Kintu

by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

  In primary five, when they were twelve, a teacher attempted to break what she regarded as an unhealthy relationship, even by twins’ standards. To foster independence, she put the children in different classes. After five minutes of separation, Ruth stopped crying but she did not stick her finger into her mouth. A stream of water snaked to the front of the class from under her desk. Then she fell off her chair and thrashed on the floor. Before the teacher could do anything, Job, whose class was on the other side of the block, was at hand.

  “Don’t touch her!” he screamed.

  Yet he stroked Ruth’s hand saying, “I’m here, I’m here.”

  When the school nurse arrived, Job insisted that the worst was over, that all he had to do was to give Ruth a wash and put her to bed. The teacher and the nurse stared as the brother washed his sister and then made her lie on the bed in the dispensary. The twins could not be taken home immediately because Faisi would be out sowing.

  “She’ll be all right,” Job assured the nurse. “Even if Mother was home, I look after Ruth better. Mother will tell you herself.”

  Ruth was kept in the school dispensary for the rest of the day for observation. Job did not go back to class either. The school nurse was suspicious. She had found no trigger for the convulsions. And how did the brother know that his sister was ill? She knew that traditionally twins were complicated—easily offended and hard to pacify. When the school van took the twins home that evening, she explained what had happened at school, but neither Kanani nor Faisi showed concern. This deepened her suspicion. She went back and advised the teacher who had separated the twins to protect herself as soon as possible.

  “God is God and I am a Christian too, but there are other forces as well,” she whispered. “The way I saw it, there is something about those twins. I would check on our ancestors if I were you. It will not make you less a Christian.”

  The teacher, being Asleep, lost faith and consulted a traditional healer who asked, “Were the twins given second birth rites?”

  “They’re Christians, they were baptized.”

  “Ah, bound to the skies.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why come to me? The Church owns the skies.”

  The teacher slumped in helplessness. The healer took pity on her.

  “An angry lightning hangs over these twins,” he warned. “They’ll burn their parents first.”

  He gave the teacher leaves to crush in her bath and others to burn at the threshold of her house to ward off the twins’ wrath.

  The following morning, the twins sat together in Job’s class. Ruth slipped her hand into Job’s who held it close to his ribs in defiance. They did not relax their stance until the day after when it became clear that the teachers had given up separating them.

  Ruth and Job sat together at break time. They whispered even when they were alone in a classroom. They did not play with other children. They did not join in drama performances, not even the nativity play. They did not join the school choir. They took part only in what they could not escape doing. The other children called them “the Kintu twins with soft heads.”

  At home, they avoided their parents, referring to Kanani as “He” and to their mother as “She.” Job would say to Ruth, his lip curling in resentment, “She wants you to sweep the yard and me to wash the dishes.” And they would both start sweeping the yard. At which Faisi would ask, “Didn’t I say Ruth to sweep the yard and you to wash the dishes?”

  Ruth would stop sweeping and look at Job worriedly, but he would pause long enough to say, “We’re doing both together, it’s quicker,” and they would sweep furiously to prove that they worked best together not apart.

  This led to Kanani Kintu’s house being split into two worlds: the twins’ and the parents’. Most of the time, the house was silent except when the twins and parents came together in prayer. At thirteen, the twins still shared the same single iron bed. Faisi and Kanani had either forgotten to buy another bed or they did not want to waste God’s money. Whatever the reason, the twins did not complain. They continued to suck each other’s thumbs at night, as they had done in the womb.

  6.

  Kanani and Faisi continually thanked God that the twins were never problem children. They had so far not received bad reports from school. In Sunday School too, the twins behaved well. In church, they sat between Kanani and Faisi who made sure that they did not run up and down the aisle like other children. The twins did not go to the toilet during the service, making grown-ups stand up, because Faisi sent them to the toilet before entering church. In fact, other parents said to their children, “Why can’t you be like the Kintu twins? They don’t disturb.”

