“Zaya was not a servant,” Magga corrected as if they could not have a servant in their genealogy.
“Then why was she living in Kintu’s home?” Kato challenged.
An awkward moment of silence ensued. Magga did not rise to the challenge. Instead he turned to Miisi and explained, “This Zaya, how she got pregnant with Baale’s son when Baale was just about to get married, is unexplained—”
“Baale was a boy, he was playing around like boys do,” Kato laughed.
Magga chose to ignore Kato and carried on, “But what we know is that Zaya ran away with the unborn child and settled somewhere in Kyaggwe. When the child was born, he was named Kidda after his grandfather, our forefather Kintu Kidda who was a Ppookino. But I will come back to that.”
“Indeed, Kintu, Kidda, and Baale are recurrent names in our clan.”
Magga’s recitation rose again and he weaved through Baale’s life. Baale was indulged by his parents. Apparently, because he was the only child without a twin, he asked for his own twin. His parents adopted a Tutsi, Kalema, as his twin and the two boys grew up together. “Then tragedy fell on the family. Baale dropped dry-dead on his wedding day and Nnakato, unable to take it, committed suicide. That was when it was discovered that Ppookino Kintu had killed the Tutsi, Baale’s adoptive twin, and a curse had been cast on him and on his house. Soon, Kintu too lost his mind and disappeared. The rest of the family scattered throughout Buganda and beyond.”
Magga once again took a breath while Kato interjected.
“At the time, Buddu was a large province. Our grandfather Kintu Kidda had devoured lands beyond the Kagera River bordering with the Bakaya people in Tanzania. We suspect the family grounds were somewhere close to the border with Tanzania.”
Magga pulled out a sheet of paper on which the family tree had been drawn. Miisi was awestricken as he looked at different branches of the family.
“You are at the heart of the family tree,” Magga said to Miisi. “We three are descendants of Kintu, of Baale, then of Kidda but you are the only surviving son of the heir lineage as it comes down the bloodline.”
“You see Kintu Kidda had chosen Baale as his heir. In essence then, Baale’s unborn son Kidda was to be the heir. When you follow that heir’s blood it leads to you.”
The men waited for Miisi to be awed. When he said nothing, Kato said softly, “We know that the curse has been harsh on you. Ours is a dreadful inheritance—”
“But then we’re blessed with twins,” Magga interrupted.
“Yes, there is that,” Kato, a twin himself, smiled. “But we would like to say that you should not be hard on your father, he was only trying—”
Miisi laughed cynically.
“He was ill-advised by a quack who had no idea what he was dealing with.”
“Indeed, any true medium would know that one man’s action toward this curse is a dog barking at an elephant.”
“So it is true?” Miisi asked.
Magga and Kato looked at each other.
“What do you mean?”
“That I had an older brother called Baale.”
“You were young.”
“My mother talks about him in my dreams.”
Kato glanced at Magga as if seeking permission to volunteer more information.
“Yes, your oldest brother was Baale and . . . he died.”
“Father sacrificed him.”
“He did not. It was the quack. No father would—”
“Abraham almost did.”
“Well,” Magga smiled uncomfortably, “I don’t know about Abraham but your father was told that just one son, the eldest, would break the curse.”
“Was Baale the smell in the house?”
“What smell?”
“There was a smell in the house.”
“How would you know?”
“I dream.”
The men looked at each other, baffled. Then Magga said, “The quack prescribed to keep the embalmed body in the roof to ward off the curse.”
“If I believed in this curse you talk about, I would take you outside to my back garden and show you the beds laid out for ten out of my twelve children.” Miisi glared at the men as if they had killed his children.
“We know.”
“But the reality is,” Miisi interrupted Kato firmly, “that five of my children were killed during the war and five have died of this our new thing. How can I blame a curse?”
Magga sighed as if he had expected this resistance.
“Regardless of what you believe, Miisi, the sooner we start the restoration the better.”
“Restoration? What restoration?” Miisi asked.
“The family seat in Buddu.”
“Who is buried in o Lwera?” Miisi asked.
The men looked at each other. Then Magga asked, “Has someone been to talk to you?”
Miisi wanted to laugh at their bewildered faces.
“I told you, I dream.”
Magga sat up. Then he looked at Kato. Before the men recovered, Miisi, now drunk on their shock, said, “Tell me about the bees then.”
“What bees?”
“You know nothing about the bees?” Miisi derided.
“Bees are a myth,” said Magga. “Apparently, long, long ago a woman gave birth to a bee in the family . . . that sort of thing,” Magga laughed. “What I know is that either there was a brother named Kayuki or there was a colony of bees close to the house.”
“A swarm of bees arrived here a week ago and camped in a room upstairs,” Miisi said.
Magga shivered.
“Then what happened?” Kato asked.
“Nothing. They died. But then I dreamt again.”
“Dreamt?”
“A man covered in bees took me to an old place, a hill. He showed me where a Nnakato and a Baale are buried. Then he took me to a moor where a lad Kalemanzira and my father are buried.”
There was silence. The men stared at him.
