Chapter 5
Things We Don't Say
By October, Nadia had a system, and the system was failing.
It lived in her head, in columns, like the accounts of a small and desperate nation. On the first of the month her salary arrived, four hundred and fifty thousand shillings, by mobile money, with a message from Mr. Kiggundu that said Thank you for your hard work. By the second, two hundred and fifty had gone to Mr. Bbosa, who counted it into his exercise book with a coughing fit. By the third, she had sent a hundred and fifty to Jinja. That left fifty. From the fifty came transport, thirty-two thousand if she walked part of the way, forty if she did not. That left eighteen. Eighteen thousand shillings for food and airtime and soap and everything else a person needs in thirty days.
She had worked it out on the back of an envelope, in the toilet at work, and looked at the answer for a long time.
Then she had folded it up very small and put it in the bottom of her bag, where it could not see her.
She no longer ate lunch. That was the first thing to go. She told Sandra she was on a diet, and Sandra, who was a large, kind, shouting woman with strong opinions on carbohydrates, approved and offered her a list of fruit. She told Hassan, the designer, who sat by the window with a pencil behind each ear and a way of looking at her a half-second too long, that she was fasting. "For what?" he said. "For a project," said Nadia, and he nodded, impressed, and left a packet of ginger biscuits on her desk the next day without a word.
She ate the biscuits very slowly, one at a time, in the toilet.
It was not that she was starving. She told herself that firmly. She was not a person who starved. People in documentaries starved. She was a person who had made a sensible budget and was learning to be efficient. She ate bread and tea for breakfast and rice and beans in the evening from a woman at the stage who charged two thousand. In between there was water. She had discovered that you could drink a great deal of water, and that if you drank it slowly, with your eyes on the horizon, you could convince your stomach to wait.
Her stomach was not always convinced.
On the fifth, her mother phoned at eight, as usual.
"Ivan's fees," her mother said. "Have you sent them?"
"I sent a hundred and fifty on the third."
"Yes. But the fees are three hundred and eighty."
Nadia sat on the edge of the bed. The bulb overhead was swinging again. "I thought you had some."
"We had some. But there was your father's medical check. And the new tyres for the bicycle. And Racheal's school trip, which you paid for, God bless you, but there was also the extra money for the lunch." Her mother's voice was tired and kind and relentless. "It is not a big amount. Two hundred and thirty. By Friday. They will send him home otherwise. I do not want him sitting at home, Nadia, with his friends in class."
"I understand."
"I would not ask."
"I know."
"You are earning. You said it was enough."
"It is."
"Then it is no problem?"
Nadia looked at the wall. On the wall, above the shelf, she had stuck a postcard that Racheal had sent her, a drawing in crayon of a house with a very large sun. Underneath, in Racheal's careful print, it said, Come home soon, we miss your voice.
"No," she said. "It is no problem."
She hung up. She sat there for a long time. Then she opened her mobile money and looked at the balance, and began, very carefully, to work out how a person could send two hundred and thirty thousand shillings she did not have.
Eli's father owned a house in Kololo with eleven bedrooms and a gate that opened by itself.
Eli did not think of it as his father's house. He thought of it as the place. I have to go to the place on Sunday. The place has asked for me. He had used the word for so long that it had become a kind of joke, a private one, and he did not know how to stop.
He took a taxi to the bottom of the hill and walked the last kilometre. This was a habit. He told himself it was because of the traffic. It was not. It was because he could not bear to arrive in the way his father's chauffeur would have brought him, in the long black Land Cruiser with the tinted windows, to be received at the door by Margaret the housekeeper and a plate of cold juice.
The road was lined with jacarandas, bare now, and big white gates, behind each of which a dog barked on schedule. Uniformed guards stood at each one, on stools, with their radios. At number fourteen a man in a cap rose, saluted, and pressed a button. The iron gates swung inward with a long electric sigh.
"Good afternoon, Mr. Elijah."
"Good afternoon, Peter. How is the knee?"
"Better, sir. Thank you for asking."
"Is he in?"
"The Chairman is on the veranda."
"Of course he is." Eli adjusted the strap of his rucksack. "Wish me luck."
"Good luck, sir," said Peter gravely, and pressed the button again.
