Chapter 4
Hell
I have put this chapter off for six days.
I wrote the others in the mornings, with tea. I can't write this one in the morning. Mama Joyce has a way of opening the door without knocking, and I don't want to be a man with a pen in his hand and this on the page when she walks in with the mug. So I am writing it at night, with the shutter closed and the paraffin lamp turned low, and every few minutes I have to stop and look at the wall to make sure it is still there.
I said at the end of the last chapter that there was a floor. I said I would tell you about it.
Understand this before I begin. I am not writing it to shock you. There are men who tell these stories with a kind of pride, the way soldiers do, and I have heard them, and I'd sooner cut my hand off. I'm writing it because if you don't see the bottom, you won't understand what it means that something reached down to it. A rescue is only as large as the pit.
I will tell it in the order it happened. I will not make it neater than it was.
After the night at my mother's grave, I stopped pretending.
Up to then I had always kept a little room in myself, a kind of spare cell where the boy sat and watched. He was the one who was sick behind the taxi after the tailor. He was the one who stood at the hospital window. He was always there, and for eight years I let him out in small amounts, to feel just enough that I could still call myself a person.
On that night, I locked him in.
I didn't decide to. It was simply that the next morning, when I woke on the floor of my flat with a split lip and a taste of iron, I found that the room was quiet. For the first time in my life I couldn't hear him. I lay there, looking at the stained ceiling, and thought: good. And I thought: now I can do the job properly.
That is how it happens. Not with a roar. With a silence you mistake for relief.
Walu noticed at once.
He called me into the office. He was behind the desk with the plant. He had grown heavier by then, and greyer, but his eyes were the same, flat and bright, like coins at the bottom of a well. He looked at me for a long time.
"Your mother," he said.
I said nothing.
"I'm sorry." He seemed to mean it. "It's a hard thing. Take some days." He opened a drawer, took out an envelope, and slid it across the desk. "And when you come back, I'd like you to meet someone."
The someone was a man called Kakooza, who ran what Walu called the south side. He was lean, and he never blinked, and he wore a leather jacket in all weathers. He ran the part of the business that did not appear on any ledger: people who didn't pay, people who talked, people who needed to be reminded of something. Walu put me with him. I was twenty-four, and I had a reputation for being clever, and I think Walu knew I was ready to become something other than clever.
"He's afraid of nothing," Walu told me, of Kakooza. "You will learn from him."
I did. I learned how to stand in a doorway so that the light is behind you. I learned how to let a silence do the work of a threat. I learned that you can break a man in a way that leaves no mark on his face, and I learned the six places on a body where a blow will go through the skin and stay in the memory. I learned to enjoy the learning. That's the part that I'm going to have to take to the end of my life: that I was good at it, and that part of me was glad.
I began to drink in the morning.
I won't list all of it. There was cheap gin in the day and whisky at night. There were pills, which came in blister packs from a pharmacy in Nakasero, white ones for the evening and blue ones to wake. There was cocaine, on weekends, and then not only on weekends. There were women whose names I never asked. There were months that I can't account for, months I know only from the dates on newspapers I found in my own pockets. I didn't care. I'd locked the boy in the cell, and I was running the house.
Now I will tell you about Daniel.
I want to say first that I'm going to use his name, and that I've thought about this. For years I couldn't. I would think of him as the boy, or the one in the warehouse. I told myself that was respect. It was cowardice. If he has no name, then he never existed, and I can keep him in the dark. His name was Daniel Ssekandi. He was nineteen years old.
It was a Thursday in the dry season. I was twenty-six. Kakooza had been drinking since noon and was in a foul temper because a delivery of cigarettes had gone missing from a container in Kisenyi, a hundred and forty cartons, worth about three million shillings, and the man who'd lost them was Walu's nephew, and Walu was angry. Somebody had talked. Somebody had told a rival crew where the container was.
