Chapter 14
The Girl She Became
On the morning of her graduation, Amara's mother arrived in Kampala with a sack of matooke.
It was a smaller sack than the first one. Amara noticed that at once, standing at the gate of the new hostel with her gown over her arm, watching her mother climb down from the taxi with the sack held in both hands. But it was the same cloth, the same banana leaves tied around the top, the same careful, stubborn look on her face as she set it on the pavement and straightened her back.
"Mama," Amara said. "You didn't."
"I did."
"They sell matooke in Kampala."
"They sell it for double," her mother said. "And it is not our matooke."
They looked at each other. Then they both began to laugh, so hard that the guard at the gate leaned out of his hut to see what was wrong. Joel climbed down behind them, carrying a bag, and Esther, who was twelve now and tall as a heron, and an aunt from Masaka in a purple dress, and two neighbours who had insisted on coming. All of them stood on the pavement in their best clothes and watched a woman and her daughter laugh over a sack of bananas as if it were the funniest thing in the world.
"It is a good sack," Joel said. "I carried it myself. For three hours. It is a symbol."
"Of what?"
"I don't know. Mama said to say that."
Her mother wiped her eyes. She wore the green dress with the small yellow flowers, ironed to a shine, and around her neck, the blue scarf with the thread of silver. She had kept her promise. She had folded it away for three years, and now it lay across her collarbone, slightly creased from the box, and Amara had to look away from it for a moment, because it was too much.
"Let me see you," her mother said.
"I'm not dressed yet."
"I don't care. Come here."
She came. Her mother looked at her face, in the bright January light, with that same long look as at the stage in Kyotera, the one that had gone on and on. When she finished, she nodded once, slowly, and said, "You have changed."
"I know."
"You look like yourself."
"I've been told."
"I didn't mean it as a compliment," her mother said. "It was only a fact. But it is a good one."
The graduation was to begin at ten, in the Great Hall.
By nine o'clock the whole hill was a river of black gowns. Students moved up the road in clusters, with their families trailing behind in suits and gomesis and church hats, carrying flowers and cameras and cold boxes of sandwiches. Photographers had set up stalls beneath the trees, with painted backdrops of the university crest. Boys in gowns that were too big were posing in front of the statue with their fists raised. A man in a bow tie was selling balloons.
Amara stood on the lawn where she had first stood, almost four years earlier, with a sweet in her mouth and a stranger's arm through hers. She had on the hired gown, which smelled faintly of moth balls, and the square cap, which sat slightly crooked. Her mother tried to fix it, and failed, and tried again, with her tongue between her teeth.
"Hold still."
"I'm holding."
"You are moving your head."
"I'm breathing."
"Stop it." Her mother pushed a pin in, firmly, and stepped back. "There. Now you look like a person who has read a book."
"I have read many books."
"Then you look like it." She stood with her hands clasped and her mouth shaking. "Your father would have..." She stopped. "No. I will not do it here. I'll do it later, in private. Come. Let me see the cap again."
Behind them, Esther was taking photographs with Amara's old phone. Joel stood a little apart, with his hands in his pockets. He wore a clean white shirt and new trousers. And on his feet, polished and bright, a pair of football boots.
She noticed them, and he saw her notice.
"Don't say anything," he said.
"I wasn't going to."
"I wore them to church. And to the interview for the school team." He shifted his weight. "They fit. It would be wasteful."
"It would."
"I thought about it. A lot. I decided..." He scuffed the grass. "I decided you didn't buy them with his money. You bought them with the money you earned by being clever, and the rest was something else, and it isn't the boots' fault." He glared at the ground. "That sounds stupid."
"It doesn't."
"I'm trying to be mature."
"You're doing very well."
"Shut up," said Joel, and hugged her, quickly, fiercely, and let go, and turned away to look at a balloon.
The Mwesigwas came on the early bus from Masindi.
She had met Nathan's father once, briefly, in November, when he came to see the app. He was a small, dry man in his fifties, with a grey moustache and large, gentle hands, and he had stood in the corner of Mama Jalia's stall in Owino with his hat in his hands, watching a woman talk to a phone. At the end he had said nothing for a very long time. Then he had put on his hat, and gone away to the corner of the market, and stood with his back to everybody, and Nathan had said, quietly, "Leave him. He is crying."
Today he wore a brown suit that had clearly been pressed for the occasion, and a tie with small blue stripes. Beside him walked Grace, Nathan's sister, seventeen, tall and serious, with a plait down her back and a camera round her neck. She looked at Amara with frank, scientific interest.
"So you are the Excel girl," she said.
"I suppose so."
