Chapter Two
Growing Away
Mulago Hospital is a city inside the city. You cross the gate and the noise changes: not quieter, but heavier, as though the air itself had been asked to carry more. There are women selling roasted maize beside the casualty entrance, and boys with wheelbarrows who carry patients for a fee, and old men sitting along the low wall with their elbows on their knees, staring at nothing with the patience of people who have been told to wait and have learned that the waiting itself is the treatment. There is a smell I cannot describe except to say that I have never been able to separate it from fear. Disinfectant on top, then something sweeter underneath, and under that, the smell of a great many people trying not to cry in public.
We arrived in the back of Mr. Ssekamatte's pickup, my father stretched across the seat with his head in my mother's lap, and Patience crouched on the floor with her fingers hooked through his belt as though he might slide away. Mr. Ssekamatte drove like a man defusing a bomb: very fast, very straight, no talking. When we pulled up at casualty, he was out and shouting before the engine had finished dying. I remember the way two nurses looked at us, and then at my father, and then at each other. I remember that look. It was not unkind. It was the look of people who have already done the sum.
They gave us a number. They put him on a trolley with one wheel that squealed.
For nine days I lived in a corridor.
The stroke ward at Mulago was not a place for family, but family lived there anyway: on benches, on cardboard spread across the concrete, on the metal steps outside the sluice room. At night the corridor was a map of sleeping bodies. Women with basins and sufurias. A grandfather asleep sitting up, his stick between his knees. Boys my age, curled in their school jackets, who had come to guard a mother or an uncle against the nurses' mistakes, and against the other patients' relatives, who would sometimes steal a blanket or a pair of slippers from someone too tired to notice.
My father's bed was the fourth one on the left. There were seven beds in the room and eleven patients, so two of them shared. He had a thin foam mattress with a plastic cover that stuck to his skin, and a drip stand that did not hold its height, so that every few hours Maama or I would stand on a stool and hang the bag on a nail in the wall. His right arm lay on top of the blanket like something that belonged to another man. The left one he could still move. He used it to hold on to us.
He could not speak. The doctors had a word for it, a long one, and a younger doctor with kind, tired eyes explained it to my mother in English and then, when she looked at him blankly, again in Luganda: the part of his brain that knew words was still there, but the road from it to his mouth had been blocked. "He understands," the doctor said. "He knows what you say. He just cannot answer." And my mother, who had stood very straight through all of it, sat down suddenly on the edge of the bed and put her hand over her mouth.
So we talked to him. All of us, for nine days, talked as though the words could pull him out of whatever had hold of him. Patience told him about school. My mother told him the price of tomatoes at the market, and who had been to the house, and what the neighbour's daughter had done. I read to him. I did not know what else to do, so I read his own Bible aloud, from wherever I opened it, in a low voice, so that the nurses would not look at me. I read him Job, by mistake, and then, realizing, skipped to a Psalm.
Every hour he watched my face. When I stopped reading, he made a sound. It was not a word. It was a long effortful hhhh, and he looked at me with an urgency that I could not understand, and I would say, "I'm here, Taata, I'm here," and he would close his eyes, and breathe, and after a while begin again.
I did not know what he was trying to say. That is the other thing that stays with me. Nine days, and I never knew.
On the second night, I made my first deal.
I want to describe it carefully, because it was the beginning of everything that followed, though I did not know that then. It was after one in the morning. The corridor was dark apart from the green exit sign over the stairwell, and the long buzz of a fluorescent tube in the nurses' station that nobody had bothered to fix. Maama was asleep on the cardboard beside the bed with her cardigan over her face. I had gone out to the stairwell because I could not breathe in the ward, and I sat on the cold concrete step, and put my forehead against my knees.
It was not a prayer like the ones behind the water tank. Those were easy. This was pressure. It came up out of me in a flood, and it was all arithmetic.
If You heal him, I said. If You heal him I will never skip tea again. I will read the whole Bible. I will go to every service. I will never look at my phone during the verse. I will be the kind of son You want. I will give You whatever You ask. I will stop wanting things. I will do it all.
I listed everything I could think of. When I ran out of things I owned, I began offering things I might one day own. Money. Years. A career in ministry, though I had no wish for it. I remember offering Him the rest of my life, in a stairwell in Mulago, with my nose running and my shirt sticking to my back, as though I had any idea what I was saying.
Then I said, Please.
Then I said it again, and again, and what I mostly remember is the sound of my own voice, going up and up the dark stairwell and arriving nowhere.
I came back to the ward. My father was awake. His eyes were open, and in the weak light I thought he looked at me with something like amusement, as if he had heard every word. I sat down beside him. He put his good hand over mine, and I held on to it until the morning.