The word came back in the afternoon. A boy called Daniel, a loader on the docks at Port Bell, who'd been seen drinking with the other crew. He was nineteen. He had a mother and three younger sisters. He had a laugh, they said. People remembered the laugh.
Kakooza said, "Bring him."
I took two men, Ssebo and a quiet one named Okello who had never said a word to me in three years. We found Daniel at nine that evening outside a kiosk selling roasted chicken, with a paper bag in his hand. He saw us coming. He did not run. I think he was too young to believe it. He put the bag down on a crate and said, "Gentlemen, there's a mistake."
I said, "Come and explain it."
We drove to the godown. It was a disused warehouse on the edge of Kisenyi, a tin-roofed shed with no windows, once used for storing coffee, with a concrete floor, one door, and a smell of mould and old sacking. Kakooza was already there. He had a chair set in the middle of the floor and a single bulb hanging from a wire. He sat on a crate with his legs apart, smoking, and watched us bring the boy in.
I remember the way Daniel looked at the chair.
"Sit," said Kakooza.
He sat. He was a skinny boy, with a thin moustache he was clearly proud of, and a green football jersey. A football jersey. I noticed it at once and I remember noticing. It was an Arsenal one, the cheap kind from the market, with the number nine. His hands were shaking on his knees.
"I didn't talk," he said. "I swear to God. I don't know anything. I only load."
"You were at the Bulldog bar."
"Everyone's at the Bulldog bar."
"With Mukiibi's men."
"I don't know who they were. They bought me a beer. I swear." He looked at me. He looked straight at me, and I saw that he'd chosen me, out of all of them, because I was the youngest. "Please. I have a mother. I'm the one who pays the fees for my sisters."
Kakooza stubbed out the cigarette. "Jonah," he said.
I said, "Yes."
"Teach him."
I'm going to tell the next part in the plainest words I can find.
I took off my jacket. That's what I remember, first: folding my jacket and putting it on a crate, because I didn't want to get blood on it. I rolled up my sleeves. Behind me, I heard Ssebo shut the door and drop the bar across it.
I hit Daniel in the stomach, and he folded in the chair. I hit him in the face, and I heard his nose go. He fell. He lay on his side on the concrete with his hands over his head and began, quietly, to say something over and over, a kind of mumble, and I knew the words, because I had said them under a bed. Please. Please. Please.
That should have been the end. A lesson. That's what I'd been sent for. Kakooza would have nodded and said, enough, and they'd have taken the boy home and left him on his mother's step with a broken nose and a message.
But Kakooza didn't say enough. He sat on the crate and watched me. And behind me I heard Ssebo shuffle his feet and Okello cough, and I understood, with a cold clarity, that I was being tested. They were all waiting to see whether I would stop.
I didn't want to stop. That's the truth. The heat came up, the old heat, the steam behind the lid, and I felt it spread down my arms into my hands, and there was a sweetness in it, a terrible sweetness, the same one I'd felt over the boy with the brick at fifteen. And I thought: I am my father. And it did not frighten me. It felt like coming home.
I kicked him.
I'll say it again so that you see it: I kicked a boy on a concrete floor, in the ribs, in the stomach, in the kidneys. I heard something give. He made a high noise like an animal. And then he did a thing I wasn't expecting.
He rolled, and came up fast. He had something in his hand, a small black folding knife, the sort you use to open a mango. I don't know where he'd had it. In his sock, perhaps. He came up off the floor with a scream and he swung it at my face. I jerked my head back and the blade went down my right forearm from the elbow to the wrist, in one clean line, and for a second I felt nothing. Then the heat reached it. Blood sprang out in a long red curtain and ran down my fingers onto the floor, and I looked at it, amazed.
"Get him off me," I said, stupidly.
Nobody moved.
And I don't remember picking up the bar.
I have tried. I have lain awake trying to find the moment when my hand closed on it. Ssebo's iron bar was on the crate by the door. I must have crossed the floor. I know I was breathing loud. I know the light on the wire was swinging, and the shadows were swinging, so the whole shed seemed to rock like a boat. And I know that I brought it down.
