Chapter Seventeen
Where Were You, God?
The bulb was on when I got home.
It was a quarter to six in the morning, grey and cold, with a thin mist lying in the lane. I had walked from Mulago. I do not remember choosing to; I only remember the road going by under my feet, grey tarmac, then red earth, and the early sounds of the city starting up around me, a cockerel, a shutter rattling up, a woman sweeping her step. My shirt was stiff with dried sweat. My mouth tasted of metal.
And at the end of the lane, small and yellow and absurd against the dawn, was the light.
My mother was sitting under it.
She had not been to bed. I could see that from the gate. She was on the verandah step in her old cardigan, with a blanket over her knees and her hands folded in her lap, quite upright, quite still. The charcoal stove beside her was cold. There were no cups. She had not made the tea. She was sitting there as a person sits in a station, with her face turned toward the road, and when the gate creaked she did not start.
She rose. She came down the steps. She stood in front of me on the red dust, a small grey figure in the early light, and looked at my face.
"Denis telephoned," she said.
"Maama..."
"At midnight. He did not want to wake you. He said you would be there." Her eyes were red-rimmed and dry. "I did not know what to do. I thought, he will come. Wherever he is, he will come here. So I put on the light."
I could not speak. My knees had begun to shake.
"Ronnie," she said, and it was not a question.
"Yes."
She did not say anything else. She opened her arms.
I do not remember falling into them. I remember only that I was inside them, and that she smelled of woodsmoke and old soap and the cold, and that she was holding my head against her shoulder with one hand, pressed hard, so hard it hurt, and that she was rocking me, very slightly, from side to side, as she had when I was four. I made a sound. It was not a word. It came from somewhere below my ribs, from a place I had not known I had, and went on, and on, and she did not say hush. She did not say be strong. She stood in the yard in the grey light with her arms round the whole length of me, and let me howl.
And over her shoulder, above the door, the bulb burned on. I could see it through my tears: a smear of yellow, with the moths still turning in it. A house should never be dark while someone is still on the road.
I thought: I have been on the road for two years.
I thought: And she has never once turned it off.
I did not tell her. It was the moment. It was the most perfect moment in the world to say it. Maama, the money is gone. I took it. I lied. I had her in my arms. She had said nothing about it, not a word, not a flicker. She was holding me with the whole of her heart, and the confession rose in my throat like bile.
I swallowed it.
I told myself it was mercy. Not now. Not today. Let her have today.
It was cowardice. It always was.
They held the vigil in Mzee Opio's single room.
It was the same room. I had been inside it perhaps a dozen times: a low whitewashed cell behind the salon, with a bed in one corner and a table in the other, a paraffin stove, a calendar, a shelf with a radio. The photograph of Ronnie's mother hung over the bed, a young woman in a white blouse, laughing at something outside the frame. Ronnie's school certificates were pinned to the wall beside it, a small shy row. The floor had been swept and sprinkled. Someone had set out plastic chairs along the walls, and there was a candle burning in a saucer on the table.
By Saturday noon, there were thirty people in a room built for two.
They came and went in a slow, hushed, steady current. Neighbours with bundles of firewood and bags of rice. A woman from the salon, in tears, holding a tray of tea. Boys from the building. Students from Makerere, in twos and threes, standing awkwardly in the doorway with their hands clasped before them, saying pole and not knowing where to look. A group of boda men from the stage on the corner, in their yellow jackets, who sat on their heels in the dirt outside and said nothing for hours.
I sat on a stool near the bed. Mzee Opio sat on the bed. He did not leave it. He sat with his hands between his knees and his eyes on the floor, in the same grey-green uniform he had worn the night before, and when anyone spoke to him he nodded, and said thank you, in a small level voice, and went back to looking at the floor.
I stayed. I do not know why anyone allowed it. There was a sort of silence around me, a margin, as if I were a man with a visible wound. People glanced at me, and glanced away. Denis came, grey-faced, and sat beside me for an hour without speaking, and then squeezed my arm and left. Brenda came, and stood at the door, in black, with her scarf over her head. She did not come in. Her eyes met mine across the crowded room, and she put a hand briefly to her mouth, and went away.
