Chapter 19
A Sack for the Road
The phone rang at ten at night, and Peninah Nalubega, who had been asleep for an hour, knew before she picked it up.
She did not know how. It was not a thing she could have explained. She had been lying on her mat in the dark with her feet drawn up and her shawl across her shoulders, listening to the frogs, and she had opened her eyes a moment before the sound began. The grey Nokia lay on the floor beside her pillow. It lit up, and shivered, and began its tinny tune. She looked at it. A small cold calm came over her, the calm of a woman who has been waiting a very long time at the top of a path and sees a figure, at last, at the bottom.
She answered.
"Hello?"
"Mama Nalubega? It is Ibra Sekitoleko. Yes. I'm sorry to ring so late. I have found her."
She did not say anything.
She sat up. She put her hand flat on the packed earth floor, and held it there, as one steadies oneself on a boat. In the other room, Kizito, who was sixteen now, long and silent and grave, turned over in his sleep and said something about a goat.
"Mama?"
"I am here."
"She is alive."
"Thank God."
"She is in Mulago. On the second floor. She's very sick." The voice at the other end was low and quick and unsteady, with a catch in it that she knew. It was the voice of the boy who had stood behind a banana tree with a bunch of weeds. "I will not lie to you. She is very sick. She has... they say it is in her head. A fungus. They are treating it. But it's serious."
"What did you say it was?"
"Cryptococcal meningitis."
She did not know the words. But she knew the sound of them, the long cold clatter, and she knew the tone. It was the tone in which, many years ago, in a ward in Masaka, a doctor with spectacles had said, Why did you wait?
"Is she dying?" said Maama.
There was a very long silence.
"She might."
"Then I will come."
"It is night. There is no taxi until six."
"I'll walk to the road."
"Mama..."
"I will walk to the road, Ibra, and I will wait. If a lorry comes, I'll stop it. I have stopped lorries before." She had stood up. She did not remember doing it. She was holding the phone against her ear with one hand, and with the other she had taken her gomesi from the nail, and was winding it round her waist. "Tell her I'm coming. Tell her not to be afraid."
"She doesn't want you to see her."
"I know."
"She is ashamed."
"I know that too." Her voice was perfectly steady. "Tell her I do not care. Tell her I've seen worse. Tell her I have seen a cow in labour." She almost laughed. "And tell her that I am bringing a sack."
She packed it in nine minutes.
She had done it before. She had done it, on a hundred nights, for a hundred other people's journeys, a bundle for the hospital, a basket for the funeral, a sack for the bride. She knew exactly what a person needed. She lit the paraffin lamp. She went to the kitchen. She took down from the rafters a bunch of matooke, green and heavy, that she had been saving for Sunday, and cut it, with a few swift blows of the panga, into hands. She wrapped them in leaves. She took a tin of groundnut paste. She took the dried fish, the packet of tea, the sugar. She took a small, battered, blackened pot. She found a bar of green soap, and a cloth, and a bottle of cooking oil.
She took, last, from the drawer, a straw mat, rolled tight, and tied with fibre.
She put it all in the sack.
It was a large sack. It had been made for her by her own mother, forty years ago, of coarse brown cloth, and had carried a great many things, wedding food, a dead man's clothes, six months' beans. It held everything. She pushed down the last leaf, and tied the neck with a length of banana fibre, and sat back on her heels.
The hen, she thought.
She went to the hen house.
It was dark. The hens were asleep, a row of vague pale shapes on the perch, with their heads under their wings. She took the brown one, the one with the red face. It did not wake. She carried it back, in her apron, warm and quiet and slightly damp, and laid it in the sack, on top, in a nest of leaves, with its head free.
"Nurse the Second," she said, softly. "Be good."
The hen opened one eye.
Kizito stood in the doorway.
He had come without a sound. He was in his shirt and shorts, barefoot, with his hair on end, and his face in the lamplight was too old for him. He did not speak. He stood with his arms at his sides, watching her. She saw him take in the sack, and the mat, and the hen.
