Chapter 9
The Man I Became
The ninth of April came and went while I was writing about the church.
I didn't notice. I looked up from the table at supper, and Mama Joyce was setting down a plate of steamed bananas and beans, and on the shelf above the door there was a candle burning in a saucer. I hadn't seen her light it. She didn't say anything. She set the plate down, and put the salt beside it, and wiped her hands on her apron, and went out.
I counted on the wall with the nail. Twenty-five years, to the day, since I walked out of my mother's door into the rain.
I sat looking at the candle. I thought: she must have asked Timothy for the date. I thought: or the pastor. Then I thought, no, she wouldn't. She is a woman who can read a man's face. She had looked at me for a month of mornings and she knew. And she lit a candle in a saucer on the shelf, as a woman once did in a house with a mango tree, and walked away so that I wouldn't have to say thank you.
I ate. I cried a little into the beans. Both things are true.
I'm going to write about the debts now. I'll tell you why I'm calling them that. When I knelt in the shed and gave it all away, I thought that was the end of the account. The pastor let me think so for about a week. Then he came down the path one Thursday with a notebook, a plain one like this, and sat down on the stool, and said:
"Now. The list."
I'll tell you what he said, because it's the thing I've turned over most.
"You've been forgiven," he said. "I believe that with my whole heart. Before God, the debt is gone, and I'll stand at the judgement and say so. But you're not alone on the earth, Jonah. There are people out there who are still living in what you did. They didn't ask to be. And they weren't in the shed when you knelt." He tapped the notebook. "God forgives you. That doesn't oblige them. It doesn't undo the thing. And a man who says I'm saved, and goes on walking past the people he hurt, I'm afraid he's only learned a better excuse."
"What do I do?"
"I don't know yet. That's why we write it." He uncapped his pen. "Not to punish you. Not to give you ideas about earning anything. Only so you can see them. Names. Faces. You've been looking at your past as a sort of weather. I want you to see it as people."
So we wrote.
It took the whole evening, and ran to three pages. Some of the names I had to dig for. Kasirye the tailor. The woman in the doorway behind him with the baby. Mugerwa, who had died on my knee. A debtor in Nakawa, whose shop I smashed in my twenties, whom I couldn't picture. A boy called Ssenyonjo who'd been slow to pay. The women I had paid for and not asked their names.
The names I did not have to dig for were these.
Daniel Ssekandi — mother.
Teopista Ssali — husband. Moses.
Brian Lule.
Hope.
Timothy.
The police.
I wrote the last one reluctantly. I held the pen over it for a long time.
"You know why that's there," said Pastor Wasswa.
"Yes."
"Do you want to tell me?"
"No."
"Then I'll say it, and you can correct me." He folded his hands. "There is a boy named Daniel, and a lake, and a mother who has been putting up posters for fifteen years. You are the only person alive who knows where he went into the water. Perhaps the only one. And you're walking about with it in your pocket."
I shut my eyes.
"I won't tell you what to do," said the pastor. "I'm not the Holy Spirit. But I've never in my life seen a man put a thing down by hiding it."
I went to the police on a Monday.
I walked into the CID building in Jinja at eight o'clock in the morning, in the clean shirt, and asked at the desk for Inspector Okello. A young constable looked me up and down. He said the Inspector was in Kampala. I said I'd wait. I sat on a wooden bench in the corridor for six hours with my hands on my knees, under a poster that said Report Corruption, while people came and went, and no one looked at me. At two, a car drew up in the yard, and the Inspector got out, with his briefcase, and stopped.
He saw me through the glass door. His face did something complicated.
He took me to his office, which was a small green room with a window onto a wall, and a desk covered in files, and he shut the door and sat down, and said, in his quiet precise voice, "Mr. Kizza. Before you say anything, I want you to understand your rights."
"I know them."
"You've been in prison."
"Yes."
"Then you know that anything you say may be used." He looked at me over his folded hands. "You're a free man. You're not under arrest. You could stand up and walk out, and I'd shake your hand."
"I want to make a statement," I said.
