Chapter Twelve
The Choice
The trouble with a plan to leave quietly is that it requires the other side to let you.
I had decided, in the toilet of a Kololo restaurant, that I would wait until the spring and then withdraw. It had seemed so sensible. It had seemed, even, a form of integrity: a man who has noticed a crack and is calmly arranging his own exit. I told myself I would do it in March. In March the next payout would be in, and the exam period would be over, and Ronnie, who still believed, would at least have had his bed and his chair and his father's smile.
But on the second of December, Denis Mukasa came to my door at seven in the morning with a face the colour of ash.
"My uncle wants his money back," he said.
He stood on the verandah with his hands hanging. He had not slept. He was a quiet boy by nature, with a long, patient, slightly bewildered face, and he had followed me into the Club the way he followed me into everything: with trust, and a degree of puzzlement, and no instinct at all for self-defence. His uncle, a retired schoolteacher in Mukono, had lent him four hundred thousand shillings in January, on the strength of what Denis had told him.
"He saw it on the news. Not the Club. Another one. A club in Jinja. It collapsed on Friday, and the man ran away, and there were women in the street with placards." Denis swallowed. "He called me last night. He's not angry. He's very calm, Eli. That's the worst part. He said, Denis, I would like it by Monday."
"Then withdraw it."
"I tried." His voice cracked. "I filled the form on Saturday. I took it to the office. The accountant was there. The boy, you know, the nervous one. He said it would be processed after the January cycle."
"The January cycle."
"That's what he said." Denis looked at me with the naked appeal of a child. "He said it's policy. Withdrawals can only be done at the close of a cycle. Which is January thirty-first."
I felt my stomach go slowly cold.
"But there's no policy," I said. "It was never in the terms. You could withdraw whenever you liked. I read it. I read the whole..."
"I know. I know." He put his hands over his face. "Eli, what do I tell my uncle?"
The office was above the pharmacy on Bombo Road, up a flight of tiled steps with a brass rail that someone polished every morning. It had changed since the spring. There was new carpet, and a reception desk with a young woman at it, and a framed photograph of the Dubai skyline on the wall. A small television in the corner played a silent loop of currency rates. The air smelled of floor polish and freshly brewed coffee, and under it, faintly, of something I would later learn to identify as panic.
Mr. Walusimbi received me in his inner room.
I had been in it twice. It was a large, quiet, cushioned space, with a mahogany desk and two leather armchairs and a long window that looked out over the traffic. On the wall behind the desk hung a framed text in gold lettering: Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and He will establish your plans. He rose to greet me with both hands out. He was in shirtsleeves, which I had never seen before, and there was a fine sheen of sweat at his hairline.
"Brother Kasozi," he said. "What a pleasure. Sit. Sit. You'll have coffee."
"No, thank you, sir."
"Tea, then."
"Mr. Walusimbi, I'd like to withdraw."
He did not stop smiling. I will say that for him: he had a gift. The smile hung there for a good second after the words had landed, and then, with an almost imperceptible movement, it changed, and became something warmer and more regretful, the look of a doctor who is about to explain a diagnosis.
"Ah," he said. "I see. Sit down, my brother."
I sat.
"You are worried," said Mr. Walusimbi. "That is natural. Everyone is worried this month. There is a great deal in the press about these... pyramids. This unfortunate business in Jinja." He sighed. "It is terrible. Terrible. They give the whole industry a bad name. I want you to know that I feel for every one of those families."
"Then you'll process my withdrawal."
"Of course. Of course." He lifted his palms. "Of course. The only difficulty, you understand, is the timing."
"The January cycle."
"The January cycle." He nodded, with the air of a man glad to be understood. "It is a technical matter. Our partners in Dubai have a structure. The funds are placed in instruments that mature at the end of each cycle, and it would be unwise, unwise, to disturb them before they ripen. It would damage the returns for everyone." He smiled. "You are a student of commerce. You see this."
I did see it. That was the horror. I saw it with perfect clarity, in the warm cushioned room, with the Dubai skyline glinting on the wall: a man sitting behind a desk, explaining in a calm, kind voice why I could not have my own money, and an arrangement of reasonable-sounding words that closed around the thing like a hand.
"I'd like it by Friday," I said.
"I understand."
