Chapter 9
Love Has a Memory
A Nescafé tin weighs almost nothing. That was the first surprise. I had carried it in my head for so long as a thing of enormous mass that when I finally set it on the floor between my knees, in the light of a single lamp, it seemed absurd that it should be so light. A red lid. A faded label. A dent in one side from the time it fell off the back of Timo's pickup on the Masaka road.
I pressed my thumbnail under the rim and the lid came away with a small dry sound, like someone clearing their throat.
There were two things inside.
The first was a ring. A thin gold band with a single small stone, no larger than a grain of rice, set low so it would not catch on things. I had bought it from a goldsmith in an arcade off Kampala Road, in the July of that last year, after eight months of saving, most of it in coins, in an old sock. The goldsmith, an elderly Gujarati man with reading glasses on a string, had held it up to the window and said, "For a serious girl." I had said, "How can you tell?" and he had said, "The size. Serious girls have small hands."
I had not known what to say. I had bought it.
The second thing was an envelope. It was a plain white one, a little yellowed at the edges, with my surname on the front in blue biro. Kirabo. Just that. The handwriting was small and square and upright, each letter separate, like a row of neat stitches. I would have known it in the dark, or in a crowd, or through a wall. It had been sealed for twenty-four months.
I did not open it. Not yet. I put it on the floor beside my knee and looked at the ring, and let myself, for the first time in two years, remember it all in order.
I was going to propose on the third of September. That was the plan. It was the fifth anniversary of the day we had first spoken, in a queue, over a miscalculated fee. She had never once got the date wrong. She kept it, the way she kept everything, in a small clear compartment, and every year on the third she gave me a card, some ridiculous drawing of two stick figures in a queue, and I gave her something I had thought about for a month.
That year I had booked a table on a rooftop in Kololo. I had ironed a shirt. The ring was in the inside pocket of my jacket, and I had checked it seven times that morning, patting it through the lining, like a man checking for a gun.
But I did not propose on the third of September. I will tell you what happened on the first.
It was a Thursday. I had been watching her for two months.
I know how that sounds. I have heard it in my own head so many times I no longer pretend otherwise. I had been watching her. I had started to read the small things, the way she tilted her phone away from me on the sofa, the way a message made her go quiet and then bright, the two evenings a week that she came home late from the library with her cheeks flushed and her eyes moving over the room as though she had forgotten where things were. I noticed that she had started to hum again, the four bars, in the kitchen, and I noticed that it made my stomach tighten.
She had been happy. That was all it was. But I had been unhappy for so long, in the low, grinding, constant way that came after my father, that I could not read happiness in someone I loved as anything but a betrayal.
I looked at her phone. It is a sentence I would give ten years of my life to unsay. I looked, on a Tuesday, when she was in the shower, and I read the first message at the top of the list. It was from a contact saved as Dr K. It said: Thursday, 6pm, my office. Bring the documents. Please tell no one yet. NK.
That was all. I stood in her bedroom holding the phone in my two hands, and I felt the floor go out from under me.
Dr K. was Dr. Nathan Kalule, a senior lecturer in the Statistics department, a man of about fifty with a sleek grey beard and a reputation for taking his best students under his wing. Naomi had spoken of him warmly. He had supervised her final-year project. He had, I remembered, once sent her a book.
Please tell no one yet.
I put the phone back exactly where it had been. I sat on the edge of the bed. I could hear the shower running, and the small clear sound of her singing through the wall. She was singing the four bars. I sat there, shaking, and something in me that had been holding on for a year and a half with two hands let go, quietly, of everything.
On the Thursday, I followed her.
I want to say I hesitated. I did not. I left studio early and took a boda to the Statistics block and stood at the far end of the corridor behind a noticeboard, pretending to read a poster about a workshop on time series. At six, she came up the stairs with a folder under her arm. She walked into an office at the end of the hall. The door closed. I saw a strip of yellow light under it.
I stood there for fifty-one minutes. I have counted them since, so many times that I could give you the seconds.
When the door opened, she came out first, and behind her, in the doorway, Dr. Kalule, tall and smiling, his hand on her shoulder. And she turned, and she put her arms around him, and hugged him, hard, with her whole body, with her face turned into his jacket, and stayed like that for what looked to me like a very long time.
