Chapter 4
The Girl Before Her
My mother still keeps my old room the way a museum keeps a room in which nothing is allowed to have happened since.
I went home that weekend because Eva had threatened to drive to Ntinda and drag me by the ear, and because, after Patience, I did not feel like being alone in a flat with a refrigerator that hummed. It was the last Saturday of September. The taxi from the Old Taxi Park took two hours to reach Mukono because of an accident at Seeta, and I spent most of it wedged in a window seat with a stranger's elbow in my ribs, watching the road go by in that long soft glare that comes off tin roofs in the middle of the afternoon.
The house is at the end of a red-earth lane behind the trading centre, a low, sensible bungalow with a corrugated roof and a veranda my father built himself over the course of one dry season, using a plumb line and a great deal of muttering. There are mango trees at the back. There is a jackfruit tree at the side that has never once produced fruit in a season that anyone wanted it to. My mother was in the yard when I arrived, in a faded gomesi with a hoe in her hand, and she straightened when she saw me and pressed her free hand flat against her lower back and said, in Luganda, "Ah. The stranger."
"Maama."
"Look at you. You're thin. Are you eating?"
"I eat."
"Eggs," said my mother, with contempt. "I know. Eva told me. Eggs. In a bachelor's kitchen. Come inside, I have matooke."
She hugged me in the doorway, briefly, with the hoe still in her hand so that the handle knocked against my shoulder blade. She smelt of woodsmoke and Vaseline and the faint sourness of a day's work. I stood in her arms for a moment longer than she expected and felt her notice it.
Rose Nakku was fifty-eight years old and had been a headmistress for twenty-two of them. She had a voice built for correcting people at a distance. My father used to say she could stop a boy at the far end of a football field with a single adjective. But in the years since he died, she had been slowly and unobtrusively shrinking, not in body but in volume, as though she had turned herself down by one notch to leave room for a silence.
We ate at the kitchen table, matooke with groundnut sauce and a piece of smoked fish. Eva had not yet arrived; she was coming by boda in the evening. The kitchen was full of the old objects: the enamel basin, the calendar from the parish with a photograph of a bearded saint, the row of blackened saucepans hanging from nails in the wall. Through the window I could see my father's bicycle, still leaning against the mango tree under a plastic sheet, where it had been left on the last day.
"You'll sleep in your room," she said.
"Where else?"
"Eva says you have a girlfriend."
"Eva says a lot."
"She says, girlfriends." My mother gave the word a faintly medical intonation. "Many."
"Maama."
"I am not asking. I am only saying what she says." She poured me tea. She did not look up. "I am not stupid, Ethan. You are twenty-six and you are handsome and there are women in this country, and it is not for me to say. But you should know that a man can eat a great many meals and still be hungry."
I laughed, because I did not know what else to do. She did not.
Then she said, mildly, stirring her tea: "I still think about the girl from Gulu."
I put down my cup.
"I know I shouldn't. I know you said it's finished." She tapped the spoon against the rim. "But she was good to your father, at the end. She sat with him, remember? On the last Sunday. You went to get the doctor and she stayed in that room, and she read to him from the Psalms in a voice that I could not have done. I have never told her thank you enough."
"Maama."
"I have her card," said my mother. "In my Bible. She sent it in February. I did not show it to you."
The kitchen went strangely bright and very far away.
"I don't want to see it."
"I'm not offering. I'm telling you where it is." She pushed her chair back and stood, and began to clear the plates. She kept her eyes on the basin. "Some things a mother keeps, that's all. In case."
I did not ask in case of what.
I did not sleep in my old room so much as lie in it.
It had a single bed, a wardrobe with a warped door, and a desk under the window where I had done every piece of homework from Primary Five to Senior Six. There was a poster on the wall that I had never taken down, faded almost white, of a bridge in Norway. On the ceiling, above my head, a brown water stain that had always been the shape of a country I could never identify. Africa, Eva said. A pig, said my father. A boot, I said, at eleven.
