Abyssinian Chronicles (17 page)

As though summoned by some worried gods and charged with the laudable task of defrosting the chilly air inside the house, a customer arrived at that moment. She lifted Padlock from the chilly depths of isolated suffering. Padlock asked how she was, how her children were doing, if her husband’s van was running again, and if … I felt totally useless.

City women, like this specimen, operated in their own hemisphere,
even the pregnant and the ugly ones. This woman, whose stomach, thighs and buttocks had been crushed by too much childbirth, was the type who would have badgered Grandma and me to give her love potions and all the dubious charms insecure women resorted to in a bid to win back the spark of bygone days. Here, however, she did not even look twice at the short-trousered classroom terror whose exercise books were wrapped in old newsprint and glowed with the teacher’s red marks of academic excellence.

Padlock continued to shower the woman with attention. She rose and turned her back to me for the first time that afternoon. She was headed for the Command Post to take the woman’s measurements. I saw the patch. Was this a new one? It looked larger, more dangerous, and in need of immediate attention.

Suddenly, I lost control of the words I had imprisoned and barricaded in my head. Suddenly, as if the words were fed up with all the cowardly silence of the day, the sentences came out feetfirst like babies at a breech birth. Suddenly, I heard myself say, “You are going to die. Aren’t you aware that you’ve been bleeding all day … Ma?”

More words threatened to gush out, but I barricaded them with hands on my throat. Padlock stopped dead, her head thrust forward and then skyward as if yanked by giant hands. She pirouetted with the agility and grace of the dancers at her wedding. Her face creased into a thousand wrinkles. The customer’s face, which had gone pop-eyed when I first spoke, fell with the relief of a commuted death sentence, and her eyes twinkled mischievously as she saw the patch for herself. With all manner of nunly and girlish shames mincing her, all vestiges of self-control gone, Padlock snapped. Something like a tree trunk split in two by lightning flew sideways and hit me with such force that the lights went out.

Hours later I woke up with a bad headache and a swollen eye. Not a single word of what had occurred passed between the lips of the parties involved. In a dictatorship, the past and the present were Siamese twins, I learned, better left unseparated for the good of public order and family harmony. Anyone who needed a sense of history had to cultivate it in catacombs, where its ugliness could not disgust the eyes of the populace.

For now, I carved the incident in potato. The sweet potatoes I was made to prepare for supper were inedible. Serenity said nothing.
Padlock shot me her warning eye, assuring me that neither was I forgiven nor the act forgotten.

For the next few weeks, I prepared the best meals in my repertoire, because I had seen the clothes Padlock had bled into. I did not want her blood to contaminate the food, so I did all the kitchen work with the fanaticism of a late convert. Because she left me alone for a while, I guessed that she took my enthusiasm for a change of heart, for remorse.

At night I was invaded by a series of bad dreams, which made me believe that Padlock had substituted mental torture for physical harassment. I was visited by the wooden effigy of Jesus on the cross. An image seen uncountable times in church, in prayer books and on rosaries, the Crucifixion had taken on the surrealism of a dream; however, it was not Jesus but Padlock on the cross. All her skin was lacerated, and her blood dripped on the stones propping up the ugly cross. I was the only person watching her ordeal. The look of blame on her lugubrious face was meant to cultivate eternal guilt in me: I was her putative crucifier. On other nights she came to me camouflaged as the Virgin Mary, in a white robe, a blue sash round her waist, in her hands a globe, her feet hidden in clouds. Then she would be crucified with her robe on, torn by whips, and she would start bleeding.

Despite my efforts at rationalization, not ruling out the possibility of my mind playing mean tricks on me, I could not erase the feeling that the bad dreams were somehow caused by Padlock.

In the mornings, as I knelt to proffer my greetings, I would search her face for clues as to whether she remembered dressing herself as the Virgin Mary or disguising herself as Jesus and coming to me, but she betrayed no emotion, no inkling that she knew of my nocturnal terrors. With the weight of night after night of gory visions sitting on my mind, I wondered what I had to do to break the cycle. I wanted her to know that the guilt stuff would not wash with me—it was too late for that. I also wanted her to know that it was better for us to work together, as adults and partners, than to decapitate our endeavors with spurious violence.

