Abyssinian Chronicles (62 page)

“Provided our luck sticks,” I cautioned.

“It will stick like hell, don’t worry.”

The pattern was set: we reported two out of every three cases; the third was ours, and we pocketed the money. Did the padre know about us? I never knew, but he would have been naive to believe that we were angels, especially when the official government line was that corruption was dying in the top echelons, though still pervasive at the bottom. The political cadres, of which Lwendo was not a member, brought in to root out police corruption were not doing well either. Many of them had taken the Lwendo line and were feathering their own nests.

It came as no real surprise that when our game was picking up, sudden changes were made. Almost all the staff at the Rehabilitation office and the warehouses was transferred, and new people were brought in. We were among the few survivors.

“Business” slowed down for some time. We went back to making those long, arduous journeys to obscure places on the back of rotten trucks and in terrible, overloaded buses. One of the worst was to Mubende, one hundred kilometers from Kampala. The first forty kilometers were on tarmac, the last sixty on hellish seasonal roads that disappeared in storms. At one place, a truck had jackknifed into a swamp, and another truck that tried to outflank it had ended up deeper in the swamp. The cargo on the second truck was being unloaded and placed in what was left of the road. We had nowhere to go, and there was no
transport anyway at that late hour. We spent a chilly, hungry night in the bus, waiting for a tow truck.

The case here concerned iron sheets which had disappeared without a trace. Our guess was that they had been sold at Mityana, a fast-growing town which was a magnet for all sorts of crooks. The padre was sore because he knew these areas very well, having worked here as a Catholic priest for many years and briefly as a representative of the guerrilla movement. He wanted the case thoroughly investigated. By now we knew that the Kibanda Boys probably had something to do with it. They had found more and more friends in government and in the army, people with Lwendo’s frame of mind.

At Mubende, we discovered that indeed the sheets had been sold at Mityana. We hurried back. The eerie thing was that the two men we arrested never begged for mercy or threatened us. What was their secret? Was it pure stoicism or knowledge that they would get us later?

“I don’t like this at all,” I said to Lwendo as he smoked one cigarette after the other. Here we were, in this strange town, sitting in a small restaurant that still smelled of paint, and there were people out there who wanted to get us.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said confidently, as though he were bulletproof. “Nobody can touch us.”

“How are we going back?”

“By taxi,” he said cockily.

“Why don’t we use a government vehicle on some of these missions?”

“That would blow our cover.”

I looked outside: Mityana was a dynamic little town. New buildings were going up all the time—the whole place seemed to be one big construction site. There were bare-chested men going up scaffolds with pans of concrete, and others coming down. Concrete-making machines were spinning their fat bellies ceaselessly, and foremen’s voices agitated the air with supreme impatience. Trucks and buses were rolling in, together with overloaded pickup vans full of people and merchandise. Shoppers from Mubende and the surrounding areas poured in and out of town in hordes. Outside Mityana, level with the horizon, was Lake Wamala. The serenity of its silver-gray surface did not calm my nerves.

To come here, you had to pass through monstrous forests and open grassland for much of the way. The army had suffered big losses in these areas. How would we fare?

“Cheer up, man,” Lwendo said. “This time we couldn’t let the bastards go. Next time around, we will have our cut.”

“It is dangerous money.”

“That is what it is all about: beating the odds.”

At about three o’clock, our business was finished. We got papers from the police, who would keep the men till they were picked up by the fraud squad, and we prepared to leave. We knew that a few heads had to roll on local reconstruction committees and at the Rehab office in Kampala. We got into a taxi van and set out for Kampala.

We entered thick forests where the sun was cut off for miles by the giant canopies, and emerged at little sodden towns with fruit stands and dilapidated buildings, some of which had been used as torture chambers by the army not so long ago. We went up a hill and descended a steep slope. Halfway down, we heard a big explosion. The van rolled over and over, and we were dumped in the grass below. I felt disembodied. I had banged my head on a seat and was cut on the left arm. Lwendo was unscathed, except for pain in his chest and in his right leg. Some people had been cut by flying glass and lay in the grass whimpering, calling for their dear ones. A man kept on about his wallet till he got exhausted and shut up. Some people thrashed about; some lay dead still, with only trickles of blood and light moans to show they were alive.

