Chapter 19
Apart
The law, Ruth learned, moved at the speed of a glacier with a clerical error.
Timothy Kasozi walked into the Entebbe police station at seven-fifteen on the morning of the thirteenth of December, in a creased navy suit and a borrowed jacket, with his brother at his shoulder, and said to a sleepy sergeant behind a desk, "I would like to report a crime. I committed it eight years ago." It took the sergeant eleven minutes to find the right form. It took the Director of Public Prosecutions until the end of January to decide how to proceed, and the High Court in Kampala until the second week of February to hear the plea.
She went to it. She sat at the back of the public gallery in a plain grey dress, between her mother and Esther, on a wooden bench that creaked, and watched the man she had nearly married stand in the dock with his hands clasped before him.
He had lost weight. He wore the navy suit, pressed now, and a tie she did not recognise. He looked at no one. When the clerk read the charge, in a high flat sing-song, he said "Guilty" in a clear voice, and the word went up into the high ceiling of the court and hung there.
Francis Okello spoke in mitigation. He came forward on his stick, in his Sunday suit, with Brenda a pace behind him. He gave his evidence slowly, without notes, to the judge, a stout tired woman in a red robe, and he said that he did not ask for vengeance. He said that for eight years he had sat in a quiet house with a silence he had himself helped to build. "I do not say Mr. Timothy is innocent," he said. "I say that he is the only person in this room who has come to my door every Christmas and sat in my yard. I say that when a man pays for a thing for eight years in the only coin he has, I think the law may count it." And he bowed to the bench, and sat down, and the judge looked at him for a long time over her spectacles.
Grace was in the front row, in a black hat, with her stick across her knees. She did not move once.
The sentence was two years, fourteen months of it suspended, with the time he had already spent on remand counted in full.
It was shorter than Esther had feared, and longer than Ruth had hoped. When it was read, Timothy bowed his head. Then, as the warders came forward, he turned in the dock and looked once at the gallery. His eyes passed over his mother, who had put her fist against her mouth. They passed over Daniel, who sat beside her, with his hands locked between his knees and his jaw working. They passed, last of all, over Ruth. For the barest second, they held.
He nodded. Very slightly. Then he went down the steps, between the two warders, and out of the light.
The Court of Appeal was kinder, and slower.
On the nineteenth of March, in a courtroom on the third floor of a building near the Parliament that smelled of old paper and floor wax, three judges in black robes set aside the conviction of Daniel Kasozi for dangerous driving causing grievous harm. They did it in under four minutes. The presiding judge, a lean grey-bearded man with half-moon glasses, read the order in a dry voice, as he might read the minutes of a meeting, and added only, as an afterthought, that the court regretted the error and the grave injustice done to the appellant, by himself and by others. The DPP, he noted, had entered no objection. Mrs. Grace Kasozi, in respect of certain matters in the year in question, would not be proceeded against.
That was all.
There were no cheers. There was a rustle in the gallery, a few coughs, the scrape of a bench. A young reporter from the Monitor leaned over and whispered to his neighbour. And Daniel, in the well of the court, in his father's grey suit, stood perfectly still with his hands at his sides, looking up at the three judges as though he had been shown a language he had once spoken and could no longer remember.
He found her on the steps afterward.
It was a hot bright noon. The pavement shimmered. A line of boda-bodas waited at the kerb, and pigeons strutted on the stone. He came out of the doors with Esther at his elbow and his mother on his arm, and stopped when he saw Ruth, a few steps down, shading her eyes against the glare. Grace, with a perception that Ruth would remember for the rest of her life, disengaged her arm at once, said "I shall sit in the car," and went away along the steps with Esther, tapping her stick.
They stood a yard apart.
"Well," said Daniel.
"Well."
"That was quick."
"Eight years and four minutes."
"I thought there'd be more." He looked down at his hands, turning them over as if to check they were still the same. "A trumpet. Or a form. I haven't any feeling at all. I keep waiting. I think I'm still in the yard at Luzira, counting the days." A laugh, rough and uncertain. "I've been told that's normal."
"It is."
"Is it?"
"I'm told it takes a while." She smiled at him, gently. "I'm told one goes on checking the pockets for a key."
"Yes. That's it." He lifted his eyes. "That's exactly it."
The sun was in his face, and she saw how thin it had made him, and how clear. The grey at his temples had spread. The mark beside his mouth had faded to a thread. Whatever had been shut in him for eight years had gone out at last, like a held breath, and what remained was not triumph, nor relief, but something plainer and braver, a kind of quiet attention, as of a man waiting for the next thing to be asked.
"I'm going back," he said. "To Mombasa. In April."
"I thought you might."
