Chapter 7
The Book
I have to tell you about the exercise book.
I have put it off, I realise, for the same reason I put off the river. Both times I had thought: I'll get to it, and both times I sat down and wrote six pages about something else. But I have it here, on the table, beside the blue one I am writing in. I looked at it this morning for a long time before I picked up the pen.
It is exactly the same sort of book. That is the first thing. Soft cover, ruled pages, a multiplication table on the back. Mine is blue. Hers is brown, gone soft as cloth at the corners, and it smells of wood smoke and old paper and, when you open it, very faintly, of her. I don't know how that's possible. It has been seventeen years.
I am going to tell you how it came to me. And then I am going to tell you what was in it. I will do it in order, because I can't do it any other way.
My brother came in the second week of August, in the evening, in the rain.
It was a thin cold drizzle, the kind that comes off the lake and hangs about in the trees. I was sitting on the stool at the edge of the shed with a half-mended net across my knees, and Joel was out on the water, and I didn't hear anybody on the path until a shadow fell across the mesh.
I looked up.
He was standing at the edge of the roof, just inside the dripping line. He was tall, taller than I remembered, with a long quiet face, and he'd put on weight since the night at the grave. He wore a clean white shirt, buttoned to the neck, grey trousers, polished black shoes now muddy to the ankle, and he carried a plastic shopping bag in one hand. His hair was cut short and had begun to go grey at the temples. He looked like a man who taught children for a living.
He did. I'd learn that in a minute.
"Hello, Jonah," said Timothy.
I stood up. The net slid off my knees. I could not think of a thing to say. I stood there like a boy in front of a headmaster, with my hands hanging, and I noticed that I was looking at his shoes.
"You're thin," he said.
"You hit me once."
"I did." He looked down at the bag. "I'm sorry about that. I mean — I'm sorry for the manner. I'm not sorry that I did it."
It was so exactly the thing he would say that I laughed. I couldn't help it. It came out like a bark, and my chest hurt, and I put a hand on it. And he watched me with that long steady face, and something moved at the corner of his mouth, and for one second it was the boy at the edge of the football road with my school bag against his chest.
"You read about it," I said. "In the paper."
"A man pointed it out to me in the staffroom." He nodded. "New Vision. Page six. Man survives bullet and river. It said Jonah Kizza, thirty-six, of no fixed address. I was marking. I read it twice and I put the book down and I couldn't hold the pen." He looked at the nets. "It took me eight weeks to come."
"Why?"
"Because I was afraid."
"Of what?"
"That you'd be dead," said my brother. "And that you wouldn't."
We sat on two stools in the shed, with the rain coming down outside and the lamp lit between us, and Timothy told me, in order, like a man giving evidence, what had happened to him in fifteen years.
He'd finished school on a scholarship the pastor arranged. He'd gone to a teacher training college in Mbale. He taught at a primary school in a village called Busiu, with sixty children in a class and one blackboard. He had a wife, Esther, who was a nurse. He had a daughter, five years old, whose name was Rebecca. He said it lightly, looking at the floor, and then he looked up, and I saw that he was waiting to see what my face would do.
I think it did something. He nodded, as if I'd said it aloud.
"I'm not going to preach at you," he said. "I want that clear. I'm not here to save you. I'm not in the business. I used to think I was, for a long time. I used to rehearse the speech in the shower." He rubbed his face with both hands. "Then I realised that the speech was for me. It was so I wouldn't have to feel what I felt. So I'd know the words."
"What did you feel?"
He told me he had spent years being the practical one: paying bills when Mama was sick, helping with school fees, standing between neighbours and the family when people asked questions about me. He had built a life that did not include waiting for my return. That, more than his anger, frightened me. I had expected him to tell me he hated me. I had not expected him to tell me that he had learned how to live without me.
"Fury." He said it calmly. "Pure, steady fury. For years. At you, at God, at Mama for being so good. At the church for giving her nothing. I used to stand at the back of the service with my arms folded, watching the old ladies sing, and think, none of it works." He shrugged. "I had a lot to say about it."
"And now?"
"Now I'm only tired." He looked at me directly. "And I'm still angry. I don't want you to think I'm not. But there's a thing I have to do, and it's been on my back for twelve years, and I can't put it down."
He picked up the plastic bag from beside his foot.
"She asked me," said Timothy. "Near the end. In the hospital in Mulago, when she knew. She made me promise. She said, Timothy, if he ever comes back, give him this. Not before. Not if he's drunk. Not if he's angry. Wait until he is — until he has been to the bottom. She said you would know."
