A clutch of new houses with red bricks and iron roofs had loud advertisements dangling on the verandas: SUPERMARKET, HOTEL, RESTAURANT, CASINO. In front of these “supermarkets,” “hotels,” “restaurants” and “casinos,” youthful gamblers slapped smudged cards hard and loud on gaudy tables to the roar of the spectators. Expert nostrils produced double-barrelled nicotine fumes. Alcohol flowed among the tables. It impregnated brains with fights and groins with frustrated hard-ons. I glimpsed a mini-brawl. A card game had gone rancid. Cards flew in the air. The table lost its limbs. A platform heel ground the middle of a fallen face, to the cheers of the inebriated, thick-bottomed girls. Hard by, three youths were trying out small Honda motorcyles, revving them and pumping blue smoke into the eyes of the cheering girls. Somebody with a large hat was collecting money for a race as I walked past. Sodden noises tickled the back of my head, as though pulling me back into the fray. A little farther on, three motorcycles passed me in a bend, splashing me with mud as they tore past to the other end of the village. They were being followed by a puny Honda Civic filled with noisy youths banging the windows, the seats and the roof.
I hurried to the old village. The old people were cowering in the shadow of desolation. It seemed as if the explosions predicted by Grandpa had begun by sucking the village into whirlwinds of violent change, dividing it into irreconcilable parts. The nostalgia that had marked the early years, when the oracle of Grandma and Grandpa invoked stories from the lacuna, was gone, erased by the aggressive energy of the young smugglers and their friends. A touch of fear had crept into the area.
Serenity’s house was wrapped in webs of decay. The windows were sealed from the inside by termites, and the doors were being sawn off their hinges by ants. The roof was flaking and reddening in the incessant rain and sunshine. Serenity had obviously lost interest in the house, and in the village, and was ready to see the past crumble into the dust of decrepitude. I opened the house as I used to in the past when a visitor emerged from the lacuna. I was greeted by a musty cloud of heat, dust and bats. I handled the doors and the windows carefully lest they fall from their hinges. I did not remove the termite tracks. I did not sweep either. What was the point? I watched as the wind picked up the dust and swept it into the branches of the nearby trees. In the sitting room, tucked away in a corner where Padlock used to keep her mat, was a two-foot anthill. In Serenity’s bedroom a large snake had sloughed under the bed of memories. The bed was dusty but still on its legs, thanks to anti-termite varnish. I emerged into the backyard in a rush. Weeds had overrun the place, colonizing the bathroom and the fireplace where I used to boil water for Aunt Tiida’s four daily baths. Somewhere here I had received my first thrashing, somewhere there Grandma had stood, planning her intervention. The latrine from under which I had spied on Padlock’s genitalia had shrunk like a can in the fist of a giant.
Grandma’s place still bore the marks of the fire. The puny cottage built by a relative near the site of the old house was empty. The yard was overgrown and full of old leaves from the trees under which Grandma and Grandpa used to fight after lunch. I stood at the spot where the crowd was on the night of the fire. The bottom seemed to fall out of my bowels. I no longer belonged here. I had to find a new center of existence. Oppressed by the weight of the past and the brutality of change, I walked away.
Grandpa’s house still looked big and impressive, but carried the sulky air of a deteriorating monument. The coffee shamba was battling with weeds, the windbreakers with mistletoe, the terraces with erosion.
Grandpa had aged too. All those beatings, and the shooting, and the stabbing, and the turmoil of his political and personal life had taken a big toll. If you were looking for him, you could find his old warring self only in the eyes: the candid, questioning gaze was still there. His ears had weakened, especially the one slapped by goons in 1966. Now you had to shout a bit to be heard. He cocked his head to favor the better ear. We were very happy to see each other. He was struck by the fact that I had grown. He kept asking when I would conquer my lawyerly studies, and I kept explaining that I still had a long way to go.