"Nathan talks about you. In his sleep also." She shook her hand, firmly. "I'm Grace. I'm going to be a pilot."
"I've heard."
"I'll fly you somewhere. When I'm qualified. You can pick."
"I'll think about it."
"Think quickly. I will be very busy."
"Grace," said Nathan, appearing behind her, in a rented gown that stopped at his shins, with his cap in his hand and his hair sticking up. He looked red-faced and happy and slightly ill. "Please be normal."
"I am being normal. This is how I am."
"It's how you are, and it's frightening."
Amara's mother, who had been standing a few steps away with her hands folded, studying them all with grave attention, came forward at that moment. She and Mr. Mwesigwa looked at each other. Two parents. A market woman and a village teacher. He took off his hat.
"Madam," he said, in careful English. "I am Nathan's father. Mwesigwa."
"Rose Nakamya." Her mother extended a hand. "Amara's mother."
"I have heard a great deal."
"As have I. All good."
"Of course." He smiled. It softened his whole face, and he was suddenly very like his son. "He says your daughter is the cleverest person he has ever met."
"He is very wise."
"I have told him so." Mr. Mwesigwa cleared his throat. "She tells him what is wrong with his work. In a way that he can hear. It is a rare skill. I have been a teacher for thirty years, and I have not mastered it."
"Eh." Her mother's face changed. She was trying to look dignified and failing. "She gets it from her father."
"Then he was a wise man."
"He was a stubborn man."
"The same thing, often." Mr. Mwesigwa laughed. "May I offer you tea, madam? There is a stall by the gate. I'm told they have chapati."
"I would be honoured."
They walked off together, side by side, toward the gate, talking in a tangle of English and broken Luganda, with Esther and Grace trailing after them, already discussing aeroplanes. Amara and Nathan stood watching.
"That's a worry," Nathan said.
"What?"
"They are going to get on. They'll compare notes. They'll tell each other stories about us."
"Probably."
"I may not survive it."
"You'll survive." She laughed. "They're parents. It's what they do."
He turned to her. He looked at the gown, and the cap, and her face. He did not say anything for a moment. There was a smudge of dust on his cheekbone, and she wanted to wipe it, and did.
"What?" she said.
"Nothing." He caught her hand. "I'm just looking."
"Don't. I'll cry, and the pins will fall."
"Then I'll stop."
"Don't stop."
"Make up your mind."
"I'm in a state," Amara said. "Leave me alone."
He kissed her forehead, lightly, in the middle of the crowd, with his father's voice floating back to them from the gate, and half the graduating class going by in their black gowns.
"I wrote my father a letter," he said, in a low voice.
She went still.
"Last July. Before I came back to the library. I wasn't sure what I would do, and I needed someone to say it to. I wrote four pages. I didn't send it. I wanted you to know that, before he says anything." He met her eyes. "I told him. Not the details. Only that you'd been through something hard and told me the truth, and that I was angry and trying to understand. I asked him what a man should do."
"What did he say?"
"He wrote back one page." Nathan's mouth moved. "He said, Your mother used to say a person is not judged by her worst thread. You look at the whole cloth, or you do not look. And then he said, Be a good tailor."
She put her hand over her mouth.
"I didn't send it, either," he said. "The first one. I read it to him on the phone. He was very quiet. Then he said, Marry the girl or don't, but do not waste her time."
"Nathan!"
"I'm joking. He didn't say that." He grinned, and then it faded. "He said, Be honest, and be kind. In that order. You'll find it's usually enough."
She laughed, and cried, and tried to stop, and could not.
"Don't ruin the pins," Nathan said.
The Great Hall was enormous, and hot, and bright. Rows of graduates in black sat in the front, facing a stage hung with the university colours. The chancellor sat in a high chair in red robes. Beside him, the vice-chancellor, the deans, a line of professors in coloured hoods. A choir was singing something solemn, and every so often a baby cried, and was hushed, in the long hall.
The speeches began. They were very long. A minister spoke about national development. A professor spoke about excellence. A young alumnus, who had made a lot of money in telecoms, spoke about resilience eleven times. Amara counted. She sat in the fourth row of the Bachelor of Business Administration, between Peace and a boy she barely knew, with her cap in her lap and her hands clasped.
"I'm going to faint," Peace murmured.
"You are not."
"I haven't eaten. I was too nervous. If I fall, you must catch me."
"You've been first in the class for three years. You have nothing to be nervous about."
"That's why I'm nervous. If I'm called last, everyone will know I've lost."
"Lost what?"
"The overall prize." Peace gripped her hands. "It's you or me. You know it is. They said it will be announced today."
