Chapter 3
The Letter from the City
The letter came in an envelope with a blue crest on it, and it cost her mother four thousand shillings to collect.
It had been sent to the post office at Lwengo, a low brown building with a red door and a sign that said Uganda Posts, where a thin man in a cardigan sorted the village's mail into pigeonholes and demanded a small fee, for reasons nobody understood, from anyone who wanted to take it away. Maama went on a Wednesday, on foot, in her good gomesi, with the exact change knotted in a handkerchief. She came back at three in the afternoon with her face shining with dust and sweat and the letter held in both hands in front of her, like a plate of food she was afraid of spilling.
"It has a crest," she said, at the gate.
"Give it to me."
"It has a crest. I did not want to open it."
"Maama..."
"It is yours. I did not touch it. The man said it is from a nursing school." She laid it in Nabirye's palm, and stepped back, and folded her hands, and stood there in the afternoon sun with her lips pressed tight, like a person at a graveside.
It was on thick cream paper. Nabirye opened it carefully with her thumb. She read it standing in the yard, with the chickens round her feet and her mother breathing hard beside her, and her eyes slid over the first lines, Dear Miss Kibirige, We are pleased to inform you, and stopped, and went back, and read them again.
"What does it say?"
"It says..." She cleared her throat. It came out as a croak. "It says I've got a place. At St. Veronica's. For the Diploma in Nursing and Midwifery. It starts on the second of February."
"Where is it?"
"Kampala. At Nsambya."
"Is it a good school?"
"It is private. It's run by sisters. The woman at the career day said it was the best." She was reading on, running a finger down the page. "There is a hostel. And a hospital next door where we do the practice. And..." She stopped.
"And?"
"The fees."
Maama's hands tightened.
"One million, six hundred thousand shillings a semester," said Nabirye, slowly. "And a registration. And the uniform. And a thing for the practical kit. And books. For six semesters." She looked up. "That's about ten million."
"Ten million."
"It might be less. I could ask about a bursary."
"Ten million," said her mother, in a very small voice, to the tin roof of the house.
For a moment neither of them spoke. A hen scratched at the dust. Down the hill a woman was beating a mat with a stick, thwack, thwack, thwack, and the sound came up clearly through the still afternoon air.
Then Maama let out a long breath and straightened her back. She did it the way she did everything difficult, in one deliberate movement, as though lifting a sack onto her head.
"Good," she said. "Then we have six months to find it."
They did not find it. They found a part, and then another part, and then, with enormous effort, enough.
Nabirye would remember that January as a long blur of arithmetic. Every evening, after the work was done and Kizito was in bed, she and her mother sat on the veranda by the paraffin lamp with a school exercise book between them and a stub of pencil, and added things up. There was the coffee, which would not be ready till July. There was the maize, which would feed them but not sell. There were the matooke bunches, which were worth four thousand each at the roadside and eight in Masaka if you could get them there. There was the little shop, no, there was no shop, that was the neighbour's. There was the cow.
"Not the cow," said Nabirye.
"The cow is eight hundred thousand."
"She gives milk."
"She gives four litres. We can buy milk." Maama did not look up. "She is a good cow. But I would rather have a daughter who is a nurse than a cow who is a good cow."
"I'll find a bursary."
"Then you will find a bursary and we will sell the cow."
The cow was sold on the twelfth of January, to a man from Kalungu, for seven hundred and forty thousand shillings, after a long and bitter negotiation conducted under the mango tree. Nabirye did not watch. She stayed in the kitchen with the door shut and listened to her mother's voice, firm and flat, saying, No. Eight. She is in calf, and the man's voice, wheedling, Mama, be reasonable. When they led the animal away down the path, she heard the long hollow clank of the bell round its neck, receding, receding, and put both hands over her face.
Her mother came in afterward, and put the money on the table in a roll tied with banana fibre. She did not say anything. She sat down and took the groundnuts she had been shelling into her lap and went on with it, one by one, cracking the shells with her thumbs.
"I'm sorry," said Nabirye.
"For what?"
"For the cow."
"It is a cow." Crack. Crack. "I will buy another one when you are a matron."
"Maama."
"I mean it. A fat one. Brown, with a white face." The shells fell into the basin with a dry pattering sound. "I do not want to hear one more word about the cow."
There was also the matter of the coffee.
It was the best of the village's crops, the dark red berries on the little green trees in the lower field, picked by hand in July and dried on sheets in the sun. They would not be ready for six months. But Maama went to see Mzee Kasirye, the buyer, who ran a little store at the trading centre and a very large debt to half the district, and she sold him the harvest in advance, at a bad price, for a cash payment. She came home with four hundred and fifty thousand shillings and an expression of such stony calm that Nabirye did not dare ask.
Ssenga Rehema gave three hundred thousand. She came in her yellow gomesi and put it on the bench like a bomb. "It is for her shoes and her little things," she said. "It is not a loan. If you offer to pay it back, I will be offended, and I will tell the whole clan."