We visited Grandma’s grave. Stiff-backed, Grandpa stood and watched as I effortlessly pulled weeds, rearranged stones moved by erosion and straightened the cross bent by the winds. The same unspoken question went through our minds: Who killed this woman? Who judged her, sentenced her and executed her? I remembered all those babies we delivered and all the herbs we collected in the forest, in the swamp, everywhere. I again felt like wetting my pants, a strange feeling after all those years. I waited for her ghost to rise and shake the leaves of my favorite jackfruit tree. I waited for some miracle to happen. Nothing happened. She had left me to finish the job she had begun. My medium of communication had changed from amniotic fluid and gore to lawyerly ink and saliva.
We left the burial ground. The coffee shamba could do with better maintenance. Many trees needed trimming. Grandpa relied on hired labor both to weed and to pick his coffee. He still got enough money from it to look after himself, although the mills took months to pay, blaming the government for the delays. It seemed as if Serenity’s dream had come true: Grandpa’s estate was no longer as profitable as before, but he did not mind. He had not wanted to go to Rome. He rarely travelled these days, except to attend funerals, important weddings and big clan meetings. Clan land had gone to other families. Grandpa was now free, no longer the arbiter of clan disputes, no longer the custodian of clan property. He was just a man who sat and watched the fluctuations of the political climate.
He asked me to shave him. It took me time to find the razor blades. He sat in his easy chair, with his legs stretched out, his thin, deeply etched Beckett face upturned. The razor crackled and filled with stubble as I dragged it across valleys and ridges. Birds chirped fussily in the tallest gray-skinned mtuba trees. They jumped up and down on one branch.
“Snakes,” Grandpa said irately. I nicked his throat. “It is a black mamba up there. This place is full of black mambas.”
“Green mambas too,” I said, cleaning the stubble and the blood.
“All this bush,” he said, sweeping with his hands. “It is full of snakes.”
“Are you still afraid of snakes, Grandpa?”
“Who isn’t? Of course I am still afraid of them. My worst fear is finding one in bed, sitting on it and getting bitten.” I suddenly remembered Padlock’s mother and the puff adder that had killed her. I did not laugh.
“Snakes replaced all the people who left the village,” he continued.
“How about the newcomers?” I asked eagerly. “I can hardly recognize a familiar face in this village!”
“I told you the village is full of snakes. It is the coffee-smuggling madness that is the cause of all this.”
“When was this area taken over by smugglers?”
“A few years after you left. It was good that this happened in your absence.”
“How did it happen? I mean …”
“In the sixties, your parents migrated to the city to look for work and a better life. Now young people leave to join coffee-smuggling gangs and to get killed by anti-smuggling patrols.”
“Tell me about it, Grandpa,” I said, almost salivating.
“Young people discovered a way of making quick money, without having to go to school. They smuggle coffee across the lake to Kenya and exchange it for American dollars. They come back laden with consumer goods: bell-bottom trousers, radios, Oris watches, wigs, all that junk, and behave like maniacs. They discovered that this little village was a good place to hide and to cause mayhem without attracting undue attention from the authorities. The nearest military barracks is fifteen kilometers away, so they have nothing to fear from the army. Now and then, a few soldiers escape from the barracks and spend a weekend here, drinking and fighting over women. The smugglers can live with that. The chiefs lost control and let the youths have their part of the village and destroy themselves in peace. But sometimes they hold motor races through the old vil
lage, scaring children and women out of the way as they tear past at great speed. All those boys are gamblers. Anti-smuggling patrols are killing them in ever-increasing numbers. Others kill their colleagues when they see so much money and greed sets in. It all seems to make the survivors more reckless. They come home, spend the money like lunatics, go broke and go back. Most survive only a few trips before getting killed. Most of the boys who used to take my coffee to the mill are dead. You just hear that so-and-so’s son or grandson ‘drowned.’ ”
“What a waste!”
“Keep your nose in the books, my boy.”
“It is all I seem to do, Grandpa.”
“I used to tell you about the coming explosions and you sometimes looked incredulous. You were too young, I guess. But I think now you see that I was right. Things cannot remain as they are.”
“What will happen afterward?”
“That is for you to work out; you are the lawyer, aren’t you?”