Once.
It struck Daniel above the left ear. There was a sound, which I won't describe to you, except to say that I had heard it once before, in a butcher's shop, and that it was not a sound a human head should make. He dropped the knife. He stood for a moment with his eyes open, looking at me with a kind of mild surprise. Then his knees folded, and he sat down on the concrete, and then lay back.
I stood over him with the bar in my hand.
He didn't die at once.
That's what I need you to understand. People imagine a thing like that being swift. It wasn't. He lay on his back on the cold floor, under the swinging bulb, with a dark pool spreading out beneath his head, and he breathed. Each breath was a long, slow, rattling pull, like a man drawing water through a straw. His eyes were open. They moved. They went from the roof to the wall to me.
"Mama," he said.
It was not a loud word. It was a child's word, the word of a boy who had just woken from a bad dream and was looking for the one person in the world who could make it better. His lips shaped it again, without sound.
I dropped to my knees on the concrete. I have no idea why. I put the bar down. I put my hand, my bleeding hand, on his chest, as if I could keep something in. His jersey was warm and sticky. Under my palm, I felt his heart, which was beating very fast and light, like the heart of a bird.
"Don't," I said. "Don't. Please."
I was begging him. I, who'd stood in a doorway and smiled while a man held out his hands. I was on my knees in a pool of someone else's blood, begging a dying boy not to die.
His eyes found mine. He looked at me, steadily, for what I think was a full minute. There was no hatred in it. That's the part that I can't make anyone understand. I have had men curse me, and spit, and promise to find me in the next world. But this boy only looked at me, wide-eyed, with a kind of dim, patient wonder, as if I were the strangest thing he had ever seen, and he was trying to work out what I was.
Then the light went out of them. It didn't flicker. It simply wasn't there any more. His heart stopped under my hand like a clock that has run down.
Behind me, Kakooza said, calmly, "Clean that up."
I didn't speak for three days.
They took me to a flat in Kisenyi. Somebody bandaged my arm. It needed forty stitches, and I got eleven, from a man who did it for money, in a back room, with fishing line and a lamp. I remember the smell of the antiseptic. I remember that someone put a bottle in my hand, and I drank it, and it was gone, and there was another. I remember that I was sick in a bucket and then I wasn't.
I remember the next two nights. I will tell you what I saw because it matters.
I saw the jersey. I saw it every time I closed my eyes: green, cheap, with the number nine. And I heard the word. Mama. It came out of the dark, in his voice, over and over, and each time it came I felt his heart under my palm, beating like a bird's.
On the third day, I asked Ssebo where they'd taken him.
"Forget it," he said. "It's done."
"Where?"
"Lake. Past the landing at Port Bell. There's a place where the current goes out." He didn't look at me. "He won't be found. Mukiibi's crew will be blamed. Walu has already sent word."
I nodded. I went to the bathroom, and I knelt on the floor, and I washed my hands. I washed them for what must have been an hour. The water ran pink, then clear, then clear. I scrubbed at the lines in my palm with a nailbrush until they bled again. And I could still see it. A dark line, in the crease of each finger, that wasn't there, and was.
I have scrubbed my hands for fifteen years. I did it again this morning, before I picked up the pen. You will think that is a figure of speech. It isn't. It is simply what my hands do.
I want to talk to you about the eleven days.
After Daniel, I drank. I do not mean as I'd been drinking. I mean that I went to a small room at the back of a bar in Kabalagala, with a bed, a bucket, and a window painted shut, and I stayed there, and I drank every waking hour for eleven days until a man came and found me.
I remember little. I remember a wall, which breathed. I remember the ceiling, which was low and brown, with a stain in the corner the shape of a hand. I remember lying on my side with my knees drawn up, as I'd lain on the floor of a house in Kawempe, and shivering until the bed shook.
And I remember the visits.
