Abyssinian Chronicles (39 page)

Some pilgrims wept when they arrived in the Holy Land. It was almost too much for peasant folk who had never dreamed, as they dug in the fields, as they plucked their coffee, as they fed their goats and pigs, that they would ever come here. All the powerful people in the world had been here, and now, wonder of wonders, they were here too! They marveled at the power of modern technology which enabled Israelis to grow crops in the desert. It seemed miraculous, like many Biblical stories of their childhood. Serenity also marveled at the level of technology here, but he noticed that the owners of this capability had lost that precious sense of wonder. They took everything for granted, like a peasant finding beans in a pod. It seemed sad to him.

The nights were cool and calm, a far cry from the hot, hectic days, and he looked forward to them. They enabled him to withdraw
and to rest. It was three weeks now since he had last touched Nakibuka. He felt the miracle of her fire burning, testing him to the limit.

Serenity’s arrival at Entebbe Airport was anti-climactic. Ugly meter-long rosary dangling round his neck, the knocking of wooden beads a monotonous, raucous song, the iron links clinking like dog chains, he and other returnees vacated the plane and headed for the check-in gate. On the second floor, overlooking the tarmac and the silver-gray lake in the distance, excited relatives and friends waved and cheered with a mixture of ululation, rapturous song and the shrill calling of names. Serenity waved like everybody else, a dazed expression on his face: home, he was back home. Padlock, Kawayida, Nakatu and Hajj Gimbi were among the people who surrounded him and smeared him with the oil of their happiness, relief and joy. The gloom that had enveloped him all night on the plane lifted and dissipated like morning mist.

General Idi Amin’s pragmatic fist had been cocked for more than a fortnight, and now it hit Serenity full in the face. During his absence, the general had made an additional four thousand places available, including foreign exchange benefits. Padlock had hardly slept a wink during the last five days: Mbale had secured her a place in their home parish! The suddenness of it all had thrust her into the immortal terror that something might go wrong to balance this unexpected good luck. She became gripped with the fear that Serenity would not return. Planes blew up or fell or hit rocks frequently these days, but now he was back! Alive! Where was he going to get the money for her journey, though? “We will see, we will see,” he had kept saying. The impatience in her bones and the fear of disappointment in her bosom made Padlock tongue-tied and a touch sullen amidst the joy of Serenity’s return. Blind faith had kept her going before Amin’s surprise turnaround, and it was blind faith she was counting on once again to seal her victory. Beyond it she dared not look: the lacuna of analysis and speculation was too deep and too vertiginous to dive into. Now the sight of Serenity, her Serenity, looking so distinguished made her proud. She tried to be happy, hoping that her happiness for him would be rewarded. Had he really been to Rome? And Lourdes? And the Holy Land?

The journey home was a bittersweet ordeal. Everyone was talking at once. Hajj Gimbi’s voice boomed, and Padlock was proud that
pagans were giving praise to God: stones were indeed shouting. She felt an absence of hatred for this bearded fellow, for Kawayida and his wife, and for Nakatu, who remained a dull enigma to her.

At home there was cheerful pandemonium. A delegation of postal workers from the union was there, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, pagan. They had hijacked the occasion and taken over organizing the celebrations. The pagoda seemed to belong to them now. They barked orders and served drinks and food with ease. Now and then they burst into song. Padlock had looked forward to a low-key event, but these fellows had no regard for jet lag or anything else. They were here to eat and drink and dance and show allegiance to their new leader. As the drums rolled, both Serenity and Padlock found themselves thinking of their wedding day so many years ago. The celebrations gathered momentum rather quickly, and by the time night fell there were drunks swearing and cursing and brawls Serenity dared not break up for fear of annoying his constituency. He reveled in the cheerful disorder.

During the small hours of morning, Padlock tabled her request. Serenity resented the timing. She had not left him any room to maneuver, any chance to go behind her back and give the opportunity to her aunt, whom he was dying to see. He agreed to finance his wife’s journey, especially because the dollars were government-priced. To test her, he said that he was going to borrow the money from Hajj Gimbi, but Padlock raised no objection. As a matter of fact, during her desperate hours, when she feared a plane crash or some other disaster involving Serenity, she had also thought of that alternative. All that was behind her now: she was going!

