Tuesday, April 13, 2004
The eighth hour of the day, two o’ clock in the afternoon, was approaching. This was the time when the Ganda committed the dead to earth and turned their backs on them. Kamu’s coffin was carried through the front door then around the house to the path that led to the family cemetery. Mourners fell behind the coffin and walked out of the house. Miisi gripped Kusi’s hand. His wife and sister wailed loudly but the rest of the mourners bowed their heads in silence.
Miisi, against Kusi’s advice, had insisted on examining Kamu’s remains. He did so at that moment of wrapping the dead when all mourners are sent out of the house and the body remains with only the heads of the clan, when all the synthetic objects, clothing, jewelry, hair extensions, or weaves are removed from the body—so that it can go back to earth the way it came into the world—and it is then wrapped in barkcloth. One of Kamu’s front teeth, after the milk teeth fell out, had arrived before the other and grew so wide that his siblings had nicknamed him “Axe.” When the other tooth arrived, it squeezed into a small gap upsetting the arrangement of his teeth. Miisi hoped that this would help him identify Kamu.
He was therefore surprised to find the real Kamu in the coffin, the whole of him—one eye swollen, puffed lip, nose and ears plugged with cotton and the head bandaged—but he was as whole as if he had died the day before. Miisi could not believe that the Mulago Hospital that he knew—corrupt and indifferent to human suffering—could have so preserved the body of an unknown person. He was both glad and heartbroken. It was Kamu in the coffin but it meant that Kamu was truly dead. Miisi stood up and stared, trying to arrange his feelings. He should have felt relief first and then heartbreak but he had a sense of floating. After the death of his daughter the previous year, he had thought that he would never be able to take the death of another child. Yet here he was staring at Kamu’s bandaged head without clear emotions.
“He is my son,” he said to the clan leader.
“All right then, step outside now, leave him to us.”
Now he understood why Kusi did not want him to see the corpse. She had lied about robbers. That attack on Kamu had been sustained; robbers hit to disable so they can get away. Kamu was targeted. It was premeditated murder. He was now sure that Kusi, for all her “I don’t know what happened,” had not told him the whole truth surrounding Kamu’s death. Apparently, she had spent the week leading up to Easter trying to contact Kamu so that they could come to the reunion together. Failing to raise him on the phone, she drove to Nabugabo Road where Kamu sold hardware. The men on the street had said, “Kamu Kintu? Wuuwi, he’s long gone.”
Kusi had said that she found out that day, in Bwaise, that Kamu had been attacked on the night of the 5th of January as he returned home but she did not know why. Frightened, the woman who lived with him at the time had fled. This did not make sense to Miisi. Why would Kamu’s woman be frightened? Why did she not try to find Kamu’s people? But all Kusi had said was that the woman probably did not know where to find them. When Kusi found her, the woman had told her of the people she suspected of killing Kamu but when Kusi turned up to interrogate the men, she found them dead. That was on Good Friday.
“Are they the same councillors in the Bwaise massacre?” Miisi had asked.
“I think so.” But Kusi could not look straight in his eyes. “You never know what people get up to—local councillors in the day, thugs in the night.”
Now, as he walked behind Kamu’s coffin, realization crept on him. Kusi had killed the men in Bwaise. She would not flinch at administering her sense of justice. Miisi waited for the whole horror of what Kusi had done to overwhelm him. Instead, a spark of satisfaction with her swift execution of justice shot through his heart and his mouth twitched. That was when horror gripped him, at the surge of pride and satisfaction. His decay had set in, Miisi realized. Other people would call it becoming numb but to Miisi it was decaying and to decay was to die.
Miisi remembered the fifth of January clearly. While Kamu lay dead somewhere, the bees saw it fit to lodge in his house. He had laughed at Kato saying that dead bees announced death. Why were the gods so good at displaying omens? Surely if they stopped tragedies, there would be no need for omens?
At two o’ clock, when Kamu’s coffin was lowered into the grave, Miisi’s grip on reality slackened. A new reality was slowly overwriting the existing one. It had happened before. Miisi had gallstone problems, a doctor friend recommended codeine, but when he swallowed the two prescribed tablets he did not feel any relief. After two hours he took another two, which made him sleep fitfully. At one point when he woke up, the floor in his bedroom was a lawn. It was frightening to realize that eyes could lie.
