Chapter 2
The Man by the Window
For the first two weeks, Nadia did not know she was being looked at, and for the next two, she did not know she was looking back.
It was just a route. That was how she thought of it. A strip of road, twelve kilometres long, that she travelled twice a day, in a white minibus with a cracked windscreen, in the company of about fifteen strangers who changed slightly every morning and not at all. She learned it the way you learn the words of a song you did not choose to hear. The stage at Banda, where a woman in a green apron sold roasted maize from a basin. The big gate of Kyambogo University on the right, with its crowd of students and its faded sign. The hill past the water tower where the engine always complained. The long flat stretch beside the railway line. The roundabout at Nakawa with its patch of dead grass and its police officer, who was always eating something. Then the traffic, thickening and slowing, until the buildings began, and the old taxi park came up ahead like the mouth of a river.
Forty minutes if the road was kind. An hour and ten if it rained.
She learned the people, too. The driver was an old man called Mzee Kasozi, with white stubble and a flat cap, who drove with his seat pushed so far forward that his chest almost touched the wheel and who never, in all the weeks she rode with him, said a word to anyone. He had a cassette player taped to the dashboard. He played the same four tapes in rotation, old Congolese rumba, the guitars rippling and the singers sounding as if they were laughing at something just out of sight. The conductor was a skinny boy called Tosh, nineteen or twenty, in a baseball cap that was too big, who did not so much work the door as perform it. He called out the stages in a sing-song. He tapped coins on the roof. He shouted, at every stop, in the same bright voice, "Move in, move in! There is space!" even when there was no space at all, even when a woman with a sack of onions was standing on someone else's foot.
"There's no space," Nadia said, once, on her third day, to the person beside her.
The person, a retired-looking man in a safari suit, gave her a mild, pitying look. "In Kampala," he said, "there is always space. It is only that you haven't tried hard enough."
She had thought it was a joke. It was not. It was a philosophy, and by the end of the first month she had absorbed it. She no longer flinched when a stranger's elbow settled in her ribs. She had learned to breathe out and make herself thinner.
And she had learned the man by the window.
She would not have said she noticed him. That would have been untrue and slightly embarrassing. It was only that, in a crowd of ever-changing faces, he was one of the few that stayed.
He got on at Kireka, before her, and was always there when the taxi reached Banda. He sat on the right side, in the fourth row, by the window, with his knees pressed against the seat in front because he was too tall for the space. He was perhaps twenty-five or twenty-six, long-limbed and rather thin, with short hair, a narrow face and a mouth that looked as if it was always about to say something dry. He wore the same grey jacket every day, with the cuffs gone soft, over a plain shirt, and on his feet a pair of canvas shoes that had once been white. On his back was a blue rucksack. On his knee, always, was a notebook.
It was a black notebook with a rubber band round it. He opened it as soon as the taxi pulled away, and for the next forty minutes he drew. She could tell from the angle of his hand. It was not writing. It was quick, small, repeated movement, his pencil going over a line again and again, then stopping, and tilting, and a long pause while he stared at it with his head on one side as if it had said something rude.
She wondered what he was drawing.
It was not a thing she could ask. You did not ask strangers on a taxi what they were doing. You looked out of the window, or at your phone, or at the back of the head in front of you. That was the whole etiquette of the city. You pressed yourself into a stranger's side and then you pretended he was not there.
But she noticed, in the way one notices small, unimportant things on a long road. She noticed that he got up, without fuss, to give his seat to an old woman with a walking stick, and then stood in the aisle for the rest of the journey, holding the rail with one hand and his notebook with the other, drawing against the lurching of the vehicle with an expression of mild, intense concentration. She noticed that when a baby on the seat across from him began to cry, he pulled a face, an absurd one, cross-eyed, with his cheeks puffed out, briefly and without looking at the mother, and the baby stopped, astonished, and then laughed, and the man went back to his book as though nothing had happened. She noticed that he never used his phone. She noticed that he always got off at Nakawa, at the stage beside the petrol station, and that he never hurried, and that he said "Thank you" to Tosh, every day, which no one else did.
She started to call him Window, in her head. It was not a clever name. She did not mean it to be.
It was a Tuesday in the third week of June when they first spoke, and it was only three words.
It had rained in the night, and the road was wet and shining. The taxi was packed, more than usual, because a rival vehicle had broken down at Kyambogo and its passengers had been shoved onto this one, so that people were standing in the aisle with their faces pressed against each other's shoulders and a boy was riding half out of the door with one foot on the step. Nadia had been standing since Banda, holding a ceiling strap with her bag clamped under her arm, her head tilted at an unnatural angle to avoid a man's umbrella.
