Chapter Twenty-three
A Different Man
The first real tutoring I ever did, I did in October.
I had told that lie so often, and for so long, that when it finally came true I did not at first recognise it. It was Kato who started it. He had failed a paper, a mathematics test, at the technical school where Mzee Ssekamatte had sent him two evenings a week, and he came into the garage on a Monday with his bag over his shoulder and his face thunderous, and threw a crumpled sheet onto the bench.
"Twenty-six per cent," he said. "It's percentages. Who needs percentages? The engine does not care."
I picked it up. It was a page of problems, in a boy's cramped, stabbing hand. A trader buys goods at 40,000 and sells at 52,000. Calculate the percentage profit. He had written an answer, and crossed it out, and written another. I stood there for a long moment with the paper in my fingers, in the smell of oil and wet iron, and I felt something happen in my chest that I can only describe as a very old, very quiet door swinging open.
"Sit down," I said.
"What?"
"Sit. I'll show you. It takes ten minutes."
He sat, with a bad grace. I found a stub of pencil and turned the page over. I drew a line. I wrote 40,000, and under it 52,000, and between them a small curved arrow. "You do not need percentages for the engine," I said. "You need them for the day a customer asks you whether the price has gone up by too much. And if you cannot tell him, he will pay you less."
He stared at the arrow. After a moment he said, grudgingly, "Go on."
It took twenty minutes. At the end he looked at the page for a long time, and then at me, with an expression of deep suspicion, like a man who has been shown a trick and cannot see how it was done.
"That is all?"
"That's all."
"Then why didn't the teacher say?"
"I expect he did," I said. "In a different voice."
He grunted. He took the page and folded it with great care into his pocket. But the next evening he brought a friend, a thin, anxious boy from his class, and the evening after that, two more, and by the end of the month there was a row of them at the back of the shed, on upturned crates, with their exercise books on their knees and a paraffin lamp on a tyre between them, and Mzee Ssekamatte, without a word, had set out four enamel cups.
I charged them nothing. I did not need to. But I had begun, by then, to be asked by others. A lecturer at the university, hearing of it, sent a student with a failing grade in accounts. A woman in the lane knocked at our gate with her son, a sullen fifteen-year-old with a mathematics paper, and said that she could pay three thousand a session, and I said, "I'll take two," and she said, "Why?" and I said, "It is the price," and took it.
I told my mother. I told her that night, at the table, in the lamplight, and I laid the notes beside the notebook, folded once.
She looked at them. She looked at me.
"Tutoring," said my mother.
"Yes."
She did not say anything for a moment. Her mouth was quite straight. But at the corner of it, very faintly, a small muscle moved.
"I should like to see it," she said. "Some evening. If I may."
"You'd be bored."
"I think," said my mother, "that I should like to be bored by it. For once."
She wrote the figure down. 2,000. She drew a line. And then, beneath it, in small neat letters, in the margin, she wrote a word that I did not see until she had gone to bed, and I took the book up to look at the total.
It said: Honest.
They gave me a date in the second week of November.
It was a Thursday. The courtroom was in a long yellow building near the Clock Tower, with a sagging roof and a smell of floor-wax and old paper, and a bench in the corridor where fifty people sat with their documents on their knees and their faces closed. My mother came with me. She wore her good green gomesi. She sat on the bench with her handbag in her lap, very upright, and when a policeman asked her to move down, she said, with great dignity, "I am the mother," and he did.
I will not tell you all of it. It was long, and very dull, and most of it I did not understand. A magistrate in a grey wig sat behind a high desk and read from a file. A prosecutor, a brisk young woman with a clipped voice, stood up and sat down. There were several other young men in the dock, recruiters like myself, in clean shirts, looking at their shoes. I recognised two of them from the Pearl Executive Suite.
When they called my name, I stood.
The prosecutor said something about voluntary disclosure. She said that the accused had presented himself to the police within a fortnight of the collapse. That he had provided a full and unsolicited statement, naming the principal, identifying twelve other persons, and surrendering the details of his own contributions and commissions. That he had, she understood, been making regular restitution to the family of the principal complainant, and was currently employed in an honest trade.