I started thinking that she might be one of those people who, when possessed by ancestral spirits, sat in fire, ran around naked, climbed very tall trees, fought and destroyed things with diabolical fury, then denied everything when the spirits left them. Grandma
would probably have helped me verify my suspicions, or at least dismiss them. I decided to tell Lusanani about them, but around that time the nightmares dwindled and stopped.

The lasting effect of the bad dreams was to unburden me of the millstone of heavy sleep. I now slept lightly and woke early, before Padlock barked in my ear or doused me in cold water or struck me with her guava switch. I reverted to the schedule of the village, where periodic tranquillity was interrupted by the sudden advent of babies. It felt wonderful to lie awake at night and imagine the world in slumber. It gave you the feeling that you were living in a different time zone, in a different universe, in a place where people awoke as you went to bed and put on their nighties as you slipped on your school uniform.

I sometimes felt the urge to go out and wander through the streets, dark lanes and piss-sodden alleyways, or negotiate my way to the taxi park and watch its midnight emptiness. I wanted to gauge its actual size, walk its length and breadth alone and fill it with my imagination, but it was unsafe. The caverns of darkness crawled with robbers. The mysterious depths of the night hid wrongdoers on the prowl. The length and breadth were alive with soldiers on patrol, in search of nocturnal excitement and illicit adventure. The sky was alive with ghosts of people killed in the coup, killed before the coup, killed during the state of emergency, killed at the dawn of independence as politics wore hideous masks and became bloodier all the time. The night was full of ghosts redolent with earthly smells, ghosts in search of the next world, ghosts saying endless, faceless goodbyes, ghosts flying about for one last glimpse of their beloved, ghosts marking their loved ones with batlike claws. Grandma was one of those ghosts. It was better to spend the night in the same place, in case she located me, in case she smelled me, in case she chose this particular night to reveal herself to me.

Lying awake on my back, I would think about her, and about the despots’ lack of bitterness, joy and excitement. Accustomed to the afternoon brawls in which Grandpa and Grandma thrashed every subject under the sun with heat and passion, giving the impression that every line of argument and every word mattered, I found the dull harmony of the dictators sickeningly lacking. They seemed to enter each other’s heads telepathically, suck out the necessary information and imbibe it, rendering words superfluous. It seemed like a trick, a clever ploy to monopolize power by keeping everyone else guessing. Could
two despots be in such perfect harmony? It was possible, but it was also possible that there was something I did not know, something under my nose, hidden from me by my inexperience or blindness.

I delved into the depths of the latter possibility with the intensity of obsession. I rose to such high plateaus of nocturnal contemplation that when I heard sharp voices one night, my first reaction was to think that I was dreaming, of a fight at the African shops, perhaps, or at the sand patch behind the school playgrounds, where long-jumpers held practice sessions and school toughs held dramatic fights to establish their supremacy.

As the words whistled and the air vibrated with the suppressed hostility of so many heaped frustrations, I realized that I had stumbled onto something. I quickly got out of bed. The shitters, immersed in childish sleep this side of bliss, emitted dull farts and little snorts and innocent groans, as if in lamentation for missing my discovery. I slipped into the sitting room, the smell of tilapia fish eaten that evening kicking my palate. I ventured past the fat green sofas, past the redwood dining set where Serenity ate alone, overlooking us as we sat on the floor, and I was soon at the connecting door which led to the epicenter of the salvoes. This door was usually left ajar to allow the nocturnal cries of the shitters to be heard from the sanctuary of Padlock’s bedroom. Now it was open a little wider, and my parents were at each other’s throats because they were sure that everyone was asleep. This was tradition transplanted from the village into the present garden of marital strife.

As I stood on the rim of this seething crater, my mind careered off into the realm of probabilities. Had somebody fetched a weapon from the sitting room or the kitchen, and in murderous haste forgotten to close the door? And if so, what damage had been done to the other party? How long had this been going on? Had Serenity finally found the courage to discipline his enforcer? Or was it Padlock dishing out the hard blows? I was trembling with excitement. The sound of breaking glass brought me back to my senses. There were additional heaves, gasps, sighs. A curtain of darkness effectively cut me off from the action, but the thought alone of the despots hitting, clawing and choking each other made it all very real in my mind. I was flabbergasted to learn, when the noise had subsided, that it was Loverboy at the center of the conflagration.

