Snakepit (29 page)

Alone, Victoria felt the world contracting. Luckily for her, the butchers did not know where she lived. It slowly sank in that it would take a miracle for Bat to take her back. She still loved him deeply and wanted to be with him, but the way was now blocked by Babit's death. For the first time since the murder she thought of her daughter: what would become of her? In her terror she tried to reach for the only rock of certainty in her life: General Bazooka. She tried to call, but the phone was engaged. She wanted to go to his house and report the deed and ask for advice, but she was afraid of landing in police hands. She knew what the General would tell her: he would congratulate her and advise her to savour the moment, but she wanted to hear it all the same. It struck her again that if she failed to locate him, or if he turned her away, she was all by herself.

Two days later somebody knocked on her door at eight in the morning. Her heart leapt with fear. He knocked again, loudly, like the knocking of soldiers. “Fungua mlango,” he barked in gruff Swahili. She threw the door open and saw a man standing in her doorway. He was dressed in the gear of a Safari Rally driver, with advertising stickers on his clothes. When she recognized him, her fears grew. Behind him was a rally car festooned with dark windows and big advertising stickers. It looked like there were people inside. Perhaps it was Bat with military policemen or guys from the Public Safety Unit. The thought of falling into their hands chilled her. They would take the chance to vent their hatred of the Bureau on her. Not too long ago there had been a gun battle between the two groups.

“We are going for a ride,” Tayari said in a stern voice.

“I can't leave my child here by herself,” she replied in a shaky voice.

“Do you want to bring her along? The clock is ticking. I hope you won't reach for a gun or do anything stupid.”

“I don't have a gun.”

“Every Bureau member is entitled to a pistol, but can always get an AK-57 rifle.”

“I don't have one.”

“You obviously prefer knives. My first love is dynamite. It is cleaner and more dramatic,” he said, smiling maliciously.

“You can't kill me. I am the mother of Bat's daughter.”

“Just hurry up, will you?”

They left the child with a neighbour. Victoria sat in front with him. He was a little surprised by her lack of resistance: she could have shouted and alerted neighbours, and maybe somebody would have called soldiers from the barracks. The car roared and then sped away. They were headed for the north. His plan was to follow the main road to Kakooge, Katuugo and, if necessary, continue to Nakasongola. If by then she had not told him the truth, then he would resort to other means. He would have preferred to use weathered back roads to bruise their backsides in the potholes, but the possibility of hitting livestock, cyclists or schoolchildren kept him away.

She sat in the car, beautiful, gloomy, her breasts heavy on her chest. He felt a small pang of regret. This might be her last journey, their last meeting. Personally, he did not care; he would do anything to get his brother out of his current state of grief. He remembered the first time he saw her. He felt outdone by his brother, who seemed to have it all: the education, the power job, the beautiful woman. But a lot had happened since. His stint as a spy had blunted his fantasies.

What mattered now was getting the truth. He would try to respect his brother's decision. Intellectualism bred guilt which bred gutlessness much of the time. He agreed that there were things he did not understand, intricate designs and logic his head could not bore through. Those were the things which held his brother in check. Less education made his own position easier to defend: he either did something or he didn't. When he decided to do something, he did not regret it. His father had more or less the same attitude.

Over the years, he had met many women like Victoria: women wanting to break out and doing it wrong. To rebel against their parents they married soldiers. To appear tough they hung out with Bureau men. To feel safe they joined the Bureau. They often ended up in the clutches of evil men who were infected with violence. They had children with these men, making the bonds of their oppression even tighter. They got blackmailed into staying or complying because they feared for their children. Sometimes they complied and the children got hurt all the same. He had helped a few to get out, but some had been so bruised that even when outside they felt unsafe, wanting to go back to what they knew. A few years ago he might have let Victoria off lightly, reasoning that the dead couldn't be brought back whatever one did. Now he was a different man, maturer, tougher.

