Chapter 1
The Village Under the Hill
The first sound of every morning in Kisaana-Nabbale was her mother's broom.
It scratched across the hard-packed earth of the compound before the sun was up, a long, steady, scraping rhythm, back and forth, back and forth, like the breathing of a large animal. Nabirye lay on her mat in the dark of the small bedroom and listened to it. She knew it better than she knew her own name. She could tell by the speed whether her mother was happy or worried. Today it was slow, and a little heavy. It was the broom of a woman who had not slept.
She is thinking about the results, thought Nabirye.
She turned over. Beside her, on the other mat, her brother Kizito lay on his back with his mouth open and one foot sticking out from under the blanket. He was thirteen, all knees and elbows, and he slept like a person who had been dropped from a height. A cock crowed outside the window, a hoarse, offended crow. Another answered from across the valley. Then, as they always did, the whole hill began to wake. A goat bleated. A woman called to a child. Somewhere down the slope an axe struck wood, once, twice, and was still.
She got up and went outside.
The compound was a square of red earth in the middle of the banana grove, with the house at the top of it, the kitchen at the side, and a small round hut at the back where the hens slept. The house was a plain brick building with an iron roof, painted cream a long time ago and now streaked with the brown of many rains. It had three rooms and a veranda. On the veranda stood a long wooden bench, worn smooth, and a basin of washing, and a pair of her mother's gumboots turned upside down on two sticks to dry.
Maama was standing in the middle of the yard, with the broom in her hand, looking at the sky.
She was a small, broad, strong woman of forty-six, with a round face and a firm chin and a way of standing with her feet planted apart as if the ground might try to move her. She wore her old gomesi, the green one, tied up at the waist so it would not drag, and a faded scarf over her hair. Her arms were thick and brown to the shoulder. Her hands were enormous, scarred and cracked, with a wedding ring worn thin as wire on the left. She did not turn when Nabirye came out.
"You are up."
"I could not sleep."
"Nor could I." The broom started again. "The rain will come this afternoon. Look at the clouds over Masaka. Dark at the bottom, like the belly of a cow. I told Kizito to bring the coffee in from the drying sheets before school. He will forget."
"I'll do it."
"You have your own things to think about."
"I can think and carry at the same time."
Her mother looked at her then, sideways, and the corner of her mouth moved. "You are your father's daughter," she said. "He said the same. He used to say, I can think and dig. And then he would dig up the beans."
Nabirye laughed. It was a good morning joke, a family one. It had been told many times. But she saw that her mother's eyes, as they went back to the broom, had a small flat shine in them, like water in a dish, and she took the basin from the veranda and went to the tap behind the kitchen so as not to see it.
Nabirye was nineteen, and she had a plan.
It was not a secret. The whole of Kisaana-Nabbale knew it, because she had talked about it since she was nine. She was going to be a nurse. Not just a nurse, a nurse and midwife, with a certificate, and a white uniform with a little blue stripe on the sleeve, and a badge with her name. And then she was going to come back.
Back where? people would ask. They always asked. Why would you come back to a place like this?
And she would say, with the fierce plain seriousness of a child reciting a lesson: To build a health centre.
It was the nearest thing to a religion she had. The nearest clinic was fourteen kilometres away, at Kyazanga, on a road that turned to a river in the rains. There was a government dispensary at Mbirizi, nearer, but it was open three days a week and often had no medicine. When a woman went into labour in the night, her husband ran for a boda boda, and if the boda boda man was drunk, or asleep, or afraid of the road, she stayed where she was, and it was her mother, Maama Nalubega, who came with her hands and her basin of hot water and her great calm.
For twenty years, her mother had caught the babies of Kisaana-Nabbale. She had never been trained. She had learned from her own mother, who had learned from hers, and she did it for no money, for a hen or a bunch of matooke or a thank you, and she had never lost a mother. She had lost two babies, long ago, and she did not talk about them.
Nabirye had been going with her since she was ten.
She remembered the first time. A woman called Mama Harriet, in a mud house at the bottom of the hill, in the middle of a rainy night. A paraffin lamp. The smell of sweat and blood and wet earth. The long groaning in the dark and her mother's voice, steady and low, saying, Good. Good. Breathe. Yes. Again. And then, suddenly, an astonishing slippery purple creature, furious and alive, held up in the lamplight, and her mother laughing, with tears running down her face.
That, Nabirye had thought, is the best thing in the world.
She had not stopped thinking it. She had gone on thinking it through primary school, and the long walk to the secondary school at Lwengo, and the hungry years when there was no money for lunch, and the nights she studied by a candle stub with a book on her knee. She had read every biology textbook in the school library, twice. She had learned the names of the bones. She had learned how a baby's heart divides itself, in the dark of the womb, into four small rooms. She knew that when she became a nurse she would stand at the door of a clean bright building with a roof that did not leak, and women would come to her in the night, and none of them would die.
It was not a vanity. She would have been ashamed to call it one. It was only the simple, solid, certain shape of the future, like a house seen from the top of a hill.
I want to be a nurse, she had written, in the front of her exercise book, in S1. In a childish hand, under her name. I want to build a place where nobody has to be carried.