At Kireka Junction two seats opened. One was taken at once by a woman with a toddler. The other was in the fourth row, by the window, beside a long young man with a notebook on his knee.
She looked at it. He was looking out of the window.
She did not want to. It was the sort of seat you only took if you had no choice. But her arm was aching, and the umbrella man was swaying again, and the taxi was about to go over the railway tracks, which was never a good place to be on your feet.
"Is this seat taken?" she said.
He turned. It was the first time she had seen his face from so close. He had dark eyes with something steady in them, a little like a person who is listening to two things at once. He looked at the seat, and then at her, and then, with great care, at the crowded aisle behind her.
"Not yet," he said.
She thought it was an odd answer. Then she saw his mouth twitch, and understood that he was making a joke, a small, dry one, at the expense of the whole vehicle. Not yet, because in a minute, given Tosh and the philosophy of space, three more people would be squeezed onto it.
She almost smiled. She sat.
He moved his knee. He moved his rucksack. He moved his notebook, which he closed, she noticed, and slid under his thigh, as though she might read it from the side. Then he turned back to the window.
That was all. They did not speak again that morning. She spent the rest of the ride with her heart, for no reason she could name, going rather quickly, and her eyes fixed on the back of the head in front of her. At Nakawa he got up, said "Excuse me" in a low voice, and climbed over her knees, and she caught a smell of soap and pencil shavings and something else, something faintly sweet, like warm sawdust. Then he was gone, down the steps, into the rain.
"Thank you," she heard him say to Tosh.
She stared at the empty seat.
It is nothing, she told herself. It is a seat.
She did not look at the window again until the old taxi park.
After that, it became a kind of game that neither of them had agreed to play.
The next morning she boarded at Banda and looked, before she could stop herself, at the fourth row. He was there. His head was bent over the notebook. The seat beside him was empty, and for a moment she thought she would take it, and then she thought, That would be strange, and sat in the third row instead, on the left, by the window that did not close.
The morning after that, the same.
On Friday, he was not there. She noticed the absence before she knew she had been waiting. The window seat on the right stood empty, with a woman in a church hat settled beside it, and the whole minibus felt oddly wrong, slightly tilted, like a table with one short leg. She sat very straight and told herself she was only worried because it was an unusual change. A pattern had broken. She was a person who liked patterns.
On Monday he was back, with a plaster on his thumb.
She wanted to ask. She did not.
Some mornings they sat near each other and some they did not. Some mornings he looked up when she got on, and nodded, a very slight movement, as one nods to a neighbour, and she nodded back and felt foolish. Some mornings he did not look up at all. She told herself this was fine. They were strangers. It was perfectly natural to nod at a stranger you had seen thirty times. It meant nothing. It was the same as nodding at the old man with the safari suit, or the woman who sold maize.
But she did not wonder what the old man with the safari suit was drawing.
The taxi broke down on the nineteenth of July.
It was a Wednesday, grey and heavy, with a low sky the colour of a dirty plate. They had left Banda on time, which was unusual. Mzee Kasozi was driving more slowly than ever, and the rumba was playing a long, rolling number with a guitar that sounded like water. Nadia was in the third row. Window was in the fourth. At the Nakawa roundabout, the police officer, who was eating a mango, waved them through with the hand that was not holding it.
They had gone about two hundred metres past it when the engine coughed.
It was not a loud cough. It was a polite, apologetic, rattling little sound, like an old man clearing his throat before speaking. Then it did it again. Then the whole vehicle began to shudder, and slow, and from under the bonnet, with a sort of tired dignity, rose a thin white column of smoke.
"Ah," said Mzee Kasozi.
It was the first word she had ever heard him say.
The taxi drifted to the side of the road, by the edge of a ditch, and stopped. For a moment nobody moved. The rumba played on in the sudden silence, absurdly cheerful. The smoke curled up past the windscreen and bent in the wind.
"Everybody out!" shouted Tosh. "Out, out! Everybody out! The Matatu is resting!"
Nobody laughed. People were already getting up, groaning, gathering bags and umbrellas, passing children down to the road. Nadia checked her phone. It was twenty-three minutes to eight. The ninety-minute call with Mr. Mutebi, a client who owned a chain of pharmacies and who liked to ring promptly at eight with changes to his order, would begin in exactly twenty-three minutes. She had been trying to get through it for three days. She had promised that the revised proofs would be on his screen by eight. And the proofs were on her laptop. And the laptop was in her bag. And she was two kilometres from the office, in a ditch.
