Abyssinian Chronicles (67 page)

I kept remembering the red-ink-patch day and my belief that Padlock was bleeding to death. The thought that Aunt was oozing to death almost paralyzed me. Why wasn’t she blaming anyone? She believed she was responsible for everything. Looking at all this misery, Dad’s family history of dying violent deaths seemed glorious. It seemed more meaningful than this diabolical, slow disintegration of everything one has been. Faced with the decomposition of beauty, the eclipsing of good memories, the trashing of fortitude and the disintegration
of dignity in a pool of futile suffering, any other death seemed better than this torture rack of poisoned afflictions.

It was total mayhem. Padlock and all the rest of the family arrived in force. Padlock looked haunted by her own prophecy. She firmly believed that God had spoken through her, although the physical deterioration of her sister shocked her. Kasawo was moved too, but she was more interested in what was going to become of Aunt’s business affairs. She started interrogating me about a hundred and one things. She seemed to believe that I had plundered Aunt’s safe, bank account and treasure box. I did not like it, but the fight had been taken out of me. I bent with the wind. I wanted to extract myself from the whole grisly situation, but first I had to see this through.

In her last days, Aunt dreamed and talked many times about snakes. She would scream that her bed was full of snakes, and that a big snake had entered her mouth and was swallowing her intestines. Her helper would stroke her and reassure her that there were no snakes anywhere in the house. It was painful to watch. The woman I had once desired, spied on through a keyhole and felt protective about had gone, leaving behind a skeleton barely covered by rubbery skin. Her eyes were floating partridge eggs. Her nose had shrunken; her lips had tightened like rubber bands around her mouth. The neck was gone, the vertebrae protruding. The arms and legs had dried up. The kneecap was like a stone balancing precariously on high, gale-whipped ground. She jabbered a lot about snakes, but when she recovered from her delirium, she told cheerful stories in a squeaky, scratching voice. She had become a smiling skeleton, a talking bundle of bones. I remembered the skulls on fruit stands I had seen soon after the guerrilla war. They had been removed and taken away by government workers, some for burial, some for preservation in a museum of national history. For me, they had all been dumped inside Aunt’s house, and she was fighting their legacy with the forced demonic smile of the tortured living dead.

On the last day, her friend Teopista took me aside and asked me to fetch a priest. I refused. What was the use? The woman had undergone her purgatory and hell here. If anything, she was a saint who could do without frocked platitudes. But I finally caved in. In the meantime, the brigadier came with some of his relatives. He looked embattled; they looked vengeful. The priest came. In his black clothes,
he looked like an undertaker, or a gangster after a painful point-blank execution. The bundle of bones was buried by multitudes. The burial ceremony and its aftermath remained one blur of ungummed images. Aunt Lwandeka had got it right: “Nobody got born thrice.” The virus had denied her a third chance.

Lwendo came to my aid. “You need to go somewhere and sort yourself out, man,” he insisted. “Go to Britain or America for a long holiday. You can afford it.”

“I don’t know anybody there.”

“There are many Ugandans there. Some of our old schoolmates are already there. Go and meet them.”

“No, I want to stay here.” The brigadier had offered me a job on top of pledging to settle his late wife’s business affairs personally.

“You have to go. You look more dead than alive. You are so absentminded that I am afraid a car will knock you down one of these days.”

“No, no, don’t exaggerate.” I knew he was right.

Help came from unexpected quarters. There was a Dutch aid organization called Action II which had landed in trouble over child pornography. A government official had found controversial pornographic material in the house of one of the aid workers, along with pictures of orphaned children taken while they were swimming naked in Lake Victoria. The man who made the scoop concluded that the aid worker was a pedophile who must have come to this country to indulge his perverted tastes. He recommended that the group be deported. Lwendo, who knew a few people who mattered, got wind of the affair and stepped in. Serious negotiations took place. Money changed hands. Even then it seemed the organization was going to be closed down as an example to others.

In the end, the deportation order was cancelled. Lwendo invited me to accompany him to the city that day. The man handling the case was Cane. He looked tall, big, sluggish. He drank a lot. He had maneuvered his way into the civil service and landed in different government offices.

