Chapter 10
After Hell
Miriam Ssekandi sent for me on a Thursday.
I said at the end of the last chapter that I'd tell you how it came out, and I have been carrying it around for three days, not wanting to set it down. It is the last thing I have to write. After it there is only a little, and then the book is done, and I will have nothing left to do with my hands.
The message came on Monday. It came by way of Inspector Okello, who drove from Kampala to Jinja on his day off in an old green Corolla, and found me on the landing, and stood for a minute at the edge of the planks with his hands in his pockets, looking uncomfortable, the way a man does who has been asked to carry a message he doesn't fully understand.
"She came to my office," he said. "On Friday. She sat on the bench outside, as she always does. I came out. She stood up. And she said: Tell the man. Thursday. Port Bell. Four o'clock."
"That's all?"
"That's all." He looked at the water. "I asked if there was anything else. She said, Tell him to bring the old one."
"Which old one?"
"I assumed she meant the fisherman."
I did not ask what it meant. I only said, "Thank you." And the Inspector nodded, and turned to go, and then turned back and said, a little stiffly, "Mr. Kizza. I would like to say something. I've wanted to for some time." He cleared his throat. "I've been in this work fourteen years. I've put away a lot of men. And I've never — I have never seen one of you come in. Not on his own. Not like that." He fumbled with his car keys. "I thought it was a trick. I'm sorry. I thought it for a year."
I said I'd have thought so too.
"I don't know what you believe," he said. "I don't know what happened to you. But I have started going to church again. My wife is delighted." He smiled sheepishly. "I don't think she knows why."
He shook my hand and went away.
We went on Thursday, Joel and I, and Pastor Wasswa, who had insisted on coming and whom nobody had the heart to refuse. It was a hot day. We took the minibus taxi to Port Bell and then a boda down to the landing, and got off at the end of a dirt road beside a tangle of rusted cranes and old fishing boats. Beyond them lay the lake.
I had never seen it from there. I had known it only as a word in a statement. It was wide and flat and silver, with a haze over it, and the far shore lost in the shimmer, and a few canoes standing out in the glare. There was a smell of fish and diesel and wet mud. Children were swimming off a concrete slip. A woman was washing clothes on a stone.
She was waiting at the end of the pier.
She had come with her three daughters. They stood in a row behind her in black, tall girls in headscarves, with their hands folded, each with her mother's long face. Miriam herself wore grey. She had her bag on her arm. She stood with her back straight, looking out over the water, and she did not turn as we came along the planks.
I stopped a few paces away. Joel stopped beside me. The pastor, who has a limp, stopped last, breathing hard.
Miriam turned her head.
"You brought them," she said.
"Yes, Mama."
"Good." She looked at Joel, and her face softened by about the width of a hair. "Sir. Thank you for the flowers."
"It was nothing," said Joel. "They were for her son."
"I know what they were." She turned back to me. "I have been up for three nights. I have prayed the whole night. I do not know what I am doing."
"You don't have to—"
"Be silent." She said it without heat. "I will say it, and then you will do what I tell you."
I bowed my head.
"I told you I would not curse you. I have not. I tried, on the second night. I stood in my kitchen and I said the words, the ones my mother taught me, the old ones, for a man who has killed your child. They are very strong." Her voice was low. "And I could not finish. I got as far as your name. And I heard — I don't know what I heard. A boy. A boy in a chair, saying please."
I couldn't move.
"I do not forgive you," she said again. "I want to be clear. I am not a woman who forgives. But I am very tired." She looked out at the lake. "I have been angry for fifteen years. I thought it kept him alive. I thought if I let it go, he would be gone. And I found, on the third night, that it was not so. That the anger was not him. It was only me, holding something that was heavy, because I thought I had to." She took a breath. "And I do not know how to put it down. I thought perhaps — I thought you might."
"Mama?"
"You said you had a way. The pastor told the Inspector. He said that you had given something away, to your God. That you had said a thing and it had been taken." Her eyes came to me, dark and bright and dry. "I do not know if it works for a woman like me. I do not know if it works for a mother. But I have a stone."
She opened her bag.
It was a flat grey stone, about the size of her two hands, smooth on one side, rough on the other. It was heavy. She held it a moment, then turned it over, and I saw that something was cut into it, in neat deep lines, with a chisel. A small cross at the top. And below it, in plain letters:
DANIEL SSEKANDI. Beloved son. 19 years.