The drive was a long curve of white gravel between lawns so green they looked painted. At the end of it stood the house. It was a handsome, heavy, cream building with two storeys and a double row of white pillars along the front, and a fountain, now dry, in a circle of flowers. A silver Mercedes stood by the steps, and next to it a black Land Cruiser, and next to that, shining like a beetle in the sun, his mother's small blue Honda, which she drove herself, to the horror of her husband.
He had grown up in that house. He had learned to ride a bicycle on that gravel. He had once hidden for four hours in the third-floor linen cupboard to avoid a piano lesson. And every time he walked up those steps, in his grey jacket and canvas shoes, he felt that the house looked at him with a kind of polite surprise, like a hostess who has been told that an unexpected guest is arriving.
"Elijah."
His father did not get up. He sat in a wicker chair at the end of the veranda, with a glass of water on a small table beside him and a newspaper folded in his lap. Gerald Mugerwa was sixty-two, a broad, upright, close-cropped man with grey in his moustache and a gold watch that he wound himself. He wore a pale shirt, with the cufflinks Eli's mother had given him on their twenty-fifth anniversary, and he had a way of sitting, absolutely still, with his hands on the arms of the chair, that suggested a person waiting for the world to approach him.
"Good afternoon, Papa."
"You walked."
"The traffic was bad."
"Peter told me. He says you have been walking for two years." His father looked at the canvas shoes. "It is an interesting hobby. Does it have a purpose?"
"Exercise."
"Hmm." He did not smile. "Sit."
Lunch was served at one.
It was served in the big dining room, at a table that could seat sixteen and today seated three, with a white cloth and silver and a bowl of lilies in the middle. Margaret brought the food on a trolley: rice, matooke, beef stew, a green salad, a dish of fried tilapia, each in its own covered silver dish. Eli's mother had made the stew herself. She always did. She stood at the end of the table, in her Sunday dress with her glasses on a chain, directing a young girl in a black apron with small movements of her hand.
Florence Mugerwa was fifty-eight, small and round and quick, with the bright, observant eyes of a woman who had spent thirty years sitting beside a very powerful man and listening to what he did not say. She had been a primary school teacher before the supermarkets. She still ran a foundation, now, that paid school fees for girls in four districts, and she did it with the same exactness with which she used to mark spelling tests. She had never raised her voice at her sons in her life. She had never needed to.
"Eli," she said, putting a hand on his cheek as he bent to kiss her. "You are thin."
"I'm the same."
"You are thinner. Sit by me. Eat the fish. It is the good kind."
"Yes, Mama."
"Are you sleeping?"
"Yes."
"Truly?"
"Mostly."
"Hmm." It was the same hmm his father used, but warmer. She served him a mountain of rice.
The screen at the end of the table lit up, and there, in a pixelated square, was his brother.
"Hello, hello!" said Joseph, from Toronto. It was seven in the morning there. He was thirty, broad like their father, in a hooded sweatshirt, with a mug of coffee and a grey window behind him. "Can you hear me? Is it working? Papa, I can see you."
"I can see you too," said their father. "You look tired."
"I am fine. It is getting cold. How is everyone?"
"Your mother has made stew."
"Ah! Beef? Send me a plate."
"It will not survive the postage." For the first time all afternoon, their father's mouth lifted at one corner. "How is the job?"
They talked about the job. They talked about Joseph's wife and Joseph's flat and the price of milk in Ontario. Joseph was an accountant at a bank, and had been in Canada for six years, and Eli's father spoke of him in a tone of dry, perfect pride, as of a distinguished foreign investment that was performing satisfactorily. Eli ate his fish. He said very little. Now and then his brother's eyes slid to him on the screen, with an expression that was half apology and half something else, a kind of warning, and then away.
It was when the plates were cleared, and the coffee came, and Joseph had said goodbye with a cheerful wave, that his father laid his hands flat on the cloth.
"Elijah."
"Yes, Papa."
"I wish to speak about the business."
Eli put down his cup.
"I have been patient." His father said it in the tone of a man reading a statement. "I have waited since you finished university. You said, one year. I gave you one year. You said, give me two. I gave you two. You went to Nairobi. You came back. You said you would start something. I did not object. I have watched with interest, as a father."
"I know, Papa."
"Fresh Basket has thirty-one branches. Thirty-one. In five years it will have fifty. We have the property side, which is growing, and the new distribution centre in Namanve, which requires management. I am sixty-two. I will not be able to do this forever." His voice was perfectly even. "Joseph has made his life elsewhere. I do not complain. He is doing well. But you are here."