He didn't answer for a long moment. Then he took a pad of foolscap from the drawer, and uncapped a pen, and said, "Start at the beginning."
I started with Daniel.
It took until eleven that night. A constable brought tea and groundnuts and went away. I spoke in English, then in my own language, then in English again. I gave dates, as near as I could. I named the godown. I named the men who were there. I told him where the water went out past Port Bell landing. I told him about the jersey. He wrote it all in a small neat hand, and read it back, and I signed every page.
When I came to the river, to the night on the rock, and Kakooza's voice, and the pistol that clicked, he put down his pen and sat for a minute with his hand over his mouth.
"The fisherman," he said. "The one who wrote down the plate. That was good luck, you know, for us. That was what finally let me get a warrant for Walusimbi."
I said, "It wasn't luck."
He looked at me.
"I'm not saying it for show," I said. "I've stopped saying that word. I'll tell you why one day, if you'd like. But I don't think that's what it was."
"No," said the Inspector, quietly, after a moment. "I'm beginning not to either."
I'll give you the rest quickly, because it's the kind of thing that happens in offices, and in corridors, and does not make a story.
I was held for eleven weeks on remand in the Jinja prison. I knew the smell of the place before they opened the gate: the same bucket, the same concrete, the same sour breath. I walked in and a warder looked at my file and said, with a kind of grim humour, "Welcome back, Mr. Kizza." I was put in a cell with thirty men. I slept on my side. I read the black Bible by a bulb in the corridor.
It was not like the first time. I want you to hear that. I was in the same kind of room. But I wasn't in the same kind of dark. The nights were as long. The food was as bad. But there was an old man in the corner, a pickpocket named Lubega, with a bad cough, who asked what I was reading, and I told him, and by the third week we had eight men on the floor of that cell on Sunday afternoons while I read to them from Luke, because most of them couldn't read. They did not all believe. I don't know that any of them did. But there was a rule that nobody talked during the reading, and nobody broke it.
In the ninth week, they took a diver to Port Bell.
I wasn't there. The Inspector told me later. He said they had spent three days in the water at the place I'd named, with a police boat and two divers and a metal detector, and that the bottom was silt, deep, and soft, and full of fifteen years of rubbish. They found a bicycle. They found a good many bottles. They did not find a boy.
"I'm sorry," said Okello. "Fifteen years. In that kind of water, the current, the mud. I doubt we ever will."
I nodded. I said, "His mother?"
"She has been told." The Inspector looked at his hands. "She came to the station. I told her someone had made a statement. I didn't say who. She asked me one question."
"What?"
"She asked whether he'd suffered."
I felt the floor go out from under me. I put a hand on the edge of the desk. "What did you say?"
"I said I didn't know." He raised his eyes. "I was waiting to ask you."
I had to take a minute. I was gripping the desk with both hands.
"He said, Mama," I said. "Once. At the end. He wasn't in pain, I think, by then. He looked —" I stopped. "He was looking at me as if he were trying to understand something. I wasn't sure what. He wasn't afraid."
The Inspector nodded slowly. He wrote nothing down.
"I'll tell her that," he said. "If you're sure."
"Tell her I said it. Tell her my name."
"She'll want to see you."
"I know."
"You may not want to see her face," said Okello.
I said, "I think I have to."
The trial was in October.
I won't make it long. There was a courtroom in Kampala, high-ceilinged, with fans that didn't turn, and rows of brown benches, and a dock with a rail. Walu sat in it in a grey suit, thinner than I remembered, with his white hair combed and a handkerchief folded in his top pocket. He didn't look at me for the first two days. Kakooza was beside him, in the leather jacket, not blinking. Okello wasn't there. A young man in a tie, with a face like a pale question, sat where he should have been, and kept looking at the door.
On the third day, they called me.
