Chapter Six
The Questions
There is an hour of the night that belongs to no one. It comes somewhere between two and three, when the last bar has closed and the first cockerel has not yet decided, when even the dogs in the lane have given up and the city holds its breath. If you are awake in that hour, you are alone in a way that you are not alone at any other time. The mind has no audience. It stops performing, and starts to talk.
I began to meet that hour in June.
It was not insomnia. I slept, or something like it. But I would wake, regularly, as if someone had touched my shoulder, and lie there in the dark with my eyes open and the shadows of the window-frame laid across the ceiling like the bars of a cage. The house was quiet. From the next room came the faint rasp of my sister's breathing. A long way off, on Bombo Road, a lorry changed gear. And I would think about nothing, and then everything, in no particular order: the sum I was owed on the thirtieth, the girl with the pink Bible, a long hospital corridor, my mother's hands.
On the shelf above my bed was a row of books. Textbooks, mostly, and a battered football annual, and at the end, wedged on its side because it was too thin to stand, a small black Bible with a zip. It had been a gift at my confirmation. My name was stamped in gold on the cover, ELIJAH KASOZI, and under it, in my father's careful blocky writing in blue pen, Be still.
I had not opened it in over three years.
One night I took it down. I do not know why. I sat on the edge of the bed with the zip in my fingers and a faint dust coming off it, and I looked at it for a long time without opening it, and I was suddenly, absurdly afraid, as if it were a letter whose contents I already knew.
I put it back. I put it in the drawer under the bed, beneath a pile of old exam papers and a broken calculator. Out of sight. Then I lay down, and stared at the ceiling, and said into the dark in a low voice, "Are You there?"
I think I expected to feel foolish. I did. But I also felt the old sensation, very faint, the mere memory of a warmth. It was not an answer. It was more like the place where an answer used to be, as the shape of a missing tooth is a kind of tooth.
I waited. The lorry on Bombo Road ground away into the distance. The silence closed over the question like water.
"Right," I said. "Okay."
That was the summer I started reading the wrong things.
I do not mean pornography, or anything of that sort. I mean the long threads, the forums, the podcasts: the articles with titles like Why Prayer Doesn't Work and Ten Reasons I Left the Church. I read them in the back of lecture halls, on my new phone, with my face lit blue. I told myself I was curious. I told myself I was only examining the evidence, as a Commerce student should: weighing, testing, being honest.
And some of it was clever. Some of it, I will admit, was devastating. A man with a quiet reasonable voice on a podcast explained how the human mind is built to find patterns, to hear voices in the wind, to see faces in the grain of wood; how a grieving child can pray for a miracle and, when nothing comes, find a way of thinking that it was his own failure. He was gentle about it. That was what got under my skin. He did not mock. He said, I'm not telling you what to believe. I'm only saying it is possible you were taught.
Taught. I turned the word over for days. You were taught. It fitted so neatly into the space where I had been keeping my anger that I could have wept with relief. Of course. I had been a child. I had been told a story, in a house that smelled of tea, by a man I loved, and I had believed it the way you believe a fairy tale, and then reality had struck, as it does, and the story had failed. It was nobody's fault. It was merely what happens.
I told myself that for about eleven days. Then, on the twelfth, I was walking past the open door of a church in Wandegeya on a Wednesday afternoon, and a woman inside was singing alone, no instruments, in a cracked clear voice, a song whose words I could not make out, and I stopped on the pavement with a bag of groundnuts in my hand and could not move.
I was not moved by the song. I want to be precise. I was not struck by any holy thing. I was struck by her face: I could see it through the doorway, a woman of sixty or so in a faded wrapper, standing alone in a half-empty hall, eyes closed, singing as though someone were listening. As though she had no doubt at all.
She's been taught, I told myself.
But she looked, I thought, like somebody who had been answered.
I walked on. I ate the groundnuts. I did not look back.
"Do you think He sees?"
