Chapter 6
The Question
It's Sunday. The church down the hill has been ringing a bell since seven, a cracked iron one that sounds like someone hitting a saucepan with a spoon, and every time it rings my hand jumps on the page.
Five years ago, I would have gone down that hill and thrown a stone at that bell. I want to say it now, so you know that when I describe how angry I was, I am not exaggerating for effect. I can still feel it. I felt it a minute ago, when the bell started, a flat hot pressure under the breastbone, the old steam behind the lid.
But I notice something else with it. I notice that I'm not afraid of the sound. I think that, in itself, is a kind of miracle, though I'd have been embarrassed to say so once.
I'm going to tell you about the five weeks in the hospital, and the five months after, and the question. It will not be tidy. I was not tidy.
They kept me in the Jinja hospital for thirty-eight days.
For the first nine, I didn't know what day it was. The drain in my chest ran red and then pink and then a thin yellow, and they changed the bottle every morning, and every morning a boy in a blue apron came with a bucket and carried the old one away. I was fed through a tube. I was washed by women who were gentle and brisk and talked over me as though I were furniture. At night the ward was full of sounds: the hiss of oxygen, the clank of a bed rail, a man at the end who screamed for his wife between two and four. And in the corner, a policeman on a plastic chair, whom I didn't recognise, asleep with his cap over his face.
On the tenth day, a nurse sat down on the edge of my bed.
She was a big woman, about fifty-five, with a broad calm face and a nurse's cap perched on grey curls, and she had a way of settling her weight that made the whole mattress sigh. Her badge said Sister Agnes. She looked at my chart for a long time. She looked at me. Then she put it down on the blanket and said, without any preface: "You are the one who came out of the river."
I said I supposed so.
"Everybody's talking about you." She smiled. "The surgeon cannot sleep. The porters think you are a ghost. There is a boy in Ward Four who says you are an angel, because his mother told him so." She patted my foot through the blanket. "I think you are a man who has made a lot of people very tired."
I almost laughed. It hurt.
"I'm not going to ask you anything," said Sister Agnes. "It is not my job. But I will tell you what I do each morning on this ward, so you won't be surprised. I go round the beds before the doctors come, and I put a hand on each person, and I pray for them. It takes about four minutes. I don't ask whether they believe. I just do it."
I said, "I don't want it."
"I know," she said. "That's why I'm telling you. So you can look away."
I turned my face to the wall.
She put her big warm hand flat on my shin, through the blanket, and she prayed. It was short. I didn't catch it all. She mentioned my name, which she'd read on the chart, and the word mercy, and the word rest. Then she got up, and the mattress rose a little, and she went on to the next bed. She did it every morning for the next twenty-eight days. I turned my face to the wall every morning. And every morning, on the same cold second, I felt my own shin become warm.
I hated it. I want that clear. I hated her for it as I'd hated my mother's hymns, with a flat, helpless, personal hatred. It was like being touched on a bruise. But I never once said, stop.
Joel came every day.
He came in the afternoon, after the heat. He walked from the landing, I learned, five miles each way, in his sandals, with a covered enamel dish in one hand and a flask of tea in the other. He sat on the stool beside the bed with his white cap on his knee, and he opened the dish. It was fish soup, thick and peppery, with chunks of tilapia, and he held the spoon himself until I could.
He talked. He was one of those old men who talk the way other men breathe. He told me about the river: where the fish ran, where the water was bad, which stretches were dangerous. He told me about his wife, who'd died of a fever in the year of the big floods, and his five children, scattered over East Africa, who wrote at the festivals. He told me about the old church by the market, where he sat in the back pew every Sunday and never sang, and the vicar, who was a fool, and a good man. He told me nothing at all about what he wanted from me.
On the fifth day, I asked.
"Why do you come?"
Joel put down the spoon. He thought about it, honestly, with his head on one side. "You are a man in a hospital," he said. "Somebody should come."
"I'm nothing to you."
"Yes." He nodded. "That is correct."
"Then why—"
"I pulled you out." He shrugged his thin shoulders. "My people say, when you save a life, you own a little of it. Not like a slave. Like a gardener. You have to come back and see if it is growing."
