Chapter 20
The Last Rain
For four days they fought for her, and for four days it seemed that they might win.
It was, in its way, a good ward. The nurses were tired and brusque and kind. The doctors, young men and women in rumpled white coats, came at seven and again at six, and stood round the bed with their folders, murmuring in English. There was a drip of amphotericin, amber as tea, that dripped through the night. There was a bag of saline, to protect her kidneys. There was a small round tablet, four times a day, that Ibra had begged from a friend in the pharmacy, because the ward had run out. Every morning, at eight, a pair of hands turned her onto her side, and a long needle went into the small of her back, and she screamed.
It was to take the pressure off. The fluid built up in her head, thick and cloudy with the fungus, and pressed on her brain, and the only way to ease it was to draw it off. Dr. Atim did it himself. He did it with great care, with his lips pressed together, holding the end of the tube in a measuring cup, watching the level fall. "It's down to twenty-five," he would say. "Good. Twenty. That's very good." He would put his hand on her shoulder, and say, "Well done."
Peninah held her head.
She did it every time. She knelt on the floor, beside the bed, and took the thin face in her hands, and looked into it, as one looks into a well, while the needle went in. She did not look away. She did not close her eyes. She said, in a low steady voice, in Luganda, the same thing every morning, over and over. I'm here. I'm here. I am here. Look at me. Look at my face. I'm not going anywhere. Look at me.
And Nabirye looked.
It was extraordinary. She had never seen her mother's face so close. It was broad and brown and lined, with a deep crease beside each nostril and a small white scar through one eyebrow, from a fall off a ladder, thirty years ago. It was wet. It was calm. Behind it, in the soft dark of her eyes, was something she had never been able to name and now could, simply. It was a kind of floor. It was the place where, when everything else gave way, one stood.
"Maama," she said, on the second morning.
"Yes."
"I'm sorry."
"I know you are."
"It hurts."
"Yes."
"You don't have to stay."
"Hush." Her mother's thumbs moved over her cheekbones. "Be quiet, now. Save your breath."
They came, those four days, in a small steady stream, and she was astonished that there were so many.
Shamim came on the first afternoon, in a pink T-shirt, with her braids tied up in a fountain and a large plastic bag. She stopped at the end of the ward. She stood still, for about ten seconds, with her mouth open and her eyes enormous, and then she walked down the aisle on shaking legs and put the bag on the floor and said, in a thin cracked voice, "Oh, my friend."
"I'm so sorry I didn't write."
"Shut up."
"I promised."
"I said, shut up." She sat on the bed and put her arms round her. She smelled of oil and hair spray and cheap sweet perfume. She was shaking. "I'll never forgive you. I want you to know. I will be angry for the whole of my life. You will be very sorry."
"I am."
"Good." She drew back. Her face was a ruin. She wiped it on her sleeve, smearing her mascara, and looked across the bed at the broad woman on the mat. Their eyes met. "Mama Nalubega."
"My dear."
"I am Shamim. We spoke on the phone."
"The one who looked after her."
"I tried."
"You did." Peninah rose, with a grunt, and crossed the floor, and took both Shamim's hands. She was a head shorter. She looked up. "I owe you a debt. I cannot pay it. But I will say this. I have a hen, and a very large sack of matooke, and I would be honoured if you would eat."
Shamim burst into tears.
Mama Teddy came on the second day, in a purple gomesi, with a basin of food and a tin of biscuits. She did not weep. She was the only one. She stood at the end of the bed with her arms folded and her great bosom heaving, and looked at the girl, and at the drip, and the monitor, and said, "Well. You've made a mess of it." And then she sat down, on a chair that creaked, and began to knit.
"I'm sorry."
"For what?"
"For running."
"It is what we do." She did not look up. "I ran for three weeks. I went to a prophet, and a witch doctor, and a man who sold magic stones. I spent every shilling I had. And at the end, a very cross nurse put a tube in my arm, and told me to stop being an idiot." The needles clicked. "I have never been so happy to be insulted."
"Is it too late?"
"Do not ask me that."
"I want to know."
"I don't." Mama Teddy's voice was level. "I do not know. Nobody does. The doctor has his numbers. I have my feelings. And both of them say the same thing, which is that it's a very close thing." She lifted her eyes. They were bright, and dry, and fierce. "But I'll tell you what I know. I know that you are not alone. And you are not ashamed. And that is more than I had."
Sister Agnes came on the third.