Now, in his mind, the reality of Kamu being buried was like thin white paint. But a new reality, a thick red paint, was spreading over it. Miisi closed his eyes to clear his vision, but it stayed. He had a sense of floating in two worlds. In one, his wife was crying out to Kamu, which meant that he was awake and that Kamu was really dead. In the other, the coffin being lowered held his father’s body and Miisi was a child. There were cousins all around but the bush was Kiyiika, which meant he was dreaming. Miisi turned and saw Kusi standing close to him. Recognizing her, he grabbed her hand and the invading reality fled. He recognized the residents—Kaleebu was in charge of the burial, Nyago and his wife minded the grandchildren, the house was behind him rising above the matooke plantations, and the ten graves of concrete slabs before them were his children. Miisi heaved a sigh of relief; he had almost lost his mind.
Miisi is walking away from the grave. He is relieved that his father has been committed to the underworld. Mourners are streaming back to the house. Miisi whispers to the woman holding his hand, “I’m lucky he’s dead. I won’t be sacrificed.”
“What?” The woman is puzzled.
“Shhh, keep your voice down. He sacrificed my older brother, Baale. I was next.”
“Father?”
“Shhh, they’ll hear you!”
“Father, it’s me, Kusi.”
Miisi hesitates, then shakes his head. “How can I be your father? I am just a child.”
The woman becomes agitated. She leads him to a double-story house. Mourners stare. Others are still crying for his father.
“Don’t cry for him,” Miisi shouts at them. “He was going to kill me too.” Another woman, old, joins them and leads him through the back door, through a dining area, and up a staircase.
“Where are you taking me? Are you in league with him?”
“No, he’s dead,” the old woman says, but the woman who had been holding his hand is crying.
Miisi smiles in relief. The old woman is joined by another old woman. They lead him up the stairs to a bedroom at the end of the corridor. As they enter the bedroom, Miisi sees his father’s shirts and trousers in the wardrobe. He panics.
“This is his bedroom.”
The women turn onto a balcony and into the room on the right. It is small; the bed is made up with white sheets. He collapses on the bed and realizes that he is too exhausted to keep his eyes open.
Miisi wakes up in a dark room. It is night and the house is silent. He does not know how he got into this room. He sits up and sees a woman sleeping on the floor. A guard. He has been abducted. His father must have brought him here to sacrifice him.
Carefully, he picks up his clothes, steps over the woman, and slips out of the room. The corridor and stairs are familiar but downstairs is a puzzle. The house is dead. There are people sleeping everywhere on the floor but no one wakes up as he walks past. Miisi lifts the heavy bar across the door, then opens the latch and runs out of the house heading toward a hedge. He looks back: he has never known a double-storied shrine. He ducks through the bushes under a mango tree and then runs as fast as he can.
13.
Tuesday, April 13, 2004
It was nine thirty in the evening. Paulo sat on the verandah leaning against the wall of the annex. His stomach growled but he ignored it.
The night sky was clear and the stars had come out to play. The man in the moon still held up his axe—to chop firewood—the way he did when Paulo was a boy. Images and words and gestures from his childhood came and went as he searched for clues and hints about his incestuous birth. Ruth sat weeping under the palm tree near the steps to the road. Paulo had reverted to his childhood habit of calling her Ruth. Uncle Job stood over her, his hand on her shoulder. Now, even such an innocuous gesture seemed incestuous. Paulo felt the urge to go over and toss his uncle’s hand off his mother’s shoulder. His eyes met Uncle Job’s. Uncle Job stared back steadily. Paulo looked away in disgust.
Faisi was as unshaken as granite. Amidst the confusion, she was focused. It was as if she had known that one day Kanani would let her down but there was no anger. When Kanani’s body arrived from hospital at around midday, neighbors had streamed in to console her but her lack of grief threw them. Not knowing what to do with a cheerful widow, they sat for a polite while and then left. All inquiries about Kanani’s death—How could he die so quickly?—were met with a clipped, “One moment he was alive, the next he was dead.”
