Chapter Twenty
Forgiveness
She did not run into my arms.
I had pictured it, on the walk to the basin, the way you picture a thing you are afraid of: the gate flung open, the cry, the embrace. It was not like that. My mother came through the wicket door at a quick, stiff walk, in her market apron, with a plastic flask in one hand and her handbag clutched under the other arm, and stopped three paces inside the yard. She looked at me. She looked at the old man, who had risen from his stool and taken off his cap. She looked at the tyre, the cups, the sunlight lying across the floor.
"Mzee," she said. "Thank you."
"It was only tea, Margaret."
"I know what it was." Her voice was steady. "I would like to speak with my son."
"Of course." He put the cap back on his head. He did not look at me. He picked up a spanner from the bench, and a small oily rag, and walked unhurriedly to the far end of the shed, where the minibus stood on its blocks, and ducked under the raised bonnet of the Corolla. A moment later I heard the soft, rhythmic tick of a ratchet. It went on, patient and even, like a clock.
My mother set the flask down on the stove. She took off her handbag, and put it beside the flask. She straightened, and folded her hands in front of her apron, and looked at me again.
"Sit," she said.
I sat on the tyre. She did not. She stood in front of me, with the sun behind her, so that her face was in shadow and the edges of her head-wrap burned gold, and I could not read it.
"I told you," she said, "that I did not want to hear it from a boy who was not able."
"Yes."
"Are you able?"
I looked up at her. My hands were hanging between my knees. I thought of every way I had ever begun this sentence, in the shower, in the dark, in the long walk down the Gayaza road. I thought of the green passbook in the biscuit tin.
"Yes," I said.
"Then say it."
I told her everything.
I will not set it down again. You have been with me from the start, and you know what there was to tell. I began with the yellow shop, and the first twenty thousand, and the night in the room in Kikoni. I told her about the six hundred thousand shillings I had taken off the top of her envelope, and how I had put them back with winnings, and said nothing. I told her about Mr. Walusimbi and the banner with the bridge. I told her the name. I said it plainly, Bridge Capital Club, and watched it land in her face.
I told her I had known by November. I told her that I had heard a man on a telephone. I told her that I had brought thirteen other people to the door, and that I had been paid for each of them, and that I had spent the money on shoes.
I told her about the kitchen table. I said, "You asked me whether it was different. And I said yes." I said, "You put your hand on mine."
I did not look away. That was the thing I had promised myself, on the tyre, in the sunlight. I held her eyes through all of it, and I did not soften any word, and when my voice broke, I let it break, and went on.
"There is no cooperative," I said. "There never was. It was all of it in the Club. The four million two hundred thousand. It's gone. It's gone, Maama. The police say six billion shillings, and none of it is coming back, not one shilling. I took everything you saved in six years and I gave it to a thief." I took a breath. "And I'm not sorry because I was caught. I was sorry before. I've been sorry for months. I only wasn't brave."
I stopped. The ratchet ticked at the far end of the shed. A pigeon had got in through a hole in the roof, and was walking along a beam.
My mother did not move.
She stood perfectly still. She did not blink. The silence went on for so long that I began to hear my own heart, and then, behind it, faint and far, the sound of a radio from a house across the lane. I thought: she is going to leave. I thought: she is going to turn round and walk out and I will never be able to follow.
She took a step forward.
And then she hit me.
It was not a slap. It was a blow with her fist, closed, against the middle of my chest, and it was not hard. She was a small woman. But it was so unlike her, so sudden and so entire, that I felt the breath go out of me. She hit me again. And again. She was making a sound I had never heard from her, a low, ragged, animal sound, and her fists came down on my chest and my shoulders, over and over, and I did not lift my hands.
"Four million," she said. "Four million."
"I know."
"Your father's shirts. I sold them. I sold them for your fees." She struck me. "Two of them. The ones with the collars. Do you know I sat on the bed and cried? I thought, he would not mind. I thought, it is for the boy."
