Moses Isegawa: Abyssinian Chronicles

After a fortnight, my new identity was ready. When I went to collect it, Chicken Shit gave me a little test. He gave me two booklets and asked if I could identify the one he had made. I failed the test. I paid over a thousand dollars for both the passport and the birth certificate. Adrenaline hit my system as I pocketed the booklet. I had been reborn: my new name was John Kato. My new surname was a common name for the second male twin back home in Uganda. Somewhere in Britain there was an ant going by the same name, unaware of the existence of a twin brother negotiating the wetness of the Dutch polders.

To test my new powers as a citizen of the powerful West, I went to the City Council cemetery to ask for a job. My nerves jangled, but I called upon my acting capabilities. I veneered my agitation with a serious and eager expression. The time had come to lawyer for myself. The cemetery was on the edge of the city, secluded in a wood with tall, thin trees, paved walkways, clipped lawns and neat graveyards arranged in rectangular configurations. It was very clean and very quiet here among the dead. I walked among the graves, marvelling at the variety of headstones, the messages written on them, the lettering, the little flower patches round the graves and the atmosphere of peace that dominated the place. There were water taps and green watering cans to carry to the plants and flowers. I had found a place to relax and think. The job negotiations went on in English. They wanted a cleaner and gardener. Would I be interested? The pay was bad, but it was enough to take care of my needs. The man did not find anything wrong with my passport. I had passed my first test.

I worked with the fanatic drive of the newly liberated. I was after catching somebody’s eye, to make a connection that would help me reach out for bigger things. Would I get them, as I had got their fellow countryman Fr. Kaanders? I observed quite a few burials: very quiet, very decent, very clean affairs. No blood-curdling wailings, no flailing of arms, no tearing of hair or gnashing of teeth. Dressed in black, the mourners would congregate in the hall, say a few words about the deceased, listen to a song or two and proceed to the graveyard, the coffin in the hands of the black-clad undertakers. I knew somehow that my salvation lurked among the mourners. After lowering the coffin, people would leave in neat lines, some whispering, most silent, and go back to the coffee room for coffee and cake or a biscuit before driving home. It was hard to come into contact with the mourners, even those who came singly to water the flowers round the graves of their beloved. The closer I came to penetrating this new world, the further it seemed to recede.

A few months into the job, I learned that the real money lay in disinterring long-dead, long-forgotten people whose rent had expired and burning their remains or reinterring them in specially designated places. I had never liked gardening that much; it seemed a mockery of Uncle Mbale’s back-breaking efforts and his children’s tough shamba life. Disinterment was pretty disgusting, but it released something in me. I felt a deep curiosity to see what happened to the dead after ten or more years under. It was heavy, dirty work, in some cases worse than what Keema’s cronies did, but it exhausted me enough to make me sleep like a crushed log.

The first time I raised my hand against the dead, I felt the freakish energy of discovery course through me. I first attacked the graves reverently, but with time I acquired the reckless pleasure of the more seasoned demolishers. As going up a mountain makes people giddy, going under the earth made me feel more grounded, like a rock. The graves opened up like sea chests split open by a pirate’s axe. The legacy degraded — curious, sad, hard to make sense of. The skeletons, the skulls, the crumbling cloth, the brittle hair, in a way reminded me of the Luwero Triangle and the aftermath of the guerrilla war, of people who had rotted into the earth so completely that only skulls and skeletons had remained at the end. Sometimes there were rings, remains of shoes or necklaces, some objects which had been nice in their own time, reminders of values, tastes, customs. These would be piled onto the remains of their wearers and taken to the incinerator. The burning of these remains, these relics of past lives, touched something inside me that burned brutally and pointed to the invaluable role of memory and the fragility of the past.

I did not know anything about these people, but the confrontation with their obscure pasts, terminally locked in the mists of time, touched me. From the filth and the dirt of stinking or crumbling bits and pieces, something glorious seemed to emerge, akin to the resurrection of a dead person come back to tell old stories everyone thought left in the grave. I was no longer working with the dead: in them I was resurrecting those I thought had gone forever. I was back to my library days in the seminary. Graves were my bookshelves loaded with dust-caked secrets. Stories started arising, knocking about in my head, making me wonder what I should do with them. The dedication with which I worked surprised both my colleagues and my boss. They seemed to think that I was morbid, feeding off the dead in an uncanny way. The ghosts of the dead seemed to fill me with indefatigability. I would outwork my more sturdy colleagues, race them till they sweated like sprinters. Most were whiners, going on and on about the dirt and the terrible work. I never contributed to their dirges; I was onto something special. In my mind, I reconstructed our victims’ lives, deaths and burial ceremonies. For some I created glorious pasts, for others dismal days in which death was a liberation from a life of tedium, routine, misery. For some I painted a gray life which was neither good nor bad, glorious nor obscure, painful nor joyous.

In the meantime, things were picking up on other fronts. It was while I was working here that I met the woman, the ghost, that seemed to rise up out of one of the old graves we had demolished and wind my life up another notch. The power of the original spark made me believe that there was something deathly about the encounter and its aftermath. It was a gloomy day, and there had been no disinterments and only one burial. I had stayed on and volunteered to look after the watering cans, wanting to take time to think and just have a quiet moment. I found her kneeling at a new grave, a lone figure who seemed to be intent on resurrecting whoever lay under the tombstone. Her body was shaking with sharp sobs. Most white women stood in the sand like trapped buffaloes and mourned their dead with the calculated pomp of a priest at high mass. She, however, did the opposite, and for a moment she reminded me of Padlock clawing the floor of Mbale’s house after being thrown out of the convent. As I approached, my eyes went to the tombstone: the deceased had been forty-four years old, the current average life expectancy in Serenity’s Abyssinia. Her boyfriend, I thought uneasily. Yes: older-man, younger-woman scenario. I was suddenly gripped with the terror that my find was in her late forties or early fifties, and that it had been an older-woman, younger-man scenario. With every step I took, the mass of dark hair shielding her face blew slightly in the scented wind. I was quite close now. I stood a meter away and waited for her to turn. She did not. I coughed, bowed a little and asked if she wanted me to water her plants for her. I still had not seen her face. She turned her eyes to me in one slow, querulous movement. A decent tan had given her face great depth and solidity and pulled it out of the mass of dark hair to hold its own against her dress and the surroundings. By the look of her, we were about the same age, and I found myself swallowing hard, but then how could such a person be unmarried or unengaged? There were four rings on her fingers, fingers which had never tasted the harshness of the hoe or the smoothness of a pestle. How was I going to get through to this spoiled person, who possibly had a thin country-western pin of a voice? The only souvenir I had ever got from the demolished tombs was a golden wedding ring, and the sight of this woman’s rings now disgusted me to the point of wanting to throw my trophy in the trash can. Everything seemed like a game to these people. Four rings bought for the hell of it!