Chapter 14
Truth
Brenda Okello was in the staff canteen, eating cold rice from a plastic box with a spoon, and she did not look surprised when Ruth walked in.
It was a quarter to eight. The hospital had changed over to its night self: dimmer corridors, a single radio murmuring somewhere, the smell of disinfectant and frying onions. The girl sat alone at a corner table with her cardigan over her shoulders and her eyes red, and when she looked up and saw a woman in an office dress and sensible shoes standing in the door with her bag clutched to her chest, she put down her spoon, very slowly, and wiped her mouth.
"You were in the car," she said. "Across the road."
"Yes."
"He said somebody was watching." The girl's voice was low and clear, with the formal clipped English of a good school. "He rang me an hour ago. He said, if a woman comes, tell her whatever she asks. He said it twice."
Ruth could not speak.
"You're Ruth." The girl rose. She was shorter than she had looked from across the road, and her face, close to, was very young and very tired, with the faint blue shadows under the eyes of someone who had been working on her feet since dawn. "You are Mr. Timothy's fiancée. The architect. I've read about you in my father's newspaper. They printed a photograph of the engagement."
"I'm sorry. I don't know what to say. I came to ask—" She stopped. She heard how it would sound. I came to ask whether you are the lover of a man I have been sleeping with. "I don't know what I came to ask."
"You came to ask who I am."
"Yes."
Brenda Okello looked at her. There was no hostility in the look, and no pity either. It was the plain, level scrutiny of a girl who had spent seven years learning to read faces in bad light.
"I'll take you to my father," she said. "It's better he tells it. It's his." She picked up her bag. "He'll be glad. He has wanted to tell someone for a long time."
The house was in Katabi, at the end of a red-earth lane that ran down toward the lake between banana plantations and the high walls of other people's compounds. They went in a boda-boda, Ruth riding pillion behind the driver, Brenda behind her with a hand on her shoulder to steady her at the bumps. It was full dark when they stopped. A single paraffin lamp burned in the window of a small square house with a corrugated roof, painted a pale peeling blue, and a bicycle leaned against the wall with its front wheel off.
"Baaba?" Brenda called, at the door. "I've brought a visitor."
There was a pause, and the sound of something moving across a floor: a slow step, then a pause, and a soft metallic click, then a step. The door opened.
He was a man of fifty-four or so, thin and upright, with iron-grey hair cropped close and a short white beard. He wore a patched cotton shirt and trousers that had been ironed with a careful hand, and he held a stick. His face was a good face, long and weathered, with a deep crease between the brows. It was the face of a man who had spent years deciding not to be bitter, and had succeeded, and had never quite stopped paying for it.
Beneath his right trouser leg, below the knee, was something that did not bend.
He looked at Ruth for a long moment. Then he looked at his daughter. Then he nodded, once, as if some small private expectation had been fulfilled at last, and stood aside.
"Come in," said Francis Okello. "Please. You will have tea."
It was one room, with a curtain across the back. A table. Four chairs. A kerosene stove. A shelf with a framed photograph of a plump laughing woman in a gomesi, and beside it a certificate in a wooden frame, Brenda Okello, with distinction, and beside that a plastic Virgin Mary. On the wall opposite hung a wooden clock, and under it, to Ruth's surprise, was a small pencil drawing of a boat, curved and clean, on the flyleaf of a book. Someone had cut it out and pinned it up.
He made the tea himself. He would not let her help. He moved across the room with that slow clicking step, and set down three tin mugs, and lowered himself into a chair with a small exhale. Then he laid both hands flat on the table, and looked at them.
"My daughter has told me nothing," he said. "She says only that you are a person who must hear it. I have thought for eight years about what I would say. I find that I have forgotten the beginning."
"Take your time," said Ruth. Her own voice sounded remote.