She was in her white coat, with her grey curls on end, and she carried a small plastic flower in a pot. She set it on the locker. She did not speak. She took Nabirye's hand and held it, for a very long time, with her round face turned toward the window. When she did speak, her voice was thick.
"You have a letter."
"From whom?"
"From St. Veronica's." She took it from her pocket. It was a cream envelope, with a blue crest, slightly creased. "Sister Benedicta brought it to me yesterday. She did not want to bring it herself. She is a proud woman." She laid it on the sheet. "I think you should open it."
She did. Her fingers were weak. It took her a long time. Inside was a single sheet.
Dear Nabirye,
The Board met on Tuesday. I am to tell you that your readmission is confirmed, without condition, with effect from the next intake. I am also to say that the matter of the video has been closed. The Board regrets the distress.
I am to say these things officially. I would like to say one thing for myself.
In thirty-one years of teaching, I have had perhaps four students who held a person as you did. You held Mercy. I saw it. I have not forgotten it. I should have defended you in July. I did not. It is a failure I'll carry.
Come back when you can. You will have a place.
B.
She lay for a long while, with the paper on her chest.
"She says I can come back," she whispered.
"Yes."
"Sister. I'm in a bed."
"I know, my dear."
"I don't think I'll..."
"Don't say it." The old woman bent. She laid her forehead against Nabirye's, as a mother does with a feverish child. She was crying. "Don't say it. Just keep it. Keep it in your hand. It is a thing to hold."
Nabirye held it.
Ibra came every night.
He came at seven, after the laboratory closed, in a white coat that was never clean, with a carrier bag and a thermos. He sat on the plastic chair on the other side of the bed, opposite Peninah, and the two of them, the broad woman on the mat and the thin young man in glasses, kept the watch together in a long silence, like two sentries at the opposite ends of a bridge.
They did not speak much. They did not need to. He brought her mother tea, and she took it without a word. He changed the drip bag, when the nurse was busy, and she held the tube. When Nabirye slept, they sat with their eyes on her face, and on one occasion, at about two in the morning, when she cried out in a nightmare, he found that her mother's hand had come across the bed and gripped his, hard, and was not letting go.
"She will be all right," said Ibra.
"Hush."
"They say the pressure's down."
"I heard."
"It is a good sign."
"It's a sign." Peninah did not look at him. "I have seen many signs. I've seen a woman sit up and ask for porridge, an hour before she died. I do not trust them." She tightened her grip. "I only trust this."
"What?"
"That we are here."
He said nothing. He sat in the lamplight with his hand in hers.
On the fourth night, he brought a pencil.
It was a very small one, a stub, worn almost to the end. He laid it on the sheet beside her hand, without comment, and she looked at it, and then at him.
"What's that?"
"A pencil."
"Why?"
"For the plan." He smiled, a little crookedly. "You had a list. In a green book. I found it, in Kisenyi. It was a very good one. You wrote, on the first page, I want to build a place where nobody has to be carried." His voice was thick. "I have been thinking. I would like to help. When you are better."
"I'm not going to be."
"You might."
"Ibra."
"You might." He said it fiercely. "And if you are not, I'll do it anyway. I will do it for you. I have saved forty thousand shillings." He laughed, thinly. "It is a start."
She began to cry.
"I do not want you to..."
"I am not asking permission." He took her hand, and put the pencil in it, and closed her fingers. "I'm telling you. It will have a blue door."
It was on the fifth night that the rain came.
It had been threatening for a week. The air in the ward was thick and hot. The fans turned slowly under the ceiling, moving it about like warm soup. The patients lay in rows, in their sweat, and at dusk, from the window, a great purple bank of cloud was seen to rise over the hills of Kampala, rolling and swelling, edged in livid gold. A wind sprang up. A tin sheet clattered. A bell began to ring, a long way off, and was torn away.
She woke at about two.
She lay still, listening. It began, far off, on the hills, a soft hush like the whispering of many people, and rolled nearer, and broke on the roof like a thousand small drums. She heard it. She knew it. She turned her head on the pillow, and the whole world was clear.
It was the strangest sensation. There was no pain. The great band of iron round her skull had loosened, and gone, and in its place was a vast calm quiet, like the stillness at the top of a hill. She could see. She could hear. Every sound in the ward stood out, singly, bright and distinct, the click of the drip, the cough of a man along the row, a woman praying under her breath. The yellow bulb at the far end burned like a small sun.
It's the last of it, she thought.