I lay on my back with the window open and listened. Crickets. A dog barking three compounds away. The wind in the mango leaves, and under it, always, the sound I had grown up with and never known was a sound: the enormous ordinary quiet of a place where nothing is about to happen.
And I thought about her.
I did not decide to. It was more that I had, that evening, put my guard down for a moment at my mother's table, and something had slipped into the room. It came the way smells come, all at once, from nowhere, complete. I was lying in a boy's bed in Mukono, and I was also, without any change in my body, nineteen years old, standing in a queue in Lumumba Hall with a plastic basin in my arms, in the rain.
She corrected my mathematics.
That was how it began, and I still think it is the best possible way to begin. It was the first week of first year. I had come up from Mukono with a suitcase, a mattress, and the crippling politeness of a boy who had never lived without his mother. Makerere in August is a mad place, a tidal wave of new bodies, banners for every kind of society, boys with megaphones, hawkers selling second-hand textbooks from the boots of cars, and the whole hill glowing green under a wet sky. I had no idea where anything was. I was in line for the registration desk in the architecture department with a folder of documents I had triple-checked, when the girl in front of me turned around.
"Excuse me," she said. "Your fee calculation is wrong."
"Sorry?"
"You've written the balance as one million four hundred and twelve thousand. It's one million four hundred and twenty-one." She was pointing, with a chewed pencil, at the top page of my folder. "You've transposed the last two digits. They'll send you back."
I looked. She was right. I looked at her.
She was small, with a round forehead and an upright, forward-leaning posture, like a person always slightly ahead of her own legs. She wore glasses too large for her face, and her hair was pulled into two puffs, and she had a green plastic bangle on her left wrist that clacked against the pencil when she moved. She had the calm, unbothered look of someone who spent a lot of time being right and had long ago stopped expecting thanks.
"How did you do that so fast?"
"I'm doing Statistics," said Naomi Atim. "It's not fast. It's just looking."
"Do you always read strangers' folders?"
"Only when they're wrong."
I laughed. It was an unplanned laugh, a real one, and she looked, for the first time, faintly pleased, as if a small experiment had turned out as she had hoped.
"Ethan," I said, and held out my hand.
"I know. It's on the folder."
That was it. It was not a thunderbolt. No one heard a choir. It was ten minutes in a queue, and a mistake in arithmetic, and the odd secure sensation of being noticed by a person who noticed everything. But I have gone back to that moment more times than I would like to admit. I cannot find, anywhere in it, the exact place where the ground started to tilt. It is only that one day I was a boy in a queue, and the next I was a boy who knew where a particular girl would be at four o'clock.
She was from Gulu. This mattered more than I understood.
She had grown up in a small house near the market with her mother, a primary teacher, and two younger brothers, in a town that had spent the better part of her childhood learning how to live after a war. She never said much about it. When she did it was in fragments, dropped like coins into conversation: a night when the whole family slept in the bus park, a cousin who had come home years late and never talked about it, the smell of the first bread after the fighting ended. She told these things flatly, without ornament, and then changed the subject to something like the price of tomatoes, and I learned not to press.
She was the first in her family to go to a university. Her mother had sold three plots of land, one by one, over six years, and had never once mentioned it. Naomi carried this, I think, the way you carry a full bowl through a crowd: with total attention, and without spilling a drop, and without ever being able to put it down.
"I can't fail," she told me once. It was the second year. We were in the library at midnight, with the fluorescent lights buzzing and a dusty smell of old paper. She said it lightly, over a book, but her hand was flat on the table and I could see how white the knuckles were. "It isn't a question of wanting to do well. It's that if I fail, it's not mine to fail. It belongs to a lot of people."
"You won't fail."
"You can't know that."
"I'll help."
"You're doing architecture. You can't even balance your own budget."
"I can learn."
She looked at me across the table, and the fluorescent light made a small white circle on each of her lenses, so I could not see her eyes. Then she smiled, and reached across, and took the pencil out of my hand and wrote something on the page in front of me, a formula, a neat little chain of symbols like a row of footprints.
"Start there," said Naomi.
