Chapter Twenty-four
Home
They called me to the High Court on the ninth of February.
I had been dreading it for three months, in the way one dreads a visit to the dentist: with a steady, low, background fear that colours everything and never quite arrives. I had rehearsed it in the shower. I had practised my answers at the garage, under the Corolla, talking to the underside of a chassis. Mzee Ssekamatte had listened to a good deal of it without comment, handing me spanners, and finally said, from the other side of the bonnet, in his dry mild voice, "You are very good, Eliya. You are so good that I do not believe a word."
"What do you mean?"
"You are saying it as if it were a speech." He wiped his hands. "Say it as if it were true. It is a different shape."
I tried. It was a difficult shape to find.
The courtroom was on the third floor, up a wide stone stair, through a pair of heavy doors. It was a great, high, pale-green room, with a ceiling fan turning slowly overhead and a long bench of dark wood at the front, and on the bench, in a red robe and a white wig, a judge, a woman, sixty perhaps, with a long calm face and a pair of half-moon glasses. Rows of seats ran back from the well of the court. They were full.
I knew most of the faces.
There was Joan, in her pressed blue blouse, at the end of the third row, with a boy of fourteen beside her in a school blazer. There was Gladys, Brenda's cousin, thinner than I remembered, with her hands clasped hard. There was the stout, sweating man from the landing on Bombo Road, in a shirt buttoned to the neck. There was the woman with the baby on her back, now a baby on her knee. There was a man in a safari suit with a gold tooth, who, I noticed with a faint private shock, was wearing a jacket that I knew.
And in the very last row, against the wall, in a head-wrap the colour of old wine, with her hands folded over a worn handbag, sat Mama Peace.
I did not know that she would be there. I do not know how she had come. Naomi told me afterwards that she had gone to fetch her, by taxi, from Bwaise, at six in the morning, and that Mama Peace had said, in the taxi, I wish to see the man, and nothing else. I had only seen her once. I would have known her anywhere.
She looked at me. She did not smile. She nodded, once, with great gravity, as one might to a person about to cross a road.
And at the far side of the court, in the dock, between two policemen, in a prison-issue shirt and a pair of canvas shoes, a man sat with his hands in his lap and his head down.
I was sworn. I took the Bible in my right hand. It was a small black one, shabby and soft, with a cracked spine. I said the words in a voice that came out steadier than I had feared. I swear by Almighty God that the evidence I shall give... And I looked at the cover of the book in my hand, at the faded gold lettering, and thought, quite clearly, the cover can be wiped clean.
I do not know why. I do not think that it was mine.
The prosecutor took me through it in an hour. She was gentle. She asked short questions, and I gave short answers. When did you first attend a meeting of the Club? Who introduced you? What were you told? What did you do next? I told it plainly, in order, without ornament, as I had told it to my mother in the garage. I said the names. I said Pearl Executive Suite. I said thirty percent, and watched a ripple go along the third row. I said, I knew by November.
"You knew that it was fraudulent?" said the prosecutor.
"Yes."
"And you continued to recruit."
"I did not recruit after November. I kept my own money in. And I did not warn anyone."
"Why not?"
I looked at the people in the court. I looked at Joan, with her hands in her lap, and the boy in the blazer. I looked at the man in the safari suit.
"Because I was afraid," I said. "And because I thought that if I could get out first, it would not be my fault."
A murmur. The judge lifted her head.
"Go on," said the prosecutor.
"I was wrong. It was my fault. I brought fourteen people into a thing that I knew was false. One of them was my best friend. One was my mother." My voice shook, and I let it, and went on. "I don't ask the court to excuse me. I am here to say what I did."
"Thank you, Mr. Kasozi."
The defence counsel was a different matter. He was a short, heavy, smooth man in a pinstriped suit, with a great deal of gold on his fingers and a voice like warm oil. He rose slowly. He walked to the middle of the floor and stood there with his thumbs in his waistcoat, looking at me with an expression of enormous, pained, courteous disbelief.
"Mr. Kasozi," he said. "You are, if I understand correctly, a convicted... no, forgive me. A self-confessed participant in the scheme which you now come before this court to condemn."