"My eldest daughter had it made," she said. "Last month. In the market. She said, Mama, we have to have somewhere." Her mouth twisted. "I said there is no body. She said, there is a lake."
"I've no right—"
"I am not asking what you have a right to." She held it out. "I am asking you to carry it."
I took it. It was cold and heavy. I held it against my chest, with both arms, as one holds a child.
"Walk to the end," said Miriam Ssekandi.
We walked to the end of the pier together, all of us, in a line: Miriam first, then her daughters, then I, with the stone, then Joel, then the pastor limping last. The planks creaked. The water slapped underneath. At the very end there was a rail, and below it the lake, brown-green and lapping, only a few feet down.
I could see the bottom. It wasn't deep here. It was dark and thick with silt, and a fish, a small silver one, hung motionless near the pilings.
"Here," said Miriam.
I stood at the rail with the stone against me.
I don't know what I'd expected. I think I'd thought it would be a moment of great feeling. A catch of the breath. A sense of something passing. But what I felt was only the stone, heavy and cold against my ribs, and the sun on the back of my neck, and the smell of the water. And the thing I was thinking about was not Daniel at all.
I was thinking about the weight.
It was exactly the weight of a thing I'd carried for fifteen years. I'd have known it in the dark. A flat, unyielding, ordinary, rough-sided thing, pressed against the place where the heart is. I'd thought of it as a metaphor. I had written carry it, and put it down, and I had thought of those as figures of speech. And here it was, in my arms, in the sun, with its name cut in it.
"Mama," I said. "Will you say something?"
"I cannot."
"Will you let the pastor?"
She hesitated. She looked at Pastor Wasswa, who stood leaning on his stick at the back, with his shabby brown suit and his white beard. He said nothing. He only waited.
"Let him say what he must," said Miriam. "And let the old one say his."
The pastor came forward. He took off his hat. He didn't preach. He didn't say any of the things that I might have said. He only stood at the rail, with the lake behind him, and spoke in a quiet voice.
"Lord," he said. "We don't know what to say. We are a mother and a murderer and a few old men on a pier, and we have nothing to offer You but a stone. We know You were here. We know You were in the godown, though we did not see You. We know You were in the water. We know You took him in Your hands when we couldn't. We ask You to hold him now. We ask You to hold her. And we ask You, with all our hearts, to teach us how to carry what we can't put down."
He paused.
"He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds," he said. "Amen."
Joel spoke next. He did not make a prayer of his own. He said, in his slow old voice, the twenty-third psalm, from memory, and when he came to Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me, he stopped, and said that line again, softly, as if to the water. I saw Miriam's daughters bow their heads. I saw the eldest begin to cry, silently, with her hand over her mouth.
When it was done, there was a silence.
"Now," said Miriam.
I leaned over the rail. I held out the stone, as far as my arms would reach, over the green water, with its face turned up to the sky. I looked at the letters. Beloved son. The sun lay on them. They were cut very clean.
"Daniel," I said.
It was the first time I'd said it aloud to him.
"I'm sorry. I took everything from you. I don't know what You are, now. I don't know if You can hear me. But I want you to know that I think of you every day. I'll think of you every day I'm alive. I'll never stop. I'll carry your name." My voice broke. "And I'm going to ask the Lord to give you back to her, in whatever way He can. And if He won't, I'm going to ask Him to carry her till He does."
I let go.
The stone dropped with a small hard plunge and a ring of silver. I watched it go down, turning slowly, through the green, and out of sight. The water closed. The ring spread to the pilings and was gone.
Nobody spoke.
I stayed at the rail with my empty hands held out in front of me. They were open, palms up. They were shaking. They looked small.
Beside me, I heard a sound. I turned my head.
Miriam Ssekandi was standing with her hand on the rail, looking down at the place where the stone had gone. Her face was wet. She did not wipe it. She was weeping quite openly, without noise, as a person weeps who has been holding her breath for fifteen years and has just let it go. Her daughters had gathered round her. The eldest had an arm about her shoulders.
"There," said Miriam, to the water, in a low voice. "There. Now I know where to come."
I'm going to finish.
It's after midnight. It's raining on the tin, a quiet steady rain, the sort that makes a room feel like the inside of a drum. The lamp is full. Mama Joyce has gone to bed. The house is still. Out beyond the wall I can hear the river, which I can't see, and which I know the way you know where a sleeping person lies.
