Abyssinian Chronicles (27 page)

Her nerves fully assuaged with the sounds and smells of home, she contemplated her following task with ease; she had to make a dress for a girl who was going to be baptized in two days’ time. If there was enough time, she could also make a dress for a woman who was going to attend a wedding in a week’s time. There was various repair work she had to do. Her life was back on track. The girl had top priority: she would probably become a nun, Padlock thought wistfully. Nunhood, the convent and the vows were things that would speak to her for the rest of her life. Nunhood, she said to the walls, makes a woman a woman among women, a priestess, a goddess, a queen of heaven.

If Padlock had not been such a control freak, and had lacked delusions of infallibility, the devastation which befell her when she discovered the theft of her bobbin would have been proportionate. Singer’s cold indifference to her coaxing would have been in the realm of possibility.

How in the world could her bobbin go missing? A mere bobbin, and not the precious gray head, the clothes or the scissors, but the bobbin! The cold calculation of it! The devilish timing of it! The humiliating simplicity of the crime! Her head spun with bewilderment and incomprehension. She must have inserted her finger a dozen times into the empty bobbin hole. Once or twice, she almost mangled her index finger as she absentmindedly pedaled, but the hole remained empty.

She overturned every box, every container, she shook every piece of cloth and moved every stick of furniture, but the ultimate insult, the ultimate anti-miracle, continued to stare her coldly in the face.

If armed robbers or drunken soldiers had marched in, ordered her off her throne, taken her money and commanded her to remove the gray head, put it in a gunnysack and hand it over to them with a
servile thank-you-for-robbing-me-sirs, she would have understood. Brute force and raw power she understood very well, and appreciated how they worked, but not sneaky wit; especially not when her Command Post still had inviolability written all over it. The excision of the heart from her machine, and the bloodless insult of it all, made her head swell dangerously with a murderous rage.

If Padlock had been a woman of words, she would have cursed holes into the roof and drowned the room in the saliva of her invective, but that was not like her. She just sat on her desecrated throne and let all the anger, the sorrow and the frustration course through her, not bothering to wipe away the despair which mingled itself freely with her tears. She wanted to do something terrible, something horribly cathartic, in order to wash away the debilitating feeling of human weakness.

What kind of animal, human or devilish, could do this just a week after she had beaten the piss, the goo and the blood out of two thieves? What kind of devilish maggot was stirring in this thief’s rotten mind? Was this imperviousness to pain or
love
of pain at work? She shuddered at the thought, at the fleeting possibility, that this monster could have burst onto the planet from her belly, carried for nine months in her womb and suckled on her breasts.

As if that line of investigation were too treacherous to pursue, she took the view that the criminal had come from abroad, exploiting her absence.

Padlock grilled us for what seemed like hours. The main question was “Who called while I was away?” She lashed us again and again with the same question, framed differently each time, twisted into all possible configurations, as she dug to conjure the thief from under the floorboards.

Padlock hardly knew what to believe when the answers came. She seemed to sense, for the first time in her married life, the emergence of a new product, hundreds of guava switchings later: a ball-less, timid-to-hell breed of shitter had emerged, the kind that could hardly say no to authority. She must have sensed hatred, fear and the fact that truth had become a suspect entity. This made her investigative duties that much more hazardous.

At the height of it all, with conflicting reports swirling in her
head, she contemplated the possibility that Mbaziira, alias Loverboy, might be the culprit. Had she not brusquely asked him to stay away from her house? Had he not vehemently denied having had anything to do with the fated love letter, as any guilty young man would have done? Had he not called her accusations ungrounded and questioned her state of mind? And though he had not threatened to do anything, had he not left rather too quietly in the end? He had a motive and possible access. He, like nobody else, knew the ins and outs of the Command Post. Yet the children insisted that he had not called. Had he, then, come when everybody was away?

Amidst the confusion, Lusanani surfaced like a leviathan in the troubled waters of Padlock’s mind. A married woman who played with young boys had to have perversity carved all over her psyche, especially if she was married to a man old enough to be her father or even grandfather. In Padlock’s mind, those were indicators big enough to pinpoint a criminally unstable mind to which transgression was second nature. She was obviously a callous thief who had coldly befriended Padlock’s son in order to gain access to her bobbin, her son’s virginity and God knew what else. Lusanani’s husband had given her carte blanche to sin by declaring, “My wives never borrow money or anything else. I forbade them.”

Padlock could not believe her ears that day; Hajj’s words sounded like a huge smoke screen which shielded the sinister activities of his thieving young wife. She now hated and distrusted that bearded man more than ever. She deeply believed that he had something to do with Serenity’s dallying with Nakibuka, for it was still true that one’s friends said a lot about somebody. She wished that this man and his wives would move to some dust bowl, rotten slum or, preferably, dismal cave, where they would destroy themselves and their ungodly way of life.

Halfway through the investigation, I glowed with hope: yes, Padlock had changed, or was changing. She had exhibited great self-control; she had not touched anybody, and for the first time in living memory she seemed to respect our bodies, despite the terrible distress she was in. She could have lined us up and thrashed us till the skin came off our backs, but this time a new light seemed to have come on inside her head. Was there no way I could secrete the bobbin back in its cave and save her from further suffering? I figured that in the coming days
I could find a way of bringing it back, say, by leaving it in a place where a shitter could pick it up.

The investigation was interrupted by the arrival of the good news that Lwandeka had been released after a short court case. Instead of lifting Padlock from the dungeons of her affliction, the news seemed to plunge her even deeper. It was as if, once again, her sister had got off easily and had not learned any lesson. Instead of filling with the joyous mood of a woman’s escape from suffering, the house was oppressed by the cadaverous smell of ill will.

