Epilogue
Ten to Six
My son woke at ten to six this morning.
He does it every day. Nobody taught him. He is eight months old, with a round head, a gap where his front teeth will one day be, and a frown of serious inquiry that he has inherited from his mother. At ten to six exactly, in the dark, in the small room at the back of our house, he opens his eyes and begins to make the low, indignant, rising noise of a person who has been kept waiting.
I go to him. I do not turn on the lamp. I lift him from the cot, warm and heavy and smelling of milk and sleep, and I carry him out through the kitchen, where Naomi is already standing at the stove in her old green dressing gown with her glasses on crooked, stirring a pot of ginger and milk and swearing, softly, at the charcoal.
"Language," I say.
"He is eight months old. He has no idea."
"He's listening."
"He's listening to the milk," says Naomi, and takes the pot off just as it climbs to the lip, and breathes out. She turns. She kisses the top of our son's head, and then, briskly, the corner of my mouth, and hands me a cup. "Go on. Your mother's waiting."
We live four steps from my mother's house. The plot behind the old one had been Taata's, and Uncle Fred, who has never entirely stopped holding opinions about it, was finally overruled in the second year by a letter from Mzee Opio, of all people, in a firm clear hand, citing a clause in a document I never read. We built the second house in eighteen months, a small, square, plain one, with two rooms and a verandah, mostly with our own hands. Kato mixed the cement. Joseph laid the floor. Mzee Ssekamatte supervised, from a crate, with a flask, in the last spring of his life, and said very little, and corrected the angle of the roof.
He died in November. He was seventy-seven. He died in his sleep, in the room behind the garage, with the kettle still warm on the stove and, on the shelf above it, four enamel cups set out in a row. I found them in the morning. I stood for a long time looking at them. Then I took down all four and washed them and put them back, upside down on their saucer, because I did not know what else to do.
The garage is mine now, and Kato's. It says SSEKAMATTE & KASOZI MOTORS on the gate, in white paint, in letters that I did myself, badly. Kato, who is nineteen, and the best mechanic I have ever worked beside, says the K looks like a man falling off a ladder. In the evenings, at the back, under a tin roof, forty children sit on upturned crates with paraffin lamps and exercise books, and Naomi sits among them on a low stool, because she has never in her life stood where she could sit. We call it nothing. They call it the lamp.
I should tell you the rest.
I stood in the High Court, in the end, three times. Mr. Walusimbi was given fourteen years. He wrote me a letter in the second, from Luzira, an awkward, stiff, rambling one, in a careful hand. I did not answer it for a month. When I did, I wrote four lines. I told him that I had been to see the woman in Bwaise, and that she still prayed for him, and that I did not know whether that was a comfort. I told him that I had no more to say. I signed it Eliya. I do not know if he read it. I find that this is one of the things I can leave in the hands of someone larger.
The green notebook closed on the sixth of June, a year ago. It was a Friday. I came in from the garage, and put the last envelope on the table, and my mother opened the book, and wrote a figure in the column, and drew a line. She looked at it for some time. Then she put down the pencil, and took off her glasses, and laid her hand flat on the page, as one lays a hand on the head of a child.
I read it over her shoulder. OWED. 4,200,000. PAID. 4,200,000. And beneath it, in her upright schoolteacher's hand, one word. She has never told me why she chose it. She did not write Honest. She wrote Home.
Patience is at the university. She is studying medicine, which she says is because she likes to be useful and which Naomi says is because she cannot bear to be wrong. She sings still, in the choir, in a voice that has gone deeper and stranger and gives me gooseflesh. Joseph has been clean for three years and five months. He counts them, still, and nobody laughs. He runs a small group on Thursday nights, in a church hall in Ntinda, for people who have just come out of the programme; he sits among them in the circle of plastic chairs, tall and grave and thin, and says his name and the number of days, and then he says, in his quiet voice, it isn't easy, and I'm still here. Mr. Tumusiime goes to every meeting. He sits in the back, in a dark suit, with a flask, and does not say anything. Nobody has ever asked him to.
Brenda married a doctor in Masaka. She sent a card. Inside, in round firm handwriting, she had written the cover can be wiped clean, I'm told. There was a photograph of a pink Bible on a shelf.
