Abyssinian Chronicles (25 page)

On the day of judgment, night prayers were said as usual and the roof was stained by Padlock’s last-hymn tremolos. Supper was just minutes away. This time, though, two shitters were not served groundnut soup, which was appetizingly thick with dry fish. The aroma filled
the house and tickled our sharp appetites. A schooled sadist, Padlock had taken care to buy quality fish and quality groundnuts and had prepared the food in a quality banana-leaf-thatched pot to heighten the flavor. We ate our food inches away from the condemned shitters, their foreheads gleaming with beads of guilty sweat, their eyes red with fear. We washed our dirty fingers with water poured and trapped by the two criminals in small bidet-like plastic basins such as I would, years later, find in a foreign brothel, and which I would always associate with smut, soap, fish smells and poisoned meals. Serenity, high in his chair like Pontius Pilate, washed his fingers absentmindedly, looking neither at the block of blue soap proffered nor at the trembling shitter making the offering. Godot, encased in red, tired-looking hard covers, was the only being on his mind. And, oh, the ever so sunny aunty of the woman herding his brood.

Determined to register my protest, and to sabotage Padlock’s sense and system of justice, I was the first to rise. An undercurrent of disgust coursed through me, making me resent the calculated sadism of official justice. Maybe I empathized too much with the subversive element. The truth remained that I had played a part in the drama which had culminated in this, and I had enjoyed the exploits of the duo. I was troubled by the jangling question of whether I was responsible for their defense. Padlock called me back.

She reached under the green sofa and removed three finger-thick guava switches and declared, rather pompously, that she had caught the thieves who had been terrorizing the household. The duo was ordered to lie down a foot from each other. Serenity, who had so far said nothing, and in the spirit of despotic harmony was not supposed to say anything, disappeared behind the red shroud of Godot. Padlock was all over the shitters like a hungry eagle terrorizing a brood of hens. In a wan attempt to resurrect Big Brother’s machismo, which had saved them on the two earlier occasions, the duo turned their glazed eyes to their hero; but my act was too surreal to replicate, and at their age their hero too would have failed to call forth any macho wonders. The orgy of howling, drooling, prancing dogs cracked the confines of nocturnal mating scenery and invaded the house. The resultant mayhem of canine vociferation was punctuated by pleas for clemency, promises never to sin again and prayers seeking deliverance from the notorious St. Jude Thaddeus, savior of desperate cases. One of the shitters even went so
far as to call upon the mighty Serenity, probably in the name of Godot, to intervene; but he only got cut more viciously as Padlock made it clear that despotic or non-despotic intervention was out of the question.

General Idi Amin had told us to fight hard and come back each time we fell. And his rise to power had proved that the majority of people needed a savior, somebody to save them from themselves and their fears before they could get in shape to fight. There had to be giants, heroes, like me to save the helpless. It struck me how easy it was to sit back, watch and put your hands hopelessly in the air. Everybody had put theirs in the air the day Serenity hammered me, maybe because they never listened to the general as I did. Maybe it was because they had never drunk from the well of heroism and self-sacrifice Grandpa had shown me. Maybe it was because they had never woken up at midnight to go with Grandma and deliver a baby five kilometers away. I wanted to rise above them and take the blows. I asked myself what General Amin would have done in this situation. He would have intervened to save the shitters, or at least distracted Padlock to give the victims a breather.

Moreover, General Amin was fond of sending messages and warnings to his enemies. He warned imperialists, colonialists, racists and Zionists that their time was over. It was high time somebody sent a message to Padlock that overkill was not the baptismal name of corporal punishment. Above all, for the first time since my arrival in the city, it struck me that I was as much a parent to the shitters as the original providers of sperm and eggs. I, in fact, knew more about these children than the despots. In cleaning them, washing them, helping them with homework, bribing and blackmailing them, I had got close to them. I had grown fond of them.

Anyway, wasn’t it known that I was a co-parent? Wasn’t it known that I was the third force in this dictatorship? Wasn’t it known that I regarded Serenity as my elder brother, and Padlock as his mean-hearted wife who had to be harassed, corrected and damned if she was too crooked to change?

“I am the one who gave them the money,” I suddenly said.

