Chapter Twenty-one
The Road Back
My mother kept the accounts in the same notebook she had always used, a school exercise book with a green cover and a ruled margin. On the first page, in her upright schoolteacher's hand, she wrote the date, and under it, in two columns:
OWED. 4,200,000.
PAID. 0.
She did not show it to me at first. I found it by accident, in the second week of April, when I went to fetch the salt and saw it lying open on the kitchen table beside her reading glasses. I stood and looked at it for a minute, at the neat zero, the straight line under the figures, the small blue ink. Then I closed it, very gently, and put it back exactly as it had been.
The next evening, when I came home from the garage, I put ten thousand shillings on the table beside it, in two five-thousand notes, folded once. I did not say anything. My mother looked at the notes. She looked at me. She opened the notebook, and wrote, under the zero, 10,000, and drew a line.
That was how it began.
I should say what I had left to sell.
The phone first. It was a decent one; a man in Wandegeya gave me three hundred and ten thousand for it, and I took it without haggling. The watch, a week later: gold-coloured, with a small expensive tick. It fetched one hundred and eighty thousand. The honey-coloured shoes went to a boy in Katwe for ninety. And then there was the jacket.
I could not bring myself to sell it in the city. It hung in my wardrobe for three weeks, on a wire hanger, black and smooth and richly lined, with the faint residue of a tea stain on the inside of the cuff that no dry-cleaner had quite removed. Every time I opened the door it looked at me. Naomi had been right. It had opinions.
In the end it was my mother who took it.
She came to my room one evening, and held it up by the shoulders, and examined it with the cold professional gaze of a woman who has handled ten thousand garments. She turned it inside out. She ran her thumb along the seam. "Good wool," she said. "Italian. Four hundred thousand, you said?"
"Yes."
"Who would pay that?"
"Nobody, I suppose."
"A bank manager," said my mother. "A pastor of a very large church. A man who wishes to be seen." She folded it over her arm. "I will put it on the rail. At the front, where the light is good. I will say it is from Europe."
"Is it?"
"I will say so," said my mother, "and you will not contradict me."
It sold on the Saturday. I was at the stall, helping her unpack a bale, and I watched it happen. A stout man in a safari suit, with a gold tooth and a very new telephone, stopped and fingered the sleeve. He asked the price. My mother named a figure of such serene and unreasonable magnitude that I nearly dropped the bale. The man haggled. She did not move. At the end, he paid two hundred and sixty thousand shillings, in cash, and walked away wearing it, delighted, with the collar turned up.
My mother counted the notes. She tucked them into her bosom. She did not look at me.
"It was a very good jacket," she said. "I am sorry to see it go."
That night, in the green notebook, under 10,000, she wrote a new line. I read it over her shoulder. 260,000. She had underlined it twice.
I started at the garage on the first of May.
It was Mzee Ssekamatte's suggestion, though he did not put it as one. He said only, on the morning after the burial, as I was leaving, that he had a gearbox that wanted holding and a boy who wanted watching, and that if I had nothing to do on weekdays between lectures, I might come and sit. I went on the Monday. By the Wednesday I was holding the gearbox. By the Friday, I was covered to the elbows in black grease, and the boy, a skinny, serious fifteen-year-old called Kato, had decided that I was an idiot and told me so.
"You hold it like a baby," he said.
"What's wrong with that?"
"It's a clutch plate. It is not a baby. It does not want to be loved." He took it out of my hands. "Watch."
I watched. He was good. He was very good, with a quick, deft, impatient competence that reminded me of someone, and I stood there in my father's old overall, which Mzee Ssekamatte had taken from a nail without comment and handed to me on the first day, and felt a laugh rising, helplessly, in my throat.
"What?" said Kato.
"Nothing. You're right. I'm an idiot."
"I said."
It was slow work. I will not pretend otherwise. I was not gifted. My hands, which could do a column of figures in a blink, were clumsy with a spanner, and for the first month I scraped my knuckles raw on every bolt. I dropped things. I broke a gasket. I fitted a bearing the wrong way round, and the old man, without raising his voice, took it out and turned it, and said, "Again." I did it again. And again. And at some point, around the sixth week, in the middle of a Thursday afternoon, with the rain drumming on the sheet-metal roof like a thousand small fists and the shed full of the smell of wet earth and iron, I realised that I was not thinking about anything.
It was not peace. I do not want to oversell it. It was only the absence of noise. A man cannot think of his sins while he is holding a spark plug. He thinks of the spark plug. It was the most merciful thing I had found.
On the last Friday of May, as the light was going, Mzee Ssekamatte called me over to the bench.
He had a box under his arm. It was a wooden toolbox, long and low, with a leather handle worn to the shape of a palm, and a brass catch that had turned green. He set it down on the bench in the pale slant of light, and rested his hand on the lid.