The first fifteen kilometres were done in a matter of minutes. They overtook everything on the road. He played games with the Boomerang of an army officer. He would slow down, let it overtake him and get away, and then he would put his foot down, put on the spotlights, catch up with the bigger car and overtake it in one breath. He did that twice. The second time the soldier stuck out a hand and waved an automatic pistol at him. He was gone by then. The soldiers at the roadblock admired the car.

“When did you win the Safari Rally?” one asked, almost drooling.

“At the beginning of the year,” Tayari lied, adjusting the visor on the helmet, feeling grateful to the friend who had organized the borrowing of the car and the gear.

“It was my dream, still is,” the man said and waved him on.

The sun had come up but was kept out by the smoked windows. During the next twenty minutes, with top speeds of two hundred and above, Victoria's bowels gave way. Tayari was awakened from his trance by the stench. They were now in the endless grasslands of Katuugo. The giant grass, almost two metres high, formed thick walls on both sides of the road. When the wind blew, it felt as if the grass walls would collapse and drown the road and the car. He opened the side window, ground through the gears and stopped. He held his breath for some twenty seconds, savouring the deliciousness of adrenaline, the banging heart, the shaking knees, the tingling in his back. He got out and stood beside the car, breathing in fresh air.

“I want to know where the killers are,” he said, leaning in.

“Let me first wash up, please.”

“Hurry.”

As she walked away, she remembered the military school where General Bazooka had sent her to become an agent, especially the big posters with the words WE LOVE YOU MARSHAL AMIN. She remembered her hair being shaved off; and stripping, walking naked with other women through a corridor to get military fatigues and boots; the old clothes and shoes burning on a heap through the night; the graduation parade wearing new clothes, a new persona; and membership of a new family. As she washed the filth off her body, she knew that it was time to become a full person again. But how and where?

Tayari smoked a cigarette. It was going to be a beautiful day, clear, warm, windy. It was very quiet here and gave the impression that the whole country was at peace, blessed with the serenity of a very small rural village. He wondered what he would do after the conflicts, the dynamite. Would he return to civilian life? Or spy for a new regime? The way things looked, the final war would be short and fierce. The regime had dislodged itself by virtue of its lack of order. The fact that they could not catch him, and that many believed he was a ghost, said a lot about the present state of affairs. His journey down this dangerous path had begun simply: with sibling rivalry. All he had ever wanted was to beat his brother and prove his worth. The weight of the political situation, and the fact that he would never catch up to his brother, had pointed the way to his destiny. He had enjoyed the secrecy, the silences which had covered his tracks. People had written him off. Then came the fireworks, the beauty of the weddings, the air of celebration, the release of the explosion. He sometimes missed the ambience, the smell of pilau, the dancers, the wrestlers, the beauty of the flower of dynamite fading in the air.

The sight of Victoria stumbling back broke his train of thoughts. He stood in front of her and watched her approaching. She dared not meet his eyes, preferring to look to the side or on the ground, which was for the better because he felt so much hatred for her that he did not want to see her as a full person. He wanted to see her as an object he could hate and, if given the opportunity, could smash and trample. His voice was an ugly croaking sound which carried the full impact of his feelings. “We can do it the easy way or the hard way. It is up to you. Start talking.” Standing two metres away, her head turned to the side, her fingers playing with a cluster of blades of grass, her voice tremulous, she told him everything. From the way she talked, he knew that she was telling the truth.

“Get in the car.”

The drive back was slower; he had got all the answers. She thought he was driving her home; instead, he took her to the small town where his friends were waiting. They debated whether or not to go and arrest the butchers themselves. They knew that the killers would be on their guard and would do anything to protect themselves. They knew that they were burly men, not easily subdued. Wisely, they decided to call the detectives working on the case.

THE NEWS OF THE ARREST of the main suspects in the murder investigations was broadcast on the evening news. Victoria had hit national radio. It was further reported that one of the suspects was in hospital with gunshot wounds sustained during his arrest. He had swung at the arresting officers with his machete-cum-cleaver and been shot.