"Know what?"
"I don't know. She didn't say." He had to stop. His jaw worked. "She said: The day he comes back, or is brought back, give it to him. And do not explain."
He held out the bag.
I took it. It was heavy and soft, wrapped in newspaper, and it smelled of something I could not at first place. I stood there turning it in my hands, and I saw that my fingers were trembling, and I didn't know why.
"I'll be at the guesthouse by the bus stage," said Timothy, getting to his feet. "The Gateway. I'll be there tomorrow. If you want me, come. If you don't, I'll go home on the afternoon bus and you'll never hear from me again, and I'll understand."
"Timothy."
"I'm going to walk out into the rain now," said my brother, "because if I stay another minute I'll say something that's for me, and not for you."
He walked out into the rain. I watched his white shirt go up the path between the trees and get smaller and darker until it disappeared.
I stood there with the bag in my hands.
I did not open it that night.
I want you to know that. I'd like to say I tore into it, that I knelt at once on the earth floor and unwrapped it with shaking hands. I didn't. I sat on the cot, with the bag across my knees and the newspaper unopened, and I looked at it, and I was more afraid than I'd been on the rock by the river.
It was past midnight when Joel came back. He saw me and the bag, and he didn't ask. He lit the stove, and made tea, and put a mug beside me without a word. He sat down on his mat, and drank his own, and took a small worn Bible out of his pocket and read it by the lamp, moving his lips. After a while he lay down and turned his face to the wall.
At about two in the morning, I took off the newspaper.
It was a Bible.
It was the one I'd watched her read every night of my childhood, at the table, with the candle. A small thick black book, bound in cracked leather, the spine held on with a strip of brown tape. The gold had worn off the edges. The corners were soft. On the front, in her own hand, in faded blue ink: Rebecca Kizza, her book.
I held it. It was light. I had thought it would be heavy.
I opened it at random, and it fell open at a place where it had clearly been opened a thousand times, and there, at the top of the page, in the margin, in her small upright writing, in pencil, was my name.
Jonah.
I turned the page.
It was there again. On the next page, and the next. I turned them faster, and my heart began to knock. In every margin, in every blank space between the columns, along the top, down the side, wedged into corners and squeezed between lines, in pencil and blue ink and black, in a handwriting that tilted and straightened and grew shaky and firm again, was my name, and a date, and a few words.
3 April. Jonah left tonight. He said the thing about the bed. Lord, he is only a boy. Keep him.
4 April. Morning. He has not come back. Evening. Still not. Keep him.
19 May. Mama Lule says she saw him in town, in a car. He did not stop. Keep him.
2 Sept. Dry season. He sent money. I know where it is from. I am not going to spend it. I will put it in the tin for him. Keep him.
I read them. I read them one after another, with my finger moving down the margin, and I could not stop.
14 March. A bad dream. A boy standing in the dark. Lord, whatever he has done, do not let it be the end of him.
22 Nov. Timothy says I must stop praying for Jonah in front of the church. He says people talk. I said, let them. My son has been talking to everyone for years but you.
7 June. My knees are bad. I pray on the bed. I think You hear a woman lying down.
30 Dec. Another year. Eleven kilos lost. The doctor frowns. I say: I am keeping my strength for someone. Keep him.
I turned to the Psalms. They were in the margins there too, thick as a hedge. Beside Psalm 91, where it said there shall no evil befall thee, she had written, for Jonah, in the car. Beside the verse that says I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, she had put a small, careful tick, and the date, and he is not looking up, so I look for him.
I read by the lamp until my eyes burned. And when I put the book down for a moment, I found that my face was wet, and that I had been making a low noise, in my throat, like an animal, for some time.
Joel had not turned over. But I saw his shoulders. I think he had been awake the whole while.
I need to tell you about the exercise book now.
It was tucked in the back, between the last page of Revelation and the cover, flat, where it had been pressed for so long that the boards of the Bible had taken the shape of it. A brown counter book, soft at the corners, with a multiplication table on the back. The cover was blank. On the first page, in the same upright hand, in blue ink, she had written:
Prayers for Jonah. Begun the night he was nine. Morning and evening. To be given to him when he comes.
I turned the page. And I understood, with a slow sinking of the heart, what Timothy had meant when he said, do not explain.
