Epilogue
What the Hills Remember
They buried her on a Saturday, under the mango tree, in the first dry week of November, and the whole of Kisaana-Nabbale came.
They came on foot, in the early morning, up the red path between the bananas, in twos and threes, in their church clothes, with their children by the hand. They came on boda bodas, and bicycles, and in the backs of lorries. They came from the next hill, and the next. By nine o'clock the compound was full. Men stood in clusters under the trees, in dark jackets, with their hats in their hands. Women sat along the veranda in rows, in gomesis of every colour, with their legs stretched out in front of them, rocking. Children were hushed. A goat was led away. And in the middle of the yard, on two trestles, under a sheet of white cloth, lay a plain wooden coffin that Ssenga Rehema had paid for and then refused to discuss.
Nobody had been sure what they would see.
That was the thing that hung over the place, like the heaviness before rain. It had gone round the district, in the three weeks since the telephone call. It had gone by whisper, and by phone, and by a woman from Masaka with a big screen. The girl. The one on the video. She died of it. And under the whisper, the other word. Slim. People said it, in the lane, and at the borehole, in a low voice, glancing over their shoulders, as one says the name of a thing that may hear. It had been said eighteen years ago, over a dying man, and many times since. It was said now, of a girl who had been first in the sub-county.
They came, though.
They came because it was Peninah. That was what Mama Juliet said, to the old women, on the veranda, with her two sticks across her knees. They are not here for the girl. They are here for the mother. They want to see what she will do.
It was a long service.
There was a priest from Lwengo, a stout man in a green chasuble, who read the Gospel in a rolling voice, and a choir of fifteen women in purple, who sang. There was a reading from the Book of Wisdom. There was a hymn, which Kizito, standing very straight in a borrowed suit, with his hands clasped, managed to get through to the end without a tremor, and then sat down and wept silently into his sleeve. There was a prayer. The priest spoke for twenty minutes, on the subject of sorrow and hope, and said the usual things about a good girl taken too soon, and did not use the word.
It was a thing the village noticed.
They noticed that he did not say it. They noticed the shape of the silence round it, the way the sentences went carefully round a hole. A man at the back coughed. A woman in the third row shifted. Ssenga Rehema, in a black gomesi, enormous and magnificent, with a swollen face and a pair of dark glasses, drew a long breath through her nose, like a bull.
At eleven o'clock, the priest sat down.
There was a pause.
It went on for a very long time. It was the pause that, at a Ganda funeral, is left for the family. A place for the remembering. In a more ordinary year it would have been filled by an uncle, or a brother, a man with a paper, who stood and said, in a formal voice, We thank you all for coming. There was a man in a dark suit, a cousin from Mbarara, who half rose, and looked at the widow, and sat.
She had not moved.
She sat on a plastic chair at the head of the coffin, in her best gomesi, the green one with the yellow flowers, which she had washed, and ironed, and starched, until it shone. She wore a blue scarf, with a thread of silver, round her shoulders. It was creased from long keeping. Her hands lay in her lap, very large and brown and still. Her face was wide, and calm, and set. She was looking at the coffin. She had been looking at it, without a word, for two hours.
Then she stood up.
It was a slow movement. It was the rising of a woman who has sat through a long night, and a long journey, and a long life, and finds the ground a little further off than she had thought. She smoothed the green cloth over her hips. She stepped out from behind the chair. She walked to the front of the coffin, and laid one hand on the lid, flat, as one lays a hand on a child's head, and turned, and faced the crowd.
Three hundred people looked at her.
She did not look at any of them. She looked above them, over the heads, at the hill beyond, where the sun was coming through the bananas in long gold bars, and a thin blue smoke rose from a cooking fire.
"I am Peninah Nalubega," she said.
Her voice was low and rough. It carried. It was the voice of a woman who had called children in from a field for thirty years.
"Many of you know me. Some of you are older than I am, and remember my mother. Some of you were born in my hands." She paused. "I have lived in this place all my life. I have never made a speech."
A rustle, like wind in dry leaves.
"I will make one now. It is short."
