Chapter Twenty-two
Learning Grace
I fell on the ninth of September, and it was a very small fall.
That is why I want to tell it. If I told you about a large one, a bender, a binge, a night of ruin, you would be able to say well, that was a different man. But it was nothing like that. It was ten thousand shillings. It was a Tuesday afternoon. It was twenty minutes.
The wage from the garage came on Fridays, in a brown envelope, handed over by Mzee Ssekamatte without ceremony, and the greater part of it went straight into my mother's hand. I had kept to that for five months. I had not missed a Friday. But that Tuesday, a boy named Kizza, the round-faced boy from the Sunrise, the one with the bad impression of the dean, had stopped me at the gate of the university and said, with perfect innocence, "Kasozi! I've been meaning to say. Sorry about your friend." And then, because he was a kind boy, and knew nothing, "You should come out. We're all going to the shop. There's a big one tonight. Everyone's in."
I said no. I said it quite firmly. I walked away, and went to the garage, and spent the afternoon with my head under a Corolla.
At half past four, I took the long way home.
I want to be honest about this. There is no way to tell it that does not make me sound weak, and I will not try. I had ten thousand shillings in my pocket, the remains of a lunch allowance I had saved. I had not decided anything. I had told myself I only wanted to walk past. I walked down the hill, past Mama Sylvia's, past the pharmacy with the faded notice on the door above it, and at the corner, where the road bends, I found myself in front of a narrow yellow-painted room with six screens on the wall.
I stood on the opposite pavement. A woman went by with a basket of oranges on her head. Through the open door, I could see the girl behind the counter, in the branded T-shirt, writing on a slip, with her head bent. It was the same girl. She had a new haircut.
Just look, I thought. You can look.
I crossed the road.
I do not remember the details. I remember the smell: cigarette smoke and old sweat and cheap aftershave, the plastic of too many seats. I remember that the screens were showing a match, and that a man in the front row shook his head slowly, in that particular way. I remember the girl looking up, and a small flicker of something crossing her face, not recognition, but a sort of dull inward weariness, as at the sight of a customer returned. I remember pushing the ten thousand shillings across the counter. I remember choosing.
It lost in the sixty-third minute.
I stood in the shop, among the men, with the slip in my hand, and watched it go. And what I felt was not the old dull indifference, nor the hot lift. It was a clear, bright, appalling clarity, like a cold bucket of water thrown over my head. What have I done? What have I done? I looked at the slip. I looked at the girl. She was not looking at me.
I walked out. I walked straight home, without stopping, with my teeth clenched. I went into the kitchen, where my mother was grating cassava, and I put the empty envelope on the table. I said, "Maama. I put ten thousand on a match."
She stopped grating.
"I was walking past," I said. "I didn't mean to. I told myself I was only looking." My voice shook. "I've lost it. It's gone. It was money for you."
My mother put down the cassava. She wiped her hands on her apron, slowly, one finger at a time. She looked at the envelope, and at me. I braced myself.
"Ten thousand," she said.
"Yes."
"When?"
"Twenty minutes ago."
"And you came straight home."
"I didn't know what else to do."
She nodded. She was silent for a long moment. And I saw, with the part of me that was still waiting to be struck, that she was not angry. There was a tiredness in her face, a deep, patient, infinitely weary sadness, but under it, quite distinctly, there was something I had not expected.
It was something like recognition.
"Sit," said my mother.
I sat.
"You owe me ten thousand more," she said. She opened the green notebook, and took her pencil, and wrote a figure, and drew a line. "That is how it is done. You do not throw it away. You do not say I am useless. You say I owe ten thousand, and you pay it." She looked at me over her glasses. "You will tell Pastor on Sunday."
"Yes."
"And Mzee Ssekamatte."
"Yes."
"I do not want a secret, Eliya. I do not care how small. A small secret is a very large seed." She slid the notebook across to me, so that I could see. OWED. 4,200,000. PAID. 1,412,000. And beneath it, in fresh ink, +10,000. "There. It is written. It is in the book. It is no longer in the dark."
I stared at it.
"I thought you'd be..."
"What?" She smiled, a tired crooked smile. "Angry? I am angry. I will be angry on Thursday. I will be angry when I see the bulb." She put out a hand, and tapped the page. "But you came home. Do you understand? You did the thing and you came home. Two years ago, you would have hidden it for a month. This is a different boy."
"I still did it."
"Yes," she said. "That is the nature of the road. You keep walking. You fall. You get up. You tell someone." She picked up the cassava again. "It is not the falling that is the sin, Eliya. It is the hiding."