Ronnie asked it in July, on the roof of his building, at an hour that had no name.
We had been out. There was a pattern to those nights by then, of which I am not proud: a bar, a second bar, a long walk back with the road shining under the streetlamps and our voices too loud. Ronnie's building was a four-storey rental behind the market, and the roof was flat and wide and cluttered with satellite dishes and plastic water tanks and the washing of eleven families, still hanging, ghost-pale in the dark. We climbed up through a hatch and sat with our backs against a tank, and the whole city lay in front of us, a field of small lights, orange and white, with the black bulk of Kampala's hills against the sky.
I had thought he was asleep. He had been silent for a long time, his chin on his chest, an empty bottle dangling from his fingers. When he spoke, his voice was thick, and it was not the voice I knew.
"Who?"
"God." He did not look at me. "I mean, do you think He sees? Us. All this. Me, up here, with a bottle. The whole thing."
I did not know what to say. It was not the sort of question we asked. Ronnie was a joker; it was his function; there are friendships built on an unspoken agreement that one person will carry the weight and the other will carry the laughter, and I had never dreamed of questioning the arrangement.
"I don't know," I said. "Maybe."
"My mother used to say He did." He lifted the bottle and looked at it as though it might give him the end of the sentence. "She said it all the time. When I was small. She'd say, Ronald, God sees you. He sees you when you steal sugar." He laughed, a short ugly sound. "I stole a lot of sugar."
"You were a child."
"She got sick when I was eleven. You know that. It took a year. A year, Eli. And she was so good. She was the best person I ever met. She would sit on her bed, all bones, with a rosary in her hands, and say it, and say it, every night. And I prayed too. I sat next to her. I said, I'll do anything. I said it just like that."
I did not breathe. I knew that sentence. I knew its exact weight, its whole terrible shape.
"And then she died," said Ronnie. "On a Tuesday. My father was at work. I was at the table doing homework. I came in to ask her something, I don't even remember what, and she was just..." He lifted a hand and let it fall. "Looking at the ceiling."
A long silence. Below us a taxi went by with its radio playing. A woman's voice, high and sweet, singing about love in Luganda.
"I used to think He was busy," Ronnie said at last, quietly. "That's what I told myself for years. That He has so many people. That He's looking after better ones. People in Syria. In hospitals. People who need it more." He turned his head and looked at me, and in the dark his eyes were wet and very bright. "And now I think maybe He's not busy. Maybe He's just not there."
"Maybe," I said.
"But if He's not there," said Ronnie, "then who am I angry at?"
I opened my mouth. I did not have an answer.
I want to tell you that I did. I want to say that I turned to my friend on that rooftop and spoke some wise and gentle thing, some word that would have turned him back. That is the sort of scene I would write if I were inventing it. But I was not wise. I was a young man with a bottle and a stolen sum and three years of silence behind me, and my own anger was so close to the surface that his felt like my own face in a mirror.
"I don't know," I said again.
"Yeah." He wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist and grinned, suddenly, ferociously, and it was the old Ronnie again. "Ignore me. I'm drunk. I'm talking nonsense. Forget it, mukwano."
"Ronnie—"
"Forget it." He stood up, swaying, and held out a hand to haul me to my feet. "It's the Bridge. It's making me emotional. Thirty percent! Do you know what I'm going to do with my first thirty percent? I'm going to buy my father a bed. A real bed, with a mattress that doesn't hurt his back. And then I'm going to buy him a chair. A big one, in front of a television. And he is going to sit there for the rest of his life."
"That's a good plan."
"It's the best plan."
I took his hand. I let him pull me up. I did not say I'll listen if you want to talk. I did not say I'm angry too. I did not say any of the thousand things that, later, I would lie awake and say to the empty air.
We went down through the hatch together, into the stairwell that smelled of damp and fried fish. At the bottom, in the dim yellow light, Ronnie turned and put his arm briefly around my neck.
