Abyssinian Chronicles (45 page)

I could appreciate all the different hats Aunt wore except that of church volunteer. Her reconciliation with the Church seemed quite dramatic in the context of her teenage rebellion and independent adult life. It seemed a calculated decision to incorporate a part of her past into her present life. She went to church every Sunday and was a member of the Catholic Women’s Group. It did not occur to me then that she might have stayed near the Church just to milk information for the guerrillas, because many Catholics sympathized with the cause.

During the week, she spent the biggest part of the day at the market fulfilling her duties as a market supervisor. In the process of settling disputes, handling applications for stalls, collecting stall dues and liaising with local government officials, she conducted NRM business. She exchanged messages with contacts, guerrillas who came disguised as customers, potential traders and favor seekers. In addition to this, she brewed liquor once a month at a friend’s place in the suburbs. It was a very dangerous undertaking, whose crudity repelled me. I would compare it with Fr. Kaanders’ book bindery and feel dismayed. Why was Aunt taking such a risk? Were there no better ways to supplement her income? It was only much later, after contact with the soldierly Infernal Trinity, that I reconciled myself to the business.

For the time being, things went well. I enjoyed the holidays very much, save for the occasional worry when Aunt was late coming home in the evening. I would start speculating. Had her luck run out? Had the security forces caught her carrying NRM documents? But she always came back, and apologized for keeping me waiting.

My wish came true. Aunt’s man friend stopped spending nights at her place during school holidays. I had pushed him off his pedestal. I did not care how often Aunt went over to his place, as long as he stayed out of my way.

During my second holiday, I saw a picture of the famous brigadier. It was again in that Good News Bible, where Aunt seemed
to hide things dear to her. I had seen the man once on television and three times in the papers. I started suspecting that this was more than guerrilla business. Soldiers never gave photographs to civilians like that, except for very personal reasons. I felt excited and at the same time repelled by this move. So my maternal aunt was fucking one of the leading men in the country! What nerve! The picture had been taken with a Polaroid camera, a very convenient thing for such a man, who must have mistrusted photo studios. But why keep it in the house? Was that not the height of girlish folly? I remembered her fat, girlish handwriting. Was my family doomed to cross paths with soldiers? I was also consumed by hero worship. I would have given anything to know what this man was like as a person. What made him tick? What did it feel like to be in government and at the same time sympathize with guerrillas?

With Mr. Storm Crusher confined to his house, I felt secure in Aunt’s house. I no longer had reason to bully her children. I had grown to like them. I thought of them as the outspoken version of my old shitters, whom I had not seen in a long time.

Early in 1976 I went to the village for the first time in years. The hills and the swamps and the forests were as magnificent as ever. The village had shrunk. It was like a desert island eroded by gales, before being revitalized by a new population of pirates. The old part of the village was trapped in an abyss of desolation, while the new part exhaled the harsh air of dubious wealth. I found drinking places in the most unlikely spots. Loud dance music emanated from the obscure corner where Fingers, the leper, had his house. There was a new house now, with a new iron roof that glared like trapped lightning and a huge loudspeaker on the veranda that spread musical mayhem all around. Strange youths in bell-bottoms and large, ugly platform shoes swayed past me as they struggled with intoxication from imported liquors. Loud drunken boys walked with thick-bottomed drunken girls in thick shoes, Afro wigs and gaudy jewelry, mouthing obscenities formerly unknown in these swampy areas. Where had all these people come from?

A clutch of new houses with red bricks and iron roofs had loud advertisements dangling on the verandas:
SUPERMARKET, HOTEL, RESTAURANT, CASINO.
In front of these “supermarkets,” “hotels,”
“restaurants” and “casinos,” youthful gamblers slapped smudged cards hard and loud on gaudy tables to the roar of the spectators. Expert nostrils produced double-barrelled nicotine fumes. Alcohol flowed among the tables. It impregnated brains with fights and groins with frustrated hard-ons. I glimpsed a mini-brawl. A card game had gone rancid. Cards flew in the air. The table lost its limbs. A platform heel ground the middle of a fallen face, to the cheers of the inebriated, thick-bottomed girls. Hard by, three youths were trying out small Honda motorcyles, revving them and pumping blue smoke into the eyes of the cheering girls. Somebody with a large hat was collecting money for a race as I walked past. Sodden noises tickled the back of my head, as though pulling me back into the fray. A little farther on, three motorcycles passed me in a bend, splashing me with mud as they tore past to the other end of the village. They were being followed by a puny Honda Civic filled with noisy youths banging the windows, the seats and the roof.