"The beginning is a night." He smiled slightly. "They always are. It was the fourteenth of September, a Friday. I had been working at the cement depot in Abayita, loading, and I was going home on my boda. A good boda. It was my own. I had paid it off in March." A short breath. "It was twenty to midnight. I remember because the clock on the church at Kitoro struck, and I thought, Francis, you will be in bed before the hour, and Mama Brenda will have kept your food."
He paused.
"There was a car. I did not see it, I only saw the lights. They came very quickly, from behind and to the right, and then there was no road." His fingers moved on the wood. "I remember the smell. Whisky. It is a very strange thing to remember. When I woke on the grass at the side of the road, I could smell it. Not on me. In the air. As if the whole night was full of it."
"Who was driving?"
"A young man in a pale shirt." His eyes lifted. They were steady, and brown, and very kind. "He was kneeling in the road beside me. I could not feel my leg, you understand, I thought it was gone. He was saying, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, please, I'm so sorry, oh God. Over and over. Like a child. He was weeping. I looked at his face under the headlamps, and I thought: This is a boy."
Ruth's hand was at her throat. The little silver shutter was burning against it.
"It was Timothy," she said.
"Yes."
The kettle ticked on the stove. In the corner, Brenda had sat down on an upturned crate with her arms around her knees, and she was looking at the floor.
"Twenty-seventh birthday," said Francis. "The family had held a dinner at the old house. He drank a great deal. He had never been a drinking boy, I learned later. It was a night where something broke. He took his father's car, I think, to be alone." He shook his head. "I do not say it to excuse. I say it so that you will understand how young he was. And how frightened."
"And Daniel?"
"Daniel arrived in ten minutes."
He told it slowly. Ruth did not interrupt. She sat with the tea going cold in her hands, and she saw it as he told it, scene after scene, with the eerie clarity of something she had been, in some deep way, expecting.
A black road. A broken motorcycle in the ditch. The headlights of one car pointing uselessly at the sky. A young man kneeling, sobbing, with a man's blood on his good white shirt, and a telephone in his hand, and a voice at the other end saying Where are you? Stay there. Don't move. Don't say anything. Not one word. Ten minutes. A second car. A tall figure out of it, quick and calm, who knelt down in the dust and took the first young man by the shoulders, and said something low in his ear. And the face of the first, in the headlights, turning toward him, bewildered, with the look of a child who has been handed a loaded gun and told to hold it.
"I heard it," said Francis Okello. "I was lying in the grass and I heard every word. The older one said, You'll go home. You'll wash. You'll sit in the kitchen with Mama and say you were in bed all night. And the younger said, I can't, I can't, Danny, I killed him, he's dying. And the older said, He's not dying. I'm here. I'll say I was driving."
"No," said Ruth.
"He said it very calmly. As if he were ordering tea." The old man's voice was low and even. "The younger one was crying, he said no, no, but the older said, Listen to me. You have your whole life. You have the bank, you have Papa's name. If this goes to a court, you're finished. I'm thirty. I've nothing to lose. And the younger one, God forgive him, he did not argue enough." A pause. "And then the police came, and the ambulance, and I could not see anything more. They were cutting my trouser leg. I think I screamed."
Brenda made a small sound in the corner.
"I woke in the hospital the next day," said Francis. "My leg was gone, below the knee. And the first thing the nurse told me was that the driver had been arrested, a Mr. Daniel Kasozi, aged thirty, who had gone to the police himself and said I was driving, I had been drinking, I take full responsibility. He had not been drinking, of course. He has never taken a drink in his life. They did not test him. They simply believed. It was so easy for them. He was a respectable man, he came forward, he was polite. They had a driver and a victim and a form."
"But you knew."
"I knew."
"Why didn't you say?" It came out harsher than she had meant. She flinched at it. "I'm sorry, I don't mean—"
"No. It is a good question. It is the best question." He turned his face toward the little window, where the lamp showed a moth beating on the glass. "I have asked it of myself every night for eight years."
He was silent for a long time.