Pastor Lubega came at two.
He walked into the room and took off his shoes at the threshold, and nobody had told him to. He went across to the bed, and knelt, with his bad knee cracking, on the bare floor in front of Mzee Opio. He did not say anything. He laid his hand on the old man's knee. And Mzee Opio, for the first time since the hospital, lifted his head, and looked at him, and began to weep.
I went outside.
On Monday, it came on the radio.
I had known that it would. I had told myself, on the stool by the bed, in the long hours of that weekend, that it was a day I would simply have to survive. It was Monday the twenty-third. The office on Bombo Road was due to reopen. A message in a group chat had said Come and see.
At eleven, a girl came running up the lane with a transistor held against her chest. She was perhaps ten, in a school uniform, and she was shouting something in Luganda, and the men in the yard turned. A radio is a powerful thing. She set it down on an upturned crate, and turned up the volume, and a man's voice came out of it, brisk, and grave, and utterly without mercy.
...police confirm that the offices of Bridge Capital Club Limited were raided this morning on Bombo Road. Officers found the premises empty. Preliminary investigations suggest that more than four hundred members of the public may have lost an estimated six billion shillings in what is believed to be a Ponzi scheme. The company's proprietor, Mr. Hamza Walusimbi, is believed to have left the country on the fourth of this month. Police have issued...
Nobody spoke. The men in the yard stood quite still. A woman from the salon, drying her hands on her apron, said in a flat voice, "Eh. Bridge."
...and are appealing to any victims to come forward. A number of arrests have been made among the scheme's regional recruiters...
Someone looked at me.
It was a small movement. A head turning, a man in a green shirt. Then another. I do not know who knew. In the end, I think, everybody did; it is that sort of neighbourhood, where the news arrives before the truth has had its shoes on. I stood against the wall with my arms at my sides, and I felt the glances touch my face, one by one, light as insects, and I did not look up.
Then Denis said, quietly, at my elbow, "Eli. Come."
He led me round the corner of the building, to a narrow passage between two walls, where the washing hung from lines, and leaned me against the brick. He was shaking. He held on to my sleeve with both hands.
"I have to tell you something," he said. "And you must not be angry."
"I won't."
"It's Mzee Opio." His voice cracked. "He put in money. Not Ronnie's. His own. Ronnie told me, on Wednesday. He said, don't tell Eli, he'll feel bad. His father's pension, the whole of it. Two million and a half." Denis swallowed. "Ronnie took it from the SACCO, in October. With a form. He forged the old man's signature. He was so sure, he said. He was going to put it back, in January, with the profit, and the old man would never know."
I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the ground.
"He told him last night," Denis said. "Mzee Opio. Ronnie rang him. Before the calls to you. He said, Baba, I did something stupid. He told him all of it. And the old man said, come home, we will talk, we will find a way. And Ronnie said, I have to find him first."
"Find who?"
"Walusimbi." Denis's face crumpled. "He went to look for him. In Naguru. He'd found out where he lived. He said he was going to stand outside his house until he came out."
I put my head on my knees.
A bed, I thought. A chair. A big one, in front of a television.
"He wanted to buy him a bed," I said, to the ground.
"I know."
"He said it on the roof. He said, for the rest of his life."
"I know, Eli." Denis sank down beside me. We sat in the dust between the washing, two boys in funeral black, shoulder to shoulder. A sheet flapped above us, white as a sail. After a long time he said, in a very small voice, "Mine was four hundred thousand. My uncle has written to me. Do you know what he said? He said, I am not angry. I am only disappointed." He laughed, a hollow, awful sound. "I'd rather he shouted."
My mother came home early that day.
I heard her at the gate at three, the heavy slow step, the stool scraping down off her head. I was on the verandah. I had come back from the vigil to wash and change, and I was sitting on the jerrycan in a clean shirt with my hands hanging between my knees, looking at nothing.
She did not say hello. She set down the stool. She came up the steps, and stood in front of me, and I saw that she had been crying. Not recently; the marks had dried. But there was a stiffness about the face, a hardness at the corners of the mouth, that I had not seen there before.
