Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

I told her a little about myself, and about Aunt Lwandeka, the seminary, the university, SIMC and Boom-boom Brewery. The evening quickly turned into night. We walked down to the main road, and she saw me off. From then on, we started meeting regularly. I got rid of the other Triangle girls, even though I continued to financially help out one or two of them.

On chosen Sundays, we would go to the Catholic cathedral and hear mass. Neither of us was that devout, but sometimes one got information about what was going on in the country, especially what the papers missed or just hinted at. The Catholic Church was still playing chief political critic of both the government and the guerrillas. We would have lunch at a decent restaurant and then go to an alfresco bar and sit and watch the people and the soldiers. She liked beer. By the fifth bottle, she would start singing nursery rhymes and some of the songs her pupils sang in the end-of-term concerts. I enjoyed the show and the childhood it invoked. It seemed we were both looking for an anchor to steady us in these turbulent times.

At such moments, the war faded to the oblivion of the Triangle and its phantoms, suffering and wantonness. We were in our own small world, locked behind steel gates, allowing in those we wanted to see, barring the undesirables. Soaked in beer, we would tell stories that evaporated with the stupor and remained on the sheets where we made love. Lovemaking itself was an act of war, an expression of the tension ripping the country apart. By trying to create something new and beautiful, we were firing our weapons, opposing forces of evil and destruction, throwing a lifeline to something on the other side that had to be redeemed. By driving ourselves to the limit, we were steeling ourselves for battle, for all those confrontations ahead of us, and making sure that we would have the capacity to survive the most painful ordeals. We were both orphans, people from whom something dear had been robbed. The common bond drove us further into the search for fulfillment.

As I thrust deeper into the marshes of love and the triangle of life, I kept wondering where her child had passed through, because this was one super-tight woman, the tightest I was ever to encounter. Had she lied about the child and the marriage? Was she just another mythmaker and I her gullible victim? I knew almost immediately that even as I was savoring the splendors of my paradise, I was also witnessing the beginnings of my doom. This was one experience that would not be duplicated, one act that would be almost impossible to follow. My joy was bruised with sorrow, my happiness touched by fear. I had hit the sexual jackpot: if I lost this, I would only have memories to ruminate on. I savored the sweet torture of her excruciating contractions with unease. I felt that loss was inevitable. I could feel her slip away. Such marvellous things never lasted. If they did, they enslaved their owners and turned them into drooling fools. I had either to enslave her or to pass her on. One side of me wanted to chain her, to tie her on a leash, to saddle her with bells that would betray her every movement. One side wanted to set her free to go out into the world and inflame and torture and madden others with the bruising grip of her hidden treasures. I could see old men drooling and getting heart attacks on top of her. I could see young men driven insane by her flame, getting rid of their wives and girlfriends and ending up bankrupt and alone. I could see men walking round and round, asking themselves where it had gone wrong, how and why they could not stop this pearl from diving back into the depths whence she had come. I loved it.

It would have been easy to ask Jo to move in with me, but I was into the torture games of letting her go and welcoming her back, watching her vanishing backside and embracing her when she returned. I was steeling myself for the loss, preparing the trap for other men to fall into. When she left, I kept thinking that she would never return. When she returned, with the smell of the school on her hair and the heat of passion in her veins, I kept wondering whether she would ever leave. I kept wondering how Husband was taking his loss of this woman or girl or phantom or whatever she was. In the midnight hour, when the bed or the trench or the ambush turned into a torture rack of lust, he must have pined for her. His lust for her must have turned into lust for blood. He must have embraced her in his dreams, but on waking up cold and alone, his head must have spun. I hoped we would never meet.

My time with Jo helped me gain insight into the ways other people conducted their love affairs. Had Grandpa not lived with Uncle Kawayida’s mother’s buckteeth? Had he not known that Serenity’s mother had fallen for another man? Had Serenity not accommodated his wife’s ways? Had Padlock not accommodated the fact that her husband was in love with her aunt? Was Aunt Lwandeka not in love with the mysterious brigadier, keeping his picture in her Good News Bible under the mattress? Didn’t they maintain trust in each other despite the distance and not hearing from each other for months? Wasn’t Uncle Kawayida in love with three sisters? Affairs of the heart had never been perfect; imperfection was part and parcel of the package. I was prepared for the worst. In the war to find and free myself, Jo was one big skirmish, not the final battle.

Midway into the decade, it was clear that there was a stalemate in the fighting. We would see army trucks, as indifferent as sealed coffins, carry their stiff, blank-eyed cargo into the Triangle. We would see dishevelled soldiers returning from their nightmare campaigns with the look of death in their eyes. We would see intelligence officers, walkie-talkies sticking out, eyes red with fear, legs stiff with uncertainty, moving up and down our little town in a frenzied daze. There were rumors, corroborated by Aunt, that the guerrillas were about to start an urban campaign, focussing on the city. After many weeks, they attacked a big army barracks near the two cathedrals. They caused considerable damage, as the army, despite all outward show of vigilance, was caught unawares. In retaliation, the army picked up people from around the city and detained them and interrogated them and tortured them. The dragnet netted few, if any, real guerrillas.

This was when the running games, or Olympic Games, as wags called them, began. During office hours, a report would suddenly circulate that the guerrillas were in the city, and people would stream out of offices and businesses and dash to their cars or to the bus and taxi parks. The pandemonium would be heightened by rumormongers who claimed that even as they spoke, a few suburban towns had already fallen. I was once caught in the wave. People poured out of the filthy Owino Market, Kikuubo, Nakasero Hill and everywhere, and made the taxi park tremble with the noise of their cries and the stamping of their feet. I got knocked in the back and spun around, but luckily got pushed upright by those behind me. Everybody was clearing out. Supercilious snake charmers, trapped in their flaccid dignity, saw their boxes kicked into the air, the reptiles ground into the asphalt. Rat poison merchants saw their goods flying all over the place. Hawkers ran with cardboard boxes on their heads. Van drivers made incredible turns, cutting through the masses before the doors could be ripped from their hinges. Lost shoes, torn bags, shirt buttons, roast maize, white bread, were all ground into the asphalt as people ran from the invisible enemy.

Hordes of unemployed youths who paraded the bus and taxi parks quickly got the hang of the game. They would come to town ready to snatch bags and fun whenever possible. They would stand in little groups by the roadside and watch well-dressed women and men wobbling down the hills, blowing like cows chewing cud at the fireside. They concentrated on women who fled with high heels in their hands, burdened with vanity bags and sacks of clothing, tongues protruding out of parched mouths.