I walked to the witness box. I was thirty-seven years old. I put my left hand on the Bible, which I did not need to be handed because I had brought my own, and I said the oath in a voice that echoed in the hall. The public gallery was full. I saw faces I knew. I saw Timothy, in the third row, in his white shirt, with his hands clasped. I saw Joel, at the back, in his cap, who had come all that way on a bus because he said a witness should have someone behind him who was not a witness. I saw Sister Agnes. I saw an old woman in a blue headscarf in the front row, very upright, with a handbag held on her knee, whom I did not at first recognise.
I looked at her for a long time.
She was perhaps sixty. A narrow face, a dark skin, deep lines at the corners of the mouth. She sat with her head high and her eyes on my face. She wore a black dress and a grey headscarf, and her hands were folded on the clasp of her bag, and they weren't trembling. She did not look away.
And I knew. I'd never seen her. But the line of the forehead, the set of the eyes, I'd seen those under a swinging bulb, looking up from a concrete floor.
I held on to the rail.
The prosecutor asked me my name. I gave it. He asked me my occupation, and I said fisherman. He asked whether I knew the accused. I said yes. He asked how. I said, "I worked for him for twenty years."
I told it all.
It took a day and a half. I told them about the tailor, and the fuel, and the jobs, and the debts. I told them about Ssali's shop, and the three jerrycans, and the order given in a room with a plant. I told them about a boy in the Arsenal jersey, and the man who had said Teach him. I did not look at the dock. I looked at the woman in the front row. I said every word to her. I said, "His name was Daniel Ssekandi. He was nineteen. He had a small black knife. He said Mama."
I heard a sound in the gallery. A sort of low, cracked intake of breath. I did not look to see whose.
At the end, the defence lawyer, a big man with a gold watch, got up and tried to destroy me. He called me a murderer. He called me a thief and a liar and a drunk. He said I'd been bought by the police with promises. He said I was a convicted arsonist who would say anything to save myself.
"Mr. Kizza," he said, smiling, "you are a deeply unreliable man."
"Yes," I said.
He paused.
"I am," I said. "I'm all of those things. You've listed them correctly. I have done every one." I looked at him. "I can't give you a reason to believe me. I'm only telling you what happened. You can do what you like with it."
The courtroom went quiet.
"No further questions," said the lawyer, and sat down.
They sentenced Walusimbi to twenty-eight years. Kakooza to twenty-two. Ssebo, who had been found in Kenya, to eight. Okello, the quiet one, was never traced.
I was sentenced the following week, in a smaller room, by a tired judge. He said that I had confessed, freely, to a killing for which there was no corroboration, no body, and no complaint but that of an absent mother; that I'd given evidence at considerable personal risk; and that in the circumstances he would not impose a custodial term. He gave me three years' suspended, and two hundred hours of community service, and a record that would follow me to my grave.
I thanked him. He looked at me over his glasses.
"Mr. Kizza," he said, "I've been on this bench nineteen years. I've never had a man thank me for a conviction."
"It's the first time I've been given one I deserved," I said.
I walked out of the room and into a white corridor, and Walu was there.
They were taking him down. He was between two warders, in cuffs, with his white head up. He saw me, and stopped. The warders waited.
He looked at me for a long time. He was an old man, and sick. I could see it in the grey of his skin, the loose collar. He had once been the biggest thing in my world. He'd fed me goat and chips and told me what I was. And I stood in the corridor and felt, to my surprise, neither fear nor hatred. I felt something I can only call grief.
"I fed you," said Walu. His voice was hoarse. "I took you in. You were nothing. A boy with a bag."
"Yes."
"I made you."
"I know," I said. "Thank you for the goat."
I don't know why I said it. It came out of me quite naturally, in a level voice, and it was true. He stared at me. For a moment I thought he would spit. And then something went across his face, a flicker, an old man's flinch, as of someone who has been handed a thing he doesn't know how to hold.
"I'm sorry for what I took," I said. "From you. I know I took your people. I'm not sorry it's over." I met his eyes. "I'll pray for you, if you'll let me."
"Save it," said Walu. But there was no heat in it.
The warders moved him on. I watched his white head go away down the corridor, between the two grey uniforms, until the door closed.
Now the people.
