Chapter 10
The City Without You
It is a strange thing to learn a road all over again.
For three weeks, Nadia rode the Matatu with a sensation she could not name. It was like walking into a room she knew well and finding that someone had moved the furniture an inch to the left. Nothing was missing. Everything was a little wrong. The seat by the window was the same seat, with the same crack in the vinyl, and it was sometimes empty and sometimes full, and she noticed that she could not decide which was worse.
She tried not to look. She sat in the third row, on the left, with her phone on her knee, and kept her eyes on the road. She counted the stages. She counted the potholes. She learned the names of the people who got on at Kyambogo, a student with a trumpet case, two women who sold second-hand shoes, an old man who read the Bible aloud, in a murmur, and always got off at the railway bridge. She said good morning to them. They said good morning back. She began to find that a stranger who knows your face is a kind of company.
But it was not the same.
She had not understood, until it was gone, how much of the day had been built around that one low, dry voice in the fourth row. She would find herself, at eleven o'clock, at her desk, with a funny line half formed in her head, and no one to give it to. A client would say something absurd. I want a poster that says Welcome in every language. She would think, I'll tell Eli, and then stop, with her mouth open, in the middle of a thought.
It was the small things that were hardest. The way the seat beside her smelled of old vinyl and nothing else. The way she reached, from habit, for a tea she had not been given.
On the third Friday, Mzee Kasozi spoke.
It was the second time in a year. He did it at the Nakawa roundabout, in the middle of a traffic jam, with his flat cap pulled low and his eyes fixed on the road, and it was so unexpected that the whole vehicle went quiet.
"The tall one," said Mzee Kasozi.
Nadia looked up.
"He used to bring me tea." The old man did not turn round. "Every Monday. A small flask. I never asked. He just put it on the dashboard."
"I didn't know that."
"No." The traffic moved a metre. The Matatu rolled forward. "He asked me not to say."
"Why are you telling me?"
"Because I am old and I have driven this road for thirty-one years." He changed gear. "In thirty-one years I have seen many people get on and many people get off. And I have noticed that the ones who sit together do not always get down together. It is not a rule. It is only a thing I've noticed."
She did not know what to say. She sat with her hands in her lap.
"It's a long road," said Mzee Kasozi. He reached out and turned up the rumba. "Sometimes it takes a while to reach the stage."
That was all. He did not speak again for a month.
Eli took a boda.
It cost him twelve thousand a day, there and back, which he could not afford. But he found that he could not sit on that seat. He had tried, twice. On the Monday after the shed, he had climbed on at Kireka, by habit, and gone down the aisle with his notebook in his hand, and then stopped. There had been a woman in his place, with a baby, laughing. The third row, on the left, was waiting, a few paces ahead, with its cracked window and its small bent figure in a blue dress, and for one wild second he had almost kept walking.
He had turned round. He had got off at the next stage, and found Dan, and said, "Take me to town."
"Boss, you have a pass for the taxi."
"I know."
"You sick?"
"Yes," said Eli. "Quite."
He told himself he was giving her room. It was the right thing. It was what she had asked, in her way, and he was a man who had learned, painfully, in the last month, to take a person at her word. But every morning, when the grey dawn came up over the roofs of Kireka and he heard the Matatu go by on the road, a rattle and a cough and the faint thin scrape of the rumba, he stood at the window of his room above the shed with a cup of cold tea and listened until it had gone.
On Friday evenings, the money arrived.
Rent, 2 of 15. Rent, 3 of 15. Fifty thousand shillings, each time, to the same number, with the same short line. He watched it come in. He did not touch it. He opened a tin, an old biscuit tin from his mother's kitchen with a picture of a Scottish castle on the lid, and every Friday, when the message came, he drew out the notes at the mobile money agent and put them into the tin, one on top of another, crisp and neat.
She is paying me back, he thought. She is paying me back, a week at a time, because I took something she could not afford to give.
He had thought it would feel like punishment. It did not. It felt, strangely, like a letter. A short one. Fifteen lines, to be delivered over fifteen weeks. I'm here. I'm still here. This is how I stay.
He closed the lid and put the tin on the shelf beside the books on foam.
His father found him on the second Sunday of March, because Eli did not go to the house.