I smiled sheepishly and said, “Yes, Grandpa.”
“I don’t need all this coffee, all this land anymore. It is for you and your brothers. I have a feeling that you will not come back to the land. Go out into the world and make a place for yourself. A big lawyer does not need to be tied to the village, especially if it is full of the wrong people.”
“Thank you, Grandpa.”
I thought about asking him to challenge Cane’s view that it was our chiefs who let the British into the country and destroyed what remained of it, but he seemed lost in thought, as if communicating with people I could not see. I already had my send-off; what more did I need?
There was a relative of some sort, a careless young girl who laid things all over the place—kettles in the doorway, pans in the yard, the kitchen knife on the table—who was responsible for Grandpa’s householding. She cooked, cleaned, washed and did some work in the shamba. On the weekend, Uncle Kawayida’s mother came over and helped her. I found that a very interesting turnaround, but again I did not ask Grandpa what he thought of it. I pitied the woman a bit. She must have worked like a horse, cleaning up this girl’s mess. The girl was semi-illiterate, polite and very hospitable. When she brought tea, my cup had traces of hurriedly wiped dirt, and Grandpa’s was in no better condition. I was caught between insulting her hospitality by asking her to immerse the cups in a mountain of suds, thrice, and closing my eyes to take the torture. The cup smelled of fish. I engineered a little accident, pretending that an insect had crept up my leg. I spilled the contents of my cup and refused a refill. I started suspecting that Grandpa’s nose was in trouble too: in the past, he would not have touched dirty utensils with a barge pole.
Grandpa reminded me of King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. Although he lacked the look of absolute power and total harmony with death of the king, Grandpa too had reached that stage where the old looked frozen in their dessication. His cane looked like a thinner extension of his hand. He had prodded me a few times with it when I annoyed him and tried to get away. He volunteered to show me round the village. It was very good weather: mild sunshine was drying the rain that had fallen the day before. The sky was very blue, as it mostly was here, with a few scanty clouds. Vegetation was glossy with constant rain. The air was laden with earthy smells mingled with whiffs coming off different plants. It was quiet here.
Grandpa got into a gray trench coat, a white tunic and soft slippers and grabbed his cane. He was going to show me off, his prize bullock. I felt proud. I would be the first lawyer from this village. We followed the main path that went round the old village in a semi-circle.
We went over to the Stefano homestead. It was a large compound that used to be full of people, sons and daughters and their families living in smaller houses built round the main house. I was always afraid to go there: the courtyard used to look enormous, and with all those eyes looking, it felt intimidating. Now it was like a deserted football field long after the match, with just a handful of people looking for souvenirs in the stands. Mr. Stefano, once a big, tall, fat man, lay paralyzed by a stroke. His infirmity haunted the place. It felt dead. “My only competition,” Grandpa said. “What a sad way to go!” I was thinking about Tiida and her efforts to take Grandpa to Rome. How idiotic the whole enterprise looked on the ground!
I wanted to see some of the children Grandma had helped to birth. I wanted to see the tanner, whose courtyard used to be haunted by the stench of drying cowhides stretched and fastened onto wooden frames with pieces of string. He was a tall, gaunt man I used to associate with the Biblical Abraham. He had a lot of jackfruit, mango and avocado trees, but no child wanted to eat his fruit because of the stench in the yard. He used to live with his old wife, whom we called Sarah. I asked Grandpa about him. He said that he was alive, still tanning his hides.
I also wanted to see Aunt Tiida’s first lover, the one who gobbled her virginity but would not marry her. I did not ask about the man, because Grandpa did not like him.
The path was wide but uneven, with potholes here and stones there. Grandpa stepped into a pothole he had not seen and made one prolonged wince. He had hurt his bullet leg. I did not know what to do. I suggested he sit down, but he refused. He bent forward, clutching the leg, his face a twisted mass of lines. I could hear loud music from the other end of the village. It was a Boney-M song, and the crowd was singing along. After some minutes, when the song had ended and another had started, Grandpa stood erect, held my hand, and we headed home. End of tour.