My father came on the third night. I'm sure of it. He sat on the end of the bed, in his lorry-driver's overalls, with the gap in his teeth showing, and he didn't speak. He only looked at me, and at my arm, and I saw his boots, black, with the toe-caps worn through, and a loop of wet grass on the left heel. I screamed at him. I told him I wasn't him. I said it over and over, I am not you, I am not you, until the barman came and slapped my face and told me to be quiet.
My mother came on the seventh. She stood in the doorway, by the painted window, in the brown dress she was buried in. She didn't speak either. Her hand was on a book. She looked at me with the face she had worn in the candlelight, the face of a woman at the bottom of a well.
And Daniel came last, on the tenth night.
He sat on the floor in the corner, with his knees up, in the green jersey. He wasn't bleeding. His head was whole. He looked at me, and I looked at him, and for a long time neither of us moved. Then he said, in a perfectly ordinary voice, "It's very cold where I am."
I woke on the eleventh day with the barman standing over me, holding a bucket.
I have wondered since whether I was dead, those eleven days. Not in the body. In the other place. I have wondered whether this is what the preachers meant, when they said that hell has no walls and no fire, that it is simply a room with the door locked from the inside, where you are left alone with what you have done. I didn't believe in it. I don't know that I believe it now, in any literal way. But I know that room. I know it better than I know my own face.
I should stop and tell you what I was like, those years, so you don't think the horror was only in the dark.
I was clever and I was careful and I was good company. That's what frightens me. I could eat a meal with a man whose son I'd beaten. I could laugh at a joke, and mean it. I could go to a wedding and dance, and my arm, with the long white seam, would wave in the air above my head. I never lost my manners. I tipped well. I called women madam.
The boy I had been, the one who was so good at long division, learned to calculate everyone's price. The man who laughed at church learned to laugh at everything else. I carried a gun by then, a heavy black pistol in a holster at the small of my back. I never used it. I want that known. I just knew it was there, the way you know about a sleeping dog.
And I never, in all those years, looked up.
That's what I mean when I call it hell. Not the blood. Not the drink. Not even the thing I did to Daniel. The worst of it was the downward gaze. I walked for years with my eyes on the ground, on my shoes, on the next job, because I knew if I looked up there would be a sky. And if there was a sky there might be someone in it. And if there was someone, He had seen.
Then there was the fire.
I'm going to tell it quickly, because it came when I was twenty-nine, and by then I was a man who did things quickly, without looking.
There was a shopkeeper in Katwe, a wiry man called Ssali, who sold hardware from a tin-roofed shop on the main road, nails and paint and rope and charcoal stoves. He'd borrowed from Walu to finance a second shop, and he'd paid on time, month after month, for a year, and then the second shop had flooded and the stock had rotted. He couldn't pay. He came to Walu on his knees. Walu was not moved.
Walu said, "A lesson. Not the man. The property. At night."
"What about the family?" I asked. I don't know why I asked. It was a formality.
"There's a house behind. They sleep in the house." Walu looked up from his papers. "The shop is empty at night, Jonah. Just do the shop. It's a message."
I looked at him. He held my eye.
"The shop is empty," he said again, gently.
I should have known. I'd been in that business for twelve years. I knew what a man meant when he repeated a thing. But I was tired, and I had a hangover that sat behind my eyes like a nail, and I wanted to be gone. I said all right.
We went at two in the morning. It was Ssebo, Okello, and me, in a borrowed van, with three jerrycans of petrol. The road was empty. A dog was barking somewhere. The shop was dark, a low tin building with a hand-painted sign, SSALI & SONS HARDWARE, and behind it a smaller house, with a window, with a curtain, with a light left on in the kitchen.
I saw the light. I saw it and I looked at it and I thought: someone left it on.
I did not go and look. I want you to hold that. A thing I could have done in fifteen seconds. I could have walked round the side of the shop and put my face to the glass. I stood in the road with a can of petrol in my hand, and I looked at the light, and I decided it didn't mean what it meant.