I hurried to the old village. The old people were cowering in the shadow of desolation. It seemed as if the explosions predicted by Grandpa had begun by sucking the village into whirlwinds of violent change, dividing it into irreconcilable parts. The nostalgia that had marked the early years, when the oracle of Grandma and Grandpa invoked stories from the lacuna, was gone, erased by the aggressive energy of the young smugglers and their friends. A touch of fear had crept into the area.

Serenity’s house was wrapped in webs of decay. The windows were sealed from the inside by termites, and the doors were being sawn off their hinges by ants. The roof was flaking and reddening in the incessant rain and sunshine. Serenity had obviously lost interest in the house, and in the village, and was ready to see the past crumble into the dust of decrepitude. I opened the house as I used to in the past when a visitor emerged from the lacuna. I was greeted by a musty cloud of heat, dust and bats. I handled the doors and the windows carefully lest they fall from their hinges. I did not remove the termite tracks. I did not sweep either. What was the point? I watched as the wind picked up the dust and swept it into the branches of the nearby trees. In the sitting room, tucked away in a corner where Padlock used to keep her mat, was a two-foot anthill. In Serenity’s bedroom a large snake had sloughed under the bed of memories. The bed was dusty but still on its
legs, thanks to anti-termite varnish. I emerged into the backyard in a rush. Weeds had overrun the place, colonizing the bathroom and the fireplace where I used to boil water for Aunt Tiida’s four daily baths. Somewhere here I had received my first thrashing, somewhere there Grandma had stood, planning her intervention. The latrine from under which I had spied on Padlock’s genitalia had shrunk like a can in the fist of a giant.

Grandma’s place still bore the marks of the fire. The puny cottage built by a relative near the site of the old house was empty. The yard was overgrown and full of old leaves from the trees under which Grandma and Grandpa used to fight after lunch. I stood at the spot where the crowd was on the night of the fire. The bottom seemed to fall out of my bowels. I no longer belonged here. I had to find a new center of existence. Oppressed by the weight of the past and the brutality of change, I walked away.

Grandpa’s house still looked big and impressive, but carried the sulky air of a deteriorating monument. The coffee shamba was battling with weeds, the windbreakers with mistletoe, the terraces with erosion.

Grandpa had aged too. All those beatings, and the shooting, and the stabbing, and the turmoil of his political and personal life had taken a big toll. If you were looking for him, you could find his old warring self only in the eyes: the candid, questioning gaze was still there. His ears had weakened, especially the one slapped by goons in 1966. Now you had to shout a bit to be heard. He cocked his head to favor the better ear. We were very happy to see each other. He was struck by the fact that I had grown. He kept asking when I would conquer my lawyerly studies, and I kept explaining that I still had a long way to go.

We visited Grandma’s grave. Stiff-backed, Grandpa stood and watched as I effortlessly pulled weeds, rearranged stones moved by erosion and straightened the cross bent by the winds. The same unspoken question went through our minds: Who killed this woman? Who judged her, sentenced her and executed her? I remembered all those babies we delivered and all the herbs we collected in the forest, in the swamp, everywhere. I again felt like wetting my pants, a strange feeling after all those years. I waited for her ghost to rise and shake the leaves of my favorite jackfruit tree. I waited for some miracle to happen.
Nothing happened. She had left me to finish the job she had begun. My medium of communication had changed from amniotic fluid and gore to lawyerly ink and saliva.

We left the burial ground. The coffee shamba could do with better maintenance. Many trees needed trimming. Grandpa relied on hired labor both to weed and to pick his coffee. He still got enough money from it to look after himself, although the mills took months to pay, blaming the government for the delays. It seemed as if Serenity’s dream had come true: Grandpa’s estate was no longer as profitable as before, but he did not mind. He had not wanted to go to Rome. He rarely travelled these days, except to attend funerals, important weddings and big clan meetings. Clan land had gone to other families. Grandpa was now free, no longer the arbiter of clan disputes, no longer the custodian of clan property. He was just a man who sat and watched the fluctuations of the political climate.