I did not say anything. I turned and walked out of the building and went and stood in the rain by the Freedom Square and looked at nothing, and something in me went very calm and very cold and very sure.
On the Friday, it was Achan's birthday.
She held it in a rented hall in Wandegeya, with a DJ and a table of samosas and about thirty people. Naomi came with me. She wore a dress I loved, dark green, with a gold chain I had given her. She looked, all evening, radiant. She danced with Achan. She laughed. I sat in the corner with a warm Coke, watching her, watching the way she kept turning to check her phone, and I felt myself go tighter and tighter, like a wire being wound on a spindle.
At about ten, Achan's cousin, a loud young man in a purple shirt, asked Naomi across the table whether she'd heard back about the thing.
"What thing?" I said.
The table went quiet. Naomi looked at the cousin. She looked at me. Her face did something complicated, and I saw her decide, in a fraction of a second, to say nothing.
"It's nothing," she said. "A job thing. Later."
"What job thing?"
"Ethan. Not here."
"Why not here?" I heard my voice rise. I had a strange clear feeling, as though I were standing a little behind my own shoulder, watching a man in a chair do something dreadful and unstoppable. "Is it a Dr. K thing? Is it a tell no one yet thing?"
I have never seen a person go so white so quickly. It was as though a hand had wiped the colour from her face. She stared at me, and her lips parted, and I saw the exact moment she understood that I had read her phone.
"You looked at my messages," she said.
"How long have you been sleeping with your professor?"
I said it loudly. I said it in a hall full of thirty people, and a DJ who had, at that moment, fumbled a transition, so that the silence between two songs was total, and my words went out into it like a stone through a window. I saw Achan's face. I saw the cousin's mouth fall open. I saw a woman put her hand over her lips.
Naomi did not say anything. She did not cry, or slap me, or shout. That was not her way. She stood up very slowly. She picked up her bag from the back of the chair. And she looked at me, across the table, for perhaps three seconds, with an expression I have never forgotten and never been able to name. It was not hatred. It was something much worse. It was recognition. It was the look of someone who has been told a rumour for a long time about a person she loves and has just, at last, seen it confirmed.
"Thank you," said Naomi quietly. "That's very clear."
She walked out. The DJ started the next track, too loud, in a wild panic, and thirty people looked at their shoes.
She told me on the Saturday morning.
I have to give her that. She came to my flat at nine, in yesterday's dress, with her eyes swollen. She stood in the middle of my living room and did not sit. She told me in a low, steady voice, as one reads out a statement.
There was no affair. She had applied, eight months before, for a Commonwealth scholarship. A master's in biostatistics at the University of Leeds, fully funded, one place per country per year. She had not told me because of Nairobi. She had not told me because she knew what I would do. Dr. Kalule had been her referee. On Thursday, he had told her, in his office, at six, that she had been shortlisted for interview. The hug was gratitude. She was so happy she could not stand still. She had wanted, more than anything in the world, to come home and tell me.
"Then I remembered your face," she said. "In the Nairobi week. And I thought, not yet. I thought, I'll wait until it's certain. I'll wait until I can show him a letter. I was going to tell you on the third. On our day. I had it all planned. I had a speech."
I stood there. I could hear the blood in my ears.
"Eight months," I said.
"Yes."
"You lied to me for eight months."
"I didn't tell you. It's not—"
"You lied. You sat in this flat, in this bed, and said I'm going to the library." My voice was rising again. "You said I love you. And the whole time you were planning to get on a plane."
"I was planning to apply."
"To leave."
"To do a master's. Ethan." She was crying now, at last, silently, her chin trembling. "It's one year. It's a year. You would have come. We'd have figured it out. If you had once let me say the word without doing the wall—"
"Don't put this on me."
"I'm not—"
"You hid it. That's what you did. You hid it." I was pacing. I could not stop. It was as though I had swallowed a wire that was spooling out of my mouth. "Eight months of lying, and you want me to say congratulations? You want me to say sorry for reading a message? You were lying to my face!"
"I was scared of you."
The word stopped me. It fell into the room like a plate.
"That's not true," I said.
"It is." She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "Not that you'd hurt me. You never would. I mean scared of your face. Scared of the silence. Scared that I'd have to choose between the thing I want and the man I love, and I'd choose you, like I did with Nairobi, and I'd wake up in ten years and not know where I'd gone." She took a shaking breath. "I'm so tired of being careful. I'm twenty-four. I've been careful since I was nine years old."
