Chapter 5
Survival
Mama Joyce read my face this morning before she read the book.
She put the tea down on the table and stood there with her hands on her hips and said, "You were awake all night."
"A little."
"I heard the board." She nodded at the floor. "Up and down. Up and down. A man who walks like that is either in love or in debt."
I said it was neither. She waited, and I said, "It's the school work. I'm on a hard part."
"Then you'd better eat." She went to the door and turned. "I'll bring eggs. Don't argue." And then, as she was going out, lightly, without looking round: "My husband used to walk like that. Before he went to church."
She left the door open behind her. I sat looking at the rectangle of morning in it, the yard, the mango tree, a hen, and I felt something that I can only describe as being seen by someone who has no idea what she's looking at.
I've eaten the eggs. I'm going to write about the river.
When the white Prado door opened outside the prison, the man who got out was older than I remembered, and softer, and he was smiling.
"Jonah," said Walu. He came across the road with his arms out. He had a belly now, over a belt with a gold buckle, and his hair had gone completely white. He wore a pressed cream shirt and polished brown shoes, and he smelled of a very good cologne. He took me by both shoulders and kissed me on each cheek, and I stood there like a post.
"Six years," he said. "Six years, and you never spoke my name. Do you know how rare that is? I have been proud of you."
I said nothing.
"Get in. You'll want a bath. There's a flat. There's a suit." He looked me up and down with fond regret. "And food, my son. Real food. Look at you. They've starved you."
A man who is ashamed to be hungry will do anything for the first person who feeds him. I heard it in his own voice, twenty years old, across a table of goat and chips. And I stood in the dust with a plastic bag in my hand, and I understood that I could still feel the pull of it. It was almost physical. After six years of the washroom and the hose and the bucket, a clean shirt looked like a promise.
I got in the car.
I want you to know that I knew exactly what I was doing. I knew what was in the leather seat, and the air conditioning, and the smell of cologne. I got in anyway, because I had nowhere to go, and nothing in my pocket but fifteen thousand shillings, and a name that every shopkeeper in Katwe would spit at.
He gave me the flat in Ntinda. He gave me the suit. He gave me an envelope with two million shillings, and a phone, and a place to be on Monday. For a week I did what he said. I ate. I slept in a bed. I woke up at five every morning in a clean room and lay there with my heart pounding, listening for the bucket.
And I discovered, in that week, a thing that frightened me more than anything in prison.
I didn't want it.
I mean the life. I sat in the flat in Ntinda with the television on and the fridge full, and I looked at it all, and I felt no pull at all. It was like looking at a photograph of a house I'd once lived in. I tried to feel the old hunger, and it wasn't there. Something had burned out of me. Whether it was the cell, the fire, the hymn on the bucket, I couldn't say. But when Walu's driver came to the door on the first Monday and said, "Mr. Walusimbi is waiting," I stood in the hallway of that flat and I couldn't make my feet go.
I heard myself say, "Tell him I'm sick."
That was a Monday. On Tuesday I was sick again. On Wednesday I took the envelope, put it in a drawer, unopened, and walked out of the flat with a plastic bag and one shirt.
I went to find my daughter.
This is a part I don't want to write.
I did not know her name. I did not know where she lived. All I had was a city, a hospital, and the memory of a gap between two teeth. I went to the bar in Kabalagala where Sarah had worked. It had closed. It was a phone shop. I went to Mulago, and stood in the compound where I'd put my hand on the glass, and a clerk in a back office told me patiently that records of births from fifteen years ago were not kept in the same building, were possibly not kept at all, and that I should return with a letter from a lawyer. I had no lawyer. I had no letter.
I went to Iganga, on a bus, and asked in the market for a woman who had a daughter in Kampala. They looked at my face and my arm, and they were polite, and they told me they didn't know.
It took me two weeks to understand that I was being lied to.
I'll write it as plainly as I can. In a village called Nawandala, outside Iganga, an old woman sold me a cup of tea and said, "You are the one from the bar."
I said yes.
She looked at me for a long time. "She is dead," she said.
I stopped with the cup in my hand.
"Sarah. Four years. It was the sickness that takes the young." She said it without cruelty. "Her mother has the child. In Ntinda. They are not to be found by you."
"The child — is she—"
"She's alive. She is a girl of fourteen, now. She goes to school. She is quiet and she reads." The old woman took the cup out of my hands. "She does not know your name. Her grandmother told her that her father died. It's the only kind thing anyone did for her. Let it be true."