"Maama..."
"Six years! Six years, Eliya! Every note, a little, a little. I ate at the stall so I would not have to buy lunch. I walked to the market. I walked so I would not pay the taxi." Her voice cracked in half. "And you looked at me. At the table. With that face."
"I know."
"You looked at me!"
"I know."
She struck me once more, weakly, her hand sliding off my shoulder. And then her whole body folded. She went down on her knees on the earth floor, in front of the tyre, in the dust and the oil, and put her face in her hands, and her back heaved. She was sobbing, as I had never seen her sob, not at the burial, not in the hospital, not on any night of my life. It shook her like a wind shaking a tree.
I slid off the tyre. I knelt in front of her. I did not touch her. I did not know whether I might.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm so sorry. I'll never... I know there's no..."
"Don't say it." She did not lift her head. "Not yet. I cannot hear it yet."
So I was silent. I knelt in the dust, in the sunlight, in front of my mother, and listened to her cry. It took a long time. The ratchet at the end of the shed stopped, once, and began again.
When she was done, she wiped her face with the hem of her apron. She sat back on her heels. Her eyes were swollen almost shut. There was dust in the tear-tracks on her cheeks, and a smear of oil on her chin, and she looked, at that moment, like a child who has been crying for a very long time, and like the oldest woman in the world.
"I am angry," she said.
"Yes."
"I want you to know that. I am not going to say it is all right. It is not all right. I am going to be angry for a long time. Maybe for a year. Maybe more." She drew a ragged breath. "I will wake up in the night and be angry. I will see the bulb and be angry. You will have to live in the house with me, and I will be angry, and you will not say anything about it."
"I won't."
"And Patience's fees will not be paid."
"I'll find..."
"You will not find. You will work." It was fierce. "You will wash cars if you have to. You will carry bricks. You will give every shilling you earn, for as long as it takes, and you will not buy another pair of shoes."
"Yes."
"And the police will come. They always come." She said it with the grim flat certainty of a woman who has watched neighbours taken. "You will go to them. You will tell them all of it. Not just what is safe. All."
"I will."
She looked at me for a long moment. Her eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot and utterly clear.
"And I forgive you," said my mother.
I stared at her.
"No," she said, quickly, lifting a hand. "Not like that. Do not think it is finished. I am not saying the anger is gone. I am saying..." She stopped. She pressed her lips together. When she went on, it was slowly, a word at a time, like a person walking across a river on stones. "I am saying that I have decided. I decided at five o'clock this morning. I was sitting on the step with the light on, and I said, Lord, I cannot do this. I do not have it in me. And I heard..."
"Heard?"
"Not a voice." She shook her head. "A... sentence, in my head. Your father's. It is only one verse. If you cannot find five minutes for God, you have a bigger problem than time." She smiled, slightly, wetly. "I thought, what has that to do with it? And then I understood. I cannot forgive you. I do not have the strength. But I can ask for it, one morning at a time, and I can wait until it comes. That is all that he meant. That is all it has ever been."
She put out a hand. It was shaking. She laid it against the side of my face, her palm dry and warm, smelling of cassava and soap.
"I am your mother," she said. "I will be angry for as long as I need. And I will not stop being your mother while I do it."
I put my own hand over hers. I could not speak. I bent forward until my forehead rested on her knee, in the dust, and her hand slid to the back of my head and held it there, as it had held it in the yard, on the morning she had waited under the light.
She opened the flask. Of course she did. She poured tea into the lid, a thick brown stream, and held it to my mouth as though I were four years old, and I drank. It was exactly the way she made it. Ginger and milk and too much sugar.
At the far end of the shed, an old man tapped quietly on an engine, and did not look round.
I went to see Mzee Opio on the Thursday.
I went alone. My mother had offered to come, and I had said no, and she had looked at me for a moment and nodded. It was a thing I had to do on my own two feet.