I'm going to give you the four I was most afraid of. I'll take them in the order I went to them. It wasn't the order I wished. It was the order they let me.
The first was Daniel's mother.
Her name is Miriam Ssekandi. She lives in a two-room house in Kisenyi, in a lane so narrow that two people can't pass, with a corrugated roof held down by stones and a goat tied to the fence. She makes a living selling doughnuts from a basket at the taxi park. She has three daughters, now grown. She has a long face and a ramrod back, and a way of looking at you as if you were a sum that doesn't come out.
I went with Joel.
It was his idea. He said, "She is a mother. If you go alone, it will be a man coming to a door. If I come, it will be a family." I said I could not ask it of him. He said that I hadn't. We went on a Friday afternoon, on the minibus taxi from Jinja, and we sat side by side and said nothing the whole way. When we came into the lane he walked a little behind me. He carried, in his hand, a bunch of white flowers wrapped in newspaper.
She was in the yard, sitting on a stool, shelling beans.
She looked up and saw us. She saw me. She put down the bowl.
I'd rehearsed it. I'd rehearsed it for six weeks. I'd planned the words in two languages. I'd practised in the shed, to the nets. I stood at the gate with my hat in my hands and it all went out of my head.
I knelt.
I knelt in the dust, in the lane, outside her gate. I didn't decide to. My knees went. I put my forehead on the ground, as I'd seen Joel do, and I said, in a voice I didn't recognise:
"Mama. I am the one."
There was silence.
I heard a goat bleat. I heard a radio somewhere, playing a song. I heard Miriam Ssekandi get up from the stool. I heard her feet cross the yard, in rubber sandals, a slow flat slapping, and stop in front of me.
"Look at me," she said.
I lifted my head.
She was standing over me with her hands at her sides. Her face was perfectly white under the dark of the skin. Her eyes were enormous. She looked down at me, and I saw, in the set of her jaw, in the line of the mouth, the boy with the thin moustache who had sat in a chair and said Please.
"Did he say it?" she said.
"Yes."
"What did he say?"
"Mama."
Her face did not change. But her whole body moved, as a tree does in a gust, a shiver that went from the shoulders down. She said nothing for a long time. I stayed on my knees. Behind me, I heard Joel, softly, begin to pray under his breath.
"Fifteen years," said Miriam. "I have lit a lamp every Thursday. I said, he will walk in. The police said, he ran away. The neighbours said, he went to Congo. I said nothing. I lit the lamp." She drew a breath. "My husband died three years ago. He went to his grave not knowing. He asked me on the last night: Is he coming? I said: Yes."
"I'm sorry."
"Do not say it."
"I —"
"Do not say that word to me." Her voice was low and hard. "It is a small word. A word for stepping on a foot. I have heard it from the police and I have heard it from a priest and I do not want it from you."
I stayed where I was.
"I want to say something," said Miriam Ssekandi. "And you will hear it on your knees."
"Yes, Mama."
"I will not say it is all right. It is not all right. It will never be." She took a step closer. "You killed my son. You took him in the dark and you broke his head and you put him in the water like a dog. He was nineteen. He was the one who paid for his sisters' books. He had a laugh. You will never hear it. I will never hear it. You took it, and there is no mending it." Her voice cracked. "Do you hear me? No mending."
"I hear you."
"I wanted to kill you," she said. "I thought of it every day. When they said a man had confessed, I went home and I put a knife in my bag. I sat in the court. I looked at you. I saw you in the box, and I thought, I will do it. I will stand up." She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "And you said his name. You said Daniel Ssekandi. And you said he had a knife. And you said he said, Mama. And I could not stand."
She stopped. She was breathing very fast.
"I do not forgive you," she said. "I am a Catholic woman. I know what my church asks of me. Every Sunday for fifteen years I have said forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive, and every Sunday I have stopped at your name. The justice I have left with God. But I will tell you what I have decided, in the last night, since the Inspector came." She looked at me. "I will not curse you today."
I bowed my head.
"I may tomorrow. I do not know. Do not come to this house again, unless I send."
