Epilogue
Years Later
I asked her a year later, as agreed, once.
It was a Wednesday in February, on the yellow stairs, by post. I had written her a long letter about a hospital I was designing in Mbale, and about Josephine, who had learned to say staircase and used it exclusively to ask for biscuits. At the end, on a line by itself, I wrote: It has been a year. How is it going?
Her reply came in eleven days, on blue paper, in a hand as quick and slanting as her voice. It was four pages. She wrote about a warehouse in Kisumu and a chief who had lied to her beautifully for two hours. She wrote that she was happy, and it was not a simple happiness, and she did not think she would be able to describe it to me without making it sound smaller. She wrote that she had met a man, an engineer, kind and tall, and had gone to dinner with him three times, and that on the third she had found herself explaining what a staircase was for. She wrote that she did not forgive me, exactly, because forgiveness did not seem to be a thing that happened once. It was a thing she was doing, a little every day, like a repair.
On the last page she wrote: You said I could ask you anything in a year. It's my turn. Are you still sad?
I wrote back that I was, a little, on Sundays. I said it was not a wound. It was more like a room in the house that I visited, where the light was good.
We wrote for another year. It is astonishing what you can say on paper. She told me about her mother's diabetes and I told her about the day I gave a client a design I did not believe in and had to go back and undo it. We did not write about us. We wrote about everything else, which turned out to be the same thing.
She came home in the second March, for a fortnight. I met her at Entebbe.
I want to tell you what that was, because it is the reason I keep the tin. I parked in the short-stay, not the long. I got out of the car. I walked across the tarmac into the terminal, in the full white light of the afternoon, and stood at the barrier with about forty other people holding flowers and placards, and I felt my knees go weak, and I did not go back. She came through the doors with a rucksack and a boarding pass in her teeth, looking for something in her pocket. She saw me. She stopped in the middle of the arrivals hall so that a man with a trolley swore at her, and she took the boarding pass out of her mouth and said, loudly, in front of everyone:
"You came in."
"I came in."
"That's a first."
"I've been practising," I said.
She did not fall into my arms. It was not that kind of story. She walked forward slowly, with the rucksack banging her hip, and stopped a foot in front of me, and looked at my face for a long moment, at the fine lines that had come in the two years, at the mouth.
"You've got older," said Maya.
"So have you."
"I've got wiser."
"You've got a boarding pass in your hand."
"I'm using it as a metaphor."
We laughed, both of us, helplessly, in the arrivals hall, and a small girl in a school uniform stared at us as though we were mad. Then I took her rucksack, and she let me. It was a small thing. I have never forgotten it.
The rest is slow, and I will not tell it slowly.
It took her fourteen months to stay. She took the Sentinel's editorship when Mr. Okumu retired, in a ceremony at which he wore his cardigan and made a speech of four words, It is very yellow. We were not together for the first seven of them. We had dinners. We had arguments, about a headline, about Timo's driving, about a film. She told me, at a table in Kisementi, what I had cost her, in a level list, with dates, and I did not defend it. I told her what she had cost me. It was not a competition. It was an accounting, and at the end of it we sat there with our tea cold and looked at each other, and it was not a bad thing to have seen.
On the fifth of October, on a veranda in Ntinda in front of a hair salon, at half past five in the morning, with a cockerel practising in the lane, she said, "I think I'd like to try again."
"Are you sure?"
"No," said Maya. "I've noticed it never seems to matter."
I opened the bottle of red wine that night. It had stood on a shelf for three years and four months, beside a stub of candle, a jar of pencils. It was, technically, vinegar. We drank it anyway, out of two glasses, in the kitchen, and she wrinkled her nose and said, "That's the worst thing I've ever tasted," and I said, "It's got some very complex notes," and she laughed until she had to sit on the floor.
We married three years later, in a small church in Kansanga, with Josephine as flower girl and Timo as best man, weeping openly, and Harriet in a hat so large it obstructed the view of the back row. My mother wore a green one with a small feather. She had had it made. She did not say a word about it, and when she stood at the altar rail, and saw me looking, she lifted one hand very slightly to the brim.
