by Giles Foden
She smiled, in spite of herself. ‘Don’t be a – what is it you say in English? – don’t be a … twit!’
I moved up my hand and tried to tickle her but she held my wrist hard, and then climbed on top of me, pushing my hands into the pillow.
‘You’re my prisoner,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘You must do as you are told.’
‘The Americans argued with Major Mabuse,’ Waziri said at the clinic on the Monday. ‘The rumour is that they were bayoneted and buried just off the road.’
The very next day I saw Major Mabuse in town. He was driving a blue Volkswagen, his peaked cap on the dashboard and the scarification on his cheeks so noticeable, in broad daylight, as to make me touch my own to check their smoothness.
‘That’s a bit daft,’ Ivor remarked, when I told everyone in the clinic canteen. ‘You’d think he’d be a bit more secretive than that.’
June was also the month I saw the corpse in the Rwizi, below the Ngaromwenda bridge. It was blown up with putrefaction, like a sheep’s carcass I’d seen once back home, and the head was wedged between two rocks. The balloon of the man’s torso rose and fell with the current, a ghoulish instrument of measurement.
And that month, too, the flimsy blue airmail letter came from my sister, Moira. It was about Father’s death. And then the one about Mum. The two events brought closer by bad post. Consequences, consequences: the whole thing is that. Me wondering whether I should go back each time, and then feeling guilty about not doing so. Now I cannot understand how I was so callous. But perhaps even then, as early as that, something in me had begun to close down.
As if to top it all, we had a small fire at the clinic. A bottle of ethanol was knocked over in the dispensary without anyone noticing. It trickled down the corridor to the paraffin fridge. No one was killed, luckily, but part of one wing was destroyed, including the library. Merrit raged – and obviously I couldn’t tell him I thought it might have been my fault. I wasn’t sure, though. I just remember, the day it happened, hearing a clink as I shut the dispensary door. Having put the fire out (which involved all of us running with buckets of water – and any container we could lay our hands on), the smell of burned building hung around, even after we had got the builders in to demolish the damaged parts.
Against the grain of all this, things were going very well with Sara. Borrowing the clinic Land Rover one Sunday, we went for a picnic by one of the lakes up in the mountains near Kabale. I spread out the rug on the meadow-grass like a magician. I never saw a lovelier or more romantic spot: the hills a deep green, covered with cacti, ferns and giant lobelia, and farther below the terraces where the coffee bushes were in blossom. Higher up, the Ruwenzoris proper were doing their volcanic thing, compressing and twisting their moss-covered rocks and misty, tree-covered plateaux. I remembered the words in Uganda for Travellers: ‘confusing for petrographers’ – students of stones, describers of rocks. Not photographers, as I’d misread it at first.
Sara’s head was on my chest, her chin digging into it. I could see our shoes, which we had taken off, piled on each other by the edge of the rug, then the platinum brooch of the lake, pinned on the mountainside. Far below us – where the ground fell away into the valley – an eagle was circling, looking for monkeys on which to feed. All around us were the sounds of pigeons calling, or whirring down forest slopes, and those of a hundred other birds I could not begin to name.
‘They say it moves one millimetre a year,’ I said, into her hair.
‘What?’ Her voice was muffled too, I could feel the vibrations of it against me.
‘The mountains … the range.’
‘I thought you meant this.’
She moved down, pulling up my shirt, and into my head there came images of ridges and fissures, the Mountains of the Moon bending and stretching, heating up to impossible fahrenheits as, deep beneath us, they piled fold upon fold, layer upon layer, sediment upon sediment – all leading, a million years hence, to what end? For a moment, less than a moment, a malachite sun-bird hovered near to where we were lying. And then its plumage exploded like a thunderflash between my eyes, and it was gone.
Afterwards we got up and walked around, going over to inspect the meadow’s edge. Some rock hyraxes were chattering on a shaggy outcrop. They dashed into a crevice as we approached. Below the rock was a large yellow flower.
‘Look,’ said Sara. ‘It is somebody’s house.’
