Chapter 3
The Descent
I have been trying all week to find the place where I went wrong, and I can't.
That is the thing nobody warns you about. When you are inside it, you expect a moment, a door, a fork in the road with a sign. You expect to be able to look back and say, there, that was the day. And there were days. I could give you a list. But when I lay them side by side on this table, in the grey light, they don't look like forks. They look like stairs. Each one a little lower than the last, each one so shallow you could step down it without noticing, and at no point did the descent feel like a fall. It felt like walking.
I was sixteen when I left my mother's house. I was twenty-four when I came back to it. This is the chapter in between, and I'll tell you now that I don't come out of it well. I will also tell you that some of what I'm about to describe I did not feel at the time. I felt it later, all at once, in a room in Jinja. I'm going to try to write it as I saw it then, with the eyes of the boy, and then step out of it and tell you what the man sees now. If it sounds like two people arguing, that is because it is.
Walu took me in as you would take in a stray dog that has proved useful.
He had a room for me, over a hardware shop in Nakasero, with a mattress and a window that looked onto a wall. He gave me a phone, one of the new kind, with a little green screen, and a charger, and a card of airtime. He bought me two shirts and a pair of trousers that fit. And on the first night, he took me to a restaurant on Kampala Road and ordered goat and chips and a Fanta, and watched me eat as though it were an entertainment.
"You're hungry," he said.
"I'm fine."
"No. You're hungry. It's all right. Eat." He leaned back, with his hands folded over his stomach, and his gold chain caught the light. "A man who's ashamed to be hungry will do anything for the first person who feeds him. Do you understand? Remember that. It'll be the most useful thing I tell you."
I remember I laughed. I thought he was joking.
I did not realise, until I was in prison in my thirties and had a lot of time, that he had told me exactly what he was doing, and that I had written it down in my head as wisdom.
I'll explain the business, because I am going to describe a lot of what it did to people, and I want you to know what it was.
Walu was not a gangster in the way films show them. There was no warehouse of guns. He ran what he called services. He bought stolen goods and sold them again, a wide web of it: phones, car radios, generators, containers that fell off lorries on the northern highway. He lent money at rates that would have made a bank blush to the market women who needed stock by Monday and couldn't wait for Friday. He sold fuel that had come across the border in drums, and cigarettes, and, as time passed, other things, small white packets that came in on a bus from the coast and went out again in pockets. He had an office, with a desk and a plant. He wore a tie on Sundays. He paid his tithe.
I carried bags. That was all, for the first year. I carried bags and counted money and kept my mouth shut, and I learned quickly, because I had that gift, the map in my head, the way I could see where everyone would be before they got there. Within six months I knew every stall in Owino market by the colour of its tarpaulin. Within a year I could look at a man's shoes and tell you what he owed.
I was good at it. I want you to hear that I was good at it, and that this was the worst thing that could have happened. If I had been clumsy, if I'd been caught the first week and sent home with a beating, I might have been saved. But I was talented. I was the best thing he'd found in years. He told me so. He put his hand on my shoulder, in front of the other boys, and said, "This one has a head."
I had been waiting my whole life for somebody to say that.
The first time I hurt somebody, it was a tailor.
His name was Kasirye, and he had a shop the width of a doorway behind the old taxi park, with a treadle machine and a bolt of blue cloth and a picture of the Sacred Heart on the wall. He'd borrowed two hundred thousand shillings from Walu to buy a second machine. The interest was thirty per cent a month. Four months later, he owed more than he had borrowed, and he had no money, and Walu said, "Go and talk to him."
I was seventeen. I took with me a boy called Ssebo, who was older and bigger, and who carried a short iron bar in his jacket. I didn't need it, I told myself. I would only talk.
Kasirye was sewing a trouser leg when we came in. He was about fifty, with grey hair and small round glasses, and when he saw us he stopped, with the needle in his hand, and stood up, and wiped his palms on his apron. His wife was in the back, and I could hear a baby.
"Gentlemen," he said. "Please. A few days."