I sat in the kitchen for a long time after she had gone back to her grating. I looked at the page. And a very curious thing happened. I had expected, after such a fall, the old crushing weight, the voice that said you see? Nothing has changed. I waited for it. It did not come, not in the old form. There was shame; there was a good deal of it. But there was also something else, a strange, firm, unreasoning steadiness underneath, like a stone under water.
I had lied to no one. I had told the truth within the hour. And the sky had not fallen.
On Sunday, Pastor Lubega preached on Romans five.
I do not say it was chosen for me. I am sure that it was not. He had been going through the letter for weeks, a few verses at a time, in his slow, driving way, and that Sunday it was the eighth verse of the fifth chapter, and he stood in front of the plastic chairs and read it very plainly, without ornament.
"But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us."
He closed the book.
"I want you to notice the word while," he said. "It is a small word. It is easy to miss. He did not say after we cleaned ourselves up. He did not say when we had made a good start. He said while. While we were still. In the middle of it. With the dirt still on our hands." He looked slowly round the room. "We want it to be otherwise. We want to bring something. We stand at the door with a little parcel, a few good works, a decent record, and we say, please, Lord, may I come in?"
A murmur of laughter.
"And He says what is in the parcel? And we say, oh, only this, and we show Him. And He looks at it with great tenderness. And He says, you may put that down." His voice dropped. "You may put that down. I did not ask for it."
I sat with my hands on my knees, behind the pillar.
I thought of an envelope. A green notebook. A column of figures. I thought of the five months, the Fridays, the careful tally, the unspoken conviction that I could work my way back, shilling by shilling, to a place from which I could look at God without shame. I thought, I have been doing it again. I had brought a parcel. I had brought a small, grubby, carefully wrapped bundle of effort, and held it out in front of me, saying, look, Lord. Look how hard I am trying.
You may put that down.
I do not say I understood it. I say only that something in me, which had been clenched for five months, with the hand locked round the parcel, began, very slightly, to open.
Ronnie would have been twenty-three on the thirtieth of August.
I had forgotten. It was Mzee Opio who reminded me, on the Friday before, at the door of the room behind the salon, where I had gone every Sunday since April, and eaten beans, and sat on the cracked stool, and said very little. He had been thin and silent for most of the summer. But that day he said, in his dry level voice, "Eliya. It is his birthday on Sunday."
"I know," I said. It was a lie. I had not known. I felt it rise in my face, and I put it down at once. "No. I forgot. I'm sorry. I'd lost the date."
"It is only a date." He gave me a small, odd look. "I am going to the grave in the afternoon. I will take beans. He liked beans, when he was small. He said they were the food of the poor, and that he would one day eat something else." A faint smile. "Come with me."
We went on the Sunday, in the heat of the afternoon, to the old cemetery on the Gayaza road.
It looked different. The frangipani trees had come into flower, a hundred small white stars among the leaves, and the red earth had sprouted a fine green fur of grass. The slab over the grave was new, plain grey cement, with a plastic vase at the head, and in the vase a bunch of paper flowers that someone had made. Ronald Opio. Beloved son. And two dates.
Mzee Opio knelt, with a grunt, on the grass, and set a tin plate of beans on the slab. He spoke a few low words in Luo, in a conversational tone, as to a man in the next room. Then he got up, and dusted his knees, and said to me, "I will go and sit under the tree. I am tired. You stay."
He went. I stood alone at the foot of the grave.
I had not been there since the burial. I do not think I could have come on my own. I stood for a long time, with my hands hanging, and looked at the name, and the two dates, and the small plate of beans going cold in the sun. A bee crossed my line of sight. In the distance a bell was ringing, from one of the churches along the road.
I took out my phone.
It was a new one. A cheap one, bought in June, for six thousand. I had transferred what I could from the old: the numbers, the photographs. And one small thing, which I had carried across from handset to handset as one carries a stone in a pocket, without ever quite deciding what it was.
Voicemail (1). 0:41.
I sat down on the grass beside the slab. I crossed my legs. I held the phone in both hands, and for a long time I only looked at it.
Not tonight, I had said, on Jinja Road. Not here. It had been five months. I had thought I was waiting until I was strong enough. I understood now that I was not. I was waiting until I was weak enough, which is a different thing. A man who is strong does not need to hear the thing he fears. A man who has put down his parcel has nothing to lose.
I pressed the button.
There was wind.
That was the first thing. A great rushing roar of it, hollow and distorted, as of a mouth held against a tunnel. And over it, a motor, a thin high ragged whine, and a voice, shouting, laughing, in a way I would have known in a thousand years.
"Mukwano! Mukwano, pick up, pick... ah. Voicemail. Okay."