  At thirteen and fourteen Job was a bit confrontational but it was nothing that prayer wouldn’t eliminate. Hence, Kanani and Faisi did not see the Devil coming. He arrived early in 1968 and camped in the twins’ world. The twins were eleven years old at the time.

  On Wednesdays, school closed at midday. Normally, the twins went back home and played outside the house until Faisi returned from sowing to open up. One Wednesday, however, the twins walked from school as they normally did but rather than turn to Naakulabye to go home, they crossed Bukesa Road and rolled down the hill until they came into the narrow valley called ewa Namalwa.

  The valley was flooded. Frogs croaked among the yams. There were no houses. The twins walked past a well and stood on a dry patch near the muddy road. They looked up Makerere Hill. All they could see was bush. The track was undefined: rainwater from the university came down the track more often than people. On the left, ten minutes of walking would take them to Old Kampala, which was now considered the Indian capital. Apart from Fort Lugard, a forlorn and lonely monument for Kapere Lugard (named after Captain Fredrick Lugard—fabled for being the most stupid person the Ganda have ever met and who was responsible for children being called kapere if they were silly), there was nothing exciting in Old Kampala.

  The twins turned to the right and walked toward Makerere Road. At the top of the road they stood at the junction wondering whether or not to cross it. On the other side, beyond the shrubbery, was Kiwuunya, the only place on earth that replicated hell. Every day between 8:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m., the twins heard shrill squeals and grunts as pigs were butchered. Children at school said that pigs made a lot of noise because they did not have necks. In the evenings, the smell of death, thick and rotten, fell like a blanket over Naakulabye.

  As the twins were about to go home, they saw, on their right, children from their school scurrying around a church, peering and giggling. Ruth explored first; Job was wary of churches. Ruth followed the other children to the church doors and stood still. Before her were grown men and women singing, clapping, and dancing, their piano raucous. Job joined her and he too gaped. The pianist now knocked, now tickled, now caressed the keys like a heathen playing drums. The piano grunted and squealed and whooped as if it were not European. The songs being sung were Christian, yet heathen. The twins knew all of them but in their holy versions. When a kindly woman came and led the twins inside the church, neither Ruth nor Job resisted. They sat on the pews and watched. There was no sermon. In their church, the sermon was the main course of a service. This congregation indulged mainly in singing, a side dish, sprinkled with short readings from the Scriptures. The twins expected God to empty a wrathful bowl of brimstone and fire on the church but they did not leave. It felt wrong and right at once, like stealing with your mother.

  By the time the twins emerged from the church, it was the end of the school day. Faisi was already home when they arrived but she did not notice that it was Wednesday and that the twins should have been home earlier. The twins went back to Gguggudde’s Mungu ni Mwema’s Church the following Wednesday and many Wednesdays thereafter. Ruth was the first to let go. Until then, she had never realized that she owned dancing energies. Her eyes shone as she nodded, swung, and clapped. The familiarity of the songs in dance versions must have unlocked her inhibition. Job, on the other hand,
was stiff. He clapped and swayed but only to egg Ruth on.

  Then one Wednesday, the twins arrived at Gguggudde’s to find the congregation howling. The worshippers threw their hands in the air, pulled their hair, beating down on their thighs, wailing. Without hesitation, the twins launched themselves into crying. Even Job threw his arms in the air and had a hearty howl. Every bad deed, evil thought, and ill feeling was exorcised. It was so personal, this wailing, that the twins did not even share with each other the agonies they howled.

  Finally, the piano whispered softly and the congregation calmed down. Then singing started, melodious and soothing at first, then it rose and rose until they were singing to fill the church up to the roof for the Lord. They clapped and danced with as much abandon as they had howled. Leaving Gguggudde’s that afternoon, the twins were lightheaded. For the following three years, until they went to secondary school, they sneaked into Gguggudde’s and joined in the abandonment of worshipful howling.

  The Devil revealed his true intentions just after the twins sat their primary leaving exams. There was a man, Kalemanzira, a water-man who fetched water for the family. Initially, Kalemanzira annoyed the twins by claiming that the family had Tutsi roots.