I said, bitterly, "It isn't."
"Not yet," said Joel, and offered me the spoon.
I took it. I've thought about that spoon many times since. It was an ordinary tin spoon with a bent handle, and the soup on it was warm, and I realised with a kind of despair that I was weeping. I hadn't wept in front of a person since I was twelve and I'd promised myself I never would. Tears were running into the soup. I couldn't stop them. And the old man looked at the wall, politely, and went on holding the dish until I'd finished.
I'd like to say I was a gracious patient. I wasn't.
I was rude to the doctors. I swore at the physiotherapist who made me blow into a plastic bottle. I refused the policeman's questions when he woke up, and then the other policeman's, and then the Inspector's, when he came, in the grey suit, and stood at the foot of the bed. He said he was glad to see me alive. He said that Walu had been questioned and released. He said that a witness had come forward, a fisherman, who had seen a white van on the Bujagali road that night and had written down part of the plate.
"Would you like to make a statement?" said the Inspector.
I looked at the ceiling. "No."
"Mr. Kizza. They tried to kill you."
"Then they'll try again."
"That's rather my point."
"I'm tired," I said.
He stood a moment. Then he put a card on the locker, the same card, and went away.
I'll tell you why I wouldn't, since I've told you everything else. It was not fear. I'd have liked it to be. It was something more cowardly. If I made the statement, I would have to speak of Daniel. And if I spoke of Daniel, it would be a story with a beginning and an end, and the end would be a police cell and a rope, and I would have to walk to it. And I wasn't ready to walk. I wanted, for a little longer, to be a man who had been shot.
That is a strange thing to say. But there is a kind of vanity in being wounded. I lay in that bed for thirty-eight days being looked at, and I enjoyed being a mystery, and I didn't want to be solved.
On the thirty-ninth day, Joel took me home.
I use that word on purpose. I had no home. But he put my bag over his shoulder, and walked me out of the gate on his arm, slowly, because I couldn't yet climb, and found a motorbike taxi at the roadside, and told the rider, "Landing." And we went down through the town, in the long red afternoon, the three of us on a motorbike, with Joel's white cap flapping and my ribs screaming at every bump.
The hospital bill was four hundred thousand shillings. I had never seen it. I learned later that it had been paid, in cash, in notes folded small, by a man who sold fish. When I asked him, he waved a hand. "I sold a net."
"You sold your net?"
"I have another."
"Joel."
"Brother," he said, and put a hand on my arm, "let me ask you something. When you were at the bottom of the river, did anyone stop to calculate?"
I shut my mouth.
He had a shed.
It was at the water's edge, below the landing, a tin lean-to against a bank of red earth, open on the river side. Inside, it smelled of tar, fish, rope, and smoke. There were nets hung from the roof beams like grey curtains. There was a clay stove, a paraffin lamp, two stools, a mat, and, in the corner, a narrow cot with a grey blanket, which he had made up for me. A plastic bowl stood beside it with a cake of soap.
"My son's," he said. "He is in Mombasa. He will not be needing it."
I lay on that cot for a week and did nothing. I listened to the river. I had not realised how loud it was. It was never silent, even at night. A low continuous murmur, like a great animal turning in its sleep. Frogs sang. Bats went over. Sometimes there was the plash of a fish, or a paddle, or the soft knock of a canoe against the landing.
When I could walk, I started to help. It was Joel's idea. "A man who sits grows weak," he said. He put a netting needle into my hand. It was a flat piece of wood about a foot long, wound with twine, and he showed me how to take the broken mesh and loop it, and pull, and knot. I was clumsy. My hands remembered the sanding and not the knotting. But after a day I caught the rhythm. And after two, I noticed that the shaking had stopped.
My hands, that is. The shaking I've told you about. For fifteen years I had had a tremor, in the evenings, a fine trembling in the fingers that I'd drowned with drink. And sitting on a stool at the edge of the Nile with a broken net across my knees, going over, under, through, pull, I looked down at my hands and they were perfectly still.
I put the needle down. I looked at them for a long time.
I'd like to say I understood. I didn't. I put the needle up, and went on.
The nightmares started in the second week.
