Chapter Five
What I Was Becoming
By Christmas I had lost nearly everything I had won.
I do not say it to be dramatic; it is simply arithmetic. A man who bets because he has been lucky is not a man who is any longer interested in the sum. He is interested in the feeling. And the feeling, I found, required a constant supply of fresh stakes, as a fire requires wood. The one million three hundred and sixty thousand shillings that I had carried home in a plastic sack lasted ten months. There were wins, some small, one large, enough to keep the engine turning. There were losses. There was a week in November when I put in two hundred thousand on a single match in the Italian league, on a team that had not lost at home since the previous spring, and watched them concede a goal in the third minute of added time.
I walked out of the shop afterward into a street full of bright wet light and stood there with my hands in my pockets, perfectly calm. That was the strange thing. I felt nothing at all. A kind of numb surprise, as if somebody had asked me a question in a language I half understood.
By the end of the month, I had four hundred thousand left, and a habit.
And so, when Ronnie called one evening in January and said, in a voice I had not heard from him before, low and careful, "Eli, I need you to meet someone," I did not ask why. I said, "Where?"
The conference room was on the second floor of a hotel on Bombo Road, above a pharmacy and a shop that sold car batteries. It was called the Pearl Executive Suite, and it had a carpet the colour of lake water, thirty-odd plastic chairs set out in rows, and a banner across the front wall that read, in gold letters on a navy ground, BRIDGE CAPITAL CLUB: BUILD YOUR WEALTH. BUILD YOUR FUTURE.
I remember thinking that it was a very nice banner. Somebody had paid for it. It had a small graphic of a bridge on it, a graceful curved one, the sort of bridge that does not exist in Uganda, spanning a river that was probably in Europe.
There were perhaps twenty-five people in the room. Most were young: students, I guessed, or recent graduates, in the careful clothes of people who wanted to be mistaken for something richer. A few were older. A woman in a bright head-wrap sat at the front with her handbag clutched on her lap. Two men in suits stood by the door with the stiff, watchful look of those hired to be there. Denis was in the third row, upright, hands on his knees, giving me a small nervous wave.
"Don't speak much," Ronnie murmured, as we found our seats. "Just listen. He's very good."
"Who is?"
"You'll see."
He came in a few minutes later, and the whole room, without anyone asking, straightened.
I have thought a great deal about Mr. Walusimbi since. I have tried to be fair to him, because it is so easy not to be, and because I have learned the cost of making someone a monster so that you can avoid seeing yourself. He was not a monster. He was a man in his mid-forties, medium-sized, with a face you would trust in a bank: round, soft-cheeked, calm. He wore a navy suit that fit him perfectly, and a small gold pin in the shape of a cross on the lapel. He had a way of walking to the front of a room as though he were being carried there, and a way of standing, once he arrived, with his hands lightly clasped before him and a small, patient smile, waiting for the silence to arrive on its own.
"Good evening, family," he said.
It was exactly what Pastor Lubega said. It was the same two words, the same quiet music. And the whole room answered him: "Good evening."
I felt something slide in me, very slightly, like a key finding the wrong lock and turning anyway.
I will not describe the presentation in full. It lasted an hour and forty minutes, and there was a slideshow, and a great deal of it was real. He talked about the exchange rate. He talked about the way money moves between countries, and who is paid for moving it. He talked about gold. He drew a diagram on a whiteboard to show how a large company can borrow cheaply and lend dearly, and as a Commerce student, I found myself nodding. It was correct. Every sentence was sound. It was only when you put the sentences together that the structure they made had no floor.
"I am not here to make you rich," he said at one point, to an appreciative murmur. "I am here to teach you that wealth is not a miracle. It is a method. The Bible says, he who gathers little by little will increase. Proverbs, thirteen. Little by little. We are not gamblers here. We are stewards."
I felt Ronnie shift beside me. I did not look at him.
The offer, when it came, was simple. A member contributed an amount, starting from two hundred thousand shillings. The Club pooled the contributions and invested in a basket of currency trades and gold-backed instruments, managed by a team in Dubai, and at the end of each month it paid the members a return of between twenty-five and thirty percent.
Thirty percent. Monthly.
The numbers sat in my head and did not fit. I knew they did not fit. I had spent a year learning how money works, and one of the first things you learn is that there is no such thing as thirty percent a month, not honestly, not for anyone, not for long. Some part of me, the part my father would have called the garage part, the careful, practical, spanner-in-hand part, said very clearly: Eliya. Look at the wheel. It does not run true.
And then a young woman near the front stood up.
She was perhaps twenty-three. She had a small voice and a pressed blue blouse, and she held a phone against her chest, and she said, a little breathlessly, that her name was Joan and that she had joined the Club in October. She had put in four hundred thousand. She had been paid in November, on the dot. She had put in four hundred thousand more. She had been paid again in December. And last week, she said, her voice breaking, she had used the money to pay her younger brother's fees for the entire year, and he had cried.
"I did not believe," she said. "I'll be honest. I thought it was a trick. But Mr. Walusimbi said, come and see. And I came and I saw."