"It is her," he said.
"Yes."
"I knew." He swallowed. "I knew when you did not eat. On Friday."
"I did eat."
"A spoonful."
"It was a large spoon."
He did not smile. He came into the room. He knelt in front of her, on the packed earth, and put out both hands, and took one of hers. His fingers were long and cool and strong. He was almost a man.
"Is she going to die?" he said.
"I do not know."
"I want to come."
"No."
"Maama..."
"You will stay. You will take care of the goat, and the garden. You will go to school." She said it as one gives an order, but she was holding his hand very hard. "I'll send word. I swear. As soon as I know. I'll send it with Ibra."
"What if she..."
"Then I will bring her home."
"And if she doesn't want to come?"
She looked at him.
It was a very long look. In the yellow lamplight, in the small dark kitchen, with the smoke-blackened walls round them and the sack at her knee, she looked at her son. She saw the long serious face. She saw his father's ears. She saw the child who had been born seven months after a funeral, and had grown up among women, and had learned to be silent.
"She will want to," said Maama. "She does not know it yet."
She stood on the road at midnight, with a sack on her head, in the dark, and waited.
It was a clear night. A thin new moon hung over the hills. The sky was thick with stars, and the air smelled of wet earth and woodsmoke, and a long way down the slope, in the valley, a dog was barking. The road was empty. It ran away to the north, between two walls of banana, a pale unmade ribbon, as far as the eye could see.
She did not mind. She was used to waiting.
She had stood on that road, or one like it, on many nights. She had waited for a boda man to carry a labouring woman. She had waited, once, for a husband. She had stood in the rain, with a lantern, and a baby on her back, saying, He will come, he'll come, and he had not. She had waited for a girl in a blue uniform to be handed down from a taxi, and the taxi had never stopped.
I am good at this, she thought.
She was not afraid. That surprised her. She had expected terror. She had expected to be sick on the road, with fear, and she was not. She was only very quiet. She felt like a vessel that had been filled, and filled, and filled, for years, to the brim, with something that she had not been allowed to spill, and which had now, at last, been given a place to go.
I am coming, my child.
At half past one, a lorry came.
It was a big rattling one, loaded with sacks of cement, with a single yellow headlamp, and it came up the road at a great pace, bellowing. She stepped out into the middle. She lifted her hand. The driver, a huge bearded man in a vest, stood on the brake with both feet. The whole vehicle shuddered to a halt a metre from her chest, with a scream of air.
"Are you mad, woman?" he shouted, leaning out.
"Where are you going?"
"Kampala!"
"Take me."
"I do not take..." He stopped. He looked at her. In the glare of the headlamp, a short broad woman in a green gomesi, with a sack on her head and a hen's red face poking out of it, stood in the road with her feet apart and her chin raised. "What's in the sack?"
"A chicken. And matooke."
"Why?"
"My daughter is dying in Mulago."
He looked at her for a long time.
"Get in," he said.
She did not remember the road.
She remembered the smell of the cab, diesel and old tobacco and a pine tree hanging from the mirror. She remembered the lights, a long string of them, appearing out of the dark, red and white and gold, and the great shape of a hill. She remembered the driver, whose name was Moses, saying nothing at all for two hours, and then, as the first grey came up over the edge of the city, saying, in a low, rough voice, "My sister died of it. In ninety-eight. We did not know what to call it."
"I'm sorry."
"I was fourteen. I sat on the floor. I thought, she'll get better." He glanced at her. "She did not."
"Mine will."
"God willing."
"No," said Maama. "Not God. Me."
She said it simply, looking out of the window at the long grey roofs coming up out of the dawn. She did not know why she had said it. It was not a thing she believed, exactly. But it came out of her with the force of a vow, and the driver, hearing it, nodded slowly, and did not speak again, and at Mulago hill, at six in the morning, he put her down at the gate, and would not take her money.