"Papa..."
"I am offering you the logistics division. A salary. A title. A car. An office on the fourth floor with a window, not the one beside the toilet, where I started." The ghost of a dry smile. "I am not asking you to be me. I am asking you to take what I have built and put your name to it."
"I have my own thing."
"The boxes."
"The crates."
"The crates." He pronounced it as one might pronounce the name of a distant, mildly embarrassing relation. "I have seen the prototype. Your mother showed me. It is a plastic container with foam. I would not say it is without interest. But it is a small thing, Elijah. It sells for twenty-five thousand shillings. You would have to sell a million of them."
"I would like to."
"To whom? Women at the roadside?"
"Yes."
"They cannot afford it."
"They can. If it saves them a basin of fish every week." He heard his own voice sharpen, and tried to smooth it. "I have done the sums. I have talked to forty of them. It pays for itself in a month. I only need to get the price down, and get the first thousand made, and prove it."
"And who will lend you the money to make a thousand?"
"I'm looking."
"You have been looking for two years." His father leaned back. "I could buy the whole production tomorrow. I could put them in every branch. I could have a pilot in three weeks. If you came to me, as a partner."
"As a Mugerwa."
"As my son."
"It's not the same thing."
"It is exactly the same thing." For the first time, his father's voice rose, not loudly, but with a kind of dark pressure, like a weight placed on a table. "You think you are the first man in Africa who has wanted to do it alone? You think you are being brave? I did it alone, Elijah. I did it from a single stall on Nakivubo Road with a debt and a bicycle. I know what alone is. I would not wish it on you. I do not want you to suffer the way I suffered."
"Then let me suffer a little."
There was a long silence.
At the end of the table, his mother had gone still. Her fingers lay on the tablecloth with her glasses beside them. She did not look at either of them.
"You will do it badly," his father said, in a voice that was almost gentle. "It is not a criticism. It is a prediction. You are intelligent. You are stubborn. You will work very hard, and run out of money, and run out of friends. And then, in five or six years, you will come back to me, a little older, and I will take you in. And you will have lost six years that I could have given you."
"I would rather lose them."
"You say that because you are twenty-five."
"I say it because they are mine."
His father looked at him for a long time. It was the look he gave to a column of figures that had failed to add up. Then he took a breath, and set his napkin on the table, and rose to his full height.
"Until the end of the year," he said. "That is all I will ask. In December, we will discuss it again. If it is going well, I will say nothing more. If it is not..." He did not finish. He straightened the cuff of his shirt. "We shall see."
He walked out of the room. His footsteps went down the long marble hall, steady and unhurried, and a door closed.
Eli sat looking at the lilies.
"Eat your coffee," said his mother, quietly.
"I can't."
"Then hold it." She stood up, and came round the table, and put her arm round his shoulders, and laid her cheek against the top of his head. She smelled of vanilla and starch and the particular soap she had used all his life. "He is afraid, you know."
"Of what?"
"Of everything. It is how he loves." She patted his hair. "He does not know how to say it any other way."
"I know."
"You are very like him."
"Don't say that."
"I am saying it." She was smiling now, a small, tired smile. "You are both stubborn and you both think you are the only one carrying a weight. It is a terrible combination. I have lived with it for thirty-four years." She kissed his head, once. "Take some food home."
"Mama."
"A little. A very little. In a bag. Do not argue."
"I'm fine."
"I know." She went to the kitchen. She came back with a large plastic bag that was not at all little, heavy with foil parcels, and put it in his hand, and then, as he turned to go, slipped something else into his jacket pocket with a quick, practised movement, as she had done since he was seventeen.
"Mama, no. Not again."
"It is for the taxi."
"I don't need it."
"Then give it to a beggar." She closed his hand over the pocket. "Go. Go, before he comes back."
He walked down the white gravel in the late sun, past the dry fountain and the silver cars. The gate swung open for him with its sigh. At the bottom of the hill, in the shade of a jacaranda, he sat on a low wall and took out the thing in his pocket. It was a folded envelope with ten crisp notes inside. He looked at it for a long time.
He put it back.
Then, because he could not help it, he took out his phone and opened the conversation that he had checked eleven times since he left the house, and looked at the last line of it, from her, at ten the night before.