Padlock resumed her interrogation in a meaner vein. All the previous days’ self-control had vanished. Her head was awash with the metallic sounds of a train derailing and crashing to bits.

“Did Lusanani come here?”

“Yes, she did,” I replied.

“What? What for?”

“To talk,” I said softly.

“How many times have I warned you to stay away from that woman? What did you talk about: letting her steal my bobbin?” Her voice was dangerously controlled, almost coldly indifferent.

“She did not steal it.”

“You did? Who else? After all, you were in charge of the house, were you not? Or did you let her do her own dirty work?” She was almost off her chair now, muscles taut, like a horse about to attack a high fence. “Who was responsible for looking after the house? Answer me!”

“Dad,” I said very slyly, to deflate her momentum and divide blame into more manageable parts, with the bulk at the address of her fellow despot.

Suddenly she was towering over me, blocking my view with the corrugated, trembling grayness of her garment. “You, you, you, you,” she puffed, bending over, her breath hot on my forehead. “You, you, you, you, and I said you.” For emphasis, she cracked me hard on the top of my head with her knuckles. It felt like a hornbill was up there pecking, pecking, pecking. I almost cried out. I reversed all my plans. I would never return her bobbin. I would never be reduced to the timidity of the shitters. Now she could rant, rave or go on a rampage and break my nose or arm, but the precious bobbin, made even more valuable by the scarcities created by my godfather, General Idi Amin,
would remain under cover. It was mine now. I had earned it. If I ever failed to find a buyer for it, I would enjoy the perverse joy of seeing it swallowed by latrine shit and maggots.

“Yes, I had to look after the house,” I said in order to appease her.

I was happy that the Indians had gone, and along with them the last Singer agent. I hoped that no Singer owner in the area had any bobbins to spare, least of all to sell to Padlock. I wanted her Singer to gather dust and become a breeding place for spiders.

I was happy that Serenity had been drawn into the situation: he now had to look for a new bobbin or ask Hajj if he knew anybody who could import bobbins from London or elsewhere. It was going to take time. I loved it.

Padlock was going to disintegrate with impatience before my very own eyes. I would have advised her to veer into a less sedentary line of business, say, selling fish in the filthy Owino Market, where she would imbibe the stench of rotting offal and garbage on top of suffering the indignity of competing with market men and women who openly worshipped the Devil and Mammon.

Serenity played his usual low-key game, wondering why and how a thief could take only a bobbin, of all things. He promised to enlist Hajj Gimbi’s help in the search for a new one. Hajj, Hajj, Hajj, Padlock fumed, her teeth gnashing, her nose dilating, beads of furious perspiration on the bridge.

The poison of uncertainty sank deeper into her: Who had really written the Miss Singer letter? Who had really stolen her priceless bobbin? Had Serenity really slept with her aunt? Was somebody really hell-bent on derailing her life and destroying her?

Padlock brooded, pumping the house full of poison and putting everyone on edge. She sat on her throne, put thread on the Singer board, placed her feet half on the treadle, half on the floor, and knitted, driving the thick steel needle in and out with the cold fury of someone hatching a sinister scheme. The Command Post brimmed with the ill-omened silence of a haunted graveyard. She became very dangerous: my things were relentlessly searched every single day. She was ever on the lookout for Lusanani’s figure on the edge of the courtyard, but I had warned the girl to back off; now we met only on the way to the borehole.

One afternoon, as I was brushing the infernal carpet, I reached
under the green sofa and what did I discover? A neat bundle of five half-dry guava switches, carefully cut on both ends! Woe to the thief! Woe to the craggy landscape of Padlock’s mind! Woe to any defaulter who would fall on the jagged edges of its crags! How lucky I was to be the real thief! Such predictable plans of vengeance no longer impressed me.

It was evident that this time round there would be no waiting for night to fall; the deed would be done early in the morning, after Serenity had left for work. The thief would be asked to remain behind and skip school. The door would be locked, the key pocketed. Then woe to the thief who would see, if he still had eyes to see at all, switches rising and falling with diabolical fury and orgasmic insistence. I smiled cheekily, patted the bundle like I would a good faithful dog, and continued with my sanitary duties. My only worry was that a frustrated Padlock would use any excuse, say, bad school performance, to cane some defenseless shitter. Was this bundle an indicator of Padlock’s predictability, parental incorrigibility or despotic fallibility? Or all three?

Padlock started reading from the Old Testament every evening after night prayers. She started by beseeching God to reveal the thief. When He refused, she beseeched Him to use His tremendous power, the type that had delivered Israel from Egypt, to bring back the bobbin. I noticed that, under the narcotic influence of her faith, she started looking in the most curious places every morning, afternoon and night, as though through her earnestness the Almighty would be moved to let the bobbin drop from above like steel manna and cure her hunger for miracles.

As the searches intensified, they mesmerized me with the power of their blind insistence. At one point I almost panicked. Had she dreamed, like my Biblical heroes, and received the rough bearings or coordinates of the spot where the bobbin was buried? I recalled the blind faith some women had invested in my mascotry not so long ago, and how some were rewarded with sons. What if Padlock’s faith was going to achieve its reward?

I started having odd nightmares with Padlock bearing down on me, the bobbin in one hand, a hammer in the other.

Padlock stepped up her campaign of terror by reading frightening passages from the Old Testament and praying for maladies like leprosy to afflict the thief. I had already seen what leprosy had done to Fingers; I remembered the stumps and the scars. What if Fingers’ sugarcanes had secreted bacteria in my body and all Padlock’s prayers and curses had to do was activate them?