"The state is minded," said the prosecutor, "to treat Mr. Kasozi as a witness, and not as a defendant. On condition that he gives evidence at the trial of Mr. Walusimbi, in full, and without reservation."
The magistrate looked at me over his glasses. He was an old man, with a thin, tired, intelligent face.
"Mr. Kasozi," he said. "Do you understand the terms?"
"Yes, Your Honour."
"You will be required to appear at the High Court in the new year. You will be required to say, in public, what you did. It will not be pleasant."
"I understand."
"You may be asked questions that you do not like."
"I will answer them."
He looked at me for a long moment. I do not know what he saw. A young man in a borrowed shirt, with grease under his fingernails, standing very straight in a wooden box.
"It is not often," said the magistrate, "that one sees a person in your position come forward before he is sought." He turned a page. "I have been on this bench for twenty-six years. In my experience the first ones to run are generally the last to come home." He closed the file. "Case adjourned."
I stood there, with my hand on the rail, and my knees shook.
In the corridor, my mother took my arm. She did not say anything. We went down the stairs together, slowly, and out into the sunshine. The traffic roared round the Clock Tower. A boy was selling newspapers. A group of schoolchildren in blue uniforms were crossing the road, in a long crocodile, singing.
"I did not know that it was possible," said my mother, "to be so proud, and so afraid, at one time."
"Neither did I."
"It is very uncomfortable." She patted my arm, briskly. "Come. I will buy you a mandazi."
Naomi and I began again on the first Saturday in November, at Mama Sylvia's, on the low wall.
It was not a date. We were both very clear on that. She had sent me, the night after the dawn in Ntinda, a message with exactly nine words. Saturday. Mama Sylvia's. Two o'clock. Bring a pen. I had stared at it for a long time, and typed All right, and deleted it, and typed Yes, and then, for no reason I could name, Thank you, and sent that.
She was there before me. She sat on the wall with her thermos, in the mustard dress, with a notebook open on her knee. The sun was warm. The stall was crowded. Mama Sylvia, as I came up the hill, glanced at me over her black pan, and raised a single eyebrow, and did not say a word, which for Mama Sylvia was an act of heroic self-restraint.
"Sit," said Naomi.
I sat. She did not look at me. She uncapped her pen.
"I've made some rules," she said.
"All right."
"I wrote them last night. I don't want to negotiate. I want you to listen, and then say yes or no." She cleared her throat. "One. We go slowly. Slowly means slowly. Not like before. I don't want a rolex and a walk and a, a moment. I want a rolex and a rolex and another rolex. I want months."
"Yes."
"Two. We tell the truth. All of it. Not the true thing that hides the other thing. All. If something is hard, we say it, and we say it the same day. I don't want to find out from a notification." She looked up, briefly, with a hard bright glance. "I don't care if it's small. I don't care if it's embarrassing. If you think you should tell me, you tell me."
"Yes."
"Three. No lids."
"No what?"
"Lids. You know. The church voice. I don't want God is good if I'm crying. I don't want it'll be all right. If I'm angry, you let me be angry. If you're angry, you tell me. Nobody puts a lid on anybody." She took a breath. "Four. I'm allowed to change my mind."
I looked at her.
"About anything," she said. "At any time. I'm allowed to wake up on a Tuesday and say, I can't do this. And you do not argue. You say okay."
"Okay."
"You don't have to say it now."
"I'm saying it now." I held her eyes. "It's fair. It's the fairest thing I've ever heard. I accept all four."
She nodded, slowly. She wrote something. Her hand, I saw, was not quite steady. After a moment she said, in a smaller voice, "And five."
"Five?"
"I'm still angry."
"I know."
"I'm angry in a way I can't explain. It isn't the lie. I mean it is, but it isn't. It's that I liked who you were. At Ggaba. In the stairwell. And I don't know what to do with that. I don't know where to put it." She shut the notebook. "I think about it at night. I lie in bed, and I think, where did that person go? And then I think, he didn't go anywhere. And then I think, that's worse."
I did not answer at once. A bus went by, with its radio playing. Down the hill, a child shrieked with laughter.