Amara had known. She had been trying not to think about it. In the last two years she had worked harder than she thought was possible. She had taken in the SACCO job, the tutoring, the incubator programme with Nathan, and still found time to sit up with books until the library lights went out. She had missed a first in the second year by a fraction of a point, because of the weeks after June, and had gone back and earned it back. Her average for the final year was ninety-one.
"If you win," she told Peace, "I'll be happy."
"Liar."
"I'll try to be."
"That's honest." Peace almost smiled. She gave her a sideways look. "You know, I've been meaning to say. About what happened. I behaved badly."
"You did not."
"I did. For a while. I thought a lot about it." She stared straight ahead. "I thought about how I would feel if it had been me. If I had been in your situation, with the same people, the same shoes. And I realised I don't know. I would like to think I would have said no. But I don't know. And I think that's the whole point. I don't know. So I should stop pretending I do."
"Peace."
"That's all." She pressed her lips together. "I only wanted to say it before they called my name. In case I fall."
"I'd catch you," said Amara.
"I know. That's why I said it."
They were called alphabetically within each faculty. Brenda went first, with a tiny, tearful smile, in her best skirt, and walked across the stage with her back so straight she looked like a pole. A cheer went up from the back of the hall, a whole bench of church members shouting, "Praise Him!" Peace was next, and she did not fall. She took her certificate with both hands and nodded to the chancellor, with the gravity of a woman signing a treaty.
When they called, "Nakamya, Amara Rose," she was so numb that Peace had to nudge her.
She stood. Her legs seemed a long way off. The aisle stretched ahead of her, wide and bright, with the red carpet running up to the stage. She had walked it a thousand times in her head. She walked it now, one step, then another, in the old cracked shoes that she had polished until the crack could hardly be seen.
The hall was very quiet. Out of the corner of her eye she could see a sea of faces. Then the faces began to sort themselves. She saw Joel, standing, with his hands cupped around his mouth. She saw Esther waving a pink pen with a light on it. She saw Nathan, at the end of a row, bolt upright, with his father beside him, and the old man's face wet and shining.
And as she passed the sixth row, she heard it.
It was a whisper. Low and quick, from two girls behind a row of hats. She did not catch the first words. Then, quite distinctly, the second sentence, in the clear little voice of a person who has forgotten that whispers carry.
"Isn't that the one? The one who was with the man in Ntinda? I heard she..."
"Shh!"
"I'm only saying."
A silence. A cough.
Amara did not stop walking. She felt her face grow warm, and the old cold dread begin to rise in her stomach. For one second, she was in the corridor of the finance office again, hearing the whisper go round the pews. She was a girl in a green dress in a restaurant in Kololo. She was a girl with a rolex in her hand in the rain.
Keep walking.
She raised her chin. She did not turn. She did not hurry, and she did not slow. She went up the steps to the stage at the same measured pace as before, and in the middle of the platform she stopped, and turned to face the chancellor, and the lights, and the whole bright hall.
It's true, she thought.
It was a strange thought to have at that moment. It was not defiant, or bitter, or even sad. It was a plain, calm fact, like the number on a page. It's true. All of it. I did that. And I am also this.
The chancellor, a large, benign man in red, took her certificate from the table. "Congratulations, Miss Nakamya," he said. "First Class Honours. And I understand you are also this year's winner of the Dean's Prize for Academic Excellence."
She blinked.
She had not expected that. She had half-expected it to be Peace. In the third row, Peace had turned, stunned, with her mouth open. Then she began to clap, hard, with her whole face shining, and Brenda beside her, and a roar rose from the back of the hall where the church members were sitting, and from somewhere near the front, a single voice shouting, "That's my daughter!"
It was not dignified. It was her mother.
Amara took the certificate. She shook the chancellor's hand. And she turned to the audience, and she smiled. Not the bright smile of the girl in the silver dress, or the careful one she had worn for years. This was a different one, wide and plain and a little crooked, and it came from somewhere low in her body, where there was no performing.
She saw the two girls in the sixth row. They were staring up at her, openmouthed, one with her hand over her mouth. She met their eyes, and she did not look away, and she did not glare. She only held it for a moment, quite kindly. Then she nodded to them, as to anyone.
They both dropped their gaze.
She walked across the stage, and down the steps on the other side, and back along the red carpet, to her seat. Her hands were shaking. Her knees seemed to have turned to water. She sat down next to Peace and let out a very long breath.
"You won," said Peace.
"I know."
"You beat me."
"I know. I'm sorry."
"Don't be an idiot." Peace was crying, and laughing. She gripped Amara's arm so hard it hurt. "You deserved it."