The blue book is nearly full. I've turned to the last pages. There is a line of print along the bottom, in tiny letters, that I didn't notice before: Made in Kampala. 80 leaves. Eighty pages. I have not used a single sheet of paper in my life that I didn't mean to fill. But I've filled this.
I want to write you the last thing. And I find, now that I'm here, that I don't have to search for it. It has been lying in front of me all the time, since the night in the shed, when I sat up in the dark and asked a question.
For twenty-five years, I asked the wrong thing.
I asked it in the bed in Kawempe. I asked it on the football road and in the Wandegeya gate. I asked it in the godown and in the cell and on the rock by the river. I asked it every time I was hurt and every time I hurt someone, until it had worn a groove in me, deep and smooth, like the groove a rope makes in a rock.
Why did God let me suffer?
I'd have said I had good reasons. A boy under a bed. A father in the road. A mother who cried. A friend in prison and a child I couldn't find. There was a great deal to suffer. I won't say there wasn't. I won't say the question was a stupid one, or a wicked one. It's the oldest in the Bible. It's in Job and the Psalms and the mouth of Jesus on the cross. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? If it's good enough for Him, it's good enough for us.
But it was the only one I asked. And because I asked it of a God I didn't believe in, I got no answer, and I took the silence as proof.
Why did He let it happen?
I still don't entirely know. I'd be lying if I said I did. I don't know why a nine-year-old lies on his stomach and watches his mother's blood go into the earth. I don't know why Daniel was in the godown. I can't explain Teopista Ssali. I don't believe that God sends suffering as a lesson, like a man giving a child a beating for his own good. I've seen too much. I don't think the pastor does either.
What I know is this. I know a thing that I didn't know, and that I cannot unlearn.
I had been twenty-five years in hell, and I had asked all that time what had put me there. I had never once asked what had been holding me up.
It was so simple. It was so exactly the thing I'd not been able to say.
I had been twenty-five years in hell, and I had asked all the time what put me there. I never once asked what was holding me up.
Why did God keep me alive?
I'm going to give you the answers I have. They aren't big. I haven't a grand mission. I'm not going to tell you that I've been called to preach to nations or to found an orphanage or to write a book that will change the world. This book is eighty pages in a blue cover, bought for two thousand shillings. It may be read by three people.
I think the first answer is the plainest. I think He kept me because He loves me.
I wrote that sentence and stopped, because it looks so small, so like something you might embroider on a cushion. But I've been turning it over for four years. I've tried every other. I've tried to teach a lesson. I've tried to use me. I've tried to show His power. None of them fit. None of them can explain a man in a godown, or a mother who prayed for fifteen years, or a woman in the front row of a courtroom with a knife in her bag.
What fits is only that. Greater love hath no man than this. I read it in the shed. And then I read the one beside it, which I hadn't noticed until Pastor Wasswa pointed to it with his thick old finger: But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
While we were yet sinners.
Not after we'd stopped. Not when we'd tidied up. Not when I was finally someone worth dying for. While I was in the godown, on my knees, with the blood to my wrists. While I stood on the road with a can of petrol, looking at a light in a window. While I knelt on a rock in the dark with my eyes shut, and thought, this is correct.
While I was yet a sinner.
That is why. That's all. He kept me alive because He wanted me. He wanted me the way a father wants a son who is a speck on the horizon in rags. And He kept me, with all the stubborn, silent patience of a love that does not get tired, until I turned my head.
The second answer is smaller.
I think He kept me for the people I would come to. For Brian, on his crate, who tells me about onions. For Timothy, who has asked me to be godfather to a second child. For Hope, who rang me on a Tuesday, without warning, and said, "I don't know why I'm calling." And then talked for an hour and ten minutes about a book she was reading, and at the end said, "Right. Bye," and put the phone down, and I sat for a long time in the dusk with the phone on my knee.
I don't know what any of them will be. Moses has not answered. Miriam may curse me tomorrow. There are people I may never be forgiven by, and I have to hold that. But I've begun to see that there is a work to be done, and it's a work only I can do. It's the work my mother did.
I pray for them. Every morning, every night.