I stopped breathing.
"Okay, listen. I know you're out. I know you're probably celebrating. I saw the message, the one about the airport, the photo, ha, I don't believe it, it's too dark, it's a fake. But listen. Don't worry. I'm not doing anything stupid. I'm only going to talk to him."
A burst of laughter. A scrape, a rattle, a sudden near-voice: "No, it's fine, bro, I'm holding on. Go. Go!" And then, to me again, with the wind tearing at the words:
"I've got a helmet! Look, he made me wear it! He says I look like a bus!"
I put my hand over my mouth.
"Eli. Listen. Eli, are you listening? It's... listen, this is going to sound... Ah. I've had two beers. Don't tell my father." A pause. A breath. The motor rose and fell. "I only wanted to say. If it goes bad. I mean, it won't. But if the money doesn't come back. If it really doesn't. It's not on you. You hear me? It's not on you."
I closed my eyes.
"You never lied to me. Not once. You're the only person who... you never did. I always know where I am with you. Do you know what that's like? When everyone else..." A sound, half a laugh. "You're my brother, mukwano. That's all. I'm not being soft. It's the beer. You're my... hold on... slow down! Slow down, man, there's a... "
The voice changed. A new tone, quick, sharp, surprised.
"...a lorry..."
And then there was the wind. Only the wind. A long, hollow, rising roar, and under it a sound I will not describe, and then a blankness, and a click, and the clean mechanical voice of the network saying, in Luganda and English: You have no more messages.
I do not know how long I sat there.
The bee came back. It went round the paper flowers, and found nothing, and went away. The bell down the road had stopped ringing. A faint wind stirred in the frangipani, and a few white petals came down, slowly, onto the slab and the plate of beans and my own knees.
I was not crying. I want to say that. I had expected to. I had thought that when I heard it, the dam would break, and I would howl, as I had in the field. But I only sat, with the phone in my lap and my hands lying open, and it was as though something very large had passed over me and gone on, and left the air quite still.
It's not on you.
I said it aloud. I did not know I was going to. It came out in a croak, to the stone.
"It was."
The grass moved.
"It was, Ronnie. It was on me. I turned it over. I heard it ring." My voice shook. "You said I never lied. I lied the whole time. I lied to you about the Club. I lied about the money. I told you it was safe. I looked you in the face and I..." I stopped. "You forgave me for something you didn't know. You said it wasn't on me, and you didn't know."
It was the same thing. I saw it, in that moment, with the strange cold shock of recognition. It was Mama Peace, in her one-room house, saying it was not you. It was my mother, with her hand on mine at the kitchen table. It was a man in a hospital corridor, saying I will let him have the night. It was a hundred people who had loved me in advance of my deserving, who had handed me the thing before I had asked for it, who had said no, no, it's all right, while I stood there with the knife behind my back.
I had thought forgiveness was a payment. I had thought it was the thing you earned, at the end of a long road, by being sorry enough. And here was my friend, on the back of a boda in the dark, with two beers in him and a wind in his mouth, giving it away. Giving it, unasked, in advance, for a debt he did not know existed.
While we were still sinners.
While.
I put my face on my knees.
"I can't earn it," I said. It was the plainest thing I had ever said. "Can I? I thought I could. I've been trying. I've been trying for five months. I thought, if I paid the money back, and sat at the back, and was good enough, long enough, then someday... But you gave it to me on a motorbike." A wet laugh broke out of me. "You gave it to me before I even... and there's nothing I can do about it. There's nothing. I can't pay it back. I can't make it fair. I can only..."
I looked up. The sky was white. The frangipani flowers moved gently on their stems.
"I can only say thank you," I whispered.
And then I did weep, at last, not in the old way, not the tearing, drowning, appalled grief of the field, but quietly, almost gently, with my head bent, as a man weeps who has been carried a long way on someone's back and set down at a gate. It went on for some time. And the wind came, and moved in the grass, and a few more white petals fell on my hair.
When Mzee Opio came back across the cemetery, with his slow uneven tread, I was sitting by the grave with my arms round my knees, quite dry-eyed, looking at the plate of beans. He stopped beside me. He did not ask. He lowered himself, with a creak, onto the grass.
"He called you," he said at last.
"Yes."
"You listened."
"Yes."
"What did he say?"
I turned my head. The old man was looking at the slab, not at me. His face, in the white light, was grave and calm and unutterably tired.
"He said I never lied to him," I said. "That it wasn't on me."
Mzee Opio was silent for a long moment.
"Then he was wrong about the first," he said. "And right about the second." He reached out and took a petal from my hair, and looked at it, and let it fall. "It is a hard thing, to be forgiven by a person who did not know what he was forgiving. But it is not less true for that."
