Abyssinian Chronicles (10 page)

“When are we going to leave this place?” Padlock, sitting on a fine red mat, asked. She was watching Serenity eat banana plantain with meat. Or was it sweet potatoes with fish?

“I am doing my best,” he replied without looking at her. He was satisfied with the way she ran the house, but he was uneasy about important matters being thrust at him during mealtime. Some women, like Kasiko, did this sort of thing in bed; Padlock did it at lunch or at suppertime, and he resented it. “I am waiting for job interviews.”

“You have been waiting for a long time. It is almost two years now. Maybe the post office is letting you down by misplacing your mail. Or maybe somebody at school is sabotaging you by sitting on your incoming mail.”

“I am going to look into all that,” he said flatly, struck by the irony of being let down by an institution he wanted to work for. How many application letters had he sent to the Postal Workers’ Union? Very many. He watched as I ineffectually chewed a piece of meat. Two more children and the Serenity Trinity would be complete, he thought. He would then concentrate on his job, and on getting enough money to send his children to the best schools. What more could a father do?

In the midst of his daydream he was struck by something: the second
sex drought was already on! The vomiting and clay nibblings had already started! His original plan had been a child every three years in order to ease financial pressures. Now it was too late for that plan.

“Any invitations for job interviews this week, this month?” Padlock asked, a residue of clay on her gums. Last time the swamp from which this clay came conspired against her by drowning the car which should have taken her and her unborn son to the hospital. What was it going to do this time? Was it going to punish her for stealing its clay by instigating a miscarriage or a stillbirth?

Serenity wondered which contraceptive method she would prefer: the condom, the diaphragm … “I am planning to go to the city to inquire.”

“I am not going to rear my children here,” she said rather sternly, the last word dropping like a huge chunk of clay in a basin of water.

“I know,” he replied, thinking that she had made “children” sound like a crowd, not just three little individuals. He got up to clean his bicycle. Oh, it needed a proper wash. He put two rags in a bucket, strapped it on the carrier and cycled down to the stream at the other end of the village. Five kilometers in that direction lay the church, the missionary hospital and the school. He cycled past Fingers the leper’s house and two others. Children waved at him from the muddy courtyards, their bare feet smudged, their bellies peeping from loosely hanging shirts. They reminded him of his school, poorer than the Catholic school in Ndere Hill, struggling to keep up. It was time to leave it all behind. He had given six whole years of his life to that school, and he felt that enough was enough. He had to leave before he became too old, before it was too late. Quite a few of his colleagues had missed their chances, had aged, compromised their dreams and become stuck like trucks drowned in mud swamps.

“Children are given by God,” his wife had fumed when he introduced the question of birth control. “How many people want them but can never have them? Take your aunt, if I may use your family as an example. She will never know the joys of parenthood despite delivering just about every other baby in the area.”

“Enough. Enough of that,” he had replied with finality. He now felt that he had missed a golden opportunity. He should have put his foot down and insisted that he was not going to breed for the whole
barren world. He felt that he would have to create another opportunity in order to drive his message home. He stood a better chance when they migrated to the city. The cost of living was higher there, so it would be easier to convince her to space out the children and to have just those they could look after. It was going to be a hard task, and he wondered how successful he would be.

Serenity had viewed the wedding pictures over and over again, dissatisfied by he didn’t know what in his wife’s face. Now, with mud sucking at his feet and the water rippling away murkily into the bulrushes, into the stretch of forest and finally into the papyrus swamps on the other side of Mpande Hill, he believed that he had found the object of his musings and ruminations. The bride hadn’t smiled in any of the wedding pictures, and in a few she had just grimaced, like somebody with safari ants in her pants. The only person with a constant smile on her face was Nakibuka, the woman who had broken the nuptial stalemate and accessed his past with that magic touch on his shoulder. She smiled sweetly, confidently, as if it were her wedding, as if she were celebrating victory over all her husband’s past loves, as if she were quite invincible. The fire that had led him down the dais onto the dance floor, to be fucked by the other dancers and to dance himself, came rushing back. He smiled gratefully. During the honeymoon, Nakibuka had told him all about Padlock. It had not been the best thing to listen to. His wife’s background made Serenity wonder whether she would ever compromise and accept contraception.