She sat down to applause. Not wild applause, nothing so vulgar. A warm, rippling, grateful sound, like rain on a roof.
I looked at Denis. He was clapping, his face shining. I looked at Ronnie, who was not clapping, who sat with his hands pressed between his knees and his eyes on the floor. And I understood then, with the clarity that comes at the worst moments, that if I was going to say no, this was the time. I could stand up. I could walk out into the January dusk and go home to my mother's rice and the quiet verandah and a bulb with moths around it.
Is this what you want?
I did not hear it, this time. I think the voice had stopped coming. Or I had trained myself to speak over it.
When Mr. Walusimbi came down the aisle afterwards, shaking hands, he stopped in front of me. He did not say anything for a moment. He looked at me with a warm, level, unhurried gaze.
"Mr. Kasozi," he said.
"How did you know my name?"
"Mr. Opio told me." He smiled. "Mr. Opio tells me you are very good with numbers. He says you saw something tonight."
"I saw a lot of things."
"Of course." He put his hand briefly on my shoulder. A warm, dry, heavy hand. I had not expected it to be so kind. "A young man who sees the numbers is a young man the Lord has gifted. Don't be afraid of them. Come and see."
Come and see. It was what he had said to Joan. It is also, I have since learned, what Jesus said to the first disciples. I did not know that then. I only knew that it entered me like a hand into a glove.
I put in five hundred thousand shillings the following Monday.
They paid me on the thirtieth.
I was in a lecture on cost accounting when my phone buzzed. A message from mobile money. You have received UGX 150,000 from BRIDGE CAPITAL CLUB LTD. I read it three times. I held the phone under the desk so that it glowed on my knee. Beside me, a boy was copying notes from the board with his tongue between his teeth, and at the front the lecturer was drawing a graph.
A hundred and fifty thousand shillings. On five hundred. Thirty percent, to the shilling.
I want you to know that I did not feel triumph. That is the strange part, and the part I would most like to be able to explain. What I felt was relief, like someone who has been holding his breath for a long time and is told, at last, that he can exhale. The doubts that had followed me out of the Pearl Executive Suite, the small mutinous voice of the garage, went quiet. It was true. It worked. I had been wrong to worry. There were such things as honest miracles, and I had been given a place in one.
That afternoon, I put in another seven hundred thousand.
I did not tell my mother. I told no one, apart from Ronnie and Denis, who had followed me in, Ronnie with three hundred thousand he had borrowed from a cousin, Denis with four hundred from an uncle. We sat in the hot back room of a restaurant that evening, the three of us, eating chicken with our fingers, and Ronnie raised a Fanta as though it were champagne.
"To the bridge," he said.
"To the bridge," said Denis, solemnly.
I clinked my bottle against theirs. And I thought: this is what it feels like when things go right.
It took me a long time to understand what happened to me over the next months, because from the inside it did not look like a fall. It looked like success.
By March I had made nine commissions: ten percent on the first contribution of every person I brought into the Club. I had a talent for it, which surprised me. I knew how to explain the numbers. I knew how to tell a quiet, slightly frightened person at the back of a lecture hall, look, I was sceptical too, and watch their shoulders loosen. I knew how to say come and see. I introduced the Club to six classmates, a cousin of Brenda's, two boys from the library, the sister of a boy from our church. They all paid, and they were all, for a time, paid back, and I stood in the back of rooms with my hands in my pockets and watched them smile, and felt something close to goodness.
I bought a phone. Not an expensive one, I told myself, merely a decent one, a thing with a screen that did not crack when you looked at it. Then shoes. Real ones, leather, the colour of dark honey. Then a jacket, a good one, with a lining. Then a watch, which I did not need and which made a small expensive tick that I could feel against my wrist when I sat in lectures. I bought drinks. I bought food. I paid for Ronnie's taxi when he could not, and for Denis's lunch, and for a girl whose name I never learned to get home safely at two in the morning. I told myself I was being generous. That was the word I used.
It was the truth, in the same way that the song in church had been true. I was being generous. And at the same time, every time I took out my wallet, there was a small private tingle of power, like the first mouthful of a strong drink: look what I can do. Look who I am.
At some point that spring, I began to feel that I was better than the people I had come from.
I do not know how else to say it. It was not a thought. It was a posture. It showed up in small things: the way I stopped looking at the boda riders when I paid them. The way I began to correct my mother's English, gently, in the kitchen, without knowing why. The way, passing the roadside tailors on Bombo Road, I felt a faint impatient tenderness, as for people who would never get out. I had a new ease, a slouch, a bright rapid manner of speech. When I looked in the mirror in the mornings, to knot my tie, I did not recognize the boy who had sat on a jerrycan holding a cup of tea. I thought: good.
"You've got new shoes," said Mzee Ssekamatte.
It was a Saturday in April. I had come to Kawempe to see my mother and had taken the long way round, past the garage, because I wanted, I think, to be seen. The old man was sitting on an upturned crate at the mouth of the workshop with his sleeves rolled up, an enamel mug between his hands, watching a boy of about fifteen beat a dent out of a car door with a mallet. He looked up as I passed, and said it in a perfectly neutral tone, as one might say it's raining.