The results came on a Friday.
Everyone knew when. It was in the newspaper, and on the radio, and a boy at the trading centre had a phone, and all morning, as the news came up the hill from house to house, from mouth to mouth, a thin hum of anticipation went through the village. Girls ran up and down the paths. Old men on the bench outside the shop looked sideways at the road. A woman at the borehole said she had seen a sign, a white hen laying a double-yolked egg, and it would be good news for someone, but she did not know who.
Nabirye did not go to the trading centre. She could not. She stayed home and washed the compound, and weeded the beans, and cut up a heap of cassava that did not need cutting. At noon her stomach was so tight that she could not eat. At one o'clock Kizito came flying up the path from school, in his torn shirt, shouting.
"They are out! They are out!"
"Who told you?"
"Mr. Ssegawa. He has the list. He has a phone." He was gasping. He stopped in front of her, bent double, and put his hands on his knees. "He says... he says..."
"Kizito!"
"You are first!"
She stood very still.
"First in the school," said Kizito, between gasps. "First in the sub-county. He says, nobody from Kisaana has ever. He says it is a record. He says you have the points for any course. Any course at all. He said you could do medicine." He straightened up, his whole thin face blazing. "Nabirye, you can be a doctor."
She did not move. She was looking at him, but she was not seeing him. She saw the hill and the sky and the long wet line of the banana leaves, and in the middle of them, very clear and small, a white door.
Then she heard a sound behind her, and turned, and her mother was standing in the door of the kitchen with a wooden spoon in her hand.
She had heard. She had been there the whole time. Nabirye saw it in her face. But Maama did not speak, or smile, or run. She only stood in the doorway in her green gomesi, with her feet planted and her broad hand on the frame, and looked at her daughter across the yard. Her mouth was not steady. Her eyes were very bright.
"Maama," said Nabirye.
"Come here."
She went. It was only ten steps. It seemed like a long way.
Her mother put down the spoon. She took her by both shoulders and held her at arm's length and looked at her, the long look, the one that went on and on, from her head to her bare feet and back. Then she pulled her in, hard, against her chest, so that Nabirye's face was in the warm damp cloth of the gomesi and she smelled woodsmoke and groundnuts and sweat, and felt the whole strong body shaking.
"Your father," said Maama, into her hair. "Your father."
She did not say anything else. She did not need to.
The news went through the village like fire through dry grass.
By four o'clock the compound was full. Neighbours came with bananas, and a live hen, and a basin of sweet potatoes, and a bottle of homemade waragi that Mzee Kasirye, from the next hill, pressed on her mother with a solemn bow. Women sat on the veranda in a row, clapping and ululating. Old Mama Juliet, who was bent nearly double now, came on two sticks and stood in front of Nabirye and said in a cracked voice, "I was there when you were born. I held the lamp. Now you will be the one holding it," and burst into tears.
Ssenga Rehema came at five.
She came in a taxi from Masaka, in a purple gomesi with enormous puffed sleeves and a pair of gold earrings the size of small saucers, shouting from the road. "Where is she? Where is the genius? Where is my niece?" She was her father's sister, a large, loud, magnificent woman in her fifties, with a gap in her teeth and a laugh that rattled the roof. She ran a shop in Masaka and a small money-lending business and the lives of everyone in her family. She grabbed Nabirye's face in both hands and kissed her on each cheek, loudly, like a seal being stamped.
"First!" she cried. "First in the sub-county! Do you hear, you people? The daughter of my brother! Yosamu, wherever you are, look down, look down and see!"
"Ssenga, please," said Nabirye, laughing.
"I will not be quiet! I have waited twenty years for something to shout about." She sat down heavily on the bench, and fanned herself with her hand. "Now. Listen to me. You will get a place. A good one. Not in the village. In Kampala."
"I want to study nursing."
"Nursing! With those points? You could be a lawyer."
"I want to be a nurse. A midwife. I have wanted it since I was nine."
"Hmm." Ssenga looked at her over the top of her hand. For a moment the bright mockery went out of her face, and she looked, surprisingly, older and softer, and a little sad. "You are like your mother. A woman who knows what she wants is a dangerous thing. Nobody knows what to do with her." She sniffed. "Well. A nurse. It is an honest job. People will always be sick."
"Yes."
"And you will come back here?"
"Yes. I will build a health centre."
"A health centre." Ssenga rolled the words round her mouth, like a sweet she was not sure she liked. "In this place."
"Yes."
"With what?"
"With my salary. And donations. I have a plan."
"Of course you have a plan." Ssenga began to laugh, softly, and then not so softly, and patted her knee. "God help the man who falls in love with you. He will find himself building a clinic."
"There is no man."
"There is always a man." She cast a glance at the fence, where a tall thin boy in a clean white shirt was standing, half hidden behind a banana tree, holding a small bunch of flowers wrapped in a newspaper. "For example. That one."
Nabirye followed her eyes, and felt her face go warm.
"That's Ibra."
"Ibra who?"
"Ibrahim Sekitoleko. From the house at the bottom."
"The mosque family?"
"Yes."
