Moses Isegawa: Snakepit

AS SOON AS BAT RETURNED, he knew that the coming months were going to be tempestuous, to say the least. For the first time he was obliged to get out of his XJ10 at all roadblocks. He endured body and car searches and demands for bribes with a stoic air. He would look at the rifles in the soldiers’ hands and feel like emptying magazines into the bastards.

A week after his return his lawyers withdrew from the case. They were reluctant to give the reasons why, but he found out that they had been abducted and their lives threatened by armed men. Bat conferred with the Kalandas and the Professor and they found other lawyers. This was a pretty distressing period, but as one of the principal players in the drama, he had no way out. He gritted his teeth and hoped for the best.

GENERAL BAZOOKA FOUND a new purpose in life when his old lover asked him for help in the murder case. He had always known that Victoria would return. They had been together for so long that the bonds, however aged, would be hard to sever. His original plan had been to engineer her escape from police custody and kill the trial summarily. A prince could get away with it, but his chief advisor, the self-effacing colonel, had cautioned him “to let justice take its course.” He discovered that if he wanted to punish Bat properly, and to spit at the justice system at the same time, he had to let the trial go on. Thus he had let Victoria endure the humiliation of detention. He had nonetheless ordered the police to make life easy for her. She was given her own Nissen hut, where she could look after her child, prepare her own meals, and receive visitors.

He had renamed the child, calling her Samsona, claiming paternity on the technicality that Victoria must have carried his sperm in her body for years before it exploded into germination. He had convinced Victoria, who was not in a position to argue to the contrary, that this was a common occurrence among bears, and since bears, lower animals, could do it, what of humans? Whenever he came to visit, she would tell the child, “Come and greet your father, Samsona.” The child would come and sit on the General’s lap. He would make an effort to play with it before tiring of the games and sending it off. There was little conversation between the General and Victoria, partly because it had always been that way, partly because there was not much to say. The General usually came to instruct her what to do when the trial began. He had made sure that the State Research Bureau paid her salary on time, and in full, and gave her round-the-clock protection. This last provision did not sit well with the police, but there was little they could do about it; they had their lives and careers to think about.

Before the trial started, the General hired the best lawyers left in the city and ordered the best tailors to design the most flamboyant garments for Victoria. The first time she appeared in court, she was dressed like a Muslim pilgrim from Mecca. She was wrapped in clothes so fine and so white that they looked almost diaphanous. On her head she wore a thin cape which flattered her features well.

Bat and Babit’s family were scandalized. Since the first proceedings were highly technical, mere preambles, and since lawyers spoke softly, most people in court paid more attention to Victoria’s appearance than to what was going on. Bat had come expecting the General to reveal his tactics, and from then on he knew that provocation was going to be a regular feature of the sessions. There were complaints from Muslims about Victoria’s clothing in the only paper in business, but no apology was offered.

The next time round, two weeks later, she came dressed as an Egyptian queen, with flowing garments, a belt, huge gold bangles, rich eyeliner, a bottle of perfume radiating its entire intoxicating content to every corner of the court-house. People got headaches, stomach cramps, and violent attacks of nausea. The judge became sick in his handkerchief and suspended the hearing for the day. It soon occurred to the General and his team to dress Victoria as a southern princess. He immediately fired the previous dressmakers, without paying them a cent, and hired one who designed royal costumes out of barkcloth and cotton. This time three hefty Bureau agents brought Victoria, with eyebrows in the sky like a haughty royal, to court in a resplendent chair. The monarchists seethed with fury and vowed revenge, but since the kingdoms were abolished, they had to take their anger to bed with them.

The trial turned into such a farce that Bat walked out on a number of occasions. He would lie in his bed at night, unable to sleep a wink, and wonder what use the trial was. The search for justice seemed futile. At the height of his despair he would see his brother’s irate face asking him why he had turned down his offer to deal with Victoria outside the reaches of justice. “Is this what you wanted?” he would be saying in a hoarse voice. He would get up and walk about in the house to distract himself from such thoughts. He would think about Babit in her glory and in her desecration, and the determination not to give up came back. He no longer had nightmares, just waking dreams, feelings of longing, guilt, emptiness, loss.

On the days she was cross-examined, Victoria would put on her royal robes and arrive in a magnificent chair with long polished handles. Her lawyer made so many objections and wasted so much time that little work was done. Bat would lose patience with his lawyers, but since there were no others eager to take on the case, he could not push them too far. They were receiving death threats against themselves and their families but had refused to quit the case, and he respected them for that.

Many people, including Babit’s parents, talked of dropping the case, if only to save Babit’s name. They could not bear to hear her called a common prostitute. Bat knew that, these being rural folks, they might forget that history was ephemeral; it erased itself as soon as it wrote itself. Opening the case under another regime would not be possible. The case would simply vanish. Files would get lost or burned. They forgot that the next regime would have bigger problems than the aborted search for justice in Babit’s name.

Babit’s mother could hardly bear to look at Victoria. The fact that the same woman, a commoner passing herself off as royalty, had killed her first child made her physically sick, and many times she refused to go to court. She would stay home or come with the family and stay somewhere in town and wait for the reports at the end of the day.

GENERAL BAZOOKA SAVOURED the drama. He saw himself as an artist at work and he loved every minute of it. He would sit with his cronies on the veranda of his orgy mansion, drink and laugh and argue about the merits and demerits of certain episodes. He planned twists and turns, and the impunity of it served to take his mind off the pressures of work and the misery of having a wife hovering between life and death, her skin as brittle as a dry leaf. He still visited her, disregarding non-visiting hours if necessary, pushing doctors and nurses around, posting guards in awkward places. His chief advisor had urged him to vary his visiting hours for fear of attack by dissidents dressed as doctors, nurses or cleaners.

There had been plans to fly his wife to Libya, to the same hospital where the former Vice President stayed in his wheelchair, but they were still on hold, for she did not want to leave her children behind. When he proposed sending the children along with her, she said that she would think about it. He remembered the way she struggled with each word, releasing it like a gummy drop of sap seeping from a wounded tree trunk. He could imagine the effort giving him an answer cost her. The doctors said that it was a good sign that she had begun to talk, albeit slowly, but he could not recognize her voice; it sounded like sandpaper on rough wood. Nowadays, whenever he brought up the subject, she would ask him to tell her a story, or to talk about the good old days, or to describe the weather outside the window. He had sensed that she was afraid to leave the country, afraid that she might get neglected, left on her own in a strange land. In his heart of hearts he knew that she wanted to die on the soil she had walked all her life. The idea of her death got to him. It trickled into the things he did. It insinuated itself in the way he behaved in cabinet meetings, the impatience he showed at traffic lights and roundabouts. It drove him into creating more spectacles.