Chapter 14
Love Without Possession
I wrote to Naomi on the ninth of November, at a quarter to six in the morning, at the kitchen table, in pencil first and then on a screen.
It took three weeks to get to that morning. I will spare you the drafts. There were fourteen, and they fell into two families. In the first, I explained. I set out the year after my father, the fear, the mitigating circumstances, in a tidy reasonable order, like a man submitting a planning application. In the second, I begged, in the sly manner of a man who has learned not to ask. Both were dishonest. Both were, underneath, ropes.
The one I sent was shorter than either.
Naomi,
I opened your letter two years late. I'm sorry for that too.
You were right about almost everything. I read your messages. I followed you. I accused you, in front of thirty people, of something you hadn't done, and then when you told me the truth I punished you for it. You had hidden a good thing because I had taught you to. That was mine, not yours. I've spent two years telling a different story, and it wasn't true.
I came to the airport. I sat in the car park for forty minutes. I watched you go through the gate. I could have come in and I chose not to, because I was afraid to say I couldn't do it without you. I've never told anyone that. I'm telling you because you should have the whole truth, even the ugly part, even late.
I'm not writing to ask for anything. I'm not asking you to forgive me or reply or see me. I only wanted to say it clearly, in words, once, so that it exists.
I still have the ring. I don't know what the right thing is to do with it. If you have an opinion, I'd like to hear it. If you don't, I'll work it out.
I hope you're happy. I hope Leeds is cold and interesting.
Ethan.
I read it five times. It did not contain an argument. It had no ask, no hook, no small warm hand held out in the dark. I sat with my finger over the button for a very long time, and found that I was not afraid of what she would say. I was afraid of what I would do if she said nothing. It was the same question, again. It was the question I had been asking for two years.
Can I stand it?
I pressed the button.
She answered on the eleventh. Two days. I was at the office when the notification came, and I did not open it until lunch, when I took my tea to the fire escape at the back of the building, where the pigeons live, and sat down on a step with my phone on my knee.
Kirabo,
I read this in the library at Leeds, at a carrel by a window, in the rain. I cried very quietly and a man at the next desk lent me a tissue and asked if I needed to sit down. I said I was sitting down. He said, "Well, sit down harder."
Thank you for telling me the car park. I need to think about that. I'm not angry. It's just very large.
I'm coming home on the twentieth of December, for three weeks. Mum wants to hold my face. Would you like to have a coffee? Not a rooftop.
N.
P.S. I don't have an opinion about the ring. I'll have one when I see it.
I read it three times. Then I laughed, alone on the fire escape, with a pigeon watching me from the railing, and the laugh turned, quite suddenly, into something else, and I sat with my forehead on my knee for a minute or two until it passed.
Not a rooftop. She had always known exactly where I would go.
I did something else in those weeks, and I put it here because it belongs with the rest.
I wrote to Lydia. I found her on a gallery's page, and sent a short message. I never told you that the head was extraordinary. I saw it in a photograph and I've thought about it since. You were right about the trick. It took me two years to see it. I'm sorry I didn't say so when it would have mattered. She replied a fortnight later with a photograph of a small clay hand, half-formed, very rough, and three words. Still working on. I took it to mean that I was not forgiven, and that it was not required, and that she had, in her own way, shut a small door quietly and kindly and gone on with her work. I found that I could bear that.
I wrote to no one else. I want to be clear. There was no list, no penance tour. I had not, as I understood it then, been put on earth to apologise to everyone I had ever hurt in the order that I had hurt them. It would have been another way of making the whole thing about me. I did the ones that were owed, in the way that was owed, and I let the rest of it go by, a name here and there, a face on a rooftop, a woman in a leather jacket who would never know how sorry I was. They had their lives. It was not for me to walk into them with my hands full of remorse.
That, too, I had learned from a woman who was three hundred kilometres away.
We met at a café in Kololo on the twenty-third of December, on a bright hot Monday, in a small place off Acacia Avenue with a tin roof and a few rickety tables and a fan that did nothing.
I was there forty minutes early. I sat at a table in the corner, with my back to the wall, and drank a glass of water, and watched the door. My hands were quite steady. I had rehearsed nothing. I had spent the previous evening at Timo's, playing with a very small girl who could now say dada, tata, no, and who had thrown a wooden spoon at my head with unerring accuracy, and I had come away feeling, unaccountably, that I was going to be all right.