We splashed the front, and the sides. The smell of it rose in the dark, sweet and sick. Ssebo struck the match.
It caught with a soft whump, like a great cloth being shaken. The whole front of the shop leapt into orange. I stepped back from the heat. And for about eight seconds I stood in the road watching the fire climb the wall and take the sign, and I felt a great clear calm, the calm of a job done, and I thought, it's only tin.
Then I heard the scream.
It wasn't a man's scream. It came from the back, from the little house. A thin high shriek that went on and on, and a second one under it, a child's, and I realised with a freezing horror that the fire had run along the dry wooden eaves, that it had crossed the gap in the time it took to blink. The kitchen window glowed. The curtain went up like a flag.
"They're in there," I said.
"Go," said Ssebo. "Come on. Come on."
He was already at the van. Okello was already inside. I could hear the engine.
I did not get into the van.
I don't know why. I've thought about it more than I have thought about anything. I wasn't brave. I wasn't good. I think it was the child's voice, which in my head was already the voice of a boy of nine, and I could not hear it and drive away. I dropped the can. I ran.
I went round the side of the shop, through the heat, with my arm over my face. The fire was roaring. The back door was already burning, and I kicked it, and kicked it again, and the wood gave in a shower of sparks, and I went in.
The smoke was black. It was thick and oily, and it filled my mouth like a hand. I dropped onto my knees. The heat was extraordinary. It pressed on my back like a living thing. I crawled along the floor with my eyes shut, feeling for a shape, and the voice kept screaming, somewhere ahead, in the roaring dark.
I found a boy.
He was about thirteen. He was lying on the floor of the kitchen, beside a bed, with his arm raised over his face. His sleeve was alight. I smothered it with my hands and heard the skin go. He didn't scream; he had gone past it. I grabbed his collar and pulled, and he came up like a sack, and I dragged him the length of the room.
Behind me, a woman was calling. I turned my head. In the back of the room, by the far wall, there was a figure on her knees, a woman in a nightdress, and she was holding something and shouting a name. The ceiling above her was a sheet of fire. As I watched, a beam let go. It came down in a roar of sparks, and I saw her look up, and I saw her face.
She looked straight at me.
I would like to tell you she cursed me. I would like to tell you she was angry. She wasn't. She only looked at me, and then at the boy in my arms, and I saw her understand that I was taking him out. I saw something happen to her face. It was not a smile. But it was the nearest thing to one I have ever seen on the face of a dying woman. It was relief. She was relieved that one of them would live.
The beam came down.
I was in the doorway, dragging the boy by the collar, and I felt the heat on my back like a hand, and then I was out, and we were both lying on the dirt, and the whole back of the house was one roaring wall.
I knelt over him. His arm was a ruin: black and red and shining, with the sleeve melted into it. His eyes were open. They were looking at me, wide and white in the glow of the flames, and I knew that he had seen me. I knew that he would remember. His name, I learned later, was Moses Ssali.
"Mama," he said.
That word again. It follows me. I think it will follow me for ever.
I got to my feet and looked at the house. It was gone. There was nothing in it but light.
They arrested me four hours later.
I had not run. I should say that. I sat down on the kerb outside the burning house, in the dawn, with my hands black and my hair singed and a boy lying beside me wrapped in somebody's coat, and I waited for the police. When they came I held out my wrists.
Ssebo and Okello were never caught. Walu's lawyer came to see me at the station. He was a small neat man in a pinstripe suit, and he sat across the table with his briefcase on his knees and told me exactly what was going to happen. He said that Mr. Walusimbi was shocked and saddened. He said that Mr. Walusimbi had never heard of a man called Kizza. He said that if I mentioned a name, my mother's grave would be dug up. He didn't say it like that. He said, "It would be a pity, Mr. Kizza, if anything were to disturb the peace of your family."
I understood. I'd taught that language to others.