"Eliya," she said.
"Yes, Maama."
"I was at the stall. The woman who sells onions has a radio."
I did not move.
"They were speaking of a club. Bridge. They said it was a thing of fraud. They said many persons have lost their money. They said it is six billion." She said the numbers carefully, as if reciting a lesson. "I did not know there was so much money in Uganda."
"Maama..."
"What is the name of the cooperative you put my money into?"
It was said very quietly. It was the quietest I had ever heard her speak. She was standing with her arms at her sides, perfectly composed, in her market apron, with a smear of red dust across the front, and she was looking straight into my eyes.
I opened my mouth.
And I could not. I want you to understand that it was not that I would not. I stood on the brink of it, and looked down, and what I saw was not her anger. It was her face a minute from now, the moment it would change. It was the instant in which I would cease, forever, to be the son she believed me. I had held that image up in front of me for two years like a shield, and I could not put it down.
"It's called..." I said. And stopped.
My mother waited.
I do not know what she saw. I know that something passed over her face, very slowly, like the shadow of a cloud across a field. I know that her lips parted, and that for a moment she looked, not angry, but old, older than I had ever seen her, as if the rest of her life had fallen on her all at once.
"No," said my mother. "Don't."
"Maama..."
"Don't tell me now." She held up a hand. It trembled. "I can see that you are not able. I do not want to hear it from a boy who is not able." She drew a long breath. "Tell me when you can say it. When you can say it to my face, and you are not lying, and you are not sorry because you are caught. Tell me then."
"Please..."
"Today a child is dead," said my mother. "I will go to the vigil. I will take rice. I will sit with that man. We will bury his son." She looked at me, and her eyes filled, and she did not let them fall. "And after, we will see."
She went inside. She did not slam the door. She closed it, gently, as she closed everything, and I heard her walk across the floor, and heard the bed creak, and then nothing.
I sat on the jerrycan under the unlit bulb. It was still daylight. The light was not needed.
They buried Ronnie on the Tuesday.
It was at the old cemetery on the Gayaza road, a long untidy field of crooked crosses and cracked cement, with a tin-roofed gatehouse and a few frangipani trees. His mother lay there, in the corner by the wall, under a plain slab with a vase of plastic flowers. Mzee Opio had asked that the boy be put beside her. It was the only thing he had asked for. The ground was red and baked hard, and the men who dug the grave had worked since dawn, in their vests, with pickaxes, singing.
It was hot. It was ferociously hot. The sky was a blank white glare, and not a leaf moved. We stood in a rough half-circle round the hole, a hundred and fifty of us, more than I would have thought, in black and grey and dark blue, and the sweat ran down inside our collars. The coffin was a plain pale wood. Six of us carried it from the gate, Denis and I and four boys from the building, and it was so light that I looked down, once, in alarm, to see whether I had hold of it.
Pastor Lubega spoke. He read from the Gospel of John. In my Father's house are many rooms. He read slowly, in the driving voice. He did not preach. He said only that he had known Ronald Opio since he was a small boy, a loud, restless, generous child, who had once stolen a whole packet of biscuits from the church kitchen and then given them away to the street children, saying I was only the delivery man. A ripple of laughter went through the crowd. It was a good laugh, a real one, shaky and grateful. I felt it in my own chest like a cough.
I looked up, over the heads, and saw Naomi.
She was standing at the back, under a frangipani, in a plain black dress and a white scarf, with Joseph beside her, tall and thin and grave. She was not looking at me. She was looking at the coffin. Her face was quite white, and her lips were moving, and I understood after a moment that she was singing, under her breath, not a hymn, but a Luganda lament, one my mother's friends sang at funerals, in which each line is a question and each question is left to hang.
She did not see me. Or she did, and chose not to. I stood with my hands pressed against the wood of the coffin, in the white heat, and felt the distance between us as one feels a cold draught from an open door.
Then they lowered him.