I peered inside. The cup of the flower was full of rainwater. Floating in the liquid was a very small, very green frog, motionless except for where its eyes rolled back and forth.
‘At least he doesn’t need a bathroom,’ I said.
As we walked back to the rug, hand in hand, I was as full of joy and love as I have ever been. The damp grass moved between my toes and from a moss-covered branch a hornbill gave a loud squawk out of its curved double beak.
We had just sat back down when there was another strange noise. There, in the foothills of the Ruwenzoris, we heard, of all the sounds in the world, bagpipes. As if from nowhere a detachment of soldiers in full Scottish paraphernalia – kilts, sporrans, white-and-red-chequered gaiters, drums and pipes – appeared over a hill, marching along the dirt track just as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the sound of their wonderful lungs of leather skirling out over the bush. They must have been a border patrol. But what a border patrol. Around their tunics of khaki drill were navy blue cummerbunds, and on each head sat a tall red fez with a black tassel.
The strangest thing of all was that they ignored us totally, as if we ourselves were part of the whole bizarre parade. Not observers but participants. We sat there, stunned, as they tramped off, and we might well have thought they were nothing but ghosts coming down out of the mist on the Ruwenzoris. Except that the music kept on for miles later. Dumbstruck, we watched them march down the track to town, their outlandish figures getting smaller and smaller.
13
Things went along smoothly in the second half of the year, although I was dogged by an ear infection. Well, I thought it was an infection and had been dosing myself with antibiotics accordingly. But in fact it was nothing but a blockage. I was all plugged up. Sara scoped and syringed me and afterwards it was wonderful, my ears as fresh and glowing as petunias in a window-box after rain.
‘It’s like someone’s turned the volume up,’ I told her.
She emptied the fluid into the sink. ‘You’ve got the longest ear canals I’ve ever seen,’ she said. ‘Like sea-shells turned inside out.’
We made love tenderly that night. In the morning when I awoke, with my bright new ears I heard her talking urgent Hebrew into the radio. I read the Uganda Argus as I waited, and then a fortnight-old Observer. Amin was in Rome, visiting Pope Paul. Back in the UK, a Labour MP was warning of ‘another Ulster’ in Yorkshire following the death of a picketing miner. There was a committee of inquiry into the coal dispute, and another into Bloody Sunday. Better to be here, I thought.
‘Who were you talking to?’ I asked, when Sara had finished.
‘Just Tel Aviv. I want a pay-rise.’
‘Get one for me too, will you?’
She moved her head to one side, looking troubled.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing,’ she said.
That morning I had to give a class for the two interns we’d taken from Mulago Medical School. To get things going, I read out to them sections from Bailey and Love’s Short Practice on the happy topic of the day:
Syphilis derives its name from a poem by a Physician, Giro-lamo Frascatoro, published in Venice in 1530. The poem tells of the shepherd, Syphilus, who was struck down by the disease as a punishment for insulting Apollo. On his return from Haiti in 1493, Christopher Columbus brought back syphilis, parrots and rare plants. The King and Queen received him with the highest honours …
When a patient presents a fissured tongue, it used to be assumed that he or she is suffering from hereditary or acquired syphilis. Fissures, even deep
fissures, are usually due to congenital furrowing. John Thomson, after a study of a large number of cases, showed that the furrowing of the tongue was not present at birth, but was acquired in early childhood …
And so it went on, until we did the rounds and I showed them the disease in the flesh. I think they were quite shocked.
In the evening I got home to hear on the World Service that they had declared a State of Emergency in Britain.
‘It is not quite the same as with us,’ Sara said, spikily, when I told her. ‘Israel is a permanent state of emergency.’
In September, I went on tour on my own for the first time. Waziri was on holiday. It was OK, at least until I got back. I came home that evening, tired and dusty, to find a child standing in my doorway – stiff, his eyes glazed, Adam’s apple stark and pulsing.
It was Gugu, messenger and chameleon trainer.
‘What’s up?’ I said, patting him on the head.