He had missed two lunches. He had said he was ill, and then that he was busy, and on the third week a text arrived at nine in the morning that said, in its whole length, Elijah. Come. There was nothing else. There was no signature. It had the weight of a stone.
He took the taxi to the foot of the hill. He walked up the road past the jacarandas, which had put out their first purple flowers, and found Peter standing at the gate with his hands behind his back and an expression of such wooden, painful blankness that Eli knew at once.
"He's not on the veranda."
"No, sir."
"Where is he?"
"In the study."
"Is it bad?"
"I would not say, sir." Peter pressed the button. As the gates swung open, he said, in a rush, very low, "Mr. Elijah. If I may. I have worked here eleven years. He is not an easy man. But he has not slept since February."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm only saying, sir." Peter looked at his boots. "The light is on all night."
The study was on the ground floor, at the end of the hall, a long dim room lined with leather books that nobody read. There was a desk the size of a boat. There was a globe, a gold clock, a framed photograph of a young man on Nakivubo Road. His father sat behind the desk in his shirtsleeves with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and a large brown folder open in front of him.
"Sit down."
"I'd rather stand."
"I did not ask what you'd rather." Gerald Mugerwa closed the folder. "Sit down, Elijah."
He sat.
"It is March," said his father. "I gave you until the end of the year. I extended it to the end of February. You have not come. I have been patient. I have been, I think, more patient than any reasonable man."
"I know, Papa."
"I would like an answer."
"I haven't changed my mind."
"I did not ask if you had changed your mind. I asked for an answer." He leaned back. "Will you come to Mugerwa Holdings in April, as logistics director, with a salary, an office, and a place on the board? Yes or no."
"No."
The word fell into the room like a coin into a well. Neither of them moved. The gold clock ticked.
"I see," said his father.
"I'm sorry."
"Are you?"
"Yes." He found, with some surprise, that it was true. "I am sorry that you are disappointed. I am not sorry that I said it."
"Hmm." The old man took off his glasses. He folded them, and set them down, very precisely, on the folder. "I will tell you what I know. I know that you have rented a garage in Kireka. That you have two employees, one of whom is a welder, and one an unpaid friend. I know that you have made four hundred and eleven shillings in profit in the last quarter. That you sleep on a camp bed. That you have not touched your account since you came back from Nairobi, except on the sixth of February, when you withdrew seven hundred and fifty thousand shillings in cash."
Eli went still.
"I have people who watch these things," said his father. "It is not a pleasant thing to say. I do not enjoy it. But it is my money, and it is my son."
"It was my money."
"It was. You are right." He did not raise his voice. "May I ask where it went?"
"A friend."
"A friend with a landlord."
"Papa."
"I am not accusing you. I am telling you what I know. I know it was for her. For the girl who works at the printing firm. I know she refused my help on the veranda, and I confess I thought it would end there." He paused. "I did not think my son would go behind her back."
"I did not go behind her back. I..."
"You did, Elijah. You may not like the phrase. But it is accurate." His father looked at him. It was a long, level, heavy look, with no heat in it at all, and it was the worst thing Eli had ever received. "You did it for love, and she did not want it. Is that correct?"
"Yes."
"And what did she say?"
"That I was your son."
"Ah." A very small, very odd movement in the old man's face. "I see."
Neither of them spoke for a time.
"I will tell you something," said Gerald Mugerwa, at last, in a different voice. "I did not intend to say it. I am an old man. I was proud of my pride. But I have thought about it for a month." He turned his head and looked at the photograph on the wall, the young man with the stall of onions and the fierce, hungry face. "That girl said a thing to me on the veranda. She said, I will do it myself, or I'll do without. I'm good at it. And I thought, I know that voice. I have heard that voice in my own head, every morning, for forty years."
"Papa..."
"She is right to refuse. She would be a fool to take it. I was a fool to offer." He drew a long breath. "I wished only to say so. It is not an apology. I am not capable of one. But if you wish to tell her."
Eli stared at him.
"That is all," said his father. "That, and the matter of the account."
"What about it?"
"I have decided that I will close it."
"You can't."
