Chapter Eighteen
The Longest Night
Kampala at dusk is a city that forgives nothing and notices everything.
I had not known that. I had lived in it all my life, and I had never once walked through it without a destination. That evening, with the sun going down red and enormous behind the television mast on Kololo Hill, and the first lamps pricking on in the stalls along Bombo Road, I walked as a person walks who has been emptied of reasons, and the city came at me with a sharpness I could hardly bear. A woman fanning charcoal under a pan of corn, and the sweet smoke of it. A conductor leaning out of a minibus, slapping its side, shouting Wandegeya, Wandegeya, Wandegeya. A boy with a tray of phone chargers calling his prices in a singsong. The smell of exhaust and frying fish and rain coming from somewhere far away. All of it going on, as if nothing had happened. As if a boy had not been lowered into the ground that afternoon beside his mother, and a hundred and fifty people had not stood in the sun to watch.
I had no plan. I had a borrowed jacket and a phone with eleven per cent of battery and fourteen thousand shillings in my pocket. I had not eaten since Sunday, except for a mandazi that Denis had pressed into my hand and that I had put down somewhere. I kept walking, and my feet took me, one after the other, by roads that I knew.
I passed the bar called Sunrise.
It was open. The sign was lit, the yellow face glowing in the dusk with its spokes of light, and through the door I could see the plastic chairs, the television, a group of young men round a table. One of them was laughing. I stood on the opposite pavement and looked at the table by the window where I had sat, three nights ago, with my phone under my palm, and I do not know how long I stood there, with the traffic going by.
Nobody looked out. They did not know me. I was only a man in a black jacket, standing in the road.
I walked on.
I do not know why I went to Ntinda. It is a long way. I did not take a taxi, though I could have; I could not bear the closeness of other bodies. I went on foot, by the long road up the hill past the Shell station and the tall dark walls of the embassies, and the light drained from the sky and the stars came out, and by the time I reached the lane where she lived, it was past nine.
It was a quiet place, a street of low walls and bougainvillea, with a gate at every house, and a security light over each. Dogs barked behind the fences. A television played in an upper window. I found the gate, a green one, with a small brass plate, TUMUSIIME, and across from it a dusty patch of verge with a drain, where I sat down.
The house was dark, except for a light in an upstairs room. I looked at it for a long time. A thin yellow curtain. A shadow that moved, and stopped, and moved again.
I did not want to go in. I want to be clear about that. I did not want her to see me. I wanted only to be near, as one wants to sit near a fire one has no right to warm oneself at. I sat on the edge of the drain with my arms around my knees, and the cold came up from the concrete, and I thought of nothing. It was the first thing in three days that had not hurt.
A gate clanged.
It was the green one. A figure came out, tall and stooped, carrying a bucket, in a pair of slippers and a long grey sweater, and crossed to the rubbish pit at the corner of the wall. He tipped the bucket. He stood with it hanging from one hand, looking up at the stars, in the way of a man who has come outside only to be out of doors.
Then he turned his head, and saw me.
"Eli," said Joseph.
I got to my feet. I could not run. I was too tired. I stood in the glare of the security light with my hands at my sides.
"Hello," I said.
"Hello." He did not seem surprised. He came slowly across the road, still holding the bucket, and stopped a few paces from me. In the white light his face was all hollows, and his eyes were enormous. "How long have you been sitting there?"
"A while."
"Do you want to come in?"
"No."
"She's asleep." He said it quietly. "She's been asleep since six. She cried herself to sleep. She thinks you didn't see her at the grave."
"I saw her."
"I told her you did." He put down the bucket. "She said, he didn't look. I said, he looked. I said I saw you look."
I said nothing. A dog barked behind a wall. The bougainvillea moved a little in the dark, a slow, papery shiver.
"I won't tell her you came," said Joseph. "If you don't want me to."
"I don't want her to know."
"All right."
"I only..." My voice cracked. "I wanted to see the light."
He nodded. He did not say anything for a moment. Then he did a surprising thing. He took off his sweater, a thick, old grey wool one with a hole in the elbow, and held it out to me.
"You're cold," he said.
I took it. It was warm. It smelled of woodsmoke and soap. I put it on over the jacket, and it hung on me, and for a moment I felt such an absurd rush of gratitude that I could not look at him.
"I know that look," said Joseph.
"What look?"
"The one you've got. I had it for years." He spoke gently, matter-of-factly, looking at the ground. "I'm not going to ask what you're thinking. I don't think I need to. I just want to say one thing, and then I'll go in."
"Joseph..."
"Don't do anything tonight." He lifted his eyes. "That's all. Not tonight. I'm not telling you what to do about tomorrow. I'm not telling you to be all right. You won't be all right. I know that. But whatever it is, whatever it looks like from where you're standing, it's the kind of thing that looks one way at night and another in the morning." He took a breath. "There's a thing they say, in the meetings. Get through the next hour. Not the day. Not the week. Just the hour. You can do an hour, can't you?"