I started in the shed, without thinking, and I haven't stopped. I kneel on the floor of this room, by the bed, with my elbows on the blanket, and I say their names. Hope. Timothy. Brian. Moses. Miriam. Daniel's sisters. Walu, in his cell. Kakooza. The tailor and his wife. I don't know that it does anything. I think it does. I say, Lord, keep them. Not fix them. Not change them. Only keep. Because I have learned what the word means.
It means do not let go.
My mother knelt on a mud floor, with a broken rib, and said it for fifteen years over a boy who wouldn't hear. And it was heard. It took everything she had. It took until after she was dead. But the answer came down the lane on a Thursday evening in a white shirt, carrying a plastic bag.
I'm now the one on the floor. I don't know whose door I'm kneeling at. I know only that someone will, one day, come up the path.
There is a third answer. I'll put it last. I'm not sure it's mine to give.
Perhaps that is why I have been kept. Not as proof that suffering has an explanation, but as evidence that a man can be carried farther than he knows.
Not me. I'm nothing to show. A broken, middle-aged man with a record, a scar, a bad heart in the weather. But if you'd told me when I was sixteen that someone like me could be held, I'd have laughed in your face. If you'd told me at twenty-six, with Daniel's blood on my wrists, I'd have hit you. At thirty-five, with a plastic bag at a prison gate, I'd have shrugged.
I needed to see it. I needed to see the thing done, and there was no one to do it before me. So perhaps He keeps people like me, the ones who fall right to the floor, the ones who've nothing to bring, as a kind of evidence. A man pulled out of a river. A map of the place where grace reaches to.
I'm not saying it will be quick. I'm not saying it will be clean. I'm saying there is a hand. I felt it in the godown, in the fire, in the river, and in the quiet room where I finally stopped running.
You haven't.
I'm not saying it will be quick. I am not saying it will be clean. I'm saying there's a hand. It was in the godown. It was in the fire. It was in the river. It's in the room where you are tonight, in the dark, listening for the lorry in the lane. I can't prove it to you. I can only tell you that I was where you are, and I have been dragged, kicking, out of there, by something I didn't deserve and didn't ask for, and I'm sitting now at a table in the lamplight, with my hand steady, and a candle burning on the shelf.
Whither shall I flee from thy presence?
You can't. That's the good news. I tried for twenty-five years. It cannot be done.
I should close.
The rain is lighter. It has dropped to a thin patter, and under it I can hear the first bird. The window has gone grey. The lamp is going pale in the growing light, and the book is almost done.
I'd like to say one more thing, for my mother, because I don't have anyone else to say it to.
It took longer than I wanted. It took twenty-five years. But it came.
You asked Him to bring me home, and He did. It wasn't the home either of us imagined. It was a tin church, a river, a fisherman, a brother, a daughter, and a life I had to learn to live honestly.
It took longer than you had. It took twenty-five years of me. But it came. I want you to know it came.
You asked Him to bring me home, and He did. It wasn't what either of us thought. It wasn't a lane in Kawempe or a kitchen with a candle. It was a tin church on a hill, and a shed by the river, and a fisherman who washed my hands. But I am home. I'm kept. I'm in the arms of the One you were talking to, all that time, in the dark.
Do not let go, you said.
He didn't, Mama.
He never did.
The sun's coming up.
I can see it through the shutter, a thin gold line, laid across the table, across the page, across the back of my right hand. The hand is still. It has stopped shaking. I don't know when. I looked down just now and it was lying on the paper, flat and brown and scarred, with a white seam from the thumb to the wrist, and it was perfectly steady.
There's something I haven't told you. When I started this book, I said the pen was borrowed, and that I would have to give it back. I've been dreading it. It's a stupid little plastic pen, blue, with a chewed cap, and it belongs to Mama Joyce's grandson, who is nine, and who lent it to me on the first night without a word, because he saw I had none.
I'm going to go down to the kitchen in a minute and put it on the table beside the teapot.
And I think she will say, Keep it. I think she'll say it without looking up. She says it about everything. I've a notion that I'll be given more than one thing, in this house, that I have not earned.
I've learned not to argue.
The cockerel is going. He's wrong about the time, as always. He's late today. But I forgive him. He is doing the only thing he knows.
I was nine years old when I hid under a bed. I was forty-one when I finally came out.
I spent twenty-five years thinking survival was the whole story.
It wasn't.
It turns out I was not surviving.
I was being carried.
It is of the LORD'S mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not.
This is the one. He will do it.
He did.
Amen.
He did.
Amen.