"I can. It is mine. I put the money there when you were eighteen, on the understanding that you would join the business. That understanding has not been honoured." He picked up the glasses again, and put them on. "I will not be cruel. You may keep what you have in your pocket. The car, I will take back. The apartment in Bugolobi, which you have never used, will be sold. And the allowance your mother sends, which I know about, will stop."
"Mama sends nothing."
"She sends ten thousand notes in an envelope every month. I do not mind. But it will stop, because I will tell her it must." He met his eyes. "I want you to understand what I am doing, Elijah. I do not want you to be poor. I want you to see what it is. You say you can live on nothing. Then do. I will not stand in your way. But I will not be the one holding the cushion."
The room was very quiet. A fly buzzed against the window.
"Is that all?" said Eli.
"That is all."
"May I go?"
"You may go."
He stood. His knees felt strange. He did not feel angry. He felt, extraordinarily, light. It was as if a cord that had been wound round his chest for twenty-five years had been cut, all at once, and he had not yet learned to stand without it.
"Papa."
"Yes?"
"Thank you."
"For what?"
"For telling me." He did not know how to say the rest. "For the thing about her voice."
His father did not answer. He sat in the dimness behind the great desk with his hands on the folder, looking very old, and very straight.
At the door, Eli stopped. He did not turn round. He said, over his shoulder, in a low voice, "I was not trying to be you. I was trying to be better at being me."
"I know," said Gerald Mugerwa, to the closed door.
His mother was waiting at the gate.
She stood in the shade of the big jacaranda in her blue house dress, with her arms folded, and there was a plastic bag by her feet. She did not say anything. She did not weep. She looked at him, as he came down the long white drive, with the face of a woman who has been standing in the sun for a long time and is not going to leave.
"It is done?"
"Yes."
"He closed it."
"Yes."
"I knew he would." She bent, and picked up the bag. "I have put in the rice. And the stew. And some of the little bananas. And a flask of tea, because you do not drink enough." She held it out. "Take it."
"Mama..."
"It is only food."
"I know." He took it. He stood with the heavy bag in his hand, in the road, in the long afternoon light, and looked at her, at the small, straight, unbowed figure with the glasses on a chain. "You are not going to give me an envelope."
"No."
"You always do."
"I do. And you always refuse." She smiled, a little crookedly. "I have decided to stop. It is a ridiculous game. We have been playing it since you were seventeen, and we both know the rules, and we both lose."
"Mama..."
"I'm proud of you." She said it very quickly, looking at the bag. "That is all I came to say. I should have said it at the table. I am a coward. I married a man who is always right, and I have been practising silence for thirty-four years, and I am not good at the other thing." She looked up. Her eyes were bright. "You are doing something hard. Your father cannot say it. I can. I am saying it."
"Thank you."
"And I like her."
"Mama."
"I do. She stood up. At my table. And told that man the truth about her salary. I have wanted to do that to him for thirty years." She gave a short, helpless, delighted laugh, and wiped her eye with a knuckle. "Go and find her, Eli. Say it properly. Do not be your father about it."
"She doesn't want to see me."
"She said she needed time."
"How do you know?"
"I have an excellent network," said Florence Mugerwa, and kissed him on the forehead, and pushed him down the hill.
It took Nadia six weeks to win the dairy, and she did not tell anyone until it was done.
It began, as most things did that spring, by accident. On a Thursday in the first week of March, a woman in a headscarf and a faded kitenge appeared at the door of Brightside, with a plastic bag in her arms and an expression of grim embarrassment. She was fifty or so, short, with powerful forearms and a weathered face, and she carried the bag as if it held a baby.
"I am looking," she said, in Luganda, "for someone who does labels."
Sandra, who was eating, waved vaguely at Nadia.
She was called Mama Joyce. She was the chairwoman of a cooperative of fifty-three women who kept cows in Mpigi and made yoghurt and ghee in a shed behind a church. They had been selling it at the roadside for six years, in recycled bottles, with handwritten labels. A man from a supermarket had told them that, if they wanted to be on a shelf, they needed branding. They did not know what branding was. They had saved a hundred and eighty thousand shillings.
"I cannot pay you much," said Mama Joyce. She put the bag on the desk, and drew out a bottle. It was an old whisky bottle, washed clean, with a lid made from a piece of cork, and inside, thick and white and glistening, was the best yoghurt Nadia had ever seen. "But I want you to see what we make."