"No," she said aloud. "No, no, no."
She climbed out, onto the shoulder of the road, into the wet grass, and stood looking at the line of traffic going slowly past in both directions. Nobody stopped. A boda man slowed, looked at her blue work dress and shoes, and shook his head at the mud. A lorry drove by throwing up a fan of brown water, and she jumped back, too late.
"Perfect," she said.
"It is not that bad," said a voice beside her.
She turned.
He was standing a little to her left, with his rucksack on one shoulder, looking at the taxi with his head on one side. In the grey light, with a smear of dust on his sleeve and the notebook tucked under his arm, he looked like a man examining a particularly interesting accident. He did not seem angry. He seemed, if anything, pleased.
"It is," said Nadia. "It is that bad. I have a call in twenty minutes."
"Ah." He nodded gravely. "That is bad."
"Yes."
"I would like to say it will be fine. I do not want to lie to you."
"Thank you."
"What I will say is this." He lowered his voice and leaned toward her, as though conveying a secret of state. "I have been riding this vehicle for fourteen months. It has broken down eleven times. And in every case, the driver has said the same thing. It is resting. This is a sign of respect, you understand. The Matatu has done four hundred thousand kilometres without leave. He is not broken. He is a man who has finally asked for a day off. We must be happy for him."
She stared.
"And look," he said, pointing, "how he does it. With dignity. No fuss. He goes to the side. He gives a small cough. He sends up a little smoke, as a flag. He does not sulk or make a scene. We should all have such manners when we are tired."
Something rose in Nadia's chest. It started low, and grew, and she tried to hold it down, because she was late, and furious, and standing in mud. She pressed her lips together. She looked at the taxi, which stood on the verge with its door wide open and a thread of smoke lifting from its bonnet like a tired old man lighting a pipe. She looked at Mzee Kasozi, who was sitting on the front bumper with his cap in his hands, looking out at the road with an expression of profound and weary patience.
She laughed.
It came out all at once. It was not a polite laugh, or a pretty one. It was a snort, followed by a gasp, followed by a long cracked peal that bent her over and made a woman nearby turn and stare. She put a hand over her mouth. It did not help. She laughed until her eyes watered.
"There," said the man, mildly, with the satisfaction of someone who has solved a problem. "That's better."
"I'm sorry." She wiped her face. "I'm sorry. It's not funny. I'm going to be fired."
"You won't be fired."
"You don't know my boss."
"Is he a good man?"
"He's a tired man."
"That's the same thing, after sixty." He shifted the rucksack. "Where do you work?"
"Kampala Road. A printing company."
"What do you print?"
"Everything. Brochures. Banners. Wedding programmes. Funeral programmes. Once, a hundred T-shirts with a goat on them."
"A goat?"
"A political goat. It was a campaign."
"I'm sure it was very persuasive."
"It had opinions." She checked her phone again. Seventeen minutes. Her laughter had gone, and the knot in her stomach was back. "I have to get a boda. Are there any boda men here? I can't see any who will take a woman in a dress through this mud."
"There are always boda men." He looked along the road. "But not on this stretch. They go to the stage. Come. It is a short walk. I know a man."
"You know a man?"
"I know a man who knows a man." He was already walking, with a long, loose, unhurried stride, his notebook under his arm. "It is a very Kampala thing. You will learn."
She hesitated. It was a stranger. It was an idiotic thing to do, to follow a man you had never spoken to, along a road, in the rain. But she looked at the long grey line of traffic, and the time on her phone, and thought of Mr. Mutebi's voice on the line, and of the four hundred and fifty thousand shillings a month that she could not afford to lose.
She followed.
The man he knew was called Dan, and he sat on a motorcycle with a faded cushion on the seat, outside a kiosk selling airtime and soap. He wore a reflective vest that said SAFE RIDER on the back. When he saw the tall young man coming he raised a hand, and said, "Boss! Morning!" and the tall young man said something in Luganda that made him laugh. Then he turned to Nadia and said, "This is Dan. Dan is the fastest man in Nakawa and the safest man in Uganda. Both of those things are true on alternate days."
"Today is a safe day," said Dan solemnly.
"Take her to Kampala Road. The big green building, the one with the school bags. You know it?"
"I know it."
"Twenty minutes?"
"Fifteen."
"Fifteen." He looked at Nadia. "He is lying. But he will try."
"How much?" she said.
"Ten thousand."