They were the same, every night, with changes in the details. A concrete floor and a swinging bulb. A smell of petrol. A woman in a nightdress on her knees with a beam of fire coming down. A boy in a green jersey, in the corner, saying, "It's very cold where I am." I woke every night at two, in a sweat, with my heart thundering and my chest hot where the scar was, and lay there in the dark, listening to Joel snore, and to the river.
The first time, I thought: I'm tired.
The tenth time, I thought: I'm being punished.
The twentieth time, I stopped thinking, and simply lay there.
On the night of the twenty-first, I sat up.
I want to describe it exactly, because it's the thing that I told you about in the prologue, and I've been circling it. There was no moon. The shed was full of a faint grey light that came from the river. Joel was asleep on his mat across the floor, on his back, his mouth open, one hand folded on his chest. The lamp was out. I sat on the edge of the cot with my feet on the cold earth and my hands on my knees, and I was not afraid, and I was not in pain.
I was thinking about the list on the wall.
I had been doing the sum. I do sums when I'm afraid; I always have. I had gone through the ten again, one by one, and added the small ones, and my mind had run, as it ran at school, over the problem like water over a stone. And suddenly, quite clearly, the sum finished. It came out. It stood in my head, not as a number, but as a plain fact, the way a table stands in a room.
I had not been lucky.
You can be lucky once. You can be lucky twice. I had been lucky, if that's the word, ten times, and each time the alternative was not just death but the most likely death, the death that every probability pointed to. I had been kept. I do not know how else to put it. A man who is lucky is not hunted. A man who is lucky is not saved from his own rope by an old man's hum. A man who is lucky does not have the pistol jam three times in a row.
Someone was doing it.
I sat quite still. The river ran. And I heard my own voice, in the dark, saying aloud, in a hoarse whisper, a question I had never in my entire life put to anything:
"Why am I still alive?"
I don't mean the old question. I'd asked the old one for decades, in every bar and cell. Why did this happen to me? Why me? The old question was all self-pity. It had an answer, which was because you're a man.
This was different. It came from the other side. It meant: if I am being kept, what for?
Across the shed, Joel stirred. His eyes opened. He did not move, but I saw the whites gleam, and I knew he'd heard.
He said nothing. After a moment he shut them again.
I lay down. I did not sleep. And somewhere around four, when the sky went from grey to pearl, I understood that the question would not leave. It was going to follow me. That was all right. I had been followed before. But this one did not have boots.
For the next two months, I tried to kill it.
I told myself it was weakness. I told myself I was feverish, that it was a symptom, a thing that happens to men with holes in their chests. I tried to be practical. I worked harder. I got up at four and went out in the boat with Joel, and hauled nets, and sorted fish in the cold light, and gutted them on a board, and carried baskets up the bank. My arms got thick. The scar on my chest turned from red to purple to white. I ate. I slept. And every night, at two, I woke.
I had two escapes, and I used both.
The first was the argument. I went to the library in Jinja, a bare brick room with a leaking roof, and I looked for books on probability. I wanted to prove that I was wrong, that the ten events were unrelated, and that any man would have such a list if he looked back far enough. I sat at a table with a pencil and a sheet of paper and worked out the arithmetic. I did it carefully. And the pencil kept coming out at the same place.
Then I tried the opposite. I read about evolution, and chance, and the human tendency to see patterns. I read that gamblers on a winning streak believe the dice are listening. I read that every survivor of a disaster feels chosen, and that the dead, who would feel the opposite, aren't there to say so. I thought that was good. I wrote it down. The survivors are the only ones who can ask.
But when I wrote it, I looked at it, and something in me turned over like a fish.
The dead aren't there to say so.
I thought of Daniel.
That is the other thing I did, in those months. I was angry.
I want you to see this part, because I think people expect a conversion to begin with a feeling of awe, and mine began with a feeling of rage. I was furious. It had grown in me, slowly, from the moment I put the sum together, until it filled my chest.
Because if I had been kept, then someone had been keeping me. And if someone had been keeping me, then that someone had been there. In the godown. In the fire. On the rock by the river. In the bed in Kawempe, with the boots.
And had done nothing.
