Chapter Three
Things That Felt Like Happiness
Nobody warns you how ordinary the drifting is.
When I picture a man leaving God, I still, even now, tend to imagine something dramatic: a slammed door, an angry speech, a night of terrible decisions. That is not how it happened for me, and I have since come to suspect it is not how it happens for most people. It happened the way a boat comes loose from a jetty on a calm day. There was no storm. There was only a rope that I stopped tying, and a long, soft, pleasant morning in which the shoreline slid quietly sideways, and I kept saying to myself, I'm fine. Look how nice it is out here.
Three years went by. I finished school with grades my father would have been proud of, which I tried not to think about. I got a place at Makerere, to study Commerce, and my mother held the admission letter against her chest for a full minute in the middle of the kitchen with her eyes closed, as if it were a living thing she was trying to keep warm. The university was close enough that I did not have to leave home. A boda from Kawempe to the main gate cost two thousand shillings; walking, if I was in no hurry, took forty minutes, down Bombo Road past the car washes and the roadside tailors and the men frying chips in oil that had seen too much.
I had not planned to like it. I had planned to survive it. I had planned to sit at the back of lecture halls with my notebook and my head down, doing exactly what was necessary to be able to say to my mother that I had worked hard. But in my second week, a voice behind me in a queue for the library said, "Kasozi! Eliya Kasozi! They've let you in! They've let both of us in! The system has collapsed!" and I turned, and it was Ronnie.
I should tell you about Ronnie properly, because I have been unfair to him. I have let you think of him as the boy who came to the funeral with the sodas, and he was that. But he was also so much else.
Ronnie Opio was the loudest person I knew. He was short and wiry, with a gap in his eyebrow where a boda had once thrown him against a wall, and he was always, always in motion: tapping, humming, drumming his fingers on whatever surface was available. He had the kind of face that makes strangers feel they have already met you. He could do an impression of any lecturer after a single hour of class, the stoop of the statistics professor, the nasal sigh of the head of department. He could cry with laughter at a joke he had made himself. He was, I think now, one of the most generous human beings I have ever known, and one of the loneliest, and I did not see the second thing until it was much too late.
His mother had died when he was twelve. His father, Mzee Alfred Opio, was a security guard at a bank in Wandegeya, a quiet, upright man with a limp from some old army injury, who worked six nights a week and slept most of the day. Ronnie had grown up in a one-room rental behind a salon, cooking his own dinners from the age of thirteen and washing his own school shirt in a basin on the verandah. He never complained. When I asked him, once, whether he missed his mother, he said, "I miss her cooking," and laughed, and changed the subject so fast that I understood I was not meant to follow.
What he wanted, more than anything, was out. Out of the one-room rental. Out of the borrowed shirts. Out of the particular sort of poverty that is not dramatic, that does not make the news, but wears you down by simply being constant, like water on a stone. He wanted money the way some men want God: with his whole body, with a kind of hunger that was almost holy.
"I'm not going to be a guard," he told me, on one of our first nights at Makerere, as we sat on the low wall outside Wandegeya market eating rolex from a paper bag, chapati wrapped around fried egg and cabbage and tomato, the steam rising in the evening cold. "No offence to my father. He's the best man I know. But I'm going to be a person who doesn't have to stand anywhere for twelve hours. I'm going to be a person who sits."
"Sits where?"
"Anywhere I want." He took a huge bite and talked with his mouth full. "In a car. In a chair. On a verandah in Muyenga with a view."
"Doing what?"
"Eli," said Ronnie, with great patience, as though I were a child, "that part comes later."
I laughed. I laughed a great deal that year. I want to be honest about this, because it would be easy, now, to rewrite those months as a descent. They were not only that. For the first time since the morning on the verandah, I was in a place where nobody looked at me with a careful face. At Makerere I was not Samuel's boy, or the boy whose father had died. I was just Kasozi, from the Commerce class, a guy with a cracked phone and a good head for numbers. I did not have to wear the grief like a school uniform. And it was such a relief that I did not ask what it was costing me.
The first time I placed a bet, it was twenty thousand shillings, and I did not think of it as a bet.
I thought of it as a joke. We were in the shop beside the pharmacy on the corner opposite the market: a narrow room painted yellow, with six screens on the wall and a counter where a girl in a branded T-shirt took slips and cash. The place smelled of cigarette smoke and cheap aftershave and the plastic of too many seats. A dozen men sat in front of the screens in complete silence, not drinking, not talking, with their eyes fixed on small green rectangles in which twenty-two men from a country none of us had visited were running in circles after a ball.
"Just one," Ronnie said. "Just to see."
I said no. I said that my mother counted every note. I said it was gambling, and that Pastor Lubega had once preached for forty minutes on the folly of wanting what you have not earned. I said all of this very firmly, and I heard myself say it, and I also heard that it did not sound like conviction. It sounded like quoting.