"For the hen," he said.
It was a great grey place, and it was full of shouting.
She stood at the gate with the sack on her head and looked at it. It rose in front of her, a vast cliff of concrete, with a thousand windows, and a thousand people pouring in at the doors. Ambulances. Taxis. Men on crutches. Women with babies. A boy with a handcart. A great white building with a tower, and a long low shed, and a yard in which half the population of Uganda seemed to be waiting in the sun. The smell was extraordinary, carbolic and cooking and old blood and dust. The noise was like a wall.
She had been here once, thirty years ago. She had brought a cousin, with a snake bite. She had stood in the same yard, in the same dust, terrified, and a nurse had shouted at her.
I am not afraid of you now, she thought.
She walked in.
She did not know where to go. She asked. She asked a woman selling oranges, who pointed. She asked a boy, who laughed. She asked a security guard in a peaked cap, who looked at her bare feet and her gomesi and her sack, and said, in English, "Madam, visiting is at four."
"I am her mother."
"Visiting is at four."
"She is dying."
"There is a form." He gestured, irritably, at a window. "You must go to Reception."
She went to Reception. There was a queue. She stood in it for an hour and ten minutes, in the heat, with the sack on her head, among a crowd of weeping and sweating and complaining strangers, and at the end a young woman in glasses looked at her over a desk and said, "Name of the patient?"
"Nabirye Kibirige."
"Ward?"
"I do not know."
"Date of admission?"
"Yesterday."
"I can't help you without a ward number."
"I have been told it is the second floor."
"There are four wards on the second floor." The girl's eyes, behind the glasses, travelled with polite incredulity from the sack to the shoes, and stopped, and a very small tight contraction appeared at the corner of her mouth. "Mama, are you sure you're at the right hospital?"
It was a thing she had heard before.
It was said in a voice she knew. It was the voice of a woman in a taxi, long ago, with a clean blouse and good shoes. Ah, a village mother. Look at the feet. It was said lightly, without malice, in the cool bright indifferent tone of a person who has never been hungry, to whom the whole world is a room that she has been invited to leave.
Peninah Nalubega looked at the girl.
She did not shout. She did not lower her eyes. She stood where she was, still, with her great hands folded in front of her, and she said, in the slow, firm, rolling Luganda of Kisaana-Nabbale, in a voice that carried across the entire hall:
"I am the mother of a nurse."
The girl blinked.
"She was a student at St. Veronica's. She is the first in our village to go. I sold a cow for her. I borrowed from the women of my parish. I walked three kilometres to the stage with a lantern." She did not take her eyes from the girl's face. "I have come a hundred and sixty kilometres, on a lorry, in the night, with this sack. My daughter is on the second floor of this building. I am going to find her. If you would be so kind as to tell me which stairs, I will go. If you will not, I will go anyway, and I'll open every door."
The hall had gone quiet.
A man in the queue had turned round. A woman with a baby was staring. A porter, with a trolley, had stopped.
The girl's face changed.
"It's... Ward Two C," she said. "It is... take the stairs on the left. Past the pharmacy. There's a lift, but it's broken." She stood up. Her voice was small. "I'm sorry, Mama. I did not mean..."
"I know." Peninah inclined her head, with great dignity. "God bless you, my child. Have you eaten? You are very thin."
She went out.
Behind her, in the hall, somebody began, softly, to clap.
She found the ward at nine.
She would remember it for the rest of her life. It was a long green room, with thirty beds, in two rows, under a high ceiling with slow fans. A smell came out at her at the door, carbolic and bleach and, under it, the other smell, the sweet one, that she knew from a house at the foot of a hill, fourteen years ago, on a dry-season night. She stopped.
Oh, she thought.
It was a very small sound. It was not a thought. It was a thing that went through her, from the soles of her feet to the roots of her hair, a long cold shudder, as one feels when a grave opens. She stood in the door with her hand on the frame, and for a moment she could not move.