I have played this moment ten thousand times. There is a version in which I cross the room, and hold her, and say: I'm sorry. I say: I've been afraid since my father died. I say: Go to Leeds. I'll wait. I say: I'm not good at this, but I love you. I have written that version a hundred different ways.
This is what I said.
"Go, then," I said. "Go to Leeds. Go be somebody. I hope it keeps you warm."
She looked at me for a long time.
"That's what you have to say," she said.
"That's what I've got."
"Okay." She nodded slowly. She picked up her bag. She stood in my doorway with her back to me, and I saw her shoulders straighten, one vertebra at a time, as a person straightens who has been carrying a load and has decided to put it down. "I'm going to tell you something, Kirabo, and then I'll go."
I said nothing.
"I never left you. I want you to know that. I wanted you with me. It's you who won't let anyone be a person." She did not turn round. "You don't love me. You guard me. It's not the same thing. I've been in a cage for two years, and it's a very kind cage, and I don't think you even know it's there."
She went out and shut the door.
I stood in the room for a long time. I told myself she was wrong.
I went to the rooftop on the third.
I do not know why. I had told myself I would not. I put on the ironed shirt. I put the ring in my pocket. I drove to Kololo and climbed to the top floor of a restaurant with white tablecloths, and a waiter with a small bow tie showed me to the table I had booked, by the railing, with a view of the whole city going gold in the evening.
There were two glasses. There was a candle in a glass sleeve, and a small vase with a single orange flower. I sat down. I waited.
At seven, my phone lit up on the tablecloth. Naomi. I looked at it. I did not answer.
At half past, it lit again. I watched it buzz across the white cloth, an inch to the left, and go still.
At eight, again. At a quarter past. At nine, the waiter asked, delicately, whether I would like to order, and I said I was waiting for someone, and he said, "Of course, sir," with a look of such practised tenderness that I wanted to hit him. The candle guttered in a draught. The flower dropped a petal. Down in the city, the lights came on in their thousands, the taxi park and the flyovers and the long yellow line of Jinja Road, and I sat above it all with a ring in my pocket and let the phone ring until it stopped.
She rang five times. I counted. On the sixth call, at half past ten, there was a message. It said only: I'm sorry. I love you. I'm not calling again. And she didn't.
I paid for two dinners I had not eaten. I drove home. I put the ring into an old coffee tin, and I put the tin under the bed.
She left in January, after Christmas, on a Tuesday, on a night flight.
I knew the date. It had been on her mother's fridge in Gulu, in the photograph that Achan sent me by mistake. I did not speak to her in the intervening months. I saw her twice, from a distance, once across the Freedom Square with a rucksack and a look of terrible composure, once in the library with her head bent over a book. I turned and walked the other way both times, like a man stepping around a hole.
On the night of the flight I drove to Entebbe.
I do not know what I meant to do. I told myself I was going to say goodbye. I told myself I was going to say I'm sorry. I told myself all sorts of things, on the dark road past Kajjansi, with the lake glimmering on my left, and the lights of the airport growing up out of the trees like a low, cold constellation.
I parked in the long-stay car park, in a slot by a fence. I turned off the engine. Across the tarmac I could see the terminal, lit, glassy, and through the glass a queue of people at a desk with their suitcases, and among them, a small figure in a green jacket, with two puffs of hair, and beside her a woman in a gomesi holding her face in both hands.
Her mother. I knew her at once. I had never met her.
I watched them for forty minutes. I watched the mother cry and Naomi hold her. I watched her hand her luggage over a counter and turn, and look back once over her shoulder through the glass, towards the car park, towards the dark, as though looking for someone, and then turn again and go through the gate.
I did not move. I sat with my hands on the wheel and my forehead against the glass. I thought: I will get out now. I thought: I will run. I thought: it's not too late. There's time. There was time. There was a full hour before the doors closed. I had my keys in my hand.
I did not get out of the car.
At midnight a plane went up over the fence, low and slow, with its lights blinking, and I watched it go into the dark over the lake. I watched until I could not see it. I started the engine, and I drove home, and I never told anyone that I had been there. Not Timo. Not Eva. Not the women. Not, until this book, myself.
