Abyssinian Chronicles (52 page)

Outside the barracks, everything was fine; inside, the men left behind to guard the town got bored. With boredom, repressed, deep-frozen demons thawed, throbbed into life and started pounding on internal doors. Consequently, more and more soldiers thought they could do with a little booze and a little sex. After all, they were about to go to the front line, and this could be their last chance. Anyway, hadn’t they put their lives on the line for these very booze makers and booze sellers and booze-drinking women? They pounded on the glass wall that separated them from the juicy, big-bummed women they had come all the way from Tanzania to liberate and protect, but whom they could not touch without getting whipped, incarcerated or even shot dead like their two comrades.

It was one hundred and fifty days since the seven brothers had had their last meal. They had been ten brothers at the time: three of them had died while fighting Amin’s forces in Masaka. The seven remaining
formed a close-knit unit that planned its moves with the care and patience of a weaver. They were a family, and family was more important than its constituent members. They had sworn on their life that if one of them ever got caught, he would shoulder the blame on behalf of the whole group. Originally, they operated in two groups of five, but after the death of their brothers, they had merged into a single unit. For the moment, they watched as stupid soldiers escaped to drink booze and get laid, only to be caught and brought back in handcuffs for incarceration or dispatch to Masaka or back home to Tanzania. The seven brothers had watched the execution of two soldiers with sadness. What a waste! In effect, that was the fifth execution since the beginning of the war. They had no intention of getting caught; they would not act with the clumsiness of Amin’s men.

The brothers had decided years ago that quality and quantity were not mutually exclusive factors. Every year they made do with a certain number of meals whose heaviness compensated for the dry periods. While stupid soldiers thought in terms of women, they thought of one woman, a single meal. Hastily gotten women talked, resulting in lineups and floggings. A woman feasted on by the brothers had trouble pinpointing the responsible parties because of the way the whole thing was organized. They had never been caught and could not see themselves getting caught here in this little town.

When Aunt Kasawo went out to try her luck on the black market one afternoon, she walked into a well-set trap. Behind a line of unroofed edifices originally meant to house Amin’s army personnel, a soft-spoken young man in jeans, a clean T-shirt and a straw hat stopped her. He offered to sell her quality rice, beans and beef at a price she could not refuse.

“Beef from America! Real beef, madame. Rice from Japan, thick-grained, factory-washed rice that goes straight into the cooking pan! I will give you a discount, madame.”

Kasawo liked this affable young man with his clear skin, his clean teeth and his unscented breath. She liked being called “madame,” and he was the first person to say the word like he meant it. She enjoyed the young man’s enthusiasm. She wanted black-marketeers to work and to smile for their money the way she worked and smiled for hers.

“I am not here to buy air, young man,” she said, assuming a superior air. “Show me the goods.”

“At your service, madame,” he said with a cute smile. He picked up samples from his raffia bag. “Bite on that fat-grained rice, madame. See! Look at that beef: a whole bull crammed into this small tin! A word of advice: open the tin carefully, you don’t want to be getting gored in the face by an American bull.”

Kasawo was impressed by the sense of humor, the quality of the samples and the price asked. The young man should not have wasted any more words, but, like all starving souls, he could not believe that a meal was standing in front of him begging to be taken. The brothers had been warned about the arrogance of Ugandan women, which made the speed of this victory even more astounding. Then again, Aunt Kasawo had not been the first woman to come by. The man had let quite a few pass by because the vibes were wrong.

“I have not sold a thing today, madame. God must have sent you in answer to my prayers,” he said, flashing his white teeth. Aunt Kasawo liked the clear pink gums too.

By the look of things, he was her lucky star too. She was buying low and was going to sell high. She thought about establishing regular contact with him and sidestepping the black-marketeer who took every chance to hike prices by hoarding commodities and creating artificial scarcity.

“Show me the rest of the goods, young man,” Kasawo, still not believing her luck, said with mock brusqueness.

“They are in that building,” he said, pointing with a long, beautiful finger.

“Afraid of army raids, are we?” she said with the complacency and complicity of a black-marketeer.