"No, Mama."
"Go."
I got to my feet. My legs were shaking. I turned. And then I heard Joel's voice, quiet, behind me, say something to her, quietly, and I saw that he had taken a step forward. He held out the flowers. He laid them on the stool, beside the bowl of beans. He said something else, a few words. She looked at him. Her mouth twisted. For a moment I thought she would throw them.
She didn't.
On the minibus taxi home, I sat looking out at the dusty road, at the fields, at the long red light, and I said, at last, "What did you say to her?"
Joel was silent for a time.
"I said, the Lord keeps a place for the dead, Mama," he said. "I said that you could not give her a grave. But that perhaps, one day, she would let you help her make one."
I turned.
"Do not look at me like that, my friend." He settled his cap. "She will not answer. Not for a year, maybe more. A mother like that does not forgive. She decides, one morning, that she is tired. It will come."
It did. But I'll tell you that at the end.
The second was Moses Ssali.
He was easier to find. He had a garage.
It was in Katwe, on the main road, a block from where the shop had been. There was a tin roof, a hand-painted sign, a stack of tyres, and two cars on jacks. I stood across the road and watched for an hour. A man in blue overalls was working under a Corolla, and a boy was holding a torch. When the man rolled out and sat up, wiping his hands on a rag, I saw his left arm.
It was a ruin. From the shoulder to the wrist, the skin was a tight, glossy, puckered map of pink and white and brown, drawn into shiny cords at the elbow, pulling the hand into a half-fist. It had healed as it was going to heal. It would never open. He used it like a hook. He lifted a spanner in it, with the fingers curled, and went on working.
He was twenty-two years old, and he was tall, and broad across the chest. His face was long and grave.
I crossed the road.
He heard my feet. He looked up from under the car. He had the same eyes. I'd seen them once before by the light of a burning house, wide and white and certain, looking at me, and I knew he knew me at once.
He didn't move.
He put down the spanner. He took the rag and wiped his good hand, finger by finger, slowly. Then he stood, and the boy with the torch stepped back, and Moses Ssali faced me in the doorway of his garage with the sun behind me and the shadow across his face.
"I wondered when," he said.
I didn't speak.
"I read it in the paper. About the trial." He had a quiet voice. "I thought, he'll come. I've thought it every day for a month."
"I'm not here to ask for anything."
"No?"
"I'm here because —" I stopped. "I wanted you to see my face. And say whatever you want. I'll stand here as long as it takes."
He regarded me. His expression did not change. Then he said, in the flattest voice I'd ever heard, "Do you know what I wanted?"
"No."
"I wanted you to leave me."
I felt a cold wash go over me.
"In the fire." He lifted the ruined arm slightly. "I've thought about it every night since I was thirteen. The smoke. The floor. I was on the floor, and I couldn't breathe, and I heard her. My mother. She was calling me. She was twenty feet away." His voice was steady. "And a hand took me by the collar and pulled. I was screaming. I didn't want to go. I was trying to hold on to the bed. And you dragged me out, and I saw the roof come down, and I saw her."
"Moses—"
"I wanted to go back. I fought you. Do you remember? I bit your arm. And you held me down on the ground, and you said, No. No. You said it over and over." He closed his eyes. "I have hated you every single day for that, for nine years."
I stood still.
"If you had left me," said Moses, "I would have died in that house. With her. I'd have been with my mother. I'd have been spared nine years of —" He lifted the arm. "This. And of waking. And of the other thing. The thing of being the one." He opened his eyes. "Do you understand? You didn't save me. You sentenced me."
"I know," I said.
"You know?"
"I've thought it too. I thought it in prison." I met his gaze. "I've thought, why did I go back? I can't answer. I don't think I wanted to be good. I think I heard a child, and I couldn't leave him. That's all."
"That's all?"
"I'm sorry. It isn't enough."
He laughed. It was not a happy laugh.
"What do you want me to say?" he said. "That I forgive you? I'd lie." He stepped forward. He was an inch taller than I was. "That I understand? I don't. That because you pulled me out, we're even? We're not even. We'll never be even. You took her. You took her."