"That's too much!"
"It is the price of a good job," said Dan, with dignity. "I will take you through the back streets."
She opened her mouth to argue, and shut it. She looked at her phone. Fourteen minutes. She took out a ten-thousand note and counted it carefully into his hand, the whole of her day's lunch and half of her next one. She climbed on behind him, sidewise, in her dress, with her bag clutched to her chest. She did not look at the tall young man.
"Thank you," she said stiffly. "For the... for the man who knows a man."
"You are welcome." He stood on the verge with his hands in his pockets, in the drizzle, his eyes crinkled at the corners. "I hope the goat does not get you fired."
"Are you coming?"
"No. I am going the other way."
"Oh."
"Meetings," he said vaguely. "I make things. Mostly mistakes."
She did not know what to say to that. Dan revved the engine. The motorcycle jolted forward, and she grabbed him round the waist, and the whole road began to move. She turned her head, as they pulled away, and saw the man in the grey jacket standing at the side of the road with one hand lifted, not waving, only lifted, in a small salute. Then the rain closed around him, and the bend took him, and he was gone.
She reached the office at nine minutes to eight.
Her hair was wet and plastered to her forehead. Her dress was spotted with mud to the knee. She ran up the stairs two at a time, and burst in, gasping, past Sandra, who looked up from her desk with her mouth open, and past Hassan, who said, "What happened to you?" and past the glass office where Mr. Kiggundu was reading a newspaper. She dropped her bag on her desk, tore out the laptop, and opened the files with trembling fingers.
The call came at eight o'clock exactly.
"Good morning, Mr. Mutebi," she said, in the calmest voice she had. "Yes. I have the revised proofs. I'm sending them now."
She got through it. She did not know how. Afterward she sat at her desk with her hands flat on the table and her heart rattling, listening to the printers, and Sandra came over with a plastic cup of tea and set it down beside her without a word.
"Thank you."
"You are shaking."
"I'm fine."
"You are shaking and you are dripping." Sandra looked her up and down, with sympathy, and a certain relish. "What was it? A ditch?"
"The taxi broke down."
"Which one?"
"I don't know. The one from Banda. It has a sign on the dashboard. Matatu."
"Ah, that one!" Sandra nodded sagely. "It is very famous. It used to belong to a man in Mombasa. Someone imported it and never changed the sign. The whole route calls it the Matatu now. It breaks down every month, and nobody ever leaves it." She drank some of her own tea. "It is sentimental."
Nadia, who was thinking of nothing at all, said, "I didn't know that."
"You have been riding it a month!"
"I thought it was just a sign."
"Everything is just a sign," said Sandra comfortably. "Until it isn't."
She did not think about him that day. She told herself so, firmly, at lunchtime and again at four. She had too much to do. She had proofs to approve and a deposit to chase and a woman on the phone who wanted funeral programmes in a shade of purple that did not exist. She had no time to wonder what a man did who made mistakes for a living, or why he got off at the petrol station, or whether he had got his meeting.
She did not think about the way he had said Not yet, with his mouth twitching.
She did not think about the smell of pencil shavings and warm sawdust.
At twenty to seven she shut down her laptop, put on her coat, and went down the stairs into the city, where the evening traffic was backed up as far as the eye could see. A thousand tail lights glowed red in the damp. The air smelled of fried dough and exhaust. She walked to the old taxi park with her head down, in the thick, unhurried crowd, and joined the queue at the Banda stage, behind a woman with a baby and a man with a mattress.
The Matatu was at the front.
It was the same one. She was sure of it. The dented side, the cracked windscreen, the flaking paint. A mechanic must have worked on it all afternoon, because the bonnet was closed and the smoke was gone and Mzee Kasozi was sitting in the driver's seat as though nothing whatever had happened. Tosh was hanging in the open door, shouting. "Banda! Kireka! Move in, move in! There is space!"
She climbed aboard. The third row, on the left, was free. She sat down in it, by the window that did not close, and set her bag on her knees.
And in the fourth row, on the right, with his notebook open on his knee and his pencil moving, sat a long man in a grey jacket.
He looked up.
He did not smile. He only looked at her, steadily, for about two seconds, with his head tilted and an odd, interested, patient expression on his face. Then he lifted two fingers from the page, in a small, ironic wave.
She lifted her hand.
It was a very small thing. It lasted no time at all. But as the taxi lurched out of the park into the red river of the evening, with the rumba playing and the dust rising in the headlights, she found that she was smiling at her own reflection in the glass, and that she did not mind who saw.