"You know I'd be lost without you," he said.
"You'd be fine."
"No." He said it very simply. "I wouldn't."
I went to church on the second Sunday of August because it was my mother's birthday, and she had asked.
She did not ask often. She did not make demands. It was only that, the evening before, she had said, in the careful offhand way she had begun to use, "Pastor Lubega is preaching tomorrow. It would be nice if we were all there," and then had gone on stirring the pot, and I had understood that I would be going, as one understands that the rain is about to start.
I sat between my mother and Patience in the fourth row. The room was full. The heat was already rising, the smell of Vaseline and starch and a hundred bodies, and the drums pulsed in the floor, and a woman in front of me fanned herself with a folded programme that said, in blue ink, WHEN HEAVEN IS SILENT.
I looked at the title. I looked at my mother. She was looking straight ahead, with a face so composed that it could only have been arranged.
Oh, I thought. She told him.
I do not know that she had. I will never know. Pastor Lubega may have chosen the subject for his own reasons, because someone in his flock was suffering, or because it was simply what he had been given that week. But I sat there in the heat with my watch ticking on my wrist and felt as if the whole building had turned toward me like a sunflower.
He preached on the Psalms. He read, in his slow driving voice, the first line of Psalm 22: My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? And he stopped, and let the words stand. The whole room waited.
"Family," he said. "I want you to notice something. This is in the Bible. This is scripture. Someone wrote it down, and someone else copied it, and someone decided it was holy enough to keep. And it says: Why have You forsaken me?" He looked around the hall. "We are sometimes told that to feel this is to have too little faith. That a strong believer never asks. But here it is, in God's own book. The question. Asked out loud."
A murmur ran through the room.
"I have asked it," said Pastor Lubega. "I will tell you honestly. I asked it when my first wife died. I asked it when my son went to prison. I asked it in a taxi, on a Tuesday, in traffic, so loudly the passenger asked me to calm down." A ripple of laughter, quickly stilled. "And I will tell you what I found, if you want to hear it. I found that the silence did not mean what I thought it meant."
I felt my mother's hand find mine. I did not pull away. I did not look at her.
"I thought it meant no. I thought it meant I am not here. But silence is a very strange thing. A mother who sits beside a sick child at night says nothing, sometimes, for hours. A father who stands behind his son while he learns to ride a bicycle..."
I stood up.
I did not decide to. My legs did it. I stood, in the fourth row, in the middle of the sentence, and the woman in front of me turned her head, and Patience made a small sharp sound beside me, and my mother's hand tightened on mine and then, slowly, let go.
I said, "Excuse me." I said it to no one. I edged along the row, treading on feet, and walked up the aisle with my face burning and my whole back prickling, and the drums seemed to stop and the voice at the front, at the exact same pace as before, went on speaking, as though nothing at all had happened: ...and he does not say a word, because the words would only be noise...
I pushed open the door and stepped out into the white glare.
I was sitting on the low wall by the gate, with my elbows on my knees, when he came out.
It was fifteen minutes later. He had not stopped the service; I could still hear it faintly, the drums, a surge of singing. He must have asked someone to take over. He came across the dusty yard in his dark suit, a tall slow man with a slight limp, carrying nothing, and sat down on the wall a little distance from me, not too close, the way one sits beside a bird that has landed on a fence.
He did not say anything for a long time. A boda went by on the road with a girl riding sidesaddle, her headscarf streaming. A small boy came out of the church, looked at us, and was called back by someone inside.
"I wasn't talking about you," Pastor Lubega said at last.
"Yes, you were."
"No. I was talking to the room." He smiled slightly. "But I'm glad it felt personal. That's how it is supposed to work."
"I wasn't trying to make a scene."
"I know. You stood up very quietly. It was well done." He looked at the road. "I used to walk out of churches myself. For about three years. I was good at it. I'd go in, listen for ten minutes, wait for the sentence that hurt, and leave."
