Chapter 2
What the Dead Leave Behind
Her father had left a tin box.
It sat at the bottom of the wardrobe in her mother's room, under a pile of folded kitenge and a sack of dried beans, and Nabirye had known about it all her life without ever once touching it. It was a square green tin, the kind that had once held biscuits, with a picture of a lion on the lid and a dent in one corner where it had been dropped. A bit of string was knotted round it. Her mother never opened it. Her mother never mentioned it. It was simply there, like a grave in the corner of a field, a thing you walked round.
On the Sunday after the results, while Maama was at church and Kizito was down at the stream with his friends, she took it out.
She did not know why. It was the kind of idle, restless, tender impulse that comes on the eve of a long journey, when one wants to touch every object in the house. She carried it to the veranda and sat on the bench with it on her knees, and untied the string. It was stiff with age. The knot came loose in her fingers like something giving up.
Inside, there was very little.
A man's watch with a cracked glass and a brown leather strap. A pair of reading glasses with one arm mended with wire. A small cloth bag of coins from an old currency, worth nothing. A photograph. A folded paper, yellow and soft. And at the bottom, wrapped in a handkerchief, a small battered prayer book, with a picture of Mary on the cover and, in the front, in a careful, upright hand, Yosamu Kibirige. His book.
She turned over the photograph.
It was a studio portrait, taken in Masaka, in black and white. A young man stood in a dark suit that was too big for him, with his hands at his sides and a stiff, startled smile. He had a long face and large ears and his daughter's wide mouth. Beside him, on a stool, with her hands in her lap, sat a girl in a white dress, very young, looking straight at the camera with an expression of grim, magnificent seriousness.
Maama, she thought. She is eighteen.
She looked at it for a long time. Then she put it down, and, because she could not stop herself, unfolded the yellow paper.
It was a letter, on a sheet torn from an exercise book, in pencil. It had been folded and unfolded so many times that the creases had gone through. The writing was her father's, shaky and uneven, as though it had been written lying down.
Peninah,
I am sorry I am a trouble. I did not want you to see me like this. I know you want me to go to the hospital but I cannot, not now, not like this. They will know. Everybody will know. The children will be the children of the man who had it. I would rather go quiet.
Look after the garden. The coffee will want pruning in March. Do not let Nabirye's cough go on without seeing someone. And tell Nabirye,
It stopped there. The pencil had trailed off in a long line, as if the hand had slipped. At the bottom of the sheet were two words in a different hand, her mother's, written much later in ink.
She knows.
Nabirye sat very still on the bench.
The noon sun lay in a hot square on the boards. A hen walked across the yard, clucking to herself. Somewhere on the hill a radio was playing a hymn.
Tell Nabirye.
She did not know what she had been going to tell her. She did not know what her mother had meant by she knows. She had been five years old. She had been five, and her father had been a long thin shape in a bed in the dark, and a sound, and a smell, and a voice that said, Come here, my little hen.
But she had not known about this. About they will know. About the man who had it.
Had what?
She read it again. Her hands were cold.
Maama came home at one, in her church gomesi, with a Bible under her arm and a bunch of bananas from a neighbour.
She stopped at the foot of the veranda steps.
She did not say anything. She looked at the tin box on the bench, with its open lid, and the string lying beside it, and the letter in her daughter's lap. For a very long moment she stood perfectly still. Her face did not change, but something went out of it, a kind of braced readiness, like a person who has been carrying a bucket of water on her head for years and feels it, for the first time, set down.
"You found it," she said.
"I'm sorry. I should have asked."
"No." Maama put down the bananas. She climbed the steps, slowly, and sat on the bench beside her, with a small grunt, and folded her hands. "It's yours as much as mine. I have been meaning to give it to you. I did not know when." She looked at the yard. "There is never a good day to give a person that."
"What is it?"
"It is what he left."
"I mean the letter. They will know. What did he have?"
Her mother drew a long breath. She held it a moment, and let it go.
"What do you think?" she said.
"I don't know. A cough. A cold that did not go. I thought maybe TB, but..."
"It was not only TB."
"Then what?"
"People called it slim," said her mother.
The word dropped between them like a stone into a well.