There were two lines on each page. One for morning, one for night. They were dated. They began on the fourth of April, 1992, the day after my father's funeral. The first said: Lord, I am a widow. I have two boys. One is hard and one is soft. Keep the hard one. The soft one can keep himself. The second, that night: He did not cry today. Keep him. I do not know what to do about the not crying.
I turned the pages. They went on and on. Entry after entry, two a day, for fifteen years.
He has stolen from the basket. Forgive him. Forgive me. I should have known how little we had.
He beat the boy Kigozi. I am so ashamed. Keep him from becoming what he is afraid of.
He walked eleven miles to the trial and was too late. He came home with his face closed. Lord, this was a small thing and You could have made it right. I will not tell You what to do. But I would have.
That one I read twice.
He said terrible things tonight. He has gone. I am sitting at the table. It is eleven o'clock. Lord, You were there. You are the one who knows where he is. Do not take Your eyes off him. I am his mother and I have to sleep; You do not.
My brother had not lied. She had prayed for me, every morning and every night, for fifteen years. Five thousand, four hundred and seventy-five days. I did the sum at the table in the shed with a pencil, my hand shaking so badly that I had to do it three times.
Eleven thousand prayers, I thought. And I didn't hear one.
I will tell you the ones that broke me. I'm not going to put in all of them. You'd stop reading, or you'd not be able to.
There was an entry from the eleventh of March, 2003, when I would have been twenty, the winter I broke the tailor's hand. It said only: I dreamed today that his hands were red. Lord, let them be washed. I do not know how. You do.
There was an entry from the week Sarah left. Mama had never met her. She hadn't known she existed. But in the margin, on the night I said the cruel thing in the kitchen, she had written: Something has gone wrong tonight. I cannot say what. Someone is weeping who does not know my name. Keep her. Whoever she is. Keep her for him.
I closed the book at that.
I went outside and stood at the edge of the water, in the dark, with the rain on my face. After a while I got down on the mud, on my hands and knees, and stayed there. I can't say how long. I think I was trying to be sick. Nothing came. There was just a great, dry, shuddering ache in my ribs, where the bullet had gone through, as if the hole had opened again, wider, and everything I'd been holding was draining out of it in the dark.
The last entry I saved until dawn.
It was the final page. It was written in a hand I almost didn't recognise: huge, slanting, unsteady, with letters that wandered off the line. The pencil had been pressed so hard in places that it had torn the paper. At the top was the date, and I did the sum in my head, and it was the Saturday before she died. She was in Mulago. She was weak. She had Timothy hold the book.
Lord, it said.
I did not see my son's face again. It is all right. I have asked You to forgive me for the times I wished it otherwise, and You have.
I am not afraid. I am a little tired. I think I should like to lie down.
But I must tell You what I have not said. He is not a bad boy. He is a boy who was frightened under a bed. Whatever he has done since, he was frightened first. Remember that. Remember that You know what it is to be a child in a bad night.
Do not let go of him.
Bring him home. I have asked You every day for fifteen years, and I will go on asking after I am gone, wherever I am, and I do not think You will mind. I think You have heard it so many times by now that it is a kind of song.
Even if it takes longer than I have.
Even if it takes longer than anyone has.
Even if it takes the whole of his life.
Do not let go.
Amen.
It was getting light.
I sat on the floor of the shed with my back against the bed frame and the brown exercise book open in my lap. The rain had stopped. The river had gone silver. Somewhere out on the water, a fish eagle gave its high, falling cry, three notes, then three more.
I looked at the page.
Even if it takes the whole of his life.
I'd been kept alive. I knew it. I'd been in that river, in that cell, in that godown, and every time I'd come out, and I'd called it luck. And all that time, in a room in Kawempe, on a mud floor, with a broken rib, a woman had been asking for exactly that. Asking for it by name. Day after day, year after year, until the pencil tore the page.
It was no accident. It was an answer.
I'm not going to say I believed. I didn't. Not then. I'll say what I did feel, which was something else, and which I find harder to describe. It was the sensation of coming in from a long, cold night and finding that someone has been keeping a fire. Not for me. I hadn't earned it. Someone had kept it, all along, without being asked, in case a man should come.
And I thought, in a whisper, to the page, to the dead woman, to whatever had been listening to her:
All right.
Timothy was at the Gateway Guesthouse, at the bus stage, sitting on a bench in the yard with a cup of tea going cold in his hands. He looked up when I came through the gate. He looked as if he hadn't slept either. I stood in front of him with the black Bible under my arm.
