Abyssinian Chronicles (37 page)

Serenity’s sisters, Tiida and Nakatu, had in the meantime kicked up a storm of controversy in the village. Largely uninterested in Catholicism, they had no ambitions for themselves; but in a bid to turn the tables on all families in the village, especially the formidable Stefanos, they had decided that Grandpa should go to Rome. Both women’s Muslim husbands had promised to contribute to the pilgrimage fund, and so had Uncle Kawayida, who was doing very well in business. Grandpa’s chances of securing a place were good, for the local people were generally poor and places were left over after the initial registration heat had died down.

Tiida and Dr. Ssali had won their battle with the Conversion Committee about a year earlier. They had been awarded an oily-white Peugeot, which was washed daily and looked after like the sole remnant of an endangered species. Tiida enjoyed being chauffeured to important meetings in the car because it was new and elegant, and also
because the leathery smell of its cool gray upholstery imbued her with the heady feeling that she was as tough as leather. One day her husband drove her to Serenity’s home during his lunch break. She stepped out of the car full of the leather smell, feeling that her opposition had virtually no chance. Her mission was to pressure Serenity into contributing to Grandpa’s pilgrimage fund. She could have met him at the office, but she had decided that her larger-than-life presence in the pagoda would be the best way to clinch a resounding victory.

As Tiida surveyed the pagoda, with the chaotic events of the Indian exodus bubbling at the back of her mind, she felt proud that her family had done well. Here was Serenity, or Mpanama, as she fondly remembered him in his short-trousered, tall-women-accosting days, in a house built by Indians which was indeed a far cry from the obscurity of his bachelor cottage. Here he was in the middle of the city, abreast with new developments and furthering his ambitions. The postal union move had been a very brilliant maneuver, she conceded. At one time when they were growing up, she had worried that Serenity was too sleepy to come to much in life. She had feared that he would end up poor, with patches in his trousers and debts up to his neck, simply because he didn’t seem smart enough to put winning moves together; but now, after all those years and all the changes in the fortunes of the family, she felt that they were better off than the Stefanos. Here were father and son about to go to Rome, and Kawayida and she both owning vehicles, and Serenity involved in the leadership of the Postal Workers’ Union. The Stefanos were now a family of the past. Old man Stefano was battling the ravages of a stroke that had left him paralyzed on one side. The star of the scions of the Stefano family had stopped rising.

Aunt Tiida knew that Serenity did not espouse this kind of family rivalry, but she was ready to work on him, to stir guilt in his heart and make it clear that he owed his father this last favor as a show of gratitude for all he had done for him. She would remind him of the land Grandpa had donated for him to built his bachelor cottage, and the role the old man had played in organizing his wedding. She felt that she had Mpanama in her grip. She had left nothing to chance. It was the reason she had come to neutralize his wife and pin her down in her pagoda. This village girl, whose parents were saved from the terrors of a rotten
roof by her brother, could not defeat Tiida. She was ready to put Padlock in her place—at the bottom of the pile, where she belonged.

Like most people who have just acquired new status symbols, Tiida believed that the brand-new Peugeot had given her a sharper edge in relation to everybody else, and it was true that the village girl her brother had married had nothing in her possession with which to counter the glitter of the French-made machine. It looked very unlikely that Serenity would ever buy himself a new car. Not with so many children, not with so much responsibility. All this made Tiida feel high up in the air.

What she did not know was that Padlock had not changed over the years. She still was indifferent to material goods, she still felt utter contempt for shamefully acquired possessions, and anybody who exchanged his foreskin and his religion for some spray-painted piece of metal was utterly despicable in her eyes. In her scheme of things, the Peugeot had been acquired from the Devil, by devilish means, and its owners deserved no respect and would never get any from her, least of all in her own house.