"Yes."
"Say it."
"I took her."
"Again."
"I took your mother," I said. "I set the fire. I knew the light was on. I looked at it and I decided it meant nothing. I killed her. I killed Teopista Ssali. She was thirty-four. She died looking at me."
He was shaking. His whole good arm was trembling, and the ruined one hung at his side. The boy with the torch had gone. A taxi hooted in the road. I stood and let him look.
"Get out," he said, at last, very low.
"Yes."
"Don't come back."
"I won't."
"Get out of my garage."
I turned. I walked across the road. I got as far as the verge. And I heard him behind me say something, in a different voice, thick and strange, as if to himself.
"She looked at you."
I turned.
He was standing in the doorway with the sun on his face. He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the ground.
"The police report. It said you told them. That she was looking at you." He swallowed. "What did her face look like?"
I told him. I stood in the middle of the Katwe road and told him exactly. I told him she was kneeling. I told him that she'd seen me take him, and that something in her face had eased. I told him that I'd never seen anything like it. I said, "I think she was relieved. That one of you would live."
He put his good hand over his eyes.
I stayed where I was for a minute. Then I went away.
He did not forgive me. He has not. I've written to him three times, since, and he has not answered. But I'll tell you something that I learned from that afternoon, and I want you to remember it, because I think it's the real shape of everything I've described.
I used to think that if you were forgiven by God, the people would follow. That it was like a line of dominoes. You knock down the first, and the rest fall.
They don't. Not by themselves. Not always. Some of them will go to their graves with their arms folded. And you have to learn to live with that, and not to demand it of them. You have to let them have their anger, which is theirs, and which is just. You can't buy it off. You can't make a speech.
You can only go on being sorry, and wait.
The third was Brian.
I found him on a Saturday in the Wandegeya market, behind a table piled with onions.
He was thirty-seven. He'd been out of Luzira for eight months. He wore a faded green shirt that had once been somebody else's, and his hair was grey over the ears, and he had a scar through one eyebrow that I'd not seen before. But the ears were the same. I'd have known those ears in the dark. He was shouting prices at a woman with a baby, in the old cracked-tin voice. And he looked up, and saw me, and the voice stopped.
I stood at the edge of the stall.
Brian said nothing. He weighed an onion in his hand and put it down. He gave the woman her change. He waited until she had gone. Then he sat down on a crate behind the table, and folded his arms, and looked at me.
He said, "I told you I wouldn't speak to you."
"I know."
"I told you. In the corridor."
"I know. I'm not asking you to." I put my hands in my pockets and took them out again. "I only came to say it. I should have said it twenty years ago, at the gate of that warehouse. I dropped the keys at your feet and I ran, and I let you go to prison for me. I let them make you the name. I didn't write. I didn't visit. You were there nine years and I never once stood on the other side of the glass." I felt my voice start to go. "I'm sorry. It's not enough. It never could be. But I wanted you to hear it said by my own mouth."
Brian looked at me. His face was thin and tired, and old before its time, with the enormous ears sticking out like the handles of a jug.
He didn't say anything. He sat for a long time.
Then he reached down beside him, took another crate, dragged it round the end of the table, and set it on the ground.
"Sit," he said.
I sat.
We sat there, side by side, on two crates behind a table of onions, in the roar and stink of the Wandegeya market, with the sun going down behind the roofs. Brian didn't speak. He didn't look at me. He sold a kilo of tomatoes. He argued with a man about the weight. A boy came by with a tray of groundnuts, and Brian bought a paper cone, and, without looking round, held it out sideways.
I took one.
We ate in silence. After an hour he said, "I cannot yet."
"I know."
"But you can come on Saturdays."
"Yes."
"Bring your own crate," said Brian. And for the first time, very faintly, at the corner of his mouth, I saw the old thing, the laugh like a dropped tin cup. It didn't come out. It was only a twitch. But I saw it.
I go every Saturday. I sit on my crate. We talk about onions.