"I was lying in a hospital bed with one leg," he said at last. "I had a wife who was dying of cancer. I had a daughter of sixteen, and a loan. I had no job, because a man with one leg does not carry cement. And on the third day, a lawyer came, a very kind man in a grey suit, from the Kasozi family. Dr. Samuel's lawyer." His mouth twisted. "He said that the family was deeply sorry. That they wished to offer a settlement. That my medical costs would be paid in full. That Brenda's school fees would be paid. That I would have a monthly allowance, for life. And that all they asked was that I give a statement to the police saying that I could not identify the driver. Only that. That I had been dazed, that I had seen nothing. It was, he said, simply the truth."
"Dr. Samuel knew?"
"He knew nothing. He believed what he was told. He believed his eldest son had been drunk, and had taken his car, and had nearly killed a man. He disowned him that night. He sat on the veranda and wept, they say, and said, I have no son called Daniel." The old man spread his hands. "It was Timothy who sent the lawyer. Before the trial. He came to see me himself, that same week, in the hospital, at four o'clock in the morning, in a pale shirt with my blood on it, and he did not say anything at all. He stood at the foot of the bed with his hands open like this. He was crying so hard he could not speak."
"And you took it."
"I took it." It was said without self-defence. "I took the money, and the silence, and the leg that was made with it. I told myself, the older boy has chosen, it is his choice, not mine. I told myself, he is a man, let him pay what he wishes. I told myself, my wife is dying." The crease in his brow deepened. "My wife died in March of the next year. It was a very good funeral. It was paid for by the Kasozi family. I stood at her grave and thought: Francis, you have sold the truth, and you have bought a funeral. It is not a good bargain."
Brenda had put her face against her knees.
"I tried twice to go to the police," said Francis Okello. "Once when Daniel was released. Once five years ago. Both times I got as far as the gate. And both times I thought of what it would do. Not to Timothy. To Daniel. A man who gave eleven months of his life, who sat in a cell in Luzira with thieves, for a lie. If I speak, it was for nothing. If I say, it was the other boy, then his whole sacrifice is made foolish. His whole self is made a joke." He looked at her. "And I thought: if a man pays so much for something, one should not have the right to take it from him."
"Eleven months," said Ruth.
"Eleven months, and the loss of his father, and his name, and his home. And he came to me, the day he was released. I was sitting on that step outside, in the sun, with the new leg, and he walked up that lane in a prison shirt with a plastic bag in his hand. I did not know what he would do. I thought he might strike me." The old man's eyes were wet. "He knelt in the dust. He said, Mr. Okello, I am so sorry that this has happened to you. He said sorry to me. I could not bear it."
"What did you say?"
"I said, You did not do it. And he said, No. But it was done."
The lamp hissed. Ruth sat with her hands locked round the cold mug.
Remember that I chose.
"He paid for this leg," said Francis Okello, lightly, and tapped it with his stick. It rang faintly. "It is a very good one. The best in the country. Carbon fibre. A man in Nairobi made it. I wear it every day and I hate that it is good." He gave a dry, small laugh. "He paid for the school. Not Timothy. Daniel. Timothy pays the allowance, every month, to the day. Timothy comes at Christmas. Do you know what he does?"
"No."
"He sits." The old man's voice dropped. "He sits in my yard, on a stool, for two hours. He brings a bag of rice and a bag of sugar. He does not speak. He does not ask forgiveness. He sits in the sun and looks at the banana trees, and then he gets up and goes home." He shook his head slowly. "I used to be angry. I used to think, Why does this boy come? He is torturing me. And then one year, Brenda said to me, Baaba, I think it is the only thing he knows how to give."
"I was right," said Brenda, from the floor, muffled.
"You were always right." He reached out a long thin hand and touched his daughter's hair. "Today the younger one is a banker. A man of position. A man going to be a minister, they say. And the older one lives in a room above a boatyard in Mombasa with a woman who calls on Sundays. And I sit in this house, with a clean leg, and a daughter who has a certificate, and I am the only one of the three of us who is not paying anything at all." He drew a long breath. "That is the worst of it, madam. That I have been paid. That they have paid me so well."
