphasis.
Like weeds yanked from a garden, Rebecca and her brother were not allowed to take root anywhere again. As she grew up, she stayed with various stepmothers until the mistreatment became unbearable or until they chased her out. Food was scrounged from friends. She cut firewood to pay her own school fees.
Mary Faith began to whine. Her mother had been parceling out her portion of rice on one side of the plate, but the toddler was determined to take possession of the whole dish. She reached across the tabletop with sticky, insistent hands.
“The baby wants her own plate,” Gladys noted with amusement. “It seems she feels cheated to get something from someone else’s plate.”
Osman flagged down the waitress. Once the baby had her own bowl and her own pile of rice, she began stabbing it contentedly with a fork. They chuckled at her satisfaction. All kids liked the feeling of owning something. For many, it was not a feeling they enjoyed very often.
Gladys drummed her pen on the table. “I would like to know how you met John Bosco.”
Rebecca nodded and resumed her tale. After living like a beggar in a series of homes, she had again found herself chased away by an abusive stepmother. “And that is when I met this man John. I had nowhere to go, so I just decided to marry him and run away to Kampala.”
“I understand now,” Gladys murmured, addressing her notepad as she wrote. “Because she was suffering, she would want to run away with someone who promised her heaven and earth.”
From Rebecca’s abject perspective, John Bosco must have seemed like a man who could deliver on such a promise. At twenty, he was educated, having completed secondary school, and he had a job in Kampala as a guard at Pioneer Mall.
“How old were you then?”
“Thirteen.” Marcy’s age.
“Did anyone know that you had come here?”
“No one was even looking.”
“Eh! No one even bothered to look for you. Can you imagine?” Gladys sighed.
By the time she was fifteen, Rebecca had given birth to two children, born just a year apart: Junior—or rather, Adams—and Marcy. Her husband blamed her when she became pregnant a third time. “He said, ‘Now you have conceived again. I don’t want another child to come and shout around here.’”
“Why didn’t he invite you to use the pill?” Gladys asked. “Or why didn’t he use a condom?”
“I don’t know.” Rebecca shrugged.
He began beating her. He beat her until she became unconscious. He stepped on her until blood flowed from her private parts. The bleeding would not stop, and neighbors took her to the hospital. Fearing what would happen if a third child joined this earthly nightmare, she prayed for her pregnancy to end. Unsentimental in his mercy, her God listened. She miscarried in the hospital.
It was a dreadful story. Fortunately, the room was noisy, and Junior and Marcy were comfortably engrossed in the small coloring books they had been given. Elbow to elbow with her brother, Marcy appeared free of her earlier distress.
Mary Faith, bored of ruling her kingdom of rice, sidled up to her new half-brother, gaping curiously at the pink discoloration at the back of his hand. He mugged at her, sending her away, squealing.
Even after the miscarriage, Rebecca went on, she returned to John Bosco’s home. It was the same song: she had nowhere else to go. From the moment she had been cast into the river, she had been forced to eat whatever life served to her. When her husband expressed regret over his behavior, she had no choice but to hope that things would improve.
They did not. She discovered that her husband had taken another woman. Sometimes he was away for weeks, even months. On the
rare occasions that he came home, Rebecca could sense that he was not fully present.
“Oh yeah,” Gladys commented. “When a man gets a new catch, there is a way they change.”
“Even in bed, he’s like this.” The young woman brushed her skinny arm against the reporter’s substantial one. Then she flinched, as though touching a hot stove. “‘Eh! Why are you being so close?’” she growled angrily, pushing Gladys away.
As he moved on to other women, John Bosco wanted to take his children with him, particularly his firstborn son. Rebecca resisted.
Her stubbornness surprised those around her. After all, children were traditionally considered the property of the father. And John Bosco had a good salary as an officer. He could provide for his son in a way that Rebecca could not. Even Rebecca’s brother, who had been flung into the river with her, questioned her thinking. “He asked me, ‘Why do you want to carry all the burdens? You don’t have money, you are struggling. Why don’t you leave one child with him?’”