He didn’t reply, just raised his hand and pointed down at the town. I could see a plume of black smoke, and suddenly realized that something terrible had happened.
‘What’s the matter?’
Again he said nothing, just stared at me. So I let him into the bungalow, turned on the World Service and sat him down in front of it with a bottle of Coke. I then went over to the Merrits to see if they knew what was going on. No one there. Sara, too, was out.
Leaving Gugu, still silent, in front of the radio as it chuntered away, I ran down into town to the Malumbas. When I arrived, there were lots of people milling around and shouting.
I couldn’t make out the words at first, and then I realized it was ‘Amin daima!’
Amin for ever.
I was confused. A whole section of the street was burning and some twenty or thirty bodies lay outside the houses, surrounded by a large crowd. I spotted Sara, Ivor and the Merrits, a little circle among the black faces, like fans in the wrong place at a football match.
‘Amin daima! Amin daima!’ the crowd were shouting again, punching their fists in the air.
The other three standing over him, Ivor was winding a bandage round the head of a young woman with a wounded temple. Her eyes were rolling and she was making a kind of mewing sound.
‘Nicholas! There you are,’ cried Sara, reaching over through the crush and gripping my arm. ‘We thought you might have been caught in it.’
‘In what?’
‘You mean you haven’t heard?’ said Merrit. ‘The Obote guerrillas came over today. They drove in with lorries. About a thousand. They attacked the barracks with a mortar but it landed here. We’ve been at it all day.’
‘Field hospital,’ Ivor said. ‘It reminds me of the war. Anyway, it’s no go for her.’ He nodded at the young woman who was being helped up by two men from the crowd. ‘We’ll have to take her in. I think the lung is punctured.’
‘Nicholas,’ said Sara gently, ‘you should know. Your friend is dead.’
I said, ‘What friend?’
She led me over to where the bodies were laid out on the street, their limbs sticking out. Crazy paving, I thought, wildly.
The face was a mask of blood.
‘Amin daima!’
I hardly recognized him. His parents were laid out next to him. There was a rip in Mr Malumba’s torso where the coils of his intestines showed blue-grey, falling to one side outside of his torn gown.
The map, Mr Malumba’s map – it flashed into my head and then great holes started to appear in it, like plastic melting. I started to be sick on the ground. Sara held my shoulders tight. A crowd started to gather round, the sight of a muzungu throwing up apparently as much of a spectacle as a row of bodies. A little way away from me, four men lifted a corpse into a truck, holding it by the arms and legs. Limbs seeking limbs.
Bonney.
As I retched, I dimly heard the voices of two women wrapped in bright, colourful cloth, one with a baby strapped to her back, the other with a bundle of wood under her arm.
They spoke slowly and carefully, as if taking part in a ritual.
‘Is the lake calm?’
‘No, the lake is not calm.’
‘Is this how we live in Uganda today?’
‘It is not us, it is because a great calamity has fallen on the town.’
‘Is God driving?’
‘No, God is not driving.’
Gugu remained with us for a short while afterwards. By then, Sara was spending many of her nights at my place. We didn’t know what to do with the child. He never spoke again. We tried all the recognized methods, but it was no good: that kind of trauma needed the sort of treatment the clinic simply wasn’t able to provide. However, I felt a duty of care (did I really, I wonder now?) and in the end the boy stayed for nearly a month. In some ways, it was a happy time – Sara frying up some delicious Israeli dish with peppers on the stove and us coaxing Gugu into a game of tag round the living-room before tucking him up in bed.
But he never spoke, not once, and one day Nestor came with some other men and said he had to come away to his relatives. There was almost a feeling that we had done wrong by keeping him with us. Sara and I stood at the door, watching them go, the old watchman in his khaki coat resting his hand on the boy’s shoulder.
‘There’s nothing more we can do,’ she said. Then she turned and looked at me, her brown eyes full of pain. ‘You should leave Uganda soon, Nicholas. Things will go badly here.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said, following her back into the house. ‘How do you know?’