She drew a long breath.
"My daughter's name was Nabirye Rhoda Kibirige. She was twenty-three years old. She was the first child of this village to go to a school of nursing. She went with the money of this village. With my cow. With the savings of thirty women, who sat under this tree and voted. With the shillings of her aunt. With the forty thousand of a boy who is standing at the back." She did not turn. "She wanted to be a midwife. She wanted to build a health centre, at the foot of this hill, so that no woman in labour need be carried fourteen kilometres on a bicycle."
Her voice did not shake.
"She did not build it. She did not finish her course. She went to the city, and she was clever, and she was young, and she was frightened of being poor. She made some choices. They were not all good ones. I do not defend them." She looked, now, at the faces. She looked at them one by one, at Mama Juliet, with her sticks, and Mzee Kasirye, in his hat, and the pastor, and the woman from the borehole. "I am not here to say that she was a saint. She was a girl. She was my girl."
Not a sound.
"My daughter," said Peninah, "had HIV."
It went through the compound like a gust.
It was not a loud word. She had not raised her voice. She said it plainly, in the same slow firm Luganda, as one says rain, or bread. But it fell, in that silence, like a stone into a still pond. She saw it go out, in rings. She saw a woman at the front put a hand to her throat. A man in the third row took a step back. Somebody gasped. A child, on a veranda, asked in a clear small voice, What did she say? and was hushed.
Slim.
She saw the word go through them. She saw it written on every face.
"Yes," said Peninah. "I have said it. HIV. The virus. The thing you call by another name, in a low voice, at the borehole. The thing my husband died of, in this house, eighteen years ago, behind that door." She lifted her hand, and pointed. "Some of you were in this yard when we buried him. I remember who stood near. I remember who did not."
The silence changed.
It was no longer a surprised one. It had gone deep, and still, and heavy. It was the silence of three hundred people looking at something they had never in their lives been made to look at. Mama Juliet, on the veranda, had lowered her head.
"I'm not angry," said Peninah. "I was, once. I am too old now. I only want to say that I have buried two people I love, in this ground, of the same thing. And in both cases, the thing that killed them was not the virus. I have been told this by doctors. By nurses. By a woman in a white coat, with a plastic flower. I'm telling you what they told me."
She drew breath.
"It was the silence."
"My husband was ashamed. He would not go to a clinic. He thought that if he said it, we would be driven from this village. He was right. We would have been. I was there. I saw how you looked at me." She was not accusing. It was the voice of a woman reading out the date. "He died in a bed, in the dark, with a root in his hand, because he was afraid to be seen."
"And my daughter," said Peninah, "died in a hospital, in the city, of the same fear. She was twenty-three. She had a medicine, a small yellow tablet, the size of a pea, that would have let her live to be an old woman. She took it for eight months. And then a thing happened, a thing on a telephone, and she was ashamed. And she stopped."
A man at the back had taken off his hat.
"I am not telling you this to make you sorry. I am telling you because there is a boy at the end of that bench who has a cough." She did not look. "And a woman on the veranda whose husband is in Kampala. And a girl in the third row who has been very tired. I don't know who. I do not want to. But I know, because I know this village. There are some of you. There are always some."
The hill was very still.
"There's a clinic at Mbirizi. It's free. It is open six days. They will test you in ten minutes, with a pinprick, and if it is bad, they will give you a tablet, and you will live as long as I do." She said it very slowly. "I'm fifty. I have a bad knee. I have a very large sack. And I intend to live a long time, and be a great nuisance to you all."
A ripple, strangely like laughter, went through the crowd.
"My daughter asked me to say this," said Peninah. "Before she died. She said, Don't let them whisper. She said, I want you to stand in front of the whole village and say it out loud. She said it was the only thing she wanted." Her voice, for the first time, caught. She steadied it. "So I have. I am sorry if it is hard. It's not hard for me. It is the easiest thing I have ever done. She asked."
She looked down at the coffin.
"And I should like to add one thing more. It is this."
She lifted her head.
"I am proud of her."