"You said that in March," said Ssebo.
"I have a customer. A big order. A wedding. If you give me till Friday—"
I should say that I felt sorry for him. I did. I want to be honest about that, so you can see it's not that I was a monster who felt nothing. I felt it quite plainly, in my chest, like a stone. I thought: this is somebody's father. I thought of my mother's sewing machine, going away on the handcart.
And then I thought of Walu's face if I came back with nothing. And I felt something else, which I'd learned to recognise by then, the heat at the back of my neck, and I thought: he's making me do this.
That is the trick, you see. That is the thing that no one tells you about evil. It never arrives as a decision. It arrives as a reason.
"Show me your hands," I said.
I don't know why I said it. I think I wanted to see whether he would. He did. He held them out, palms up, like a child showing he's washed. They were long and clean, with a callus on the right forefinger from the needle.
Ssebo took the bar out of his jacket.
"Not the fingers," I said, quickly. Too quickly. "Not — the one. The left."
I will not describe the next part. I tell you only that the baby had stopped crying by the time it was over, that Kasirye did not scream, that he made a sound like a man trying to lift something enormous, and sank down against the wall with his hand held in the other, and that the silence in the shop afterwards was the loudest thing I have ever heard. His wife was standing in the doorway to the back with her mouth open. I looked at her and she looked at me. And I took the money from the drawer, forty thousand and some coins, and went out.
On the pavement, I was sick behind a parked taxi.
Ssebo laughed. He slapped my back and said, "First time, eh? It passes." And it did. That's the horror. It passed. By the third time, it didn't even do that.
Let me stop here and talk to the boy for a moment, because I can feel him in the room, defending himself.
You didn't swing the bar, he says. You said not the fingers. You tried to soften it. Ssebo did it. You only said the words.
No. I am sorry. I did it.
You were seventeen. You were told to. You were hungry. He fed you. You had no way out.
I had a way out. I had a mother who would have taken me back at a word. I had a brother. I had a door.
It wasn't that simple.
It was exactly that simple, and it was the hardest thing I ever had to do, and I didn't do it. That's all. That's the whole of the confession. I'm going to keep saying it until I stop arguing.
Kasirye still has the hand, as far as I know. I found out later that he got work as a doorman. He never sewed again.
The years from seventeen to twenty-two went by like the pages of a book being flicked with a thumb.
I rose. Walu moved me from carrying to counting, from counting to collecting, from collecting to something he called relations. I had a flat of my own in Kabalagala, with a television and a fridge. I wore a gold watch. I learned to drink, first beer, then whisky, then the clear spirit called cheap gin that tastes of petrol and burns on the way down, and I learned that if you drank enough of it the heat at the back of your neck cooled to a hum. I learned about other things, small white things, that did the same, and then more. I learned to sleep at dawn and wake at dusk. I learned to walk into a club and have the doorman step aside. I learned that women looked at you differently when you had a watch.
And I discovered that money buys a kind of silence. It doesn't buy peace. But if you spend enough, the noise inside is drowned, and for a few hours you can believe you are free.
I sent money home. I want to say that. Every month, through a bus driver I knew, an envelope with fifty thousand shillings and no note. Then a hundred. Then two. My brother, I learned later, put them in a tin and never spent them. My mother gave half to the church and put half in the tin with his. Neither of them said anything. They both knew where it came from.
I didn't go home.
I told myself I was too busy. I told myself that she wouldn't want me. I told myself she'd made her choice and I'd made mine. These were all lies that wore the clothes of truth, and I believed them, because the alternative was walking up the lane and standing in the doorway and watching her face.
I'll tell you what I really thought, though. Late at night, in the flat in Kabalagala, when the spirit had worn off and the television was making noise in the corner and I lay on top of the blanket with my shoes on. I thought: If I go back, she'll pray over me. And the idea terrified me. Not because I believed it would work. Because I was afraid that it might.
Her name was Sarah.
I'm going to write this slowly, because I've never written it, and because I'm afraid I'll do it badly.