The room behind the salon was almost empty. The plastic chairs had been stacked in a corner. The mourners had gone, and the candle, and the rice, and the smell of cooking. There was only the bed, and the table, and the photograph of the woman in the white blouse over it, and the old man, sitting on the edge of the mattress in his undershirt and a pair of grey trousers, with a cup of cold tea beside him that he had forgotten to drink.
He looked up when I knocked. He did not speak.
I stood in the doorway. I had rehearsed it. All the way across Kawempe I had said it over to myself, in my head, a short sentence, a simple one. Mzee, I lied to you. But now I stood on the threshold in front of that small tired figure, and every word turned to ash.
"Sit," said Mzee Opio.
I sat on the stool. It was Ronnie's. It had a crack in the seat and a faded orange cushion, and it creaked.
"I have something to tell you," I said. "About the night."
"Yes."
"You asked me where I was. At the hospital. When you said that he had called fourteen times."
"I remember."
"I told you I didn't hear it."
He said nothing.
"That wasn't true." I made myself look at him. "I heard it. I saw his name. I saw it on the screen, every time. I was in a bar, with some boys from my class. I thought he was drunk. I thought he was being dramatic. I thought I would call him back. I..." My voice shook. "I turned the phone over. On the table. I laughed at a joke."
The old man did not move.
"I could have answered. If I had answered the first one, or the third, or the seventh... I don't know what he would have said. But I think he would not have gone. I think he would have come to me. And I didn't. And I lied to you about it, in the corridor. When you were standing there, in your uniform. When you said he had told you I never lied." I could not see. "I'm so sorry, Mzee. I'm sorrier than I can say."
I put my face in my hands. It was very quiet. Out in the yard, somebody was washing clothes, and I could hear the slap of the wet cloth on the stone.
After a very long time, Mzee Opio said:
"I knew."
I lifted my head.
"I knew," he said again. His voice was quite calm. "In the corridor. When you said it. I have been a guard for thirty-one years, Eliya. I have stood at the door of a bank every night since you were in nappies. I know when a man is lying to me. It is the whole of my profession." He looked at his hands. "You were looking at my left ear. People do that. They cannot look at the eyes."
"Then why..."
"Why did I let you?" A faint, awful smile. "Because I looked at you. And I saw that you were drowning. And I thought, he has lost his friend. I will let him have the night." He was quiet for a moment. "It is a long time since I had a night of my own. I knew what it was worth."
I could not speak.
"I have been angry," said Mzee Opio. "I will not tell you otherwise. For three days I looked at your photograph. You are in many, with him. On the wall, in the book. Do you know I turned them to face the wall?" His mouth worked. "And then I turned them round again. I thought, what is it, to hate the boy my son loved? It is not an honour to him. It is not a memorial."
"Mzee..."
"I cannot say the word." He lifted a hand, as my mother had, palm out. "I would like to say it. I think that I will, one day. But I cannot say it today. If I say it today, it will be a lie, and I have had enough of those from this family." He gave a short dry laugh. "My son forged my name. You lied to me in a hospital. We are a house of liars, the three of us. I would like to see if we can do better."
"How?"
"By sitting together," said the old man, "and not lying." He pointed at the stool. "That is all I know. I do not know about the rest. I know that a person cannot hate and eat at the same table. I have tried. The food goes cold." He reached across to the table, and took a small round loaf from a plate, and broke it in half, and held out one piece. "Eat."
I took it. My hand shook so hard that crumbs fell on my knee.
We ate in silence, the old man and I, side by side, in the little room where his son had grown up. The bread was dry. It tasted of nothing. And I have never forgotten it, as I have never forgotten the tea from the woman by the road, or the egg and the twist of salt in the garage. I have come to think that the Kingdom of God is made, for the most part, of small plain food, handed across a table by people who have every reason to refuse.
At the door, as I was leaving, Mzee Opio said, "Eliya."