I remembered the day I saw Loverboy sitting on a stool, his arm on the cutting board on which lines of violets were twitching as Padlock sewed two pieces of material together to make a dress. His face carried the merest suggestion of a smile, and Padlock’s glowed with the finest patina I had ever seen on her countenance. At that moment she seemed to be in seventh heaven. No one living or dead, apart from Loverboy, had ever taken her that high.

On the strength of that evidence, I couldn’t blame Serenity for feeling jealous and hurt by Loverboy’s visits. I could see lazy clouds of vicious rumor circling round his head. Townspeople were no different from villagers. They all loved gossip. Except that whereas the latter swigged it from tumblers, the former sipped it from thimbles.

Serenity, who had had his failed trial marriage to Kasiko, could not help feeling that his wife was doing whatever she wanted with Boy, as he called Loverboy, to show him what it felt like when the shoe was on the other foot. Suspected revenge and misguided jealousy had thrust the crocodile and the buffalo onto the treacherous sands.

“You love that boy, don’t you?” Serenity asked, quivering like a crocodile with its vulnerable underbelly exposed to the destructive capabilities of a buffalo’s horns.

“Not in the way you think,” Padlock replied icily. “He is just nice to have around.” The words had resurrected her voice and impregnated it with a vein of warmth.

“Why can’t you tell the truth about this boy of yours? Do not think that I am a fool.”

“I told you the truth. He is just a customer of mine who happens to say things that make me laugh.”

Serenity, old shop and shopkeeper prejudices filed to a fine sharp point, momentarily wondered why he had succumbed to the demands of his wife and brought the commercial devilry of sewing machines and customers into his home.

“Wh-what things?” he stammered, as he used to when he was sent to the shops and could not find anybody willing to go there in his stead.

“Compliments. He admires the way I handle material and turn plain strips of cotton into beautiful dresses.”

I steadied myself against the door as my knees almost gave way. Padlock, a woman from whose vocabulary the word “compliment”
had been expunged in infancy and replaced with “threat,” craved compliments! And was desperate enough to lap them from the purulent platter that was Loverboy’s mouth! Loverboy, the only creature, bipedal or quadrupedal, to oppose, reject and compliment Padlock and her views and get away with it! I was struck by the way I had misread Padlock, but I felt my chest swell with gratification: despite her indifference to hemorrhage and her quickness to strike with guava switches, she was not impervious to pain. I could hurt her!

“Ah! So, I don’t make you laugh! I don’t appreciate what you do despite the freedom I give you!”

“It is not the same,” she replied, her voice thick with impatience, her tone loaded with a patronizing edge. What she did not put in words was the idea of purity and innocence which nullified the usual man-woman devilry when she was with Loverboy. Loverboy sought only the healing power of words from her. The flattery she got from him was the nearest thing to calf-love and adoration she had ever experienced.

“What do you mean by that?” Serenity asked, an edge of anger to his diction.

“If there are women who can make you laugh, there are also young men who can make a married woman laugh. I know there are many women waiting for something to happen to me so that they can rush over here to occupy my place. But I tell you this: breed your bastards as you like, as long as you know that they will never be allowed a place in this house.”

Serenity did not like the matter of his daughter brought into discussion. He did not like being on the defensive all the time. Earlier on he had made it clear that he was too busy worrying about money to go chasing other women. Why was she going back to the old topic?

What she did not tell him was that she kept having nasty dreams about her wedding day, with images of children with outstretched hands, waiting for a piece of wedding cake. The cake crumbled into stones, which the children used to hit her because she had supplanted their mother. She now doubted that Kasiko’s child was a girl. In the dream, Padlock was always surrounded by boys who vowed to succeed their father because they were the true firstborns in Serenity’s house. She craved reassurance that Kasiko’s child was a girl, but she could not find a way to get it without betraying herself.