THE BODY OF THE LATE BABIT was finally released by the coroner for burial. The torso had, mercifully, been reunited with its head, the whole embalmed, and enclosed in a gleaming mahogany coffin with genuine brass handles. During all this time Bat's mind was locked onto the encounter in the surgeon's office. He had gone there to sign some forms pertaining to the case. He arrived to find the man holding his wife's head by the hair, headed for the operating theatre. He remembered standing still to take in the scene. He might have shaken his head to clear the perplexity. The man was smoking a cigarette and humming Nat King Cole's “Coquette.” He smiled when he saw him and said, “This baby is in safe hands. I am going to sew her up really well.”

All that time he kept thinking that he had held that head in his arms, kissed it, laid it on his breast. He had liked that lifeless hair, and sometimes complained about the smell of the products used to keep it glossy. He had loved those eyes, now vacant, and knew those lips, now gaping, and that tongue, now lolling. He knew that neck, now abbreviated, waiting to be rejoined onto its old hinges; the taste of the saliva in that desecrated mouth; and the torso which lay somewhere on a slab, emptied of its organs. The essence had gone; the head now looked foreign, monstrous.

At that moment he was convinced that there was no resurrection of bodies; he didn't want the idea to exist. He had no wish to meet Babit in that body ever again. It would be too unpleasant an experience; there would be no joy in it. His mind would keep going back to the bathroom, to this office. He only wanted to meet her in ethereality, pure, liberated from bodily encumbrances. Sublimated. At the same time, he discovered another basic truth, that he had become a polygamist, just like any man who lost a wife in whichever way. Babit had become a trinity: there was the Babit he had courted and married; the dead Babit, whose head he found on a plate on the bathroom floor; and the ethereal Babit, the one he wanted to see again.

The scene played itself in his head through the wailings, the eulogies, the rituals of saying goodbye. The first shovelful of dirt to hit the coffin sounded like an old prison gate banging closed: how long would his incarceration last?

The family was reminded that it was an exceptional occurrence to lower the coffin when the culprits were already apprehended. There was a growing feeling that they could be the few who would benefit from the justice living a weak existence in an age of gun rule. This became the focus tempering much of their grief because, deep down, people were optimists, who wanted mistakes corrected, things back to running as they remembered them in the past. They waited for the court case as if it were unquestionable that the verdict would be in their favour. They could not allow anybody to crush that with pessimism; that would be like breaking open Babit's grave and throwing her body out of the coffin. Bat promised to hire the best lawyers money could buy and to give the killers the sentence they deserved.

What Babit's family did not know was that General Bazooka had been briefed about the case and had vowed to leave no stone unturned in the effort to free “a hard-working Bureau agent falsely accused of the murder of a common prostitute.” It was just as well that they remained uninformed. In a country where there was no open prostitution, the word “prostitute” would have hurt too much, most especially because Babit had known only one man in her life.

BAT FOUND HIMSELF in a crater of despair he could not climb out of. His friends visited often, but because they knew him well, they knew when to stay and when to leave. With other sympathizers it was different. They kept streaming in from the village of his birth, from Babit's and Mafuta's families, and they kept the place buzzing even when he craved solitude, a moment of contemplation. People he had done favours for, lent money to, recommended for jobs, came to pay their respects. On one level the attention was good; on another it was counterproductive because grief is an individual emotion. But he still entertained his guests, men who now held him in high regard because of his education, and the fact that he had come back from the dead after being presumed six months in the morgue. He had become their man, their beacon. They could count on him to understand their problems.

They brought him chickens, multicoloured birds with legs tied together with banana fibre. They brought him goats, which had survived the roadblocks and the cooking pans of hungry soldiers. They brought him long-fingered cooking bananas because they had heard that they were his favourite food. They brought him sacks of beans, groundnuts, maize, millet. His home became a food depot, an abattoir, a chaotic holiday camp. In their goodness, their enthusiasm, they just made things worse. He would see them following him around, listen to their questions about the lawyers: Why had he not hired Saudi or Libyan lawyers who were most likely to exert influence because of their nationality? Why had he not hired people to take care of the killer? Why had he not removed his daughter from the hands of a murderess? When was he going to remarry?