Chapter 7
The Life He Hides
The job came in on a Monday in the third week of January, and Mr. Kiggundu announced it as if it were a birth.
"Listen!" he shouted, from the door of his glass office, waving a sheet of paper over his head. "Everybody. Stop what you are doing. Hassan, take the pencils out of your ears. Sandra, put down the mango."
"It is a pawpaw," said Sandra.
"I do not care what it is. Listen." He drew himself up. He had put on his good tie. For the first time since Nadia had known him, there was colour in his heavy, tired face, and his hands, with their permanent ink, were not quite steady. "We have been given the Mugerwa job."
There was a short, awed silence.
"Which Mugerwa?" said Hassan.
"The Mugerwa. Fresh Basket. Mugerwa Holdings." He said it reverently, as another man might say the Cathedral. "Their thirtieth anniversary. A gala dinner, in two weeks, at the big hotel in Kololo. Four hundred guests. The programmes, the invitations, the banners, the place cards, the thank-you booklet, the stage backdrop, the lot. They have asked for us." He looked around at the four of them. "Us. I do not know why. Someone must have said something. But I am a man of sixty and I have never been asked."
"How much?" said Sandra.
"Enough to pay everyone a December bonus we did not pay in December."
Sandra shrieked. Hassan whistled. Nadia, who had been sitting very still at her desk with her pen in her hand, felt something odd move in her chest, a small cold flicker, like a draught under a door.
Mugerwa.
She did not know why it troubled her. It was a common enough name. There were a dozen Mugerwas in the telephone book. There was a Mugerwa who sold timber at Kalerwe, and a Mugerwa who had once been her father's boss. She told herself that it was only a name that had settled somewhere at the back of her mind, with a woman in a yellow overall who had said it in the wrong voice, on a pavement, in November.
Mugerwa-ni. The old measuring man.
She put her pen down. It rolled across the desk and she caught it.
"Nadia," said Mr. Kiggundu, "you will manage the account."
"Me?"
"You are the best at clients. You are calm. They do not bite you. I need someone who can deal with a man like Mr. Mugerwa."
"What is he like?"
"I have never met him." He wiped his glasses on his tie. "I am told he is exact."
The next two weeks passed in a blur of proofs.
She dealt with a secretary called Mrs. Nankya, a thin, polite, terrifying woman who rang at seven every morning and again at six every evening, and who had a way of saying Noted that made Nadia's stomach turn over. She sent drafts. She received corrections. She re-sent them. She sat up till midnight at the long table at Brightside with Hassan, while he drew the anniversary logo, a stylised basket with a sun rising out of it, nine times over, and Mrs. Nankya sent back each version with a single line. The Chairman finds the sun too small. The Chairman finds the sun too large. The Chairman requests the basket be more traditional.
"The Chairman wants a basket from nineteen ninety-four," said Hassan, with his head on the desk.
"Then give him a basket from nineteen ninety-four."
"It is the same basket."
"Give it to him again."
She had never worked so hard. She had never been so tired. She did it with a kind of fierce gratitude, because the job was real and the pay was real, and because on the second Friday Mr. Kiggundu came to her desk and said, in his dry, stiff, awkward voice, "Nadia. I want you to know that I am putting a little extra in your envelope this month. It is not much. But you deserve it." And she said, "Thank you, sir," and went into the toilet and sat on the lid and put her fist in her mouth and cried, soundlessly, for a minute, with relief.
Ivan's fees. Racheal's shoes. The rent in arrears.
She did not tell Eli the real reason for her good mood. She said, "We've got a big client," and "It's very stressful," and he nodded, drawing, and said, "I'm sure you'll be wonderful." They were still new, in those weeks, and everything between them was soft and dazed and slightly unreal, like the light at five o'clock. They held hands on the Matatu. They kissed at the stage in the dark. They sent each other long messages at night, which began with Did you get home? and ended somewhere very far from it.
But she noticed that something in him had changed.
He was quieter. Not cold, but turned inward, as though listening to a sound beyond the room. At times, in the middle of a sentence, he would stop and look out of the window, and she would see his jaw tighten. He took phone calls in the aisle with his back to her. Twice she caught him staring at a message with a face she did not recognise.