I said nothing. There was nothing in me to say. I put the shilling coin for the tea on the little table. The old woman picked it up and looked at it and then pushed it back across to me.
"Go," she said. "For her sake, if not for yours."
I went. I walked the whole road back to the highway and stood by the side of it for an hour, and a lorry went past, and for a moment I thought quite clearly, I could step out. It would be easy. And I didn't. I want to be honest: not from courage, and not from faith, but because it seemed like too much effort.
I took a bus east, as far as it went. I got down at Jinja because the bus stopped there.
I'll tell you what I saw, because it matters. I got down in the early evening in a dusty bus park with a stink of diesel, and I walked, not knowing where I was going, through streets of old brick shopfronts and flame trees, until I came to a slope, and at the bottom of it was a great flat gleam of brown water, going the other way. It was wide and slow and had a mist on it. A man was poling a canoe across it, with the sun going down behind him. It was the Nile.
I stood and watched it for a long time.
I can't explain why it did what it did to me. I'd been told, at school, that this was the source, that the longest river in the world began here, and I'd never cared. But I stood on that slope, a ruined man of thirty-five with a plastic bag, and I watched the water leave Lake Victoria and go north through the whole of Africa to the sea, and I thought: it doesn't stop. Whatever has happened, it goes on.
It wasn't a thought I would call religious. It was too small. But it was the first time in years that I'd looked at something without looking for its price.
I found a room that night, over a barber's. I found work the next week at a boatyard, where an old man named Lutalo needed someone to sand hulls. I sanded hulls. I scraped paint. I painted, again, and sanded again. It was the dullest work in the world, and I did it from seven in the morning until five at night, and my hands blistered, and bled, and calloused, and in the evenings I walked down to the water and sat on a rock and ate a roll of bread.
I did not drink for eleven months.
I'm not saying that to be proud. I'm saying it because I want you to know I tried. In the language of the people who write testimonies, I'd say that I was a man of good intentions. I had no intentions. I only wanted to be a small thing, in a small place, doing a dull job, with nobody looking.
For almost a year, it worked.
Then a policeman came.
I'd been at the boatyard eleven months. It was a Thursday morning, and I was standing in a hull, up to my shins in wood dust, when a car pulled up outside and a man in a grey suit got out. He was young, and neat, with a briefcase. He asked for me by name, and Lutalo, bless him, pointed at me with the paintbrush and said, "That one."
The man's name was Inspector Okello. A different Okello. He told me, politely, that he was from the Criminal Investigations Directorate, and that he was investigating a man called Walusimbi.
I said I didn't know the name.
"Of course." He smiled. "Mr. Kizza, you served six years in Luzira for the Ssali fire. You were a man of considerable value to Mr. Walusimbi. You were a quiet man, and a loyal one. We know that. We're not here to threaten you. We are here to ask you whether you've ever wondered why he left you to take it alone."
I said I was busy.
"Forty-one people," said the Inspector. "In nine years. Some of them in the river." He put his briefcase on a sawhorse and opened it and took out a photograph. "Do you recognise this boy?"
It was a school photograph. It was a boy of eighteen in a blazer, laughing, with a thin moustache.
I looked at it for as long as I could. Then I walked out of the hull, round the side of the shed, and was sick on the ground.
The Inspector came after me, quietly, and stood a few feet away. He didn't speak. Then he said, "His mother is still looking. She has put up posters. She comes to my office every Friday. She doesn't ask for anything. She only sits, and when I come out she stands up." He cleared his throat. "I thought you might like to know there is a woman who doesn't know."
I wiped my mouth. I said, "I can't."
"I know."
"If I speak, they will kill me."
"Yes," said the Inspector. "They probably will. But they probably will anyway." He put the photograph back in the briefcase. "I'll leave my card."
I didn't take it. He put it on the sawhorse. I watched it flutter in the wind, and stay.
I want you to understand something about that conversation.
I did not do the brave thing. I want that on the record. Everything I'm about to tell you, the river, the bullet, the rest of it, was not a punishment for goodness. I did not stand up. I did not decide to testify. I did not even pick up the card.
I did the thing I was best at. I thought about what it would cost me.
I stood in the yard in the sun, sweating, and considered. And what I thought was: he knows too much about me. If they've followed him here, they know I've talked. And I went back to the barber's room and I packed my bag, intending to leave that night.
It was already too late.
They came at ten past midnight.