I walked down to the water one night in the fourth month. I was alone. It was past midnight. The river was black and smooth, with a skin of stars, and there was a smell of wet reeds. I stood on the end of Joel's little jetty, a few planks lashed to poles, and I shouted.
I'd never shouted at the sky before. I'd muttered, once, outside a church in Wandegeya. I'd spat. But I stood there on the end of a jetty and screamed, in a voice I didn't know I had, so loudly that a roosting bird went up out of the reeds and a dog started to bark across the river.
"Where were You?"
The water kept flowing.
"Where were You? Where were You when he was kicking her? Where were You on the floor of that godown? I knelt in that boy's blood, and I begged him, and I begged You, and nothing! Not a sound! You kept me! You kept me! A drunk. A thief. A man who broke people's hands for a living. You put Your hand out for me over and over, and You didn't lift a finger for a boy of nineteen in a football shirt!"
I was crying. I was shaking. I raised my fist.
"His name was Daniel! He had a mother! Say it! Say his name! And Teopista Ssali, who was burned alive in her own bed, and looked at me and was relieved! She's dead, and I'm here! Why? What kind of God does that? What kind of arithmetic is that?"
I went on. I won't give you all of it. I named every one I could think of. I named my father. I named Mugerwa, who died with his head on my thigh. I named a hundred faces, the ones I'd known, the ones I'd made. I named Sarah, with a gap in her teeth, who was dead at twenty-eight, in a village hospital, and had left a girl of ten to be raised by somebody else. And at the end, when my voice was a raw croak and I'd run out of names, I sank to my knees on the planks, and said:
"If You kept me alive for a reason, then Your reasons are monstrous. I want nothing to do with You."
Silence.
Frogs. The river. A long way off, the lights of Jinja, and above them the enormous slow wheel of the stars.
I knelt there for a long time. I don't know whether I expected a voice. I think I did. I think part of me waited for it to say something; to defend itself, or to forgive, or even to strike. I'd have taken any of them.
It did nothing. It kept silent, with a kind of terrible, patient stillness, as if the whole sky were listening.
That was the worst of all.
I got up and walked back to the shed.
Joel was awake. He was sitting on his stool in the dark, with the lamp unlit and his hands on his knees. I didn't know how long he'd been there. He'd heard it all, I suppose; the whole landing had.
I sat on the cot. I did not look at him.
After a time he said, "You are very angry."
"Yes."
"With whom?"
I laughed, a short ugly laugh. "You tell me."
"Ah," said Joel. He rubbed his stubble with the back of his hand. "You see, my friend, this is the funny part. You say you do not believe. Yet you shout at the sky for an hour, in the middle of the night. And you are angry that nobody came." He shook his head. "A man who does not believe does not shout. He does not need to. He sleeps."
I said, "I'm shouting at a hole."
"Perhaps."
"There's nothing there."
"Then it is a very patient hole," said Joel. "It let you finish."
I stared at him in the grey light.
"I'll tell you a story," said Joel. "It is an old one, and I think you know it. In the Bible, there is a prophet called Jonah. He was angry, too. He was angry with God because God would not punish a city, and he fled. He got on a ship. A storm came, and the sailors cast lots and threw him into the sea. And a great fish swallowed him." He folded his hands. "And in the belly of the fish, in the dark, he cried out. And the Lord heard him. And the fish spat him onto the shore."
"That's Jonah," I said.
"Yes."
"My mother named me for him."
"I thought she might have." He smiled in the dark. "A woman who names her son after a man who runs from God is either a fool or a very great believer. I think I would like to have met her."
I said nothing. My throat had closed.
"Here is what I think," said Joel gently. "You say, God kept me, and did not keep the boy. That is a terrible thing, and I do not have an answer. I am an old fisherman. I am not a scholar. I cannot tell you why one man is lifted and another is not. I think only a fool would try." He leaned forward. "But I know this. When Jonah was in the fish, he did not say, Why did You throw me? He said, I called, and You answered. You understand? He did not understand either. But he stopped asking the question that had no answer, and he began to ask the other."
"What other?"
"What do You want me to do now?"
I lay back on the cot. I looked at the roof.
"I don't know Him," I said.