She was nineteen. I was twenty. She worked at a bar in Kabalagala where I drank, a small place, with plastic chairs and a tin roof and a jukebox that only played one tape, and she carried the crates and wiped the tables and never smiled at the customers, which was why I noticed her. She had a gap between her front teeth. I want you to hear that. A gap like my father's. I remember it startled me, the first time she laughed, and I stared at her so openly she asked if she had something on her face.
"No," I said. "Your teeth."
"What about them?"
"Nothing."
She laughed again, and the gap showed, and I felt my chest do something that I'd forgotten it could.
Her full name was Sarah Nabirye, and she was from Iganga. She had a mother who sold vegetables and a little sister at school, and she'd come to Kampala for work and slept in a room with five other girls. She read novels. That's what I remember. She read cheap paperback romances that she bought for five hundred shillings from a man on the street, and she read them behind the bar when it was slow, with her lips moving slightly. She said it was the only way to live more than one life.
She wanted a small room of her own one day, with a shelf for books and a table near a window. She talked about opening a little second-hand bookstall in Iganga, where people could sit and read without being hurried. I remember laughing and asking who would pay for that. She said, "Maybe nobody. Maybe that isn't the point." At the time I thought she was being sentimental. I understand now that she was describing the kind of life I had never learned to imagine.
I started coming in every night. I didn't drink much, at first. I sat at the end of the bar and watched her. One evening she put a soda in front of me that I hadn't ordered and said, "You look like you've never had one."
I said, "I've had many."
"No," said Sarah. "I mean one that nobody paid for."
I didn't know what to say. It was the kindest thing anyone had said to me in four years. I drank it slowly, and when she took the empty bottle away, her hand touched mine, and I think I've never been so afraid.
I loved her.
I'm saying it plainly. I don't want you to think what came after was because I didn't. I loved her in the clumsy, hungry, frightened way of a young man who has never learned to do it. She moved into my flat after three months. She brought one suitcase and a box of paperbacks. She hung a curtain. She put a plant on the windowsill, a small green thing in a tin, and watered it every morning, and I came home one night and there was a smell of cooking and a light on, and I stood in the doorway of my own flat unable to move.
"What's wrong?" she said.
"Nothing," I said. "It's just — somebody's home."
She didn't understand. How could she? But she put her arms round my neck, and I stood there with her face against my shoulder and my hands hanging at my sides, because I didn't know what to do with them, and I thought: this is what a house is. This is what she had, and I broke it.
And I want to tell you, because it matters, that for eight months I was a different man. I came home at six. I stopped the white things. I drank beer on Fridays. I told Walu, once, that I wanted fewer nights, and he looked at me coolly across his desk and said, "A woman?" and I said yes, and he said, "Be careful. Women are the most expensive thing you can own." He smiled. "But I understand. Take your time."
It was the last warm thing he ever said to me.
I could have stopped. I could have walked out of that office and taken Sarah to Iganga and found a job as a mechanic or a shop clerk. I was twenty. I had some savings. We could have lived small. I knew it even then. I think she knew it too. One night, in the dark, she said, "Jonah, what is it you do?"
"I work in finance," I said.
She turned her head on the pillow. I could just see her eyes. "Don't lie to me," she said. "Not you. Everyone else, but not you."
I should have told her. I lay there looking at the ceiling and felt the truth sit in my mouth like a stone, and I said, "I'll tell you one day."
"When?"
"Soon."
She turned over, and after a while her breathing slowed, and I lay awake. That was the moment, if there was one. I'm sure of it now. She gave me a door, in the dark, and I stood in front of it and didn't open it.
She was pregnant by the end of the rainy season.
She told me in the kitchen, with her hand on the counter, in the voice of someone reciting a thing she has rehearsed. "I'm going to have a baby," she said. "I went to the clinic. I'm three months. It's yours." She looked at me. "It's all right if you don't want it. I can go to my mother."
I want to tell you what I felt.
