Chapter 13
Without Her
She flew on the twenty-second of July, on a Sunday morning flight, and I did not go to the airport.
I want to give that its due, because it is, I think, the smallest and most difficult thing I have done. At six that morning I was awake and dressed. I stood in the kitchen with my keys in my hand, and I could see the road to Entebbe as clearly as if it had been laid out on a drawing, the long dark run past Kajjansi, the lake on the left, the car park by the fence. I could see myself getting out of the car this time. I could see myself walking into the terminal and finding her in the queue, and saying, I just wanted to see you go.
It would have been lovely. It would have been the sort of scene that a film would have kept. And it would have been, in every particular, a way of making her departure about me.
I put the keys back on the hook. I sat at the kitchen table. At half past eight, when her plane would be taxiing, I picked up my phone, and wrote a message I had already written in my head about fifty times.
Safe flight. I'm not coming to the airport. I'd like to, and I'm not going to, because you asked for room and I want you to have all of it. I hope Nairobi is everything. Ethan.
I did not add anything. I did not add x. I sent it, and turned the phone over, and looked at my hands on the table. They were quite steady. It seemed a strange thing, that they should be steady, when everything else was moving.
She did not reply. I had not expected her to. But at ten to ten, a small notification lit the screen. It was a photograph, no message. A window seat, a wing, a patch of lake very far below, silver and wrinkled, with a thread of cloud drawn across it. That was all.
I looked at it for a long time. Then I saved it, and did not answer, and the room around me was very quiet.
I had thought that being alone would be the same as it had been before.
It was not. That was the first discovery, and it took me nearly two weeks to understand it. The flat was the same flat. The refrigerator hummed in the same key. But the silence in it had changed its texture, as a room does when the person who lives in it has changed. Before, it had been a silence I filled: with the radio, with the phone, with a woman's laughter close enough to my ear that I could feel the warmth. I had fled that silence the way you flee a smell. Now it was only a silence. It sat there in the corner of the room, patient and enormous, like a large animal that meant me no harm.
I did not fill it. That was the whole discipline. I let it be.
The temptation came, of course. It came in the second week, at about ten at night, on a Wednesday, with the exact soft insistence of an old friend at the door. I was at my desk with a set of drawings, and my phone lit up with a message from a number I knew. Hey stranger. Heard you're single again 😉 Drink? It was Tessa, of the braids and the broken kettle. She had heard it from someone who had heard it from Denis.
I looked at it. I felt the familiar warmth start, like a hand laid flat at the base of my neck. Just one night. Just a few hours of somebody laughing at something you said.
I set the phone down on the desk. I put both my hands flat on the drawing, and I made myself say aloud, in the empty room, what it was.
"It's not her I want," I said. "It's the four hours where I don't feel it."
That was all. It was not a cure. But it was the first time I had ever named the thing without dressing it. I heard my own voice go out into the flat, small and dry, and it sounded, curiously, quite kind. I sat there with my heart going, and the wanting rose in me and crested and, after about twenty minutes, began to recede, as a wave does, leaving a wet dark line on the sand.
I did not answer Tessa. I wrote: Thank you. I'm not in a place for that. I hope you're well, and I'm sorry about the kettle. She replied with a single laughing face, and then, a moment later: That's the most honest thing a man's ever said to me. Good luck. And that was the end of it.
I went to see Patience on a Friday in August.
I had not planned to. I was driving home from a site in Kabalagala, and I found that I had turned down the lane off Ggaba Road without deciding to, and was parked outside a low building with a hand-painted sign that said AUMA'S, and a string of coloured bulbs over the door. It was five in the afternoon. The bar was empty. A radio was playing low, and on a crate at the end of the counter, a boy of ten was doing his homework with the scowl of a small judge.
Patience was stacking crates. She stood up when she saw me, and put one hand on her hip.
"Well," she said. "The man with the umbrella."
"I don't want a drink."