"He has been standing there since four o'clock. He has been looking at those flowers as if they were a bomb." Ssenga's eyes were full of wicked enjoyment. "Go. Go and speak to the poor boy before he faints."
He did not faint, though he looked as if he might.
He was a long, quiet, serious boy of twenty, in a white shirt too short in the arms, with a mild, thoughtful face and a pair of round glasses that he kept pushing up his nose. He had been in her class at primary school, and two years above her in secondary, and had gone off to a technical institute in Masaka to study medical laboratory technology, which nobody in the village understood. He looks at blood through a glass, her mother had explained, to a doubting neighbour. To see what is wrong. He came home on weekends. He carried his books in a plastic bag. He talked, when he talked at all, in a low, careful, slightly formal voice, as though each sentence had been checked.
"Congratulations," said Ibra.
"Thank you."
"I heard in Masaka. Yesterday. Someone told me the results were coming." He held out the flowers. They were wild ones, yellow and white, with long stalks, and a piece of string round them. "They are only from the roadside. I'm sorry. I did not have money for..."
"They are beautiful."
"They are weeds."
"They're beautiful weeds." She took them. Their stems were damp, and she realised that he had been holding them so tightly that his hand had made them wet. "Thank you, Ibra."
"I wanted to say..." He swallowed. He pushed his glasses up. "I am proud. Of you. That is all. I think you are going to do something very big. And I... I would like to help. If I can. I will be in Kampala also, next year, at the hospital. For my attachment. If you need anything."
"What would I need?"
"I don't know. Someone who knows the way."
She smiled, a little absently. She was looking at the flowers. She was thinking about the white door and the blue stripe on the sleeve, and she did not hear the thing under his words, the small, held, careful thing, like a coin kept in a closed hand.
"That's kind," she said. "I'll remember."
He nodded. He stood there for another moment, as if there were something more, and then said, "Well," and "I should go," and went away down the path, with his hands in his pockets, walking very straight. She watched him go. She did not know that she was watching the back of the best man she would ever meet.
She would remember that, later. She would remember it with a sort of grief that had no bottom. But that afternoon she only thought, He is nice, and turned back to the singing.
That night, when the guests had gone, and the paraffin lamp had been lit, and Kizito was asleep on his mat with a half-eaten sweet potato in his fist, she sat with her mother on the veranda.
It had rained at dusk, as predicted. The air was cool and washed and smelled of wet earth, and the whole valley was loud with frogs. Maama sat on the bench with her feet up, which she never did, and a cup of tea in her hands, looking out at the dark. The lamp threw a small trembling circle of gold on the boards.
"You are quiet," said Nabirye.
"I am happy."
"You do not look it."
"It is a quiet sort." Maama sipped her tea. "I thought I would shout. I thought I would run round the hill. But when it came I only wanted to sit down."
"Maama..."
"I want to say a thing. And I do not want you to answer."
Nabirye waited.
"Your father would have been so proud." Her mother's voice was low and level. "I have said it already. I will say it again. He used to hold you, when you were a baby, and say, This one will go far. He did not know how. He was a man with one hoe and half an acre. But he said it every night."
"I remember him."
"You were five."
"I remember his cough."
The lamp flickered. Her mother did not move.
"Yes," she said, after a long time. "You would."
"It was a long one. A wet one. It came at night. I used to lie on the mat and listen. And in the morning he would not eat." She heard her own voice, small and clear in the dark. "I did not know what it was. I only knew it was the sound of him getting smaller."
"Nabirye."
"I'm not sad. I just want to say it. I think about it. Every time I read about a disease. I think, that is what he had. I think, that could have been seen. That could have been helped. If he had gone to a clinic. If there had been one near."
"There was no money."
"I know."
"And he would not go." Her mother's voice cracked, very slightly. "He was a proud man. He said it was a cold. He said it was a thing that would pass. He went to a man in the next parish who gave him roots. And then it was too late."
For a long moment neither of them spoke. Down in the grove, a frog started up, and was answered, and then the whole choir.
"That's why I want to be a nurse," said Nabirye.
"I know."
"So that nobody has to say it is only a cold."
"I know, my child." Maama put down her cup. She reached out, and took her daughter's hand, and held it between her two hard cracked ones. The wedding ring, worn thin as wire, pressed against Nabirye's palm. "I have known since you were nine. I have been afraid, and I have been proud. It is a strange mixture. I think it is the thing a mother is made of." She smiled. "Go. Go and be it. I will find the money. I do not know how. But I'll find it."
"I'll pay you back."
"You will pay me by coming home."
"I will."
"Say it."
"I will come home, Maama. I will build the centre. I will put your name over the door."
"No." Her mother laughed softly. "Put your father's. He liked to be at the front of things."
They sat for a long time without speaking, in the lamplight, with the frogs and the dripping leaves. She was happier than she had ever been. She did not think it could last. She was a child of a place where nothing lasted. But the dream was as clear and bright as a lit window, and she put her whole weight against it, and it held.
I will not forget, she thought. Whatever happens. I will not forget this.
It was the kind of promise young people make. She meant every word. She had no idea how far a person could walk from a place, and how quietly, and how long it took to remember the way.