Abyssinian Chronicles (46 page)

Grandpa reminded me of King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. Although he lacked the look of absolute power and total harmony with death of the king, Grandpa too had reached that stage where the old looked frozen in their dessication. His cane looked like a thinner extension of his hand. He had prodded me a few times with it when I annoyed him and tried to get away. He volunteered to show me round the village. It was very good weather: mild sunshine was drying the rain that had
fallen the day before. The sky was very blue, as it mostly was here, with a few scanty clouds. Vegetation was glossy with constant rain. The air was laden with earthy smells mingled with whiffs coming off different plants. It was quiet here.

Grandpa got into a gray trench coat, a white tunic and soft slippers and grabbed his cane. He was going to show me off, his prize bullock. I felt proud. I would be the first lawyer from this village. We followed the main path that went round the old village in a semi-circle.

We went over to the Stefano homestead. It was a large compound that used to be full of people, sons and daughters and their families living in smaller houses built round the main house. I was always afraid to go there: the courtyard used to look enormous, and with all those eyes looking, it felt intimidating. Now it was like a deserted football field long after the match, with just a handful of people looking for souvenirs in the stands. Mr. Stefano, once a big, tall, fat man, lay paralyzed by a stroke. His infirmity haunted the place. It felt dead. “My only competition,” Grandpa said. “What a sad way to go!” I was thinking about Tiida and her efforts to take Grandpa to Rome. How idiotic the whole enterprise looked on the ground!

I wanted to see some of the children Grandma had helped to birth. I wanted to see the tanner, whose courtyard used to be haunted by the stench of drying cowhides stretched and fastened onto wooden frames with pieces of string. He was a tall, gaunt man I used to associate with the Biblical Abraham. He had a lot of jackfruit, mango and avocado trees, but no child wanted to eat his fruit because of the stench in the yard. He used to live with his old wife, whom we called Sarah. I asked Grandpa about him. He said that he was alive, still tanning his hides.

I also wanted to see Aunt Tiida’s first lover, the one who gobbled her virginity but would not marry her. I did not ask about the man, because Grandpa did not like him.

The path was wide but uneven, with potholes here and stones there. Grandpa stepped into a pothole he had not seen and made one prolonged wince. He had hurt his bullet leg. I did not know what to do. I suggested he sit down, but he refused. He bent forward, clutching the leg, his face a twisted mass of lines. I could hear loud music from the other end of the village. It was a Boney-M song, and the crowd was
singing along. After some minutes, when the song had ended and another had started, Grandpa stood erect, held my hand, and we headed home. End of tour.

I had a lot of time on my hands. I climbed my favorite jackfruit tree and studied Mpande Hill. It seemed to float in the wind, drifting past stationary clouds and carrying with it a lake of papyrus reeds that resembled pale green umbrellas. This hill was our Golgotha. Two or three bike riders had died on its slopes. I remembered breathtaking downhill dashes by the area’s tough guys, two hundred meters of the steepest ride one could get. The only time I participated, riding pillion, it was a five-bike race. We stood at the top, the front wheels in a line, the riders’ faces masks of concentration, the valley below a yellowish-green mess, the spectators dwarfs on a giant plain. I sat on a gunnysack folded in four. My underthighs were already chafed. The rider’s bare waist was slippery, and I held on to it and fixed my eyes on his back. I kept wondering how he would brake with his bare heels—all race bikes had no brakes as a rule. We shot downhill at a blinding pace, pebbles pouring into the ravine. The hillside tilted. The trees and papyrus reeds rushed at us. The wind wailed horribly, whipping and cutting my skin. Two riders shot past us in a ghostly blur. We went faster. Oh, the thrill! The front tire wobbled as it hit a stone, and displaced gravel poured in golden rivulets down the roadside into the valley. The rider bent forward to exert more force, opening my face to the wind. Tears and snot and saliva flew in thin threads. I ate an insect or two and spat into the wind. The front wheel skidded, filling my mind with broken limbs, torn guts, endless days in the hospital, countless injections, overflowing bedpans and blood-soaked bandages—the phantoms of my fear. I was now sitting in empty space, the carrier gone, my hands on the wet pants of the rider, a shredded scream in my sore throat. He was fighting to avert disaster, every muscle taut and soaked. We went sideways, cutting across the road, floating on air. In a daredevil overtake move, a rival drew abreast of us. I felt a sharp kick to my leg as he went past. Helped by the momentum of the kick, my rider got the wheel back onto the road. We came in last. His back was running with vomit. He didn’t complain. Some boys did worse: they wet and shat themselves. His left heel was raw, skinless; the right one was angry red. He limped.

“Thank me for saving your foot,” the man who had kicked me said. “The spokes were just about to chew it off, and I guess we would never have retrieved it.”

“His Grandpa would have killed you,” they said to my rider as he stoically tended his heels.

“I would not have waited,” he said, grimacing. “I would have taken the boy straight to the hospital and fled the area.”

Everybody laughed. I didn’t. My legs still felt independent of my body.

I never told Grandpa about the ride. Why weren’t the young smugglers in the new village organizing such races? Scaring villagers did not seem that much of a thrill to me.

Uganda was in a state of siege, writhing like a dying moth on the floor. The bugles of defeat were poised, waiting to blow the walls down. The inside of the country was like a grenade whose pin had already been drawn. There was an explosive feeling in the air. Catastrophe or catharsis?