I said nothing. The sun was hot on the back of my neck.
"I won't ask where you've been," he said. "I think you would tell me a story, and it would be a good one, and we'd both know it wasn't the whole thing."
"Pastor..."
"I only want to say one thing." He turned and looked at me properly, and I saw how tired he was, and how kind. His eyes had a yellowish tint in the white, a taxi-driver's eyes, a man who had spent twenty years peering at headlights. "I don't know why your father died. I have asked. I have asked a great deal. And I do not have an answer I would dare to put in a sermon."
"Then what are you doing in there?" It came out sharper than I meant it. "If you don't know. What's the point of..."
"Telling people that He is still there?" He nodded, slowly. "Because I don't have to know why in order to know who. Those are different questions, Eliya. I spent many years confusing them."
I looked at my hands.
"I keep a list," said Pastor Lubega, "of times I thought He was absent. I started it after my wife died. It's in a notebook. Whenever I look back and see something I could not see at the time, I write it in. This is what I didn't know. Some of the entries are very long." He paused. "Some of them are still blank."
"Blank?"
"Things I'm still waiting to understand. I don't throw those pages away. I keep them." He smiled again, and this time it was a sad, steady, ordinary smile. "I've found it helps to leave room."
I did not know what to say to that. I looked at the dust between my shoes. A column of ants was carrying something away along the base of the wall, a crumb, a dead insect, a trophy too large for them.
"Come back in when you're ready," he said, and stood, with a small grunt, and put a hand briefly on my shoulder. It was a heavy hand, warm through my shirt. He did not wait for an answer. He walked back across the yard and into the noise.
I stayed where I was.
That night, Patience came to my door.
She did not knock. She stood in the frame with her arms around herself, in her old school sweater and a pair of pyjama trousers, barefoot, her hair bound up in a scarf. It was after ten. In the front room the radio was going quietly. My mother was talking to a neighbour on the phone, her voice a low rise and fall.
"You walked out," she said.
"I know."
"Maama didn't say anything. She cut the cake and she did the prayer and she didn't say anything." Patience scowled. "That's worse. She wants to say something. She just doesn't."
"I'm sorry."
"I don't want you to be sorry. I want you to..." She stopped. She looked at the floor, at her toes, curling against the cold concrete. "I'm going to be baptised."
I sat up. "What?"
"Next month. The last Sunday. Pastor Lubega said I could. He said I'm old enough if I know why I'm doing it." She lifted her chin, and I saw, with a lurch, that she was frightened. "I know why. I wrote it down. I've been thinking about it since... since you said what you said. About Taata."
"Pati..."
"I'm not asking you to agree with me." She looked up. "I only want you to be there. In the front. I know you've got your things, and your Fridays, and whatever it is you do when you say you're doing tutoring, and I'm not asking about any of that. I just want my brother in the front row, on the last Sunday of September. That's all."
I looked at her. My sister, sixteen in two months, tall and thin, with my father's gap between her teeth, standing in the doorway of my room with her whole fragile courage held out in front of her like a cup of something too full.
I thought of the verandah. The jerrycan. A cup rolling across concrete. I thought it was supposed to keep us.
"I'll be there," I said.
"You promise?"
"I promise."
"In the front."
"In the front."
She nodded, once. She did not smile. She turned to go, and then stopped, her hand on the frame, and said without looking back, "Maama's birthday cake had a candle that wouldn't light. Did you notice? She kept trying. In the end she just left it."
I sat for a long time after she had gone, with the lamp off and the window open and the night air coming in over the sill, smelling of wet earth and charcoal. At two, I woke, as I always did. I looked at the ceiling.
I said nothing at all.
But for the first time in three years, I did not feel entirely alone in the silence. It was a small thing, a thin thing, no more than the pressure of a hand against my back. I lay still, afraid that if I moved it would go.
It did not go. It was there until the morning.