I did. I have never been so happy to be corrected.
The first time we kissed was in the rain, on the steps behind the Main Library, and neither of us could later agree on whose idea it was.
She said it was mine. I said it was hers. We argued about it for five years, with mounting pleasure, and it never resolved. What I remember is this: we had been out for the evening to the rolex stall, with the two chapatis torn in half and the egg spilling out onto a paper plate, and she had a smear of chilli on her chin that I had not mentioned because I liked looking at it. The rain came down suddenly, the way it does, in a wall. We ran for the library steps. We stood under the overhang with our shoulders touching and the water running down in silver ropes in front of us, and I could feel her laughing, feel it through my arm, and then it stopped, and she turned her face up to me and said, quite seriously:
"You've been staring at my chin for twenty minutes."
"I didn't want to tell you about the chilli."
"That's the worst reason I've ever heard."
"I know."
"Say it now, then."
"You have chilli on your chin."
"Thank you." She wiped it with her thumb. She looked at the thumb. Then she looked at me, and she said, with a small, resolved, alarmingly matter-of-fact expression, "I think you should probably kiss me before it stops raining."
"Why before?"
"Because I'll have lost my nerve."
I did. It began badly, our noses misaligned, my glasses, hers, colliding, and she laughed against my mouth, and I laughed, and then it did not matter, and for an unmeasured length of time the whole steaming hill of Makerere with its shouting and its megaphones and its ten thousand students receded to a distance somewhere behind the rain. When we finally pulled apart, the rain had thinned to a drizzle. She had her forehead against my collarbone. She was breathing very fast.
"Well," she said. "That's inconvenient."
"Why?"
"Because now I'm going to want to do it again, and I have an exam on Thursday."
That was Naomi. She would say the most tender thing in the world and dress it as a scheduling problem.
I am going to tell you about the ordinary things now. I could tell you about the large ones: the birthdays, the big trips, the night on the Nile with a bottle of Ethiopian wine and a plastic tent that leaked. But those are the things you tell strangers. The ordinary things are the ones I still hold.
She hummed when she cooked. Always the same four bars of something. She never knew the name of it. She said her mother used to hum it while she scrubbed the pots, and that if she stopped, the food would go wrong. She made a dish called malakwang, a sour, slippery stew of hibiscus leaves and groundnut paste, that I hated on the first bite, on the second bite pretended not to, and by the third month was eating in secret at midnight straight out of the pot. "You see?" she said, watching me from the door with her arms folded. "You're a traitor. You can't be trusted with an opinion."
She called me by my surname. Just Kirabo, said with a slight upward hitch. It had started as a joke, in second year, when she got tired of hearing people shout Ethan! across the quadrangle. But it stuck, and by the time we graduated I would not turn my head for the other. When she said it, it was like being handed something. Kirabo. Come here. Kirabo, look. It meant, you. It meant, the one I mean.
She had a habit of reading aloud when she thought I was asleep. Not for me. For herself. Statistics papers, grocery lists, the backs of shampoo bottles, in a low, level, faintly sing-song voice. I would lie with my eyes shut and my arm around her waist and let it wash over me like water.
She was afraid of exactly three things: geckos, being late, and being a burden. I knew this list. I had it memorised the way a man learns the layout of a building he is going to have to defend.
We fought, of course. I want you to know that, because I don't want you thinking of her as a saint. She was stubborn to the point of medical concern. She would not ask for help, ever, on anything, and when I offered it unprompted she treated it as an accusation. She kept score. She would deploy, in the middle of an argument, some grievance from fourteen months earlier, with dates. She hated silence, and I, when I was angry, went silent, and she would stand in the doorway of whatever room I had retreated to and say, in a voice that was very small and very angry, "Say something. Say anything. Don't do the wall."
"I'm not doing the wall."
"You are. You do it with your whole face."
I did. I learned it from my father. I will come to that.
But we made up. That was the thing. In those years, we always made up. We fought in a loud, fluent, exhausting way, and then someone would say something ridiculous, and the whole thing would collapse into helpless laughter, and by ten o'clock we would be lying on her narrow hostel bed with the fan turning above us and her head on my shoulder, negotiating a truce in whispers.