"The dhow wants finishing. The yard's held her for me. I've promised the owner's grandson. It's a thing I should do, I think." He hesitated. "It isn't running. Is it? I've been careful. I wouldn't want you to think—"
"I don't."
"I'll come back for the trial of the house. The reopening. In August, Mama says." He shifted his weight. "I'd like to, if you'll have me."
"It's your mother's house."
"It's yours, too. You've been mending it for a year." The crooked smile flickered. "I only ask that you let me carry the heavy things."
She laughed, and it hurt. "Daniel."
"I know."
"I want to say something, and I don't want you to take it as—"
"Don't." He said it gently. "Not here. Not on the steps of a court. You'll say something sensible and generous, and I'll say something sensible and generous back, and we'll both go home feeling terribly well-behaved." His eyes were bright. "I told you I'd wait. I'm not going to make you say it twice. It's a long way to Mombasa, Ruth, but I've done it before, on a worse bus."
"Will you write?"
"I'll write."
"I'll answer."
"All of them?"
"Perhaps not the underpants one."
"That's fair."
He bent his head. For a moment she thought he would kiss her, there on the steps, in the white glare, in front of the pigeons and the boda-bodas and a young man from the Monitor with his pencil raised. She felt her whole body lean for it. But he only took her hand, and raised it, and pressed his mouth to the inside of her wrist, to the place where the pulse beat, and held it there, with his eyes closed, for the length of a long breath.
Then he let it go, and walked down the steps, and did not look back.
She wrote to him the first night, on the back of an old elevation, in pencil, in a hand that wobbled. It said: The jacarandas have finished. The pavements are purple mud. I hate them. Brian says I should be a person, not a plank. I am trying. R.
The reply came in nine days, from a post office in Mombasa with a camel on the stamp. It said: The dhow has a new keel. It is the colour of tea. I thought of your hair, and then I thought that this was an unforgivable thing to put in a letter, and then I wrote it anyway. D.
She kept them in the drawer where she kept the shaving.
They wrote all through April, and May, and June. They were not love letters. She noticed that, with a kind of astonished gratitude. They were descriptions. A caulking mallet. A ship's cook who sang. A fight in the market. A line drawing, in blue biro, of a bracket. She wrote about the hospital wing in Entebbe, which she had won in a small, quiet, unglamorous tender in April, against three larger firms, because a cardiologist named Dr. Ssali had liked her survey and not cared a straw for her fiancé. She wrote about Brian, who had made partner, and wept about it, and bought a suit. She wrote about the fern, which had flowered. She wrote about her mother, who had come to stay for the whole month of May and rearranged the kitchen.
They did not write the thing itself. They went round it, as one goes round a hole in a floor, with a careful, loving, watchful tread. She came to understand that this was not evasion. It was a kind of building. They were laying, board by board, a surface that could be stood on.
She went to see Timothy in June.
Luzira prison squatted on its hill above the lake, a long low sprawl of whitewashed walls and razor wire, and she went through four gates and two searches and a corridor that smelled of bleach and old sweat before she was shown into a visitors' room with a table, two plastic chairs, and a window barred with iron. She sat. After ten minutes, a warder brought him in.
He wore the mustard-yellow uniform of the convicted, and sandals. His head was shaved. He had gained a little weight, and a good deal of colour, and when he saw her, he smiled, a slow, wide, uncomplicated smile, and she saw with a lurch of her heart that it was his own. It had not been seen since the jetty at Ggaba.
"You came," he said.
"I said I would."
"You say a lot of things." He sat down across from her. He laid his hands flat on the table. They were thicker, and callused, with a new white scar on the thumb. "Look. I make chairs."
"Chairs?"
"There's a workshop. They've a carpenter's shop, run by a man called Mzee Bukenya who looks about a hundred. I applied in February and he said I'd never be any good, because I had banker's hands. I said I'd work harder. He said that was exactly what a banker would say." The smile deepened. "I've made nineteen. They're dreadful. The first had one leg shorter than the others. But I keep thinking about Danny, in the shed, and Kibuuka, and I think: this is what it is. You make a thing, and it's wrong, and you take the plane to it, and it's slightly less wrong. And that's all. That's the whole of the job."
"It sounds like it."
"Is it a good prison?" He laughed. "Don't answer. It's a prison. I've got a cellmate who snores and a stomach like a bag of nails. But I'm sleeping. I sleep better than I've done since I was twenty-seven." He tilted his head. "Mama comes on Thursdays. She brings a basket and tells the guards how to run the place. Danny wrote. He's finishing a boat."
"I know."
"Of course you do." The brown eyes were warm and direct. "How are you?"
"I'm well."
"Are you?"