  “You’re too good-looking to be Ganda. Look at that slender nose,” he pointed at Ruth.

  The family ignored him but Kalemanzira carried on asking, “Are you sure there is no Tutsi blood in your family? Look at Nnakato: look at that shape, those legs. Ganda women have such twisted legs that they make a ram’s horns jealous.”

  “Her name is Ruth,” Faisi admonished.

  “Don’t talk about her,” Job was so angry he choked.

  Then one day, Kalemanzira was so tempted by Ruth’s voluptuous body he sneaked a finger to poke her bottom. Job was so incensed he picked up a stone and hurled it at Kalemanzira’s head. Kalemanzira passed out.

  Kanani was paralyzed with fright.

  It was Faisi who called an ambulance. After recovery, Kanani gave Kalemanzira so much money that the water-man went back to Rwanda.

  Shortly after Kalemanzira’s departure, Ruth was taken to Namirembe Hospital with a fever. The rest of the family came along—Kanani to make sure that a doctor, who was a friend, saw Ruth quickly so he could go to work, Faisi to guarantee that whatever the problem she would still go sowing, and Job to be together with Ruth. Hence, all four were stunned silent when Ruth was pronounced pregnant.

  7.

  Kanani parted with the family in the hospital foyer. “There’s nothing else for me to do here, is there?” he asked no one in particular. He took the back gate of the hospital, which opened into Namirembe Cathedral’s grounds. Faisi and the twins carried on walking through the wide corridors of Albert Cook Ward until they came to the main road that ran through the hospital. But Faisi walked away from the twins as if she did not know them. When they came to the main gate she said, “Gone to do God’s work,” without looking back.

  By the time they got home, the twins had become indifferent to Ruth’s condition. It had only been a question of time before either followed into their parents’ sinful footsteps. Even then, getting pregnant was nowhere near as horrible as the twins had anticipated. As Ruth pushed the front door, which was stuck again, she said, “I’ve committed my worst sin but I didn’t kill any child.”

  “Lucky you,” Job clicked his tongue. “Maybe I’ll kill them.” Ruth laughed as Job mimicked Faisi: I was so depraved I killed my parents, and for what?

  “You need to be contrite about it otherwise it doesn’t count.”

  “Then your pregnancy does not count: you’re not contrite.”

  “It would count if I abort and then confess.”

  “Like her?”

  “Never.”

  The twins fell silent as they contemplated the sins they would commit and confess on buses, in church and markets when they started to sow the seed. That night as they lay in their bed, they heard Kanani and Faisi whisper,

  “It’s the Devil, Kanani. He hoodwinked us.”

  “But my children?”

  “That is how the Devil works, Kanani.” There was a hint of impatience in Faisi’s voice. “Remember Job in the Bible? When the Devil failed to make him denounce the Lord, he used his family against him.”

  A week later, Faisi called the family to get together in prayer. Instead of Kanani, she led the prayer and beseeched God to give them wisdom so they would make the right decisions. When they got off up their knees, Faisi smiled as if she had had an epiphany. First she wiped the dining table with her hand even though it was clean, then she announced that Ruth was going away to live in Nakaseke-Bulemeezi for the time being. Kanani’s heathen cousin, Magda, had married there. Magda was heathen because she had defied her father. She had refused to be confirmed in church with the name Magdalene.

  “Why was I named after a woman who leaked?”

  Everyone in the family had expected Magda’s father to get omwenyango, a shrub with fiery leaves, and scrub her lips. But Magda’s father was a weak man. Instead he offered to name her Victoria, a beautiful name, which was not yet common in Uganda. But Magda would not have it either.

  “The whole world is full of Victorias: the lake, the falls, and streets. Isn’t that enough?”

  Then Magda had named herself Mukisa and asked the family to call her Blessing if they wanted an English version. But the family agreed that she was far from a blessing. In retaliation, Magda took Mukisa in its heathen form, Bweeza. The end result was not surprising; Magda fell away from the church and was living a heathen life.