"You don't have to believe in it," Ronnie said. "You just have to watch. Look. Pick a team."
I picked Arsenal, because my father used to listen to their matches on a small radio under the Corolla in the garage, with the volume turned low and a rag over his shoulder, saying ah, no, no at intervals as if the commentator could hear him.
They won. Two-one, a late goal, and I jumped up from the plastic seat with a sound I did not know I could make, and Ronnie was shouting, and a man beside us was shaking his head slowly, in a way I would later learn to read as the look of a person who has seen this before and knows how it ends.
The girl at the counter counted out my money. Sixty thousand and a few hundred. I had put in twenty. I stood there with the notes in my hand, soft and slightly greasy, with the smell of a hundred other people's hands on them, and a feeling went through me that I would spend the next two years trying to find again.
It was not the money. I tell you that honestly. If it had been the money, it would have been easier to quit. It was the lift. For about ninety minutes, my body had been completely, thoughtlessly alive. For ninety minutes, there had been no hospital corridor, no cup rolling across a concrete floor, no stairwell. There had only been a ball, and a clock, and the possibility that something good might happen to me for no reason at all.
"See?" Ronnie said, grinning, as we walked out into the evening. "See? God likes you."
I laughed. I put the notes in my pocket. And something at the back of my mind, very faint, like a voice from another room, said: That's not funny.
I did not answer it.
That year, I learned how to be two people.
On weekdays I was a student. I went to lectures, I took notes in a neat hand, I sat in the library under the high fans and learned about marginal costs and double-entry bookkeeping. I was good at it. Numbers had always made sense to me; they were like my father's engines, patient things that rewarded attention. My lecturers began to know my name. A professor who rarely spoke to anyone stopped me after a class and asked whether I had considered a postgraduate programme.
At home, I was a son. I was careful to be. I came in before dark; I washed the plates; I asked my mother about the stall. Patience, thirteen now and suddenly all elbows and opinions, followed me from room to room asking questions I could not answer: why the sky was a different colour at Makerere than in Kawempe, whether I had a girlfriend, whether university food was nice, whether it was true that the lecturers there never smiled.
"Some of them smile," I said.
"At who?"
"At the people who pay their fees."
"But we pay your fees."
"Your brother," I said, "is a special case."
She narrowed her eyes. She was learning to read me. It frightened me, a little, how quickly.
And then there was the third self, the one I kept in neither place. On Friday nights, after my mother was asleep, I would take a boda back to Wandegeya and meet Ronnie in one of a dozen cramped rooms behind the market where somebody's cousin was always having a birthday. Loud music. Someone's phone connected to a speaker the size of a shoebox. A crate of beer on the floor, and a girl dancing on a bed because there was no room anywhere else. The air was thick with sweat and charcoal smoke from the grill outside, and the pleasure of it was physical, almost unbearable, like cold water on a burn.
I had my first drink in one of those rooms. It was a Nile Special in a brown bottle, and it was warm, and bitter, and I made a face. Ronnie laughed so hard he had to sit down. "It's not about the taste, mukwano," he said. "It's about what it lets you stop doing."
"What does it let you stop doing?"
He thought for a moment, which was rare for him. "Listening," he said.
I did not ask to what.
By the third bottle the room had softened. Faces blurred and warmed. A girl whose name I did not catch put her arm through mine and said something I did not hear and I said something back, and we both laughed as though we had known each other for years. For the first time in what felt like forever, I did not feel watched. The old internal observer, the small stern witness who had lived in me since the age of seven and had a habit of saying Eliya, what did you hear?, had gone quiet. He had gone somewhere. I did not look for him.
I walked home at three in the morning, down Bombo Road under the orange streetlights, with my shoes in my hand because my feet hurt, and the road wet and shining, and nobody about except a boda man asleep on his seat and a dog nosing at a paper bag. I was not drunk, quite. I felt light. I felt as if some enormous weight I had been carrying for so long that I'd forgotten it was a weight had been lifted off my back. I looked up at the sky and it was clear, with a few stars through the haze of the city.
I'm happy, I thought. And then, startled, because it was true: I'm actually happy.
The thing I should say, and it is what makes the whole story so hard to tell, is that it was happiness. It was not a counterfeit. It was real, in the way a warm drink is real on a cold day: it did what it said it would do. If I try to tell you now that those nights were empty, I'd be lying, and you would know I was lying, and you would trust nothing else I told you.
The trouble was not that it was false. The trouble was that it did not last until morning.
The mornings were the part I could not manage.
At ten to six, every day, I woke. It did not matter how late I had come in. My body had been trained for years, and it woke by itself, and lay there in the grey light, and listened to the small sounds from the verandah. The match. The charcoal. The cups.