"And Denis Mukasa's. And Ronald Opio's."
"Of course." He did not look at the paper I had slid across the desk. "I will see what can be done. Now, Brother Kasozi. May I speak frankly?"
"Please."
"Do you know what I have always admired in you?" He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the mahogany, and lowered his voice to the soft, confiding register of a man about to share a secret. "It is that you have vision. You came in at the beginning. You trusted. You were among the first to come and see. And I have watched you grow. I have said to my team, that young man will go far."
"Thank you."
"I will tell you what I tell no one else." His eyes held mine. "There is a small turbulence. I will not deny it. A little cash-flow tightness. It is temporary. It is the effect of this panic in the market, these rumours, people pulling out all at once. If everyone withdraws on the same day, the structure suffers. You see?"
"Yes."
"The Dubai partners have asked me for a liquidity top-up. A bridge, if you will." He smiled at his own pun. "A short-term injection from our most committed members. Those in the Gold Circle. For three weeks. Just three. And in return, those members will be first in line. They will be repaid first, in full, with the forty percent. Before anyone else. Before the cycle even closes."
I said nothing.
"A man with five million in the Gold Circle," said Mr. Walusimbi, softly, "could be out of the Club by the first week of January with seven million in his pocket and my personal gratitude. Do you see? That is not a risk. That is a door."
He opened his hands.
"You remember Peter," he said. "On the water. He walks. He is walking. It is marvellous. And then he looks at the waves, and he is afraid, and he begins to sink." He shook his head, with an affectionate sorrow. "It was not the water that drowned him, Brother Kasozi. It was the looking."
I stared at him. I had heard the sermon. I had heard it from Pastor Lubega, who had said something quite different about it: that it was not the doubt that sank Peter but the fact that he took his eyes off the one who was holding him. I wanted to say so. The words stood in my mouth.
"I'll think about it," I said.
"Do." He rose, and clasped my hand in both of his. They were damp. "Think and pray. You are a man of faith. I know that. I have seen it. You will know what to do."
I walked down the tiled stairs with my hand on the brass rail, and when I came out into the white noon, with the traffic roaring and the smell of diesel, I stood on the pavement for a long time in the glare, feeling the blood pound in my ears.
A door.
It was not a door. I knew it was not a door. A door has two sides.
"Can I ask you something?" said Naomi.
It was Saturday. We were at Mama Sylvia's, on the low wall, in the thin afternoon sun. A harmattan haze lay over the road, giving the light a pale dusty cast, and the stall was crowded with Christmas shoppers carrying plastic bags and the stalls opposite had strung up tinsel and small flickering lights. Naomi had her thermos beside her, and a half-eaten rolex on a paper plate, and she had not touched it for ten minutes.
"Anything."
"I'm hearing a name." She turned the thermos in her hands. "In the interviews. There's a woman, in Kisaasi. Her nephew's in something called Bridge Capital. She says he's been paid every month. She says he's been trying to get her to join."
I did not move.
"I looked it up. There's nothing. No registration. No licence. Just a Facebook page with a lot of photographs of men in suits and a bridge." She frowned. "It's the sort of thing I've seen before. Thirty percent. Dubai. I wondered if you'd heard of it. You're always around people who talk about money."
It is a strange thing, to be asked a direct question by someone you love. In that moment I saw every road. I saw the one on which I said, Naomi, I need to tell you something, and she took off her glasses, and I told her. I saw how her face would change. I saw her put down the plate. I saw Mama Sylvia turning a chapati and glancing across, and the whole of that bright dusty afternoon shatter like a dropped cup.
I saw the other one too. It was shorter.
"I've heard the name," I said.
"Have you?"
"Ronnie mentioned it once. A cousin of his. It sounded... I told him to stay away." I picked up my own plate, and looked at it, and set it down. "It's a pyramid, Naomi. I'm almost sure. Everything you've described. I'd tell your respondent's nephew to get his money out."
It was a perfectly fluent lie. That was the worst of it. I could hear how well it came out, how natural, how concerned. I had been telling lies for so long that they had taken on a kind of grace.
"You think so?" said Naomi.
"I'm sure."
"Thank God." She let out her breath. "I've been worrying. I kept thinking, what if Eli's in one of these. Isn't that silly? You've been so careful. You told me about the betting. You told me everything. I knew you'd say if you were."