"This was in the back," he said. "I should have given it to your mother after the burial. I did not like to. I thought I might have a use for it." A slight smile. "I find I have not."
I opened the catch.
Inside, on a bed of folded cloth, lay a set of spanners, twelve of them, graded by size, in a row, with their chrome gone dull from long handling. A small hammer. A bent screwdriver. A spoke key, the sort used for truing a wheel, with a loop of wire through the handle. And at one end, in a neat compartment of its own, a tin of whitewash and a brush.
I did not touch them. I looked.
On the inside of the lid, scratched into the wood with a nail, in a firm blocky hand that I would have known on any page in the world, were two letters. S.K. And beneath them, smaller, Ps 46:10.
"Be still," said the old man, gently. "And know that I am God."
I closed the lid. I stood with both hands flat on it.
"Take it home," said Mzee Ssekamatte. "Use them. A tool that is not used goes to rust. He would not have liked to see them sleeping."
I went back to church on the first Sunday of June.
I had not meant to go on that day. I had only meant, on a Sunday morning, to take the long way round the end of the lane. But the drums were going, as they always did, through the walls into the street, and there was a smell of ironed cotton and Vaseline in the air, and my feet stopped.
I stood at the gate for a long time. A boda man waiting by the kerb glanced at me, and looked away.
I could feel the building. I mean that quite exactly. It was like standing in front of a large animal, a patient one, asleep, with its flank rising and falling in the dark. I heard the congregation begin a song, low at first, then swelling. And I thought: I cannot. They know. They have all heard. I thought of the safari suit, and the faces at the funeral, and a small hot flush of shame went through me from my scalp to my feet.
Then go home, said a voice.
It was a reasonable voice. It was the voice that had run me for years. And I stood there, with the sun on my neck, with my hands in the pockets of an old trouser that did not fit, and heard in that voice a thing I had not heard in it before.
It was fear. Only that. It was not wisdom. It was a very old, very small child's fear of being seen.
I went in.
I went in at the back. There was a plastic chair beside the door, in the last row, behind a pillar, where the latecomers sat, and I took it, and sat down, and looked at my knees. The song ended. There was the rustle of a hundred people sitting. I did not lift my head.
I felt them look.
It was not dramatic. I want you to know that. Nobody pointed. Nobody turned round and gaped. It was subtler than that; it was a kind of quiet stir that went through the room, as wind goes through standing grass, a small turning of heads, a lowering of voices, a whisper behind a hand. A woman in a purple hat leaned to her neighbour. A man in the row ahead coughed, and shifted.
That's him.
Samuel's boy.
The one who took the...
I sat quite still. The sweat ran down inside my shirt. I thought: you can leave. Nobody would blame you. But I did not. I stayed, in my plastic chair, behind the pillar, and I kept my eyes on the floor, and the sermon began, and I did not hear a word of it.
Afterwards, I was one of the last out. I stood at the door with my hands at my sides and waited for the aisle to clear. Most of the people went by me without a glance. One or two nodded stiffly. A very old woman I did not know patted my arm as she went. But in the yard, under the mango tree, a knot of women in gomesis had gathered, and as I came out of the door I saw them see me, and fall silent.
"Eliya," said Pastor Lubega.
He had come up beside me without a sound. He wore his dark suit and a plain tie, and he held his Bible in one hand, closed over his finger, and he did not smile.
"Pastor."
"You came."
"I know I shouldn't have."
"Why not?"
"They..." I made a vague gesture at the tree. "They know."
"Of course they know." He said it quite placidly. "I told them." He looked at my face. "Not all. I said that you had been involved in an unfortunate business, and that you had given yourself up to the police, and that you were working to repay what was lost. I said that you were a member of this fellowship and that you would be treated as one." A pause. "I did not say it was easy. I said I expected it to be done."
I stared at him.
"There is a woman under that tree," said Pastor Lubega, "whose sister lost one hundred and twenty thousand shillings. She is very angry. I think she has a right. I have asked her to speak to you, in her own time, when she is ready. She may say hard things. You will listen." He met my eyes. "Can you do that?"
"Yes."
"Good." He opened his Bible. From between the pages, he drew a small thing, a slip of old, soft, yellowed paper, folded into four. "I have something for you."
I took it. It was lined paper, torn from a notebook, covered in a cramped slanting hand. The ink had faded to the colour of weak tea. There was a date at the top. 14 March 1996.
Taxi park. Rain. A boy in the mud behind the buses. Stabbed. I nearly drove by. I was late for something I do not now remember. I was going to a bar. I stopped because I felt a fool. I picked him up, and it took forty minutes to get him through the gate of Mulago. I do not know why I did it. I said a verse in the glove compartment. It was a stupid verse. I do not think he heard.
And beneath it, in a different pen, a later hand: Blank. I still do not know why that night. Samuel Kasozi has been to church every Sunday for twenty-eight years. I have never worked it out.