I stopped. "Mzee. Good morning."
"Good morning, Eliya." He did not get up. He was a small, dry, upright man, close to seventy, with white stubble along his jaw and eyes like polished stones, and he had been my father's employer, my father's closest friend, and the man who had driven us to Mulago with his foot flat to the floor. I had not seen him since the burial, except at a distance, and each time I had crossed the road.
"You look well," he said.
"Thank you."
"Come. Sit. Tea."
I did not want to. I had a plan for the day. But there was no refusing him; it was not that he commanded, it was that he did not seem to expect anything else. He pointed at an empty crate. A boy brought me an enamel cup. The tea was strong and sweet and smelled of woodsmoke, and I held it between my palms.
For a while neither of us said anything. The mallet banged. A taxi hooted at the stage. The old man looked at the road, and I looked at his hands, which were my father's hands, I thought: the same black seams in the knuckles, the same blunt square nails.
"Your mother tells me you do tutoring," he said at last.
"Yes."
"Accounts."
"Yes."
"Good. Good." He drank. "Your father came to me when he was nineteen, you know. With no shoes at all."
I looked up. "No shoes?"
"None. A pair of rubber sandals, one strap broken. He said he had walked from town." He smiled slightly, at something a long way off. "I said, what can you do? He said, nothing yet. I liked that. Most boys will tell you they can do anything."
I waited for him to say more. It was the first time I had ever heard of my father's arrival at the garage. But the old man only shook his head, slowly, as though closing a drawer.
"Your shoes are very clean," he said. "That's all I meant. A man should look after his shoes. They tell you where he has been."
"And where have I been?"
He looked at me then. There was no judgment in his face. Only a calm, steady interest, like the way he looked at an engine with a noise he could not yet identify.
"I don't know," said Mzee Ssekamatte. "That is why I said it. Where have you been, Eliya?"
I laughed. I said something light about university, and the library, and the weather. I finished the tea standing up, though I had not finished sitting down. He took the cup from me with a nod, and I thanked him, and said I had to go.
"Eliya."
"Yes?"
"Be careful where you walk," he said. "The ground is wet."
I did not look back. I walked home with a hot patch in my chest that I took for irritation. Who is he, I thought, to look at my shoes? I was a man who paid his own way. I was a man who, in four months, had made more money than my father had in a year. I was a man who had not been to the funeral of his own faith, and was therefore, I reasoned, in no need of its mourners.
I did not think about the wet ground. I would think about it for a long time afterwards.
"Prayer didn't keep Taata alive," I said.
It was a Sunday evening in May. I had come in late and tired and a little drunk, and Patience was waiting at the table with her school Bible open in front of her, a pencil behind her ear, and a look in her eyes that I knew too well. She was fifteen now, tall for her age, with my father's gap between her front teeth and a gift for asking exactly the question you were hoping to avoid.
"You didn't come to church," she said.
"I was busy."
"You've been busy for a year."
"That's what happens, Pati, when you're an adult."
"Maama said you had a dinner. A Bible study dinner. I asked at the church. Nobody knows what you mean." She was not angry. That was what made it worse. Her voice was very even, and her eyes, large and clear and unblinking, were fixed on my face. "Eli. You don't pray anymore. I can tell. You used to, even when you were pretending not to. You moved your lips."
"Leave it."
"I'm only—"
"I said leave it." I heard my voice rise. I could not stop it. "Pati, you were ten. You don't remember. We prayed. We prayed for nine days. We prayed in that corridor until our knees were sore. Pastor Lubega came. Half the church came. We did everything right, and he died anyway. So don't tell me about praying. Prayer didn't keep Taata alive."
The silence that followed was so complete that I heard the fridge hum in the corner, and the faint tick of the bulb outside. My sister's face did something I had not seen it do before. It did not crumple. It simply, very slowly, went still, like a pond in which the wind had suddenly stopped.
"No," she said, quietly. "It didn't."
She closed her Bible. She put it under her arm, and stood, and pushed the chair carefully in. At the door of her room she turned, and I braced myself for anything, for tears, for a shouted word.
"I didn't think it was supposed to," said Patience. "I thought it was supposed to keep us."
She went in and shut the door.
I stood in the kitchen with my hands at my sides. After a while I sat down in her chair, and looked at the page where her Bible had been, a ring on the table-cloth from her cup of tea, and a small pencilled note in her round schoolgirl hand in the margin of a library book: Ask Eli about Taata's verses.
I did not cry. I did not feel anything, quite. I sat there for what might have been an hour, listening to the house settle and the old dog next door begin to bark, and when I finally rose and went out onto the verandah, the bulb was on above the door, and a few moths were still turning in it, and I stood in its light for a while, doing nothing.
Then I took out my new phone and opened a message from Mr. Walusimbi, which said, Brother Kasozi. Tomorrow. New package. Bring a friend.
I typed Yes.