Goodnight, Eli (Window).
He did not reply. He only sat on the wall with the bag of food on his knee and the sun going down behind the hills of Kampala, and thought, with a sharp small stab of something between joy and dread: She does not know. She thinks I am only Eli.
If she knew, she would look at me differently.
Everyone does.
She fainted on a Wednesday, in the third week of October, in the Old Taxi Park, and nobody noticed except the man who caught her.
It was not a dramatic faint. It was more like the lights being turned slowly down. She was queuing for the Banda taxi, in the long hot yellow evening, with her bag over her shoulder, thinking about nothing. A vendor passed with a tray of fried cassava. The smell hit her, hot oil and salt. Her stomach clenched like a fist. And the whole queue tilted, very gently, to the left, and the sky went white at the edges, and she thought, Oh, that is odd.
Then there was an arm round her waist and a voice in her ear.
"Whoa. Whoa. I have you."
She blinked. Her face was against a grey jacket. She could smell soap and pencils and dust. "Eli?"
"Don't talk."
"I'm fine."
"You are not fine. You are a very strange colour."
"I just stood up too fast."
"You have been standing for twenty minutes. I was watching you from over there." He had steered her to the low kerb of the pavement, and sat her down on it, among the boxes and the banana peel, and was crouching in front of her with a hand on her shoulder. His face, very close, was alarmed. "When did you eat?"
"I had lunch."
"What lunch?"
"I... a sandwich."
"What kind?"
She opened her mouth. Nothing came out.
"Nadia."
"Biscuits," she whispered.
He went very still. He looked at her, for a moment, as though he had been struck. Then he stood up, and said something sharp in Luganda to a vendor, and a minute later a plastic cup of sugary tea was in her hand and a paper bag with two warm samosas on her lap.
"Drink."
"I can't take..."
"Drink it, or I will carry you to the pharmacy and the pharmacist will tell you things."
She drank. The tea was scalding and so sweet it made her teeth ache, and she felt the heat go down through her chest like a hand. The edge of the world came slowly back. She ate a samosa. Her fingers were shaking. He sat down beside her on the kerb and said nothing, with his elbows on his knees, watching the queue. The sun slid down behind the roofs.
When she had finished, he spoke without turning his head.
"How long?"
"What?"
"How long have you not been eating?"
"I eat."
"How long?"
"It's... it's just a diet. A thing at work. Sandra..."
"Nadia."
It was not a loud word. It was low and level, the voice of someone who had decided to be patient and was finding it very difficult. She looked at the samosa paper in her hand. She folded it into a square.
"A few weeks," she said.
"Why?"
"I'm fine. It's..." She heard her own voice crack. "It's just a tight month."
"How tight?"
"It's none of your business."
"I know." He turned and looked at her, then, with a face that was not angry and not kind but something worse, something helpless. "I know it isn't. I am not trying to take it. I am only asking. Is it your rent?"
"It's everything."
"Let me help."
"No."
"Please. Let me lend you something. A little. It would not..."
"No!" It came out so loud that a woman at the next stall turned round. She lowered her voice, with an effort. Her cheeks were scalding. "No. Thank you. I don't need it."
"You almost fell on the road."
"I stood up too fast."
"You haven't eaten for..."
"I do not need your charity, Eli!"
The word hung in the air between them, like something thrown. She had not meant to say it. She had not even known it was there. It had come from somewhere very low and old, from the same place that said I'm fine to her mother, and Soon, and It is no problem. She stared at him. He stared back. A conductor shouted somewhere, and a loudspeaker crackled, and for a long, bad moment neither of them breathed.
"It is not charity," he said, finally, very quietly.
"What is it, then?"
"A friend."
"A friend who pays for my fish."
"Is that what you are angry about?"
"I am not angry." She stood up. The world swayed, and she steadied herself against a pole. "I'm just... I can manage. I have always managed. My parents would be ashamed if I... I would be..." She could not find the end of it. "I'm not a person who takes."
"Nobody said you were."
"I'm going to catch my taxi."
"Nadia."
"It was nice of you. The tea. Thank you."
"Please don't go like this."
"Goodnight, Eli."
She walked away. She walked down the long lane of white vehicles, through the dust and the exhaust and the shouting, without looking back, and found the Matatu in its place, and climbed in, and sat in the third row on the left by the window that did not close. She stared straight in front of her. Her eyes burned. Her hands, in her lap, were clenched into two small white fists.