I was not afraid. I had been expecting something nasty to happen, it had happened and I felt relieved. I kept wondering: Was this an accident or a setup or a warning? We got help from a truck on its way to the city. Lwendo and I refused to go to the hospital. We went for a checkup at a small private clinic run by a doctor Lwendo knew.

“It was an accident, pure and simple. If they wanted to harm us, they would have done it more easily.”

“Maybe they wanted to hide their hand,” I said.

“No, they don’t have to.”

I lay low for a few weeks, trying to make sense of the accident. Had somebody shot at us, or had a wheel simply burst? I no longer felt so adventurous. I had the option of working with Aunt, who would soon need somebody to manage her business affairs: she was planning
to make cooking oil from cottonseed. The Reconstruction Bank had already approved the loan and the plan.

The accident had made Lwendo meaner, his ransoms higher. It had also made him realize that we had to stop soon, before our luck ran out. I appreciated his logic. Greed and corruption were not going to end with us. It was wiser to do our thing and check out. His girlfriend was pressuring him to settle down. The Lwendo of the Sr. Bison days had not changed, and the woman wanted to pin him down as soon as possible. A number of women had smelled the money, but he had so far not sunk his claws into any of them because of our peripatetic lifestyle. His girlfriend wanted things to remain that way.

The deal that made us involved cement and was born of an ambitious government promise to repair all roads and to bridge all rivers in the devastated areas, beginning with those that had been destroyed as an immediate result of guerrilla activity. That was how I gathered courage to go to the village of my birth. I had already heard that it had been wiped out. The guerrillas had laid an ambush on the spot where the taxi driver who was supposed to take Padlock to Ndere Hospital for my birth got trapped by the rain and the storm. They first attacked the nearest barracks, fifteen kilometers away, in order to draw attention from the spot of the big ambush.

It had become evident early on that the army’s approach was reactive; and even when they seemed to take the initiative it was in response to earlier guerrilla attacks. Carpet bombing had not worked in many places. Sweeping arrests and torture had not rooted out genuine guerrillas. The army was growing desperate and needed a big morale-boosting trophy.

One day the guerrillas shot at army trucks near Mpande Hill and disappeared into the bushes. They did it several times and sent radio messages to the effect that they had taken over a triangular piece of land between the barracks, Mpande Hill and Ndere Parish. The army, believing they had intercepted crucial information, planned a major offensive to sweep the area clean.

On the scheduled day, the army sent six trucks full of soldiers headed by an APC and machine-gun-mounted jeeps. This was during the reign of the Katyushas. When the vehicles were stretched out a full kilometer in the swamp, with Mpande Hill looming inaccessibly in the
air, all hell broke loose. Those at both ends were taken out in big fireballs, trapping the rest on the road and proving the strategy of travelling close together catastrophic. Rocket-propelled grenades blew up vehicle after vehicle, and the surviving soldiers were locked in a gun-fight that poured walls of lead and fire all around them. In all, the army lost two hundred fifteen soldiers on that lethal spot, and many others were wounded. Casualties among the guerrillas were minimal: they withdrew in time and escaped through the swamps into the village and the nearby forests.

A few hours later, as burned-out army trucks lay on their sides in the road or swam in the swamps and bodies swelled in the sun or floated in the water, tangled in the papyrus reeds, helicopter gunships arrived in force. Katyusha rocket launchers were mounted on the two hills, and the counter-attack began. By then, though, the guerrillas had already escaped, having had no intention of getting involved into a protracted battle with the better-equipped army. Almost all the local people had fled as well. The choppers and the Katyushas blasted everything anyway: shells landed in the forest, in the water, in the valleys, on houses, everywhere. The temperature of the water in the swamps went up, killing fish, frogs, horseflies, mosquitoes; burning papyrus reeds to a sick yellow color, and inducing a hippopotamus clan at the extreme end of the river to migrate. If it had not been for the inaccuracy of the bombs, no house would have been left standing within a radius of ten kilometers.