I know that's not forgiveness. I know it's only the first step of it. But I went home that night on the bus and looked out of the window, and I thought, I would take a thousand Saturdays. I have been given a place to sit.
The fourth was my daughter.
I wrote to her. That's all I could do. I didn't go to the green gate. I'd promised. I wrote a letter, in careful block capitals, on lined paper. I told her my name. I told her I was sorry. I told her I was not asking her to know me. I said that I was alive, and that if she wanted to ask me anything at any time, I'd answer, and that I would not come unless she asked.
I took it to a post office in Jinja and sent it to the address in Ntinda.
I did not hear for four months. I wrote again. I wrote four times. I told her about the river, and the fisherman. I told her about her mother. I'd known her only a year, but I told her what I remembered: the paperbacks, the plant on the windowsill, the gap in the teeth. I said she'd named her Hope, and that I'd thought for years about what kind of woman does that.
On a morning in July, the post came to the landing. A boy on a bicycle handed me an envelope.
It was a plain white one. It was addressed in neat round handwriting that I'd never seen. I stood holding it in the sun. I opened it. There was a single sheet of lined paper, torn from an exercise book, and on it, in black ink:
My grandmother died on 2nd June.
She had your letters in a box under her bed. She never opened them. I found them last week.
I read all of them.
I am not saying yes to anything.
Naguru Gardens. Sunday. 3 o'clock.
— H.
I got there at one.
I sat on a bench for two hours with my back straight, in my clean shirt, with my hands on my knees. It was a municipal park, a dusty green square with a bandstand and a few flame trees, full of children. I kept looking at the gate. I rehearsed, as I had for Miriam. I had a speech. It left me before I reached the first sentence.
At five to three, a girl came in.
She was seventeen. She was tall and thin, in jeans and a plain white shirt, with her hair pulled back and a paperback under her arm. She came in at the gate and stood still, looking along the paths. She saw me. She didn't move. I stood up, and I think my knees were visibly shaking.
She walked toward me. Slowly. She stopped about ten feet away.
I could see her face. I'd seen it across a road, and I'd seen it in a hospital window, in the face of a girl of nineteen who read novels. It was Sarah's face, the long jaw, the brow. But the eyes were mine. I knew them. I'd seen them in water.
"You're taller than I thought," said Hope.
I said, "I'm — you're —"
"Don't." She held up a hand. "Please don't cry. If you cry, I'll go."
"I won't."
"You are."
"I'm sorry."
"Sit down," she said.
We sat. We sat on the bench, at either end of it, with the width of a person between us. She put the paperback in her lap and folded her hands on it. She looked at the bandstand. A boy ran past with a kite.
"I'm angry," said Hope.
"Good."
She looked round, sharply. "Good?"
"You should be." I met her eyes. "I'd be worried if you weren't. I'd think you were being polite."
She stared at me for a long moment. Her mouth tightened. For an instant I saw the girl who had laughed, with her head thrown back, at a man with a goat on his bicycle. Then it was gone.
"My mother died when I was ten," she said. "She had a cough, and then she was thin, and then she was in a bed, and then she was in the ground. I held her hand. She told me things." Her voice was steady, and very cold. "She told me once that my father was a man who didn't know how to stay. She didn't say he was bad. She said he was frightened. She said she'd never met anyone so frightened." She turned the paperback over. "I hated that. I wanted her to say he was a monster. It would have been easier."
I said nothing.
"I made up a soldier," said Hope. "For the wall. I put a photograph from a newspaper. He was a general. My grandmother let me." She laughed shortly. "I was eleven. I thought: if he's dead, he can't have chosen it."
"I chose it."
"I know." She finally looked at me. "That's what your letters say. I counted, you know. You said it eleven times. I chose it. I chose it. Like a man pressing on a bruise."
I said, "It's the only true thing I know."
She was quiet.
"Are you really a Christian?" she asked.
"I think so. I'm new."
"My grandmother was. She went to church three times a week. She said you were a devil."
"She was right."