"I don't think he went anywhere either," I said slowly. "I think he was just very small. And there was a very large thing, on top of him. And I kept him under it, for two years, because he was the one who'd be hurt."
She was looking at me with her mouth slightly open.
"I'm not saying it as an excuse," I said. "It isn't one. It's only what I think happened. I think I was a coward, and I think the part of me that was good was so afraid of being found out that I gave it to you in pieces. A little at a time. The way you feed a bird." I swallowed. "I'd like to give you the whole thing. I just don't know yet how much of it there is."
For a long time she said nothing. A wind came up the hill and stirred the pages of her notebook. She pushed her glasses up her nose with a knuckle, and her eyes were very bright.
"That's not a lid," she said.
"No."
"Mm." She picked up her thermos. She unscrewed the cup. She poured a stream of tea, steaming, into the lid, and held it out to me without looking. "Drink. And then you can tell me about the carburettor."
"Who told you about the carburettor?"
"Patience."
"She promised."
"She's sixteen, Eli," said Naomi. "Nobody has ever kept that promise."
We kept to the rules.
I do not say it was easy. There were weeks when I almost broke them, when I wanted so badly to take her hand across the wall, to say come back, it's over, forgive me, that I sat on my own palms. There were days when she would say something light, a joke, a remark about the weather, and her face would go suddenly white, and I would know that it had come over her again, the picture of a green path and a drain and a lie. I learned to wait. I learned that there were hours in which a person wanted nothing but to be sat beside. I learned to say, do you want me to go? and to go, when she nodded.
And I learned, slowly, something else. I learned that she was not only the girl who had been wronged. I had been so occupied, in the first year, with what she gave me, her warmth, her laughter, her belief, that I had never once looked at the person she was when she was not being kind. In the long Saturdays at Mama Sylvia's, with the rules between us like a low fence, I began, at last, to see her.
She was angry, much of the time. She was angry at her father. She was angry at the congregation in Ntinda, which still would not meet her eye. She was angry, to my surprise, at God. She said so, in her flat bright way, over a cold rolex on a Saturday at the end of November.
"I don't mean at Him," she said. "I mean with. I keep asking Him why. Why Joseph, why Ronnie, why four hundred people with a tin under the bed. I sit there at the keyboard and I play and I think, you could have stopped this. And I don't get an answer. I don't. I just get a sort of, a sort of quiet." She scowled. "It's a very rude quiet."
"It is."
"Is yours rude?"
"Mine was empty," I said. "Then it changed. I don't know how. It isn't an answer. It's just that someone's in it."
She considered that. "I'd like that," she said. "I'd like someone to be in mine." She laughed shortly. "You know what I did, in August? I went to see Mama Peace. I took her my whole thesis. All fifty pages. I said, this is what you told me. I said, I'm going to put it in a library. And she looked at it, and she said, it is very heavy, and I thought, she has no idea. And then she said, what is the last page?"
"What was it?"
"It was the conclusion. It was about accountability mechanisms in informal financial institutions." She snorted. "She said, I do not know these words. I said I'd explain. And she said, no. Tell me what you want the people to know." Her voice dropped. "And I couldn't. I sat there on her floor and I couldn't think of a thing."
"What did you say?"
"I said, that it was not your fault." She looked down at the thermos. "She said, then say that."
I did not move.
"I rewrote the last page," said Naomi. "I got a first, you know. They said it was humane." A quick sharp breath, almost a sob. "It was one sentence. It's on the last page. In the middle of all that jargon. It was not you. I put it in as an epigraph."
I opened my mouth. I could not speak.
"Don't," she said. "Don't say anything. I know. I know what it sounds like." She wiped her eyes angrily with the heel of her hand. "I didn't put it in for you. I want that understood. I put it in for her. But it was your sentence. She said it to you. And I thought, how does a person say that to someone and mean it, and not know?"
"I don't know."
"No." She smiled, crookedly, through the tears. "I don't either. That's why it's in a thesis."
The carol service was on the twentieth of December.