Padlock greeted Tiida with insulting politeness, as though she were a lunatic to be handled with great care. She played the cowed village girl in the presence of visiting royalty. She blocked avenues of conversation with terse, very polite replies. She retreated to her bridal tactics of unapproachable gentility, which left Tiida stranded and looking for ways of lifting the blockade. Tiida was not intimidated—she rarely was—but she felt embattled, confused, unable to operate in these icy conditions. There was a kink in her cable which blocked the flow of her power, her charisma, her ability to stun. This was not the kind of woman who normally fazed her. On the contrary, it was only richer women, more elegant ladies or younger sophisticated girls who made her heart pump, and even then she fought back. The strange thing was that she suddenly felt as if she had done something wrong in the past for which she was paying now, but in her living memory she felt she had never double-crossed her brother’s wife. In fact, she was one of the few people in the family who ever defended Padlock, usually pointing to her fecundity.

Refreshments were served with great care amidst a silence that seemed to howl and oppress both the house and the afternoon itself.
Tiida looked in her glass and saw minute pieces of squashed orange swimming in the yellow liquid. It occurred to her that her mind was in the same liquid state, unable to form a plan of attack or defense. It also occurred to her that her brother’s wife had not even asked about her children. Was this because they were now living in the city, where village civilities didn’t rule, and where housewives behaved like little queens? Or was it because Tiida was married to a Muslim and her male children had been circumcised, and her brother’s Catholic wife did not approve? This kind of treatment was new to Tiida, and it made her very angry. She remembered that a certain nurse at the hospital where her husband worked had tried to disrespect her and to undermine her position, possibly with fancy dreams of taking Dr. Ssali off her hands. Tiida had confronted the woman only once. The next she heard, the woman had asked for a transfer. All she had told her was to keep her dirty hands off the good doctor if she treasured them. What did the woman think? That she was going to chop them off? Anyway, it had worked, but nothing seemed to work now; even her mounting wave of anger seemed self-defeating.

The sight of the richly dressed but highly confounded Tiida strengthened Padlock’s resolve to go to Rome. This woman had to be shown that poverty could be defeated with honest labor, and that Catholicism was still the paramount religion in society. She wanted to show this woman, together with Kawayida’s wife, that she was powerful in her own right. Padlock remembered clearly that on the day Tiida and her husband had visited Kawayida and his wife in their newly acquired Peugeot, Kawayida’s wife had said, “It is a shame that Nakkazi does not have the brains to make dresses out of chicken feathers. It is the only way they can get a car, if you ask me.” The same woman lamented that Padlock’s brothers lacked the brains to use turkey shit to make bricks and tiles and build a respectable kitchen for their parents. Padlock was awaiting a confession from Tiida, but Tiida was not about to weaken her already precarious position by kowtowing to her brother’s terrible wife. She had her pride, lots of it; kowtowing to peasants was where she drew the line.

Padlock made her intentions clear by backing out of the sitting room as soon as she had served the refreshments. Leaving Tiida on her own, she retired to the Command Post and sent the sewing machine chugging. As the needle bit into cloth, the Singer filled the house with
the monotonous, train-like sound of its immobile journey, sprinkling the compound with the joyous revenge of its mistress. When the children came home from school, she ordered them to maintain a deathly silence and not disturb the guest for any reason or else she would tear the skin off their backs. After long stretches of time, Padlock would go into the sitting room to check on her visitor, the way one checked on a poisonous snake coiled inside one’s precious china pot. She would mutter a few words of mock civility, then leave Tiida to languish in the heat of her discomfiture.

At five o’clock, when the national television program began, Padlock deigned to ease her sister-in-law’s solitude by switching on the stinking Toshiba. Tiida got annoyed with the fleeting nonsense of American cartoons and their nasal chatter, which was all mumbo jumbo because she didn’t understand a word of it. The black-and-white things flew, collided with each other, clobbered each other, ran themselves over with cars and did all sorts of stupid things only a child or a moron could appreciate. To soothe her biting rage, Tiida thought about Dr. Ssali. She wished he would come for her. She wished he would run her brother’s wife over with their Peugeot. She wished he were rich enough to finance Grandpa’s journey on his own and save her the humiliation of dealing with her brother’s peasant wife.