To the north, in Sudan, the Khartoum-based Muslim government was busy fighting the Juba-based Christian-animist rebels in a war that had little prospect of ending. Bombs and guns devastated the land while circumcision razor blades terrorized virgin vulvas. Now and then, Sudanese refugees camped at our border. It seemed about time to return the favor. To the northeast, in the Horn of Clitoris- and Labialessness, the Ethiopian Ogaden war was going through its surges and ebbs, breathing violent drafts over harsh desert tracts and scalding both combatants and non-combatants, many of whom fled to neighboring countries, Uganda inclusive. To the east, in Kenya, Uganda’s goods were embargoed and piled sky high in the harbors. Smuggling operations based there, aimed at bringing down Amin’s regime by crippling the coffee-based economy, were reaching an odious climax. To the south, in Tanzania, the refuge of General Amin’s predecessor, Milton Obote, anti-Amin guerrillas were gathering, whipping themselves into attacking form and making brave incursions into Uganda. They were rehearsing for the final showdown. Using Radio Tanzania, their leaders called upon the Ugandans to get rid of Amin.

By the start of 1976, the meetings at the gas station had taken on a grimmer look. It was clear to Serenity, Hajj and Mariko, their Protestant friend, that the country was headed for stormier weather. To begin with, the State Research Bureau and other security agencies had become omnipotent, arresting whomever they wanted at any time in any place. Across the border in Tanzania, the exiled dictator Obote was making a lot of noise about his desire to topple the government that had ousted him. The exodus of Ugandans fleeing for their lives, which had begun with a brain drain as educated Ugandans quietly departed, now reached epidemic proportions as spy organizations became more paranoid and picked up more and more people suspected of helping guerrillas. Once abroad, a few of these exiles talked about the appalling situation they had left behind. Amin was not amused. Hajj Gimbi’s friends in the security forces told him of their fear that Uganda was going to be attacked, a fear vindicated when the Israelis rescued their countrymen at Entebbe Airport, hijacked by Palestinian fighters and brought to Uganda because of Amin’s sympathy with the Palestinian cause. The renewed fear of attack had become an obsession, which was exploited by pirates within the army and the security agencies for personal ends.

Nowadays my father and his friends dispersed early. One day an army jeep had stopped at nightfall and men in civilian clothes had jumped off, ordered them to lie on the ground, kicked them a few times, accused them of plotting against the government and proceeded to empty the till and demand more of the day’s takings. If Hajj Gimbi had not dropped an important name, it might have been worse, because there was no more money to take. The pirates had made do with the trio’s watches.

After the attack, Hajj Gimbi started looking for land in a rural area fifty kilometers away. He found it, bought it and started building a house there. At first, Serenity thought his friend had panicked and should not have bought land so far away from the city. Hajj disabused him: “The good times have ended. The city has become a den of killers. It is time to move back to the village.”

“Why?” Serenity asked vexedly.

“Amin’s fall is not going to be tidy. From now on, things are going to get much worse. Armed robbery is already on the increase. The soldiers are becoming more desperate. The future looks bleak.”

“Hasn’t it been like this for the past two, three years?” Serenity, anchored in suburban daydreams, asked rather obtusely.

Hajj was becoming impatient, almost angry. “What I mean is, woe to those who will be trapped in the city in Amin’s last days. Woe to families without any place to hide.”

It struck Serenity that if war broke out the following day, his family would have no safe place to go. In other words, apart from his dilapidated bachelor house in the village, the only accommodation his family had was the government-owned pagoda. Serenity felt ashamed of his myopia. He did not like rural areas, he did not like farming, and that had affected his way of seeing into the future. He was among the few people to whom the notion of land ownership did not appeal. He associated land with the bad people clan land had attracted to his father’s house, and his father’s inability to control them. He nursed a secret fear that the moment he secured land and a house, his home would be overrun by people, probably from his wife’s side. More still, he remembered the drama in his sister Tiida’s home when somebody left fly-attracting entrails and dogs’ heads near her house because of a land dispute. It was true that landowners were often dishonest and greedy, unable to resist selling the same land to a second party if the price was right, and the proliferation of guns had turned land disputes into fatal or near-fatal clashes. His worst-case scenario involved somebody hiring soldiers to shoot his children just to drive him off a piece of land. Up to that moment, he had believed that, if things got bad, he could always move to another suburb. Now he realized that he needed a quiet place far from the city where they could stay if a protracted campaign of terror or even war broke out.

The city was the seat of government, the center of power, and if it meant fighting for it to the death or bombing it flat, those caught in the cross fire would certainly perish. Serenity, who had not been too shaken up by the robbery at the gas station, found himself shivering. At the same time, he felt eternally grateful to Hajj, whom he saw more and more as the elder brother he never had. That fate had brought them together, first as neighbors, then as bosom friends, made Hajj seem like a gift from above.

It now occurred to Serenity that with the fall of Amin, he might lose his trade-union post, and maybe even his job. He started thinking very hard about the future.

Mariko looked with smug amusement at his two scheming friends: his family owned large tracts of land in several rural areas and one or two in the city. He volunteered to give free accommodation to Serenity’s family in case war broke out. Concealing his irritation, Serenity smiled at him.

Serenity asked the man who had helped Hajj find a clean piece of land to do the same for him. The era of the magical delivery notes had ended: army officers had taken over the management of state factories, most of which had been decimated by mismanagement and corruption, and it had become virtually impossible to fool them. Serenity, who had no death wish, had quickly adapted to the times. He discovered a safer way to make money: by saving on trade-union purchases like gas, he amassed a small fortune. The incompetence of his new boss played into his hands, although, with characteristic restraint, he took only what he could account for. After getting the land, he commissioned a house plan, bribed somebody in the land office to get it quickly approved and within two months of the purchase, the builders had started working. After the house had reached window level, Serenity realized how wonderful it was to own the roof over one’s head.

The year ended well, and the new one started rather quietly. Nothing special happened, and the friends hoped 1977 might be better than 1976 had been. Till Hajj brought some very disturbing news.