"Yes."
"You received commissions."
"Yes."
"Some one million, one hundred and forty thousand shillings."
"One million, one hundred and sixty. You've missed twenty."
A faint titter. The counsel's smile did not falter. "You spent them."
"On shoes. And a watch. And drink."
"You were, in short, a criminal."
"Yes."
He paused. He had not expected it, I saw. He had prepared for a defence. I had not brought one. He tilted his head, and I watched him look for the next door, and find it shut.
"You are, then," said the counsel, a little less smoothly, "scarcely a reliable witness. A man who profited from the very enterprise he now, conveniently, wishes to disown. A man who might say anything to avoid the consequences of his own..."
"Mr. Kamya," said the judge.
"My Lord."
"The witness has not wished to disown anything." She looked over her half-moon glasses at me, and then, mildly, at the counsel. "I find him rather remarkable in that respect. Perhaps you will put a question."
He cleared his throat. He turned back to me. For a moment the smoothness went out of his face, and I saw, quite briefly, a tired man in a very expensive suit, doing a job.
"Mr. Kasozi," he said. "Why are you here?"
I thought about it. It was the only question for which I had no rehearsed answer.
"Because there is a woman at the back of this court," I said slowly, "who sold tomatoes for forty years, and put her savings into this thing, and when I told her that I was sorry, she said it was not you." I swallowed. "It was. I'd like her to know that I know."
The court was very silent. A fan turned overhead. At the back, in the wine-coloured head-wrap, Mama Peace did not move.
"I have no further questions," said Mr. Kamya.
I came out into the corridor at half past two and was sick in a basin.
It was an ordinary sort of sickness, merely the body's tribute to a long strain. Naomi, who had been waiting on the bench outside with my mother and Patience, put a wet cloth into my hand and said nothing. I pressed it to my face. I stood against the cool green wall, shaking, and heard the sound of the court emptying: footsteps, voices, the murmur of people who had been a long time holding still.
"Eliya."
She was standing in front of me. She came up to about my chin. She smelled of woodsmoke and charcoal and a sharp, clean, sweetish soap. Her head-wrap was slightly askew, and her hands, on the strap of her handbag, were broad and brown and cracked.
"Mama Peace," I said.
She did not say anything. She looked up at me, with her wide, tired, weathered face, for what felt like a very long time. Then she raised both her hands, and took mine, and held them. They were warm. They were rough as bark.
"I heard you," she said.
"I'm so..."
"No." She shook her head. "I did not come to be told sorry. I have heard it. I have heard it from the pastor, and the police, and the, the, social worker." She smiled at Naomi, who had begun to weep. "I came to see what you would say. You said it." She drew a long breath. "You said that it was you."
"It was."
"Yes." She nodded, calmly. "I know. I think I have always known. I did not wish to be the one to tell you." She pressed my hands. "But I will tell you what I think. I think it is a heavy thing to say. And I think you have carried it a long way. And I think you may put it down now."
"I don't think I can."
"You do not have to put it down today." She said it in a brisk, practical voice, as one gives instructions about a recipe. "You will put it down a little each morning. Like I do. I wake up and it is on me, and I say Lord, you carry it today, and He does. And in the evening I find it has come back. And I say it again." She patted my hands. "It is only a habit. It is a very good one."
She let go. She adjusted her head-wrap. She looked at me with great kindness.
"Now," said Mama Peace. "I have been in that court since seven. I should like a rolex. Naomi tells me you know a place."
I walked home that night.
I do not know why. My mother and Patience had gone ahead in a taxi, tired, after a long, noisy supper at Mama Sylvia's, and Naomi had gone back to Ntinda with Mama Peace in her arms, so to speak, the old woman sleepy and content and holding a paper bag of mandazi. I had said I would follow. But when I reached the taxi stage, I found that I did not want to be among people. I wanted the road.