Even Ibra gave something. He came on a Saturday, with his hands in his pockets, and said, in his careful voice, "I have not got much." He had forty thousand shillings in a handkerchief. He had saved it, he said, from a part-time job in a laboratory at the hospital in Masaka, washing glass. He did not say how long it had taken. He held it out with his eyes on the ground, as if it were something shameful, and Nabirye, who knew what forty thousand shillings meant to a student from a village, felt her throat close.
"I can't."
"It's for the books."
"Ibra, no."
"It's only a loan. You will pay me when you are a matron." A faint, painful smile. "I would like to say I helped. When they ask who built the centre. I would like to be a little brick."
She took it. She did not know what else to do. She held the soft, warm, much-folded handkerchief in her palm, and said, "Thank you," and he nodded, and went away again without another word, and it did not occur to her that a person who gives you forty thousand shillings is not asking to be a brick.
By the end of January there was one million, one hundred and eight thousand. Not enough for the first semester. It would cover registration, the first instalment, the uniform. The rest was to be raised by a loan from the village savings group, which met on Thursdays under the mango tree. Maama went on the last Thursday, in her best gomesi, to stand before thirty women and ask.
Nabirye went with her. She sat on the ground at the back, with her knees up, and listened.
"I am not asking for charity," said her mother. She stood very straight, in the dappled shade, with her hands folded. She did not raise her voice. "I am asking for a loan of six hundred thousand shillings. I will pay it back over twelve months, with interest, at the rate we agreed. I have never been late. You all know that. My husband is dead, and I am not ashamed of that. I have a girl who is first in the sub-county. I want her to go."
There was a silence. A breeze moved the leaves.
"And if she does not finish?" said a voice.
"Then I will work until I have paid it."
"And if she marries?"
"Then I will have a son-in-law who is a nurse's husband. It is not a bad thing." A ripple of laughter. "I only ask that you vote."
They voted. It was unanimous. After the hands went up, Mama Juliet, old and bent, with her face like a dried plum, got slowly to her feet. She came across the grass on her two sticks, and stopped in front of Maama. She did not say anything. She put her thin hand on her cheek.
"Peninah," she said. "You held the lamp for all of us. Let us hold it for you."
Maama bowed her head. Her shoulders shook once. Nabirye, on the ground, in the dust, with the evening light going gold on thirty faces, thought: I will never be able to pay this back.
She was right. She would not.
On the last night, her mother cooked everything.
It was the thirty-first of January. The house was full of the smell of it. A chicken, killed that morning, stewed with tomatoes and onions. Fresh beans, with salt. A pot of luwombo, the Ganda dish her mother made only for weddings and funerals, the meat and groundnut sauce wrapped in banana leaves and steamed over a slow fire for three hours until the whole kitchen smelled of green and smoke. A bowl of sweet potatoes. A mound of matooke, yellow and steaming. She had been at it since five. She had refused all help.
"Sit," she said. "Eat. You will not eat like this for a long time."
"I will. They will feed us."
"They will feed you posho and beans, like a prison. I know. I have been to Kampala." She put a heaped plate in front of her. "Eat."
They ate on the veranda, on the old bench, with the lamp turned low. Kizito, his mouth full, kept saying, "Can I have the chicken neck?" and being told that he could. The frogs were singing. A pale moon stood over the hill, thin as a fingernail. When the plates were empty, her mother brought out a bundle.
It was tied in a cloth, and heavy.
"For tomorrow."
Nabirye unwrapped it. There was a small tin of groundnut paste, the good kind, roasted and ground by hand. A bag of dried silverfish. A packet of tea. A knotted handkerchief with money in it, forty thousand shillings, in ones and fives and a hundred small coins, that must have taken months. A small hand-sewn bag in blue kitenge, no bigger than a purse, with a drawstring.
"What is this?"
"Open it."
She did. Inside, folded in a scrap of newspaper, there was a small bar of green soap, and a miniature picture of the Virgin Mary, and a lock of grey hair tied with thread. She looked up.
"It's from Mama Juliet," said Maama. "She says, a nurse should have a little of the old with her. She says, when you are afraid, hold it."
"Maama..."
"And this." She reached into her gomesi, and took out something else, and put it on the bench between them. It was the watch.
Her father's watch. The man's watch, with the cracked glass and the brown strap. It had stopped at twenty past four, years ago. She had seen it in the tin box and not thought of it again.
"I got it mended," said Maama. "At Masaka. It cost three thousand shillings. The man said it was a good one, a Seiko, from before the war." She took it up, and turned it over, and fastened the strap round Nabirye's wrist, with her thick clumsy fingers. "A nurse needs a watch for the pulse. I thought, why should you buy one?"
It was heavy and a little too large. It ticked.
She had not known that it could be made to tick.