"How is it true?"
"Because he meant it," said the old man simply. "He did not forgive what you did. He forgave you. They are not the same." He nodded slowly, at the stone. "My boy was a fool. But he knew that."
I did not answer. I did not have to. We sat together on the grass in the heat and the quiet, while the frangipani shed its flowers, and the bell rang again, a long way off, and neither of us said anything at all.
The telephone rang at ten past two on a Friday night in October.
I was asleep. I had been dreaming of nothing. It buzzed on the shelf beside my bed, and I groped for it in the dark, and the screen glowed in my face, and the name that stood on it was one I had saved so long ago that I had almost forgotten it. Joseph (Naomi's brother).
I sat up.
"Hello?"
There was no answer. There was only breathing, very slow and uneven, and behind it a distant sound of music, a pounding bass, and voices.
"Joseph?"
"Eli." It was a whisper. It was slurred and cracked and thick with something that I recognised. "Hello. Hello. I'm... I'm sorry. I didn't know who else."
I was on my feet. I had the lamp on and my trousers half over my legs. "Where are you?"
"I don't know." A long, shaky laugh. "A place. There's a... a sign. It has a, a fish on it. I think it's... I've had eleven days. Did you know that? I had eleven..." His voice cracked and went out. "I said I'd ring, if I... you said I could ring. Not you. I said you could. That I'd said."
"I know. I remember."
"I told you I'd tell you about falling off a roof."
"I'd like to hear it," I said. "Stay on the line."
I do not remember dressing. I remember my mother's door opening, and her face in the dark, a pale oval under the head-scarf, and I said, "Joseph. Naomi's brother. He's... I have to go," and she looked at me for a moment, and said, "Take the torch," and went back in.
It took me forty minutes to find him. It was a bar in Bukoto, at the end of a lane, with a faded sign of a fish and a bouncer asleep on a stool. He was at the counter, alone, hunched over a glass, in the ironed shirt, which was no longer ironed, with his long thin hands wrapped round it as a man holds a candle in a high wind. His face, when he turned it, was grey. His eyes were enormous and wet.
"Eli," he said.
"Hello, Joe."
"I'm so sorry."
"Don't be."
"I'm so sorry. I'm... I was fine. I was perfectly fine. I was at the meeting. Then I went home, and my father said, at dinner, Joseph, would you mind not breathing so loudly, and I just..." He made a vague gesture. "It was eleven days."
"I know."
"I'd counted."
"I know you had." I put a hand on his shoulder. It was thin as a coat-hanger under the shirt. "Come on."
"I can't go home."
"Not home. Not yet." I took the glass out of his hand. It was nearly full. I set it on the counter, and the barman, a tired boy with a towel, looked at me and then looked away. "I'll sit with you. We'll go somewhere. We'll find a place to sit."
"Will you tell her?"
"Not unless you want me to."
"She'll..." He put his head down on his arms on the bar. His shoulders shook. "She'll be so... she's been so good. She's been so careful. She watches me like a, a pot. And I did it anyway. Eli. I did it anyway."
"Yes," I said. "I know."
And I did know. That was the strange part. I stood there, with my hand on his thin back, in a bar in Bukoto at three in the morning, and I understood what I had been given. I understood it in my body. I had stood in a church once and heard this man say it isn't easy for the son. It's the hardest walk of his life. I had sat in a kitchen and been told you came home. And now there was nobody to say it to this man but me.
"It isn't the end," I said. "Joseph. Listen to me. It's not the end. You came to the phone. You rang. You said, I'm sorry, before anyone asked. Do you know what that is?"
"What?"
"It's the speech," I said. "It's the walk home."
He lifted his head.
I do not know what he saw in my face. I know that his own changed, very slowly, like ice on a pond in the early morning, a long splitting from the middle. And then he was laughing and crying together, in a high thin helpless way, with his hand pressed to his mouth. I put my arm round his shoulders and drew him upright. And we walked out, the two of us, past the sleeping bouncer, into the lane, and I flagged down the only boda still running and took him across the city, wedged between me and the rider, to a place I knew.
It was a tea stall. It was the same one. It stood at the corner of Bombo Road and a small lane, a charcoal stove on a crate, a blackened kettle, a row of enamel mugs on a shelf made from an old door. It was shuttered. But the woman who owned it lived above, in a room behind the stall, and I knocked, and after a time a window opened, and a face looked out in a knitted hat.
"I said I would not be hard to find," said the woman.
"I'm sorry. I know it's late."