“Before I forget,” Miisi could not help laughing at their grave faces, “He told me to take my brothers and build him a dwelling: he gave me the specific measurements and showed me the tree to use and the one where Nnakato hanged herself.”
There was silence for a long time. Then Kato stood up rather quickly.
“We have to hurry back and report this to the clan elders. It seems like the ancients came to you before we did.” Magga was clearly rattled.
“What did you do with the bees? Dead bees are an omen—death,” Kato said.
“My sister, who believes in that sort of thing, buried them. And as you can see, no one has died.”
“Wait a minute,” Magga whispered to Kintu. “You have no sister.”
Miisi glared first at Magga then at Kato for a while. Then he blurted, “I don’t like the news you have brought.”
“We are sorry,” Kato threw a warning glance at Magga as if to say watch what you say. “None of your family survived the fire. The priests wanted you to heal and gave you a playmate.”
“Maybe we should wait until you meet the rest of the elders: they’ll explain things better.” Kato could not wait to leave.
“Don’t worry about it. No one will tell me she is not my sister,” he smiled. Seeing how shaken the men were, he added, “For a moment there, I got caught up in this whole spiritual situation and played the spiritualist at you. It is true I dream but my dreams are nothing but the rumblings of a disturbed mind. Please don’t read anything into them.”
“We hear you, Miisi, but the elders will decide what is significant and what is not.”
The men left without drinking their juice. Miisi wondered what had come over him to say what he did. He hoped the elders had more common sense than Magga and Kato.
11.
Saturday, January 24, 2004
Miisi opened wide the double doors of the garage and walked around his Toyota, a reconditioned Grande G—locally known as a Nagoya—checking the tires. Then he got in and turned the engine. The red needle of the
fuel gauge rose to the quarter mark. He turned the engine off. The fuel was saved for emergencies: his depression was not. Depression was the fancy name Miisi brought back from Britain for the slumps that sometimes bothered him. The slumps came on when he allowed himself to dwell on things. Since he met the two cousins, Magga and Kato, he had been dwelling on things. He stepped out of the car and banged the door shut. He closed the garage doors and walked across the compound down to the main road. He knew he should tell the family that he was going out but he lacked the resolve. He crossed the road and stood on the other side waiting for a taxi.
The depression crept on Miisi like a chill. He could not blame it on the cousins’ visit twelve days earlier: they only confirmed what had been in his subconscious all along.
A week after their visit, Miisi woke up feeling tired. His mind was a fog as if the drowsiness of a strong medicine had not quite worn off. For a long time, he sat on the bed with his eyes closed. His wife was dusting in the bedroom. For some reason, her dusting was shrill in his ears. There was a dead taste in his mouth. Seeing how quiet he was, his wife stopped cleaning and joked, “Your foul ancestors are upon you. You’re gnashing your teeth.”
Miisi stood up, stomped out of the bedroom and sat on the balcony. He did not go downstairs that day. He did not eat at all. The family tiptoed around him. He heard his wife tell the children, “Tread lightly around him upstairs: he’s looking for someone to bite.”
Miisi knew that he was making the house jittery, he knew that they thought he was just being moody, but he could not snap out of it.
The following day, Miisi once again sat on the balcony, leaning against the wall. To shake himself out of it, he had closed his eyes to imagine beautiful things but instead his mind revisited the 80s bush war that stole away five of his sons. The tragedy was that four of the boys shared a mother, his second wife. At the end of the war, when the bodies of all her progeny with Miisi had been located, exhumed, and reburied, she laughed, “What was all that sex about?”
At first, the bush war was a fable. Miisi had only resettled in the village for one and a half years when one day a green Tata lorry stopped at the crossroads near his house and tipped out a load of soldiers. They spread out in the village like hatched spiders. Word went around that the government suspected rebel activity in the area and the soldiers had come to flush them out. Three days later, when a whole family was killed in the night, villagers started to sleep in the bush.
Nkaada, Miisi’s eldest, died first. He was thirty-two. He was the most handsome and, for Miisi, the easiest of all his sons to get along with because Nkaada did not know how to hold a grudge. At the age of four, he contracted the flu, which his mother ignored. Miisi was working and lived in the city with his second woman at the time, estranged from his first wife. When Miisi came home to visit, Nkaada’s legs had been sucked thin and soft by polio: the boy dragged himself about on his bottom. Miisi immediately took his other children for immunization. Later, when he returned from Britain, Nkaada had become the village cobbler. Miisi bought him a motorized wheelchair, which Nkaada protected more than his life.
That first evening, before the family left for the bush, Nkaada asked to be lifted into his old wheelchair, the new one was hidden in the ceiling. He told the rest of the family to go and leave him in the house. Nothing happened that night. At dawn, the family crept back embarrassed that they had overreacted. Nonetheless, at dusk, the family disappeared into the bush again. When they returned on the third morning, Nkaada was not in the wheelchair. They searched the house but he was nowhere to be found. Then he crawled out of the outdoor kitchen beaming. He was covered in ash.
“Something warned me to leave the house last night, and they came,” he said triumphantly.
“What were they like?”
“That is the funny thing. They were not army. They wore ordinary clothes but had guns. They climbed over the water tank onto the back balcony and into the house. They took nothing though. They did not look in here. It is queer, but I thought I heard Lamula’s voice amongst them.”