“You said it, madame. Those liberators accuse us of selling their beef, but they don’t ask themselves how we get it.” He smiled and then broke into a belly laugh.

For the first time in fifteen years, Aunt Kasawo thought about the son she had disowned after his father’s attempt on her life. He must be big now. Was he this articulate, polite and smart? She hoped he wasn’t. His father did not deserve such a son. He deserved a three-foot, drum-headed dwarf. She stood outside the edifice, looked around to make sure that no one was coming, and waited. The black market was built on trust. How she trusted this young man! When establishing risky business contacts, Kasawo worked on instinct, and this one felt right.
She heard him ask from inside the number of kilos she wanted. He showed her a five-kilo bag of rice and a carton of canned beef. She decided to enter and make sure that she was not getting shortchanged. Give a black-marketeer a finger, and he will rip off the whole hand. Aunt Kasawo remembered her childhood parish priest cautioning his flock on Sundays against the Devil.

One moment she was thinking of asking him to become her regular supplier; the next, she was engulfed in the darkness of the tomb. Launched by a leg sweep, she was suspended in air, the vertigo amplified by the darkness of the bag over her head. Still calling her madame, the young man asked her not to make noise. She twitched and kicked and thrashed about on the sleeping bag she was lying on. The cold feel of a knife put an end to her efforts. She felt two extra pairs of hands on her, disrobing her. This was organization at its most efficient. She interviewed herself: How many men violated you? Two, three, four or more? I do not know. Think, make a guess, madame. The army is against all acts of aggression on civilians, and we will punish anybody you identify. Can you tell us what the man you saw was wearing? He was wearing a hat and a T-shirt and jeans … Any more clues? No.

First there were one, two, three, four, five, six, seven explosive, thick-porridge-like spurts. Then there were one, two, three, four, five, six, seven not-so-explosive, not-so-thick leakings. Last, there were one, two, three, four, five, six, seven protracted, non-explosive thin leakings. The grim statistics showed half a liter of semen discharged in sixty-eight minutes of non-stop action. The cervix got addressed more than two thousand three hundred times. The breasts got pinched one hundred ninety-five times. The clitoris was touched a paltry five times.

The seven brothers vacated the scene one by one. The decoy left first in order to make his alibi foolproof. They arrived at the barracks in time for the evening roll call. The picture that kept going through their mind was the lightning cross-border attack Amin’s forces had made on the Kagera Triangle a few months back.

The irony or perverse logic of the situation was that it was an army doctor who worked on Kasawo and helped her through the medical part of the ordeal. The same doctor went on to ask her who she thought her attackers were, and she said that she did not know. He asked her what language they spoke, and she said she did not remember. Had she seen any of them? She only remembered seeing a straw
hat, a white T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans. Had they taken her money? No. She refused to answer any more questions. She had already decided to get the demons of rape and trauma exorcised by a famous medicine man and not to waste any time in highly embarrassing investigations. How would one hold one’s head high in such a little place when everyone knew that one had been raped by seven soldiers? Aunt Kasawo was no one’s fool. As her childhood parish priest used to say, silence was golden.

A fortnight after Grandpa’s burial, Aunt Kasawo put on her best clothes and her fanciest jewelry, ready to go. She was picked up from her home by a Postal Service van sent by Serenity. It drove her to the city and from there to the place where Padlock had been living for the last two years. She looked at the soldiers with a smile full of ill will. She was happy that they were being sent back home to Tanzania, where she hoped they would rape their sisters and mothers. She wondered where the soldiers she knew in Amin’s time were now. One had offered her money in exchange for shelter. One had proposed marriage. One had cried in her house the whole night, begging her to smuggle him to the islands in Lake Victoria and to hide him there till the end of the war. The trio had sold her goods, which she peddled on the black market, up to the time the Tanzanians captured the town. Where were those men? Her guess was that they were hiding in northern Uganda, in Sudan or even in Kenya. The sense of inviolability their friendship had given her made her realize how low she had sunk. It dawned on her that the times had changed and that her bad luck with men, which for years she thought she had overcome, was still dogging her.