"Yes?"
"He did it for me. The money. I know that." He did not turn his head. "I don't want you to think it was for himself. It never was. It was never for himself, that boy."
"I know."
"Come on Sunday," he said. "I will make beans."
They brought Mr. Walusimbi back on the sixth of April.
I had this from the radio, again; the girl with the transistor was by then a regular herald in the lane. A man had been arrested in Kigali, at a hotel, trying to board a flight to Dubai. He had been extradited on a Tuesday. The news said that he had cooperated fully, which meant, I gathered, that he had nowhere else to go. They held him at Kira Road police station, in a block at the back, where the cells were. And by then I had been there twice, with my mother, in a borrowed taxi, to give a statement.
It was a long statement. A tired young inspector with a moustache took it down by hand, in a ledger, with a ballpoint pen that kept running dry. I said everything. I did not leave out the commissions. I did not leave out the shoes. When I had finished, the inspector read it back to me in a flat official voice, and said, "Mr. Kasozi, you understand that you are not merely a witness."
"I understand."
"You were a recruiter. It is an offence." He tapped the pen against the ledger. "However. You have come forward. You have cooperated. And you have a mother," he glanced at her, in the plastic chair by the wall, upright, hands folded, "who has made an impression on the sergeant. We will see what the prosecutor says." He sighed. "I would advise you not to leave Kampala."
"I wasn't going to."
"Good."
I was walking down the corridor afterwards, toward the front desk, with my mother a pace behind me, when a door opened on my left, and a constable led a man out.
I knew him at once. I would have known him in the dark.
He was in the navy suit. It was creased, now, and stained at the knee, and the jacket hung open over a shirt that had been white. The little gold cross was gone from the lapel. He had not been shaved for some days, and a grey stubble stood out along the round soft jaw, and there were hollows under the eyes. He was shorter than I remembered. He walked with a slight stoop, between two policemen, in a pair of shoes without laces, and when he saw me, he stopped.
The corridor went quiet.
"Brother Kasozi," said Mr. Walusimbi.
I did not answer. I could not. A hot wave had come up into my face and my hands had begun to shake, and I was aware of the sound of my own breath, loud and uneven, and behind me, of my mother, who had taken hold of the back of my jacket.
"Brother," he said again. He took a step. The constable's hand closed on his arm, but he did not seem to notice. His eyes, those warm, wide, steady eyes, were wet. "You must understand. I never meant. It was never my intention. I had a structure, a, a model. It would have worked, if the market had not... if the Jinja business had not caused the panic. It was only a matter of cash flow. I was going to pay you back. I was going to pay all of you back. I swear to you, on my mother's grave..."
I heard Ronnie's voice in my head. A house. A bed. A big chair, in front of a television.
I heard a girl in a pressed blue blouse. He cried.
I heard a woman in a one-room house, shelling beans. I pray that he is not hungry.
"You killed him," I said.
"What?"
"Ronnie Opio. He went to find you. He went to Naguru. He was twenty-two." My voice was shaking so badly that the words fell out in pieces. "He's in the ground. Next to his mother. You were in a hotel in Kigali. You were having breakfast."
"I didn't... I had no knowledge..."
"You had a pen." I was shouting. "You sat at a desk in a gold frame, with a Bible verse on the wall, and you looked me in the eye and told me it was a door. You told me Peter drowned because he looked at the waves. You used that. You used it on me. You used it on a woman in a head-wrap with a tin under her bed."
"Eli," said my mother, very quietly, at my back.
"No." I was weeping. The corridor blurred. "No, Maama. No. I want to... I want to hit him. I want to..." I made a fist, and looked at it, shaking in front of me, and the whole bare green-painted passage swung, and the constable moved forward, and Mr. Walusimbi shrank, his round face crumpling, and put up his hands.
And in that second, with my fist raised, I saw it.