Soon after, the twins had arrived and Faisi sang louder to drown Ruth’s sobs. The twins did not go to her for soothing. Instead, they hugged each other. Paulo realized then that the thin thread that had tied mother and twins together had snapped. Faisi looked childless already. Yet he could not go to the twins and comfort them in their moment of pain. He walked out of the house and stayed in the annex on his own until his girlfriend and other friends came to keep him company.
The Awakened had turned out in large numbers. They were all the same age as his grandparents. They sang of seeing Him over the other side when He would wipe their tears away. From time to time, Faisi interrupted the singing with a testimony from her marriage. She called Kanani the “calm and cool breeze” that had soothed her life. She talked about his patience, of his unwavering love for her, and of his devotion to God.
By the time Paulo arrived home from the reunion at midday on Tuesday, Kanani was dead. Ruth had rung him several times in the morning before he plucked up the courage to talk to her. When he did, she told him that Kanani had been to see her late Monday evening to tell her what had happened at the reunion. On Tuesday morning, Kanani was found dead on the Cathedral’s grounds—heart failure. Perhaps what he did broke his heart. Paulo, who had by then run out of emotion, felt nothing for his grandfather’s broken heart. He told Ruth that he was OK with her but he did not want to see Uncle Job. To him, Ruth could not have been a willing partner. Even when Ruth told him that she was as much to blame as Job, Paulo would not listen.
“What can we do to ease your pain?” Ruth had cried down the phone.
“Nothing.”
“You have no idea how we love you, Paulo. It was wrong and we’re ashamed, but you’re here and you’re ours.”
“You’re right. I don’t understand you two.”
“Back then me and Job, we saw ourselves as one person,” Ruth tried to explain.
“Hmm? So you are saying that it was only masturbation?”
“What can I say to make sense?”
“Don’t make sense, Ruth.”
She hesitated at being called Ruth then carried on. “Not giving you away was the only kind thing they did to us. Now they’ve taken you.”
Paulo did not reply.
“Poor Job—now you hate him.”
“I am not part of your world where a mawemuko can escape himself.”
“He did not call you that!”
“Hmm.”
“He used to be the easy one. Now he’ll not even find the salvation he’s been slaving for.”
Thirty minutes later, a large group of clan people led by Bweeza arrived. They came to the annex where Paulo sat and fussed over him. That was the moment when Paulo broke down and cried and the elders took turns holding him. Afterwards, when Elder Kityo asked, Paulo led the group to where Ruth and Job sat. He said, “These are the twins.” There were hugs and “Welcome into the clan,” and Bweeza called them her own children. There was relief among the clan people that they had finally met Elder Kanani’s twins. Kitooke whispered, “We’ve come to be with you because you’re ours.” Even Job’s angry face cracked and he wept. Paulo wondered whether he was crying with shame. Faisi watched the group anxiously. When Job broke down, she stood up and went behind the house. She had not seen him cry since he was a child.
Paulo pointed out the Awakened to the clan so they could avoid them. Nonetheless, the elders went to Faisi and offered her their condolences. Faisi must have warned the Awakened about the presence of these relatives, for soon the vigil fell into three camps: Paulo, the twins, and the Kintu clan in one, Faisi and the Awakened army in another, and then the villagers who had no idea there were camps. Uncle Job seemed to have established a rapport with the elders Kityo and Kitooke while Ruth and Bweeza reminisced through the night about old Nakaseke. Paulo relaxed. He could even bear Uncle Job’s presence a little.
When the clan inquired whether Kanani would be “returned home” to Kiyiika, the Awakened pointed out that he had divorced all his worldly kin. He would be buried in the Cathedral’s cemetery. The Awakened brethren also said that they would meet all the funeral costs and make all the necessary arrangements.
Despite the long weekend they had spent at Kiyiika, the clan sat through the funeral service at Namirembe Cathedral on Wednesday. The Awakened gave Kanani such a dignified funeral that Uncle Job thanked them in a brief speech. After burial, the clan elders told the twins about the rituals in Kiyiika. They also told Job that he was now an elder and should attend the council meetings, which put a smile on Job’s face. The twins said they would let Bweeza know when they were ready to do the rituals.