She did not need to be told. She had seen it in the wards, on a dozen beds, in the last year of her training, the clearing, the sudden lucid peace, the bright interval before the end. Sister Agatha had called it the lifting. She had said, It's a gift. They get an hour. Do not waste it. Sit down, and listen.
She looked at the mat on the floor.
Her mother lay on her side, with her knees drawn up and her head on a rolled cloth, in her faded gomesi and her slipped scarf. Her feet were bare, and cracked, and grey with the dust of the road. Her hand was stretched out across the cold concrete, and her fingers were curled round the iron leg of the bed. She was asleep. In the yellow light, her face was open, as a child's is. She looked, for the first time in Nabirye's whole life, entirely undefended.
Maama.
She watched her for a long time.
I have to tell her.
She did not know how to begin. She had so much to say, and none of it in order. She lay with her eyes on the broad sleeping face, in the sound of the rain, and tried to find a first sentence, and could not, and then, suddenly, as a thing arrives that has been waiting at the door, she knew.
"Maama," she said.
It was a whisper. It was not loud enough to wake a mouse. But the broad body on the mat stirred, instantly, as a mother's does, and the eyes opened, and were clear.
"My child."
"I'm awake."
"I see that." She was up on one elbow. She did not seem surprised. She moved with the quick economy of a woman who has learned to wake and know where she is. "Do you need water?"
"No."
"Are you in pain?"
"No. It has gone." She smiled. It felt strange on her face. "Maama, will you sit with me? On the bed? I want to say something."
"I am here."
"I know. I want you where I can see."
Peninah rose. She did it slowly, in stages, as one gets up from a very long prayer. She sat down on the edge of the bed, in the lamp-glow, with her hands in her lap, and her feet on the floor, and looked at her daughter with her whole round level face.
"Say it."
She said it all.
It took a long time. The rain went on, steady and heavy, on the iron roof, and the ward settled into its night sounds, and the bulb at the end burned yellow. She spoke very quietly, in a low, clear, unhurried voice, with her eyes on her mother's face, and she did not leave anything out.
She told her about the wedding. She told her about the dimple, and the dinner, and the phone. She told her about a white house with a desk, and a green lamp. She told her about the day she had stood in a bright kitchen and heard a man say that he could not pay. She said it all in order, plainly, without decoration, as one reads out a list.
She told her about the hotel.
She told her about the glass room, and the ferns, and a woman in a purple dress who asked where she had been educated. She said, I told her my mother was a nurse. She said it flatly. She said, And I saw you come up the drive.
Peninah did not move.
"I turned away," said Nabirye. "I want you to know that I knew. I knew what I was doing. I looked at you, and I looked at the woman, and I thought, She is going to see my mother's feet." Her voice shook. "I was ashamed of your feet, Maama. Of the dust. Of the sack. I was ashamed of the way you walk. I was ashamed that you had come."
"I know."
"You knew?"
"I saw your face." Her mother's voice was very low. "I was on the lawn, and I looked through the glass, and I saw you. You were so beautiful. You were in a blue dress. You had gold at your throat. And I thought, That is my daughter. She is a queen." Her mouth trembled. "And then I saw you turn."
"Maama..."
"I was not angry. I want you to hear me. I was not angry then and I am not now." She laid her hand on the sheet. "I stood in the sun with a sack on my head, and I thought, She does not want them to know. And I understood. I understood it, as one understands a thing that has happened to oneself." She drew a long breath. "I was ashamed, too."
Nabirye stared at her.
"Of my mother. In nineteen ninety-two. When I was a girl in Masaka, at school, with a scholarship, among the daughters of civil servants." Her voice was steady. "My mother came to the gate one day to bring me a pair of shoes. She was a very big woman. She was loud. She was in a gomesi with a patch. She called, across the yard, in front of all the girls, PENINAH! MY CHILD! I HAVE BROUGHT YOU SOMETHING!" She smiled, faintly. "I hid behind a pillar."
"Maama."
"I stayed there for twenty minutes. Until she went. She left the shoes with the gateman." She paused. "I wore them for a year. I was ashamed, every time. And she died, in nineteen ninety-eight, and I did not have a thing to say to her. Because I had not said it." She was looking at her hands. "I had always meant to. I'm sorry. I love you. I was a coward. But there is always a tomorrow, till there is not."
"I didn't know."