A few days later, as the forest smoldered and the houses lay in ruins, the army sent in mop-up operations to look for stray guerrillas who might have survived the blitz but been unable to get away. A few old men and women who had refused to flee, believing that their age might save them, had their elbows tied behind them in the triangular
kandooya
configuration. They had nothing to say, no information to give, and were killed. Those wounded in the fighting were brought to rooftops and pushed off. Anyone who could be fucked was fucked and killed. Any remaining scraps of doors, windows and iron sheets were looted. Thus the village of my birth was consigned to the caustic dust of oblivion.

The looting reached its peak at Ndere Parish. The soldiers would have stripped the church tower bare, but they did not want to share the
fate of its builder, the late Fr. Roulex Lule, by falling down and cracking their skulls. So they pumped a number of rocket-propelled grenades into it until it folded and crumpled like paper. They blew the remaining roof off the church and picked the fathers’ house and the school buildings clean. During the weeks of occupation, they broke up desks and chairs for cooking fires. Lovers of barbecue, they looked for animals to roast. This was around the time that their colleagues barbecued Fr. Lageau’s German dog after attacking and looting the seminary of my secondary school days.

On what would have been the last day of the operation, a local priest who had hidden in the forest was captured. He was arrested, together with a catechist, and the pair was hanged by the legs on the smoldering rafters of the fathers’ house. Saliva and blood and brains trickled out of their heads until they died, and birds pecked out their eyes.

Rain always followed severe bombardment. Rains poisoned with the wrath of the dead fell, and the swamps swelled, flooding and submerging the surrounding areas. They undermined house foundations and made the ruins rot and crumble. They carried the ooze to the bottom of Mpande Hill in swirling waves and washed away the history of the village. Thunder and lightning struck and, coupled with the relentless rain, broke open burial sites, filled them with water and destroyed what remained of that legacy. Elephant grass eventually took over, growing over courtyards, graveyards, everywhere.

By the time we went to investigate the need for aqueducts to control the mighty Mpande swamp, the village was no more, its memory a dark ooze seeping from the sides of the two hills. Grandpa’s house and the burial grounds were gone. So were Serenity’s house, Stefano’s grand one and the nominal restaurants, casinos and supermarkets of the youthful village. My favorite jackfruit tree was no more, cut to bits by the bombs. There were hardly any returnees.

Aunt Tiida and Nakatu came to salvage the tattered memories of their birthplace and early life but, horrified by the transience of what they had believed to be eternal, fled to the safety of their homes. Serenity came to see for himself what the cycles of history and war had done, and what he could do about it. He too fled, with palms over his eyes: the realization of the vengeful dreams of his youth horrified him.
The house of his nightmares was gone. Clan land and its exploiters were gone. His very own bachelor house, with its conquests and less savory memories, had also been obliterated. On his way out, he went to the place where the Fiddler used to live. The remains of the house were invisible, and he could only vaguely make out where his childhood refuge had been. Now he understood why the city and the towns were so swollen with people who, despite the terrible conditions, did not seem eager to respond to government calls to return to their areas. Many members of his trade union fell into the same category.

This time it was much easier to steal a truck or two filled with the cement intended for the aqueducts. The Reconstruction Committee in charge was weak because of the thinness of the population of returnees. Literacy among the committee members was low, and the honorable members got lost in the maze of mathematical calculations required. The records at the Rehab warehouse showed that ten trucks had been delivered. On the ground, only five had been received. Aqueducts were being built in Mpande swamp with less concrete than was required. The pirating pattern was the same, except that those involved in the syndicate had become greedier. I was outraged, and Lwendo appreciated my frustration. “No mercy this time,” I told him. “If we get them, we bury them deep.” He at first agreed, but then realized that this could be our last chance. He did not tell me directly. A few days later, he said, “Don’t get carried away. Don’t let feelings get in the way.”