Moses Isegawa: Abyssinian Chronicles

The developments in the country did not interest her in the least: God’s people always survived. She felt happy with the choices she had made in life, and felt that, given another chance, she would go down the same road again. The moments of relief, when she had no pain, gave her a foretaste of what she believed heaven to be like; she lived them with the intensity of a martyr about to die for the faith. The evenings were her favorite time: she would go out and look at the cows in the kraal, smell the cow dung and watch the big animals chewing their cud while they swatted flies with their long tails. She would examine their bellies and teats and check for ticks. She would order the herdsman to collect a heap of cow dung and light it with hot coals, ostensibly to keep flies away, but in reality for her enjoyment. The white odoriferous smoke reminded her of church incense, the acrid smell of holy mass. She would stand at the edge of the kraal like a statue and wait for the winds to blow the smoke her way. She would inhale very deeply and feel life creeping back, burning from head to toe like a bolt of lightning connecting heaven to earth. At such moments, she felt anchored at the center of the universe, holding things in place.

Shortly after my departure for Holland, Padlock decided to take a long break, the first in her married life. She wanted to enjoy the serenity of her parental home and the solace of the parish church of her childhood and youth. Her brother Mbale was shocked by the degree of his sister’s deterioration. In her eyes was the bottomless expression of holy sorrow he had seen only in the faces of Italian madonnas. It reminded him of the days after her expulsion from the convent. Had she come back to lock herself in her parental house and starve herself to death in one last spurt of religious fervor? The house was not in use at the time. The iron roof had aged, and Mbale had to organize a group of villagers to clean it and make it habitable. He sent one of his daughters to look after her aunt, because Padlock refused to live with him.

Early every other morning, Padlock would wake up and walk to the parish church, four kilometers away, and hear mass and receive holy communion. She took the way via the hills behind the house where, as a little girl, she used to go and hunt for grasshoppers in March and November. The rolling hills, sometimes shrouded in morning mist, reminded her of Golgotha and of the Passion of Jesus. It calmed her to imagine herself back in Jerusalem, walking where Jesus had walked. Feeling the dew on her legs as the grass touched her feet, and the wet mist in her face, made her imagine she was at the center of the universe. At such times, there was no pain, even if the secret disease was at its peak; only peace, serenity, the wish to stay in the hills forever. At such moments, she felt reinvigorated and could not understand why many people believed she was unhappy. She felt the most indescribable contentment coursing through her, and when Mbale tried to dissuade her from taking the hard way via the hills, she just smiled condescendingly at him. He got the message. He also dropped the idea of giving her a chaperone or somebody to take her on a bicycle.

Mbale was not the only person to find Padlock a changed person. People in the village remarked about how laconic she had become, how old she looked, how hardened she came across, like an old, mad nun. The sound of music or voices came to her quite frequently now. People would see her look up as if attempting to frighten off predatory birds, and wonder what was going on inside her head. “She is mad,” they said to themselves. Padlock had kept the secret of the music and the voices from everyone. Serenity had long noticed that there was something wrong with his wife, but she would not tell him what was ailing her. And she did not tell Mbale or any of the other villagers what she was hearing. Eventually, everyone let her be, especially because she was not throwing stones at people or eating butterflies or excreta.

The power and pitch of the music had intensified over time, making Padlock feel as if she were inside a musical tornado or at a crowded conference where everyone talked at the same time, at maximum volume. When the music and the voices subsided, she would say her rosary and do her chores. In the meantime, Mbale went to Kasawo to get her opinion of her sister. Kasawo, who was doing well in her little town and had not seen Padlock in a long time, came to see her at their parental home. She was not taken aback by either Padlock’s appearance or her behavior. She was sure that her elder sister had always been like that: living in her own world. She dominated the conversation, because Padlock was not in the mood to talk and seemed strangely absent. Kasawo made it a point not to mention the late Aunt Lwandeka, or other victims of the plague. She talked only about how good life was at her place. Her business was doing well, she had a man and her eyes were firmly fixed on the future. Just before she left, early the following morning, she invited her sister to visit her. Padlock was going for mass and never understood what Kasawo was jabbering about. However, she smiled dryly, almost maliciously. Her eyes glinted as she saw Kasawo’s big body disappear in the mist on the way to the main road to catch the morning bus. She wished she could force her to go to mass with her. How she would have liked to drag her sister up the steaming hills and down the dewy valleys at breakneck speed and fling her broken, sinning body at the doorstep of the church of their youth! How proud she would have been to break and deliver her to the Lord on a plate and hear her full-throated entreaties for God’s forgiveness! But now Kasawo was going back to her godless life, and she might go the way Lwandeka did: to damnation. Damnation, damnation, damnation … Obsessed with her only remaining sister, Padlock lost her way in the hills for the first time and arrived at the parish just before mass ended.

On her last day, with her prematurely gray head shaking like a ball of cotton in the wind, Padlock went to investigate why the orchestra was playing non-stop and with such intensity. She heard the crushing and tearing and hammering and banging and donging of things, and mixed in the cacophony were what sounded like the painful screams of a torture chamber in full swing. She left her room in a temper. When she stepped outside into the courtyard and looked at the forest in the distance, her legs buckled with holy fright: before her was the altar of St. Peter’s Basilica, above which doves hovered for a minute or so before dropping out of sight in blinding white arcs. There were so many doves that the whole sky looked white.

In the beginning, there had been a locust attack, and then the post-pilgrimage storm. Now there was the miracle of the celestial doves, come to wash evil from the forest and the village. The music crescendoed to a wailing wind’s pitch with breaking sticks, cracking iron roofs and splitting trees in the foreground. Then she heard the unbearable rustle of millions of locusts, and the sky filled with the violins of dropping doves.

It was almost ten o’clock in the morning. A sweet, toothless sunshine, golden to the eye and pleasant on the skin, was shining and flirting with the senses. Farmers were already in the garden with backs bent as they dug with hoes, which kept rising and falling to a deliberate no-nonsense rhythm. They worked inside the shambas, a distance from the path. Padlock could see them, but they could not see her. Now and then, the voice of a child lying on a bundle of banana leaves near the diggers came to her and resurrected the image of her dozen offspring. The diggers were busy tilling the land and planting or preparing to plant beans, maize, cassava, potatoes, tomatoes and greens. The children were either helping their parents in the garden or already at school.