Prologue
The Counter Book
I don't know whether this is a story, a confession, or an apology.
I bought the book this afternoon from a woman who sells school things at the bottom of the hill, between the man who charges phones and the girl who fries cassava. It is the kind of exercise book children use, with a soft blue cover, a multiplication table printed on the back, and eighty ruled pages. It cost two thousand shillings. The woman asked whether it was for my child. I said no. She asked whether it was for school. I said, in a way, yes, and she laughed, because she thought I was joking.
The pen is borrowed. I will have to give it back.
It is early. The Nile is behind the houses and I can't see it from this room, but I know where it is, the same way you know where a sleeping person is in the dark. There is a smell of woodsmoke coming through the wall, and a cockerel that has been wrong about the time since three o'clock. My lamp is a paraffin one, because the power went again at ten, and the flame keeps leaning toward the door as though it has somewhere to be.
I am looking at my right hand while I write this. It is a big hand, flat across the knuckles, with a white seam running from the thumb to the wrist where a knife once opened it. It is shaking a little. I don't think it is the cold.
I want to be careful here, because there are things that, if I write them wrongly, I will never be able to write again. So let me say only what I am sure of.
I am forty-one years old.
For twenty-five of those years, I lived somewhere I have no better name for than hell.
I do not mean it as a manner of speaking. I have heard men use that word about a bad job or a long week, and I have wanted to take them by the collar and ask whether they have ever listened to a man die in the dark while you stood on the other side of the wall, and been the reason. I mean the word the way my mother meant it, the way the old preacher at her church meant it when he leaned over the pulpit with the sweat running into his collar. A place you go when you have gone as far from every good thing as a person can go. I went there. I did not fall. I went on my own feet, a step at a time, and I told myself every step that I was only passing through.
I should say now that I am not writing to make myself look better. If you are waiting for the part where I turn out to be the victim, you will be waiting a long time. Some of what was done to me I will tell you. But most of what I will tell you is what I did.
And yet, here is the thing I cannot explain, and the reason my hand is shaking, and the reason I have not slept.
I am still here.
The men who tried to kill me are not. The friends I buried are not. The boy I knew who was supposed to play football for his country is not, and the girl who loved me when I was nobody is not. I ought not to be here either. There were nights, and I will count them for you, when I should have died and did not. A knife that missed a vein by the width of a thumbnail. A gun that did not fire. A river that took me and, for reasons I have turned over a thousand times, gave me back.
For years I called it luck. Luck is a good word. It lets you off.
It stopped working at about two in the morning, five years ago, in a boat shed by the water, when I sat up in the dark and heard myself ask a question I had never asked in my whole life.
Not why did this happen to me? I had been asking that for decades.
The new question was smaller, and much worse.
Why am I still alive?
I don't know if you have ever asked that and meant it. I don't mean it in the way people say it at funerals. I mean sat there with your own pulse in your ears and understood that you were being kept, for something, by something, and that you had no idea what.
I am going to try to answer it. I am going to start at the beginning, which is a rainy night in a house with a tin roof, when I was nine years old, and I was hiding under a bed.
I don't know why I am writing it down. Perhaps because I have never told anyone the whole of it. Perhaps because a man I trust said that I should, and I have not been able to think of a reason to refuse that is not cowardice. Perhaps because I am afraid that if I do not put it somewhere outside my head, I will one day wake up and find I have made it into a better story than it was.
I will try not to do that.
The lamp is leaning again. The cockerel has gone quiet. I am going to turn the page.