She came in at ten past eleven.
I knew her at once and did not know her at all. She was the same small, straight, forward-leaning figure, with the same round forehead, and the glasses had changed, gone thinner and darker. Her hair was different. It was cropped short now, close to her skull, and it made her face look longer and more grave. She wore a plain yellow shirt and a pair of jeans. There was a coat over one arm, though it was thirty degrees, and I thought, absurdly, she hasn't got used to the sun.
She stopped in the doorway. She looked around the room, and saw me, and stood for a moment quite still with her free hand at her side.
Then she smiled. It was not the smile I had kept in a drawer for five years. It was quieter, and older, with something rueful in it. But it was hers.
"You're early," said Naomi. "You were always early. It was insufferable."
"I'm working on it."
"Good." She crossed the room. She hung the coat on the chair, and sat down opposite me, and folded her hands on the table. They were small hands. I had forgotten how small. "Hello, Kirabo."
I found I could not speak. It was not that there was nothing to say. It was that the word, Kirabo, had gone into me like a key into an old lock, and something had turned, and I had to wait until it stopped.
"Hello," I said. "Hello, Naomi."
"You look tired."
"You look well."
"I am. Mostly." She studied me, with her head on one side, the way she used to study a set of data. "You've lost weight. And you've done something to your face. It's quiet."
"My mother said that."
"Your mother's very clever." She smiled a little. "I got a card from her last month. She'd written in her big careful hand. She said, he came home. He's thin. Be kind to him if you can."
"She didn't."
"She did." Her eyes were bright. "She said it in Luganda. I got Achan to translate. She's still terrifying, isn't she?"
"She picked a hat."
"I know. A green one. I've thought about that hat more than I care to."
We laughed. It was brief and unsteady and it broke something, quite gently, in the air between us, as ice breaks on a puddle. A waitress came and Naomi ordered black tea. I ordered the same. When she had gone, we sat looking at each other across a small wobbling table with a plastic flower in a jar.
"I want to say something first," said Naomi. "If I don't, I'll lose my nerve."
"Go on."
"I'm sorry." She said it plainly. "Not for going. I'm not sorry for that, and I'd do it again. I'm sorry for the hiding. For the eight months. You were right about that. I lied to your face every day, and I called it protecting you, and it was mostly protecting myself. I didn't want to have the fight. I didn't want to be seen wanting something."
"I taught you that."
"You taught me a bit of it." She held up a hand. "And I learned the rest by myself. It's not all yours, Kirabo. Don't take the whole thing. I've done that, in my head, for two years, taken the whole thing and put it in a tin. It's not honest. There were two of us in that flat."
I sat there.
I had expected to be forgiven, or not to be. I had prepared for either, in my long, slow, careful way, and I found that I had not prepared for this: to be shared with. To have a piece of the weight taken out of my arms and set down on the table between us, in the sun, where we could both look at it.
"I read your messages," I said.
"Yes."
"I followed you."
"Yes."
"I stood in a corridor for fifty-one minutes."
"I know. Achan told me." She was quiet. "I didn't know about the car park. I didn't know until your letter."
"I sat there forty minutes."
"I know." She swallowed. She looked at the table. "I looked back. In the terminal. Before I went through the gate. I turned and looked at the glass, at the dark, and I thought, he's out there. I don't know why. I could feel it. And I thought, don't be ridiculous, he'd have come in. I stood there for about half a minute. Then the man behind me said, madam, please, and I went."
"You looked."
"I looked."
"I saw you."
"Did you?" Her voice had gone very small. "You saw me look?"
"Yes."
She put her hand over her mouth. She stayed like that. Her shoulders were shaking, quite silently, and I sat and watched, and did not reach for her hand, and did not say it's all right. It was not all right. It had been a thing that happened, in the dark, to two people, and it would always have happened. I had thought that saying it would make it lighter. It did not. It made it true. And that, I found, was a better thing than lighter.
"I'm so sorry," I said. "I should have come in."
"You should," said Naomi, through her fingers. "And I should have asked. I should have rung you from the gate. I had the phone in my hand."
"Then we were both standing in the same car park."
"Yes." She laughed, wetly, and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, in a gesture that was so entirely hers that I felt it in my chest. "God. We were so young. We were so young and so stubborn."