Not again.
Please. Not again.
"Mama Nalubega?"
She turned.
He was standing beside her in the corridor, in a white coat, with his glasses on his forehead and his face grey with sleeplessness. He had grown a beard. He had grown, somewhere in the last years, from a boy into a man, and she did not at first know him. Then he said, in a cracked voice, "Mama," and she saw the whole of him, the long thin shoulders, the careful hands, the glint of wet at the rims of his eyes, and she dropped the sack.
It fell on the floor with a thump. The hen cried out.
She put her arms round him.
He was taller than she was. He had to bend. He folded over her, like a tree over a stream, and she held him, hard, against her chest, in the middle of the corridor, among the nurses and the trolleys, and felt him shake.
"I'm sorry," said Ibra, into her shoulder. "I'm so sorry. I looked for eleven weeks. I should have been quicker. I should have..."
"Hush."
"I couldn't..."
"You did." She held him off, and looked up into his face. Her own, which he had known all his life, was calm and broad and lined, and wet. "You found her. You've kept your promise. You are a good boy. You are the best boy in the whole parish."
"I am not."
"I am her mother. I am the judge." She patted his cheek. "Now take me to her."
He took her.
He walked ahead, down the long green aisle, carrying the sack, with the hen's red head peering over his shoulder. She followed. She did not look to the left or the right. She walked with her back straight and her eyes fixed on the far end of the room, and her bare feet slapped on the cold concrete, steadily, one after the other, like the beat of a drum.
He stopped at the fourth bed from the end.
She came up beside him.
She did not look at once. She stood with her hands at her sides, and her eyes on the iron foot of the bed, on the chart that hung there, on a printed label in blue ink. KIBIRIGE, NABIRYE. 23 F. She read it. She read it very slowly. She lifted her eyes.
There was a girl in the bed.
She was lying on her back, with a sheet to her chin, and a drip in her hand, and her face turned toward the window. She was very thin. Her cheekbones stood out like knuckles. Her lips were cracked. Her hair, which had been long and beautiful, was cut close to her skull, and what grew was dull, and dry, and grey at the roots. There was a rash on her throat. A bruise, yellow-green, on the inside of her arm. She lay still, with her eyes shut, and her breath came and went in small shallow gasps, with a faint click, like a latch.
It was not her daughter.
It was, for one instant, a stranger. A corpse. A face made of paper and bone. Peninah looked at it, with the whole of her wide, level, attentive gaze, and did not know it. She had a dreadful, sliding, disbelieving sensation, as of a foot missing a stair.
It's the wrong one, she thought. They have made a mistake.
Then the girl opened her eyes.
They were enormous. They were dark, and sunk, and wet, and they were turned on her. They were not dull. They were clear. They looked, from a great way off, from the bottom of a well, and in them, rising, was a thing that she knew, because she had seen it a thousand times, across a yard, at the foot of a hill, in the half-light of a morning in Kisaana.
It was the look of a child who has done something wrong, and is waiting to be forgiven.
"Maama," said Nabirye.
It was a husk of a voice. It was cracked and dry and almost without breath. But it was hers. It was the voice that had said Maama ten thousand times, from the cradle to the stage, in every tone from joy to rage. It went through her like a blade.
"Yes," said Peninah.
"You came."
"Yes."
"I'm so... I'm so sorry."
"Hush."
"I lied."
"Hush."
"I turned away. I saw you. I saw you, on the lawn, and I..." She was weeping. It came in a thin dry rain down the grey cheeks, without a sound. "I said it wasn't me. I said, It's a mistake. I..."
"I know, my child."
"How can you...?"
"Hush." Peninah put out her hand. It was a broad, brown, cracked hand, scarred at the knuckles, with a wedding ring worn as thin as wire. It hovered, for a moment, in the air, over the sheet. Then it came down. It lay, gently, along the side of a thin wet cheek, as it had lain, on a thousand mornings, along the side of a small hot sleeping face.