"It is four in the morning." She looked past me. She looked at the thin grey man leaning on my shoulder. Her face did not change. "Wait."
She came down in ten minutes in a wrapper and a shawl, and lit the stove, and boiled the kettle. We sat on the bench in the dark with the first chill of the dawn on our necks. She poured two mugs, thick and brown and sweet, and set them down in front of us, and went to stand at the corner of the road with her arms folded, looking up at the sky, as a person looks who has no intention of being asked anything.
Joseph held the mug in both hands. The steam rose against his face.
"I owe you a mandazi," I said to her, over his shoulder.
"You owe me two," said the woman. "You are going to buy me a great many, I think. I am not in a hurry."
We sat there for two hours. Joseph talked. He told me the story of the roof in Mbarara, which was very long, and in which he came out of it badly. He told me about the first time he had tried to stop. He told me about a woman in a shop in Ntinda who had once given him a bottle of water, for nothing, and how he had never forgotten it. At one point he began to shake, and I took off the old grey sweater that he had given me in March, which I had been wearing under my jacket every cold night since, and put it round him. He looked at it. He looked at me. He did not say anything.
At seven, in the pearly light, I paid a boda man the last of my money and we rode back to Ntinda.
Mr. Tumusiime was standing at the gate.
I had not expected it. I do not think Joseph had either. He stopped dead in the middle of the lane, with the sweater pulled round him, and I felt him go rigid at my side. At the green gate, with its brass plate, in a dark suit and a plain tie, with his briefcase in one hand, stood a tall, straight, grey-haired man in rimless glasses, who had plainly been waiting some time. He did not move. He looked at his son.
I saw Joseph take a breath. I saw him pull himself up, as a man does at the edge of a diving board. He began, in a thin voice, to speak.
"Dad, I..."
"Joseph," said Mr. Tumusiime.
It was the first time, I learned afterwards, in nine months, that he had said his name aloud.
Joseph stopped.
The old man did not say anything else. He stood very straight. His jaw worked. His hand tightened on the handle of the briefcase until the knuckles went white, and I saw that his glasses had fogged, and that behind them, in the grey dawn, his eyes were red.
"Your sister rang me," he said. "At four. She had a call from the, from the barman. A man with a towel. She said you had been there." A pause. "I have been up since then. I thought of going to look. I did not know where to begin."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't," said Mr. Tumusiime. His voice was rough. "Don't say that." He put down his briefcase. It was a small, stiff gesture, as of a man laying down a weight he had not known he was carrying. "I have been a... I have not been..."
He stopped. He took off his glasses. He wiped them, slowly, with the hem of his jacket, and put them on again. His mouth was working, as if on a word that had been stuck for a very long time.
"Come in," he said at last. "Both of you. There is tea."
He did not run. He did not throw his arms round his son. He was not made that way. But he took one step forward, and then another, and stood in front of Joseph, close, with his head a little bent. And then, awkwardly, stiffly, as if the arm belonged to somebody else, he reached out and put his hand on the back of Joseph's neck.
It was the gesture of a man on a verandah, with a wheel.
I looked away.
When I looked back, Joseph's face was buried in his father's shoulder, and the old man stood quite still with his eyes tightly shut and his hand flat on his son's hair, and over his head, framed in the green gate, stood Naomi.
She was in a dressing gown. Her hair was flat on one side. Her glasses were crooked. She had one hand pressed against her mouth, and she was looking, not at them, but at me.
I did not know what to do. I stood in the lane in the early light, in my oil-stained overalls, with my hands at my sides. I did not smile. I did not nod. I only looked back.
I do not know how long it lasted. A cockerel crowed. A boda went by. Somewhere in the house, a kettle began to sing.
She took her hand from her mouth. She said nothing. She turned, and went into the house, and I thought, that is that. I thought, it is enough. It is more than I was owed. I turned to go.
"Eli."
I stopped.
She had come back. She stood in the gate, with a mug in each hand, and held one out to me across the threshold. It steamed. It was a thick, brown, over-sweet tea, exactly the colour of the one I had drunk in a garage on a grey morning in March.
"You'll want this," said Naomi. Her voice was not steady. "You've been up all night."
I took it. Our fingers did not touch.
"Thank you."
"Don't." She shook her head, and her mouth trembled. "Don't thank me. I'm not... I haven't decided anything. I want you to understand that. I'm only giving you tea."
"I know."
"It's only tea."
"I know," I said. "It's the best thing I've ever been given."
She looked at me for a long moment, over the rim of her own mug, with her large dark eyes. I saw her mouth begin to curve, helplessly, against her will, at one corner, and I saw her press it flat.
"Drink it," said Naomi, "before it goes cold."