Abyssinian Chronicles (73 page)

One afternoon, he realized that he was lost. He simply could not remember where he was. He started plodding through the bulrushes, headed for a fishing point on the other side of the lake. He went deeper into the marshes, the saw-edged grass cutting his skin. Leeches leaped out of the water, bit him and drank till they fell off, bloated with his blood. At one point, he nearly fell down a slippery rock into the lake. His destination seemed to recede as he approached it. His clothes were sodden, and his shoes full of water. Mud was sucking at his feet. Locusts were gnawing at his thorax and stomach. The sun was going down, hovering dangerously on the horizon; it seemed about to fall into the lake and drown.

His attention was quickly snatched by a floating piece of wood, no, a floating desert island, jagged, ribbed, magnificent in its desolate antiquity. He was back in Rome with Romulus and Remus and the Wolf. Were those jagged edges not the erect teats of the wolves which had reared him at his father’s house? Suddenly the sharp edges multiplied, as though there were many wolves floating upside down, erect teats provocatively exposed. He could hardly tear his eyes from the
bizarre spectacle. A gigantic flash or wave, or both, burst, blurring everything. It lifted as arrows of water pierced his eyes and washed over him.

The huge crocodile had caught up with him. He had taken to patrolling this territory only recently, because a group of smaller males had tried to oust him in a little coup, which he had nipped in the bud. Now he took his time combing the shore, overturning a canoe or two whenever possible, making sure that he was the sole ruler of his territory. It was a month now since his last decent meal. This would be one of the fifty large meals he would have this year—not bad for a creature fifty-eight years old, seven meters long and so many hundreds of kilograms in body weight. He opened his gigantic jaws, and Serenity saw pink and red kaleidoscopes amidst the boiling wavelets. For a moment, everything was froth, boiling waves and furious action. Three final images flashed across Serenity’s mind as he disappeared into the jaws of the crocodile: a rotting buffalo; Nakibuka, his longtime lover, who was also the aunt of Padlock, his missing wife; and the mysterious woman who had cured his obsession with tall women. In that final instant, he suddenly realized where his wife’s bones lay, but because the ancient art of communicating with the dead through dreams had been killed off in the family by Catholicism, Western education and abject neglect, Serenity’s knowledge did not leave the belly of the crocodile, not even when it died ten years later.

Hajj Gimbi and Nakibuka believed that he had drowned, and they commissioned fishermen to look for his body and notify the police as soon as it was found. However, Serenity’s was to be a cenotaph burial too. The body was never found, and to their last days, Hajj Gimbi and Nakibuka could not agree as to how Serenity had met his end.

After the death of the despots, it dawned on me that sooner rather than later, I had to make a decision about what I wanted to do with my life. I still had a few thousand dollars, which I could spend on hand-to-mouth living or on some investment. I took the latter option and, throwing all caution to the wind, got in contact with a man who sold European passports. He was reliable, but expensive as hell. He was generally called Chicken Shit, because he always said to people who complained about his prices that you cannot make chicken soup from
chicken shit. He prided himself on delivering quality product, as opposed to those who sold cheap, fake-looking booklets which led many customers into trouble with the police. I needed a good passport in order to start infiltrating Dutch society. I was already thinking about getting a job in order to practice the language and earn a little money as I worked out my next moves. Chicken Shit offered me a choice of becoming a British, American, Spanish or Portuguese citizen! A few months in the country, and by the power of money, I had qualified to become a European! It was hard to take in at first, but eventually it dawned on me that it was soon going to happen. The powers that had parcelled out Africa among themselves at the Berlin Conference in 1884 had done it without even stepping foot on the continent. Me, I had travelled all the way to Europe, paid for everything I used and now was about to pay for my citizenship. I realized that what I was about to do was not the most extraordinary occurrence—I was just going to become one of the ants in the subterranean passages of the underworld which kept much of the economy going—but I still had a few questions. Would I exist in any particular country’s records? Of course I would: Chicken Shit was using existing particulars for the booklets. What would I do if the police needed a birth certificate? He said he could provide one quite easily. First I had to choose which nationality I wanted. I chose to become British.