“What?” Serenity prodded, gasped.

“I gave them the money.”

“They confessed to the crime,” Padlock said coldly after giving the duo a few more hard strokes.

I was caught off guard. I hadn’t thought of every despot’s stock-in-trade: confessions.

“Do you mean to say that you stole the money and gave it to them?” Padlock asked with great fury.

Heroism had tripped itself on its coattails. “No.”

Now the more squeamish of the duo looked alarmed. Padlock smelled sabotage and wanted to demonstrate that heroism was synonymous with scars and a bruised ego. She cut me across the back, and an innocent shitter got knocked down as Padlock turned, clumsily, like a buffalo speared through the ass.

I jumped and sat down again. I got four more cuts. It hurt, but I couldn’t cry out: I had my image to uphold. Another four switches came my way, this time on the legs. I bit back canine howls, thinking about the shitters. I momentarily feared I had wet my pants, but it was not so. I smiled. Once again I had denied her victory. Infuriated by the unsatisfactory sighs of whacked air, Padlock stretched her hand to deliver solid fire to my back, but something popped and glass poured down. She had struck the electric bulb and its shade. Serenity was infuriated: he hated all interruption of his reading.

“Enough of this,” he barked without looking up. “Nakibuka, enough.”

“Who?” Padlock turned to Serenity with the stick still held high in the air.

“What?” Serenity mumbled. He had given himself away. I had heard him; so had his wife.

The stick fell from Padlock’s hand. The shitters could claim it was a miracle performed by St. Jude Thaddeus. A cloud of silence had descended on the house. Padlock sent everyone to bed, and miracle of miracles, she did not even ask the shitters to thank her for disciplining them.

I slept like a log that night. I had acquired two loyal followers.

I missed Uncle Kawayida very much. He never visited us anymore. Sometimes he met Serenity at his office and returned home without coming over. He had bought himself a pickup van in the heat of the Indian exodus and was raising turkeys. I knew that only a Muhammad Ali fight could lure him to our home, but Ali had not fought anybody worthwhile for some time, and he was yet to appear on the stinking
Toshiba. I did not like Ali, because he was more arrogant than I ever wanted to be and he openly boasted about his victories. I preferred that others sing my praises. However, I would have forgiven him everything if any of his fights occasioned a visit from Uncle Kawayida. The fact that my uncle stayed away was ample proof that the rivalry between his wife and Padlock was still strong. I was worried about him and his family. His town lay along the route to where anti-Amin guerrillas, under the leadership of the former dictator Obote, were operating along the Uganda-Tanzania border. Amin had successfully repelled one guerrilla incursion, inflicting heavy losses on the attackers, but one never knew what would happen next. What if the guerrillas crossed the border and took over Uncle’s area?

When I thought about it, the idea of guerrilla warfare impressed me. I liked the risk, the odds, the guts and the sticking of pins into a despot’s backside. I realized that what I was doing to Padlock was nothing short of guerrilla activity. It was not terrorism, as I had once called it; since my village days, I had associated that word with dead dogs and Muslim converts living in fear of incurable penis ulcers. “Guerrilla warfare” sounded better.

I decided to raid Padlock’s Command Post and incapacitate her sewing machine. To begin with, I had never benefitted from the machine: my clothes always got last priority, even if I reported first. I also wanted to bring Serenity into the equation: he was getting off too easily for my liking. If the raid succeeded, I knew that he would be the one to buy the spare parts for the Singer. I also knew that the Singer agent had already gone back to Bombay, Nairobi or London, which meant that Serenity would have to import the parts. This time I was going to reap revenge plus a bit of money too, but basically I wanted Padlock to realize that brute force had its glaring limits. Moreover, I could not stand the way the despots moaned about Amin and his rule, the firing squads, the rising prices, the instability of the economy and the brutality of some soldiers.

Elsewhere, events were taking place that linked me with a woman whose house I would later occupy, whose keyhole I would peep through in a bid to assuage sex hormones gone mad and whose fatherless children I would try to parent. As I penetrated the Command Post,
General Amin’s men were penetrating the woman’s house and whisking her off to an unknown destination.