It had rained. The lane was running with red water, and the air was cold and clean and smelled of wet earth and woodsmoke. The streetlamps were out. There was only the glow of the stalls at the end of the road, and the odd stuttering light of a boda going by, and above me the sky, torn open by the rain, scattered with thin white stars. My feet slapped in the puddles. My shirt stuck to my back. I was so tired that I felt light, as if I might have been walking a little above the ground.
I turned the last corner.
And there, a long way off, at the end of the lane, small and yellow and absurd in the dark, was the light.
I stopped.
I do not know how long I stood there. I stood in the road, in the rain, with the water running down my neck. The bulb hung in the corner above the verandah door, with its wire spliced in black tape, and the moths turning in the pale cone of its glow. The little house crouched beneath it, a darker shape against the darkness, with its rusty roof and its polished step. I had seen it ten thousand times. I had come home to it every night for the better part of my life. I had never, I thought, looked at it.
It was a very small light. It would not have shown a man the road. The lane was dark for a hundred yards on either side, and the potholes lay in wait. It lit nothing but a square of concrete and a plastic chair. But I could see it. That was the thing. From where I stood, a long way off, in the wet and the dark, I could see it perfectly, a single warm point, steady, unwavering, set in a black field.
Somebody was sitting under it.
She had a blanket round her shoulders. She sat on the step, very upright, with her hands in her lap, looking down the lane. She was not reading. She was not doing anything. She was simply sitting, as she had sat on a thousand nights, as a woman sits who is not waiting, who is only enjoying the air.
I began to walk. And then I was running.
I do not know why. I was not late. She had no reason to expect me before midnight. But a pressure rose in me as I ran, and the water flew up round my feet, and I had a wild, absurd, glad sense of being a boy again, a boy of nine, a boy on a green and yellow bicycle, racing the dusk, with his father's light somewhere ahead. I came through the gate at a flat run, and stopped, gasping, at the foot of the steps, with my hands on my knees.
"Eliya," said my mother. "You are wet."
"I'm sorry."
"You will catch a cold." She did not move. Her face, in the yellow light, was calm and tired and lined, and I saw that she had a flask beside her, and two cups. "Sit. Dry yourself. There is tea."
I sat on the step beside her. She handed me a cup. I held it. The steam rose against my face, and I breathed it in.
We did not speak for some minutes. A frog had begun in the drain. The rain, which had thinned to a mist, drifted in and out of the cone of light, and the moths went round and round.
"Maama," I said. "Can I ask you something?"
"Of course."
"The bulb." I looked up at it. "Taata said once that it wasn't for people who didn't know the way. I asked him what it was for. I was ten. He didn't say." I turned the cup in my hands. "I've wondered, ever since. I thought maybe you'd know."
My mother did not answer immediately. She was looking at the light, too, with her head tilted back. A drop of rain ran down from the edge of her head-wrap and she did not wipe it away.
"He told me," she said.
"When?"
"The first year we were married. We had a small room, behind the garage, and I was very young. I had a cousin who had gone to Kampala, and not come home. A girl. She had been in some trouble. Nobody spoke of it." She stirred the tea in her cup, slowly. "One night your father was late at the garage, and I was alone, and I sat in the doorway, and I was frightened. I thought, what if he does not come. And I put on the light. And he came, at ten o'clock, and I was so cross with him. I said, do you know that I was sitting here, all this time, in the dark?"
"What did he say?"
"He said, Margaret, you were not in the dark. You had the light on." She smiled slightly. "I said, I do not mean the bulb. And he said, no. But I do."
I waited.
"He said that there is a thing that happens to a man who is a long way from home." She spoke slowly, picking each word like a stone from a stream. "He loses the road. Not the actual one, you understand, he knows the road. But the other thing. The sense of it. He walks on, in the dark, and he begins to think, I do not know if anyone is looking for me. I do not know if anyone remembers. I do not know whether there is still a house. It is a very dangerous thought. It is the one that makes a man sit down by the side of the road and not get up."
My throat had begun to ache.
"And then, a long way off, he sees a light," said my mother. "A small one. In a window, on a verandah. It does not show him the way. He knows the way. It only shows him one thing." She paused. "That somebody has not given up."
The rain whispered on the iron roof.