Lamula was Miisi’s son who lived in the city.
That evening, as dusk drew near, it became clear that Nkaada was frightened, that he did not want to be left behind. Guilt fell over the house and then grew thorns. The family avoided each other’s eyes, they avoided Nkaada’s presence. Nkaada’s wide eyes, normally languid with laughter, were now dark with resentment. At around six o’ clock, after supper, one by one, the young ones stole away to the bush until only Miisi remained downstairs. His wife was upstairs, hiding her tears. Finally, Miisi said, “You’re coming with us tonight.”
Nkaada shook his head. “Put me in bed. I want to sleep.”
“How shall we—?”
“Go, Father, go!”
Miisi called his wife to help lift Nkaada. By the time she got downstairs, Nkaada was wiping his eyes.
“Go, both of you. They won’t kill a cripple.”
As they started to lift him out of the wheelchair, gunshots rang out in the back garden and Miisi saw an army uniform running behind the kitchen. When he turned, both Nkaada and his wife had vanished. Gunfire came again close to the back door. Moments later, Miisi was behind a bush near the outer compound where the boys played football.
It was a bad raid with bullets flying about for days. As he dodged gunshots, Miisi drifted further from the house. Sanity would prevail: no one would touch a disabled man, he told himself. In those few days Miisi found out that guns had personalities: some cracked, some thundered, and some roared. With the roaring came tiny gunshots, like corn popping. Silence, after gunfire, fell like rain on leaves. Birds were silent. Bushes stood still. Time crawled. Until gunshots came again.
On the fourth day, the first people Miisi saw without guns were strangers, so he stayed put. Then he heard Kaleebu’s voice and emerged from the passion-fruit thicket he had occupied for two days. Kaleebu talked about a frontline that had been at Katikamu near the schools but had now been moved to Wobulenzi Town. He didn’t know what had happened to his family either. Miisi and Kaleebu walked back home, avoiding the road and open spaces. Everyone they met was going in the opposite direction, toward Bukeeka.
At Miisi’s house, the two men slithered along the fringes of the garden watching the house for signs of life. Faint sounds of digging came from behind the outdoor kitchen. When they came closer, the metal of a hoe flashed in the sun and descended repeatedly. Its rhythm was not threatening: someone was digging a deep hole. Four days in the bush had sharpened Miisi’s instincts. He could tell a safe bush: the shrub near the kitchen was thick enough. Miisi ran behind it and saw two of his sons. Ssendi, the fourteen-year-old, stood by a sack while Jumba, two years his senior, dug a hole. When a turn in the wind brought the stench of rotting flesh, Miisi jumped out of the bush. The lads fled. Kaleebu ran after them trying not to call out loud. Miisi remained at the hole with the sack. He felt so light-headed that he leaned against the kitchen wall. When the boys returned, Miisi pointed at the sack.
“Who is that?”
“Who do you think?” Jumba said.
Miisi sat down. The smell was bearable after all.
“Here, help me,” Jumba heaved the side of the sack to roll it into the hole but Miisi did not move. Jumba motioned knowingly to Ssendi that their father was such a muzungu. Jumba dragged the sack up to the edge of the hole. Then he jumped into the hole with Ssendi. Kaleebu kept watch. The boys lowered the sack and climbed out. Jumba sprinkled earth on the sack and said, “Nkaada, brother, wait here until we return. Then we shall give you proper rites.” Miisi looked at his son in disbelief. “Don’t hold this against us.” Jumba carried on as if his father was not there to take lead of the burial. When Jumba had finished he said to Ssendi, “Let’s cover him.”
Miisi turned to Kaleebu. “We’ve got to tell people.” But Kaleebu started to help Jumba fill the grave. Ssendi was on the watch now. Still, Miisi did not help to fill the hole. Kaleebu went back to watch without a word and Ju
mba continued to fill the grave while Ssendi carried the cooking stones from the kitchen to mark it.
When they finished, Jumba looked at Miisi and whispered to his brother, “He should’ve stayed in England.”
Miisi slapped him.
Jumba did not flinch, the grin stayed on his face. Ssendi carried on as if he had not seen the slap. Kaleebu watched the horizon. Miisi’s hands shook.
“I’ve got to check my house,” Kaleebu said.
“There’s no one at your house,” Jumba said, the grin still on his face.
“Maybe someone has just arrived.”
“But we saw your family on their way toward Bukeeka two days ago.”
“Did you say you saw them?”
“Your wife and everyone.”
“Well,” Kaleebu smiled.
“Let’s go then,” Miisi said.
“Still, I’ll glance at my house one last time,” Kaleebu insisted.
“One-last-time is the biggest killer,” Jumba laughed at his own wit.
“I’ll kill this boy before the guns do,” Miisi threatened.
“Where do we go then?” Kaleebu asked.
“That way,” Miisi pointed in the direction of Bukeeka and started walking. But the boys stayed put. Miisi stopped and looked back at them. Ssendi looked away. He tugged at a blade of grass. When it came free, he chewed at it frantically. Jumba said, “We’re going to Butanza.”
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