Serenity knew that the glumness on his wife’s face was her eternal protest against the injustice of being denied her firstborn privileges. The hardness in the set of her mouth was a plea for redress. Her parents had ignored her as soon as her brother Mbale was born. The irony was that he had been the officiating brother-in-law, the one who had handed her over to her husband on behalf of the family. The birth of three more brothers had left Padlock doing all the hard work, the digging, the cooking, the washing and the fetching of firewood, because she had to learn how to run a home. As a woman she had to learn to wake up first and retire to bed last. In a short time she had all those boys, all those mini-men, to wash, to feed, to see off to school, to pluck jiggers from, to protect from fleas, bedbugs and mad dogs. She gradually became the swamp that filled with the murky waters of hatred, the steadfast clays of perseverance and the dark green papyrus of obedience
and stoicism. Her back creaked with the loads of potatoes, cassava and wood the boys refused to carry. Her hair and her clothes reeked of kitchen smoke and dish soap. Her eyes reddened with too much worry and too little relief.

The two girls, Kasawo and Lwandeka, arrived too late, without any spare oil in their lamps for her. To them, she was like the forgotten bride: too young to be a mother, too old to be a sister, too jinxed to share secrets with and too mysterious to be of much use. So they kept out of her way, associating instead with the boys. Her parents never took her side, always coming down hard on her, because she had to learn to handle the dirty work and lift the bigger load. They seemed to have followed the same philosophy when selecting a name for her. From the arsenal of clan names they chose Nakkazi (strong, robust woman) for her. At first she was happy with it, till she came of age to go to school. There it turned into a bully’s dream because with just a little doctoring, excising a letter or two, it meant completely different things. Its malleability was her curse. Nakaza, Nakaze, Nakazi, Nakazo and Nakazu meant female pubic hair, vaginal dryness, female shit, a female cane plant and female nonsense, respectively. So to different bullies she was different things. At the end of each week they put a guava in her satchel, to thank her for her flexible name and her perseverance. At first she ate these guavas unwashed, till she discovered that they were spat on or rubbed against a bully’s buttocks before they were slipped into her bag.

In her free time she would go to the garden and stand lost in thought under guava trees, touch their smooth stems and look at their hard fruits. The stems felt like her hands, and she became fascinated, and could hardly stop caressing them. She would have swapped all her nicknames for “Nakapeela” (female guava), but nobody accorded her the privilege. When she complained to her parents, reporting the bullies, some of whom were villagemates, her parents made her say the rosary and asked her to forgive them seven times seventy times. By then she would be dreaming of guava stems, flexing her arms as if they were made of wood and using them to punish her tormentors.

She finally sought refuge in the convent, where she became Sr. Peter, a name, once again, forced on her. She had originally wanted to become Sr. John Chrysostom and rage against the body, extoll the spirit and the soul, but the Mother Superior was called Sr. John
Chrysostom and there could not be two in the same convent. It was considered extremely vain of her to contemplate naming herself after that great saint when she knew that the Mother had been called to bear that mantle. Apologizing to Mother Superior, she settled for the harebrained action man St. Peter, who, despite his defects, had risen to lead the Church and become the first pope.

The situation had changed in her favor: from behind the cool walls of the convent she watched with satisfaction as her brothers tilled the iron land, whipped by the rains, terrorized by pests, mocked by droughts, and were finally defeated by bad harvests. She knew that they would never come to much and would never rise above village level. Protected by the certainties of the habit, she watched as their wives, married young, labored with pregnant bodies, cooking, digging, washing, giving birth. She watched as they were dragged by fluctuating commodity prices into worry-infested tomorrows. That was her revenge. She sipped it in trim little drafts, and savored it whenever she had time to contemplate their lot. The only remaining step in the drama was for them to brave the sun and the rigors of climbing the steep hill to the convent, and stand, hat in hand, begging for help. She now had the power to grant or deny help. The rosebush of nunhood, with all its thorns, filled her nose with the holy smell of victory from time to time. At such moments she could not even feel the pain of a thousand thorns.