I felt cold. I felt a cold, spreading fear, like water going into a boat. I saw, in a flash, my father's lorry in the lane. I saw the boots. I saw a small shape under a bed. And I thought: I am going to do this to a child.
I had no evidence for it. I had never lifted a hand to Sarah. But I knew what lived in me, and I knew it would find a way out in time, that I would feel the heat one night and there would be a small face looking up. And I could not bear it. I could not stand in a room with that possibility.
So I did what cowards do. I made it about money.
"It's not a good time," I said.
"It's never a good time," said Sarah.
"I'll give you money. For the clinic. For — to sort it out."
She stared at me. Her mouth opened slightly, and the gap showed, and for a moment she looked younger than I had ever seen her, a girl in a kitchen who had just been struck by the person she trusted.
"Sort it out," she said.
"I didn't mean—"
"You did." She took her hand off the counter. "I'm keeping it, Jonah. I wanted you to know. I'm not asking for anything."
I said something then that I will carry to my grave. I won't write it. I will write only that it was about her family, her village, and what kind of girl she was, and that it was cruel in exactly the way my father would have been. I said it quietly. That was the horror. I said it calmly, and watched it land.
She picked up her suitcase from under the bed. She took her paperbacks. She did not take the plant. She went out of the flat and down the stairs, and I stood in the kitchen listening to her feet on the concrete, each step a little fainter, and I told myself, good. I told myself I'd done the sensible thing.
Then I went out and found a bar.
I did see the child once.
It was a girl. I heard from Ssebo, who heard from someone, that Sarah had given birth at Mulago Hospital in November. I told no one that I knew. For three weeks I carried it around like a swallowed coal. And then on a Tuesday evening, after drinking from noon, I found myself walking across the compound of the hospital, in my good shirt, with a stuffed toy I'd bought from a stall that I couldn't remember paying for.
I stood outside the maternity ward. I stood at a window. It was a long room with narrow beds, and women lying propped up in them, and nurses moving between, and at the far end I could see Sarah. She was sitting on a bed, in a blue hospital gown, with a bundle in her arms. She was looking down. Her lips were moving, and I knew what she was doing. She was reading to it. She had a paperback open on her knee and she was reading aloud to a creature three weeks old.
I put my hand on the glass.
I want you to understand how close I was. I was thirty feet from the door. All I had to do was walk down the corridor, and push it open, and say her name. She would have looked up. I knew her face well enough to know what it would have done. It would have gone through four expressions, in a particular order, and the last would have been forgiveness.
And I thought: I will go in tomorrow. Tomorrow I'll be sober.
I put the toy down on the windowsill. I took my hand from the glass. I left a damp print on it, the shape of my palm, and I watched it fade.
I did not go in tomorrow, or the day after. By the time I next thought of the window, Sarah had moved out of the room in Namirembe, and her mother's village had no phone, and the nurse at Mulago said she was sorry, she couldn't give details. I told myself I'd look later.
I had a daughter. I didn't know her name.
I'm forty-one years old and for sixteen of those years I did not know the name of my own child. I'll tell you, when we get there, how I learned it. I'll tell you now only that it was Hope. Sarah named her Hope. A girl who read about other lives, in a room with five others, in a city that wanted nothing from her, looked at the thing she'd made out of my coward's night, and named it that.
I cannot write any more of this today.
Later. Evening.
Mama Joyce brought rice. I ate it with the book open next to me and I noticed that I wasn't tasting it, and then I put the spoon down and went and stood in the yard for a long time. There's a mango tree here, too, behind the latrine. I hadn't noticed. It's not in fruit yet.
I want to finish this chapter, so I'll finish it quickly, the way you pull off a bandage. It has two more things in it.
The first one is Brian.
I'd lost touch with him for years, the way you do. I heard he'd left school and had been doing odd jobs. When I was twenty-two I ran into him on a street in Wandegeya, in a torn shirt, thinner, with those enormous ears sticking out, and he saw my watch before he saw my face.
"Jonah!" he said. "Jonah Kizza!"