That is the part I have not confessed. It is not the accusation, or the hall, or the sentence I threw at her in my doorway. I could have told you those. They are the deeds of a frightened, proud, jealous boy, and I would like to believe he is dead. It is the car park. It is that I sat there and let her go through a gate, in the light, and chose it. Because I understood, in the car, with terrible clarity, that if I went in, I would have to say the true thing, and the true thing was I can't do this without you.
And I had made up my mind that no one would ever again be able to make me say it.
I sat now on the floor of my bedroom in Ntinda at half past midnight with the tin between my knees.
I picked up the envelope.
Achan had brought it to me in February. She had come to the office in a black dress with her hair scraped back and stood in the doorway of the lobby and held it out, at arm's length, as one holds a live thing. "She asked me to," said Achan. "Don't shoot the messenger. I'm only the postman." She had waited while I took it. She had waited until I did not open it. Then she said, quite gently, "You know she thinks about you every day," and I said, "I don't want to hear that," and she said, "I know. That's why I'm telling you."
I slid my thumb under the flap.
It was very old glue. It parted with no resistance, as though it had been waiting. Inside were two sheets of paper, lined, torn from a pad, folded in three. The handwriting was the same, small and square and upright. My hands were shaking so badly that I had to lay the pages on my knee and flatten them.
Kirabo,
I have written this letter eleven times and burned ten of them. This is the only one that is true.
I am not writing to be forgiven. I don't think I need forgiving, and I don't think you do, either. I'm writing because I don't want you to spend the rest of your life believing the wrong story.
I know what you think. You think I lied. You think I was going to leave. And it's true that I hid it. I'm not going to pretend that was right. I was a coward. I did it because I'd learned that whenever I reached for something of my own, your face went out like a light, and I could not stand to be the person who put it out.
I want you to know what I saw, though. Not to hurt you. I want you to see the other side of the wall.
I saw a man who was drowning. After your father, I saw it. I saw you go out under the tree and I held on and I thought, I will not let go. And I didn't. But you started holding me back. Not because you didn't trust me. You trusted me completely. It was that you didn't trust the world. You looked at me and saw everyone you would ever lose. And I couldn't be that. I couldn't be the last person standing between you and the dark. I was twenty-three years old, Kirabo. I wanted to be a person and not a shelter.
I told you I never left you, and it's true. I would have stayed. If you'd said, come to me at the airport and ask, I would have stayed. But I couldn't be the one to ask, because I knew that the only reason I'd ever be allowed to go was if you first understood you could survive it. And you couldn't. Not yet.
I don't hate you. I couldn't. I have seven years of you in my body like a language. I'll speak it for the rest of my life.
Here is the only thing I'll ask.
I know you. You'll be tempted to decide that love was the mistake. That if you never did it again, you'd never hurt this way. You'll build something that looks very strong. You'll be very good at it. But I think you'll be lonely inside it, and you won't know why.
It wasn't love that hurt us. It was the fear. They look the same from the inside, but they are not the same, and if you ever learn the difference, you will be the best man I know.
I will always be grateful for the house on my arm. I still can't say it without laughing. I hope you build it one day, for someone. I hope you make the window face east.
Naomi
P.S. I did keep the ticket stub from Jinja. It's in my passport. It's going with me.
I do not know how long I sat there.
I remember that the room grew slowly lighter. I remember the first cockerel, and the first boda, and a woman calling to someone in the lane. I remember that at some point I had put down the letter and was lying on my side on the floor, with my cheek on the cold cement, and my knees drawn up, and my eyes open, looking at nothing, at a skirting board, at a small pale line of dust.
I was not crying. I want to be accurate. It was a stranger thing than crying. It was as though something that had been standing for two years, straight and rigid and absolutely still, had at last been permitted to sit down. My whole body went loose. I could feel my heart, slow and heavy, as one feels a large animal breathing in a dark room.
I thought: She would have stayed.
That was the first thing. She would have stayed. If I had gone into that terminal, if I had said the true thing, she would have looked at me across a departure hall and said come here. I had spent twenty-four months constructing an elaborate philosophy about the treachery of love, and the whole time, at the bottom of it, there was a plain fact I had refused to look at. She had not left because she stopped loving me. She had left because she could not breathe. And I had let her, because leaving first was safer than being left.
I lay on the floor and looked at that.
Then what have I been doing?