"What is it?" she asked, one evening in the fourth row.
"Nothing. Family."
"Is something wrong?"
"It is a kind of weather." He smiled, thinly. "It will pass."
"You can tell me."
"I know." He took her hand, and turned it over, and ran his thumb along the lines. "I will. Not yet. I have a thing at the end of the month. When it is over, I want to tell you a lot of things."
"What things?"
"Many. I have a list."
"Is it a good list?"
"It is a long one." He kissed her palm. "Trust me."
She did. That was what she would remember afterward, with an ache that did not go away for a long time. She did, with her whole heart, and without a single doubt, and she was happy.
The gala was on the last Saturday of January, and she went to it in her work dress with a trolley.
It was a heavy trolley, borrowed from the stationery shop downstairs, loaded with four hundred programmes in cream and gold, a hundred and fifty place cards in a flat box, and a long roll of vinyl banner that Hassan had taped up with a mutter of despair. She pushed it up the drive of the hotel at four in the afternoon, past a double line of palm trees in terracotta pots and a uniformed guard with a clipboard, and stopped in front of the great glass doors.
It was a very large hotel. It stood on top of a hill, white and flat-roofed, with a fountain at the entrance and a doorman in a tailcoat. Beyond the lobby lay a vast carpeted hall with chandeliers. Inside it, on a stage hung with gold curtains, a team of men in black shirts were assembling a backdrop, and a woman was shouting at an electrician, and four hundred round tables stood in rows beneath white cloths, each with a centrepiece of orchids.
It looked like another planet.
"Delivery," said Nadia, to a very young man at a desk. "From Brightside. For Mrs. Nankya."
"Back door, madam."
"I was told to come in the front."
"Back door."
She pushed the trolley round the side of the building, through a service entrance and along a corridor that smelled of onions, where a dozen cooks in white aprons were hacking at cabbages. A woman with a clipboard met her at the end, and said, "You're the printers? Thank God. The Chairman is arriving at six. Put everything on that table. Do not open the boxes until I say. Do you know how to fix a banner?"
"Yes."
"Then fix it. I'll be back."
It took three hours. She fixed the banner to the stage, on a ladder, with Hassan's tape and a borrowed hammer. She laid the place cards, one by one, at four hundred seats, from a seating plan so thick it had a spine. She did it carefully, with her tongue between her teeth, aligning each card to the edge of the cloth. The names went by under her fingers. Hon. Justice. Dr. Engineer. Bishop. The Honourable Minister. Mr. and Mrs. At the head table, in a row of eight, she set down the cards in the order on the plan. The Chairman, Mr. Gerald Mugerwa. Mrs. Florence Mugerwa. Mr. Joseph Mugerwa (by video). She did not look closely. She had a headache. She was thinking of the taxi home.
The last card in the row had a name that she must have read, because she registered it, and went on to the next.
She stopped.
She took a step back, very slowly, and looked at the card again. It was a cream-coloured oblong. The printing was her own. It was Hassan's best font, in gold.
Mr. Elijah Mugerwa.
For a moment she stood still, in the great glittering room, with the card in her hand and the sound of the electrician's drill whining distantly through the floor.
Elijah.
She did not know his full name. She had never asked. She had been told Eli, and just Eli, and on Wednesdays. It was a common name. A dozen people on that seating plan must have been called Elijah. A man could not be the only one. It was a coincidence, a joke of the universe, like seeing your own name on a tombstone in a strange town.
Mugerwa-ni. The old measuring man.
She put the card back, exactly where it had been. She straightened it. Her hands did not shake. She noticed that. She noticed it with a sort of cold, interested surprise, as though from a long way off.
It is a coincidence.
She turned and walked back to the service corridor, and stood for a time among the cooks and the chopping boards with her hand pressed flat against her stomach, and breathed.
The guests began to arrive at six.
She watched them from the doorway to the kitchen, where the waiting staff were assembling. They came in long dark cars. They came in men's suits and women's gowns, in embroidered gomesis and sequins and kanzus, in rustling silk and smoothly polished shoes. The women smelled of orchids and expensive soap. They greeted each other with a loud, warm, practised joy, kissing cheeks and holding forearms. A cabinet minister arrived with a train of aides. A famous musician, in white, was photographed on the steps.