In those days, Sr. Peter had one big worry, which she prayed over every day. It was the single defect, the one weakness, she could confess to. There were some moments when she felt as if she were being lifted by giant hands and thrust inside a bathysphere which sank and negotiated dark, treacherous reefs on automatic pilot, beyond the reach of everybody, God inclusive. Once in there, traveling at incredible speeds, she lost all control. She felt like a wingless eagle dropping from the sky. By the time she became aware of her lower back, her armpits and her olfactory system, it was too late, the consequences a marvel even to herself.

It had all started long ago, on the day when she decided to fight back. She had grabbed a stick and hit her younger brother Mbale very hard on the shoulder. She went on hitting him even when he fell down. She would have gone on punishing him if two village men had not intervened, grabbing the stick and pulling her away. That was one of the
reasons her parents had welcomed her nunly vocation, because peasant men, from whose ranks her suitor would probably emerge, would either maim or kill her if she ever did that to them.

Nowadays the attacks, or “flashes” as she called them, came only occasionally. They were usually triggered by an incident in which her anger was aroused and her temper inflamed. Gravity of transgression did not matter: a boy breaking another’s nose, trespassing in the convent garden or coming late to church could trigger the explosion. She would hear sounds and feel lifted up, and automatic action would ensue, followed by sweatings, purgings and the bursting of lemon odor on her whole skin.

It was the purgative effect of those attacks which both intrigued and worried the otherwise no-nonsense Sr. Peter. The explosion, like a holy fire, would pulverize all her inner tension and for a moment bring her bliss. In the midst of it, when onlookers saw and heard only wailing children, an orchestra would be tearing down her walls with music. At such moments of stormy bliss, everything revolved round her and she became the center of that raging, frothing, primordial, infernal world.

As a way of dealing with the resultant fear, she took the view that what occurred at such moments was a revelation, a holy fuse God had left smoldering inside her for His holy purposes which she, in her simplicity, was yet to understand. So she prayed for enlightenment and asked for answers to that mystical riddle. She fasted. She wore a strip of gunnysack on her skin. She worked harder than the rest, feeding the pigs, washing their pens, smelling their shit. She disinfected all the convent bathrooms and washed all the toilets. She won praise all round, and the fuse seemed to die a natural death.

Yet when she reduced the prayers and curtailed the work sessions, she discovered not only that the fuse was still alive, but also that its purpose was still a mystery. She turned to Holy Scripture. Elijah slaughtered four hundred fifty prophets of Baal; Jesus lashed the people who had turned the temple into a den of thieves; God unleashed snakes on His people and massacred thousands to extinguish His anger. But what was the purpose of her fuse? She was only a simple nun.

She finally concluded that the fuse was a test of the strength of her character and her commitment to the call. She started looking forward
to the attacks in order to fight them. As a tribute to the lucidity of this new vision, she forgave defaulters, content to let them escape with verbal warnings buzzing in their ears. Sometimes she gave them light punishment, like collecting straw for brooms, raking mango leaves in the compound or helping the cook wash the porridge boilers, but soon she realized that, in the end, she could not spare the rod without spoiling the children. She picked it up once again and wielded it just like everybody else. This time, though, she tried to control herself. She was only partly successful. What happened in the end was that the pupils who got beaten first got off lightly, and those who came last, when the falling-eagle phenomenon had come into play, took the brunt, as if she were compensating for earlier leniency. The children were quick to remark that Sr. Peter had gotten worse, for, if they were all being punished for the same misdemeanor, why were some getting beaten harder than others?

During her week as duty mistress, in charge of school liturgy and general discipline, the inevitable happened. She hurt seven children so badly that in the end, in order to keep the affair out of court and out of the greasy hands of scandalmongers and church-haters, Sr. John Chrysostom, in her capacity as Mother Superior, promised the angry parents that she was going to take swift and decisive action. A few hours later, she disrobed the otherwise industrious Sr. Peter and, in one stroke, thrust her back into the world she despised so much.