She sat there looking at it, on her thin brown wrist, in the lamplight, and could not say anything. She felt the weight of it, the steady, ancient, patient beat, like the pulse of someone very old. Her mother sat beside her with her hands in her lap.
"It is his time," said Maama. "Not mine. I do not want it to stop."
The taxi left at six.
It was a white minibus with a green stripe, waiting at the stage at Lwengo in the grey chill of the morning, with a dozen people already inside it and a load of sacks on the roof. They had walked the three kilometres from the village in the half-dark, her mother at the front with a lantern, Kizito yawning behind with the suitcase on his head, and Nabirye in the middle, in her new black shoes, carrying a bag with a zip. She had slept for perhaps two hours. She could not feel her feet.
Ssenga had come, the night before, to say goodbye, and had given her a plastic bag of bread and a long list of instructions, and then had cried. Ibra was not there. He had said goodbye on Friday. He had given her a small, strange gift, a sheet of paper on which he had written, in small neat print, the addresses of the hospital laboratory in Kampala, the nearest mosque, the cheapest place to buy a mattress, and, at the bottom, his own phone number, which she had put in her bag and not looked at again.
The sky was going from black to grey to the colour of pearl. A few stars lingered over the hill. Down in the trading centre, a woman was lighting a charcoal stove, and the smoke rose straight up in a thin white thread.
"You have the money?"
"Yes, Maama."
"In your bra?"
"In my bra."
"And the letter?"
"I have it."
"Both of them?"
"Yes. The one from the school. And Taata's."
"Good." Her mother nodded. She stood in front of her in the cold, with her shawl round her shoulders, and the lantern throwing a yellow circle on the red earth. She had put on her gomesi. It was not the good one. It was the old green one, tied up at the waist, with the torn sash. She had not changed for the occasion. She never did. She had come as she was, as she came to everything.
"Three things," she said.
"Maama..."
"Hush. Three things." She held up three fingers, thick and brown and cracked. "Go to class. Go to church. And go to the clinic if you are ill."
"I know."
"Say it."
"Go to class. Go to church. And go to the clinic if I am ill."
"And a fourth." She did not smile. "Do not be ashamed of where you come from."
Nabirye opened her mouth.
She did not know why. It was nothing. It was only a thing her mother said, as she said Eat and Wash your feet. But there was a small cold prickle on the back of her neck, and in the instant before she answered she heard, clearly, in her aunt's voice, in a moving taxi, a sentence about a girl in a nice dress who says, And where do you come from?
"I'm not," she said.
"Good."
"I'll never be."
"Good." Her mother stepped forward. She took her daughter's face in both hands, as she had done on the day of the results, and held it. The look went on and on. "My child," she said. "My first-born. I have not said it enough. I am so proud of you that I do not know what to do with my hands."
She did not cry. Nabirye saw her fight it. A small muscle moved in her jaw. Her mouth shut hard, and opened, and shut.
"Go," she said. "Before I embarrass us both."
"Maama."
"Go. They are waiting."
She went. She climbed into the taxi, past a man with a goat, and found a space on the end of a bench, by the window, and squeezed in. The conductor slid the door shut. Through the dirty glass she saw her mother standing in the road in the grey light with the lantern in her hand, the old green gomesi, the thick strong legs planted apart, and Kizito beside her, waving, with his whole thin arm. She saw her mother's feet. They were bare. She had taken off her sandals at the stage, as she always did, to save them. In the thin light they looked very large and brown and hard, the toes splayed, the soles grey with the dust of three kilometres.
Nabirye looked at them.
It was a small thing. She would not, ordinarily, have seen it. But a woman on the bench beside her, in a clean blouse and good shoes, leaned over to look out of the window, and said, to nobody, in English, with faint amusement: "Ah, a village mother. Look at the feet."
"Pardon?" said the man with the goat.
"It's very touching," said the woman. "They walk for miles. They have no idea."
She did not say it unkindly. She said it the way one remarks on a rare bird. And Nabirye, who had turned her head to answer, felt something happen inside her chest, a tiny, hot, unwelcome flush, like a spill of boiling water on a cold floor. It was over in a second. She did not answer. She sat very still with her hands in her lap.
The taxi lurched forward. Her mother raised her hand. The lantern swung. The red road unrolled between them, and the lantern grew small and yellow and then went out of sight behind a bend.
She had meant to wave back. She had meant to wave until the very end.
She found, with a small cold shock, that she had not. Her hand was still in her lap. It was holding the strap of her new bag, so tightly that the knuckles had gone white.
Why did I not wave?
She did not know. She told herself it was only the sleepiness, or the jolt of the road, or the effort not to cry. She told herself that all the way to Masaka.
But somewhere in the dark of her mind, where the real things lived, a small, quiet voice said: You were looking at the woman in the good shoes.
She turned her face to the window, and watched the banana plantations go by, green and silver and dripping in the first sun, and held her father's watch to her ear. It ticked. It ticked steadily on, small and stubborn, through the whole long road to the city.