"No. I never told anyone." Her eyes lifted. They were wet and bright and steady. "I'm telling you because I want you to understand. It is not a crime. It is a thing that children do, to the people who love them most. It is the oldest sin in the world." She smiled. "And the most forgivable."
Nabirye was weeping.
"I forgave you," said her mother, "on the lawn."
"But..."
"Before you had done it. I forgave you as you lifted your glass. I stood there, and I thought, She will be sorry, one day. She will think it is the worst thing she has ever done. And I thought, I will tell her. When she is ready. I will say, I have been waiting for you, since the day you were born." Her voice broke. "I never wanted you to be sorry. I only wanted you to come home."
It was very quiet.
The rain was falling steadily on the roof, in a long soft rope. The yellow bulb flickered. Along the row, the man coughed, once, and was still.
"I'm home," said Nabirye.
"Yes."
"I'm so far, but I'm home."
"You are." Her mother bent, and gathered her up, carefully, in both arms, with the drip and the sheet and all, as one lifts a very small child. She held her against her broad breast. She smelled of woodsmoke and groundnuts and sweat, and of a village at the bottom of a hill. "You are here. You have been here, always. You were never lost. Only late."
She wept.
She did it for a long time, in her mother's arms, in the sound of the rain, with her face in the old green gomesi. It came up out of her in great slow shuddering waves, from a place beneath her ribs, and as it went it took everything with it, the shame and the lie and the stage and the hotel and the long grey weight of four years. It poured out. She had not known there was so much. She had thought she was empty, and she was not, and as it left her, she felt, for the first time since the day she stood in a queue at a taxi park with a sack at her feet, the great clean quiet of a body with nothing to hide.
"Maama," she said, at last.
"Yes."
"I want to tell you the rest."
"Tell me."
"I have it. The virus."
"I know."
"You know?"
"Ibra told me. And the doctor." Her mother's hand moved on her back, slowly, round and round. "I have known for a month. I have known, I think, since the lawn. A mother can see it. It's in the skin. I knew your father's face, long before he did."
"I'm sorry."
"For what?"
"For the shame. For the secret."
"Oh, my love." Her mother rocked her. "I am not ashamed. Do you hear me? I am not ashamed. Of you, or of the thing. It is not a sin. It's a sickness, like any other. Like a fever. Like a broken leg. I wish only that I had known sooner. I wish I had come to the stage with a lantern, and brought you home."
"It was my fault."
"It was ours." Her voice was fierce. "We did not talk about it. It was in the house, like a cold draught, and nobody said the word. I should have said it. At the table. In the kitchen. I should have said, I'm not afraid. I should have taught you not to be." She stopped. "I thought if I did not name it, it would not come."
"It came anyway."
"It always does."
They were quiet.
"I want to ask a thing," said Nabirye.
"Ask."
"When I die..."
"Hush."
"No. Listen." She took her mother's hand. It was enormous and warm. "When I die, I want to be buried at home. By Taata. Under the mango tree."
"Yes."
"And I want you to say it."
"Say what?"
"The word. At the funeral." Her voice was a thread. "Don't let them whisper. I've heard them. I was five. I stood on a path behind a cart, and they said slim. They said it as if it were dirty. I don't want that. Not for me." She swallowed. "I want you to stand up in front of the whole village, in your gomesi, and say, My daughter had HIV. And she was my daughter. And she was a good girl."
Her mother did not move.
"Will you?"
"I will."
"Even if they turn their backs?"
"I will say it to the backs." Peninah lifted her chin. "I have said harder things. I said No to a shopkeeper, with a baby on my back. I can say a word."
"And Kizito."
"I'll tell him."
"Tell him to go to the clinic. If he coughs." Her breath was growing short. "Tell him it's free. Tell him it's a blue door. Tell him he must not wait."
"I will."
"And the clinic."
"What clinic?"
"The one at home." She was smiling. She could feel it, on her mouth, a thin tired smile. "I wrote it. In a book. The green one. It's with Ibra. You'll find it. It has a plan." Her eyes had begun to close. "A health centre. At the foot of the hill. For the women. With a bed. And a lamp. And a room where they can sit." She drew breath. "So that nobody has to be carried."
"I will build it."
"With what?"
"With the cow." Her mother laughed, thickly. "I will buy another. A fat one. With a white face. And I'll sell her."
"Maama..."
"And Ibra has forty thousand shillings."
"It's a start."
"It is." She kissed her daughter's forehead. It was hot and dry. "And I'll put your father's name over the door."