"That's new."
"I wanted to say thank you."
"For what?"
"For telling me the truth." I stood in the doorway with the low sun behind me. "I didn't want it. I told myself you were a woman with a theory. But you were right, and I've spent a year finding out how right, and I thought you should know."
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she wiped her hands on her apron, and came round the counter, and jerked her head at a stool.
"Sit."
I sat. She poured two glasses of water, and put one in front of me, and sat on the stool opposite. The boy, Joshua, glanced up at me with cold hostility and went back to his fractions.
"So," said Patience. "You found the hole."
"I found the hole."
"And?"
"I fell in."
"Good." She nodded, with satisfaction. "That's the only way. You can't walk round it forever." She took a sip. "Did you find her? The girl you talk to in your sleep?"
"She's in Leeds. I haven't spoken to her in two years. I've got a letter." I hesitated. "And there's someone else. She's in Nairobi. I hurt her."
"Of course you did."
"I'm not sure if I'm going to get her back."
"Do you want to?"
"Yes. And I'm not sure that's the right question."
Patience looked at me with a faint, arrested interest, as one looks at a dog that has learned a trick. "No," she said slowly. "It isn't. Look at that. Somebody's been reading."
"Somebody's been made to."
"That's the best way." She turned her glass. "I'll tell you something else, since you've come all this way to be thanked. It's not a lesson. It's only what I know." She looked out at the road, where a woman was selling roasted maize under a tarpaulin. "I was married eleven years. To a man who never once raised his voice. He was kind. He was very kind. And do you know what I finally understood? That he'd never let me see him. Not once. I lived with a locked door for eleven years and called it peace." She shrugged. "So when you came in here, with your good jacket and your nice manners, I thought, ah. I know this one. And I thought, if somebody had said it to me at twenty-six, I might have saved myself a decade."
"Did you say it because of him?"
"I said it because it was true." She smiled crookedly. "But yes. Partly for him."
Joshua finished a fraction and held up his exercise book. "Mama. Is this right?"
"Show me." She peered at it. "It's right. It's very right. You're a genius." She turned back to me. "He's not, he's average. But I tell him."
"That's love," said the boy, without looking up, in a matter-of-fact voice.
Patience and I stared at him. Then she began to laugh, with her head thrown back, and I found that I was laughing too, helplessly, for the first time in weeks. Joshua regarded us both with contempt and returned to his homework.
"Go home," said Patience, wiping her eyes. "Go and be alone. It's much better than you think."
"How do you know?"
"Because I've done it," she said, "and I'm here, aren't I? With a bar, and a genius, and a very good jukebox." She patted my hand, briefly, roughly, the way you slap a horse. "Come back and tell me how it ends."
I drove home with the windows down. I did not feel like a man who had solved anything. I felt like a man who had been handed a small warm stone, and told to keep it in his pocket.
There is a difference between loneliness and solitude, and it took me most of that autumn to learn it.
I had always thought they were the same. I had thought that to be alone was to be abandoned, to be the man left standing in a car park, watching a gate. And for a long time that was what it was, because I was always alone in the way of somebody who had been left, with the whole of the empty room pointing at me like a finger. That is loneliness. It has a shape. It says: Nobody wants you.
Solitude is something else. It has no accusation in it. It is a room with the door open, where you are alone because you have chosen to be, because there is something in you that needs a little space in which to finish. I did not understand the difference until a Tuesday in September, at about four in the afternoon, when I found myself standing in the kitchen with a pan of onions in front of me, humming.
I stopped, and listened. It was four bars. I did not know the tune. I found that I had been humming it for some time, and that it was a very simple, cheerful, repetitive thing, and that I did not mind. It did not tighten anything in my chest.
I stood in the kitchen of my flat in Ntinda, a man of twenty-six with a wooden spoon in his hand, and understood that I was not lonely. I was alone. It was quite different. It was even, in an odd, small, unexpected way, pleasant.