Afterward there were photographs, and more photographs, and a dozen people she had not seen for a year. Mama Jalia from Owino arrived in a bright yellow dress, carrying a plastic bag of tomatoes, which she presented to Amara's mother with a flourish. "For the party," she said in Luganda. "From one market woman to another."
"But I have my own..."
"Not like these." They looked at each other, and the two women burst out laughing, and embraced.
Moses was there, in a purple suit, giving anyone who would listen a long account of his own part in everything. Shanice, in a plain navy dress and no make-up, stood a little apart by a tree. She had come on her own. She had two more semesters to finish, and a part-time job in a pharmacy, and the shadows under her eyes were not as deep as they had been. She had not said a word to anyone about what she had given up. She only held out a small package, wrapped in newspaper.
"What is it?"
"Open it."
Inside was a strawberry sweet. A single one, in red foil. Amara looked at it, and then at Shanice, and began to laugh.
"I carried it for years," Shanice said. "I always have one. I thought, one day, I'll give her the last one."
"It's not the last."
"No," said Shanice, and her voice shook. "I'll bring you more."
They hugged for a long time. Shanice was crying into her shoulder. "You did it," she whispered. "You did it, you did it."
"We're doing it. You too."
"Slowly."
"Slowly," Amara agreed.
At noon, a young woman in a black blazer came and found her under the trees. She introduced herself as a recruiter from a commercial bank. She said she had read her file, and her dissertation, and the report from the SACCO, and wondered whether Amara might be interested in a graduate position in the Credit Department, starting in March. She handed her a card. The salary was written on the back, in pen, with a question mark.
Amara looked at the figure. It was more than her mother had earned in ten years.
She looked up. In the distance, among the crowd, she could see her mother, with Mr. Mwesigwa and a plate of chapati, listening to him with her head tilted. She could see Joel kicking a stone to Esther. She could see Nathan, in his short gown, trying to take a photograph of Grace and Moses and a very reluctant professor.
"I'd like that," she said. "Thank you."
"We'll be in touch." The woman smiled. "Congratulations."
When she was gone, Amara sat down on a low wall under the tree and held the card in her hand. She felt it should have been bigger, somehow. Louder. She had imagined this moment so often, and in her imagination it had come with trumpets, and a kind of golden light. But the sun was only the sun. A bee hummed in the leaves. Somewhere a boy was selling samosas, calling, "Hot, hot!" And she felt, mostly, tired and hungry and very glad.
It seemed that the most important things happened quietly. She had only needed to stop running long enough to notice.
In the late afternoon, when the families had gone to eat, she went up to the lawn alone.
It was nearly empty. The photographers had packed their backdrops. A few graduates lingered in groups, taking last pictures. The sun was low, and the light lay long and yellow across the grass. She stood in front of the statue, the man nobody ever looked at, and read the plaque, which she had never once read.
It said that he had been the first vice-chancellor. It said that he had given his life to the education of the young. It said nothing else about him at all.
She smiled at him. "Hello," she said.
The statue did not answer.
She sat down on the grass in her gown, with the certificate on her knee, and watched the light change. A young woman walked by with a bundle of books and a nervous face, a first-year, perhaps, still learning the paths. A boy in a cap carried a girl's shoes in his hand. Down the hill, the roofs of Kikoni were catching fire, one by one.
She tried to remember the girl who had stood on this lawn on the first day.
It was hard. She had to reach a long way back. A girl in school shoes. A girl with a sack of matooke at her feet, eating a sweet in a queue, who believed that she was behind. That everyone else had been given a head start, and that she had to run twice as fast. That there was a secret to being someone, and that it was written in the clothes and the cars and the phones. That to be valuable, she had to become something else.
She thought about that girl with a tenderness that almost frightened her.
You were not behind, she said to her silently. You were never behind. You were just on a different road. And I'm sorry nobody told you. I'm sorry I didn't know how to tell myself.
The girl did not answer. But in the long gold light, with the bees in the bushes and the faint sound of a choir drifting down from the hall, Amara felt, for a moment, that she was standing next to her. Not as a ghost, or a regret. As a companion. A younger sister who had taken a wrong turn and had come home, slowly, by the long way, and was a little scuffed but whole.
She had made mistakes. They were real, and they were hers, and they would not go away. There were things she would not say to a stranger. There were nights, still, when she woke at three in the morning and remembered a restaurant in Kololo, and a hand on her back, and lay in the dark feeling the old shame move through her like a tide. She had learned not to fight it. She had learned to let it come, and name it, and wait for it to pass.
And she had learned, too, that it was not the whole of her. That the girl who had done those things was also the girl who had walked into a lecture hall and told the truth. That the one did not cancel the other. That they were both real, and both hers, and she could carry them together, as one carries two buckets, for balance.