He hugged me. I stiffened. Then I hugged him back. He smelled of sweat and charcoal and old clothes, and I realised he was the only person in the world who had known me before, who remembered the boy who laughed at church and was good with a ball. I took him to eat. He ate like a boy of twelve. And I heard myself say, because I wanted to be the man who could say it, "I can get you work."
"What kind?"
"Easy. Driving, carrying. Good money."
"Jonah." He looked at me, steadily, over the plate. "What is it?"
I should have said, nothing for you. I should have said, go home. I should have walked him to the bus stage and pushed a note into his hand. I said, "It's fine. I'll look after you."
I looked after him for fourteen months.
I put him in a warehouse in Nakawa, as a watchman, with a good wage and a promise. He was happy. He'd come to my flat on Sundays with a bag of oranges, and we would sit on the balcony, and he'd tell me jokes. His laugh was exactly as it had been. For a while it was as if I had my childhood back.
Then, on a Thursday morning in the dry season, a tip came from someone at Walu's. Police were coming, in an hour, to the Nakawa warehouse. I was to go and clear the books. I got there at nine and found Brian at the gate.
"They're coming," I said.
"Who?"
"Never mind. Go home."
"What about the stock?"
"Leave it. Go home, Brian."
He stared at me. His face was changing, slowly, from puzzlement to understanding. He looked past me at the shuttered building, at the trucks, at the crates stencilled with names that weren't ours. He had not, until that second, let himself look. "Jonah," he said. "What is in there?"
I heard the sirens at the end of the road.
And here is the thing that I have never been able to forgive, in the long list of things. I had time. I had perhaps ninety seconds. I could have taken him by the arm and pulled him through the back gate. He'd have come, he trusted me, he was my friend. We'd have been over the fence and into the cane before they turned the corner.
I looked at him. I looked at the road. I did a sum in my head that took less than a second.
I dropped the keys at his feet, and I ran.
I went over the back wall and through a ditch, and I was in a taxi on Jinja road by the time they put him in the van. I learned all of it afterward, from the newspapers, and from the lawyer Walu hired to speak to me. Brian was found on the premises with a set of keys in his hand. He said nothing. He never said my name. Not at the station, not at the court, not in the dock where he stood for a quarter of an hour in the same torn shirt, with his enormous ears, looking round the room for me.
I wasn't there. I was in a bar in Kabalagala, with my back to the television.
He got five years. It was later lengthened. I'll tell you how, and why.
The second thing is my mother, and it is the end of the chapter.
I was twenty-four. I'd been gone eight years. In that time, I'd learned the names of every bar in Kampala and the faces of all the policemen who could be bought. I had a car. I had an apartment. I had an ache in my chest that the spirits no longer reached. I hadn't spoken to her in so long that I'd begun to think of her in the past tense, as a thing that had happened, not a person who was happening.
It was a Tuesday. I was at a club in Kabalagala, drunk, in a booth, with a woman I did not know and a white line of powder on the glass table in front of me, when the phone began to buzz in my pocket. I looked at it. The number was a village number. I didn't recognise it.
I ignored it. It buzzed again. And again. I put it face-down on the table, and the woman laughed at something, and a song came on that I had heard a thousand times, and I took the straw and bent my head.
It rang for forty minutes. In the end, to stop it, I answered.
"Jonah." It was a man's voice, hoarse, young. I didn't know it. "It's Timothy."
I said nothing. I had not heard my brother's voice since he was eleven years old. It had broken, since. It was a man's voice now, deeper than I'd have thought, and I stood in the corridor of that club with the music pounding through the wall and I could not get my breath.
"Mama is dead," Timothy said.
I leaned against the wall.
"She died on Sunday. In the night. It was the kidneys, they said, the doctor said it had been going a long time. She didn't tell anyone." There was a silence on the line. "We buried her today. We waited as long as we could. We tried to find you. I tried every number." His voice cracked. "The funeral was this afternoon."
I said, "Today?"
"Four o'clock."
