Abyssinian Chronicles (66 page)

The brigadier’s army friends attended in big numbers, and the bridal pair walked through a glittering arch of swords on their way in and out of the church. The place was filled with light and music and the smells of incense and well-tended bodies.

The most redeeming thing about this wedding was that the reception took place at the Sheraton Hotel. I had nothing to do except enjoy myself. I was happy for Aunt. She seemed to have it all: money, fame, power, love. For a girl who had come to the city with nothing, she had risen to the top the hard way. She could now snap her fingers and get what she wanted. She was thirty-six, a stage of life when most of her contemporaries were bogged down in dreary, diaper-ridden lives, and yet she was just getting married. And not to just anybody: the brigadier was a good-looking, presentable, powerful man. He reminded me of my former rector, and I could not help wondering whether he did not run a small spy organization. He was a mystery to me. Despite his dating Aunt for some time, I had never come to know him. Since Aunt did most of the travelling, we had met only during the preparations for the wedding. “I hear good things about you,” he had said on two separate occasions. Beyond that, he was a closed book. They both looked very happy as they cut the cake. As they distributed bits of it, I thought about Jo Nakabiri.

True to her word, she had refused to attend. I was sad about what had happened to us. I wondered what it might have felt like to see her in tulle. Jo and I hardly knew what to do with each other now. Strangely enough, our relationship had etiolated with the knowledge that we were linked by blood. I did not love her as a sister, I did not feel she was my sister, and my status as a brother had been compromised in both our eyes. To her, I had become as strange as the man who united us: Serenity. She was now struggling to resurrect her school from the ruins of war. The last I heard, the government had allocated the school iron sheets, cement and other necessities.

Food was in abundance, and I ate my fill. I drank a lot, partly to drown out thoughts of Jo, partly to celebrate Aunt’s luck. Lwendo did his fair share of demolition work. I could see his girlfriend eyeing him furtively, probably imagining herself in tulle beside him. I doubted that he would ever wed her—ten years’ difference in age seemed a bit
on the high side—but since I had never taken much interest in their romantic life, I stopped myself from further speculation.

To get away from the anti-climactic post-nuptial atmosphere, I resorted to drifting, roaming the city, visiting the taxi park, as I had done of old. My favorite spot was now crowded with hawkers behind wooden stalls on which they displayed baby wear, shoes, plastic basins, cheap jewelry, anything. The park was fuller now, with more vans, more travellers, more fortune-tellers, more rat poison sellers, though fewer snake charmers. The snakes and their bosses had returned to the nooks of the Triangle from where they had come.

I went to the pagoda: it had been renovated and sprayed with a cream color. I thought of Lusanani and me, feigning sex and getting whacked by Padlock. I thought about all the madness that had gone on inside those four walls, especially the Miss Singer letter, and I felt both happy and sad. What kind of life had gone on here before Serenity and Padlock moved in? What kind of life were the Indians who now occupied the pagoda leading? It looked as if Serenity and Padlock and their brood had never been here. Hajj Gimbi’s house had suffered the same fate—old memories washed away with new paint and glittering fittings. The little decorative dragons on the awnings seemed to have come alive and guzzled every strand of the past. I left.

An idea that kept me occupied was a plan to rebuild the burial site under the jackfruit tree where I had spent so many childhood hours looking at Mpande Hill. I bought cement and got someone to do the job. We set off. The aqueducts had been built, and vehicles crossed the swamp without drowning. There were more returnees now, but I did not know any of them. They were mostly from the youthful part of the village. Life was boring, to say the least. Accommodations were bad. Food was deficient. Many people ate posho and beans as they waited for their matooke, sweet potatoes, cassava and millet to grow. When I lay down to sleep at night, I felt disconnected, floating like a piece of wood on a lake. I knew that this was my last time here. So many ruins, so little life. I had swallowed the village, its spirit, every worthy bit of it, and my job was to rebuild it elsewhere. I was glad when the builder poured water on the completed cement graves in order to give them a sheen. It was time to leave.

Things took another turn. Many people around the city were dying of Slim. Aunt consoled the bereaved and attended funerals and sometimes organized transport for those who had to be buried in the villages of their birth. One day I overheard a group of market women talking about her. At first, they did not recognize me. When they did, they stopped abruptly and pretended they had been discussing somebody else. “She does not look well … our leader does not look well,” one of them had said time and again, to the mutual agreement of her somber audience. I knew what they meant, though it was hard to accept it. A woman who had got married less than a year ago! I went to visit her with bees buzzing in my ears. To my relief, I did not notice anything different about her. Her skin was still as smooth as ever. She had not lost any weight, and she was in a very good mood. On the second visit, though, I found her in bed with a fever. It had tortured her for a whole week.

“Don’t worry about me, son,” she said, smiling. “I will be all right.”

Had I looked too worried? She was sitting on her bed, a gown over her nightie, a cup in her hand. Her dark tan knee peeping out of the gown looked luscious. She talked about her business plans, the women’s group, her children. She asked me to stop what I was doing and become her business manager. I remembered the man burned by the oil drum at the now defunct Boom-boom Brewery. He had recovered, and nothing had come of his supporters’ threats, but I did not like dealing with workers anymore. I wanted freedom to roam and drift. I did not have to work, thanks to the little fortune I had accumulated. Yet I did not want to disappoint Aunt. She had taken me in during my hour of need: Wasn’t I supposed to help her now that she needed me? Given the fact that I no longer taught at SIMC, Aunt could not understand why I was not taking up her offer. The truth was that I feared being left with a millstone round my neck when she became too sick to supervise her affairs. But how was I to communicate that to her?