Slim. Nabirye had heard it. Of course she had. It was one of those words that lived in the air of the village, in the lowered voice of a woman at the borehole, in the way a neighbour looked away from a house with a closed shutter. It was what they called it, in the nineties, when the thin ones began to die. When whole families emptied out, and the graves multiplied behind the churches, and nobody would eat from the same plate. It was the word you used when you did not want to say the real one.
"You mean AIDS," she said.
"I mean what they said."
"He had it?"
"He was dying of it." Her mother said it flatly, looking ahead. "I did not know until near the end. He did not tell me. He was ashamed. He thought, if he said it, I would leave. Or the village would. Or that it would be a thing that came on us, on you, on Kizito, who was not yet born. He thought, if nobody says it, it does not exist."
"But there was medicine..."
"Not here. Not then. Not in a way that anyone dared." Maama shook her head slowly. "I have thought about it for fourteen years. They had the pills, in Kampala. In Masaka, soon after. They were beginning to give them out. A woman came to the trading centre with a poster. You can live. I saw her. I did not think it was for us." Her mouth worked. "By the time I knew, it was a month. Two. He was very thin. He could not stand. I took him on a boda to Masaka, and the doctor said, Why did you wait?"
"What did you say?"
"I said, He would not come."
The noon sun burned on the red dust of the yard. Nabirye did not breathe.
"It was a very long cough," said her mother. "I remember when it started. The rainy season. I said, Go and see someone. He said it was a cold. I said, It's three months. He said he would go to the man in the next parish, the one with roots. I said, No. He said, Woman, do not tell me what to do. And that was the only time in our marriage that we shouted."
"Maama..."
"I should have taken him. I should have put him on a bicycle and carried him. But I was thirty-two. I had a small girl, and a child I was carrying that I did not yet know about, and a husband who knew everything." She laughed, once, a short dry sound. "I thought it was his right to be wrong."
"It's not your fault."
"No. I know that. I have said it in prayer, many nights." She turned her head, and looked at her daughter, and her eyes were wet and steady. "But I want you to hear this from me. Not from a whisper. I want you to know what it was. Because when you go to Kampala, you are going to be a nurse. You are going to see it. And I do not want you ever to be surprised."
"Did you have it?"
The question came out before she could stop it. She heard it, small and sharp, in the hot silence.
"No," said Maama.
"You're sure?"
"I went to Masaka after he died. A kind nurse took me into a room, and she held my hand, and I gave blood." A faint, tired smile. "It was the bravest thing I have ever done. Braver than the babies. I sat on a plastic chair for forty minutes while a girl in a white coat looked at a little stick. And it was one line. Not two. I cried so hard that she gave me a glass of water."
"And Kizito?"
"He was born seven months after the burial. I did not know he was coming. They tested him when he was a year old, and he was well." She sniffed. "God was very merciful to us. It was not that I was good. It was luck, and a man who loved me enough to be careful, in the end. That's all."
"Then... then it didn't..."
"It did not get on us. No." She was quiet for a time. "But it got on the house. Everybody knew. A woman at church would not take bread from my hand. The man who sold us sugar put the change on the counter instead of in my palm. I took your father's body in a cart to the grave, and four men came to help me, and not one of them would stand near." Her voice, level until now, trembled. "That is what it does. It is not only the sickness. It is the loneliness. It makes you carry the dead by yourself."
Nabirye put the letter down.
She moved along the bench, and put her arms round her mother, and pressed her face into the green gomesi. It smelled of church and sweat and woodsmoke. She felt the broad back go rigid, and then, slowly, soften. A hand came up and cupped the back of her head.
"I am not telling you to make you afraid," said her mother, thickly. "I want you to be brave. That's all. It is a different thing."
"I know."
"There is medicine now. There is a clinic at Mbirizi where they give it free. Ibra's mother told me, the Hajjat. A man of twenty-five can live thirty years on it, if he takes it every day." Her voice shook. "Thirty years. Do you hear? Your father could have seen you in a white uniform."
"I hear."
"But only if you go. Only if you say it. That's the whole thing. It's the going." She drew back and held her daughter's face, with both hands, hard. "Promise me one thing, Nabirye."
"Anything."
"Whatever happens. Whatever you get. A cough, a fever, a sore, a fear in the night. You will go. You will not wait. You will not go to a root man. You will not hide it." Her thumbs pressed, hard, on her cheekbones. "You will come to me. And I will carry you, if I have to, on my back."