I learned to cook. Not the eggs. I made a proper pot of beans, and then a pot of matooke, and then, after three attempts and a small fire, a decent pilau. I began to read again. I read books I had bought in university and never opened, and a thick history of Buganda that took me a month. I ran in the mornings, along the Ntinda road in the pale cool light, past the women setting up their basins, and I found that I could run for forty minutes without thinking anything.
I did not write to Maya. It was very hard, and it got harder before it got easier. There were nights when I sat with the phone in my hand and the thumb on the screen, and told myself that it would be a good message, a warm one, only a little one. I could feel the rope in it. I put the phone in the drawer and stood by the drawer. I did what she had asked me to do at the beginning, which was to say the true thing out loud when it was hard, and I said it to the walls. I want to write to her. I'm afraid she'll forget me. I'm afraid she'll meet someone in Nairobi who doesn't drop things. The walls did not answer. The refrigerator hummed. The night went slowly by.
And in the morning it was always a little lighter.
I went to Mukono on the first Saturday of October.
It was the anniversary of nothing. That was what my mother said on the phone, in the flat voice she used for things she wanted very much. "It is not an occasion. I have made too much food. Come and eat it."
The house had not changed. The jackfruit tree stood at the side, unproductive. The bicycle leaned against the mango under its plastic sheet. My mother was on the veranda in her gomesi with a basin of beans in her lap, and she looked up and saw me get out of the taxi and did not say a word for a moment. She simply looked at me, at my face, with her head on one side, as she had looked at her pupils for twenty-two years.
"You look different," she said.
"Thinner?"
"No. Quieter." She put the basin aside. "Sit. Eva's at university. It's just us."
We ate on the veranda, with a plate of matooke and smoked fish between us, in a slanting afternoon light. She asked me nothing. She let me eat. When I had finished, she wiped her hands on her lap, and went into the house, and came back with her Bible. It was a big black one, with a cracked spine and a broken zip. She sat down beside me and opened it at the Psalms, and took out of it a small, cream-coloured card.
"I said I would not offer it," she said. "I am offering it."
I took it.
It was a plain card with a watercolour of a bird on the front. Inside, in small square upright handwriting, in blue biro, there were six lines.
Dear Mama Rose,
Thank you for the cake, and the matooke, and the hat you didn't show me. I know about the hat. I'm sorry I won't be wearing it with you.
Please don't blame Ethan. There were two frightened young people, and they did what frightened people do. He is the best person I know on his best days, and he had a great many bad days that year, and he didn't choose them.
If he ever comes home, be gentle with him. He'll pretend he's fine.
Naomi
I read it twice. The light lay long across the veranda floor, and somewhere in the yard a hen was making its low, anxious, contented sound.
"She knew you'd picked a hat," I said.
"Eva told her. Eva tells everyone everything." My mother looked at her hands. "It was a green one. With a small feather."
"I'm sorry, Maama."
"For what?"
"For letting you find out from Eva."
"Ah." She was quiet for a moment. "I have been thinking about that. I was angry. I am not angry now. I understood something, this year." She turned the basin a quarter turn on the boards. "I understood that you are your father's son."
"That's not a compliment."
"It is not an insult." She looked at me sideways. "Your father was afraid, Ethan. I don't think you knew. He was the most frightened man I ever met. He measured everything. Every plot, every fence, every child's fever, so that nothing could arrive unexpected. He thought that if he could measure it, he could not be surprised."
I sat very still.
"Thirty-one years," said my mother. "And he never once told me that he loved me. Not in words. I know it. I knew it in the way he built the veranda, and the way he taught you to hold a plumb line. But he never said. And when he died, at the funeral, his cousin from Kayunga stood up and said, your father told everyone he loved his wife. To everyone. To the whole village. Except me." She laughed, a small, dry, unsteady sound. "I was so angry I couldn't cry. I stood in my own yard and thought, you coward. I thought, you told a cousin."