"I'm better." She looked at her hands. "I'm not what I was. I'm trying to be someone a bit more honest. It's slow."
"It's a good thing to be."
"Tim."
"Mm?"
"I wanted to say sorry. Again. I know you said you weren't ready, and I know I've said it before, but I—"
"Ruth." He leaned forward. "Stop."
She stopped.
"I've had a long time to think in here," said Timothy. "That's the main thing about it. You can't avoid yourself. And I've come to the conclusion that I never in my life actually asked you what you wanted. I asked what would make you comfortable. I asked what was proper. I made you a spreadsheet." His mouth twitched. "I'd have made you a very safe, very kind husband. You'd have had a lovely house, and a lovely life, and you'd have stood at the window every evening of it, and I'd never have known why. I was so busy being good that I forgot to be real. Danny wasn't. Danny's never been good in his life. He's just been honest, and it frightens people."
"You were good to me."
"I was careful. It isn't the same." He shook his head. "I'm not telling you this to be generous. I'm not that, yet. There are days I could break the table in half. But I'm telling you because I want you to hear it from me, here, in the yellow. Not in a letter, not from my mother. You were right to go to him. You'd have been wrong not to."
She was crying again. She had never cried so much in her life as in this one year; she thought, vaguely, that she would soon run out.
"Don't," said Timothy, kindly. "They'll think I've been unkind."
"I'm not—"
"You are. It's all right." He reached across the table, and she thought the warder would stop him, but the warder looked at the ceiling. He laid his hand over hers, briefly, lightly, with a dry warm pressure. "Listen. He is going to wait for you. He'll wait till the end of the world. It's his terrible talent. But I don't think he ought to have to. I think there's a point at which waiting stops being love and starts being a habit, and he has had enough habits." A pause. "Go and get him."
"He isn't a prize."
"No." He smiled. "But he is the rarest thing in the world, which is a man who says I'll wait and means exactly that. Don't let him spend it all."
The house was finished on the eleventh of August.
It happened without ceremony. At four in the afternoon, a Tuesday, Mzee Kibuuka hung the last shutter on the last window of the north side, drove the last iron pin into the last hinge, stepped back on the lawn, took off his hat and put it on again. He said nothing. He stood there for a quarter of an hour. Then he turned to Ruth, who had been watching from the veranda with a clipboard she had forgotten to put down, and gave a short formal bow from the waist.
"It will hold," he said.
"Yes."
"For fifty years."
"At least."
"Then I may die," said Mzee Kibuuka, "when I like." And limped away across the gravel to his pickup, tapping his stick, with the faintest suspicion of a swagger.
She stood a long time on the veranda alone.
It was a clear afternoon, the sky high and thin, the lake quiet. The forty-two shutters were open, every one, each of them hung true and painted that dark green that was nearly black, and the sun came through the louvres in long stripes, laying bars of light across the red floor. The swing seat, rehung on new chains, swayed gently in the breeze. At the bottom of the steps, the third was sound, and the fourth, and the plaque on its granite block had a soft green shine of early weather. Up in the study, she knew, the pencil marks still climbed the cupboard door. She had refused to let anyone paint over them. She had refused to let anyone touch them.
Grace came out beside her with a tray of tea. She wore a plain grey dress and her pearls, and she walked with one stick instead of two.
"Well?" she said.
"It's finished."
"It's not. A house is never finished. It is only handed over." She set down the tray. "You have done a good job. Better than I deserved." She poured, with a steady hand. "I have had a letter from Mombasa."
"So have I."
"Mine says that he will be home on the fourteenth. For the opening." A glance sideways. "And that there is a woman there, a doctor, who has asked him to dinner tomorrow night. To say goodbye."
Ruth's cup stopped halfway to her mouth.
"He writes," said Grace calmly, "that it is only dinner. That Lillian is a friend. That she has her own news. He writes it very carefully, as though he expected me to be anxious. I think he is a little afraid." Her bright eyes rested on the lake. "I thought you might like to know. In the interests of honesty."
"Why?"
"Because I am an old woman, and I have stood still for most of my life, and I should not like to see anyone else do it." She sipped her tea. "My sons have each given me a lesson, this year. I have learned that it is possible to be too patient. I have learned it rather late."
"Mama Grace."
"I only say that tomorrow is a Wednesday," said Grace. "And that Mombasa is, I believe, an hour and a half by air."
She went in, tapping her stick, without another word.
Ruth stood on the veranda in the slant of afternoon light with her tea going cold in her hand. The swing seat creaked. A sunbird flashed in the hibiscus. She thought of a long grey road with a bus on it, and a man who had made it many times, and had never once, in all his life, had anyone come the other way.
She set down the cup, and went to find her phone.