Everything had fallen into place for Padlock. She left a few days before Mbale, because he still had some things to straighten out. She waited for him at the airport in Rome, showed him the few places she knew by then and warned him about con artists, fake photographers and guides who flashed pilgrims and tried to rob them.

In the air, looking at clouds stacked like cotton wool dropped from great heights onto empty fields, she felt like the Virgin Mary. She could see herself standing in those cottony clouds, globe in hand, eyes raised to heaven, balancing the evanescent with the eternal, heaven and earth, life and death. She was sitting next to the window, and her neighbor did not see the tears of joy furtively trailing down her cheeks.
She wanted them to flow and flow and flow, and etch tracks in her flesh, and drench the cottony clouds outside. She pushed her childhood away when it tempted her with negative feelings. She focussed her mind on peace and virtue. As she wheeled across the cottony celestial plains, she espied a small old woman. It was Grandma. She remembered Jesus’ exhortation to settle disputes with neighbors before offering sacrifice. She whispered the end of her grudge and vendetta into the stratosphere. She hoped that Grandma had forgiven her, too.

Padlock had discovered that, locked in this hermetic sarcophagus, flying at a thousand kilometers per hour, it was easy to forgive earthly wrongs. She remembered that in Grandma’s dream she had been standing in front of a buffalo in a lake of sand. She now understood it. Sand was the clouds, and she was the mighty one-ton buffalo. If only she had known that the old woman was only mouthing prophecies! If only she had known that the old woman was only a harbinger of the greatest triumph in Padlock’s life! If only she had known! But all that was in the past now. She was headed for the future.

As they flew over Israel Padlock saw the sand and remembered that she was the mighty buffalo who had come from a humble village to consummate her Biblical relationship. She was the virgin raised from the mud and the bush of a lowly village to the triumph of birthing God’s son and bringing salvation to all. She was the Virgin of Nazareth, a place where nothing good was expected but where the greatest man had lived before starting his preaching and healing career. She could feel the monstrous power of Biblical history moving under the land of Israel, crashing to a climax at the portals of Jerusalem. As she walked on this holy soil she could feel herself swelling with all the prophecies, all the miracles, all the trials and victories of the Israelites, for she was the new Israelite, with a circumcised heart, embodying the bread of life that had come from Nazareth. She wanted to go into all the little villages Jesus had traveled through and talk to the people, taste the wine, eat the bread, touch the palm trees and search for the essence of the phenomenon that had begun here and burst upon the whole world. She wanted to go to the well where Jesus sat and talked to the Samaritan woman. She wanted to watch people drawing water and carrying it on their heads, as in Uganda. She wanted to sleep in a tent and listen to the music of this land. She wanted to get to the very bottom of her faith. She wanted to go to
Golgotha, and walk up the hill of skulls, and sweat as Jesus had done. She wanted to pray at the spot where the crucifixion occurred. She wanted to pray at the spot where Jesus ascended to heaven. She remembered the woman who for years had been tormented by hemorrhage. Such faith! She felt Jesus’ healing power inside her.

Brother and sister held a joint thanksgiving ceremony in the village of their birth. Mbale, the catechist and the gifted talker of the two, told of what they had seen during their pilgrimage and how it had felt to meet the Holy Father and to be in the Vatican. He tried to describe what it was like to see the crowds in Lourdes, the mountains and the edifices in Jerusalem. The day ended in drinking and drumming and singing.

However, all those things could not fully drown out Mbale’s worries. He had financed his journey by borrowing against the coming harvest. His living, breathing collateral was a healthy tomato crop sprawling over a big stretch of land. In his absence, his wife and children had sprayed the plants and chased off curious monkeys and hungry birds. Three fantastic harvests were behind them, and this one promised to be even bigger. Mbale saw it as God’s gift to him, a sort of repayment for all the good work he did in the subparish. Nobody disputed that, not even his critics. They all agreed that Mbale was the hardest-working man in the area. The family woke up before six, prayed, ate breakfast and braved the dew and mist to tackle the day’s work. Come rain or shine, they worked the whole day, with just a few breaks to eat lunch, drink water or snack on sugarcane. This was a regimen for boy and girl alike. Mbale’s family worked like donkeys, and everyone agreed that the man deserved every cent he milked from the land. The villagers used to say that Mbale’s sugarcanes smelled of his sweat.