"That is what it is for," said my mother. "It is not so that he can find the house. It is so that he can know he is expected. That he is still wanted. That there is a place, and a person in it, who has not stopped looking at the road." She put down her cup. "Your father said, it is a very small thing, a bulb. It costs two hundred shillings a month. But I think it may be the cheapest way there is of saying: you are not forgotten."
I did not say anything. I could not. I sat on the step with the tea going cold in my hands, and the tears running down into my collar, and looked up at the light, and saw it as I had seen it from the end of the lane, a point of steady gold in a great dark field.
While he was still a long way off, his father saw him.
He had been looking. All that time. In the heat, in the rain, with no reason except that he could not stop. For six years, I had been a boy in the far country, with a cracked phone and a good jacket and a hundred excuses, and every night of it, at the end of a muddy lane in Kawempe, someone had turned on a light.
Not for the road. For me.
"You never turned it off," I said, at last. It was barely a whisper. "Not once. Not even in the morning."
"No."
"Why?"
"Because I did not know when," said my mother. She reached out, and took my wet hand in her dry one, and held it on her knee. "I did not know which night it would be. And I could not bear to think that you might come, and find it dark."
I put my head down on her shoulder. She smelled of woodsmoke and old soap and the cold. Her hand came up, and lay against my hair, and she did not say hush. She sat quite still beneath the bulb, in the thin falling rain, and held me, as she had held me once in the yard on a grey morning, as she had held me, I now understood, on every night of my life that I was not in the house.
Above us, the moths turned. The frog in the drain went on and on. And somewhere, a long way off, a church bell struck eleven, slowly, sweetly, and was answered by a dog.
"Welcome home, Eliya," said my mother.
Mzee Opio said the word on the twentieth of March.
It was a year to the day. We went to the cemetery in the evening, the two of us, with a tin plate of beans. The light was long and gold and soft. The frangipani had come into flower again, and the white petals lay scattered on the slab, among the paper flowers that someone, Patience, I thought, had remade.
The old man did not kneel this time. He stood at the head of the grave in his black suit, with his cap in his hand, and looked at the stone. He was thinner than he had been. His hair had gone entirely white. But there was something in his face, as he stood there, that I had not seen since the night in the corridor: a kind of lightness, an ease, like a man who has finished a long climb.
"Ronald," he said. "We have come."
He said a few words, in Luo, low and conversational. A bird sang in the tree. A faint wind moved the petals along the slab.
When he had finished, he turned to me.
"Eliya."
"Yes, Mzee?"
"I told you I could not say it." He turned the cap in his hands. "I said I would say it when it was not a lie."
I stood very still.
"It is not a lie now," said Mzee Opio. "I have waited. I have been very careful. I have looked at it from every side, as a man looks at a door he is afraid of." He met my eyes. "I forgive you."
It was said quite simply, in an ordinary voice. It was not a thunderclap. It was not a sermon. It was a plain flat statement, like the price of a loaf. And yet the whole of the evening seemed to hold its breath. The wind dropped. The bird in the frangipani fell silent. Somewhere beyond the wall, a lorry went by, and the sound of it passed over us like the sound of the sea.
I tried to speak, and could not.
"It took a year," said the old man. "I do not think that is long. I think a year is very short, for a thing that large." He put his cap on his head. "But it is done. I wanted to say it here. So that he might hear."
I bent my head. I pressed my hand against my mouth. After a moment, the old man put his arm round my shoulders, awkwardly, stiffly, like a man who has never been practised in the thing. And we stood there together at the foot of the grave, in the gold light, a very old man and a young one, with a plate of cold beans between us, and the petals coming down.
I asked her at Easter.
It was a Sunday, bright and cool. The church was full of lilies, great white trumpets of them, in buckets and jars and old paint tins. The choir sang. The keyboard rolled. Pastor Lubega preached, in his slow driving way, about a woman who went to a tomb in the dark and found the stone rolled away, and a man in a garden whom she took for the gardener. I sat in the fourth row. I had moved forward, again, by two.