"And so certain."
"Twenty-four. We thought we knew what love was." She shook her head. "We knew what fear was. We just thought it was the same thing."
The tea came. We drank it. The fan went round overhead, stirring the hot air into different shapes.
She told me about Leeds. It was cold. It was more interesting than she had let herself hope. She was in the middle of her thesis, a statistical model for predicting maternal mortality in rural districts, and her supervisor, a large Yorkshirewoman with a habit of saying rubbish in a tone of great warmth, had offered her a place on a doctoral programme. She had said yes. She would be in England four more years.
"You'll be a doctor."
"Dr. Atim," she said, and grinned, quite suddenly, all her old wicked delight. "My mother has had the sign painted. It's going on the gate in Gulu. It's huge."
"She'll wear the hat."
"She's bought one. It's red."
She told me she was seeing someone. A man called Daniel, a postdoc in epidemiology, slow-moving and kind, with a talent for making terrible puns. "He doesn't hold me," she said. "That's what I like. He lets go of a door at exactly the right moment. I've never had to ask him for air." She said it without any barb. She said it looking at me, with a level, unhurried honesty, as one lays a thing on a table.
"I'm glad," I said. And I found that it was true. It moved through me like a clean cold current, and left nothing behind.
"And you?"
I told her. I did not tell it well. I told it in the wrong order, in bits and pieces, with a great many pauses. I told her about the rules, and the nineteen names, and the tin. I told her about a woman on a veranda, and a bottle of wine on a shelf. I told her what I had done in Entebbe, and that I had told Maya, and that she had gone to Nairobi.
She listened without interrupting. When I had finished, she said, "Do you want her to come back?"
I considered it. It was the question I had asked myself every night for five months.
"I want her to be exactly where she wants to be," I said. "And I want, very much, for that to include me. But I've been trying to understand that they're two different wants. One of them has a rope on it."
Naomi looked at me for a long moment. Then she began, very slowly, to smile.
"That's new," she said.
"Is it?"
"Kirabo, in five years you never once said that. You'd have said, I want her back. You'd have said it in a low voice with your whole face." She shook her head. "You've grown. It's a bit alarming."
"It's not that I don't want to."
"I know. That's the point." She leaned forward. "Listen. I'll tell you a thing I learned. It took me three winters. Love isn't a claim. I used to think it was. That if a person loved you, they had a right to the whole of you, and if they didn't have it, it wasn't real. And I think you thought it too. That's what the wall was. You held me so hard because you thought the holding was the love."
"And it wasn't."
"It was the fear wearing the love's clothes." She said it gently. "Real love is more like an open hand. You can't keep a person by closing it. You just, hold it out, and they can put theirs in, or not, and either way you haven't got to be someone else."
I looked at her hands on the table. Small. Brown. Steady.
"It's very hard," I said.
"It's the hardest thing in the world." She smiled. "That's why nobody does it."
I gave her the ring at the end.
I had brought it in my pocket, in a small twist of tissue paper, and I put it on the table between our cups and pushed it across with one finger. It lay on the wooden surface, very small and gold, catching a strip of light from the window.
She looked at it for a long time. She did not pick it up.
"It's tiny," she said.
"The goldsmith said serious girls have small hands."
"He was right." She smiled. "Oh, Kirabo. You saved for that. In coins. Achan told me. She said you'd brought a sock."
"It was a large sock."
"I can't keep it."
"I know."
"It's not mine. It was never, it wasn't ever a debt." She touched it, once, with the tip of her finger, and drew the finger back. "It was a very lovely thing that somebody meant. I don't need it to mean it."
"What should I do with it?"
She thought. I watched her think, and saw, quite suddenly, the girl in the queue, with a chewed pencil and a green bangle, looking at a page of arithmetic.
"Sell it," she said. "Or, no. Give it to Mum. She's got a school. The primary in Gulu, where she teaches. It's got forty children to a class and one textbook between six. She's been trying to raise money for a library for three years." She looked up. "Would that be all right? To make it into books?"
"I think," I said, and my voice was not quite steady, "that it would be the best thing anyone has done with it."
"Then do that." She pushed the tissue paper gently back across the table toward me, with the ring still in it. "Take it to a jeweller. Give the money to her, in her name, or yours, whichever you like. Tell her I said so. She'll say she doesn't want it and then she'll build a shelf."