It is a sound that you do not forget. A soft heavy scrape of rope on wood. A thud, muffled, not loud at all. Someone gave a stifled cry. Mzee Opio stepped forward, and stood at the lip of the grave, in a borrowed black suit that was too big for him, and looked down. He held in his hand a small clod of earth. He held it for a long time.
"Ronald," he said.
His voice was clear and steady. It carried to the back of the crowd.
"Ronald. I am not angry with you."
Somebody was sobbing, quite loudly, near me.
"You did a foolish thing," said the old man. "You were a foolish boy. You were so hungry to give me something that you forgot I did not need it." He drew breath. "I have lost money before. I have lost a wife. It is not the money. You must not think it is the money."
He opened his hand. The earth fell. It made a small dry rattle on the wood.
"Go well, my son," said Mzee Opio. "Go well."
I left before the end.
It was not planned. It was only that, as the men began to shovel and the women to sing, a pressure rose in my head, and the white sky tilted, and I knew that if I stayed another minute I should make a noise. I slipped away through the crowd, between the crooked crosses, past the frangipani and the gatehouse, out onto the road. Nobody called after me.
I walked. I do not know for how long. The road ran dead straight between a line of dusty shrubs, and the heat came up off it in waves. A lorry went by. A boda. A woman carrying a bundle of firewood on her head. I walked along the edge of the tarmac with my hands hanging, in the borrowed black jacket, three sizes too wide in the shoulders, and the glare beat down on me like a hand.
I came to a field.
It was a stretch of waste ground beside the road, with a few thorn bushes and a dried-up ditch and a rusted oil drum lying on its side. There was no one there. In the middle of it stood a single tall tree, a leafless one, split by lightning, black and bare against the sky. I stopped under it. I stood looking up through the dead branches into the white blaze. And something that had been rising in me for six years, for a week, for the whole of my life, came up all at once, and I opened my mouth.
"Where were You?"
It was a shout. It rang out across the field, flat and cracked. A bird flew up from the thorn bushes.
"Where were You?" I screamed. My voice broke. "Where were You, God? Where?"
There was no answer. The wind did not move. The sun glared. A hundred yards off, a goat looked up from the ditch and went back to grazing.
"You could have done something!" My hands were clenched at my sides. I was crying so hard I could barely see. "You could have done one thing! You could have made me look at the phone. You could have made me answer. You could have let it ring one more time, I would have heard it, I would have..." I choked. "You could have stopped him."
Fourteen.
"You took my father," I said. "You took him, and I kept my side. I kept it, I sat in that chair, I sat in it for nine days, and You took him anyway. And I thought, all right. I thought, that's what He's like. I thought if I stayed out of the way You would leave me alone." I was gasping. "And I did! I stayed out of the way! I didn't ask for anything! I didn't want anything! And now You've taken him."
I fell on my knees. The red earth was hot through my trousers. I put my fists against it.
"What do You want?" I whispered. "What do You want from me?"
Silence.
"I'll tell you what You did." It had come down to a hoarse murmur, with the spit running down my chin. "You let me do it. You let me. You let me take her money. You let me lie to Naomi. You watched me. You've been watching the whole time, haven't You? You watched me turn the phone over."
I laughed. It was an ugly, ragged sound.
"You watched. And You said nothing."
And there, in the dust, with my forehead on the baked ground and the tears falling into the cracks, a quiet, cold thought came to me, as clear as a stone laid at my feet. It was not a voice. It was only a thought. It said:
It was not Him who turned the phone.
I lay very still.
I do not know how long. The sun moved. The goat finished with the ditch and wandered away. After a while I became aware that I was no longer crying, that I was only breathing, in and out, dry and empty, like a well. I lifted my head. My face was caked with dust and tears. The tree stood over me, black and split and silent.
I did not feel forgiven. I did not feel anything like it. I felt exactly the opposite: scraped, hollow, accused. I felt as a man might feel who has hurled a stone at a mirror, and watched it come back.
It was not Him who turned the phone.
I got to my feet. I was very tired.
I did not go back to the cemetery. I did not go home. I stood on the edge of the road with the traffic rushing past, and I did not know where I was going, and I did not much care.
It would be night before I decided.