"I'm here," said her mother.
That was all. She did not say anything else. She did not need to. She stood by the bed in the yellow light, with her hand on her daughter's cheek, and the whole ward, with its smell and its noise and its slow fans, receded very far away. There was only the one small bright circle, and in it, the two of them, and the sound of a breath.
I am here.
I am here. I am here.
It was a thing that she had been saying for twenty-three years, to a frightened baby, a sleepless child, a girl in a blue uniform on a bench in a taxi. She had said it at the stage. She had said it by telephone. She had said it, over and over, in the dark, to a husband who had gone quiet. She had never once, in all that time, been able to make it enough.
It was enough now.
She felt it. She felt it in her hand, which was wet. She felt it in the thin cheek, which turned, slowly, helplessly, into her palm, like a flower to the sun.
"Maama," said Nabirye.
"Yes, my love."
"I'm so tired."
"I know."
"I don't want to be afraid any more."
"Then don't," said Peninah.
She sat down. She did it on the edge of the bed, heavily, with a grunt, and did not take her hand away. She sat there, broad and quiet and immovable, as she had sat through the long nights of a hundred labours, on a stool in a dark hut, with a lamp. She did not weep. She was past that. She looked at her child, and thought, with a great calm, as one thinks the plain facts of a life, I have been given another night.
I'll use it.
They would not let her stay.
It was against the rules. A sister in a starched cap came at noon, a tall woman with a face like a closed door, and said so, firmly. There was no space. There was a visitors' hour. There were sanitary regulations. She could come, as she had been told, at four.
"I'm staying," said Peninah.
"It is not permitted."
"Then it will have to be permitted."
"Madam..."
"I have a mat." She did not raise her voice. She undid the neck of the sack, and took out a roll of straw, tightly bound with fibre, and unrolled it, with a flick of the wrist, on the floor between the bed and the wall. It lay there, pale and fresh and fragrant, smelling of the sun. She sat down on it, cross-legged, and folded her hands. "I will not be in your way. I do not need a bed. I do not eat much. I'll wash her, and feed her, and I will not say a word to anyone." She looked up. "I have buried a husband alone. I will not do it twice."
The sister looked at her.
It was a very long look. Behind her, along the row, the other patients had gone quiet. A woman in the next bed had lifted herself on one elbow. An old man was staring. At the nurses' desk, a young nurse with a clipboard had stopped writing, and was watching, with parted lips.
The sister's face did something, very slowly. It was a movement at the corners. A small, reluctant, grudging, unwilling softening, like ice in the first sun.
"The floor is cold," she said.
"I have a shawl."
"You may not light a fire."
"I have no wish to."
"You may not bring a hen."
"It is a very small hen."
"It is a violation of every..." The sister broke off. She closed her eyes. "I will turn my back," she said, in a flat, tired voice, "for the length of this prayer. Hail Mary, full of grace." She turned. She walked away, down the ward, stiffly, with her hands tucked into her sleeves, and did not look round.
She said the whole of it.
It took a long time.
Peninah sat on the mat, with her back against the cold iron leg of the bed, and her daughter's hand in hers. She felt it, small and hot and dry, curled in her palm like a bird. She heard the slow shallow breathing. She heard the click of the drip. She watched the grey light move across the ceiling, and thought, I am not going to sleep.
She slept.
It took her unawares. She had not slept in two nights, and she had come a long way, and the floor, for all its coldness, was a familiar thing. She slipped sideways, into the crook of the iron leg, with her cheek against a rolled cloth. Her fingers, curled round the cold bar, went slack.
She dreamed of a hill. It was green, and wet, and covered in banana. A small girl in a blue uniform was running up it, laughing, with a white bag on her back, and at the top was a door, and the door was open. She woke, once, in the night, when the rain began, and put out her hand, and found the bed, and held on.
It was the first of many nights.
She did not leave that room again, except to wash.