Nadia looked at it.
She did not take long. She was aware, vaguely, of Mr. Kiggundu behind her, in the door of his glass office, shaking his head. She knew he would say that a hundred and eighty thousand shillings would not cover the cost of the paper. She knew that a job like this was a charity, and that Brightside was a small firm with its own debts. She knew, in the cold practical part of her mind, that she should say, I'm sorry, we can't.
She opened the bottle. She dipped in a finger.
It tasted like nothing she had eaten in years. It tasted of grass and milk and a faint cold sweetness, of mornings, of a village. It tasted of her grandmother's kitchen in Busoga, the dry season before she died, when Nadia had sat on the floor and been allowed to lick the spoon.
"What is it called?" she said.
"We have not named it."
"What do the women say?"
"They say..." Mama Joyce hesitated. A faint colour came into her weathered cheeks. "They say it is Maama Wa. It means Mother's. They do not mean anything by it. It is only what they call it, among themselves, when they are making it. Is Maama Wa ready?"
"That is the name," said Nadia.
"But it is not a proper name."
"It's the best name I have ever heard."
She took the job. She did it in the evenings, after hours, on the long table, with a plate of rice and Hassan sulking in the corner, drawing a cow nine times. She did it on Sundays at the shed in Mpigi, sitting on an upturned crate among the cows and the steel drums while the women told her, in a steady chorus, what they wanted. She learned that they did not want a picture of a cow. They had eleven hundred cows, and they were tired of cows. They wanted a picture of a woman. Any woman. A woman with her sleeves rolled, holding a spoon.
She wrote the line herself, at two in the morning, on the back of a till receipt. Made by women who get up early.
She showed it to Mama Joyce. The older woman read it three times, with her lips moving. Then she put her hand over her mouth.
"Is it too much?" said Nadia.
"No," said Mama Joyce. "It is exactly what we do."
By the end of April, there was a label. There was a logo, a small round woman with a wooden spoon, drawn by Hassan, with great tenderness, in white on a deep green. There was a carton, and a leaflet, and a pitch to the buyer at a supermarket chain in Entebbe, which Nadia delivered herself, in her blue dress, in a glass office, while Mama Joyce and two other women sat behind her in their best gomesis, saying nothing, with their hands in their laps.
The buyer listened. He tasted the yoghurt. He asked three questions. At the end he said, "How soon can you deliver two thousand a week?"
Mama Joyce said, in Luganda, "God is good," and began to weep.
She told Mr. Kiggundu on a Monday, at six in the evening, when the others had left.
He was alone in the glass office with a lamp and a plate of cold chapati. He had his shoes off. He looked tired, and old, and older than he had in January, and he listened to her without interrupting, with his chin on his hand.
"Two thousand a week," he said.
"For a year. With an option."
"And the cooperative pays on time?"
"They pay in advance. The supermarket has guaranteed it."
"Hmm." He took off his glasses. "It is not much money."
"No."
"For us. It is thirty-five thousand shillings a week. After the cost of paper."
"I know."
"But it is a start." He put the glasses on again, and looked at her, and, to her astonishment, something moved in his heavy face, a long slow shift, like a ship turning. "Nadia. I will be honest with you. I have had a firm for twenty-two years. I have employed forty-one people. I have never, in all that time, had one who walked in off the street with a plastic bag and came out with a contract."
"It wasn't me. It was Mama Joyce."
"It was you." He said it flatly. "I would like to offer you a position. Not assistant. Account manager. Six hundred and fifty thousand a month, and five per cent of anything you bring in."
She sat very still.
"I cannot do more," said Mr. Kiggundu. "I wish I could. I have a debt at the bank. The Mugerwa job paid the staff, but it did not save us. I am not a rich man. I am only a man who believes in good work." He paused. "If you want to go to a larger firm, I will give you a reference. I will not be offended. I will weep, quietly, in the toilet. But I will write it."
Nadia looked at her hands.
Six hundred and fifty thousand. She did the sum, as she always did, in an instant. Two-fifty for the room. A hundred and fifty home. That left two hundred and fifty. For transport, and food, and the fifty a week she owed.
