Moses Isegawa - Snakepit

At church they would mingle with well-dressed men and women who worked in the beleaguered civil service, the diplomatic corps, the remnants of the aviation service, and the armed forces. In mufti, the soldiers and the spies tried to make themselves as invisible as possible. Bat liked the fact that these days the church had turned into a human rights podium. Priests spoke out directly or indirectly against the disappearances, the killings, the abuses. The clergy had felt the bite of the bayonet, the sting of the bullet, and it made a difference. The words rolled off the priest’s tongue with conviction, steeped in pain. Bat liked to sit there and think of good memories, his achievements, because his captivity had taught him how precious and luxurious the fine moments were.

On such days he liked to be surprised by uninvited guests who turned up to interrupt and enrich a day he had offered to the whims of time, to his wife, to leisure. If it happened to be his sister, they would talk about her son, her work, the state of the country. Living in a rural area, she would have a different view, a down-to-earth vision.

When his parents came, they talked about the past, who had lived where and done what. His father liked his job, a proper job, as he called it. He would mourn the fact that the coffee trade had been undermined by smuggling. His mother said little; she had always been a very reticent person. Your father talks for both of us, she used to say. His father had a bad memory now and he believed that everybody was ripping him off. Bat found it comical and would laugh.

“I always dreamed of seeing London and visiting the British Leyland plant,” he revealed one day.

“Why didn’t you say so before?”

“Where would you have got the money to take me and your mother?”

“Where there is a will, there is a way, Father.”

“It is a dream I wanted to keep. But when your wife said there were parts like Naguru and Bwaise, I believed it was better that I had not gone.”

When Babit’s people turned up, he would drive them round the town, to the zoo, to the airport, to the Botanical Gardens, to the landing point at Katabi where food and fish came in from the islands. Standing there always reminded him that Entebbe was a peninsula, almost choked by water, which in places was just a few metres from the road to the city. It was not hard to imagine floods rising out of the lake or crashing out of an angry sky, submerging the town for weeks, and receding to reveal a new island or clutch of small islands. It often made him curious about Robert Ashes’ island. During these visits Babit led the conversation, and Bat enjoyed watching her and her people interacting.

IN THE MEANTIME, the search for the bombers intensified. Numerous arrests had already been made by the Bureau, the Public Safety Unit and, not to be outdone, by the Eunuchs. The Ministry of Internal Affairs set up a team to hunt down and destroy these men. It was believed to be a big group organized into small cells. Bat heard about all these operations and wondered where his brother was. Why had he heard nothing from him for so long? He hoped that Tayari had nothing to do with the bombings, especially after General Bazooka’s wife got injured. He did not believe that the bombers were responsible for the General’s wife’s fate. He believed it was the result of infighting, possibly sanctioned by Amin to punish the man for one reason or other. General Bazooka’s current low profile seemed to confirm the theory.

AT AROUND THIS TIME Victoria disappeared. She moved from her flat without informing Bat. He suspected that she wanted more money from him, which was fair since he had not seen her for some time now. At the Ministry of Works headquarters he was told that she had been transferred to Bombo, a town dominated by a military barracks on the way to the north. He decided to let her show her hand, as she eventually would.

Soon after, his brother’s fate became clear. As Bat was driving home one evening, a man waved him down at a road junction. He held a piece of paper out to him in the darkness. Bat lowered the window and took it, and the man walked away without saying a word. He parked by the roadside and read the note: “Abel, one of us killed. Radio failed. Sorry. Cain is alive and keeping watch.”

Bat’s suspicions were confirmed: his brother was involved in the bombings. He felt a jolt of fear. He felt exposed, open to attack from unknown forces. There were many questions he wanted to ask his brother, the biggest being whether he had targeted the General’s wife in order to extract revenge for him. And if he had thought about the possible consequences. He suddenly felt very angry with him. He regretted having given him the money. He wished there was something he could do to make him renounce his campaign of violence. The fact that he was the only family member who knew what Tayari was up to made him feel like an accomplice. By giving him the money he had become one, but what was he to do now? It had been exciting to hear about Bureau cars exploding, but where would it all end? And who was the dead boy? Where was Tayari hiding?

The news that his brother was keeping an eye on him did not reassure Bat. Nobody could be reassured when a government’s resources were turned to hunting somebody down. Luck always tended to run out. People tended to make mistakes as the pressure mounted.

Bat chewed the paper and threw it out the window. Did Tayari know where Victoria was? Where was his daughter now? In the barracks? He cursed himself and the circumstances for letting his child grow up in such an environment. Some mistakes seemed to carry incredibly harsh sentences, hurting everybody in the end, especially the innocent.

TAYARI’S COLLEAGUE HAD BEEN arrested with bomb-making equipment at a roadblock not far from the city. The quartet had earlier sworn that if caught, one should fight, hit a soldier in the balls and be shot to death on the spot. That was what happened. The boy had been travelling in the back of a van carrying potatoes and cassava. The soldiers had refused the bribe and insisted on opening the sacks. As the potatoes flooded the ground, the boy saw his life slip away. He grabbed the head of the crouching soldier, raised his knee with all his might, and drove it in the man’s face. The man collapsed with a curse on his bleeding lips, his rifle clattering on the tarmac. The boy reached for it, but before he could get off shots, two soldiers shot him in the chest and he bled to death.

FOR SOME TIME NOW, cars had stopped exploding.Speculation was that the bombing ring had been crushed or had run out of steam. Bat tried to keep his mind off the events. He was busy sifting data in preparation for the annual budget. For two whole months he put in twelve-hour days and could not find time to return home for lunch as agreed. But after the Marshal had blessed the budget and launched a new million-shilling bank-note, with a picture of him defecating on Europe, the pressure abated. The shortage of petrol continued, and Bat could only afford to return home for lunch once a week as the rations at the ministry were reduced further.

The people hired to keep an eye on Bat were very delighted with this turn of events. He had thrown them off the track for some time. Energized, they put final touches to their plan.

On the scheduled day, all the staff stayed away. Babit found herself with no cook, no gardener, no guard. When they were around, she hardly noticed them, because they worked well. Now that they were absent, she missed them. The cook was a widowed middle-aged woman living near the landing point of Katabi. The guard came from the town’s police station. Since the government paid him, she had little to do with him. The gardener was a large man in his forties. He had been injured in a car crash and subsequently had lost his job as porter at the airport. Since then he had been tending gardens and mourning his fall. He was very talkative and sometimes he told her stories. She both pitied and liked him. She sometimes gave him money because he was always broke and wasn’t ashamed to admit it. He was like a sad uncle, dogged by misfortune, unlucky in love. She noticed his absence more than the rest.