"No." Nabirye's eyes were shut. "Put yours."
"Mine?"
"It was you who held the lamp."
There was a long silence.
Then, very softly, her mother began to sing.
She did not remember it afterward, exactly. She remembered only that it was low. It was an old song, in the thick sweet rolling Luganda of the hills, with a slow rocking tune, the one that every mother in Buganda sings, at the foot of a hammock, at night, to a feverish child. She had heard it ten thousand times. It had no tale in it. It was only a sound, a long soft sound, like a hand on the head.
She lay in the crook of her mother's arm, with her eyes closed, and listened.
The rain fell. The lamp burned. The ward was still. She heard the song, in her mother's chest, under her ear, deep and slow and unbroken, and she thought of a veranda, and a paraffin lamp, and a small girl on a mat, listening to a broom. She thought of a banana grove, wet and green. She thought of a white door at the top of a hill.
It is open, she thought.
She did not feel afraid.
It surprised her. She had always supposed she would. She had imagined it a thousand times, the last hour, with the dark closing in. She had pictured a terror, a clawing, a frantic dragging back from the edge. But it was not like that. It was warm, and quiet, and slow. It was like going down a long soft slope into a lit room.
I'm not alone, she thought.
She is here.
She's been here all the time.
"Maama," she whispered.
"Yes, my love."
"Do not forget who I am."
"Never."
"Say it."
"You are Nabirye Rhoda Kibirige." Her mother's voice was thick and tender and absolutely certain. "First-born of Peninah, and Yosamu. A midwife. A nurse. A daughter of the hills. You are a girl who held a lamp. You are the best thing I ever did." A breath. "And I'll never forget."
She smiled.
It was a very faint smile. It lay on her mouth like a thing laid down. And in the soft, grey, gathering, golden light, in the sound of the rain, with her mother's song going on, she opened her eyes, once, and looked up at the ceiling, and the slow fans, and the great high window, and saw that the rain had stopped.
A first light was coming. It was a thin, clear, pearl-coloured light, with a cold in it, and a smell of washed earth. Beyond the window, over the roofs of the city, over the hills of Kampala and the long wet shine of the streets, a single bird had begun to sing.
It was a very small sound.
It was the first sound of the morning, as it had been in a compound in Kisaana, nineteen years before, when a broom scratched on the earth.
She heard it.
Good morning, Maama, she thought.
And she did not, after that, think anything more.
Peninah sat for a long time.
She did not stop singing. She did not stop even when the breath, against her breast, began to come slower, and slower, and she felt the small weight in her arms grow quiet, and then, after a very long interval, still. She sang to the end of the song. She sang it again. She sat on the edge of the narrow bed, in the pearl light, rocking, with her daughter's head in the crook of her arm, and her lips against the cropped grey hair, and the song went on, steady and low, like a small stream under a stone.
The nurse found them at six.
She was a young one, in a blue apron, with a clipboard, and she came down the ward on soft shoes, and stopped at the foot of the bed. She stood for a moment with her pen lifted. She did not say anything. She put the clipboard under her arm.
She went out, and came back with a chair.
She set it down beside the bed, gently. She did not speak. She took the broad woman by the shoulder, and sat her on it, and put into her hands a cup of tea, hot and sweet and smelling of ginger, and went away.
Peninah did not drink it.
She sat with it in her lap, in the cold clear light, with the thin body in her arms, and looked out of the window at the morning. It was very still. The roofs of the city shone. The rain had washed everything clean, the tin, the leaves, the red road, and the smoke of a thousand breakfast fires was beginning to rise from the hills, in thin white threads, straight up into the sky.
She sat there until the sun was high.
And then, when the ward had begun to stir, and the trolleys to rattle, and the first visitors, with their baskets, to come through the door, she rose. She laid her daughter back on the pillow, and drew the sheet up to her chin, and smoothed it. She folded the thin hands on her breast. She laid in them, very carefully, a small stub of pencil, and a cream sheet of paper, and a watch.
She stood for a moment, looking down.
"Go well, my child," said Peninah Nalubega.
She did not weep. She stood straight in her torn green gomesi, with her bare feet apart, and her chin up, and her great scarred hands at her sides, and looked at the face of her daughter in the morning light. It was peaceful. It was the face of a girl of nineteen, on a mat, in a dark room, asleep.
"I will say it," she said. "I promise. I'll say it to the whole of the hill."
She bent, and kissed her.
Then she went to find the boy with the glasses, and tell him.