Naomi sent a card from Leeds. It had a watercolour of a bird. Inside she had written six words. It faces east, I hope.
It does. I drew it myself. It is a low house on a small hill in Mbuya, a bungalow with a wide veranda, and one tall window on the eastern wall, so that on any clear morning the light comes in across the floor and finds the bed. The heat is fierce by nine. Maya says it is a design flaw. I say it is the point. She has been saying it for six years, in exactly the same tone of voice, and I have never grown tired of it.
It is five in the morning as I write this. It is the hour I have always loved. The kettle is on, whistling at its wrong pitch. My neighbour's tomatoes are climbing the boundary wall, and he will pretend, again, that it is an accident. Upstairs, Maya is asleep with a pencil on the pillow beside her, because she wrote something in the night, and our daughter, Agnes, aged two, named after a woman in Nakawa who got her plot back, is asleep in the next room with her feet out of the blanket.
The tin is on the shelf above my desk.
It has the red lid that has never closed properly. I have moved it four times. It went in the back of Timo's pickup, and in a matatu with a chicken on somebody's lap, and once, in a bad year, in a plastic bag that I fully meant to leave on a bench in the Botanical Gardens. I did not leave it. I have told you why.
It is not empty now. I want you to know that. It is fuller than it ever was, and the lid does not close because there is too much in it. I took the lid off this morning and laid the things out on my desk, in the pale light, one by one.
A stub of white candle, the wax dented, with a small hard pearl on the side.
A receipt for a can of yellow paint and a brush.
A yellow pencil, worn to a nub.
A piece of blue paper, folded four times, with a hand as quick as a voice.
A cork.
A plastic hospital bracelet, tiny, with a name and a date.
A ticket stub from Jinja, which came in the post one morning in a plain envelope with no note, and which I have never quite been able to explain, except that a woman in Leeds had once told me that she had kept one in her passport, and I think, in the end, she must have had two.
And a folded page from a notebook, torn out on a balcony in September, on which a single word is written in capitals, in a young man's blunt hand, like a room on a floor plan. I keep it in the tin because I no longer need to hide it. It is only a name. It is the name of someone I loved, and did badly, and was forgiven for, and it sits in the tin with the others, as one thing among many, where it can be seen.
I used to think the tin held the thing I could not open. I see now that it was only a tin. What matters is what you decide to put in it, and whether you can bear to look.
People at weddings still ask me. They lean in, with a glass, wearing the face of someone about to be wise, and say, How did you know?
I have stopped giving them patience. I give them something nearer the truth. I tell them that for two years I asked myself the wrong question. I asked, Is it love or lust? as though it were a riddle with a single answer, as though the feeling arrived with a label sewn into the collar. I thought that if I could just look closely enough at what I wanted, I would be able to read it.
I could not. Nobody can. From the inside they feel the same, for the first few weeks, the way a lit window and a burning house look the same from the road. There is the same heat. There is the same quickening. There is the same helpless leaning toward a person, and the same conviction that this is different, that it has never been so before.
The difference, when it comes, is not in the wanting. Lust wants what a person can give it tonight. Love wants to know who she will be on the ordinary Tuesday after, when the wanting is quiet, and the kettle needs to be filled, and she is angry about a comma. Lust asks what can I have. Love asks what may I carry, and what must I let go. Lust closes its hand. Love, on its best days, learns to open it.
But even that is too tidy. I have wanted Maya, in every way a man can want a woman, for the whole of this book. I want her this morning, hearing her turn over upstairs, a small sound, a sheet. I have never once been able to draw a line between the wanting and the love, and I no longer believe there is one to draw. The two were never enemies. It is only that for years I let one of them lead the other by the hand into a dark room, and called the room freedom.
I do not know what it is that I feel. I have stopped needing to. I know what I do.
The kettle has begun to shriek. I am going to take it off the heat, and make two cups of tea, one with too much ginger, and carry them up the stairs. It is a good staircase. Thirteen risers, one landing. Anyone can climb it a thousand times and never once think about it.
Somebody once asked me whether it was love or lust.
I told them to ask me on a Tuesday.