I thought that was what love was. Two people who would fight all the way to the edge of the cliff and then turn around.
It is one of the things I got wrong. I will come to that as well.
She came to Mukono in our third year, with a bunch of bananas and a cake, and stood at my mother's front door in a green dress she had ironed twice, and my mother looked her up and down and said, in Luganda, "You're the one who corrects his sums."
"I'm sorry," said Naomi, in careful Luganda. "It's a compulsion."
My mother's face did a thing I had not seen it do in years. It cracked, quite suddenly, into a smile, and she stepped forward and took the cake and said, "Come in. Sit. He can't cook. Has he told you he can't cook?"
"He's told me many things."
"Then you'll know he lies."
They were friends within an hour. I sat in the corner of the kitchen with a cup of tea, watching the two women I loved most in the world stand at the counter shredding cabbage, laughing at my expense, comparing notes on the fact that I sulked when I lost at cards, and I remember thinking with a great clear, stupid ache of joy: this is it. This is the thing. This is what everyone spends their whole lives looking for, and I have it in my mother's kitchen on an ordinary Saturday.
My father came in from the plot at about four, wiping his hands on a rag, a tall stooped man with grey in his moustache and a surveyor's habit of squinting at whatever he looked at as though measuring it. He shook Naomi's hand with great formality and asked her what her father did.
"He's dead, sir," she said. "He was a driver. He died when I was small."
"I'm sorry."
"It's all right."
"No," said my father, in his level, precise voice. "It isn't. But it is very good of you to say so." And then he did something I had seen him do perhaps twice in my life. He took her hand in both of his and held it for a moment. "You are welcome in this house. I want you to know it is not a courtesy."
She did not speak. She looked at him, her face gone suddenly bare, and then nodded, once.
That night, on the veranda, she told me she was going to marry me.
"Don't be ridiculous," I said, delighted and terrified. "You can't decide that on a Saturday."
"I'm not deciding. I'm noticing." She had her feet up on the rail and a plate of leftover cake in her lap. She was not looking at me. "Your father took my hand and I thought, oh. So this is what it's like to be put on the list. On the list of people who are held on to. I've never been on a list like that."
"You were always on mine."
"I know." She turned. "That's what's frightening."
She rested her head against my shoulder. Crickets. A dog. The wind in the mango leaves. Somewhere in the house, my mother was singing to herself over the dishes.
And I promised. In my head, silently, with the seriousness of a boy who has never been asked to keep one. I will never let anything hurt you. I did not know that this was a promise I would not be able to keep, or that the thing most likely to hurt her would turn out to be me.
My father died in the fourth year, on a Tuesday in March, of a stroke.
I was in Kampala, at studio, in the middle of a critique. My phone buzzed on the desk and I ignored it, and then it buzzed again, and Eva's name was on the screen, and I knew. I don't know how. I knew the way you know that a glass is going to fall a half-second before your hand tells you.
I went to Mulago by boda. I have no memory of the ride. I remember the smell in the corridor, that flat, sweet, chemical smell, and a nurse in a blue uniform coming towards me with her hands folded in front of her, and I remember thinking that she had a very kind face and that I would not be able to bear it.
My father lay in a bed by a window with a sheet pulled up to his chest. His moustache had been combed. Someone had closed his eyes. He was, for the first time in my whole life, not measuring anything.
Naomi arrived twenty minutes later. She had run from the Statistics block. She came through the door with her glasses crooked and her chest heaving and stopped at the end of the bed, and looked at my father, and looked at me. She did not say a word. She crossed the room and took my hand, not lightly, but hard, so hard it hurt, as if she were holding on to a rope, and she stayed like that, in the ward, with the sun coming across the floor, for I do not know how long.