Afterwards, I found her under the mango tree, at the end of the yard, with her thermos. She had her glasses pushed up into her hair. She was wearing a new dress, not mustard, but a deep dark green, the colour of a forest after rain, and I thought that I had never in my life seen anything so beautiful.
"Hello," I said.
"Hello."
"It's Easter."
"I noticed." She was biting her lip. "The lilies are a bit of a clue."
I laughed. I stood in front of her, in the dappled shade, with my heart going like a hammer. In my pocket I had a small thing, a pair of earrings, in the shape of tiny silver keys, which I had bought in a stall in Wandegeya fourteen months ago and carried through the whole of the storm, wrapped in a handkerchief, in the bottom of a drawer. I did not take them out. It was not the time.
"You said to ask you," I said.
"I did."
"I've been practising. For a week. It was going to be a speech." I took a breath. "I find that I've forgotten it."
"Good," said Naomi.
"Naomi Tumusiime." I stopped. I could not look at her. I looked at the ground, at the red earth between my feet, at a small brown ant dragging a crumb across a leaf. "I would like to court you. Properly. I would like to come to your father's house, with my mother, and sit in the front room, and be asked a great many questions I will not enjoy. I would like to do it the slow way, and the right way, and the true way." I lifted my head. "I would like to be a person you could introduce to someone without checking his pockets."
She did not say anything. She was looking at me with her mouth a little open.
"And I would like to know," I said, "if I may also kiss you. Now. Here. In front of the whole church. I'd like to say it's a matter of principle, but it's not. I just want to."
For a moment nothing happened. A child ran past, shrieking. A woman called out from the door of the hall. A flock of small brown birds went up from the tree in a rattling cloud.
And then Naomi began to laugh.
It was the bark. The sudden, helpless, startling bark, loud enough to turn heads. She clapped a hand over her mouth, and her eyes were huge above her fingers, and she was laughing and crying at once, with her shoulders shaking, and the thermos fell from her hand and rolled away across the grass.
"Oh," she said. "Oh, Eli. You're such an idiot."
"I know."
"A matter of principle." She wiped her eyes. "You've been practising a week."
"Eight days."
"And that's what you came up with." She took her hand from her mouth. Her whole face was lit. It was a face I knew better than my own, the long jaw, the old pale scar on the chin, the large dark eyes behind the crooked lenses. "Yes."
"Yes to which?"
"All of it." She stepped forward. "Your mother. My father. The front room. The very unpleasant questions." Her voice shook. "And yes to the other one."
"Now?"
"Don't spill anything," said Naomi.
It was a very gentle kiss. It tasted of tea. It was not like the one in the road, hurried and shot through with a lie; nor like the one I had imagined at Ggaba, in a failing light. It was slow, and warm, and entirely honest. She put one hand on the back of my head. I felt her breath, and the small cool press of her glasses against my cheekbone, and heard, a long way off, as if from the bottom of a well, the sound of a child shouting, and an old woman laughing, and the keyboard, somewhere, being played by someone who was not her.
When we drew apart, she was smiling. She had tears on her face. She pushed her glasses back up her nose with a knuckle.
"I'm still going to be angry sometimes," she said.
"I know."
"I'm going to wake up on a Tuesday and remember."
"I know."
"And you'll say okay."
"I'll say okay," I said. "And I'll bring tea."
She laughed again. She took my hand, and we stood together under the mango tree, in the warm Easter light, with the lilies and the singing and the dust, and over the heads of the crowd, at the church door, I saw my mother. She was standing in her green gomesi with Mzee Ssekamatte on one side and Mzee Opio on the other, and Patience, tall and grave, at her shoulder. They were all looking at us. They were all pretending not to.
My mother caught my eye. She did not smile. She raised one eyebrow, very slightly, and turned to say something to Patience, who put a hand over her mouth.
And behind them, in the doorway of the little white church, as the sun came out from behind a cloud and laid itself across the yard in a long gold bar, I saw Pastor Lubega, with his Bible under his arm, standing very still, with an expression on his tired kind face that I will remember to the end of my life.
He did not look like a man who had worked something out. He looked like a man who had been given another page for his notebook, and had begun, at last, to fill in the blank.