I still wake at two in the morning. I want to say that, because it would be a lie to tell you otherwise. There are nights when the old hour comes, and I lie on my back and look at the ceiling, and hear a phone ring fourteen times in a dark room. On the twentieth of March, every year, I do not eat. On the thirtieth of August, I buy beans. I do not think that this will stop, and I do not now think it ought to. Some losses are not meant to be got over. They are meant to be carried, a little each morning, by someone stronger than you, and set down at night in a place you cannot see.
I do not pretend to understand it. I never worked out why my father died. I never learned why, on a night in March, in a bar called Sunrise, I turned over my phone, and why a boy who deserved to see his father sit in a big chair in front of a television never did. These pages in the notebook are still blank. I have come to think of them, as Pastor Lubega once taught me, as room.
But I know one thing, now, that I did not know at sixteen.
I know what my father was trying to say.
I will never know it for certain. I have given up asking the air. But I have turned it over for twelve years, the long, wet, effortful hhhh that he made in the stroke ward at Mulago, with his good hand locked round mine; and I have come to believe, with the whole of what I am, that it was not a prayer, nor a warning, nor a last instruction. It was only a name. He was trying to say a name. He was trying, with everything he had, through a blocked and broken road, to say Eliya. To say, I'm here. I know where you are. It is all right. To say, I have left the light on.
I carry my son out onto the verandah.
It is still dark. The sky over Kawempe is the colour of ink, going to grey at the eastern edge. The air is cold. A cockerel somewhere is rehearsing. Across the little yard, at the old house, a lamp is lit in the kitchen, and a figure moves across the window, small and upright, in a head-scarf, humming.
My mother is making the tea. She makes it on the same charcoal stove, the same blackened pot, with ginger and milk and too much sugar. When it is ready she will carry it across the yard in her cardigan, with two cups on a tray, and sit on our step, and open a Bible with a cover worn to felt at one corner. She has done it every morning of my life, and every morning of my father's, and she is nearly sixty, and I see no reason why she should stop.
I sit down on the step. I settle the boy in the crook of my arm. He has gone quiet, the way he does in the first grey light, and his round dark eyes are fixed on the corner of the verandah above us.
There is a bulb there. It hangs from a wire that I spliced myself, wound in black tape. I put it up in the first week we moved in. I turned it on, that night, at six o'clock, and I have not turned it off since. Naomi found it, the first morning, still burning, pale against the dawn, with a few moths turning in it. She looked at it for a long time. She did not say, you forgot. She put her hand on my arm.
"It costs two hundred shillings a month," I said.
"I know," said Naomi. "I looked it up."
My mother comes across the yard with the tray. She sits down on the concrete at my elbow, with a small grunt, and lays the Bible on her knee. She pours. The steam goes up in the cold. Naomi comes out behind us, with her own cup and her thermos, and sits on the jerrycan, which we have kept, and tucks her feet under her.
"One verse," says my mother. "One prayer. One cup."
She reads. It is a short one this morning. She reads it slowly, in her careful voice, and when she has finished she is silent for a while, as though the verse were still travelling and she were waiting for it to arrive.
Then she turns her head, and looks at the small face in the crook of my arm.
"Samuel Ronald," she says. "What did you hear?"
My son looks at her. He considers it, with the enormous seriousness of the very young. He opens his mouth. A long bubble of spit forms on his lower lip, and bursts.
"Honest start," I say.
Naomi laughs. My mother, very slightly, smiles.
"Now listen again," I tell him.
The sky is turning. The first thin line of red has come up along the roofs of Kawempe, and the iron catches it, one sheet after another, like a row of small fires being lit. A boda goes by down the lane, with its headlamp still on, and the man on it lifts a hand to us without slowing. A woman across the road is sweeping her step. Somewhere, a long way off, in a place I cannot see, someone is walking in the dark.
I do not know who. It may be a man with a bad knee, and no shoes. It may be a boy with a phone in his hand, and fourteen calls he has not answered. It may be a girl on a green path by a drain. It may be a woman with a tin under her bed. It may be all of us. I have come to think that we are all of us walking, most of the time, and have been for a very long while, and that most of us have no idea how far we have come, or how far there is still to go.
But I know what the light is for.
My father never told me. He said only, everyone knows the way, that is not what it is for, and went on oiling a chain. It took me twelve years and a great deal of ruin to learn it. It is not for the road. It does not show a man where to put his feet. It is the smallest light in the world, a bulb on a wire, at the end of a muddy lane, left burning in the dark for no reason except that somebody has not stopped looking.
It is only there to say, from far away, to anyone who is still out in the night: You are expected. You were never forgotten. Come home.
And it has never, not once, been switched off.