It was said very simply. It rolled out over the compound, over the heads of the women and the men, over the veranda and the yard and the long wet green of the hill. It did not echo. It only stood, still, in the bright morning air, like a post driven into the ground.
"I am proud of her. She was my daughter. She was brave, and kind, and clever, and she went wrong, as we all do, and she came back." The voice broke. "She came back. That is all. That is the whole of what I wanted. I have been waiting for twenty-three years, and she came. And I held her. And I was not ashamed."
She stood there.
Nobody moved.
And then, from the back of the crowd, a figure stepped out.
It was a tall thin young man in a white shirt, with round glasses, and a face that was wet to the chin. He came down the aisle between the benches, past the men with their hats in their hands, and stopped at the foot of the coffin, in front of the woman in the green gomesi. He did not say anything. He did not need to. He took her hand, in both of his, and held it, and stood beside her, facing the crowd.
"I am Ibrahim Sekitoleko," said Ibra.
His voice cracked. He did not wipe his face.
"I am a laboratory technician. At Mulago. I run four hundred tests a week." He took a breath. "I knew Nabirye all my life. I loved her. I would have married her. I want to say that, because it's a thing she did not hear." A pause. "And I want to say that I am here, and that I'm well, and that I stand by every word that her mother has said."
There was a silence.
Then somebody stood.
It was Mama Juliet, on the veranda, bent nearly double, on her two sticks. She rose, with a great effort, like a very old tree. She hobbled across the yard, step by step, slowly, with her chin trembling and the sticks scratching the ground, until she stood in front of Peninah. She looked up. Her eyes, in the dried-plum face, were red and bright.
"Peninah."
"Juliet."
"I held the lamp." Her voice was a cracked whisper. "At the birth. I was there. I did not stand near, at the other. At your husband's." She swallowed. "I have thought of it, every day, for eighteen years. I did not know how to say it."
"You have said it."
"I'm so sorry."
"Hush." Peninah took her by the arms. She was so thin. "You are an old woman. You were afraid. We all were."
"I should have..."
"You held the lamp for all of us." She smiled. "Hold it now."
Mama Juliet began to weep.
She wept like a child, loudly, openly, with her whole face, leaning on her two sticks. And across the yard a woman stood. And another. They came, one after the other, from the veranda and the benches and the trees, in their gomesis and their kitenges, a long slow stream, to the front of the coffin. They did not speak. They put out their hands. They touched Peninah's arm, her shoulder, her cheek. They stood round her, in a ring, in the morning sun, with the tears running down.
And at the back of the crowd, on the edge of the yard, in a cheap grey suit, a boy of seventeen, with a cough, who had been standing very still, turned, quietly, and walked away down the hill toward the road.
She saw him go.
She did not call after him. She stood in the ring of women, with Ibra's hand in hers, and watched the small figure get smaller, and smaller, among the bananas, until it was a fleck of grey in the green.
Go, she thought. Go, my son. Go on.
It is only ten minutes.
They put her in the earth at noon.
It was done in the old way. The grave had been dug in the morning, by four men, in the corner of the compound, in the shade of the mango tree, beside a low mound with a cross of white stones. It was six feet deep. The earth was red, and fresh, and smelled of rain. The coffin was lowered on ropes, slowly, by the men in the dark jackets, hand over hand, while the choir sang. A priest said a prayer. Ssenga Rehema let out a long, high, ululating wail, like the cry of a great bird, and fell on her knees, and was held by two cousins.
Kizito threw the first handful.
He did it with great care. He stood at the edge, with his face rigid, and let the red earth run through his fingers onto the lid. It made a small dull sound. He stepped back. He turned, and put his face against his mother's shoulder, and she put her arm round him, and held on.
Then Peninah bent. She took a handful. She held it for a long moment, in her great cracked palm, looking at it. Then she opened her fingers.
"Go well, my child," she said.
The earth fell.
The sun was high. A light wind stirred the leaves of the mango tree. And somewhere, down the hill, a cock crowed, a hoarse, offended crow, and another answered, and then the whole slope began to wake.
A year later, in the first week of November, on the day after the first big rain of the season, a small brick building stood at the foot of the hill.