  Only Kanani accompanied Ruth to Nakaseke because Magda was his heathen cousin. Faisi could not bring herself to go the Devil’s lair. Besides, she had sowing to do.

  When they arrived in Nakaseke, Kanani looked more lost than Ruth. Nakaseke was rural and traditional in ways Ruth had never known. They alighted at Nakaseke Hospital and took a narrow path up a steep hill. The path was stony but covered in dense vegetation. The world here was quiet save for twittering birds, the odd guinea fowl scratching frenziedly, or slithering lizards. As they came down the slope, they would stumble on a house here and there. The houses, sometimes as much as a kilometer apart, built with mud and roofed with corrugated iron, looked squat to Ruth. On either side of the doors to each house stood two large metallic barrels, sometimes dug into the ground with two long steel funnels on either side to trap and channel rainwater. Sometimes, skeletons of the houses showed through thin mud. Reeds looked like ribs and poles like bare bones where mud had fallen away. Doorframes were at wrong angles and made the houses look like a child’s careless drawing. The windows were small: Ruth was worried that it was dark inside the houses. Goats were tethered under trees near the dwellings. Children, especially boys in shorts whose fabric had worn away at the buttocks, played in the yards. Once in a while they came across a man wheeling a bicycle, women speaking in low tones, or a child rushing along the path. Villagers smiled and stepped aside for Kanani and Ruth to pass saying, “Seen you there,” or “Greetings.” Nakaseke looked and felt like a heathen world.

  Finally, they joined a wider track. Ruth’s curiosity was piqued. Someone along this track owned a car: the track was made up of two permanent tire trails with an island of long grass in the middle. Shortly after, they came to an open field of green bulbs like poppies.

  “What are these?” Ruth gasped the words before she could stop herself.

  “Cotton,” Kanani said. “Look ahead, the other field has exploded.”

  Ruth stopped walking. The miracle of cotton growing on shrubs had so lifted the dense air between her and Kanani that she skipped when she started moving again. The bulbs in the field that Kanani had pointed at had burst into fluffy balls of cotton. At the bottom of the field, women were picking the balls and throwing them over their shoulders into the baskets strapped to their backs.

  They came upon Magda’s house suddenly. It was vast. Ruth had expected a small dark hut shrouded in an evil-looking bush. Magda’s home was a la
ndmark in the village. Beside the main house, there were two other structures. One was built wholly from roofing aluminum. In front of it was a lorry. Men ferried sacks of coffee out of the structure onto the back of the lorry. Boys hung around excitedly. Just as Ruth and Kanani turned into the courtyard, the loading stopped. The wooden flap was lifted and the back of the lorry fastened. The engine started and some men climbed in the back and sat up on the sacks. When the driver pulled out, boys ran after the lorry yelling. They leaped and hung onto the wooden back for a while then yelped before leaping off triumphantly. Ruth shook her head at their audacity. She had turned to look at the men bringing in the cotton sacks when she heard excited girls calling, “Visitors! Someone open the reception room . . . go call Mother . . . Can’t you see they’ve come from the city? Take their bags!”

  Magda’s home was bursting with so much noise and movement it was dizzying. Before she realized, Ruth’s bag was taken.

  “I am not going to sit,” Kanani tried to stem the excitement. “Is the mother of the house in?”

  The children stopped running. Clearly, they didn’t know what to do with a city visitor who would not sit down. An older girl said, “Bring a mat and folding chair outside,” but Kanani was firm.

  “We’re not taking seats, I am leaving soon.”

  The children stopped again. Ruth, who could see their concern, marveled at Kanani’s thick skin.

  “Mother’s coming. She’s gone to a garden further away,” a girl explained.

  The children started to greet them. They were numerous. It was awkward standing while the children knelt down.

  “Bring a mat for her,” Kanani pointed at Ruth. “I’ll be fine.”

  To Kanani, taking a seat even outside Magda’s house was like shaking a leper’s hand. You still catch the leprosy even though she is a relative.