I read it twice. My eyes had blurred.
"Mzee Ssekamatte told me," I said. "About the park. About my father. He said you carried him."
"It is a very short list, the carrying." The pastor smiled slightly. "I have only done it once. I do not recommend it. I did my back in."
"You were going to a bar."
"I was going to a very bad bar, with a woman I should not have been seeing." He closed the Bible. "That is the part I like. I like that I was not good. I was only a man in a taxi who happened to stop." He put a hand on my shoulder, the large warm hand, and I felt its weight through my shirt. "Come on Sunday, Eliya. And the Sunday after. Sit at the back, if you wish. It does not matter where. A person does not have to be near the front to be seen."
Patience did not speak to me for eleven weeks.
It was not hatred, I think. It was something colder and more careful. She went on living in the house. She ate at the same table. She said please and thank you, in a small clipped polite voice, as one speaks to a lodger. When I came in at night she looked up from her book, and looked down again. When I sat on the jerrycan in the morning, she took her cup and sat on the step with her back turned. She went to school. She sang in the choir. She did her homework. She had, I saw, put a wall up round herself, brick by brick, with great deliberation, and was waiting behind it to see what I would do.
I did nothing. I had learned, by then, that it was the only thing I could do. I could not argue her out of it. I could not explain. I could only be there, each morning, at ten to six, with my cup, on the jerrycan, and wait.
It was the middle of August when she broke.
It was five in the morning, in the dark, in the cold. I had risen early to be at the garage by six, and I was standing in the kitchen in my overalls, quietly, so as not to wake the house, trying to find my boots. A light came on. I turned. Patience stood in the doorway in her old school sweater, with her hair tied up in a scarf, barefoot, scowling, holding a kettle.
"You're making a noise," she said.
"Sorry."
"You always do. You think you're quiet." She went past me to the stove. She lit the ring, and set down the kettle with a clank, and stood with her back to me, her thin shoulders hunched in the sweater. "I couldn't sleep."
"Pati..."
"Don't. I'm not talking to you."
"All right."
The kettle began to tick. I stood, with my boot in my hand, in the dim kitchen. She did not turn. Her voice, when it came, was very low and flat.
"I said I believed you."
"I know."
"I stood in this room and I said it. Okay. I believe you. After they sent me home. After the bursar read my name." She gripped the edge of the stove. "You said it was work. You said you would tell me when it was finished. And I went back to school, and I held up my head, and I thought, my brother is a person who tells me the truth."
"I'm so sorry."
"I know you are. Everyone's sorry. Maama's sorry, and Pastor's sorry, and the whole church is sorry. I'm so tired of sorry." She swung round. Her eyes were fierce and wet. "I don't want you to be sorry. I want you to have never done it. And you can't give me that. You can't give me that, Eli. You can't ever."
"No," I said. "I can't."
"So what am I supposed to do?"
I did not answer. There was no answer. We stood, the two of us, on either side of the small hot kitchen, in the blue dark, and the kettle rose to the boil between us with a thin rising whistle.
She turned back to the stove. She took the kettle off. She took down two cups from the shelf, and put a spoon of tea in each, and a great deal of sugar, and poured the water, and stirred. She did it with her back to me, jerkily, her whole body stiff. And then she set one of the cups on the table, with a bang, in front of the empty chair.
"Drink it," she said. "Before it goes cold. I'm not making another."
I sat. I picked it up. It was scalding. She sat down opposite, with her own, and did not look at me. We drank in silence, in the lamplight, and I watched the steam rise between us.
"Don't think it means anything," said Patience, at last.
"I won't."
"It's only tea."
"I know."
"I'm still angry."
"I know."
She sipped. Her eyes were fixed on the tablecloth. After a long moment, so quietly that I almost missed it, she said, "Kato says you're getting better. At the clutches."
"Kato says I'm an idiot."
"He says that about everyone." A pause. Her mouth twitched, very slightly, at one corner. "He said you cried at a carburettor on Tuesday."
"It was the fumes."
"It was a carburettor."
I laughed. I could not help it. And she looked up, startled, and for the first time in eleven weeks our eyes met across the table, over the steaming cups, and I saw a small, fierce, unwilling smile break across her face and be crushed.
"Don't," she said.
"I didn't do anything."
"You're smiling."
"So are you."
"I am not." She put down her cup, and stood up, and went to the door, and turned there with her hand on the frame. "I'll pray for you," she said, in an offhand voice. "Because I'm supposed to. Not because I want to."
"That's the best reason," I said.
She looked at me, for a long moment, in the pale light.
"Maybe," said Patience, and went to bed.
I would like to tell you that the prayer got easier. It did not.
I had thought it would. I had thought, after the garage, after the long clean silence in which something had stayed, that I would find the road ahead of me lit, and walk it. I had expected a kind of steady warmth, a constancy, like a lamp in a window. I had read in books of converts who woke every morning in a glow.