Nobody spoke.
Outside, a cock crowed, absurdly, in the dark. A dog began to bark in the next compound. Brenda lifted her head.
"Uncle Daniel never told me to take it," she said. "He told me I could stop whenever I liked. And I keep not stopping." She wiped her face. "I'm so ashamed. I'm going to be a nurse. And I'm going to be a nurse with his money. He kissed me today because I said I couldn't sit the exams. He said I was the one good thing that had come out of it."
"He is a good man," said Francis Okello simply. "That's what is so hard. If he were a bad man, one could rest."
Ruth put her hands over her face.
She sat there, in the little blue house, with the lamp hissing and the smell of paraffin and tea around her, and wept as she had not wept since she was twelve. She wept without noise, for a long time, shaking, with her fingers pressed hard against her eyes. She wept for a man who had stood in a lit boathouse and said Wait until the fourth. She wept for a man in a bathroom who had fixed a ninety-sixth slip to the glass and been reminded. She wept for the words she had thrown across a lamp: Coward. Martyr. It's not shame, he had said. And she had not heard.
I made a promise, he'd said. It is the only thing I have left that was ever worth anything.
You don't know what you are talking about.
She had not. She had stood in her small clean certainty and measured him by a kitchen window and a dish towel, and he had held every one of her accusations in his open hands, without a word, as he must have held the first.
A hand touched her shoulder. Not Brenda's. A big dry hand, with the callused palm of someone who had worked all his life, and a missing joint on the little finger. It rested very lightly.
"You love him," said Francis Okello. "The older one."
It was not a question. She nodded, without lifting her face.
"I thought so, when you came in. You looked at the boat." He nodded toward the wall. "He drew it for Brenda when she was twelve. For her school project. I have kept it." The hand pressed once, gently. "Then you will want to go to him. It is very late. Brenda, call a boda."
"Mr. Okello." Ruth lifted her head. "What will you do? If it comes out?"
For a moment he looked at her. And she saw in his face that he had considered it, at three in the morning, so many times that it had worn smooth.
"I will tell the truth," said Francis Okello. "To anyone who asks. I have been waiting eight years for someone to ask. I think I have been a coward too." He smiled, with great gentleness. "It is the worst of the sins, my daughter. Not the wicked ones. The ones we do by waiting."
It was past eleven when she reached the house.
She left the car at the gate. The garden was dark, and the lake lay wide and still beyond it with one pale road of moonlight across the water. She went down the slope in her office shoes, quite slowly, without a torch. The grass was wet. A frog was singing in the reeds. At the bottom of the slope, the boathouse door stood open, and there was no lamp.
He was sitting on the slip, with his feet over the water.
He had heard her step. He did not turn. He sat with his elbows on his knees, a long slumped shape against the silver, as he had sat on the night of the storm, and the little waves lapped at the stones beneath him. She stopped a few feet away. She did not know what to say. She had rehearsed it, in the boda-boda, and in the car, and every word had gone out of her head.
"I'm sorry," said Ruth.
He did not answer.
"I was wrong. About all of it. I went to Katabi. I met Brenda. I met her father." Her voice cracked. "He told me. The whole thing. The night. The road. What you said in the dark, and what you did after. I didn't know. I swear to you, I thought you were—" She pressed a hand to her mouth. "I called you a coward."
"You were angry."
"I called you a martyr and a coward and I said you had never wanted anything. And you stood there and took it, and you never said a word, because it was Timothy's. Because you'd promised." She was weeping again. "I am so sorry, Daniel. I'd have cut my tongue out. I don't know how to say it. Eleven months. Eleven months, in a place like that, for a thing you didn't—"
"Ruth."
She stopped.
He had turned his head. In the moonlight his face was very quiet. He looked tired beyond expression, and gentle, and entirely without anger, like a man who had been walking for days and had at last been told he could sit down.
"Come here," said Daniel.