"I promise."
"Say it all."
"I promise I will go. I won't wait. I won't hide it. I will come to you."
"Good." Her mother let go. She wiped her eyes roughly with the heel of her hand. "Good. Now. Eat. There is posho. I'm going to cook the beans."
She got up. She smoothed her gomesi. She stood for a moment looking at the little tin box with the lion on the lid. Then she bent, and picked up the letter, and folded it very carefully along its old creases, and put it into Nabirye's hand.
"Take it with you," she said. "To Kampala."
"I can't. It's yours."
"It's his. And it's yours. It will keep you honest." She smiled, a thin small smile. "Don't lose it."
She did not lose it. She carried it for four years, folded in the back of a Bible, then in a small plastic bag, then in the lining of a handbag, then in a shoebox under a bed. She read it more times than she could count. She thought of it, once, late one night in the worst year of her life, with her hands shaking and a bottle of pills in her fist.
But she did not know that yet.
That Sunday, on the veranda in Kisaana-Nabbale, in the hot white noon, she only knew that she was nineteen and strong and clever, and that she had heard a story about a man who died of fear. She believed, with the whole of her young heart, that she understood it. She thought it was a lesson. She thought the lesson was go to the clinic. She thought that was all.
She did not see the other thing, the quieter one, folded under the letter like a second sheet.
It was this: that a person can know exactly what is right, and have it written on her skin, and still, on the worst day, in the loneliest room, with the whole city looking, do the thing she swore she would not.
Her father had known better too. He had known his wife was clever and his daughter was small and the medicine, somewhere, was coming. He had known. He had gone quiet anyway.
I would rather go quiet.
It is an easy sentence to write. It is the hardest to unlearn.
That evening, Ssenga Rehema came and took her to Masaka to buy shoes.
She would not hear a word of argument. She arrived in a taxi at four, in a gomesi of yellow silk, and marched into the compound. "A girl who goes to Kampala," she announced, "does not go in those." She pointed at Nabirye's feet. They were, admittedly, in an old pair of rubber sandals, held together on one side with a safety pin. "I have seen the girls of Kampala. They look at your feet first. It is how they decide who you are."
"I don't care what they think."
"Good. You will care. Everyone does, in the end." She pulled her into the taxi. "And I will tell you something for free. A bag, a good pair of shoes, a little powder. These are not vanity. They are armour."
"Armour against what?"
"Against being looked at wrong." Ssenga settled her bulk against the seat. Her face, in the light from the window, was suddenly serious. "Nabirye. I am going to say a thing, and you will think I am an old woman. Maybe I am. But I was twenty-two once, in a city, with a pretty face. And I have seen what it is. A girl comes from the village. She is smart. She is poor. She thinks, I will do it right. I will study. I will sit in the library. And all around her are people with money, who laugh, and wear nice things, and eat in restaurants, and she begins to feel... small."
"I won't."
"Everyone does." She took her hand and squeezed it. "That is when it is dangerous. Not when you are hungry. When you are ashamed. A hungry girl will work. A girl who is ashamed will do almost anything to stop it."
Nabirye looked out of the window. The road was winding through banana plantations and red cuttings, with the evening light coming gold through the leaves.
"I won't be ashamed," she said.
"Of what?"
"Of where I'm from."
"Hmm." Ssenga did not seem convinced. She patted the hand. "You say it now. In the taxi. With your mother's soup inside you. Wait until you stand in a bright building and a girl in a nice dress says, And where do you come from?"
"I'll tell her."
"I know you will. For a while."
"Ssenga..."
"I am only an old aunt." She laughed, suddenly, and the gravity went out of her face like a lamp being turned down. "Come. Let us buy you a pair of black shoes. And a bag with a zip. And I will give you a lecture on men, which will take the whole of the road, and which you will not remember."
"I'll remember."
"You won't. No one does." She winked. "But I will give it anyway. It is my duty. It is in the clan."
She did. It lasted forty minutes. It contained many examples, a great deal of laughter, and one piece of advice that, in the end, Nabirye did remember, in the dark, years later, when it was far too late.
A man who promises you everything, said Ssenga Rehema, wagging a finger, has usually not got a thing. Look at his hands, my dear. Not his mouth. A man who has something to give does not need to say so.