I was asleep, or half asleep, on the narrow bed. I heard a car in the lane. I heard two doors shut softly. And I knew, I knew the way you know the sound of your own name, that it was Kakooza.
I got up. I went to the window. I looked down into the lane, and there was a white Hiace van with its lights off, and a man standing beside it in a leather jacket, looking up at my window. He did not blink.
He raised one hand, with the palm facing me. He did not wave. It was the gesture of a man who is showing you he is unarmed.
I could have run. There was a back stair. There was a roof. I stood at the window, and I thought, for the second time in a day, about how much effort it would take, and I was tired. I was so tired. I was thirty-six years old and I had been running since I was sixteen. I looked down at Kakooza and I felt, to my shame, a kind of relief.
I went down the stairs and out into the lane.
"Jonah," said Kakooza. "Good evening."
"Good evening."
"Mr. Walusimbi would like a word."
Okello was in the back of the van. He didn't look up. Kakooza held the door for me, with a sort of terrible courtesy, and I got in and sat on the floor between the seats, and we drove.
I'll be quick about the drive, because I don't remember it. I remember the road. I remember streetlights going by and then not going by. I remember the smell of Kakooza's jacket. We went north out of the town, and then off the tarmac onto a dirt track, and then down, between dark trees, to a place where the engine stopped and the silence came in.
There was a sound. A great slow rushing, like wind in a field.
Kakooza opened the door. "Out."
It was the river. We were on a rocky shelf, a few yards above the water, and the moon was behind cloud, so that what I saw was mostly a darkness that moved. The air was thick with the smell of mud and wet leaves. Somewhere downstream, white water muttered over rocks. A cold wind came up off the surface and touched my face, and I thought, absurdly, this is the same river I watched.
"Kneel," said Kakooza.
I knelt. The rock was cold through my trousers.
I heard Okello get out of the van. I heard the soft metallic click of a pistol being drawn. Kakooza stood in front of me, a few feet away, with his hands in the pockets of the leather jacket, and looked down. He did not blink. He had never been afraid of anything, Walu used to say, and I saw that it was true.
"He says you have a conscience," said Kakooza.
"I haven't talked."
"I know. I believe you. I told him." He tilted his head. "But he says you've started to think. And a man who thinks is the worst kind of risk. He said you'd be hard to replace, and that it was a pity."
I laughed. I didn't mean to. It came up out of my chest like a cough.
"What?" said Kakooza.
"Nothing." I wiped my eyes. "Only that — I'd have thought it'd be you. I mean that I'd have thought you'd be gone by now."
He considered this for a moment.
"I'm sorry about it," he said. "If it helps."
It did, a little. I'm not sure why.
I thought of my mother. I thought, she is at the bottom of a well, looking up. I thought of Brian's spit, and Moses Ssali's burned arm. I said, quietly, to nobody, "Let it be quick."
I heard Okello come up behind me. I heard him steady his feet on the rock.
I did not pray. I'll say that again for the sake of the record. I did not say a word to God. I knelt on the stone, with my hands on my thighs, and I shut my eyes, and the last thing I thought was, absolutely clearly, this is correct.
The shot was the loudest thing I've ever heard.
It hit me in the chest, a hand's breadth below the left collarbone, and it felt not like a blow but like a kick from a horse, a great flat shove that picked me up off my knees and threw me backward onto the rock. I lay looking at the sky. For a moment, there was no pain. There was a sort of astonished heat spreading out under my shirt, and a warm wet sensation, and a sound in my ears like a bell.
Then the pain came, and it was not an event. It was a country.
I couldn't breathe. That was the first thing. I tried to draw air and something wet and bubbling happened in my chest, and I heard a high thin whistle, my own breath, going in and out through a hole it should not have had. My mouth filled. I coughed, and tasted copper, and a spray of bright blood fell on my face.
Okello's face swung over me. He was holding the pistol out at arm's length. His hand was shaking.
"Again," said Kakooza, behind him.
Okello pointed the gun at my head.
I looked straight up the barrel. It was a small black circle with nothing in it. I remember thinking that it was smaller than I'd imagined. I remember my own heartbeat, loud and slow, like someone knocking on a door.
He pulled the trigger.
There was a click.
That was all. A dry, small, mechanical click, the sound of a latch in a quiet house. Okello stared at the gun. He pulled the trigger again. Click. He swore, softly, and worked the slide with his thumb, and a bright brass cartridge jumped out and fell on the rock beside my face, rolling in a little circle, and he aimed again.
Click.