I pleaded guilty. There was no other plea. Moses Ssali stood in the witness box at thirteen, with his burned arm bound in a sling, and pointed at me across the courtroom, and said, "That is the man. He pulled me out." And then he said — and the whole court heard it — "Why did he pull me out, if he lit it?"
Nobody answered him. The judge said it was not a question for the witness.
Teopista Ssali, aged thirty-four, died of smoke and burns in the back room of her own house. Her husband, who had gone to a funeral in Masaka that night, came home to a pile of ash and a tin sign lying face-down in the road.
I got nine years. The judge said that without the rescue it would have been life. He said the court had noted that I was the only man in the whole affair who had tried to save a life. He said it with a kind of baffled contempt, as one would say a thing about a dog that had bitten and then licked.
I would have preferred life.
I served six years of the nine, in Luzira.
I don't want to describe it at length. Others have, and better. I will tell you only some things, in no order.
A cell built for fifteen held seventy. We slept on the concrete in rows, on our sides, pressed against each other like fish in a crate, because there was no room to lie on our backs. If you wanted to turn over you had to wake the whole row. At night the heat was thick and sour, a stew of sweat and breath and unwashed bodies, and in the corner stood a bucket that was emptied at dawn and overflowed by midnight. The smell of it got into your food. It got into your hair. It got into your dreams.
I learned to sleep sitting up. I learned to eat quickly, with my arm round the bowl. I learned the sounds of the night: the scrape of a man's feet on the floor, the whimper, the cough, the long damp rattle of the sick. Toward the end of my second year, a man called Mugerwa died next to me of dysentery. It took four days. He lay with his head on my thigh because there was nowhere else to put it, and he soaked his clothes and mine, and he looked up at me out of a grey, shrunken face and said, in a whisper, Mama, Mama. I'm sure he meant someone else. I let him say it.
Every man in that cell called for his mother, at the end. I swear it. They said they didn't believe in anything, and they died saying that word.
I was beaten many times. In the first month, a group of men took me to the washroom and did what men do to a newcomer with a name. In the fourth, a warder broke two of my ribs with a rubber hose, for a reason I never learned. In the second year, a man with a sharpened spoon opened my cheek from the ear to the corner of the mouth, because he'd heard I once worked for Walu and his brother had been one of Walu's debtors.
I survived all of it.
I'm putting that down now, flat, for later. I want you to see it as I saw it then: just a thing that kept happening. I didn't think about it. I got up in the morning, and I was there. I thought, the body is stubborn. That's all. I thought I was made of something tough.
In the third year, I met Brian again.
He was brought into my block one afternoon in the rainy season, in the grey uniform, with a shaved head. He was thinner than I had ever seen him. The enormous ears stuck out, and there was a long cut over his left eye that had healed badly. He was thirty-one years old and looked fifty. He stood at the end of the corridor with a mat under his arm, and when he saw me, he stopped.
I stood up from the floor. My heart was beating so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
"Brian," I said.
He walked toward me. He walked slowly, through the men, who parted to let him pass. I thought he was going to hit me. I wanted him to. I put my hands at my sides, and I waited. He stopped in front of me, close enough that I could see the pores in his skin.
He spat in my face.
It ran down my cheek. Nobody in the corridor moved. I did not wipe it away. I stood there with his spit on my face and my hands at my sides, and I thought, thank God. Thank God. At last.
"I have been nine years in here," said Brian, quietly, "for you."
I said, "They gave you five."
"Fourteen." His eyes were dry. "They extended it on appeal. The prosecutor said I was the ringleader. A man in a good suit said I'd run the warehouse alone. I never said your name. I never said Walu's. And I'll tell you why they gave me fourteen." He leaned close. "It was because they needed a name. And I was there. And you weren't."
I shut my eyes.
"I'm not going to hit you," said Brian. "I thought about it. Four years I thought about it." He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "But I won't speak to you. You understand? If you speak to me, I will not answer. If you sit near me, I will move. I will not forgive you, Jonah. I am only telling you that I'm not going to kill you either."