She had been told to stay in case of problems. She was standing behind a pillar, with a spare box of programmes and the trolley, trying to look like part of the furniture, when the Chairman came in.
She knew him at once. It was not the face. It was the way the room made space for him, a kind of drawing back, as a crowd draws back for a wedding. He was a broad, upright, grey-moustached man in a dark suit and gold cufflinks. He walked slowly and he did not smile. He moved through the lobby with a small woman on his arm, in an emerald dress, with silver hair and bright, quick, kind eyes, who looked about her at the chandeliers with an expression of tolerant amusement, as if it were a play she had seen before.
And behind them, a pace apart, came a long, thin young man in a very good black suit.
She did not recognise him at first.
That was the strangest part. She looked straight at him and did not see. He was wearing a white shirt, and a dark tie, and his hair had been cut very short and neatly, and he had shaved. The suit fitted him as if it had been made for him, which, she saw, it had. His shoes were polished. He walked with his shoulders back and his head up, in the stiff, careful, disciplined way of a man in a borrowed skin.
Then he turned his head, slightly, as if to answer something his mother had said, and she saw his mouth.
The corner twitched.
Nadia stood still behind the pillar.
No, she thought, in a small clear voice. No. That's not.
It was. It was so plainly him that she could not understand how she had not known at once. It was the nose and the jaw and the steady dark eyes. It was the line of the shoulders under the black cloth, the hand that held a folded programme, with a callus on the middle finger. It was Eli. It was her Eli, and he was walking across the lobby of the biggest hotel in Kololo with his parents, nodding to a bishop, and nobody was surprised at all.
"Mr. Elijah!" a man in a gold waistcoat said, advancing with his arms out. "How wonderful to see you! The Chairman's son! My God, you've grown!"
"Good evening, Uncle," said Eli.
His voice was her Eli's voice. But it was lower and flatter, and some of the music had gone out of it. He shook hands. He smiled a smile she had never seen, narrow and perfect, with nothing in it. He turned to the next person in line.
She watched him for what seemed a very long time.
Then, because there was nothing else to do, she bent, and picked up the box of programmes, and began to walk. She did not know where. She walked along the edge of the lobby, past the pillars, toward a door at the back marked STAFF. She would find something to do in the kitchen. She would find a corridor and a back stair and a way out. She did not look at the stage. She did not look at the table. She kept her eyes on the floor.
"Nadia."
She stopped.
It was said very softly. She heard it across forty feet of marble, over four hundred conversations and a string quartet. She did not turn.
"Nadia."
She lifted her head.
He was standing in the middle of the lobby, among the guests, with a glass of juice in his hand that he had forgotten to drink. He had gone the colour of ash. For a second, two, they simply looked at each other. The whole glittering hall seemed to go very quiet, without actually changing, and in the stillness she saw it all go across his face: shock, and fear, and something terribly like relief.
He's been waiting for this, she thought, absurdly. He wanted me to find out.
Then his mother touched his arm, and said something, and he turned his head, and the moment was gone.
She stayed through the speeches, in the end, because she could not think what else to do.
She stood at the back, by the kitchen doors, with the programmes in a stack at her feet, where she could see the stage between two pillars. She did not feel anything, or very little. She felt as though she had put on a heavy coat and was walking round the edges of it.
The dinner went on for a very long time. There were prayers, and toasts, and a choir in orange robes who sang three hymns and a song about the nation. A minister gave a speech about enterprise. A bishop gave a speech about blessings. At nine o'clock a hush fell over the room, and the Chairman rose from the head table, and walked slowly, with his hands behind his back, to the microphone.
"Ladies and gentlemen," said Gerald Mugerwa.
He spoke for half an hour. He spoke in a deep, dry, measured voice, without notes, and she found, against her will, that she was listening. He told them how, in 1994, he had stood on Nakivubo Road with a debt of eight hundred thousand shillings and a stall of onions. He told them how his wife had worked as a teacher for six years to keep the family alive. He told them that Fresh Basket had been built, shelf by shelf, on the principle that no Ugandan family should have to choose between a good meal and a good school. It was not a vain speech. It was not even a boastful one. It was the speech of a man who had made something with his hands and had never stopped being surprised.