It was not enough. It was the first time in her life she had thought the words and not been afraid of them. It was not enough, and she knew now what enough looked like, and she was going to go and get it.
"Thank you, sir," she said. "I accept."
"Good." He smiled, a short, dry, kind smile, the same as in June. "Now go home. You look as though you've not eaten."
"I'm fine."
He raised an eyebrow.
"I mean," said Nadia, and stopped. She took a breath. "I haven't. Since this morning. I will."
"Good girl," said Mr. Kiggundu.
She called her mother that night, at eight, from the bed, with the light off.
She had not planned to. She had meant to wait, until the contract was signed, and the first cheque in. But she sat there in the dark with her phone in her lap, listening to Mama Sauda's radio next door and the long wet whisper of the rain on the roof, and she thought, If I wait, I will find another reason.
The phone rang four times. Then her mother's voice, warm, loud, expectant. "Nadia! You are late. You are two minutes late. I was beginning to worry."
"Mama. I need to tell you something."
"Is it a man?"
"No."
"Is it a job? A promotion?"
"It's... both. In a way. It's a promotion. They are paying me six hundred and fifty." She swallowed. "But that's not the thing. Mama, listen. I need you to listen, and not say anything till I've finished."
The line hummed. In the background, the shop. A radio, the clink of coins, Racheal's voice reciting a poem.
"I am listening," said her mother.
She told her.
She did it in order, slowly, in a flat low voice, like reading a report. She told her what the salary had been. Four hundred and fifty. She told her what the rent was. She told her what she had sent home each month, and what that had left, and how many days she had eaten only bread. She told her about the biscuits in the toilet. She told her about Mama Sauda's loan, and the fainting in the taxi park, and the three months in arrears. She said, "I lied. I said it was enough. It never was." She said it all, in about eight minutes, without crying.
At the end she stopped, and the line was silent.
It was a very long silence. She could hear her mother breathing. She could hear, far off, the shop door open and close, and a child laughing, and the whole of the little house in Walukuba, with its blue door and its tin roof, waiting.
"Mama?"
"Yes."
"Say something."
"I do not know what." Her mother's voice was very small. It did not sound like her mother's voice. "Give me a minute. I must sit."
"Okay."
"I am sitting." A pause. "Nadia. Did you not eat?"
"Not always."
"For months?"
"Not all the time. I managed."
"You managed." Her mother's voice cracked and reassembled itself. "You managed. You sent us a hundred and fifty thousand shillings, and you ate bread. You fainted in a taxi park. And I called you every night, every night, at eight o'clock, and said, how are things? And you said..."
"Fine."
"Fine." It came out of her like a sob. "I am your mother. I carried you. I changed your... how could you... why did you not say?"
"Because you needed me to be fine."
"I did not."
"You did, Mama. You said it. Everything is waiting on you."
"I said that?"
"In March. Before I left."
There was a very long pause.
"I did," said her mother, in a hollow voice. "God forgive me. I did say that."
"It wasn't your fault."
"It was." She was crying openly now, with a loud, wet, gulping sound, the way she cried at weddings and funerals. "It was a thing I said without thinking. I wanted to... I meant, I am proud, I believe in you. I did not mean, carry us. I did not mean..."
"I know."
"Francis!" her mother cried, suddenly, away from the phone, in a high cracked wail. "Francis, come! Come here! It is Nadia! She has been going without food!"
"Mama, don't..."
There were footsteps, and a murmur, and the rustle of a receiver being passed, and then, near, a slow, mild, familiar voice.
"Nadia?"
"Taata."
"I am here." Her father's voice was quiet and perfectly steady. He might have been speaking across a table. "Your mother is upset. She will be better in a moment. She is washing her face."
"I'm sorry. I should have told you."
"Yes."
"I didn't want to..."
"I know what you did not want." A pause. "I would like to tell you something. May I?"
"Of course."
"In 1986, I came to Kampala with a cardboard box and a good attitude." His voice was dry, and very gentle. "I lived in a room in Katwe that had no window. I ate once a day. I wrote letters to my own father, every week, saying that I was well. I said it for six years. I was not well. I was thin and frightened and alone, and I thought that if I told him, I would have failed."
She was holding the phone with both hands.