I put the ring in my pocket. It weighed nothing.
We sat a little longer. The tea grew cold. Outside, a boda went by, and a woman with a basket of oranges called out something in Luganda that made the waitress laugh.
"I'm going to say goodbye now," said Naomi. "Not the old sort. I mean I'll see you again, at Achan's wedding, and Mum will hug you and be appalling. But this is the goodbye I should have said at the airport."
"Go on."
"You were the first person who made me believe I could build something with another person." She said it quite plainly. "I've never thanked you. I was too angry. But you did. You drew a house on my arm. I still can't say it without laughing."
"I remember."
"I hope you build it." She stood. She put on her coat, though it was hot. She put her hand, briefly, on my shoulder, and I felt the small dry warmth of it through my shirt. "Make the window face east."
She walked to the door. She stopped, once, in the light, with her back to me, and I saw her shoulders straighten, one at a time. Then she turned her head and looked over her shoulder, at the glass, at me, as she had looked once through a departure hall.
I did not look away.
She nodded, once, and went out.
I sat for a long time. The waitress came and asked if I would like more tea, and I said no, thank you, and paid, and left.
I did not feel lighter. I want to say that, in case you expect a scene of release. I walked out into the white afternoon heat, down Acacia Avenue past the flame trees, and felt what I can only call accurate. It was as if a drawing that I had been working on for two years, all wrong, out of true, with the walls not meeting, had been laid on a clean table under a good lamp. Everything was where it was. Nothing had been forgiven. Nothing needed to be. It had simply stopped being a secret.
I went to a jeweller on Kampala Road, not the old Gujarati man, who had retired, but a young one with a glass eye-piece who weighed the ring on a small brass scale and told me a price. I took it in cash. I put it into an envelope, and wrote on the front, in careful capitals, MRS. ATIM, and drove the whole of the next morning to Gulu, five hours on a road that had once frightened her family. I stood at a gate under a huge hand-painted sign that said DR. NAOMI ATIM (SOON), and a small fierce woman in a red hat came out on the veranda and looked at me without any expression at all.
"You are the boy," she said.
"Yes, Mama."
"You are thin."
"So I've been told."
"Come in," said Naomi's mother. "I will not say anything nice. But there is tea."
I gave her the envelope. She looked at it. She said she did not want it. She said it twice, at length, in two languages. Then she put it in the pocket of her apron and said, "There is a shelf I have been wanting to build," and I sat on her veranda for an hour, drinking tea that tasted of smoke and sugar, while a woman of sixty told me exactly what she thought of me, and found, to my astonishment, that I could bear it.
The message arrived on the thirty-first, at nineteen minutes past midnight.
I was awake, and I was alone. I had spent the evening at Timo's, and come home early, to my own flat, with the fireworks going off over Ntinda in wild green and gold fistfuls, and the whole city shouting. I sat on the balcony with a glass of water and my father's bicycle leaning against the railing beside me, and I listened to a year end.
My phone buzzed on the ledge.
I looked at the screen. My heart did something that hurt. The name at the top was one I had not seen in five months, and beneath it, in grey, the first line of a message.
Happy New Year, godfather. It's midnight in Nairobi too. I was at a rooftop with people from work and everyone was counting down and I thought of you. Don't know why. Just wanted to say. No need to reply x
I read it twice. I read it with my hand flat against my mouth, and the fireworks bursting over the roofs, and the smell of gunpowder drifting in the warm dark. It was the same message. It was exactly the same. It was the message I had read once in a kitchen with yellow curtains, and had answered with a lie.
I sat for a long time with my thumbs over the keys. I did not hurry. I had learned that at least.
At last I wrote it. I wrote it slowly, one word at a time, and read it through once before I sent it.
Happy New Year, Maya. I thought of you too. I do know why. I'm not going to say it, because you didn't ask. But I wanted you to know that when you said, "Don't know why," I read it the way it was written. I'm not asking for anything. I'm glad you're happy. Ethan.
And then, because it was the truth, and because it was midnight, and because my mother had told me on a veranda that it doesn't have to be well said, I added a single letter at the end.
x
I sent it before I could think. I put the phone face-down on the ledge beside me, and leaned my head back against the wall, and looked up at the sky, where the last of the rockets was opening over Ntinda in a slow silver flower.
I stayed there until it faded.