I forgive you, she told the girl on the lawn.
It was a very simple sentence. It did not feel like thunder. It was more like putting down a bag she had not known she was holding, and finding that her arms, after all, had other uses.
She heard footsteps on the grass.
"Hi," said Nathan.
He sat down beside her, a little clumsily, in his short gown, with his cap in his hand. He did not say anything for a moment. He had a rolex wrapped in newspaper, still warm, and he handed it to her without a word. She took it. It smelled of onions and fried egg and tomato. She almost laughed.
"Of course," she said.
"It's the only language I speak."
"I know."
They ate. The sun slid lower. A flock of ibis crossed the sky, black against the gold, with their long curved beaks, crying out to each other.
"I wanted to say something," Nathan said, after a while.
"Now?"
"Now's good." He wiped his fingers on the newspaper. "I've been thinking about it all day. I wrote another draft. It was number twenty-two. It was bad."
"Go on."
"When I came back to the library. That day. I told you I was choosing." He looked at the grass. "I want to say that I've chosen it again. Every day since. Not because I have to. Not because it's easy. There were days, Amara, in the rainy months. When I looked at you and thought, I can't do this. I can't carry it. Days when I went home and lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling and hated everything."
"I know. You told me."
"I told you. That was the point. But I want you to know I chose it again each time. Not like a man who has no other options. Like a man who looks at the whole thing, and says, Yes. This one." He turned. His face was serious and open and very young. "I'm not saying it so you'll feel grateful. I'm not your rescuer. You saved yourself. I only held the door."
"You held it well."
"I'm a good door." He smiled. "What I'm saying is that you're not an accident that happened to me. You're a thing I decided. Every day. And I'll go on deciding. If you want me to."
She could not speak. She put the rolex down on the grass. Her whole chest had gone warm and hollow, as if a window had been opened.
"I'm not proposing," Nathan added hastily. "I want to be clear. I have no ring. I have fifty thousand shillings and a rented gown. Moses is sitting on the ring fund."
"Moses has a ring fund?"
"It's a joke. It's a very long joke." He ran a hand over his head. "I only meant that when I do, if I do, it won't be because of any of this. The gown, the day. It'll be a Tuesday. In a library. With chips. You'll be annoyed that I didn't plan it."
"I'll be furious."
"That's the idea."
She leaned into his shoulder. He put his arm around her. They sat like that on the grass, in the last of the light, with their gowns spread out around them like the wings of two large, awkward birds.
"Amara," Nathan said, after a while.
"Mm?"
"Are you happy?"
She thought about it. She took her time, because it was an important question, and he would know if she did not.
"Yes," she said. "I am. I think I'm also sad. And scared. And proud. And a bit hungry, still. I think there's a lot of me in here at once."
"That sounds about right."
"Is that all right?"
"It's perfect," said Nathan. "It's the most honest answer anyone has ever given me."
Down the hill, the first lamps were coming on. The air smelled of cut grass and cooking fires. From the Great Hall, very faintly, came the sound of music, a drum and a voice, and a chorus of people singing something old and slow, in a language they had all learned as children.
She listened to it, with her head on his shoulder.
She thought about the girl who had arrived four years ago, with a sack of matooke and a cracked phone and a fear she could not name. That girl had believed that being valued meant being something she was not. She had spent years trying to buy it, in dresses and phones and cars, and she had paid for it in coin she could not get back.
But that was only half the story. She had also, in the end, been the one who stopped.
Nobody had made her. No man, and no god. She had sat in a quiet room and told the truth, and she had walked into a counsellor's office with her hands in her pockets, and she had stood in a shop in Nakawa and given back a phone. She had gone home and told her mother. She had done the long, ordinary, unromantic work of becoming a person who could stand to be looked at.
That was the part nobody put in the stories. It was not a miracle. It was just work, done again, every day, by someone who had decided she was worth the trouble.
I was always worth something, she thought.
It was so simple that she almost missed it. She was not worth something because of what she wore, or who held her hand, or what she had passed. She had been worth something on the first day, in the queue, in the cracked shoes, and she had been worth something in the silver dress, and in the apartment, and in the dusty hall with the old guard's torch in the door. It had never gone away. It had only been buried. And all the work of the years had not been to earn it, but to dig down, and find it still there.
She closed her eyes.
The light on her lids was red and warm. A breeze lifted the hem of her gown. Nathan's arm was steady around her shoulders, and his breathing was slow. The choir in the hall reached the end of its song, and a long silence followed, and then, from far below, the evening bells began to ring.
She sat and listened until they stopped.