"I read it," I said.
He nodded.
"All of it?"
"The last page. I read it four times."
He closed his eyes briefly, and opened them. "I haven't," he said. "Not once. She asked me to hold it, and I held it, and I looked away. I couldn't." He turned the cup. "I know what's in the front. I know what's in the margins. But I never read the book. I thought if I did, I'd have to believe what she believed."
"You don't?"
"I didn't." He looked at me. "I'm not sure any more."
I sat down beside him. The yard was full of early light, and a girl was sweeping the step, and a cockerel was walking along the wall, and a lorry went by in the road, and neither of us said anything. After a long time I said:
"Does He forgive killing?"
Timothy was still.
"I killed a boy," I said. "I want to say it to somebody. His name was Daniel. He was nineteen. I hit him with an iron bar. I told no one. Only the men who were there. And a woman died in a fire I set. And I've done — I've done a great deal of other things. I've counted. I stopped at forty." My voice was flat. "I'm not asking you to tell me I'm all right. I'm asking whether there's a place in that book for a man who did that."
He took a long time to answer.
"I'm not the one to ask," he said at last. "I'm a primary school teacher. I haven't prayed in years." He took a breath. "But I'll tell you what I know. I know that she wrote that book for you. She knew what you were. She knew it better than I did. She didn't know the names, perhaps. But she knew the shape. And she never wrote, Lord, make him better. She wrote, Keep him. She wrote, Bring him home." He looked down at his hands. "I don't think you can write that for someone you think is beyond it."
I said, "She wasn't God."
"No," said my brother. "But she was talking to Him."
I went back to the shed with the Bible, and I read it.
I want to describe how, because it wasn't how people imagine. I was not a man inspired. I was a man with a headache. I sat on the stool in the afternoon light, with the book on my knee, and started at the front, in Genesis, as you would a novel. By the second chapter I was bored. By the fifth I was irritated by the begats. I skipped to the middle. It fell open at the Psalms.
I read.
Most of it I didn't understand. It was the old English, thick and strange, thee and thou, and the verses ran together in my head. I read a line, and it slid off. I read another. A wall of words. For two hours I sat there, getting nothing, feeling like an idiot, a man who'd been given a key to a house and found that it was in a language he couldn't read.
Then I turned a page, and my mother's pencil was there.
It was Psalm 139. She had underlined a long passage, heavily, twice, so that the lead had shone. And in the margin beside it she had written one word, in capitals, three times.
JONAH. JONAH. JONAH.
I read it slowly, with my finger under the line.
Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
I stopped.
I read it again.
If I make my bed in hell.
I looked at the word. I looked at it as I might have looked at my own name in a stranger's handwriting. It was a plain word. It sat in the middle of the verse in a small black hard shape. Hell. I had been using it for days to describe my life. It had never once occurred to me that the Bible used it too. That someone, three thousand years ago, in a tent or a palace or a cave, had looked at the bottom of the pit and said: and You're there.
If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.
If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me.
Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.
My hand on the page was trembling so hard that the words jumped.
Thy hand shall lead me. Thy right hand shall hold me.
I thought of a hand, in the dark, holding a candle above the river.
I'll tell you what I did then. I laid the book down on the cot, carefully, open. I went outside. I walked down to the edge of the water, where the old man's canoe was drawn up on the mud, and I sat in the bottom of it, in the sun, with my arms round my knees. I stayed there until the light changed.
I had come, on my own feet, with my own choices, with my father's anger in my fists and a lie in my mouth, down into the pit. I'd made my bed in it. I'd lain in it for twenty years, and called it freedom. And a woman I had insulted and abandoned had written in the margin of a book, in pencil, three times, Jonah, Jonah, Jonah, beside a verse that said that I had never, for one minute, been alone.
I don't know how long I sat in the canoe.
I read Jonah that evening. The prophet. The book in the Bible that carries my name.
It is short. Four chapters. You can read it in ten minutes. I read it in an hour, by the lamp, with Joel sitting across from me not pretending to be busy.
I'd known the story from childhood. I thought. A man runs from God. A storm. A fish. But I had never read it, and I found that I'd got almost everything wrong. I'd thought that the man was a hero of faith. He wasn't. He was a sulker. He was a prophet who didn't want to do the job, who thought the people of Nineveh were wicked and deserved to die, and who ran as far as a ship would take him in the opposite direction. He was an angry, self-righteous, stubborn man with no sense of proportion.