Faisi did not come home after Kanani’s burial. The Awakened had booked her into Namirembe Guest House for a month. Paulo visited her twice but both times he found her in the company of the Awakened. They seemed to be taking good care of her. Paulo feared that her gulu-gulu kind of strength would collapse as soon as the Awakened support stopped. However, after her return and cheerful resumption of sowing, Paulo gave up. The main house remained in a darkened silence.
14.
Wednesday, April 14, 2004
The thanksgiving party with the locals lasted throughout Monday night. Most clan members left Kiyiika on Tuesday morning but by Wednesday afternoon when Isaac wound everything up some cousins, especially the elderly ones, still lingered. Isaac promised the local councillors that as soon as the elders found time to meet and come up with a plan for Nnakato’s site they would be informed. All the clan elders had left earlier on Tuesday to attend the burial of Mzei Miisi’s son in Bulemeezi. But then at midday, Kalema had rung to say that Mzei Kanani had died and Isaac knew that from Bulemeezi, the elders would go to Bukesa to keep Kalema company during the vigil. Bweeza had already taken Suubi home. Isaac sighed. The medium had warned them: Ntwire was leaving, but he was not going empty-handed.
As Isaac drove through Buddu, he tried to maintain the sense of elation of the weekend. He had only been in the county for a week, but the landscape was familiar—Buddu felt as if it had been his home county all his life. But then Masaka Town receded from his rearview mirror and the euphoria started to wear off. Slowly, reality began to crystallize. The reunion had been a screen behind which he had hidden. With Masaka and Nyendo Towns now behind him, the screen was falling away. As o Lwera’s desolation rushed toward him, he had no option but to contemplate the future he was driving into. He glanced over at Kizza. He lay back in the seat dreamy-eyed, perhaps falling asleep, perhaps regretting that the numerous playmates the reunion had brought were gone.
After Lukaya, a town in o Lwera, Isaac became peculiarly aware of the oncoming traffic. As the vehicles drove past, the noise of the engines seemed to cut right through him. He was aware of the mad run of their tires. The very speed of the vehicles seemed so close that he could touch the danger. Some cars had extended bonnets, yet the tax
is, which were speedy and light on the ground, had no bonnets at all. Coaches charged like bull elephants, as if the roads belonged to them alone, yet they carried ridiculously overloaded rooftop luggage racks that would easily topple them in a curve. Family cars were less intimidating but once they came level with Isaac, he looked at the passengers and wondered who was waiting for them at home.
He liked lorries; their growl was no-nonsense. They had single front tires and the drivers were elevated twice as high as his truck. They did not have much of a bonnet for a buffer but the fact that the drivers were elevated so high was reassuring. He started to look out for lorries, especially Tatas, which were used by the army, the articulated ones and those with trailers.
After Kayabwe, Isaac became impatient. Lorries were scarce on the road; perhaps merchandise transporters traveled at night. Still there would be one or two on the road soon, he told himself. He first saw one with potential as he drew to Mpigi Town. He accelerated. Four hundred meters away from him, the lorry slowed down and turned off the road. Then he was in Mpigi Town and running out of road distance. He slowed down so much that cars behind him hooted indignantly as they overtook him. He came up to the rise in Nsangi and saw, coming below, a lorry with a trailer. He decided that he was not going to look at the occupants. He realized too late after glancing at Kizza that he shouldn’t have. Luckily, Kizza was asleep. As he came down the incline, Isaac accelerated. He did not need to because the incline seemed to pull the truck down. As he came down into the valley, a long hoot came from the lorry. The sound triggered the image of the trains in South Africa, then the train tracks, then the room he trained in, then his grandmother saying that certificates don’t rot they just collect dust, Mr. Kintu loved cakes, Sasa’s deejay clothes on a hanger . . .
He lay on the road. A lot of feet were running around him.
“Tie the wound on the head.”
Isaac’s head moved of its own accord, no matter how hard he tried to keep it still, it moved as if it were not attached to him. He did not feel it.
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