In addition, Mbale was the subparish catechist, teaching and preaching the Good News, counselling married people and preparing those who wanted to receive the matrimonial and other sacraments. His faith was rock solid, and the biggest insult was to tell him that the Virgin Mary menstruated or that St. Joseph might have been impotent. All skepticism concerning the Bible was anathema to him and could fetch one a sharp remark or even a slap when he was loaded with enough banana beer.

No pilgrim was prouder of his journey than this uncle of mine.
He retold the story a thousand times over. The meter-long rosary became his personal trademark. It reminded everyone that he was not just another peasant farmer breaking his back on the land, crawling with sweat in the iron sun, but somebody who had conquered space and traveled to the Vatican, Lourdes, Jerusalem and other places mentioned in the Bible. His sermons on Sundays became legendary. If in the gospel Jesus had been to Cana, Capernaum or Jericho, Mbale would tell his hearers: “When I was in Cana … I felt the power of the Lord inside me, moving like a raging fire. Then God commanded me to go home and preach to you my people.…” When talking about the pope, he often said, “The Holy Father commissioned me to tell you that he loves you. He wants you to repent, because the end is near.…” Two months after his return, vicious winds ravaged the village and a big part of the countryside.

The winds, when they first whistled down the hills, sounded like many wooden rosaries clapped together. They found Mbale in the beer hall listening to a song some women had composed in his honor for putting the village on the world map by conquering space. The winds swept down the hills into the village, carrying with them the fury of forty-two years of dormant disaster. They tore the roof off the beer hall, wrapped it into a jagged ball and deposited it two football fields away. They decapitated wind-blocking trees, spreading the crushed canopies all over the place. They aimed lower, uprooting or breaking banana and coffee trees. They terrorized fragile houses, blowing holes into walls, ripping off doors and carrying them to unknown destinations. The subparish church was a sturdy edifice; it put up a good fight. The winds whipped it from all sides, dumped coffee trees uprooted so many meters away onto its roof and hammered its doors with flying banana trees. The winds dived under the roof with the evil intention of furling it up obscenely like the Lamp Lady’s skirt, but all they got off were bits of tired rafters. They rampaged to the anemic little school affiliated with the church and crushed its much older buildings, ground to liquid mud the pit latrine and flooded the yard with Sunday-service and school-week excreta. Water completed the demolition job, washing away crops, paths, dogs, rats, sheets and anything else found in open space. The paltry remains of Mbale’s tomato plants were found in the village well, jamming its surface and sabotaging its flow.

No one was more nonplussed than the pilgrim, who had narrowly
escaped decapitation in the storm. The rosary got lost in the process, much to his chagrin.

“God tests those he loves,” he said philosophically, wondering how he was going to pay his creditors.

Padlock, who would one day meet her end in the nearby forest, returned to the village to survey the damage and to see what she could do.

The natural disasters which were going to dog their family and their in-laws’ families had just begun to show their hand. Unlike the locusts, which had come in the thirties and had almost been forgotten by the villagers, the new disasters would leave scars that would last through the ages.

To begin with, though, the people fought the battle of reconstructing their village. Mbale spent the next seven years struggling to pay his creditors.

Holy masses were said copiously throughout the land, and if prayer alone were enough to turn things around, the country would never have undergone the catastrophes that dogged it in the coming years. At the seminary, we seemed to be attending one long, unending mass. Morning light seemed to be doing perpetual battle with stained-glass chapel windows, holding us hostage to a self-repeating drama. Seminarians, faces upturned in sublime boredom and lips moving somnolently, were like baby birds waiting to be fed. The rector, minus meter-long rosary, told and retold the story of his journey in apparent perpetuity. The Vatican, Jerusalem, Lourdes, or was it St. Peter’s Square, Jerusalem, Lourdes, or some other peripatetic configuration? Nowadays, when he caught defaulters, he called them to his office, asked them why they had broken the rules and then clinically passed sentence. “Give me one good reason” became his leitmotif and nickname. Some staff members were annoyed by this leniency. They openly wondered how long this road-to-Damascus conversion would last.