“Don’t you think that was also a point?” Gladys asked.
Rebecca shook her head. “I said I would rather suffer with my children than leave them.”
Her husband took Junior anyway. Her many requests to visit were routinely deflected. One day she resolved to see her son, invited or not. It was evening when she arrived at the military quarters where John Bosco and his cowife lived.
When the couple strolled in drinking beer, Rebecca sensed that it would be unwise to provoke trouble. “I told him, ‘I did not come here to quarrel. My coming here is just to see my boy.’ He said to me, ‘I am not happy with you. And I will never be happy with you.’ When the other woman left to get water, he caught me there, where I was sitting, and started beating me.”
“What was he beating you with?”
“Hands! Kicks, what-what.” The children and the other woman fled from the house. “And then he started caning me at the table like this: pop pop pop!” Rebecca raised her fist and began whipping her arm down toward the table.
“Didn’t you scream for help?”
“I couldn’t,” Rebecca said, holding clawed fingers up to her neck. “He started to pinch me here like he wanted to take my throat out.”
“Is it so?” Gladys gasped.
“It’s true! He was pinching my throat and I could only make a sound like—ehhhhhh. And then he went and got a pistol and pointed it into my face.” She made her fingers into a gun shape, her small hand like a child’s, and aimed it at her mouth.
She pantomimed their fight over the gun. Somehow Rebecca succeeded in flinging it into the bedroom. “Now, he caught my leg and pulled like it was a rope. He dragged me out of the house like a sack, shouting, ‘Go out of my house!’”
The next morning the quarter guards found Captain John Bosco washing his car. “This woman, she has run mad,” he claimed, brushing off the incident.
“The man just looked at me like I was rubbish.” Rebecca’s nostrils flared as she glanced away, an expression both defiant and wounded.
A pop song on the tinny café speaker pulsed into the lull.
Every man want a fine girl
Mine she’s a super diva
“Men can really be bad,” Gladys muttered.
THROUGH THE OPEN front of the café, Gladys could see Osman leaning against the car with the absent absorption of a young man using his mobile phone as a boredom shield. The day was growing amber, the shadows lengthening. Traffic would be heavy soon.
“It is getting late,” she said. “Okay, Rebecca. Just share with me your comment now. How do you feel, seeing your son?”
The young woman drew herself up in her chair, inhaling deeply as she did so. “I was not believing that this boy was alive. Since the father said he had lost him, I thought he was dead. I used to sit alone and cry. But now I am so happy. As soon as I saw him, my heart just calmed.”
She looked down the table at Junior, and her eyes softened. He was picking at the splintered tip of his pencil, his lips pursed into a perfect circle.
“I know he doesn’t remember me. It has been so long, he forgot me.” Rebecca directed the words to her son, although he did not hear her. “But I never forgot him. That’s why when he disappeared, I could not settle. I said, ‘God, I never abandoned this boy. It is you who knows.’”
“I always feel bad for women,” Gladys said. “It seems a lot of women abandon their children. But I really want to hear it from the mother herself.” She rapped her pen on the table with each word. “To know. What. Happened.”
“I never abandoned him.”
“You didn’t abandon him,” she affirmed. “You were ready to suffer with your children.”
“Yes, I would have suffered with him.” Her own mother had not fought for her, had not even tried. She would not impose the same punishment on her own children. “Maybe another woman would not manage; maybe she would go to the street to sell her body. But for me, I said no. If someone says, ‘You wash my clothes,’ I wash. ‘Come and cook for me,’ I go. Because if I don’t go, what will my kids eat? The boy’s father left us with nothing.”
A high-pitched clamor rose up from the end of the table. Mary Faith was running in circles behind her brother’s chair. Giggling, she darted up to one side of his chair, and Junior whipped around, grinning, trying to tag her with his glance. Again and again the toddler whirled away in her lacy white dress, like a moth circling a candle.
Their mother’s smile was slightly remote, but more sweet than bitter. “I’ll pray that you can continue this work. It is through you that I have my son back. Not through that man.”