She smiled at me. It was a clear, trusting, shy smile.
I returned it. I put my hand over hers on the wall. It was a warm hand. It lay in mine with the confidence of someone who has seen what is in the box and decided to love it anyway, and I held it, and said nothing, and the afternoon went on around us, bright and loud and full of people buying presents for those they loved.
I have tried to think, over the years, when exactly it was that I crossed the line. I have gone back through every day of that autumn, every conversation, every decision. And I always come to the same place, and it is not the one you would expect. It is not the night with Brenda, nor the six hundred thousand shillings, nor the first message from Mr. Walusimbi, nor the kiss at the roadside.
It is the kitchen table.
It was the ninth of December, a Tuesday. It was after ten. Patience had gone to bed. The house was quiet apart from the tick of the iron roof, and the soft hiss of the paraffin lamp my mother kept for the nights when the power failed. She was at the table with the day's accounts spread out in front of her, in the yellow light, the notebook, the calculator, a plastic bag of coins. She had taken off her shoes. She looked tired, tired in a new way, a bone-deep weariness that no longer troubled to disguise itself.
"The stall is slow," she said, without looking up. "It's always slow before Christmas. People spend on food. They don't buy clothes until the twentieth. And then they all come at once and I have nothing on the rail."
"What do you need?"
"Stock. Two bales, at least. And the fees." She rubbed the line between her eyebrows. "Patience's fees for next term are one million four hundred. I have six hundred. I will find the rest. God provides." It was not said with conviction. It was said the way you say it to a child who is afraid of the dark.
I sat down opposite her. I had come in meaning to go straight to bed. But I had stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at her, at the grey that had crept into her hair and the thin brown hand moving the coins, and the thing that had been turning in me for a week had come to a stop.
"Maama," I said. "I want to help."
"You already help."
"I want to help properly." I heard my own voice, calm, warm, slightly earnest. "I've been working. You know I've been working. I have a friend, a very serious one, who runs a cooperative at the university. It's registered. Many lecturers use it. It pays twelve percent. Every month."
"Twelve?"
"Twelve percent every month, Maama. Not a year. A month." I made myself smile. "I've put in some of my own money. It's been reliable. I've had every payment on time since January. I'm only telling you because I've seen how much you work, and I think... I think the SACCO isn't enough."
She looked at me. She put down her pencil.
I should tell you what her face looked like. It was not suspicious. It was not even surprised. It was the face of a woman who has spent six years waiting for something she had stopped daring to hope for, and who sees it, at last, come through the door.
"Eliya," she said, very quietly. "You've changed."
"I..."
"You have. I've seen it. I didn't want to say. I was afraid to say, in case it stopped." Her eyes filled. "You've been coming to church. You come with that girl. Naomi. You've been home before dark. You sit with Patience." She pressed her hand to her mouth. "I've been praying, you know. Every morning. Every night. I've been asking Him to bring you back. And I've been afraid He had said no."
I could not speak.
"I thought," said my mother, "that He'd said wait."
I want you to understand what I did next. I want you to see it clearly, because I have spent a great many years learning not to look away from it. I looked at the woman I loved best in the world, in the yellow lamplight, with her hand against her mouth and her eyes bright, and I saw that my change, the little I had made, the Sundays and the story hour and the walks home, had not been a wasted thing. It had been seen. It had been received with the whole of her heart. And I took that trust, the very thing that had grown in her because of the best part of me, and I put it to work for the worst.
"Maama," I said. "How much is in the SACCO?"
She told me. Four million, two hundred thousand shillings. She had saved it over six years, a little at a time, in a green passbook that she kept in a biscuit tin under the bed.
"I'm not asking you to put it all in," I said. "Not all."
"What would you suggest?"
"All of it," I said. "For three weeks."
I said it without a tremor. I told her it was a short placement, a special offer at the end of the year, that the return on a three-week deposit was close to forty percent, that she would have six million by the first week of January. I told her that I would guarantee it myself. I told her I would put in my own savings as security. I said that she would pay Patience's fees, and restock the stall, and, God willing, have enough over to mend the roof. I said it all in a low, reasonable, loving voice. I used the word safe. I used it three times.