She could see, in spite of everything, that he was telling the truth.
"I have two sons," he said, near the end.
The room was very still.
"My elder son, Joseph, is with us tonight from Toronto, by the miracle of modern science." A ripple of laughter, and a large screen at the side of the stage flickered, and a broad man in a suit waved, and the guests applauded. "I am very proud of him. He has done well in the world. And I have a younger son."
Don't, thought Nadia.
"Elijah." The Chairman turned his head. "Come."
At the head table, a long young man rose to his feet.
He walked across the stage, in his good black suit, through a storm of clapping. He walked slowly, with his hands at his sides. When he reached the microphone his father put a hand on his shoulder, and Nadia saw, across the whole length of the great hall, the muscle in his jaw jump.
"For two years," his father said, "my son has been exploring the world on his own account. He has studied design. He has lived abroad. He has been building a small enterprise of his own, which I admire, and which will no doubt teach him a great many useful things." More laughter, kind and indulgent. "But I think it is time. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to say that in the course of this year, my son Elijah will be joining me at Mugerwa Holdings, to learn the business. Someday soon, God willing, he will take this chair."
The room rose.
It was a standing ovation. It went on and on. The whole of Kampala's rich and powerful rose in their silks and their gold, applauding, calling out, Bravo! Congratulations! and in the middle of it, on the stage, with his father's hand on his shoulder and a smile on his face like a coat of paint, the man she loved stood, still, looking at nothing.
He did not look at her. Not once.
She would never know what it cost him.
She found him afterward, or he found her, in a small walled garden behind the kitchens, among the rubbish bins.
She had gone out for air. It was a mean little yard, with a wall and a drain and a stack of empty crates, lit by a single orange light. The noise of the party came faintly through the brickwork. She was standing with her back against the wall and her arms wrapped round herself, in her thin work dress, breathing in the smell of cooking fat and rain, when the door banged, and a shape came out.
He had taken off his jacket. His tie was loose. He stood in the doorway with the light behind him and did not come any nearer.
"I wanted to tell you," he said.
"Did you?"
"A hundred times."
"When?"
"The first day. And every day." His voice cracked. "Nadia, please. Let me..."
"You let me say it to you." She spoke slowly, with great care, as if each word were a glass that might break. "In the taxi park. When I nearly fell. You let me say, I don't need your charity."
"Yes."
"You let me say it to a man who could buy that road."
"It's not..."
"I said I was ashamed. I said my parents would be ashamed. I stood there, with sugar tea in my hand, and told you how I could not take a single shilling from anyone, and you let me." She was shaking now. She pressed her hands to her arms. "You paid for my fish. You paid for the chips. You made a hat from a bin liner. I thought you had nothing, Eli. I thought we were two poor people on a bench."
"I am not rich."
"Are you not?"
"It is my father's. It is his. I have never..."
"Your father has cars."
"Yes. I don't drive them."
"A driver."
"I have not used him in two years."
"A big house."
"I don't live there."
"And you have a bank account."
He said nothing.
"Do you?" said Nadia.
"Yes."
"How much?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know."
"I haven't looked." He took a step forward, with both hands out. "I haven't touched it. I have lived on what I earn. Which is almost nothing, you know that. I have a room above a garage. I take the taxi. I wanted..." He drew a ragged breath. "I wanted one place where no one knew. One thing in my life that was not hers or his or theirs. That was only mine."
"I was that thing."
"Yes."
"A place where no one knew."
"It was not like that."
"What was it like?"
"You were the first person in six years who looked at me and did not do the sum." He was crying, she saw, without any noise. "You didn't ask what my father did. You didn't ask where I lived. You liked me because I made a joke about a driver. Do you know what that is? To be liked for a joke? I have never had it. Not once. Every person who has ever smiled at me has known my name."
She was crying too. She wiped her face roughly with the back of her wrist.
"That's not an excuse," she said.
"I know."
"You were lying."