Her feet were loud on the wooden floor of the living-room. She stopped in the middle, with her back to me.
‘I just do. It’s like in Israel. You do know, you know it in your head, when there will be trouble. I remember once, when I was in the army, we were going through an Arab village and it was all quiet and the only thing you could hear was a dog barking in the distance and the noise of the wind. But we were all afraid none the less and sure enough there was a sniper that night. It killed my friend.’
I went over to put my arm round her, but she shrugged it off. I presumed she was upset over the departure of Gugu.
She began sleeping back in her own bed more often after that, and in general behaving differently towards me. Often, when I said I wanted to see her, she would say she was too busy. Then I’d back off, and we’d be awkward with each other at work – until suddenly one night I’d hear a tap on my door and she’d be there again, sliding on top of me in the heat.
The trick of making love in the tropics, by the way, is to sweat a lot, and keep on sweating, else you stick against each other.
There was another thing. Every so often, the team of Israeli engineers working on the Fort Portal road would come down here for a break, and she would go into town to visit them. I was terribly jealous when she did this, sure that one of her own countrymen would have more appeal than I did.
One night, I went after her into town, more out of curiosity than jealousy. I found her in a bar. A map on the table. The tough-looking engineers were with her, all talking rapidly in Hebrew. She saw me but pretended not to notice, so I had just one beer and left.
Around midnight she came over and tore a strip off me, saying that they were her people and it was her business what she did with them anyway. We still fucked, though, after the shouting, but it was a disaster. She cried a bit when it was over, and said she might have to leave one day. She wouldn’t tell me why when I asked.
You can’t ignore it when things go badly in bed. You can’t put your head in the sand. But thinking about it, still less talking about it, seems to make it worse. The fact is, her dark little breasts started to taste sour to me every time, and the wet slick I’d grown used to reaching down for – it was no longer there. She became irritable and began spending more and more time back at her own bungalow.
I realize now that she, like me, had been using Gugu to live out some kind of fantasy family life – both of us, aware how things were going downhill at the clinic, must have been
craving a kind of normality.
And things at the clinic were going downhill. Waziri had just taken off, we discovered. He never came back from that holiday. I never got the chance to see the Bacwezi grove. Merrit was furious – about Waziri and just about everything. We were finding it more and more difficult to keep the place running. Money came through from Kampala less and less frequently.
Meanwhile, strange items of news were reaching us about Amin. The World Service reported, in its usual po-faced way, that he had sent a message to the Queen, with copies to the UN Secretary-General Doctor Kurt Waldheim, Soviet Premier Brezhnev and Mao Tse-Tung: ‘Unless the Scots achieve their independence peacefully,’ it read, ‘they will take up arms and fight the English until they regain their freedom. Many of the Scottish people already consider me last King of the Scots. I am the first man to ask the British government to end their oppression of Scotland. If the Scots want me to be their King, I will.’
This kind of thing simply made the place seem more unreal. For me, then and in that place, little reminders of home began to take on enormous importance – like finding a bottle of Bell’s or a packet of cornflakes in one of the Asian shops in town. Though that soon became impossible.
There was worse in store for me, and much worse for the Asians. One day in town, I was shocked to see a group of them surrounded by soldiers. They were scratching their faces with broken bottles.
Amin had said in a speech that the idea of the Economic War had come to him in a dream. ‘Asians came to Uganda to build the railway. The railway is finished. They must leave now.’
A sign was erected outside one of the government offices in town: ‘Bureau for the Redistribution of Asian Property’. And during that time, a new song was being played on the radio: ‘Farewell Asians, farewell Asians, you have milked the cow but you did not feed it.’
There was some confusion, initially, about only Asians who weren’t Ugandan citizens having to go, but nearly all went, in the end; 50,000 from the whole country, the BBC said, many to Britain. Amin himself called it Operation Mafuta Mingi, which translates as ‘too much cooking oil’ – a valuable commodity that in this case symbolized Asian dominance in East African commerce.