She listened. She did not say anything for a long time. The lamp hissed. A moth went round it, in a small drunken circle, and she followed it with her eyes.
"Your father," she said at last, "never trusted anything he couldn't take apart."
"I know."
"He used to say, if you can't open it and look inside, don't put your money in it."
"This is different."
"Is it?" She looked at me, steadily, in the lamplight. "Is it, Eliya?"
I held her gaze. I held it for what felt like a year. And what I saw in her eyes was not doubt, quite. It was something quieter and stranger. She was looking at me, I think, with the whole of her love, searching me, as a woman might search the face of a child who has told her he is not hungry. She was giving me the chance. I could feel it, a door held open.
"Yes," I said. "It's different."
She nodded. And then she did what I will remember to the end of my life. She put her hand across the table and laid it over mine. Her palm was dry and warm. It smelled of cassava and soap.
"All right," said my mother. "I trust you."
We went to the SACCO on Thursday morning. It was a small, hot, crowded office on Bombo Road with a counter and two clerks, a rotating fan, and a calendar from an insurance company. There was a queue. My mother stood in it with her handbag held in both hands, in her green gomesi, as if she had come to be photographed, and I stood beside her with my arms folded, looking at the floor.
She signed the withdrawal form with a stub of pencil, in her careful, upright, schoolteacher's hand, Margaret Nakato Kasozi. The clerk counted out the notes. It took a long time. Four million, two hundred thousand shillings in tens and twenties, bound with rubber bands, and he put them into a black plastic bag, and then, thinking better of it, into a second bag, and handed it across the counter.
My mother took it. She held it for a moment against her chest, with both arms, exactly as she had once held my admission letter. Then she held it out to me.
"God watch over it," she said.
I took the bag. It was heavier than I expected. It dragged at my arm.
"Three weeks," I said.
"Three weeks."
She smiled. She reached up and straightened my collar, and patted my cheek twice, briskly, as one pats a horse. "Go. Don't lose it."
I did not look back. I went out into the hot street, past the fruit stalls and the boda men and a woman selling roasted maize, and stood on the corner, and it was only when I felt something wet on my hand that I understood I was crying.
I took a boda to the pharmacy on Bombo Road. I went up the tiled stairs. I put the bag on the mahogany desk, and Mr. Walusimbi's accountant, the nervous boy, counted it with trembling fingers while I stood at the window and watched the traffic. When he was done, he slid a form across to me.
BRIDGE CAPITAL CLUB. GOLD CIRCLE MEMBERSHIP. Declaration of Contribution. It had a space at the bottom for a signature.
It was a very good pen. It was heavy, with a gold clip. I held it over the paper and looked at the line, and for a moment the whole room seemed to tilt, as a ship does when the weight in it shifts. I thought of Mama Peace. It was not you. I thought of a tin under a bed. I thought of a green passbook in a biscuit tin, and a woman's hand on mine.
A door, I thought. It is only a door.
On the wall behind the desk, in gold letters, were the words I had read a week before. Commit to the Lord whatever you do. I read them again. I wondered who had chosen them. I wondered whether he had believed them, once, when he put them up; whether there had been a day when a man in a navy suit had stood in this room with a hammer in his hand and a small clean hope in his heart.
I signed.
The pen made a soft scratching sound. It was over in a second. The nervous boy took the paper, blotted it, and said, "Thank you, sir. You'll receive confirmation by Monday."
I went out. I walked down the stairs. At the bottom I stopped, with my hand on the brass rail, and looked up at the sign over the pharmacy door, the faded blue letters, the little printed picture of a bridge. It was a graceful bridge. It rose in a long clean arc from one side of a river to the other, with a road across it and a pale sky above.
I had looked at it for a year. It was only then that I noticed what I should have seen on the first night, if I had been looking.
It had no other end. The artist had drawn the near side in careful detail, the piers, the arch, the lamps. But the far shore had been left blank, dissolving into mist, into white paper, into nothing at all.
I stood there for a long time. Then I took out my phone, and there was a message from Naomi, a photograph of a cup of tea, with the caption Christmas is cancelled until I've had this, and I smiled, and typed Never, and put it away.
I walked home slowly, with nothing in my hands.
I did not know it yet, but I had made my choice. It would be four months before it came due.