I could not speak.
"My phone's on all night," said Joseph. "I keep it under my pillow. If you want to say something, or if you don't want to say anything, just ring and stay on the line. You don't have to talk. I'll talk. I'm good at it. I'll tell you the whole story of how I once fell off a roof in Mbarara." A faint smile. "It's very long, and I come out of it badly."
I nodded. My throat had closed. He picked up the bucket, and turned, and walked back across the road. At the gate, he paused, with his hand on the latch.
"She still loves you, you know," he said, without looking round. "That's the trouble. If she didn't, she wouldn't be so angry."
The gate clanged shut.
I stood in the road in his sweater, under the white light. And then I walked away.
I tell you this next part because I have promised myself to tell it plainly.
It was about midnight. I was somewhere on the long road down from Ntinda, past the dark mass of the industrial area, the warehouses and the scrapyards, the empty petrol stations. The traffic had thinned. A lorry went by, now and then, with its lights low, and a few boda men sat dozing on their bikes at the stages, and the whole city seemed to lie under a slow grey haze, like a sleeper's breath.
I was walking, and I was not thinking. And then I was thinking, very clearly, and it was this: it would be easier.
I do not mean I decided anything. I want to be precise. It was not a plan. It was a clean cold thought, like a coin lying in the road. It was the thought that if I were not there, the particular heap of things I had made would no longer need a person to answer for it. That Mr. Walusimbi had managed it. That a man could simply leave. That there were roads that went in only one direction.
I thought about the lorries. I thought about the way they went by, and how fast, and how dark. I thought about a long pale smear on tarmac, and a helmet with a cracked visor.
I stood on the verge for a long time, quite still, with the dust blowing round my ankles, and I did not do anything.
Get through the next hour.
I heard it as one hears a voice in another room. I do not know why it was that, and not any of the other things that might have stopped me. Not my mother's face, though I thought of it. Not Naomi's. It was a small, odd, practical sentence, spoken by a thin man with a bucket. Just the hour.
I took out my phone. The battery had dropped to four per cent. I looked at the screen. I did not ring him. I only held it, and looked at the name in the list, Joseph (Naomi's brother), and the number beneath it, which he had given me with a smile on a scrap of paper in the church yard four months earlier, when I had still been a man who could look at him without shame.
I put the phone away. I walked on.
It was an hour. Then it was another.
I came to Jinja Road at half past three.
I had not decided to go there. I had only found, at each turn, that I was taking the one that led toward it. A road runs through the east of the city, a long, wide, battered artery with a ditch on either side and a wall along one length, and I came upon it from the north, out of a dark side street, and saw the lights of the distant roundabout and the white streak of the lane markings going away into the haze, and I knew.
I have told you what I found. I will not tell it again. The wall, the long pale smear, the candle stub, the visor lying in the grass like a coin. I have told you how I crouched beside it, and turned it over and over in my hands, and how I could not pray.
I will tell you only one thing that I did not say before.
At some point, standing there, I took out the phone one more time, and my thumb hovered over the small grey line that said Voicemail (1). I looked at it for a long while. Forty-one seconds. I knew that it was a thing I would have to do. I knew it as one knows that a tooth must be pulled.
Not tonight, I thought. I can't. Not here.
I put it away. And I want you to know that that, too, was a kind of mercy. It was not a good one, nor a wise one, nor one that I had any right to. But it was, I think, the first act in two years that I had performed not to protect myself but because I knew that what I would find was too large for me, and that I would need help.
I did not know that yet. I only knew that I was tired.
The sky had begun to change. A dull grey first, like old dishwater. A thin line, the colour of weak tea, along the roofs of Nakawa. A boda man slowed, and saw me, and did not ask. I stood up. My knees ached. And I started to walk.
It is a long way from Jinja Road to Kawempe.
On foot, it is perhaps eleven kilometres. You go up through Nakawa and Kitintale and along the edge of Kololo, past the dark glass towers on Kampala Road, down through the sleeping market of Nakasero, around the Old Taxi Park, where the buses stand in their thousands under the sodium lights, wheel to wheel, like cattle in a pen. You go up Bombo Road past the bar called Sunrise, now shuttered, with its yellow sign switched off. Past a pharmacy, with a notice stuck to the door above it. Past the corner where, two years earlier, in a yellow shop with six screens, a boy had put twenty thousand shillings on a team his father used to listen to on a radio under a Corolla.
I walked it all. I did not stop. I was not thinking anything. I had come, I think, to a place beyond thought, a place of simple motion, left foot, right foot, where the body does one thing because it is the only thing left.