"Then one day my father came to Kampala, without telling me. He knocked on the door. I opened it. He looked at me, and at the room, and at the one tin plate, and he did not say a word. He took off his hat. He sat down on the bed. And he said, My son, I have been writing to you for six years, and I always knew."
"Taata..."
"I have been waiting twenty-four years to say that to someone." Her father's voice was thick. "I think you should have heard it sooner. I'm sorry. I did not think. I told you, there is no shame in a road that turns, and I was too much of a coward to say, I know." A breath. "Of course you were hungry, Nadia. Of course. You are my child."
She put her hand over her mouth. She could not speak. She sat in the dark with the rain falling and her father's voice in her ear, a warm, flat, unremarkable voice with thirty-four years of municipal paperwork in it, and for the first time in a year she let go.
It was not tidy. It came out in long dry shudders. She did not try to stop it. On the other end of the line her father said nothing at all. He only stayed on the phone, breathing quietly, and let her.
When she had finished, she heard, behind him, a nose being blown, and her mother's voice, thick and fierce.
"Give me that."
"Janet."
"I said, give me the phone." There was a scuffle. "Nadia."
"Yes, Mama."
"Listen to me. I am going to say a hard thing."
"Okay."
"You will not send us any more money."
"Mama, I..."
"Not a shilling. Not this month. Not until you are eating, and you have paid your landlord, and put something in the bank." Her mother's voice was iron. "Ivan's fees, we will manage. I have a freezer. I have a second freezer, I do not need two, I will sell it. I will teach him to wash dishes for the school. Your father will ask the council for an advance. We will be fine."
"I don't want you to..."
"I am not asking what you want. I am your mother." She drew a ragged breath. "I should have asked what you needed, instead of what you could send. It is a different question. I have been asking the wrong one for a year."
"It's all right."
"It is not. I am not that kind of woman. I am a woman who runs a shop and tells people what to do. But I want you to know." She stopped. "I want you to know that you are my daughter before you are my income."
Nadia laughed. It was wet and cracked and utterly helpless. She wiped her face with the blanket.
"That's the nicest thing you've ever said."
"I know. I practised it." Her mother sniffed. "Now. Tell me. Did you eat tonight?"
"No."
"Then go and eat. Go and buy something. Go to the stage and buy two plates of rice and beans. I will wait."
"Mama, it's raining."
"Then get wet!"
She got wet. She put on her coat, and went out in her slippers, through the rain, across the dark yard to the lane, with her mother's voice still on the phone in her pocket, saying, "Is it hot? Does it have meat?" over and over. She bought two plates, and a cup of tea. She came back and sat on the edge of the bed, and ate, in the dark, with her fingers, with the phone propped on the shelf. Her mother and father ate too, in Jinja, a hundred kilometres away, on the sofa, in front of the television, with the sound off, and the three of them said nothing at all, and it was the best dinner of her life.
He found a buyer on a Tuesday, in the fish market at Kisenyi.
He had not been looking for one. He had gone because he had run out of other things to do. The shed had no money for foam, and Tina, whom he could no longer pay, had said she would work for a share, and that it was the stupidest thing she had ever agreed to. He had sold his watch. It had been a good one, Swiss, a twenty-first-birthday present, and the man in the shop at Kikuubo had given him a hundred and ninety thousand shillings for it with the air of someone doing a favour.
So he took three boxes, in a taxi, down to the market, and stood by the lake, among the nets and the cries, and waited.
It was a loud, bright, hectic place. A hundred women sat at long wooden tables under flapping tarpaulins, with mounds of silver fish piled in front of them, gutting and scaling, their arms red to the elbow, and boys ran between the stalls with baskets on their heads. The air was thick with flies and salt and the heavy sweet reek of the lake. A man was selling ice from a cart. It melted in the sun as fast as he could shovel it.
Eli put the first box on a table, and opened it.
He did not give a speech. He had meant to. He had a page of notes, in his pocket, and a line that Nadia had given him, which he had practised in the shed for a week. But when he looked at the women, with their hands and their fish and their quick sharp eyes, the line left him. He stood there, and said nothing.
"What is it?" said a woman at the next table.
"A box."
"For what?"
"For the fish."
"A fish box." She snorted. "We have those. We have basins."
"It's cold."