I knocked a tin over in the darkness, held my breath and proceeded. The Command Post smelled of cotton cloth, Singer lubricant, wood and trapped nocturnal heat. In the darkness, the sewing machine resembled a medieval instrument of torture on which sinners were punished by sadistic clergymen and their followers for holy purposes. A perverse joy kicked in my breast and offset the fear in my bones. “She is not your real mother,” I could almost hear Lusanani say in the darkness, her breath tickling my ear. What was she doing now? Would I ever be alone with her in the darkness? It would be wonderful to raid the secret of her petticoats right here, in Padlock’s holy of holies.

I moved forward. I touched the clothes in the basket, mostly women’s clothes: Padlock-made dresses, blouses and bras. The cylindrical wicker basket’s bottle-cap-like cover was under the cutting board, just inches from the underbelly of the Singer. I stuck my finger in a small cavern, slippery with lubricant. Polished steel felt perversely smooth in the darkness. I extracted the bobbin. It felt like a steel lemon, and I kept rolling it over and over in my fingers.

As Padlock prepared to enter her Command Post, we got the news that Lwandeka, her youngest sister, had got into trouble with the State Research Bureau. Her whereabouts were still unknown. Fearing the worst, Padlock left immediately. For four whole days, the house felt pleasantly light and birds sang in the nearby trees. Suddenly everyone was breathing pure air, as if a cadaverous stench had just been carried off by a cleansing wind. The shitters chased each other all over the place, threw things, besmirched their clothes, shouted and called each other names. I enjoyed my role as indulgent nanny or surrogate parent and let them have their way, provided they did not do anything to annoy me or land me in trouble. Play reached its climax an hour before Serenity’s return from work. In time, selected shitters started cleaning up so that by the time the self-effacing despot arrived home, everything was in order. Serenity was more relaxed. The network of worry wrinkles in his face was shallower than usual, and he seemed keen to put everyone at ease. He let it be known that as long as order was maintained, homework done, school attended, everyone could take a breather.

I was the second-in-command. I relished the power and the chance to do things my way. I was leading my own revolution. By showing the shitters a different way of doing things, with words rather than guava switches, I was turning them against Padlock and the way of life they had been reared in. The squeamish shitter, who now followed me like a puppy, carried out voluntary surveillance work, reporting misdemeanors, which I pretended to note so as not to decapitate his initiative. He was the one who supervised the cooking, listening to the gurgling sounds of the cooking pot, making sure that there was just enough water, not too much so as to waterlog the food or too little so as to burn it. In case of emergency, he had to call me.

I took time off to hold long conversations with Lusanani. She came over, entered the house for some minutes, but left before I could give her a tour of the Command Post. I felt disappointed. I thought that the magic of my dreams would keep her in Padlock’s holy of holies, and maybe even voluntarily make her surrender some of the secrets of her rustling petticoats. As she walked away I wondered whether Grandpa had secured himself a girl like this to take care of him. There was an official news blackout I could not circumvent to find out how he was doing.

Four days away from her kingdom seemed like a lifetime to Padlock. Four days under somebody else’s roof, following somebody else’s schedule, eating somebody else’s meals and sleeping under makeshift conditions felt like four eternities squandered in purgatory. The talk her relatives indulged in shocked her with its randomness and lack of serious content. They seemed to be blowing chicken feathers in the air and relishing the effort of catching them. Padlock found herself isolated on an island of dead seriousness, fact and humorless analysis of the tragedy while all around her teemed levity in the face of disaster. Her brothers and other sister made deep forays into the sands and bogs of childhood, history she preferred to leave undisturbed. After stirring mirthful mud pools full of toothless old men, gap-toothed old women, old clothes, Sunday masses, heavy Christmas meals and childhood escapades, they clung to the only topic that interested her: “First children turned out right, later children did not; are parents fully to blame?”

“Lwandeka was a typical last child,” Mbale said at length. “She
took advantage of Mam and Dad’s weakness and grew up thinking that the whole universe revolved around her.”

“We are told that the State Research Bureau arrested her for corresponding with German saboteurs. Why did she do that? Didn’t she know that Amin meant business? Didn’t she know that it was dangerous to write letters to Germans?” somebody asked.