"I never said a word that was untrue."
"Don't." Her voice rose. "Do not do that. Don't hide in the grammar. I never said a word. You said Just Eli. You said I make mistakes. You sat beside me every morning for six months and let me think we were the same. And when I said I was hungry, you did not tell me you could feed me for a hundred years."
"I tried to help you."
"You tried to help the poor girl!"
"No."
"Yes! That is what you saw. A girl who is ashamed. A girl who says I'm fine. And you thought, I'll look after her, but gently, so she doesn't know." She laughed, a small raw sound, and put a hand over her mouth. "You said you wanted a person who didn't do the sum. And all the time you were doing it. You did the sum on me, every day, and I never saw."
"That's not true."
"How do I know?"
"Because..."
"How do I know, Eli?" It tore out of her. "How would I ever know? Was it real? The Matatu, the fish, the walk? Was it a test? Did you want to see if a poor girl could love you for yourself? Did you want to watch?"
"Never."
"Was I a game?"
"Nadia."
"Was I something to try?"
"I love you!"
It rang off the walls. It rang off the brick and the bins and the dripping drain. He stood with his hands out and his mouth open, staring at her, as if it had been said by someone else.
For a long moment neither of them moved.
"I love you," he said again, more quietly. His voice shook. "I'm sorry. I did not mean to say it like that. I was going to say it properly. I had it planned, in the shed, on a bucket, to the foam. But it's true. I would not have done any of it, none of it, if it were not true."
She stood against the wall with the tears running down her face.
It was the thing she had wanted, she realised, for weeks. She had wanted it on the bench at the stage and in the dark of the fourth row and on the cold doorstep on Friday nights. She had turned it over in her head, practising her answer. And now it had come, in a garden full of bins, in the worst possible way, at the worst possible time, and all she felt was a vast, grey, aching tiredness, and the cold.
"I can't," she said.
"Nadia..."
"I can't do this. Not tonight."
"Please let me explain."
"Not tonight." She picked up her bag. Her fingers would not close on the strap. She did it with both hands. "I've got a trolley. I have to take it back. And a taxi to catch. And I have to think. I can't think, with you standing there in a suit."
"I'll drive you."
"No."
"I'll take you home."
"With Peter?"
"Nadia."
"Don't follow me," she said.
She walked to the gate. She heard him say her name once more, behind her, very low, and then nothing at all. She did not look round. At the end of the lane she found a boda man sitting on his motorcycle under a tree, eating a boiled egg, and said, "Banda. How much?" and he said, "Fifteen," and she said, "Fine," and climbed on.
It rained again, all the way home.
She sat behind the stranger with her arms round his waist and her face turned into the wet back of his jacket, and watched the lights of the city go past in long streaks. The hotel on the hill. The dark trees of Kololo. The roundabout, and the road with its fumes and its red tail lights, and the long, familiar stretch beside the railway that she had travelled twice every day for seven months. It looked different from the back of a motorbike at midnight. It looked unreal and empty and cold.
At Nakawa the boda went over Kasozi's Canyon with a bang. She did not even laugh.
In her room, she sat on the bed in her wet dress with her phone in her hand. It was lit up, over and over. Eli. Eli. Eli. She turned it face down. She looked at the cracked line in the floor, and at her certificate, in its laminate, on the shelf, and at the postcard with the crayon sun.
Come home soon, we miss your voice.
She lay down, and drew her knees up, and pulled the thin blanket over her head. In the dark, with the rain on the roof and the smell of damp cement in her nose, she thought of a hand on the back of a seat. She thought of a mouth that twitched. She thought of a long thin boy in a grey jacket, holding up a bin bag in a storm, and a long thin man in a black suit, smiling a smile with nothing in it, and she could not make the two of them fit.
Which is real?
She did not know. She lay awake until the first light came grey through the window, and the cocks started to crow in the lane, and the whole of the sleeping compound began to stir.
And somewhere far away, in a small room above a garage in Kireka, with his suit on the floor and his phone in his hand, a young man was lying on a camp bed, looking at the roof, saying the same thing over and over, in a very low voice, to nobody:
I should have told her. I should have told her. I should have told her.