Gladys absorbed this. To this woman, abandonment was a sin of the highest order. It was apparent now that her silence at the military barracks had not been a protest against her son being kept in school. It had been a statement on John Bosco’s crime of tearing the family apart. He had thrown them all in the river.
“I think we are done with the interview,” Gladys declared with a sigh. “Let’s go back into the jam.”
ON THE WAY back to Entebbe, they dropped Rebecca and the girls by the place where they would spend the night before the journey back to Karamoja, sending them off with phone numbers and invitations to visit. Junior poked his shining face through his half-lowered window, calling his goodbyes. His mother and sisters stood at the side of the road, waving with all their hands, the breeze from passing cars fluttering their frilly skirts. It was a touching sight. Had Rebecca borrowed money to buy those dresses, hoping to cloak the family’s hardship from her long-lost son?
Gladys lowered her hand as the Volvo pulled back into traffic. “Life,” she declared, her blunt voice a gavel.
Osman nodded. “It is not easy.”
Mugerwa Junior Godfrey Victor Mananga Adams lay down in the back seat. Weighed down by a belly full of food, he soon sank into a deep sleep. He had begun the day with no family, and now he had a mother, a father, a sister, and a half-sister. Little wonder he was exhausted.
As they drove, Gladys and Osman tried to reconcile the amenable, affectionate father they had encountered at the barracks with the cruel villain of his ex-wife’s tale. Had John Bosco reformed? Or did his gentle demeanor spring from his compromising circumstances?
Gladys’s opinion was firm. “He was only doing that sweet talking because of the problems. I know men. It’s just because he’s in problems.”
“It’s very hard to change,” Osman concurred.
“Did you see how he was now pleading with us? ‘Please don’t forget me, come to see me.’ You know, when you are in prison, you feel lost.”
“That’s why they call it the University of Understanding.”
She laughed. “You mean when they put you in detention?”
“Yes. When you come out, you have understood.” Osman grinned, warming to his theme. “The myth is like this: if they put you in Luzira Prison and you’re a Muslim, when you come out you are either Catholic or Protestant. And if you go in Catholic or Protestant, when you co
me out you are Muslim or saved.”
“So has this man reformed?”
“You mean, is he saved? Do you think so?”
“If you want to hear what I think,” Gladys said, narrowing her eyes at the windshield, “I don’t give a damn. Whether or not he has reformed, which I doubt, he will have to bring some money to support his family. We know he’s a captain. Someone of that high rank can afford to pay for his family.” The captain owned a car! How could he fail to produce school fees for his children? “This man must face his responsibilities once he comes out,” she declared. “Me and Effendi Rebecca, we will not tolerate this child negligence. If we get hold of him, he will not like it! There is no way this John Bosco can run away from us.”
Osman disagreed. The man was accused of treason. He would likely be demoted, if not stripped of rank entirely.
Gladys measured out a sigh, a long, slow deflation. Osman was probably right. “Well, he loves his son. I think we saw that. And I know he was not lying when he said he saw the boy’s picture in the paper and he knelt in his room and prayed.” She stabbed a finger in the air, as though she were pointing to the place on a map. “I believe him. And the son even loves his father. However much he may know that his father mistreated his mother, the boy feels love for both of his parents. So it has been good for them to reunite.”
The father of this lost boy was deeply flawed. Was that so shocking? Kids with stable parents were not the ones who ended up on the street. But was there a child on earth who did not benefit from knowing that he or she had the love of a parent, however imperfect that parent might be? Even a leaky roof provided some shelter.
She would never forget the image of the son and the father embracing, each having long given up the other for dead. It was a miracle. A miracle was not a permanent state of perfection; it was a moment of transcendence. A fleeting glimpse of beauty. That is what she had witnessed, and she was humbled by it.
A siren razored its way through the air, slicing a path through the traffic jam. Osman steered to the right just as a caravan of SUVs tore past. The escorted VIP could have been a cabinet minister racing to catch a flight or an official’s maid retrieving well-dressed children from school. The ordinary people in ordinary cars idled, the smoky plastic smell of burning garbage wafting through open windows.