After a fortnight, my new identity was ready. When I went to collect it, Chicken Shit gave me a little test. He gave me two booklets and asked if I could identify the one he had made. I failed the test. I paid over a thousand dollars for both the passport and the birth certificate. Adrenaline hit my system as I pocketed the booklet. I had been reborn: my new name was John Kato. My new surname was a common name for the second male twin back home in Uganda. Somewhere in Britain there was an ant going by the same name, unaware of the existence of a twin brother negotiating the wetness of the Dutch polders.

To test my new powers as a citizen of the powerful West, I went to the City Council cemetery to ask for a job. My nerves jangled, but I called upon my acting capabilities. I veneered my agitation with a serious and eager expression. The time had come to lawyer for myself. The cemetery was on the edge of the city, secluded in a wood with tall, thin trees, paved walkways, clipped lawns and neat graveyards arranged in rectangular configurations. It was very clean and
very quiet here among the dead. I walked among the graves, marvelling at the variety of headstones, the messages written on them, the lettering, the little flower patches round the graves and the atmosphere of peace that dominated the place. There were water taps and green watering cans to carry to the plants and flowers. I had found a place to relax and think. The job negotiations went on in English. They wanted a cleaner and gardener. Would I be interested? The pay was bad, but it was enough to take care of my needs. The man did not find anything wrong with my passport. I had passed my first test.

I worked with the fanatic drive of the newly liberated. I was after catching somebody’s eye, to make a connection that would help me reach out for bigger things. Would I get them, as I had got their fellow countryman Fr. Kaanders? I observed quite a few burials: very quiet, very decent, very clean affairs. No blood-curdling wailings, no flailing of arms, no tearing of hair or gnashing of teeth. Dressed in black, the mourners would congregate in the hall, say a few words about the deceased, listen to a song or two and proceed to the graveyard, the coffin in the hands of the black-clad undertakers. I knew somehow that my salvation lurked among the mourners. After lowering the coffin, people would leave in neat lines, some whispering, most silent, and go back to the coffee room for coffee and cake or a biscuit before driving home. It was hard to come into contact with the mourners, even those who came singly to water the flowers round the graves of their beloved. The closer I came to penetrating this new world, the further it seemed to recede.

A few months into the job, I learned that the real money lay in disinterring long-dead, long-forgotten people whose rent had expired and burning their remains or reinterring them in specially designated places. I had never liked gardening that much; it seemed a mockery of Uncle Mbale’s back-breaking efforts and his children’s tough shamba life. Disinterment was pretty disgusting, but it released something in me. I felt a deep curiosity to see what happened to the dead after ten or more years under. It was heavy, dirty work, in some cases worse than what Keema’s cronies did, but it exhausted me enough to make me sleep like a crushed log.

The first time I raised my hand against the dead, I felt the freakish energy of discovery course through me. I first attacked the graves reverently, but with time I acquired the reckless pleasure of the more
seasoned demolishers. As going up a mountain makes people giddy, going under the earth made me feel more grounded, like a rock. The graves opened up like sea chests split open by a pirate’s axe. The legacy degraded—curious, sad, hard to make sense of. The skeletons, the skulls, the crumbling cloth, the brittle hair, in a way reminded me of the Luwero Triangle and the aftermath of the guerrilla war, of people who had rotted into the earth so completely that only skulls and skeletons had remained at the end. Sometimes there were rings, remains of shoes or necklaces, some objects which had been nice in their own time, reminders of values, tastes, customs. These would be piled onto the remains of their wearers and taken to the incinerator. The burning of these remains, these relics of past lives, touched something inside me that burned brutally and pointed to the invaluable role of memory and the fragility of the past.

I did not know anything about these people, but the confrontation with their obscure pasts, terminally locked in the mists of time, touched me. From the filth and the dirt of stinking or crumbling bits and pieces, something glorious seemed to emerge, akin to the resurrection of a dead person come back to tell old stories everyone thought left in the grave. I was no longer working with the dead: in them I was resurrecting those I thought had gone forever. I was back to my library days in the seminary. Graves were my bookshelves loaded with dust-caked secrets. Stories started arising, knocking about in my head, making me wonder what I should do with them. The dedication with which I worked surprised both my colleagues and my boss. They seemed to think that I was morbid, feeding off the dead in an uncanny way. The ghosts of the dead seemed to fill me with indefatigability. I would outwork my more sturdy colleagues, race them till they sweated like sprinters. Most were whiners, going on and on about the dirt and the terrible work. I never contributed to their dirges; I was onto something special. In my mind, I reconstructed our victims’ lives, deaths and burial ceremonies. For some I created glorious pasts, for others dismal days in which death was a liberation from a life of tedium, routine, misery. For some I painted a gray life which was neither good nor bad, glorious nor obscure, painful nor joyous.