By the time Serenity returned home, in the evening, Tiida was silently mourning the fact that she had decided to stay and wait for her brother. Her usually clear eyes were bloodshot. There was perspiration on her brow and on the bridge of her nose. She wanted to scream and to call her brother’s wife all the names that swept through her head. But she was so enraged that she could hardly speak, let alone order her thoughts.

Serenity took his sister for a walk. Night was falling. A thin mist was descending in the distance, hovering over the tops of tall buildings and on the peaks of distant hills. They did not go toward the gas station, because Serenity did not want to introduce her to his friends. Serenity explained that he was very tired because he was in the middle of campaigns for the post of treasurer to the Postal Workers’ Union. He talked about long meetings, canvassing drives and visits to workers’ homes. He said that the campaign had robbed him of his sense of reality. He complained about his insomnia. He expressed his wish to win and gain access to extra resources. He was angry that somebody
had edged him out for the chairmanship, but he could not really complain, because Hajj Gimbi’s invisible friends had intervened, pushed aside a Muslim candidate and supported his candidacy for treasurer.

Serenity monopolized the conversation and lectured his sister as never before. Tiida found herself playing second fiddle. She was amazed at how eloquent her younger brother had become; he had finally come into his own. She could now see him representing other people, a bit edgy but capable. Before she could say why she had come to see him, he told her that he had absolutely no money to spare. He was going to Rome to boost his leadership image, he said. Tiida agreed with everything he said, sadly wondering whether the first thing she had met that morning had been a woman or a dog: this was too much bad luck to be coincidental.

“Is your wife also going?” she valiantly asked, seething with suppressed rage.

“She wants to, but she has neither the money nor a parish to register in.”

“They have never been strong, money-wise,” Tiida couldn’t help chipping in.

“But her younger brother has registered himself,” Serenity said proudly.

“Where did he get the money?”

“He is going to fly on his pigs,” Serenity said, laughing, remembering a joke about flying pigs, but his sister totally missed it. She flinched, because in her husband’s religion a pig was a filthy animal. She found herself thinking that her brother’s wife’s family were like pigs to her: she did not want to have anything to do with them.

The crushing sense of defeat Tiida felt was almost akin to that dating back to the days of the plague of flies, the dogs’ heads and the villagers’ claim that her husband’s conversion to Islam was a curse. She wished she had not come. She felt encumbered by the bad news she had to bear, and by the ballast of spurious negotiating power and insulted personal charm she had to jettison. She heard Serenity ask again how they had finally won the car, and she felt angry. He was just asking for the sake of softening the hard edges of her defeat.

“Conversion Committee politics. Heads rolled, and the new man cleared the backlog during the euphoria following his victory,” she
said, languidly thinking about Nakatu. She had probably foreseen the defeat, and that was why she had refused to come along.

Tiida’s visit only served to highlight Serenity’s almost impossible financial position. Where was the money going to come from? He had a sneaking feeling that Hajj Gimbi could be of help, but how could he go to him after all he had already done? Serenity was like a viper eyeing a juicy rabbit: in order to swallow it, he would have to break his own jaws and suffer the pain of ingesting the animal and of realigning his jaws afterward. Was he ready to take the risk? Serenity felt he was, but how was he going to broach the issue? There were also more worrying considerations: What if Hajj’s friends got fed up this time and asked Serenity to do something grisly in return? What if they asked him to transfer big amounts of union money to secret accounts? Serenity was tormented for weeks.

Nowadays, when he joined his cronies at the gas station, he spent long periods of time brooding, saying nothing, responding late to jokes and exhibiting a surly absentmindedness that annoyed his friends.

“I never knew that treasurers slept during the day and counted money during the night,” Mariko, a Protestant friend who talked little himself but won most card games, teased. They all laughed, Serenity too.

Hajj Gimbi started talking about his pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina five years back. As he talked he became very animated, as if each sentence brought him closer and closer to the glowing heart of the pilgrimage and its significance to him: “People were like grains of sand on a gigantic plain!”