“We will discuss it when you become better.”

“I am already feeling better, son,” she said, setting the cup down. She reached for a file lying on the bedside table. Healthy or not, there was so much work to do. She used to say that she wanted to give up politics, yet now she seemed to be sinking deeper and deeper into it. Should I remind her? I resisted the urge.

A few weeks later, I returned and found her in bed. A monstrous pimple had attacked her right cheek, which had swollen to the size of a fist. She looked deformed, tortured, scared. I was chilled to the bone. This whirlwind of a woman seemed embattled. What was the brigadier thinking and saying about all this? She did not mention him, which was strange, but then, she had been independent all her life. This time around, words were hard to find. She seemed to be thinking about what I had to be thinking about her. She told me about the fevers and the paralysis in her neck, which had subsided. “I sweat like a hunter,” she said.

“Have you been to the doctor this week?”

“Yes. He did some blood tests. He told me not to worry.”

The pimple disappeared as mysteriously as it had come; she got well again and started working. People were talking. She had lost some weight, but with good food, she regained it and looked her normal trim self again.

The next attack was around the waist: people called it “the belt of death.” From the waistline up to the middle of the stomach, skin lifted as if burned. It burst and formed blisters and sores. It was one of the ugliest things I had ever seen. I got goose bumps just looking at it, and felt my skin crawling like a string of worms. She could have got help in time, but she was so ashamed of the belt that she decided to treat it with ointment and pills in the hope that it would disappear. It did not. By the time she saw the doctor, it was too late. The doctor could only treat the sores. She could hardly sleep, and when she did, she woke up to discover that cloth had bitten deep into her sores. It was a no-win situation which carried on for weeks on end. She shrunk a little bit more this time. Eventually she got well again and started to work. It was like a game.

The fevers returned in full force. They made her shiver and her teeth chatter. Her sweat soaked through the sheets to the bottom of the mattress. Her skin was like a sieve, letting go of the fluids she took in. She shrunk more visibly now. Diarrhea came, burned sores in her rectum and never let go. By this time, her urine had become a mixture of red and yellow.

“Don’t cry for me,” she said one day. “Take care of yourself and your brothers.”

Matters moved from bad to worse. She refused to go to the hospital. All the shames of her past gushed back. She became a sinner earning her rightful punishment for straying and rebelling for so long. She became so ashamed of herself that she could hardly bear to look in the mirror. She hated the burden of her fame and influence. When she locked the door to her room, the whole world invaded. She could see some people laughing at her, some sympathizing, some pitying her, some totally indifferent. All the people she had worked with at the market, in the movement, in the war, were there. Her parents and brothers and sisters never left her side. As the first person in the family to catch the plague, she could not bear the shame.

The brigadier took her away for some time and hired nurses to look after her, but she felt like a fish out of water; she wanted to return to her house. She was brought back one night, and she did not leave the house again. The house stank with the heat of fever and the fumes of green-black diarrhea when she became too weak to wash her things. At the same time, she refused all help. When the few people she wanted to see dropped in, she loaded the air with bottled perfumes and hot incense, and from behind the curtain, she said firmly that everything was fine. The fire in her bowels and the talons in her flesh were nothing compared with the raging inferno in her brain. She could no longer bear to look at her children: she felt she had betrayed and shamed and stigmatized them forever. She would hear them moving round the house, handling pans with great care, running the tap as quietly as possible, and burn with sorrow. She no longer prepared their food for fear that she might revolt them or pass on to them her horrible disease. She wished they could bang the pans and break the cups and run the taps full blast and play loud music. She wished they could piss on their beds and shit in front of her and vomit in her lap as of old. But now only her stenches rattled the roof and terrorized the ventilators. Now the children tiptoed round the house as though a leopard were lurking behind the cupboard. These new changes made her burn with the caustic fires of regret. In her chosen solitude, she wished she had been conventional and malleable enough to marry early and lead an obscure life and meet a banal death. She would close her eyes and wish she were the Virgin Mary flying to heaven without leaving a trace of her life on earth. She passionately wanted to erase herself from the face of the earth, from the annals of the village, from the heads of all who knew
her. She could see her grave next to the refurbished ones of her parents, and wished she could just disappear through the roof and strike everyone dumb with disbelief. She was haunted by the feeling that she had let everyone down. All the evils of guilt the parish priest and her parents had inculcated in her invaded and smothered her in their sulfurous blaze.

The next time I went to see her, she refused to open the door. She had already sent the children to their fathers. She was determined to go through her last days on her own. From behind closed doors and curtains, she said that I should understand. She wanted me to remain with a certain image of her: “Son, I am a skeleton out of the Church’s devil books.”

“I don’t mind even if you looked like the Devil himself.”

“I never did anything right,” she said dryly.

“You have helped countless people. You fought for freedom, for common good. You sacrificed yourself in many ways. What more could you have done?”

“All that does not matter, son.”

“It is what really matters. Am I hearing you, or is it somebody else speaking?”

“Maybe I am losing my mind, son.”

“I am going to get an axe and break this door down. I have already contacted your best friend, Teopista. She is going to help you personally. First we have to take you to the doctor.”

She did not object to this woman; she had come from the same village, and both families knew each other well.

“No, I am not going back to the doctor. Not with all those people watching.”

“They are going to die one day; why do you worry so much about them? We will cover you up and walk you to the car.”