“Been to the north yet?” I said, for lack of better words. A chasm separated us, and my salivary libation did not seem to improve things.

“No. Too much fighting,” he said laconically.

“Things are improving. We both went there about a year ago,” Lwendo explained.

“So you did see where I came from, eh!” he said pensively. He was an important man and seemed to be weighed down by his responsibilities. Too much work, too little pay. I knew all about it. The occasional big bribe always ended up drained by long-standing debts and commitments.

“Sure I did,” I replied. I would have liked to remind him of his sex lessons and the erections he used to get in order to embarrass female teachers, but he looked too old to be interested. The terror of hard female teachers excused himself. His secretary had tapped on his desk meaningfully.

“Hard-bargaining bastard,” Lwendo said as we descended the Crested Towers building. “Almost broke the balls of those Dutch fuckers.”

Action II had worked briefly in southeast Amsterdam, or the so-called Bijlmermeer, which was a sprawling black ghetto on the fringes of the great city. They told us that there were many illegal immigrants there, a few Ugandans among them. They offered to give me a few connections, a few addresses, but I had no interest in becoming an illegal immigrant. I wanted to go on holiday and come back.

“You can go there and meet people who speak your language,” one Action II worker said. He offered to make travel arrangements for me, including supplying the invitation letter needed for a visa. In return for their troubles, I could fund-raise for them for a fortnight. I would get free accommodations and food. The deal was done.

The aid workers kept their word. All parties needed each other: they wanted Lwendo close to them, and me to fund-raise for them. I got invited to Holland by their parent organization. Within two months, I was on a plane to Amsterdam.

G
ETTING ON THE PLANE
was one of the best things that had happened to me in years. I travelled first class, a bait used by my sponsors to inflate my ego and make me fund-raise as if the destiny of the whole African continent depended on it. I studied the golden liquid in the four-sided liquor bottle and wished that my own brew had been good enough for bottling and export, in which case I would have been going to Europe as a businessman. In my jean suit and canvas shoes, I did not look business-like. I was turned out like a rebel on a vague mission, which I was. Already I felt I would need all my rebel credentials to get by: I was on my own. Lwendo would have been handy here—together we would have done better—but he had stayed behind to supervise his carpentry workshop, to enjoy the peace he had fought for and to await the arrival of his first child.

Those seven solid hours of flight were like purgatory; I felt like a
soul hovering above its bleeding corpse, caught between the shreds of the man I had been and the vague outline of the man I wanted to become. I thought I was free. The tyrants, the family, the wars, all past joys and pains, everything was receding, burying itself behind the jagged skyline of old experience, where I wanted it all to stay forever more. I felt weightless, giddy with the confounding dimensions of new freedom. The liquor penetrated my system and augmented the lack of gravitational pull and my frightening ebullience. I felt magical powers coursing through me, and I believed I could do anything. I closed my eyes, and the last quarter-century sank deeper into the sarcophagus of volitional amnesia. I erased myself from its annals, hell-bent on believing that I had played no part in it, and that it had all been just a figment of someone’s diabolical imagination. Before I fell asleep, I dreamed of the plane exploding, mincing the little that remained of a fading past and sprinkling the dust in the clouds, which would burst into rain and wash our chopped remains over oceans and strange lands.

Eventually, the liquor wore off, and consciousness seeped back. I reoccupied my body, repossessed my faculties and looked outside. The sky over Brussels was dusky, the airport blazing like a ship caught in a blizzard, calling attention to itself by flickering multi-colored lights. My kingdom was wrapped in somber mists and a terrifying beauty. It was a magic grotto gaudily lighted like a thousand Christmas trees.

The countless souls filing through it in a somnambulistic trance emphasized the magic. This alien world was one gargantuan foe I would have to vanquish if I was to get my way. The enormity of the task made my gait that little bit heavier. Cold sweat ran down my back and I swallowed hard as the familiar individuals from the cabin melted into the crowd. I tried to look for friendly faces, eager to save the crumbling strands of the communion of our airplane, but everyone seemed wrapped up in thought, dealing with a hundred and one things.