"Give it to me," said Kakooza.
"It's jammed."
"Give it to me."
There was a pause. Behind them, from a long way off, a dog started to bark in a village. I heard the river. I heard my own breath, whistling. I was lying on my back looking at the underside of the clouds, and I saw the moon slide out from behind them, slowly, huge and white, and for one moment the whole of that dark valley turned silver.
"Leave him," said Okello. His voice cracked. "Kakooza. He's gone. Look at him. Look at his chest. He won't last ten minutes. The river'll take him."
Kakooza stood a moment, breathing.
"Put him in," he said.
I won't try to tell you all of the river. I don't have all of it.
I remember hands. They took me under the arms and the knees and swung me, once, twice, and let go. I remember the sensation of flight, absurdly brief, and then the cold. It hit me like a wall. It went into the hole in my chest with a shock that was worse than the bullet, and my whole body arched, and I heard myself scream, a thin wet noise, and then the black water closed over my face.
I went down. It was dark. I was surprised by how dark. I could feel the current take me, a huge, muscular, impersonal pull, and I tried to kick and found that my legs would not do it. A piece of me watched all this from somewhere above my head, with a faint interest. So this is it, it thought. It's not so bad.
I came up once. I don't know how. I got a mouthful of air and a mouthful of water, and I saw the bank sliding away, and the dark shape of the van, and two small figures standing at the edge, looking down. Neither moved. Then the current took me round a bend, and they were gone.
I want to tell you what I saw.
I have gone back and forth about this. I've never told anyone. It would be easy to leave it out. I can imagine you reading, in a chair somewhere, with your eyebrows raised, saying, a man with a hole in his chest, losing blood, in a cold river at night: of course he saw things. And you would be right. I know that. I've read about it. I've asked doctors. They say the brain does strange things when it's short of oxygen.
But I saw it, and I'm going to tell you what I saw.
I saw the light on the water. It wasn't the moon. It was a warm light, low, yellow, the kind a candle makes. It lay across the surface of the river in a long unbroken path, and it came toward me. As it came I could see that it was not on the water at all but just above it, a little way in front of my face, and that it was held in something. A hand.
A hand, holding a candle, in the dark.
I did not see a face. I want to be careful. I did not see a face, or a body, or anything that I could draw for you. There was only the light and the hand, and a sort of stillness around them, in the middle of the roaring water. And I heard, or thought I heard, three notes. Then three more.
We praise You.
I lay in the current with my mouth open and the light in front of me, and I couldn't speak. And then, as clearly as I'd heard Kakooza say Put him in, a voice said, very gently:
Not yet.
I woke tangled in reeds.
It was grey. It was just before dawn. I was lying on my back in a thicket of papyrus, in water that came up to my ears, wedged between two clumps of thick green stalks that had caught me like fingers. I couldn't feel my legs. I couldn't feel my arms. My chest was a hole filled with fire, and every time I breathed, a whistle went in and out, and the water around me was a brownish red.
Above me, the papyrus heads stirred against the sky. A bird I didn't know was calling, over and over, one rising note.
I lay and looked at it. I think I smiled.
I don't know how long it was. An hour, perhaps. I was colder than I had ever been, and then I stopped being cold, which I knew was the worst sign, and I knew that I was going to sleep. I closed my eyes.
And I heard a splash, and a voice, an old man's voice, quite close, saying, "There is a man in the reeds!"
A face appeared above me. It was brown and creased and dark, with a white cap and a white stubble beard and eyes like wet stones. It looked down at me for a long moment, and then the mouth moved, and said in careful, slow English:
"Brother. Do not die yet. I have no time for a funeral."
His name was Joel.
He was sixty-seven, then, and he'd fished the Nile all his life. That morning he'd gone out at four to lift his nets, and the current had pulled him a half mile further than he meant, and he'd seen, in the grey light, a pale shape in the reeds, which he took for a drowned cow.
He hauled me into his boat. It was a long wooden thing, black with tar, that smelled of fish and wet rope. He laid me in the bottom on a heap of net. He opened my shirt, and looked at the hole, and said something I didn't catch, under his breath. Then he took off his own white cap, and folded it, and pressed it against my chest, hard, with the flat of his hand, and sat there with his whole weight on it, rowing with one arm, and talking.