And as I walked, the city woke.
I had never seen it do that. I had seen it asleep and I had seen it at noon. But I had never walked through the hour when it shrugs itself awake. A shutter went up, and then another, with a sound like a long scraping breath. A man came out of a doorway and emptied a basin into the gutter. Women with brooms. Street-sweepers in orange vests, moving in a slow line down the verge, their brooms going hush, hush, hush in the grey light. A girl in a school uniform, running. A boy with a bundle of newspapers. A man was setting up a table beside the road, a plank on two crates, with a flask and a stack of plastic cups, and he whistled as he worked, an old tune, tuneless and cheerful.
It was a very ordinary morning. That was what astonished me. The world had no knowledge that anything had happened. It was simply getting on with the day.
At the corner of Bombo Road and a small lane, I stopped, because I could not go on.
There was a woman there. She had a charcoal stove on a crate, with a blackened kettle on it, and a basket of mandazi under a cloth, and a row of enamel mugs on a shelf made of an old door. She was perhaps fifty, plump, in a wrapper and a knitted hat, and she was wiping the counter with a rag, with great energy, humming. A couple of boda men were drinking tea at a bench, with their helmets on their knees.
She looked up. She looked at me for a long moment.
"Come," she said.
"I've no..."
"Come, come." She waved the rag. "Sit. You're cold."
I sat down on the end of the bench. The boda men glanced at me and returned to their tea. The woman poured a mug from the kettle, a thick, brown, milky tea, with sugar already in it, and set it in front of me with a mandazi on a saucer.
"I can't pay," I said. My voice was a croak. "I've got two thousand."
"Then pay two thousand."
"It's all I have."
"Then it's the price." She was already turning away, to another customer, and I held out the crumpled note. She glanced at it, and then at me, with a look of such open, unpitying shrewdness that I almost flinched.
"You have been at a burial," she said.
"Yes."
"A young one."
"Yes."
She nodded. She did not say pole. She did not say God has a plan. She took the note from my hand, and then, quite deliberately, she pushed it back.
"Not today," she said. "Drink."
"I can't..."
"Drink, my son." She said it briskly, as though speaking to a child who was making a fuss about a vegetable. "A man who has buried someone doesn't pay for tea. It's a rule. I have made it myself." She picked up her rag. "When you are stronger, you can come and buy me a mandazi. I will not be hard to find."
I looked at the mug. The steam rose from it in a thin, curling thread, into the cold blue air.
I picked it up. It was hot. It burned my palms, and I held it, and the heat went up my arms like something alive.
It was only tea. I know that. It was a plastic-sweet, over-boiled, ordinary roadside tea, made by a woman who had never met me, and would never see me again. But I sat there, on a splintery bench, in the first light, with a boda man's elbow against mine, and drank it, and when I put the mug down I found that I was crying again, silently, the tears running down into the corners of my mouth, and that nobody was looking at me.
It was the first thing I had been given for nothing in a very long time.
I did not understand it. I want that to be clear. I thought it was only kindness. I did not know that it was the beginning of something; that it was a small, thin, unlikely rope let down into a well. I only knew that when I got up, my legs held me.
"God keep you," said the woman, without looking up.
I said, "Thank you."
I walked on.
It was nearly six when I reached the garage.
I had not meant to come. I want to say that, as I have said it about other things. I had meant to go home, in the end, to the verandah and the bulb and the unspeakable conversation. But my feet, which had walked eleven kilometres without consulting me, turned left, at the end of Bombo Road, past the taxi stage, down a lane of red earth between two walls, and brought me to a tall, rusty, double gate of corrugated iron, with white letters painted across it in a careful hand.
SSEKAMATTE MOTORS. EST. 1988.
I stood in front of it. I did not know why. I stood in the early light, with a grey sky overhead and a smell of oil and wet metal in the air, and I looked at the gate, at the letters, at the small patch of beaten earth in front where a boy of fifteen had once beaten a dent out of a car door with a mallet.
It was the smell. That was why. It was the smell of oil, and iron, and Omo, and the warm, bitter, honest smell of metal that has been worked.
It was my father's smell.
I put my hand on the gate. The iron was cold and wet and slightly rough under my palm. And I leaned against it, with my forehead pressed to the letters, and for a long time I did not move.
Behind it, somewhere inside, there was a sound. A soft, steady, domestic sound, a kind of clink. The sound of an enamel cup being set down on a shelf. And then another. Two cups.
And then the squeak of a hinge.
I lifted my head. In the wall beside the gate, there was a small door, a wicket, painted the same grey. It had opened by about a hand's width. A thin line of yellow light fell out across the red dust. And in the line of light, an old man stood, with a blackened kettle in one hand and the other on the latch.
He did not look surprised.
"Eliya," said Mzee Ssekamatte. "You're early."