It was the first Christmas since the one with the tin of shortbread. I had not forgotten that. I had thought of it every day for a month, with a small cold flinch, as one thinks of a place where one has been injured. But the church was full, and hot, and loud, hung with paper chains and silver tinsel and strings of tiny coloured lights, and a small boy in a bath-towel was wandering across the stage with a plastic sheep. Patience was in the choir. Naomi was at the Yamaha. My mother, in her green gomesi, sat in the third row, with Mzee Ssekamatte on one side of her in a jacket that was too large for him, and Mzee Opio on the other, in his black suit, with a small paper hat that someone had put on his head and that he had not removed.
I sat behind the pillar. I had moved forward, I noticed, by one row.
When it was over, the whole congregation spilled out into the yard, into the warm orange dusk, among the mango trees, with plastic cups of tea and paper plates of cake. There was shouting. Somebody had a speaker, and was playing a Luganda carol, and a ring of small children were dancing in the dust. I stood at the edge of it all with a cup in my hand, watching.
"Eli."
She had come up beside me. She was in the mustard dress. She had let her hair grow, a little, over the months, and it lay in short soft twists round her ears, and her glasses had slipped, and she had a smear of icing on her thumb. She looked tired. She looked, I thought, more beautiful than I had ever seen her.
"Hello."
"Come with me." She did not wait for an answer. She walked away across the yard, between the stalls, to the far corner by the wall, where the light failed and there was only a bench, and a stack of stacked plastic chairs, and the dark shape of the mango tree. She sat down. After a moment, I sat down beside her, at the end of the bench, with a hand's width between us.
We did not say anything for a while. The carol had changed. A child's voice, high and wavering, was singing a line that I knew.
"I've been thinking about rule two," said Naomi.
"Yes?"
"The one about telling the truth. All of it." She was looking straight ahead, at the dark wall. "I've told you everything. You know that. I've told you about my father. About Joseph. About the time I stole from my mother's purse, when I was nine, to buy a pen." She gave a short breath. "I don't think there's anything left. And I wondered if you could say the same."
I put down my cup on the bench.
"No," I said.
She turned her head.
"There's one more thing," I said. "Maybe two. I've been waiting for the right day." I looked at my hands. "I don't think there's ever going to be one. So I'd better say it now."
"All right."
"It's about Brenda."
She did not move. In the dusk I could not read her face.
"You know I stayed on her couch," I said. "That night. In February. I told you that. It was true. Nothing happened. But I didn't tell you why I went. I told you I was drunk. I wasn't. I was..." I could not breathe. "I'd gone to her because I wanted someone to see me cry who didn't love me. Who couldn't be disappointed. I thought that if I cried in front of you, you'd have to forgive me, and I didn't want to be forgiven, I wanted to be punished. And she wasn't going to do that. She was only going to be kind." I swallowed. "I went to Brenda because it was safe to fall apart there. And I should have gone to you."
She was very still.
"And I've seen her since," I said. "Twice. Not like that. She came to the garage in September. She wanted to apologise. She said she'd been rude to me, in the bar, and I said she had not, and she said, I'm trying to be someone who says sorry. We drank a Fanta. She asked me whether I still prayed." I took a ragged breath. "I said yes. She said, that's good. And I think she meant it. I don't think she has anything left of what she was. I think she's trying. But I wanted you to know."
Naomi said nothing.
"And the voicemail," I said.
"The what?"
"Ronnie left me a voicemail. The night he died. I didn't listen to it for six months." My voice cracked. "I heard it at his grave. On his birthday. I haven't told anyone but Mzee Opio. It was forty-one seconds long. He said it wasn't on me. He said I never lied to him."
A long pause. In the dark I heard her draw in her breath.
"That's all," I said. "That's the last of it. I've got nothing else. I swear I've nothing else."
I sat very still. I looked at the wall. The carol had ended. Somebody was clapping. A mother called a child's name, again and again, sharply, in the dusk.
Naomi was crying. I knew it before I turned my head. She was crying without sound, as she always did, with her hands in her lap and her face lifted to the sky. The tears ran down her cheeks and gleamed in the coloured light from the string of bulbs across the wall.
"Thank you," she said.
I could not answer.