In the meantime, things were picking up on other fronts. It was while I was working here that I met the woman, the ghost, that seemed to rise up out of one of the old graves we had demolished and wind my
life up another notch. The power of the original spark made me believe that there was something deathly about the encounter and its aftermath. It was a gloomy day, and there had been no disinterments and only one burial. I had stayed on and volunteered to look after the watering cans, wanting to take time to think and just have a quiet moment. I found her kneeling at a new grave, a lone figure who seemed to be intent on resurrecting whoever lay under the tombstone. Her body was shaking with sharp sobs. Most white women stood in the sand like trapped buffaloes and mourned their dead with the calculated pomp of a priest at high mass. She, however, did the opposite, and for a moment she reminded me of Padlock clawing the floor of Mbale’s house after being thrown out of the convent. As I approached, my eyes went to the tombstone: the deceased had been forty-four years old, the current average life expectancy in Serenity’s Abyssinia. Her boyfriend, I thought uneasily. Yes: older-man, younger-woman scenario. I was suddenly gripped with the terror that my find was in her late forties or early fifties, and that it had been an older-woman, younger-man scenario. With every step I took, the mass of dark hair shielding her face blew slightly in the scented wind. I was quite close now. I stood a meter away and waited for her to turn. She did not. I coughed, bowed a little and asked if she wanted me to water her plants for her. I still had not seen her face. She turned her eyes to me in one slow, querulous movement. A decent tan had given her face great depth and solidity and pulled it out of the mass of dark hair to hold its own against her dress and the surroundings. By the look of her, we were about the same age, and I found myself swallowing hard, but then how could such a person be unmarried or unengaged? There were four rings on her fingers, fingers which had never tasted the harshness of the hoe or the smoothness of a pestle. How was I going to get through to this spoiled person, who possibly had a thin country-western pin of a voice? The only souvenir I had ever got from the demolished tombs was a golden wedding ring, and the sight of this woman’s rings now disgusted me to the point of wanting to throw my trophy in the trash can. Everything seemed like a game to these people. Four rings bought for the hell of it!

I was about to convince myself that this was Padlock’s ghost come back to torment me one last time when I heard her voice. The contempt and confusion registering on my face in that brief instant had made her believe that I was mourning her dead or empathizing in some
spectacular way. I was not. Yes, I could water her plants for her. The tone of voice was not too supercilious or too matter-of-fact. It could be interpreted as vaguely friendly or indifferent. Of course I had met types who smiled just because they were bloody scared to death of you. She, on the other hand, was in command of herself. The remains of her makeup had trickled down her face with the serpentine configurations of a bush trail, but what lay underneath was quite attractive. My mixture of lame Dutch and perfect English seemed to disarm her. Given an ear, her mouth loosened and grief flowed out with the sinuousness of a sloughing serpent. Halfway through the flood, I started thinking it was probably the usual detoxifying confession to a stranger. However, I picked up a few vital strands of information: she had the jinx of being deserted by men. Her father and two brothers had died of cancer. We were standing at the grave of the latest victim, a brother. That shook me to the roots, but did not intimidate me. If the disease was perambulating her system the way the plague had hijacked Aunt Lwandeka’s body, what the hell, as long as it was not contagious. Death had brought me here; it might as well take me away. I fathomed what she must have been going through: all those deaths, all those fears. The winds of the dead bound us to each other with fearsome intensity. In a matter of weeks, we were together. I was plucked from the ghetto and the racket at Keema’s flat and placed in her roomy apartment on the outskirts of the great city. The front window looked out on part of the city, a collection of roofs and spires and towers. In the mist-laden distance I could feel the ghetto beckoning, pulling me back to Little Uganda. But deep down I knew that, having come this far, I was not going back. And I had never belonged there anyway.