"She wasn't entirely right," said Hope. She was watching a woman push a pram. "She told me before she died. She said, I was too hard on him. I kept the monkey. I don't know what she meant."
I closed my eyes.
"It was a toy," I said. "I left it on a window sill at Mulago. When you were three weeks old. I stood there. I didn't go in."
Hope was still.
"She kept it?"
"Yes."
"I know where it is," said my daughter. "It's on the shelf above my bed." She was looking at the ground. "I used to think it was from my mother."
I could not say anything. We sat there. The kite went up and caught the wind and hung over the flame trees.
After a long time, she said, "I'm not going to call you anything."
"All right."
"I don't know what you are."
"That's fair."
"I came because I wanted to look at you." She stood up, brisk, all at once, and tucked the book under her arm. "I've looked. You're not what I expected. You're old."
I smiled. I couldn't help it.
"I'm going to go now," said Hope. "I'm not saying I'll come back. I might not." She dug in her pocket, and brought out a scrap of paper, and held it out at arm's length, as one holds out a coin to a dog that might bite. "That's a number. If you ever use it without being asked, I'll block it."
I took it.
She turned and walked away. She got as far as the gate. Then she stopped, and stood there, with her back to me, quite still, for what must have been half a minute. I thought she might turn round.
She didn't. But she lifted her left hand, over her shoulder, without looking back. Not a wave. Only the hand, open, held up in the air for a second.
And then she was gone into the crowd on the road.
I sat on the bench until it was dark.
I've been trying all evening to write the last part of this chapter, and I keep putting it off. I'm not sure what it is.
I think it's this. I went to four doors in a year. Out of four, I was let into one, in a half-opened way, and given a crate. I was refused at one. I was told to wait at another. And at the fourth I was given a scrap of paper, and the back of a head.
That is not a happy ending. I want to say that clearly. A great many people who write testimonies will tell you that, once Christ comes in, the broken places mend. That the enemies become friends, and the prodigal's brothers kill the calf. It's not always so. I've learned that. Moses Ssali is still angry. Miriam Ssekandi still lights a lamp on Thursdays. Kasirye still has one hand. Daniel is still at the bottom of the lake.
I carry it. All of it. It does not leave.
And yet I'm not the man I was.
I want to describe the difference, because it is the heart of what I'm trying to say, and I've only just understood it. I was sitting this morning on the landing, mending a net, with the sun on my neck. It was an old net, grey, much repaired. Joel was beside me, on his stool, working a different mesh with his own needle. He held up the part he was mending to the light, and I saw that it was more knot than net. Every few inches there was a patch, a splice, a lump of old twine. It looked like a thing that should have been thrown away years ago.
I said so.
Joel laughed. "That is my best net," he said. "My father's net. I have had it forty years."
"It's all repairs."
"Yes." He ran his thumb along a knot. "It is the one that holds. A new net is clean, but it has not been tested. Its knots have never been pulled. This one" — he tugged the mesh, and the twine sang — "has been torn a hundred times. And each time, it was mended. Where it is mended, it is stronger than where it was whole."
I looked at the net in my hands.
"I think," said Joel, "that your God is a man who mends."
I haven't forgotten it. I think of it when I see the scar on my chest, and the line on my arm, and the thin white seam above my eye. I used to think they were the marks of what I'd lost. Now I think they might be the places where I was mended.
That is what Christianity is. I misunderstood it for so long. I thought it was a way of pretending that you had never broken. A clean net, held up to the light, with no holes in it. And the people who believed it, I thought, were the ones who'd never been torn.
It's not. It's the other thing. It's the claim that the One who made the net does not throw it away. He takes up the broken mesh in His hands, with all the knots in it, and the rot and the rips, and He says: This is mine. I will mend it.
And He does. Slowly. A knot at a time. Not by making it new, but by making it hold.
I am not the man I was. I'm not the man I should have been, either. I am something in between, which is, I think, what it means to be a man in Christ: a net with a great many knots, drawn up out of the dark, still wet, still dripping, and held, at last, in a pair of hands that do not get tired.