"I didn't think you would." Her voice was shaking. "I thought, if there's something left, he'll keep it. He'll keep it until we're married, and then I'll find it in a drawer." She gave a wet laugh. "I thought that's the kind of man you were."
"It was."
"I know." She wiped her face. "I know it was. And I think..." She stopped. She tried again. "I think I'm sitting next to a different one."
"I'm not different. I'm exactly the same."
"No." She shook her head. "You're not. The same one would have said there's nothing more. And then he'd have been very kind, and I would have been very pleased, and it would have been exactly like before." She turned, at last, and looked at me. Her eyes were red and swollen and wide. "You told me the thing that made you look bad. The thing that made me look bad, the couch, the reason. You didn't have to. There was no way I'd have found out."
"I know."
"So why?"
"Because you said," I said. "At Ggaba. You said that when you kissed someone, you'd like to know who it was."
She stared at me.
"I'd like you to know," I said. "That's all. Whoever you decide to... whatever you decide. I'd rather you knew who it was."
She did not move. The light from the string of bulbs moved across her face, red, then gold, then green. A child ran past our bench, shrieking, with a sparkler.
Then Naomi did a thing that I had not expected. She reached out, and took my hand.
She did not hold it. She only laid hers over it, flat, on the wooden slat between us, her long cool pianist's fingers across the back of my scarred and blackened knuckles. She looked at them for a long moment, as one looks at a map.
"Ask me again at Easter," she said.
"Ask you what?"
"Whatever it is you were going to ask." Her mouth trembled, and a small, shy, helpless smile broke across it, and she did not press it flat. "I'm not ready now. But ask me at Easter. I think I might be."
I did not tell my mother that night. I did not need to. At ten to six on the following morning, as I came out onto the verandah with my cup, she looked at my face for a very long moment, over the Bible, and said nothing, and poured the tea.
It was the twenty-first of December. The sky was the colour of milk. Above our heads, in the corner by the door, the bulb was lit, pale in the dawn. Patience sat on the step, cross-legged, in her old school sweater, with her chin on her fist. Beyond the fence, a cockerel crowed twice and stopped, as if embarrassed.
"The Lord is my light and my salvation," read my mother. "Whom shall I fear?" She paused. "Psalm twenty-seven. It is only the first line. I like to begin with a small one." She closed the book on her finger. "What did you hear, Patience?"
"That light is not the same as sunlight," said Patience, instantly. "It's the thing that's still there when you've got none."
"Good." My mother's eyes moved. "Eliya?"
I held my cup between my palms. The steam rose in a slow curl against the cold. I had been asked the question, I calculated, perhaps four thousand times. It was the first time in my life that I had waited, before I answered, to find out what the answer was.
"I heard," I said slowly, "that I used to think the light was for the people who knew the way."
"And now?"
"Now I think it's for the people who don't." I looked up at the bulb. "I think that's the only reason it's on."
My mother did not say anything. Patience, on the step, turned her head and stared at me. The cockerel crowed once more, and this time did not stop.
"That is a very good thing to have heard," said my mother, at last. She took a sip of her tea. Her eyes were bright. "Your father would have said mm."
"He'd have said mm."
"And then he'd have asked you to pass the spanner."
I laughed. It was not a loud laugh. It was small and quiet, and it came up from somewhere deep, and it was quite my own. I looked at my mother's face in the early light, the lined brown face with its patient eyes, and her hand resting on the cover of the book, worn to felt at the corner by a hundred thousand mornings. I looked at my sister. I looked at the bulb.
I was a man of twenty-three, with a debt of two million, seven hundred and eighty thousand shillings, and a trial in the new year, and a girl I had been told to ask again at Easter. I had lost a friend. I had lost two years. I had a garage on my hands and a hole in my chest the shape of a boy with a gap in his eyebrow, and nothing, nothing at all, was fixed.
And I was happy. I want to say it plainly. It was not the happiness of the Sunrise, the bright, brittle, borrowed lift that had to be fed with fresh stakes. It was slower. It was heavier. It was like the weight of a hand on the back of the neck.
I did not know what to call it.
It seemed, that morning, as the sun came up red and enormous over the roofs of Kawempe, that it might be what my father had meant by home.