"What?"
"It's a cold box." He opened the lid, and put in his hand, and held it out. "Feel."
She touched it, with the back of one wet finger. She frowned. She touched it again. "It is cold."
"It has been in the sun for three hours. There was ice in it at ten. Look."
She looked. Inside, on the white foam lining, lay a heap of small silver fish, glittering, and a few grey lumps that had been ice.
"How?"
"The foam. It is thick. It keeps the cold in." He stumbled. "It costs twenty-five thousand shillings. It's strong. It will last you two years. If you sell your fish at noon with the box, it's still fresh. If you sell it in a basin, it is half rotten by eleven."
"Twenty-five thousand," said the woman.
"Yes."
"For a box."
"It is expensive. I know." He wiped his forehead. "But how much do you lose in a week?"
She did not answer. Her eyes went to the basin by her foot, where a dozen grey, soft, spoiled fish lay in a heap. She looked at them for a long moment. Then she looked at the box. Then, slowly, at him.
"Forty thousand," she said. "In a good week."
"Then it pays for itself in four days."
"That is not possible."
"It is arithmetic."
"It is arithmetic," said the woman, to the market at large, in the voice of someone who has been given a very heavy and unlikely stone. "He says it is arithmetic."
A small crowd had gathered. A big woman in a green apron pushed through, with a knife in one hand. "Let me see." She took the lid, and turned it over, and rapped the side with her knuckle. "Plastic."
"Recycled."
"Who makes it?"
"I do."
"You?" She looked him up and down, from his dusty canvas shoes to his bare wrist. "You look as if you've never held a fish."
"I haven't."
"Then why do you sell boxes?"
"Because I have held a lot of foam," said Eli.
There was a pause. And then the woman in the green apron threw back her head and let out a roar of laughter, a great shaking guffaw that rolled across the market, and the rest of them joined in, and for a moment he stood in the middle of it, in the sun, with the flies, among forty laughing fishwives, and thought, Well. That's that.
But she stopped. She wiped her eyes with her wrist.
"I'll take one," said the woman in the green apron.
"You will?"
"On credit. Pay you at the end of the month. If it does what you say, I tell the others." She jabbed the knife at him. "If it doesn't, I come to your house."
"I don't have a house."
"Then I will come to your shed."
"Done," said Eli, hoarsely.
He sold three that day. He sold nine on Wednesday, and twenty-two by the end of the week. He sold them on credit, on a promise, to women who held them in both hands, with the dubious tender look of people handling a baby. He wrote the names in his notebook, and the amounts, and the dates. It was not much. It came to four hundred and sixty thousand shillings, on paper, to be collected by April. But it was the first time in two years that anyone had said yes.
He rode home on a boda in the dusk, through the long gold traffic, with the empty box strapped to his back, and found that he was singing.
They met by accident, on the last Saturday of April, in the middle of Nakasero Market.
It was a good, hot, raucous morning. The big market hall was packed to the roof. Stalls rose in tiers, heaped with tomatoes and cabbages, bunches of matooke, pyramids of mangoes and pawpaw and passion fruit, sacks of beans and groundnuts, and everywhere the crowd moved, thick and slow and shouting, in a haze of sunlight and dust.
Nadia was buying vegetables.
It was a thing she had started to do. She had made herself a rule: on the last Saturday, a proper shop. Not a packet of biscuits. A cabbage, a kilo of tomatoes, onions, a small bag of beans. She had started to cook, in the evenings, on a borrowed charcoal stove in her room, in defiance of Mr. Bbosa, and Mama Sauda, who smelled the onions, had said nothing, and had come round with a pot of her own.
She had a basket on her arm. She was haggling over a heap of tomatoes with a woman who wanted four thousand a kilo, and was prepared to go to three, when someone behind her said, in a voice that she would have known in her sleep:
"They are not worth four."
She turned.
He was standing at the next stall with a large white box under one arm. It was a new one. It was cleaner than the others, with a slightly different lid. He wore the grey jacket, and there was no watch on his wrist. He was thinner. His hair was long again, and his face was brown, and the shadows under his eyes had gone, and he looked, she thought, with a small helpless stab, extraordinarily well.
"Eli."
"Hello."
"You're here."