The question was not rhetorical. I turned it over in my mind, and I could feel every bit of it, all of it, laid out in front of me, like the drawings of a building I had been living in for two years and had never once looked at from outside.
Ritah, who wanted no strings, and whom I had let leave. Wanjiru, who had thanked me for not asking. Lydia, whom I had abandoned on the day she asked me to meet her mother. Patience, who had told me plainly, you're not over her, and whom I had never called again. Grace, who had asked for a lunch. And Brenda, on New Year's morning, in a kitchen with yellow curtains. Every one of them a small, exact re-enactment of a car park at Entebbe. Every one of them a woman I had held at arm's length, and then, at the moment that she reached for me, left first.
I had been punishing them. I saw it. Not intentionally; I had never once wished them harm. But each of them, in her own way, had walked toward a door that I could not walk through, and I had shut it in her face, and called it freedom. I had taken what Naomi had done, the hiding, the flight, the going, and I had made every woman who came after her pay for it. Not with cruelty. With politeness. With a rule. Don't stay. Don't keep. Don't say.
And I saw something else, then, something much worse and much stranger, which took a long time to come to the surface.
I had told myself that I no longer believed in love. That I had grown up. That I had seen through the whole sentimental trick. I had said it so often, in so many bars, that I had almost heard it as fact.
But a man who no longer believes in something does not build a fortress against it. Nobody sets an alarm for a ghost. Nobody keeps a tin for twenty-four months, under his bed, with a ring in it, and a letter he can't open, and arranges his entire life around not looking at it. You do not go to such elaborate lengths to avoid a thing you think is a fairy tale.
I had not stopped believing in love. That was the lie.
I believed in it so much. I believed in it with such an enormous, childish, unkillable faith that I knew, in the marrow of my bones, exactly how much it could take from me. I was not running from something I had stopped wanting. I was running from something I wanted so badly that I could not survive being refused. I had not been trying to prove that love was worthless. I had been trying to make myself incapable of needing it. To become a man who could walk out of any room, and lie in any bed, and wake in any dawn, and feel nothing.
I had wanted to be safe. And I had made myself so safe that I was dead.
I got up at seven. My body was stiff and cold. I had a crick in my neck from the floor. I picked up the letter and read it again, standing at the window, with the pale light on the paper. Then I folded it along its old creases and set it, with great care, on the bedside table.
I picked up the ring, and held it in my palm.
It was so small. I thought of the goldsmith, and the sock full of coins, and the boy I had been, so sure and so shining, buying a promise from a man with reading glasses on a string. I did not put it back in the tin. I put it on the shelf above my desk, beside a stub of white candle and a jar of pencils, where I could see it.
Then I picked up my phone.
There were eleven missed calls. One from Timo. One from Eva. Nine from a number I did not recognise, and a message that said, Brenda here. Did I say something wrong?
I did not answer any of them. I opened the message thread with Maya, and I looked at the last words in it. Sorry, I was asleep. Hope the service wasn't too long. A lie, a small one, with a full stop.
My thumb hung over the keyboard. I knew, with a quiet clarity that I had never had before about anything, exactly what I would write, if I were the man I had been for two years.
I'm sorry. Please call me. I can explain.
It was a perfectly good message. It was warm. It was contrite. It contained a request and a promise, and would, in all probability, have got a reply. And I looked at it, and understood that it was the same message as Something came up at work, so sorry. It was another way to hold on. Another kind of guarding. A rope thrown to someone in the water with the other end tied to my own wrist.
I put the phone down on the desk.
I did not write to her. It was the hardest thing I had done that year, and it was, I think, the first honest one. Not because I had stopped wanting to. But because for the first time in my adult life I was beginning to understand that the person you want most is exactly the person you have no right to hold.
Outside, the sun had come up over the roofs of Ntinda, and the whole lane was steaming gently, and a woman with a basin of tomatoes on her head was calling out the price. I stood at the window and watched her pass. I was twenty-six years old. I had not slept. I had a ring on my shelf and a letter on my bed and a truth in my chest that felt, that morning, like a stone I had swallowed, sitting heavy and cold and clean.
I was terrified. I did not yet know what to do with it.
But I knew, at last, what I was afraid of. And there is a kind of freedom in that, small and cold and enormous, like the first step onto a stair you have been afraid to climb, and finding that it is exactly as high as you thought.