She went. She knelt on the cold boards beside him, and he put one arm around her and drew her against his side, and she buried her face in his shoulder. His shirt smelled of salt and cut wood. He held her without speaking. She felt his chin come to rest on her hair, and his chest rise, and fall, and rise.
"You weren't wrong to want to know," he said, at last.
"I was cruel."
"You were afraid. There's a difference." A breath that was almost a laugh. "And I said a few things myself. About your mother. About safe men. I'd like those back, too, if there's any chance of an exchange."
"I'd say you were nearly right."
"Nearly."
"I'm not going to tell you which part."
"I wouldn't dare ask." His thumb moved on her arm. "Did he tell you why I did it?"
"He said you told Timothy he had his whole life."
"That was true. It still is." He looked out over the water. "I've had eight years to be angry. I tried. I used to sit in the yard at Luzira and tell myself I hated him. It didn't hold. He was twenty-seven, Ruth. He was a boy who'd been told all his life that he must be perfect, and he'd been drunk for the first time in his life, and he'd broken a man's leg. If he'd been punished for it he would not have survived. I knew that. I've known him since the day he was born." He paused. "I only thought it would be a year. I thought, eleven months, and then it would be done, and we'd all mend. I did not understand that it would never be done. That it would live in us like a seam in rock."
"You could have told him to confess. Later."
"I could. I've told myself I should. I came back this spring and I thought, this is it. I'll watch him, I'll see whether he's all right. And then you walked up the gravel in your flat shoes, and I thought, oh, God. Of all the houses on this lake." His mouth moved. "You'll think I'm mad. But I truly believed I'd come home to say it all, to him, to Mama, and then I saw him at that dinner with you, so happy, and I couldn't. Not then. Not with you there."
"Because of me."
"Because he'd found something good. And I'd taken so much from him already, in a way. I couldn't also take his one good thing." He turned and looked at her, and his eyes were dark and clear. "And then I fell in love with it myself. With the good thing."
She stared at him.
The word hung in the air between them, small and very plain. It had not been said before. He had said want, and happy, and a floor that holds, but never that one, and she watched it settle on the cold night air like a bird that has been in flight for a very long time.
"I'm not saying it to hold you," said Daniel. "I'm saying it because I've been a man who doesn't say what he means, and a woman once told me it was cowardice. She was right. It was."
"Daniel—"
"You don't have to answer. You don't have to do anything. I'll still be here on the fourth. I'll still stand on that lawn. I'm only telling you, so that whatever you decide, you decide it with the whole of the truth." He drew a shaky breath. "I'm in love with you, Ruth Nakitende. It's the least convenient thing that has ever happened to me. And I wouldn't give it back for all the clean years in the world."
She kissed him.
It was nothing like the boathouse. It was slow, and wet with tears, and very gentle, a kiss that asked nothing, and gave, and gave. She felt his hand come up and cradle the back of her head. She felt the cold of the night on her arms and the warmth of him down her whole side. She felt, behind her closed eyes, the little shutter at her throat, sharp as a splinter.
When she drew back, she was shaking.
"He's going to tell me on the fourth," she said. "He doesn't know that I know. He thinks I'll be shocked." A pause. "He thinks I may leave."
"Will you?"
She looked out across the black water. A fisherman's lamp was drifting, small and golden, a long way out.
"I don't know," said Ruth. "I only know that I can't be the woman who marries him with this in my pocket. And I can't be the one who tells him I know before he's said it. He's waited eight years. He deserves to say it himself, standing on his own two feet. And then I'll have to say mine."
"Yes."
"It will be the worst night of his life."
"Yes."
"I'm going to do it anyway."
"I know," said Daniel. He rested his forehead against hers. "That's why I fell in love with you."
They sat together on the slip in the dark and watched the lamp on the lake grow smaller and smaller, until it was only a point of light, and then not even that. Behind them the old house slept, with its forty-two shuttered windows. In one of them, high up, a curtain stirred.