"I'm selling boxes." He lifted it, with a faint, awkward, boyish grin. "This is the Mark Two. She has a drain. She is much better behaved."
"You sold a box?"
"Sixty-one."
"Sixty-one?"
"On credit, mostly. But sixty-one." He cleared his throat. "Nine of them have paid. The rest are still in the field."
"That's... that's wonderful."
"It's a start."
"I'm so..." She stopped. She was holding her basket in both hands in front of her stomach. "I'm happy for you."
"Thank you."
"I mean it."
"I know you do." He looked at her. The crowd moved round them like water round a stone. "You've got a new dress."
"It's not new. It's Sandra's."
"It suits you."
"Thank you."
"You look..." He did not finish. He looked down at the box. "You look well, Nadia. You look like a person who is eating."
"I am."
"Good."
"I got promoted."
"I heard."
"You heard?" She stared. "From whom?"
"Mama Sauda." He had the grace to look sheepish. "I may have gone to see her. Once. To ask how you were. She told me I was a fool, and gave me a plate of cassava, and said you had won a dairy."
Nadia laughed. She could not help it. It came up in her chest, a quick surprised burst, and she put the back of her hand against her mouth.
"I am sorry about the payments," she said. "I don't mean the money. I mean the... I know it is odd, to keep sending. You did not have to keep them."
"I'm keeping them."
"Why?"
"I have a tin."
"A tin?"
"With a castle on the lid. It is in the shed. I put each one in." His voice was low. "I couldn't send them back. I thought, if I did, it would mean we were... that it was over. So I kept them. It's thirteen so far."
"Thirteen."
"Two more."
"I'll send them."
"I know." He did not smile. He looked at her, with that steady, listening, two-things-at-once look, and for a moment she felt as though the whole noisy hall had gone quiet. "You don't have to. I don't want them. I only like to see them come."
She could not say anything. She stood with her basket in the middle of the market, with a woman shouting about tomatoes behind her and the smell of fruit all round, and could not find a single word.
"I should go," said Eli.
"Yes."
"I have a woman in Kisenyi who thinks I'm a scam."
"You'll sell her one."
"I'll sell her two." He shifted the box. He took a step, and stopped, and said, without turning round, in a rough low voice, "Nadia."
"Yes?"
"I told my father no."
She went still.
"A month ago. In the study. I said it clearly. He closed the account. He took the car." He did turn, then, and looked at her, with his chin up. "I have nothing. I am just Eli. For real, now. I thought you should know."
"Eli..."
"I'm not saying it so you'll... I'm not asking." He shook his head. "I'm only telling you. I'm not hiding anything. It seemed right to say."
"Thank you."
"I won't come to the Matatu. Not till you say. I'll wait." He tried to smile. It was a poor, crooked attempt. "But I thought, if I saw you, I should say it. In case I never did."
She looked at him for a long time, at the sunburnt, narrow, honest face and the empty wrist and the white box under his arm. She wanted, very badly, to put the basket down. She wanted to cross the two steps between them and put her forehead against his shoulder. She could feel the shape of the movement, in her arms, ready.
But it was too early. She knew it. She knew it the way you know a fruit is not ripe, by the weight in the hand. There was something else that had to happen first, something she could not name, in the long slow work of the last two months, and it was not finished.
"I'm glad you told me," she said.
"Okay."
"I'm glad."
"Okay." He nodded, once. "Goodbye, Nadia."
"Goodbye, Eli."
He walked away through the crowd with the white box on his hip, a long thin figure, head and shoulders above the shoppers, until the crush of the market closed behind him. She stood and watched him go. The tomato woman, behind her, said, "Three and a half," in a gentle, tactful voice, and Nadia nodded, and gave her the money without counting.
When she looked up again, he had gone. But on the ground by the stall, where he had stood, lay a small thing she had not noticed. It was a pencil. A stub of one, worn down to an inch, with the end chewed.
She picked it up. It was warm.
She put it in her pocket, and finished her shopping, and went home on the Matatu, in the third row, on the left, by the window that did not close. And all the way home, from the roundabout at Nakawa to the green gate in Banda, with the rumba playing and the dust blowing in, she held it in her fist and did not once look at the empty seat.
She did not need to. She knew exactly how it felt.