For six days after that, he seemed to get a little better. He ate soft porridge off a spoon. On the fifth day he said, very faintly, a word that might have been Margaret. My mother cried so hard the nurse came running. A woman from church brought a flask of millet porridge and wept. Pastor Lubega came and stood at the foot of the bed with his Bible and his careful face, and said a long prayer in his slow driving voice, with all of us holding hands, and the whole room, patients and families, went quiet to listen. When he said Amen the whole ward said it back.
I thought that was it. I thought the deal had been accepted.
I remember how the light looked that afternoon, coming through the slatted windows in thin gold bars that lay across my father's blanket. I remember feeling, for the first time since the morning on the verandah, a sort of terrible shy gratitude, as though I had been spared something that I had no right to be spared.
Thank You, I thought, and meant it more than anything I had ever meant.
He died on the ninth night.
I had told myself I would stay awake. This was part of the deal. On the eighth day he had begun to breathe differently, a wet noise that rose and fell like something being dragged, and the young doctor had looked at his chart for longer than he should have, and my mother had gone out to the corridor and been sick into a basin. I told God, in the stairwell, that if He would only let my father live to see the morning, I would not close my eyes until he did.
It was a plastic chair. It had a crack across the seat that pinched the back of my thigh. I sat in it with my elbows on the edge of the bed, and my father's good hand in both of mine, and I watched his chest. In, and out. In, and out. Somewhere near the end of the corridor a woman was singing quietly in Runyankole to a child who would not sleep. The fan clicked in the ceiling. At some point my mother put her cheek down on the blanket by his hip and her breathing slowed.
I do not remember falling asleep. That is the thing. I remember that it was twenty to two, by the clock above the door. I remember thinking I will rest my eyes just for a moment. And I remember, in a long, deep, gentle blackness, being very far from any hospital at all, being somewhere with grass, somewhere I was warm.
When I woke, my mother was standing. A nurse was holding her by both elbows. Someone had drawn the thin green curtain around the bed, and through it came a long, strange, tearing sound that I did not at first recognize as her voice.
"Eliya," the nurse said to me quietly, not unkindly, in Luganda. "He has gone."
I looked at the clock. Twenty to four.
Two hours, I thought. Two hours. And then, because the mind will do anything to protect itself, I thought of something absurd: his hand is still warm. It was. I had been holding it the whole time.
I had promised.
The burial was in Mpigi, in the village my father came from, on the third day. We went in a hired minibus with the coffin tied on the roof under a green tarpaulin, and the whole way down the Masaka road I sat with my forehead against the window and watched the banana plantations go by like a slow green film, not seeing them.
There is a kind of funeral that happens in this part of the world that is not about grief, or not only about it. It is about arithmetic and arguments, about who sits where, who speaks first, who carries the photograph. Women arrived in their gomesis with enormous pots tied in kanga cloth and began cooking matooke in the yard before anyone had finished crying. Men stood in groups under the mango trees in dark jackets that did not fit. An uncle I had met twice, my father's older brother, Fred, a heavy man with a voice that was always about to make an announcement, took my mother aside during the vigil and began to speak to her in low, reasonable tones about the plot of land behind our house in Kawempe, and what my father would have wanted, and what a woman alone might find difficult to manage.
I saw her listen. I saw her fold her hands in front of her. And then I saw something I had not known she had in her, a stillness so complete that Uncle Fred stopped mid-sentence.
"Fred," she said. "My husband is not yet in the ground."
That was all she said. He went red, and cleared his throat, and found something urgent to do on the other side of the yard.
The service was in the compound, under a white tent that flapped when the wind came. The coffin was dark brown wood with a gold-coloured cross on the lid. Patience had asked, in the car, whether Taata would be cold in there, and nobody had known what to say, and then Ronnie had said, from the back seat, very seriously, "Pati, he's wearing his best suit. Your mother made sure. Even in the cold he will look better than all of us." And she had laughed, a short wet startled laugh, and wiped her nose on her sleeve.
I had not expected Ronnie to come. He was a friend from school, a loud, restless boy with a laugh that people turned around to look at, and I had not told him the burial was in Mpigi; I had barely told him anything. But when I stepped out of the minibus at the village, he was standing at the edge of the compound in his school trousers and a borrowed white shirt, holding a crate of sodas he could not afford, with a look on his face of such raw uncertainty that I almost did not recognize him.
"I didn't know what to bring," he said. "My dad said you don't bring anything. But I couldn't come with nothing."
I did not say anything. I took the crate from him, and put it down, and then, without deciding to, I put my arms around him, and stood there like that, a stiff, awkward pair, while the whole village politely looked elsewhere.
"Ah, mukwano," Ronnie said into my shoulder. "I'm so sorry."