He did not get on.
She waited for him until the very last minute, when Tosh was swinging the door shut, and Mzee Kasozi had the engine running. She told herself that she was not waiting. She told herself that it was a relief. She told herself that she had been right, and had said what needed saying, and that a woman who could not afford fish could not afford a friend who knew it.
The Matatu pulled out of the park. She did not turn her head.
Halfway along Jinja Road, between the railway line and the water tower, she realised that she was crying, without a sound, with her face to the window and her breath fogging the glass. She wiped it with the heel of her hand. She did it again. She looked out at the dark.
Beside her, in the fourth row, the seat by the window was empty.
He sat in the shed in Kireka until after midnight, with a single bulb and a half-built crate on the workbench, and did not touch it.
The shed was a rented garage at the back of a compound, with a corrugated roof and a concrete floor and a smell of cut foam and warm plastic. There was a bench, a drill press, a dozen finished prototypes stacked in the corner, and a camp bed upstairs, in a small room under the iron roof, where he slept. A kettle. A stove. A shelf of books on materials science. A sheet of paper pinned to the wall with a single figure on it, in red, circled twice: 25,000.
He sat on an upturned bucket with his notebook in his lap and looked at the numbers.
I do not need your charity.
He had known. He had known for weeks. He had seen the way she looked at the menu, and the way she said I'm not hungry, and the way she folded the paper napkin over and over in her fingers as if it might become something else. He had seen the shoes, the blue ones, resoled twice. He had heard, though she never said, the particular silence when her phone rang at eight o'clock each night. He had been a coward. He had not said anything because he did not know how.
A friend who pays for my fish.
And what was he? A man who ate lunch on a plastic chair, in a canvas jacket, whose mother sent him home with an envelope of money that he could not use. A man with a house in Kololo he could not mention. He could have lent her a hundred thousand shillings with no effort. He could have lent her a million. He had a bank account he never touched, with more in it than she would earn in ten years.
And if he had said so, if he had opened his mouth in that taxi park and said, Nadia, I'm not poor, I am Gerald Mugerwa's son, let me help, what then? She would have looked at him. She would have gone very quiet. He knew the look. He had seen it on other faces. The little shift behind the eyes, the arithmetic, the recalculation. Oh. So you are that kind of person. After that, nothing would ever be simple again. She would never be simply Nadia, and he would never be simply Eli, and the fish would taste of something else.
He did not want that. He wanted, desperately, one thing in his life that was not about the name.
That is not a good enough reason, said a small, clear voice in his head. You know it. You are hiding.
He put the notebook down. He took out his phone. He typed, with his thumb, slowly: I'm sorry. He looked at it. He deleted it. He typed, I was clumsy. He deleted that. He typed, Are you okay? and looked at it for a long time, and sent it, and sat with the phone in his hand in the quiet shed.
The ticks went grey. They stayed grey.
He put the phone face down on the bench. Outside, a generator coughed in the dark. A dog barked once and was silent.
He thought of her face in the taxi park, with the tea in her hand and the colour gone from her lips. He thought of the way she had said, I have always managed. And he thought, for the first time, clearly, that of the two of them, he was the one with something to be ashamed of. She had been hiding a lack. He had been hiding an excess. It was the same silence, in a different coat. They had sat side by side on a bench for months, two people each carrying a locked box, being kind.
At two in the morning, her message came.
I'm okay. I shouldn't have shouted. Sorry.
He read it three times, and breathed out.
I shouldn't have pushed, he wrote.
You were being kind.
I was being clumsy.
Both.
He smiled, at the bulb, in the middle of the night.
Same matatu tomorrow? he typed.
There was a very long pause. He imagined her, in a small room in Banda, with her knees up and her phone against her chin. Then the dots appeared.
It's a taxi.
Same taxi, he wrote.
Same taxi, she wrote back. And then, after a moment, in a new line: You can call it what you like.
He put the phone down on his chest, and closed his eyes. It was not a resolution. He knew that. The thing between them was still there, locked and silent and growing, like a tree in a pot. But in the dark of the shed, with his father's December hanging over his head and her I'm not a person who takes in his ears, he found that for the moment it was enough.
I'll tell her, he thought. Soon.
It was the oldest word in the world. It was what she said to her mother. He did not notice.