He talked to me for forty minutes. I only remember pieces. He said, "You will not die in my boat, my friend. I have made a vow. I have not had a death in this boat since the year of the floods." He said, "What is your name?" He said, "Jonah? Jonah! The man of the fish!" And he laughed, a great old rumble of a laugh, and I felt it in my back through the boards. "That is a good name for a man who has been in the river. That is a sign, my friend. Do you know what that is?"
I couldn't answer.
"It is a sign," said Joel.
He got me ashore at a landing, and a boy with a bicycle, and a man with a pick-up truck. I remember the truck. I remember lying in the open back, with a rolled sack under my head and the sky going by overhead, white and then blue, and the old man's hand on my wrist, and his voice saying the same words over and over in a cracked whisper.
It was only later that I learned what they were. It was the twenty-third psalm, and he was saying it over me.
I woke in the hospital on the fourth day.
The first thing I saw was a white ceiling with a brown stain. The second was a drip, hung from a hook, running into my arm. The third was a tube. It came out of the left side of my chest, below the armpit, as thick as my finger, and ran down to a bottle on the floor, half full of red.
There was a man at the foot of the bed, in a green coat, with a clipboard. He was young, with round glasses, and he was looking at me with an expression I couldn't read.
"Mr. Kizza," he said. "Good. You're awake. I'm Dr. Ocen. I operated on you."
I tried to speak and nothing came out. He held a cup of water to my lips.
"I'm going to tell you some things," he said. "You may find them hard. I think you ought to know." He sat down on the edge of a stool. He put the clipboard on his knee, and then took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes, and I saw how tired he was. "You were shot once, at close range, with a nine-millimetre round, in the upper left chest. It entered below the clavicle. It passed through the top of the left lung. It exited your back at the level of the scapula."
I waited.
"It passed," said Dr. Ocen, "between your pulmonary artery and your aorta."
He said it slowly, as though he were reading a sentence in a language he had not entirely mastered.
"There are, in that region, about two centimetres of space. Perhaps three. The aorta is the largest vessel in your body. If the round had deviated by the width of my little finger, to either side, you would have been dead within ninety seconds. You would not have reached the river." He turned the clipboard over. "You also spent nine hours in a river, and by my estimate you lost close to half your blood. You should have been in irreversible shock within the hour. And yet the bleeding slowed, and the lung sealed itself against the water, and you kept breathing."
"I know," I whispered. "Luck."
Dr. Ocen looked at me. He was quiet for a long time.
"I have been a surgeon for eleven years," he said. "I trained in Kampala, and for two years in Cape Town, where I saw more gunshot wounds than I can count. I have opened the chests of many men." He put his glasses back on. "I do not use that word. I can't, any more. I have lost the right to it. I only know that I looked at your X-ray, on the first night, and I said to the registrar: this man is already dead. We are only formalising it."
He stood up.
"I was wrong," he said. "I don't know why. But I've been standing at the foot of this bed for twenty minutes, and I thought you should know that someone did not want you to be."
He left. The door swung behind him. The drip ticked. Outside, in the corridor, a woman was singing, softly, in the way you sing to yourself when you're pushing a trolley. I couldn't hear the words.
I lay there with my eyes on the stain.
Luck, I thought.
It was a good word. It had served me for twenty years.
I want to stop and do something I did last night, in the dark, and have not told you.
I took the nail from beside the table, and on the wall, below the line where I'd scratched the days, I made a column of marks. I'm going to write them out here, for you, as I scratched them. Not because I want sympathy. Because I want you to do what I did. I want you to read them down the page.
The knife on the forearm: a hair from the artery.
The beating in the washroom, the first month.
The warder's hose, two ribs, and nothing in the lung.
The sharpened spoon: an inch from the eye.
The dysentery, that took Mugerwa, and four others on either side of me, and left me.
The sheet, and the bucket, and the old man's hymn.
The fire at the Ssali house, from which I walked.
The bullet that went between two vessels.
The pistol that jammed, three times.
The river that took me and gave me back to an old man in a boat.
I counted them. There were more, if I included the small ones, the car I walked away from at nineteen, the fever at twenty-two. But I stopped at ten.
Ten.
Ten times in twenty years, I should have died, and the odds of each, I think, were small. I'm not good with probability, but I'm good with sums, and I did a rough calculation by the lamp, and I stopped when the number got ridiculous.
Luck, I said, aloud, to the wall.
The wall said nothing.
But a small cold thing had begun to stir in me, in the dark, behind my ribs, at the place where the bullet went through. A thought I could not dismiss. It was quiet, and simple. It sounded like a child's question.
If it's luck, it said, then why does it keep happening to you?