Dazzled by the light, I groggily walked about the grotto to see if there were any gifts dangling from the Christmas trees, tokens of the salvation I was seeking. I went to the duty-free shops to look at the watches, the cameras, the jewelry. Trapped in a glaring white light akin to burning magnesium, the gizmos breathed the harsh air of aggressive marketing and lay under the pressures of their short life span. To buy one such article on my former teacher’s salary, I would have had to work for five years. I stumbled away from the snakepit, my tail between
my legs. People floated past in a relentless surge, the tapping of their feet a hymn to the gods of itinerancy.

The plane that was to take us to Amsterdam was small. Day was breaking, the mist eaten by a cold light that revealed hundreds of cars, many waiting planes and busy airport personnel.

The most memorable sight that morning was the bird’s-eye view of the polders, green blocks of reclaimed land resembling carefully made drawings on a chart. The grotto in which I found myself was even bigger; it was suffused with a dull golden light and armed with more tunnels than a magician’s diabolical maze.

Two Action II workers picked me up at the other end of the airport: I felt like I was being vomited from the lukewarm comfort of a leviathan’s belly into the cold waters of an accursed sea. The man had small green eyes in a slab face, a cropped beard, a soft voice and large, clumsy hands. The woman had ash-gray eyes, a snub nose and a long mouth in a horsey face. They were very enthusiastic about my visit, and the good work they were doing. For the moment, I thought I was in safe hands. They asked me about the journey, the situation in Uganda, my prediction of the country’s future, the welfare of their colleagues and many other things.

The man fixed his eyes on the road, mouth ajar, and sometimes nodded but said nothing. The sea of cars floated past us, buildings loomed up and highways dived in and out of the landscape. We penetrated the city of Amsterdam in a cold sunlight that did nothing to warm the chilly air, which razored through fabric like a knife through butter.

I was installed in a small hotel opposite Central Station, and from my window I could see thousands of people pouring out of the station gate. They reminded me of the crowds at the taxi park in Kampala. Cars, trams, buses and trains rumbled on in a ceaseless hubbub that was occasionally penetrated by the roar of a monster motorcycle. Old, thin-faced buildings with gables mounted on them like magic triangles lined the canals in the grim manner of eighteenth-century soldiers awaiting another looming battle.

My euphoria lasted only till the following morning: flies had ambushed my new paradise. And like Dr. Ssali, Aunt Tiida’s husband, who had to deal with the terrorism of those terrible creatures with a raw circumcision wound, I found myself fighting a war on two or more
fronts. The irony of travelling in luxury, only to arrive and not only confront flies but also have to recount fly-bejewelled tragedies on the first day of work, was not lost on me. The harsh anti-climax gave me nervous diarrhea. The worst in international beggary, image pillage and necrophilic exploitation waited for my seal of approval. Pictures of children more dead than alive, with flies in their eyes, on their mouths, in their nostrils, on their clothes, ambushed me. The loud pleas for help festooning their heads like demonic halos completely deflated my ego. I found myself trembling and in need of a stiff drink.

My opinion of my hosts took a U-turn. The crassness of the propaganda said volumes about both them and their audience. I was in the midst of pirates far more cold-blooded than I was, and I felt the need to revise and jettison much of my old knowledge. I tried to place myself in the shoes of their so-called donors. If somebody came to me with those pictures, especially the ones with children twisted like constipated chicks, I would have asked them why they had waited that long to act. But then the business was run on expedience and was meant not to prevent but to patch up festering wounds, with flimsy, pus-soaked bandages. I had made the mistake of coming at the end of the feeding frenzy which had peaked in the eighties, when fund-raising organizations wielded powers of life and death over nameless millions and did whatever was necessary to extract money from the calculated indifference of the wealthy West. They not only targeted geriatrics, but also spread the shrapnel over a wide field, hitting the constituency they believed had to be rubbed with shit and flies before releasing a dollar here, a dime there. The caustic magnesium burst of Reaganomics and Thatcherite liberalism had penetrated deep into the aid cartels and empires, and finding myself in its residual glare did my eyes and my sensibilities no good.