For a while I got up. I sat on the jerrycan with my head throbbing and held the tea my mother handed me, and she read the verse, because she had taken over, and Patience said amen, and I said it too. I tried to keep my eyes up. I tried to look like a boy who had slept well.
My mother never said anything. That was the worst of it. She would look at me over the rim of her cup for a moment longer than was necessary, her face unreadable in the early light, and then look away.
By the end of the first year, I was getting up later. By the middle of the second, I was not getting up at all. "I've got an early lecture," I told her, through the door, in a voice that I hoped sounded busy. "Save me a cup."
She did. Every morning, for months, she saved me a cup. She set it on the shelf by the stove, under a saucer to keep it warm. When I came through the kitchen at eight, hungover and in a hurry, it would be sitting there, lukewarm, the skin of the milk wrinkled on the top, and I would drink it standing up without tasting it, and leave.
Sundays went the same way. At first I went every week. Then I went every other week, with a reason ready: an assignment, a group project, a cold. Then I went when my mother's face made it impossible not to. And when I did go, I sat towards the back, with my arms folded, and mouthed the songs. Pastor Lubega would preach, slowly, with those long pauses, and I would find myself looking at the ceiling, counting its sheets, thinking about a match that was kicking off at four.
It did not feel like losing something. That is what I most want you to understand. It felt like growing out of something, the way you grow out of shoes, without cruelty, without any particular moment. I told myself I was becoming an adult. I told myself that faith was something I would come back to when life settled down, when I had a job, when I had a house, when I was a proper man with time. Everyone did. Even my father, I reasoned, had spent his youth in a garage and found God later.
I was sure of that. I never checked. If I had, I would have remembered that my father found God at nineteen, in a taxi park, after a night in which he nearly died, and that the story of how he came to the verandah step was a long one that he told rarely and never with pride. I did not ask. I assumed I had time.
One evening in the second year, I came home earlier than usual, a little after eight, with a plastic bag of grilled chicken and chips because I had won seventy thousand shillings on a Spanish match and had an irresistible wish to be generous.
The house was lit from the inside. Through the window I could see my mother at the table with a small notebook and a calculator, doing the day's accounts: sums of tomatoes and children's shirts, of petty cash and bus fares. Patience was at the other end, bent over her homework, her pen in her mouth. The radio played low. Over the door, the bulb burned yellow in the dark, with its small cloud of moths.
I stood in the yard for a long moment, outside the light, looking in.
I could see how tired my mother was. It had been three years and she was thinner. She had a new line between her eyebrows, and she touched it from time to time, an unconscious gesture, as though she were pressing something back into place. She wrote a number in the notebook, frowned, crossed it out, wrote another. The stall had been slow. I knew it, I had heard her say so to the neighbour. The money from the SACCO, the small monthly savings she paid in with the discipline of someone who had been poor and meant never to be again, was already earmarked: Patience's fees, the roof, the stock for December.
I had seventy thousand shillings in my pocket. It had come to me for nothing, in ninety minutes, from a country I would never visit.
I stood there, and I felt two things at once, so completely opposed that I could not have told you which was truer. I felt the quick hot flush of pride, look at what I can do, look at what I can bring home, and under it, so quietly I could pretend I had not felt it, something that I can only describe as the sensation of watching a house from the outside while someone else lives in it.
I went in. I put the chicken on the table. I put the notes beside it, folded, and said, "A man at Makerere paid me for tutoring."
My mother looked at the money. Then at me. It was a long look.
"Tutoring," she said.
"Accounting. For first years."
"Mm." She did not touch the notes. She put her hand on the bag, which was warm, and the oil had begun to seep through the paper in a translucent circle. "Thank you for the chicken, Eliya."
"It's nothing."
"I know," she said. "Sit. Eat with us."
And I sat. And we ate, the three of us, at the table under the light. Patience made a joke about the size of the chicken pieces. My mother laughed for the first time in what felt like weeks, a short startled sound that seemed to surprise her as much as us. I laughed too, and the laughter was real, and the chicken was good, and the money lay on the table between us, folded and silent, the first lie I had told her that she had not quite believed.
That night I lay in bed and realized, with a small cold shock, that I had gone an entire day without thinking of my father.
It had not happened before. In three years, there had not been a day when some smell, some sound, some passing stranger's gait had not pulled him out of the air. And now I had spent a whole day, hours of it, in which he had simply not been there.
I should have been horrified. For a minute I was. I lay in the dark with my heart knocking and the old guilt rising, a taste like metal in my mouth. But then it passed. And what came after was worse, because it was relief.
It's getting easier, I thought.
I did not understand yet that the easing was not healing. It was only numbness, and numbness comes on so gently, with so much comfort, that a man can mistake it for peace for years.