That was the last Sunday I have spoken of already, the one my mother remembered. There was, in fact, a last Sunday: he had been in the hospital for a week beforehand, and I had gone to fetch the doctor while Naomi sat with him, and when I came back she was reading him the Psalms in the voice my mother had described, low and slow and completely certain. I stood in the doorway a long time and did not go in. I have never told anyone that I stood there. I did not want to interrupt. I did not want to not hear.
At the funeral she stood beside me for six hours. She held my mother's hand, and fed Eva soup with a spoon, and ran the entire kitchen with a quiet ruthless tenderness while every relative I had ever met appeared in our yard, weeping and eating. When it was over, and the last cousin had gone, and the cows had been fed and the tents taken down, she found me behind the house, under the mango tree, sitting in the dirt beside my father's bicycle with my back against the trunk.
She sat down beside me. She did not say anything. She put her head on my shoulder. It was dark. The cicadas were going.
"I don't know how to do this," I said. It was the first thing I had said in hours.
"You don't have to do it well."
"I don't know how to do it at all."
"Then we'll do it badly. Together." She took my hand. "I'm not going anywhere, Kirabo. I want you to hear me say it. I'm not going anywhere."
I believed her. I want that to be understood. I believed her with my entire body, in the dark, in the dirt, under a tree that my father had planted the year I was born.
It was the truest thing I have ever believed, and it was, in the end, the thing that destroyed us both. Not because she lied. She didn't. She meant it, every syllable. But I took it like a man handed a lifeline who wraps it around his wrist, and instead of holding it, learns to need it, until the two of them are the same knot. I began to clutch. I don't think I knew I was doing it. I only knew that I had lost the man who taught me how to measure a plot, and I could not lose anything else.
I will come to what that did to us.
I lay in my boyhood bed in Mukono, and the moon had come up in the window, and the water-stain on the ceiling had gone silver. I was twenty-six years old. I could hear my mother in the next room, turning over in the dark. She slept badly. I had heard it all my life, the small creaks, the murmured half-prayer, the pause.
At some point, I got up and went to the drawer of my old desk and opened it, quietly, though there was no one to wake. I do not know what I was looking for. There was a ruler. A broken compass. A stub of pencil worn to a nub. And at the very back, under a heap of old notebooks, a photograph.
I had not put it there. My mother must have. It was a small, glossy, badly-lit snapshot, taken by Eva, from the fourth year: the two of us on a bench outside the Faculty of Technology, in the sun. I was laughing at something out of frame. Naomi had her head turned toward me, not toward the camera, and she was looking at me with a naked, absorbed, unguarded expression, the look of someone who had found something she had never expected to find and was still, every day, surprised by it.
I sat on the edge of the bed for a very long time.
I had thought I remembered her. I had thought she was gone, wrapped, filed, sealed. And I saw now that it was not that I had forgotten. It was that I had remembered so accurately, and for so long, that I had built a place inside me the exact shape of her and had spent twenty months walking carefully round it.
I turned the photograph over. On the back, in Eva's round hand: N + E. Fourth year. So sickening.
I laughed, once, aloud, a short cracked sound in the dark. Then I put my hand over my mouth. The house was very still.
She wrote to my mother, I thought. In February. Not to me.
I did not know what it said. I did not want to know. But I could feel its presence in the house, somewhere behind the wall, between the pages of a Bible, folded small, a piece of paper as dangerous as a lit match.
And behind that, further back, I could feel the other thing. The one I had put in a tin. I could see, with a hard and terrible clarity, a table in a restaurant. A white cloth. Two glasses. A candle guttering in a draught. A phone lighting up on the cloth, over and over, with a name I did not answer.
I put the photograph back in the drawer. I closed it. I got into bed and pulled the sheet up and lay looking at the boot-shaped country on my ceiling until the first cock crowed.
I had told myself that the past was a closed room. But a house is not a series of closed rooms. It is a structure, a load path. Everything you build sits on something, and if you take away one pillar, you do not get a smaller house. You get a lean.
I was leaning. I had been leaning for twenty months.
And somewhere in the dark beyond my mother's wall, a piece of paper was waiting for someone brave enough to unfold it, which I was not, and would not be, for a very long time.