He asked me to shave him. It took me time to find the razor blades. He sat in his easy chair, with his legs stretched out, his thin, deeply etched Beckett face upturned. The razor crackled and filled with stubble as I dragged it across valleys and ridges. Birds chirped fussily in the tallest gray-skinned
mtuba
trees. They jumped up and down on one branch.

“Snakes,” Grandpa said irately. I nicked his throat. “It is a black mamba up there. This place is full of black mambas.”

“Green mambas too,” I said, cleaning the stubble and the blood.

“All this bush,” he said, sweeping with his hands. “It is full of snakes.”

“Are you still afraid of snakes, Grandpa?”

“Who isn’t? Of course I am still afraid of them. My worst fear is finding one in bed, sitting on it and getting bitten.” I suddenly remembered Padlock’s mother and the puff adder that had killed her. I did not laugh.

“Snakes replaced all the people who left the village,” he continued.

“How about the newcomers?” I asked eagerly. “I can hardly recognize a familiar face in this village!”

“I told you the village is full of snakes. It is the coffee-smuggling madness that is the cause of all this.”

“When was this area taken over by smugglers?”

“A few years after you left. It was good that this happened in your absence.”

“How did it happen? I mean …”

“In the sixties, your parents migrated to the city to look for work and a better life. Now young people leave to join coffee-smuggling gangs and to get killed by anti-smuggling patrols.”

“Tell me about it, Grandpa,” I said, almost salivating.

“Young people discovered a way of making quick money, without having to go to school. They smuggle coffee across the lake to Kenya and exchange it for American dollars. They come back laden with consumer goods: bell-bottom trousers, radios, Oris watches, wigs, all that junk, and behave like maniacs. They discovered that this little village was a good place to hide and to cause mayhem without attracting undue attention from the authorities. The nearest military barracks is fifteen kilometers away, so they have nothing to fear from the army. Now and then, a few soldiers escape from the barracks and spend a weekend here, drinking and fighting over women. The smugglers can live with that. The chiefs lost control and let the youths have their part of the village and destroy themselves in peace. But sometimes they hold motor races through the old village, scaring children and women out of the way as they tear past at great speed. All those boys are gamblers. Anti-smuggling patrols are killing them in ever-increasing numbers. Others kill their colleagues when they see so much money and greed sets in. It all seems to make the survivors more reckless. They come home, spend the money like lunatics, go broke and go back. Most survive only a few trips before getting killed. Most of the boys who used to take my coffee to the mill are dead. You just hear that so-and-so’s son or grandson ‘drowned.’ ”

“What a waste!”

“Keep your nose in the books, my boy.”

“It is all I seem to do, Grandpa.”

“I used to tell you about the coming explosions and you sometimes looked incredulous. You were too young, I guess. But I think now you see that I was right. Things cannot remain as they are.”

“What will happen afterward?”

“That is for you to work out; you are the lawyer, aren’t you?”

I smiled sheepishly and said, “Yes, Grandpa.”

“I don’t need all this coffee, all this land anymore. It is for you and your brothers. I have a feeling that you will not come back to the land. Go out into the world and make a place for yourself. A big lawyer does not need to be tied to the village, especially if it is full of the wrong people.”

“Thank you, Grandpa.”

I thought about asking him to challenge Cane’s view that it was our chiefs who let the British into the country and destroyed what remained of it, but he seemed lost in thought, as if communicating with people I could not see. I already had my send-off; what more did I need?

There was a relative of some sort, a careless young girl who laid things all over the place—kettles in the doorway, pans in the yard, the kitchen knife on the table—who was responsible for Grandpa’s householding. She cooked, cleaned, washed and did some work in the shamba. On the weekend, Uncle Kawayida’s mother came over and helped her. I found that a very interesting turnaround, but again I did not ask Grandpa what he thought of it. I pitied the woman a bit. She must have worked like a horse, cleaning up this girl’s mess. The girl was semi-illiterate, polite and very hospitable. When she brought tea, my cup had traces of hurriedly wiped dirt, and Grandpa’s was in no better condition. I was caught between insulting her hospitality by asking her to immerse the cups in a mountain of suds, thrice, and closing my eyes to take the torture. The cup smelled of fish. I engineered a little accident, pretending that an insect had crept up my leg. I spilled the contents of my cup and refused a refill. I started suspecting that Grandpa’s nose was in trouble too: in the past, he would not have touched dirty utensils with a barge pole.