He picked up his mat and walked past me down the row.
I stood there. Then I sat down on the concrete and put my head between my knees, and some of the men looked away, and one of them, an old man with a white beard that nobody had ever seen him trim, made a sound in his throat that might have been pity.
I want to tell you about the night I came closest.
It was the fifth year. It was after the visiting day when nobody came, because nobody ever came. Timothy had written once, in the first year, a single sheet. I am praying for you. I don't know what else to say. I never answered it. I told myself I didn't deserve a reply.
That night, in the dark, I lay awake among the sleeping bodies and I did a sum.
I added up what I'd done. I tried to count the people I had harmed, and I stopped at forty, and then I stopped trying. I thought of the tailor's hand. I thought of Sarah in a blue gown, reading to a bundle. I thought of Brian's spit running down my face. I thought of Daniel's jersey, and Teopista Ssali's face in the fire, and the boy saying, Why did he pull me out, if he lit it? And then I thought, with a kind of dreadful calm: there is no more arithmetic to do. The answer is the same every time.
I had a sheet. I had a window. I won't describe it further. I will say only that I got as far as standing on the bucket, in the dark, with the cloth in my hands, and that it was quiet, and that I could hear seventy men breathing.
And from the corner of the cell, so softly I thought I'd imagined it, an old man began to hum.
It was the white-bearded one. He wasn't awake. He was talking in his sleep, the way old men do, and what came out of him was a tune, in a thin cracked voice, three notes, then three more. A hymn. We praise You, Jesus, the Lamb, whose blood has washed me.
It was my mother's hymn.
It was the first of the three she used to sing by the stove, and she stopped it when she heard the lorry in the lane, and started it again, softly, when the engine died.
I stood on the bucket in the dark with a sheet in my hands. And I began to shake. I shook so hard that the bucket rocked and a man beside me muttered and turned over. And I heard myself say, in a whisper, in a voice I hadn't used since I was a child, "I'm sorry."
I don't know whom I said it to.
I got down. I sat on the floor with my back against the wall and the sheet in my lap, and the old man hummed his way to the end of the verse, and then there was silence. I stayed awake until dawn.
I did not pray. I want to be clear about that. I was not converted by a hymn in a cell. I was an angry, ruined, unrepentant man who had been stopped, for one night, by a sound. I told myself afterwards that it was coincidence. That it was nothing. That an old man had a tune in his head.
But I did not try again.
I was released on a Tuesday in the dry season, with remission, after six years and three months. I was thirty-five years old. They gave me back my belt, my shoelaces, a watch that had stopped, and fifteen thousand shillings. A warder opened the small door set into the big gate, and said, "Go on."
I stepped through.
I stood on the dusty road outside the prison wall, in the white sun, holding a plastic bag. The air smelled of dust and diesel and frying onions. A taxi hooted. A woman went past with a basket on her head.
I thought I would feel something. I stood there for a long time waiting.
I felt nothing at all.
Behind me, I could hear the sound of the prison, the muffled roar of five thousand men, and I knew that I was carrying all of them with me, and Daniel, and the Ssali woman, and the old man's hymn. I knew that I had been to the bottom, and that there was no floor. There was only the next thing.
Parked across the road, under a tree, was a white Prado with tinted windows. As I watched, the rear door opened.
I think I'll stop there. It's after two. The lamp is almost out, and my hand has cramped, and when I look at the page I can't tell any more which of these things happened and which I dreamed.
I know this much. Of everything in this chapter, the thing I would give anything to take back is not the boy. It's not the fire.
It's the eight seconds on the road in front of the Ssali house, when I looked at the light in the kitchen window and decided it meant nothing.
"Whither shall I flee from thy presence?" my mother's Bible says, in a psalm I wasn't to read for years.
I fled. For twenty-five years, I fled.
I still want to know why I was never struck down. And, later, a harder thing: why I was not allowed to die.