Kasawo was impressed by the bungalow and the chunk of land owned by her sister. She had always wanted to own a house, a little place she could paint and decorate as she wanted. She greatly admired Serenity’s sense of vision: buying this land and building this house just in time. Many people who had made money in Amin’s time were now languishing in poverty because they had foolishly believed that Amin would be in power forever and had not saved anything for a rainy day. She, for one, could have built a big house with the money she had made off the black market, but she kept procrastinating. Now she felt ashamed that she was still renting the same place after a dozen years.

Kasawo was struck by the bronze plaque depicting the legend of Romulus and Remus. It had acquired more meaning here. On the dining table was a plastic bottle made in the likeness of the Virgin, with crown, heart on the chest, clouds and all. She felt envious of her sister, who had been to Rome, Lourdes, Jerusalem and many other places in the Bible. The girl they used to call Nakaza, Nakaze, Nakazi, Nakazo, Nakazu! Time had not diminished Padlock’s achievement. Aunt Kasawo kept thinking that Padlock was lucky not only with men, but also with children and money.

The place was run like a military barracks. The courtyard was very clean; the children obeyed their mother’s orders without question and knew exactly what was expected of them. One after the other, they all knelt down and welcomed their visiting maternal aunt properly. They did their homework quietly, and Kasawo noticed that their grades were very good, even the relatively dim shitter’s. As she watched her sister wield the scepter, she remembered the conversation they had had about aging parents years ago when Lwandeka was abducted. Padlock was an exception: age had not undermined her disciplinarian tendencies in the least. If the last-born child was going to get any leeway in comparison with the firstborn, it was not going to be by much. Padlock still used the guava switch with grim determination and was not above sending a defaulter to bed on an empty stomach.

A beneficiary of parental laxity, who at the eldest shitter’s age was drinking alcohol, keeping late hours and refusing to mess up her hot-comb-straightened hair by carrying water pots on it, Kasawo could hardly believe her eyes. This kind of cast-iron discipline she had not seen in a long time, and she wondered how her sister was able to keep it up.

As a guest, Kasawo did not have to do anything but eat and sleep. The shitters surprised her with the quality of their cooking, and if she had not seen the two boys peeling the bananas, thatching them in banana leaves and preparing the fire, she would have credited her sister for the meal. The shitters were at her beck and call, and warmed her bathwater whenever she wanted it. In the afternoon, she went for short walks. There had been no looting here, and the shops were running. She felt tempted to step inside the dispensary and get a quick examination by a civilian doctor. It was a whim, for she was all right and the pain had long gone. Kasawo got irritated by the fine Kiswahili spoken
by the liberators. It reminded her too much of the decoy who had led her into the trap. She wished she could blow up the shop building the liberators used for military detachments.

The most significant change in her since the ordeal was her tendency to blow up over little things and to belabor insignificant points. If, say, there was too much salt in the food, she would go on and on about it the whole day, unearthing obscure plots to starve her by killing her appetite, dehydrating her and giving her ulcers.

Aunt Kasawo went over the why-me aspect of the rape so many times that she almost drove the stoic ex-nun crazy. It resulted in a visible hardening of feelings on the latter’s part. Two opposing forces had met. Padlock had God and Catholic stoicism in her bag, while Kasawo had only her stubbornness, her anger, a vague sense of justice and the belief that the exorcist would solve her psychological problems. Padlock devised the system of letting her sister belabor the whys for something like thirty minutes and then cut in with an unhelpful “It is God’s will.” This had the adverse effect of infuriating Kasawo and making her more recalcitrant and strident. Kasawo eventually got the impression that her sister thought she had deserved the violation. Padlock viewed the deed as part of a divine plan to save Kasawo’s soul. Kasawo felt that she was being listened to but not heard, that her sister was like a know-all doctor ready with the cure before the patient even opened his mouth. She was enraged by the realization that her sister was viewing her as a potential convert to conservative Catholicism. Padlock was talking to her in the patronizing tones of a church elder, and it made her feel like hollering. She was now sure that Padlock believed herself far better than Kasawo.