I recognised him at once.
And God didn't strike him down. I kept waiting for it. I read the first chapter, and the sailors throwing him into the sea, and I thought, here it comes. And what came was a fish. Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. Prepared. In advance. The fish was not a punishment. It was a rescue. It was waiting.
I read the second chapter twice, standing up.
Then Jonah prayed unto the LORD his God out of the fish's belly. And said, I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the LORD, and he heard me; out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice.
I said, aloud, "Out of the belly of hell."
"What?" said Joel.
"It says it here. It says the man was in hell, and he cried, and God heard." I looked up. "It's the same word."
"Yes," said the old man softly. "I told you it was a sign."
I went on. I read the third chapter, where God says it again, the same errand, the same city: And the word of the LORD came unto Jonah the second time. The second time. Not You are too much trouble. Not Find yourself another prophet. I read it, and I thought of my mother in the doorway of the back room, in the rain, saying: He said, Go.
And then the fourth chapter, the last, where the prophet sits on a hill outside the city, in a temper, because God has forgiven it. He is angry. He is angry that mercy was given to the wrong people. He sulks, and a plant grows over him to give him shade, and then a worm kills it, and he grows faint in the sun, and says, It is better for me to die than to live.
And God asks him one question. It's the last verse of the book. It is not an answer. It is a question, put gently, almost tenderly, to a man in a temper:
And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?
That is how it ends. With a question. No reply. The book just stops.
I sat there, in the lamplight. I was thirty-six years old. I'd killed a boy. I had burned a woman. I'd been a hard, cold, careful man for twenty years. And I found that I was crying, quite quietly, with my hand over my mouth, for a man who had been dead for two and a half thousand years, who sat on a hillside outside a city he'd wanted destroyed, and was asked, with infinite patience, whether he would not like to learn how to forgive.
Cattle, I thought. He mentions the cattle.
It was such a small, kind, absurd detail. It was the last thing I expected from the Almighty. It struck me that someone who remembered the cattle would not forget me.
I did one more thing that night. I'll tell you, and then I will stop.
Joel was asleep. The lamp was low. I sat on the edge of the cot with the Bible closed on my knee and my mother's exercise book beside me, and I looked at my hands.
I did not kneel. I want that clear. I'm not sure my knees remembered how. I sat there with my hands open in my lap and my eyes on the wall, and I tried to think what you were supposed to say.
I had no formula. I had heard my mother pray ten thousand times, in the low voice she used for the Lord and the sick, but it had been like hearing someone speak a foreign language through a wall. I knew the sound. I did not know the grammar.
So I did the only thing I could. I talked to the wall, as you'd talk to a person in the dark whom you could not see and weren't sure was there.
"I don't know how to do this," I said.
My voice sounded small.
"I'm Jonah. You know that. You've known it a long time. I've never been any good at this. I don't know what to call You. I'm not going to say I believe. I'm not there. I'm sorry; I'm not. But I read what she wrote, and I read the verse, and I —" I stopped. I wiped my face with my wrist. "I want to ask You something.
"If You're there. If You were there, all those times. If You really were in the godown, and the cell, and the river. Then — I don't know what I'm asking. I don't know. Only —
"Don't let go."
I heard it come out of my mouth. It was not what I'd meant to say. It was her words, from the last page, in my own voice, small and cracked, going out into the dark of a tin shed on the bank of the Nile.
"She asked You to keep me. I think You did. I don't know why. I don't know what You want. But if You're going to keep on, then please —"
I stopped. I couldn't go on.
I sat there.
Nothing happened. I want to be clear. No light came down. No voice. Joel snored. A frog was calling at the water's edge. The lamp flickered and settled.
But a thing happened in me that I can only describe by saying that for the first time since I was nine years old, I did not feel like a boy under a bed. I felt like a boy who had come out.
I lay down and slept. I slept until the sun was high, and Joel had gone out and returned and put a mug of tea on the floor beside me, and I woke, and for several seconds I didn't know where I was.
I knew one thing. It was the first morning in twenty-seven years that I had not woken up afraid.
I'll close here for tonight. My hand is tired, and I have a long way still to go.
My mother wrote Keep him. She never wrote Save him. I searched the book for that second word and never found it.
I think I understand why now. Before rescue, there has to be keeping. Before a man can be changed, he has to remain alive long enough to be reached.
She asked God to keep me alive.
And He kept me alive until I could be found.