"No." Joel shrugged in the dark. "But I think He knows you. He has long arms, that one. Longer than the river." He yawned. "Sleep. You have a face like a man who has been to a funeral."
I didn't sleep. But I want to tell you what I did the next morning, because it is the last thing I did in that season before the door opened.
I went to Kampala.
I took a bus, and then a taxi, and I told no one. I had one clear thought in my head, which was that I could not bear to have been kept for no reason, and that I should at least see the one reason I knew of. I had her address. I'd got it, at last, from the old woman in Nawandala, who sent it on a torn piece of paper by the hand of a boy. Ntinda. Behind the shopping centre. A green gate.
I found it at noon. It was a small, neat house with a tin roof and a hibiscus hedge. There was a bicycle against the wall. I stood across the road, under a tree, in the heat, feeling like a thief, with my shirt stuck to my back.
At half past twelve, the gate opened.
A girl came out. She was fourteen, perhaps fifteen. She wore a green school uniform with a white collar, and her hair in two thick braids, and she was reading as she walked. She held the book open in one hand and held her bag on her shoulder with the other, and she went along the verge without looking up, with her lips moving slightly. She was thin and tall. She had long hands.
She stopped at the roadside, to wait for a taxi. And she looked up, for a moment, at the sky, as people do. And then at something that made her laugh. I don't know what. A man on a bicycle, with a goat across the handlebars. She laughed out loud, with her head thrown back.
There was a gap between her front teeth.
I held on to the tree.
I stood there, across the road, a grown man with a ruined chest and a record of violence, and I looked at my daughter. She didn't know I was there. She got into a taxi. It pulled away, in a cloud of dust. And I watched it go, with a feeling as of a hand closing round my heart, and I heard a voice say, quite near, sharp and not unkind:
"Stay dead."
I turned.
A woman stood at the gate. She was in her sixties, in a faded blue dress, a head-tie, a pair of rubber slippers. She had a broom in her hand. She was tiny. She had Sarah's eyes.
"I know who you are," said the woman. "I knew you the day you came to the hospital. I was there. You put a toy on the sill. A stuffed monkey. I kept it." Her voice shook. "I kept it, to remember what kind of man you are. A man who brings a toy and doesn't come in."
I opened my mouth.
"She thinks you are dead," said the grandmother. "She has a picture of a soldier on her wall. I told her that was her father. It's a lie, and I will answer for it before my God, but it is a better lie than you." She stepped forward, with the broom held low. "She is fifteen. Her mother is in the ground. She has me, and she has her books, and she has not asked for you. If you ever once come to this gate again I will go to the police. I will say you are a criminal. I will say you tried to take her."
"I don't—"
"You are a dead man," said the grandmother. "Be one."
She went in and shut the gate. I heard the bolt.
I stood in the road for a long time. A motorcycle went past. A girl in a yellow dress walked by with a jerrycan on her head. I looked at the green gate, and I looked at the hibiscus, and I thought of Joel on his stool, and I said, aloud, to nobody, quietly:
"I've heard you."
I don't know what I meant. I've thought about it often. I didn't mean it as a prayer. I didn't mean it as a surrender. It was more like the thing you say to a person who's been talking to you for hours, in another room, when you finally put down what you were holding and say, all right. I hear you.
I got on the bus.
It's late. The bell stopped hours ago, and the hill is quiet. Mama Joyce has gone to her own church and come back, and I heard her singing in the yard, a tune I knew, and I had to put the pen down for a while.
I want to say one more thing before I go to bed.
I have called this chapter The Question, and I've told you what the question was. But I think now that I got it slightly wrong. When I sat on the edge of the cot that night and asked, aloud, Why am I still alive? I thought that I was asking it of the universe. I thought that I was putting a problem to the dark and waiting for it to be solved.
I understand something I didn't then. A question like that is not a problem. It is a door.
You don't solve a door. You either walk through it or you don't.
I stood in front of it for a long time. I stood there, I think, for about two more months, with my hand on the handle, saying I didn't believe in it, until my brother came down the slope to the shed one evening in a clean shirt, with a plastic bag in his hand.
But that is the next chapter. I must sleep.