"Maama."
"I'm not saying it to hurt you. I'm saying it so you know." She put her hand over mine. It was rough, and dry, and very warm. "It's not a curse. It's a habit. A habit can be broken. You do it by saying the thing, once, out loud, to the person's face, even when it's frightening. It does not have to be well said."
I looked at her hand. I looked at the card. And I found that I was crying, quite quietly, without any noise, with the tears running down my face and dropping from my chin on to the cracked boards of my father's veranda.
She did not say anything. She did not hold me. She sat beside me, with her hand on mine, and let it come, as one lets rain fall on a roof.
After a long while, she said, "There is more matooke."
"I can't."
"You can. You're thin."
I laughed, wetly. She patted my hand and stood, and went to fetch it, and I sat there in the low gold light, holding a card from a woman in Leeds, and feeling something I had not felt in more than two years. It was not happiness. It was too quiet for that. It was the plain, clean sense of a wall that has been leaned on for a very long time, and has, at last, been given permission to stand up by itself.
Before I left, I went round to the back of the house.
The mango tree was very tall. It was in leaf, dark and glossy and full, and the air under it was cool and green. The bicycle stood where it had stood for four years, under its grey plastic sheet, gone brittle and cracked in the sun. I took the sheet off. It came away in pieces, like old skin.
The bicycle was a black Phoenix, a heavy old roadster with a rusted chain and flat tyres and a leather saddle that had split along one seam. My father had ridden it to the Ministry of Lands every morning for twenty-eight years. It had a bell on the handlebar, a small dented brass bell, and I flicked it with my thumb. It gave a thin, tired, silvery note.
I stood there for a long time with my hand on the crossbar.
Then I went into the house and found my father's toolbox in the store, under a heap of old sacks, still packed exactly as he had packed it: spanners in order of size, a tin of grease, a patched inner tube in a rolled-up cloth, a hand pump with a leather washer. I carried it back under the tree and sat on the ground beside the bicycle and began, slowly, to work.
It took me two hours. I greased the chain and cleaned the rust off the spokes with a wire brush. I found the puncture in the front tyre by holding it under a basin of water, and patched it, and pumped it up. The saddle I could do nothing about. I sat on the ground with my back against the trunk of the tree, sweating, with grease to my elbows, and looked at the thing, and it looked, in the green shade, very nearly alive.
I wheeled it out to the lane. My mother stood at the door, watching, with her hand over her mouth.
I got on. It was too high for me, and the saddle cut into my thighs, and for a moment I wobbled, and thought I would fall. Then the front wheel found its balance and straightened, and I was moving, slowly, under the mango leaves, down the red dirt lane toward the trading centre, and the old chain ticked steadily under me, like a clock, and the wind came cool against my wet face.
I rang the bell. It rang thinly, bravely, the whole length of the lane, and a child on a verandah looked up and waved.
I rode to the end of the lane and turned round and rode back. It was four hundred metres. It was the best ride of my life.
My mother was still at the door when I came up. She had taken her hand from her mouth. She was smiling, and her face was wet.
"He rode it like that," she said. "Exactly like that. With his elbows out."
"Did he?"
"Everyone laughed. He didn't care." She wiped her cheek with the corner of her gomesi. "Take it with you."
"To Kampala?"
"Why not? It's a machine. It should be used."
I put it in the back of the taxi, wedged between a sack of charcoal and a goat, and rode home through the red dust of an October evening with my hand on the crossbar, and the bell ringing softly at every bump in the road.
I did not know yet what I would do next. I had a letter to answer. I had a woman to write to, or not to write to, in a city three hundred kilometres away. I had a ring on a shelf, and a bottle of wine I did not know how to open.
But I was, for the first time, in no hurry. I was a man in the back of a taxi with his father's bicycle, going home, and in the whole of the long amber light there was nobody I needed to be.