It was not a large building. It was a single room, with a tin roof and a veranda, and a door painted a vivid, cheerful, slightly uneven blue. It had been built in five months, by six men from the village, out of bricks made on the spot from the red earth, and a few sheets of iron donated by a Pentecostal pastor who had been persuaded, after a long night of argument, to put them to better use. A small hand-painted sign hung above it, in white letters. NALUBEGA HEALTH CORNER. Testing. Counselling. Antenatal. Walk In. Free.
Beneath it, in smaller, shakier writing, someone had added a line. So that nobody has to be carried.
It had a bench. It was a long wooden one, worn smooth, that had stood for forty years on the veranda of a house up the hill. A woman was sitting on it now, with a baby on her lap, and a small plastic bag. She was young, and thin, and frightened. Beside her, in a purple gomesi, with a great bosom and a larger smile, sat a large woman with her knitting in her lap, who was telling her, at some length, about a pastor who had once proposed to her at a funeral.
"What did you say?" said the girl.
"I said, Pastor, I have already got a husband." Mama Teddy sniffed. "He is in the cemetery. He is a very quiet man."
The girl laughed.
It was a startled, wet, hiccuping laugh, and it was the first she had made in weeks. She put a hand over her mouth. Beside her, on the step, a small, solid, grey-haired woman in a white coat and a pair of reading glasses looked up from a ledger, and smiled, and did not say anything at all.
Inside, in the one room, at a plain wooden table, a thin young man in a white coat, with round glasses, was bent over a small machine. He was labelling a row of tiny tubes. He did it with great care, in a neat small print, with a pencil stub. On the shelf behind him, between a stack of leaflets and a box of gloves, stood an old green exercise book, with a curling cover, open at the first page. In a child's hand, at the top: I want to be a nurse. Beneath it, in another hand, a woman's: I still want to build a place where nobody has to be carried.
And beneath that, in the round, large, careful hand of a person who had learned to write, late, from a boy at a village shop, in black pen:
It is built.
Outside, the sun was hot. A line of women had formed along the path, with their babies and their bags, patient, quiet, ready. A bicycle went by. A boy of eighteen, in a clean white shirt, with a cough that was no longer there, sat on the end of the bench with a small yellow tablet on his palm, and a cup of water, and the grave, absorbed look of a person taking a promise.
He swallowed.
A small round woman in a green gomesi, with a scarred hand and a blue scarf round her shoulders, came down the path from the house on the hill. She was carrying a sack on her head. It was a large, coarse, brown one, tied at the neck with banana fibre, and from the top a few green leaves poked out, and a small brown hen's red face. She walked barefoot, steadily, with her back straight, and her chin up, and her feet leaving small clean prints in the dust.
She stopped at the blue door.
She lifted down the sack, and set it on the step. She stood for a moment, with her hand on the frame, looking in at the room, the table, the young man, the line of tubes. A baby was crying somewhere. A radio, on the shelf, was playing a slow sweet song about a girl who came home.
Good morning, she thought.
She did not say it aloud. She looked, instead, beyond the road, to the bottom of the hill, where an old mango tree stood in the angle of a compound, and under it a small flat grave with a cross of white stones, and beside it, a larger one. A flower had been laid there. It was a wild one, yellow and white, with a long stalk, tied with a bit of string.
The wind moved the leaves.
It was a clear morning, with the smell of rain, and the hills very green. Somewhere in the long valley a cock was crowing. A woman was lighting a charcoal stove. A child was running up a path with a white bag on its back, laughing, and at the top, in the sun, a door stood open.
Peninah stood there, in the blue doorway, with her hand on the wood.
She thought of a girl in a blue uniform, with a watch on her wrist, running up a hill. She thought of a letter, in a tin box, with a lion on the lid. She thought of a pencil, trailing off in a line, and another hand, taking it up. She thought of all the people who had been carried, and all the ones who had not, and the long, patient, unremembered work of the dead.
A dream does not die when it is forgotten, she thought.
It waits.
She picked up the sack. She went in.