I had a lot of time on my hands. I climbed my favorite jackfruit tree and studied Mpande Hill. It seemed to float in the wind, drifting past stationary clouds and carrying with it a lake of papyrus reeds that resembled pale green umbrellas. This hill was our Golgotha. Two or three bike riders had died on its slopes. I remembered breathtaking downhill dashes by the area’s tough guys, two hundred meters of the steepest ride one could get. The only time I participated, riding pillion, it was a five-bike race. We stood at the top, the front wheels in a line, the riders’ faces masks of concentration, the valley below a yellowish-green mess, the spectators dwarfs on a giant plain. I sat on a gunnysack folded in four. My underthighs were already chafed. The rider’s bare waist was slippery, and I held on to it and fixed my eyes on his back. I kept wondering how he would brake with his bare heels—all race bikes had no brakes as a rule. We shot downhill at a blinding pace, pebbles pouring into the ravine. The hillside tilted. The trees and papyrus reeds rushed at us. The wind wailed horribly, whipping and cutting my skin. Two riders shot past us in a ghostly blur. We went faster. Oh, the thrill! The front tire wobbled as it hit a stone, and displaced gravel poured in golden rivulets down the roadside into the valley. The rider bent forward to exert more force, opening my face to the wind. Tears and snot and saliva flew in thin threads. I ate an insect or two and spat into the wind. The front wheel skidded, filling my mind with broken limbs, torn guts, endless days in the hospital, countless injections, overflowing bedpans and blood-soaked bandages—the phantoms of my fear. I was now sitting in empty space, the carrier gone, my hands on the wet pants of the rider, a shredded scream in my sore throat. He was fighting to avert disaster, every muscle taut and soaked. We went sideways, cutting across the road, floating on air. In a daredevil overtake move, a rival drew abreast of us. I felt a sharp kick to my leg as he went past. Helped by the momentum of the kick, my rider got the wheel back onto the road. We came in last. His back was running with vomit. He didn’t complain. Some boys did worse: they wet and shat themselves. His left heel was raw, skinless; the right one was angry red. He limped.
“Thank me for saving your foot,” the man who had kicked me said. “The spokes were just about to chew it off, and I guess we would never have retrieved it.”
“His Grandpa would have killed you,” they said to my rider as he stoically tended his heels.
“I would not have waited,” he said, grimacing. “I would have taken the boy straight to the hospital and fled the area.”
Everybody laughed. I didn’t. My legs still felt i
ndependent of my body.
I never told Grandpa about the ride. Why weren’t the young smugglers in the new village organizing such races? Scaring villagers did not seem that much of a thrill to me.
Uganda was in a state of siege, writhing like a dying moth on the floor. The bugles of defeat were poised, waiting to blow the walls down. The inside of the country was like a grenade whose pin had already been drawn. There was an explosive feeling in the air. Catastrophe or catharsis?
To the north, in Sudan, the Khartoum-based Muslim government was busy fighting the Juba-based Christian-animist rebels in a war that had little prospect of ending. Bombs and guns devastated the land while circumcision razor blades terrorized virgin vulvas. Now and then, Sudanese refugees camped at our border. It seemed about time to return the favor. To the northeast, in the Horn of Clitoris- and Labialessness, the Ethiopian Ogaden war was going through its surges and ebbs, breathing violent drafts over harsh desert tracts and scalding both combatants and non-combatants, many of whom fled to neighboring countries, Uganda inclusive. To the east, in Kenya, Uganda’s goods were embargoed and piled sky high in the harbors. Smuggling operations based there, aimed at bringing down Amin’s regime by crippling the coffee-based economy, were reaching an odious climax. To the south, in Tanzania, the refuge of General Amin’s predecessor, Milton Obote, anti-Amin guerrillas were gathering, whipping themselves into attacking form and making brave incursions into Uganda. They were rehearsing for the final showdown. Using Radio Tanzania, their leaders called upon the Ugandans to get rid of Amin.
Abyssinian Chronicles Page 35