I saw the hands. Smooth, plump, trembling. I saw the cuff, the sleeve, the dirty shirt. I saw the stoop in the shoulders. I saw the man behind the desk, with the sweat on his hairline, the one who had flinched when the accountant spoke. The one on the telephone, in the dark corridor, with the rope in his voice, saying no, no, no, ssebo, Friday.
He was afraid. He had been afraid for a long time.
He was a man who had started with a banner, and a small clean hope, and a verse on the wall. Who had made a lie so large that he could no longer get out from under it. Who had run, and been caught, and was standing in a corridor, without laces, begging a boy to understand.
I knew him. That was what was unbearable. I knew every step of the road he had come by. I had walked it, at a smaller scale, in better shoes. The only difference between us, I thought, was the number of zeroes.
My fist came down.
I did not know what to do with it. It hung at my side, open, and I looked at it.
"I forgive you," I said.
I do not know where it came from. It was not a thought. It was a sentence that had arrived whole, in a voice that did not sound like mine, and the minute it was out I wished it back. It was absurd. It was monstrous. It was a lie, I thought; I did not forgive him; I could feel, in my belly, the hot black stone of the thing I felt.
But I had said it. It was in the air. And I understood, with a sort of dull astonishment, that I had meant something by it. Not that he was innocent. Not that Ronnie's death did not count. I had meant that I would not carry him. That I was putting down a weight I could not hold.
If I carry it, it makes me heavy. I have a daughter to carry.
Mr. Walusimbi was weeping. He stood with his hands over his face, between the two policemen, and his shoulders shook. "Thank you," he said, over and over, through his fingers. "Thank you. Thank you, brother. God bless you."
I did not answer. I felt nothing. That is the truth, and I will not decorate it. I stood in the corridor of a police station, with my mother's hand on my jacket, and felt exactly as I had felt before: empty, sick, and furious. There was no warmth. There was no release. It was as though I had put a coin into a machine and the machine had not so much as clicked.
They took him away. A door shut. The corridor was silent.
"Come," said my mother.
We went out into the sun. The taxi was waiting, and she paid the man, and we sat side by side in the back, not speaking, and the city went by outside the dirty window in a long bright smear.
It was two days before I understood what I had done. It was on a Saturday, in the early morning, at ten to six, on the verandah, with a cup in my hand. I had woken, as usual, to the smell of ginger and charcoal. I was sitting on the jerrycan, half asleep, and my mother was reading, in a low voice, a verse about a woman who had swept her house and found a coin, and I was not listening. And then, quite without warning, I thought of Mr. Walusimbi's hands.
I waited for the old black stone. I waited for the hot, hard, familiar pressure.
It was not there.
It was not that I had forgotten. I could see his face perfectly. I could see the cuff and the stained knee and the gold cross missing from the lapel. But the thing that had sat in my chest like a fist, since the night on Jinja Road, had loosened. Not gone. Loosened. As if a hand that had gripped me for weeks had, in some unnoticed moment, begun, by degrees, to let go.
I forgive you.
It had not worked, in the corridor. It had only been a coin dropped in a slot. But a coin does not have to ring to have fallen. It had gone down, and down, in the dark, for two days, and it had landed somewhere I could not see; and what I felt now, on the verandah, in the cold bright morning, was not joy, nor peace, but something plainer and more solid, like the first firm place a man's foot finds in a flooded field.
"What did you hear?" said my mother.
I looked at her. She was looking at me over the rim of her cup, calm and tired and quite unafraid.
"That it doesn't have to ring," I said.
She waited.
"Forgiveness," I said. "It doesn't have to feel like anything. You say it first. The feeling comes after. It might come in two days."
My mother lowered her cup. She did not say that is very good, Eliya. She did not say anything at all. She put out a hand, and laid it over mine on the arm of the jerrycan, and left it there.
Above our heads, in the corner, the bulb burned on in the early light, pale and ridiculous, because nobody had remembered to turn it off.