I woke every morning in a grey fog.
I would get up at ten to six, in the dark. I would sit on the jerrycan, with my cup. My mother would read, and I would listen, and the words would go by me like water over stone. I would go to the garage, and work, and come home, and kneel by my bed, and say my one plain prayer, I don't know what to say, but I'm here, and nothing at all would happen. The ceiling remained a ceiling. The dark was only dark. There were days, whole weeks, when I felt nothing, when I could not have told you whether I believed or not, when it seemed to me that the hour in the garage had been a dream of exhaustion and grief, and that I was a man praying into an empty room.
I told Mzee Ssekamatte. We were under a Hilux, on creepers, in July, with the rain drumming overhead.
"I don't feel it anymore," I said. "Whatever it was. In the garage."
"Mm."
"I do it every day. I read. I pray. I go to church. And it's as if I'm talking to a wall."
"Mm." A spanner clinked. "Pass me the nine."
I passed it. We worked in silence for a while, side by side, in the dim space beneath the chassis, with the smell of oil and wet metal and the old man's slow breathing.
"Your father said something to me once," said Mzee Ssekamatte. "In the early days. After he first began to come to the verandah. He said, Gideon, I do not hear anything. I read, and I sit, and it is as if the book were written in another language." He gave the bolt a quarter-turn. "I said, then why do you do it?"
"What did he say?"
"He said, because the one time I did hear, I was lying in the mud." The old man turned his head, in the dark, and I saw the pale gleam of his eyes. "He said, I cannot ask for a second proof. I have had mine. The rest is only learning to listen."
I did not speak.
"Some mornings," said Mzee Ssekamatte, "it takes time to arrive."
I lay very still on the creeper, staring up at the black underside of the truck. A drip of oil gathered on the sump, swelled, and fell. I thought of a boy of fifteen on a jerrycan, with a cracked phone, saying Nothing, Taata, five days in a row. I thought of a man looking at him over the rim of a cup.
Mm. Some mornings it takes time to arrive.
He had said it to me. I had forgotten. He had said it, in that mild even voice, with no reproach, and gone on drinking his tea.
I had been the one who was late.
It was a Sunday at the end of July when I saw her.
I had been going every week by then, to the plastic chair behind the pillar. I had grown used to the glances. They had thinned. The woman in the purple hat had stopped leaning. The one whose sister had lost a hundred and twenty thousand shillings had, in the second week of July, come up to me at the door and said, in a voice like a strip of tin, I want you to know that I have not forgiven you, and I had said I understand, and she had said good, and gone away. It was strangely restful. It was the first conversation of the summer in which no one had pretended.
That morning, as I sat down, I heard the keyboard.
I had not heard it since March. There had been a boy, a stand-in, who played in a heavy-handed, cheerful, flat way. But this was not he. A slow chord rolled out from the front of the church, low and warm, and then another, and the choir came in, and I knew before I looked up whose hands were on the keys.
She was at the side, by the stage, where she always sat. The mustard dress. The round glasses, pushed up into her hair. She was bent over the Yamaha with her tongue between her teeth. She had grown thinner, I thought, in four months, and there was something about her shoulders that was different, a little more guarded, a little straighter.
I did not move.
I sat in the back, behind the pillar, with my hands on my knees, and listened. The song was an old one. I recognised it in the second line. It was the one that had sent me to the water's edge at Ggaba, when I had said not that one, not tonight. Great is Thy faithfulness. The slow, plain, grave tune of a man on a verandah mending a chain.
I closed my eyes.
I do not know how I got through it. I know that the whole congregation was singing, and that I heard my sister's voice, high and clear, over the others; and my mother's, a little cracked; and the thin quavering line of the old women; and somewhere in the middle, faint, a voice I had forgotten I had, which was my own. I was singing. I had not decided to. It came up through my chest of itself, low and rough and out of tune, morning by morning new mercies I see, and the tears ran down my face and I did not wipe them.
When it was over, I looked up.
She was looking at me.
She had turned on the stool. Her hands lay in her lap. Across the whole width of the church, over a hundred heads, past the pillar and the plastic chairs, her eyes met mine. I could not read them. They were dark and large and very tired. There was no smile in them. There was no anger either. There was only a long, grave, careful attention, the look she had turned on a woman in Bwaise, the look of someone sitting on the floor, with nowhere to be.
She held it for perhaps three seconds.
Then she nodded. Once. A very small, very slow nod, with her chin, like a person acknowledging something across a river.
And she turned back to the keys.
I sat there for the rest of the service with my heart beating hard against my ribs. I did not hear the sermon. I did not need to. I had been seen. That was all. Not forgiven, not welcomed back, not anything. Only seen, by someone who had every reason to look away.
It was enough to carry me through the week.