I looked at my watch. It was past midnight. I'd been in the booth since dusk.
I said — and I know how this will sound — "I didn't get the messages."
My brother was silent for a long time. When he spoke again his voice was very flat, very even, and it frightened me, because it was the voice of a man who has decided to be polite.
"She asked for you," said Timothy. "Near the end. She said, Is Jonah here? I said, he's coming. She said, Good. And then she said, Tell him it is all right. She said it three times. I don't know what she meant."
I didn't answer. I couldn't.
"Where are you?" he asked.
"Kabalagala."
"Come to the grave," said my brother. "It is still fresh. You can see it."
I went.
I want you to know that. I want to be able to say, at least, that I went. I took the car, drunk, and drove through the dark to Kawempe, and left it in the lane, and walked up between the houses with my heart going like an engine. The compound was dark. The mango tree dripped. The church was locked.
The graveyard was behind the church, on the slope. It had rained that afternoon, and the ground was soft, and I slipped twice on the clay. There was a heap of red earth, fresh, still shining, with a wooden cross at the head of it and a bunch of wilting yellow flowers in a jam jar. Someone had stuck a candle in the soil. It had gone out. I stood at the foot of it with my hands hanging.
I looked at the mound, which was smaller than I'd thought. I had expected something monumental. I had expected her to take up more space.
I tried to speak. I opened my mouth, and nothing came but a breath, and the smell of whisky on it, rising off me into the wet air, and I was suddenly so ashamed of that, of the smell, that I took a step back.
A voice behind me said, "You stink."
I turned. It was a tall young man in a black suit that was too short in the sleeves. He had a face I knew from somewhere far back, long and quiet. He was holding a torch. He did not shine it at me. He held it down at his side so the light fell on the grass.
"Timothy," I said.
He hit me.
It was a clean, hard, accurate blow, straight to the jaw, and I went down on my back in the clay. I lay there looking at the sky. There were stars. I couldn't recall the last time I had seen them. He stood over me with his fists shut, trembling, and I realised that he was weeping, that tears were running down his face and he wasn't wiping them away.
"Get up," he said.
I got up.
"She prayed for you," said my brother. His voice was shaking. "Every morning. Every night. For eight years. On her knees, until the doctor said she couldn't kneel any more, and then in the bed, with her hands. I used to hear her through the wall. Keep Jonah. Keep Jonah. I used to want to put a pillow over my head." He wiped his face at last with the back of his sleeve. "I was angry at you for a long time. And then I realised I was angry at her too. For still believing."
"Timothy—"
"Don't say anything. You smell of drink. You smell of whatever you've been doing." He drew a long breath. "She told me, near the end, not to hate you. I'm trying. I'm trying very hard." He turned the torch away. "You can come to the house. There's food. There are people. Or you can go back to whatever it is." He looked me in the eye. "But if you go, Jonah, don't write. Don't send money. I mean it. Don't put any more envelopes in my hand."
I stood there.
"I don't need you to be sorry," said my brother. "I need you to be here."
I wasn't able to do it. God help me, I couldn't. I looked at him, at his tall quiet shape against the dark church, and at the heap of clay, and at the candle that had gone out, and I felt the whole weight of eight years come down on me, and the only thing I could think of was how to make the feeling stop.
"I can't," I said.
He nodded slowly, as if he had expected it.
I turned and walked back down the slope, slipping in the mud, to the car. I heard nothing behind me. I got in. I started the engine. I sat with my hands on the wheel and my jaw throbbing and saw, in the mirror, the small red mound and the dark figure beside it, and then I drove to the nearest bar and stayed until it closed.
That was the night, I think, that I decided there was no bottom.
I was wrong. There was. It was a long way down, and it had a floor, and I'll tell you about the floor in the next chapter. But I want to say, before I close the book tonight, that I have been counting wrongly. Timothy said that she prayed for me for eight years, since the night I left, and I believed him.
It was fifteen.
I know because I have seen her handwriting. But I'm not ready to tell you how.