It was the first time I cried. Not at the hospital, not in the minibus. In a village I barely knew, with my face in the neck of a boy who smelled of cheap soap and sodas and the inside of a bus.
I have never forgotten that he came. Remember it. It will matter.
When the time came for the family to speak, Pastor Lubega looked at me. I had been asked, the day before, to read a passage. It was a short one. Psalm 23. I had known it by heart since I was six.
I stood up. I walked to the front. The Bible was handed to me open, and I looked at the page, at the first line, The Lord is my shepherd, and the whole tent was silent, hundreds of faces, the wind pulling at the canvas, and my mouth opened, and what came out was nothing.
No sound. Not a single word. I stood there with my lips moving and my throat shut like a fist, and I felt the whole crowd waiting, and I thought: You want me to read this? To You? Now?
Pastor Lubega did not hurry me. After a long time he stepped forward and put his hand under the book, gently, as one might take a plate from someone who is about to drop it, and read the psalm himself, slowly, in that driving voice. When he got to though I walk through the valley, I saw my mother lower her head.
I sat down. I did not hear the rest.
We came home on a Thursday. The house smelled of other people. There were cups on every surface and a cardboard box of the rubbish of mourning: paper plates, a torn banner, somebody's shoes. Maama moved through it all in her black dress, collecting. Patience slept on the sofa with her mouth open, her fist wrapped in the hem of my father's jacket, which she had taken from the coffin-room and refused to put down.
At six o'clock my mother walked out onto the verandah and turned on the bulb.
I was sitting on the jerrycan. I had been there for an hour, not thinking, just sitting. The light came on above us, yellow and weak against the dusk, and a few moths found it at once.
"Maama," I said. I did not mean to say it. It came out harsh. "He's not on the road."
She did not turn. She stood with her hand still on the wall beside the switch.
"I know," she said.
"So why—"
"Leave it, Eliya."
I did not understand then. I was sixteen, and angry, and exhausted, and it seemed to me the most foolish thing in the world: a woman leaving a light on for a man in a grave. I thought it was a kind of denial. It was years before I understood it was the opposite. It was the most honest thing she could do. It said: I know he is gone, and I will do the one thing he taught me anyway.
She sat beneath it, as she always had. After a while, Patience came out and sat on her knee, though she was too big now. None of them said anything.
The next morning, I woke at ten to six.
I do not know why. No one had told me to. The house was dark and cold. I lay there looking at the ceiling, and from the verandah, I heard the small familiar sounds: the scratch of a match, the hiss of charcoal catching, the clink of the enamel cups being taken down from the shelf. Three cups. She set out three.
I went out. My mother was crouched by the stove with her back to me. Patience was already there on the step in her school sweater, hugging her knees. Between them, on the concrete, where he had always put it, lay my father's Bible, closed.
Nobody picked it up.
I stood in the doorway. The sky was the colour of milk again, and in the corner above me the bulb was still on, though it was nearly light, because someone had forgotten. Or because nobody had been willing to turn it off.
I sat down on the jerrycan. My mother poured the tea. The three of us held our cups and looked at the Bible, and the Bible lay there, and the silence stretched out until Patience, in a very small voice, said, "Who's going to read?"
My mother looked at me.
I picked it up. It was lighter than I remembered. The cover was worn almost to felt at the corner where his thumb had always rested, and for a moment I held it in both hands and could not have said what I was waiting for. A sign, I suppose. A word. A sudden warmth, like the one in the dark room when I was eleven.
I opened it at random. A verse sat there on the page, a line, a perfectly good line.
I read it aloud. My voice came out flat, like someone reading out a bus timetable. My mother said, "Amen," and Patience said it after her. I said it too. And when it was over and we had drunk our tea, I put the Bible down on the step exactly where it had been, and went to wash.
That afternoon, I walked to the water tank behind the house. I stood there in the dust, with my back against the cold rusted metal, the old place, the small church, and I opened my mouth to say what I always said.
Nothing came.
It was not anger. That would have been easier. It was something quieter. I stood there for perhaps ten minutes, listening to the tank tick as it warmed in the sun, and understood that something had closed between us, and that I was the one who had closed it, and that I was not at all sure I wanted to open it again.
You didn't keep Your side, I thought. And there it was, simple as a bill. I had paid my part in the stairwell and the plastic chair; I had kept my eyes open, nearly, for nine days. And He had taken my father anyway.
I went back to the house.
On Sunday I put on my good shirt and went to church with my mother and my sister and sang every hymn. I stood when everyone stood and bowed my head when everyone bowed theirs. When Pastor Lubega said let us pray, I closed my eyes and moved my lips. Nobody could have told the difference.
That was the first of many years in which I did exactly that.