Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

Because Padlock had no gossip friends round the village, rumors about her proliferated like weeds after a bushfire. People did not understand her, and since they could not get the information they craved, they supplied their own. This led to Padlock’s growing hatred for the village. She felt squashed between Grandpa and Grandma, the centrality of Serenity’s house charged with the vertigo of a precipice. She began feeling policed, the invisible eyes nudging her to jump into the abyss on either side of the house. Grandma made matters worse, for whenever she heard me wail or scream for any period of time, she would quietly appear in the compound with a vague expression on her face, as if she had come to borrow something she had forgotten. Padlock would see her out of the corner of her eye and ignore her at first, pretending that she was too immersed in whatever she was doing; then, still fuming with economically managed anger, she would turn, acknowledge Grandma, hold her eye for one long moment and say, “Welcome, aunt. To what great fortune do we owe this unexpected visit?”

“It is not an unexpected visit,” Grandma, exhibiting great equanimity, would reply. “It is a courtesy call from an old-fashioned woman.”

Later, when the hostility increased and came out in the open, she would add, “An old woman who believes in keeping an eye on her husband.” Grandmothers jokingly called their grandsons “husbands” because, traditionally, a grandson of my caliber was the putative protector of his widowed grandmother. Padlock could barely stomach this brutal flaunting of crude paganism in her own yard, especially because there was nothing she could do to stifle it.

Paralyzed and incapacitated, like a legless grasshopper, Padlock could not help turning the fire of her hatred on me for my arrival on that monstrously rainy day, thus helping her worst enemy to gain such a firm hold in her house. Yet all the clashes in the village were just mere curtain-raisers for the epic showdowns that were to come in the charged atmosphere of the city.

Padlock realized quickly that she would never win the war against rumormongers, some of whom had gone as far as saying that she owed her current status to witchcraft. Knowing that they could do worse, she tried to avoid the villagers, keeping quiet even when she wanted to tell off those pagans. As a result, pressure accumulated dangerously inside her, and the need to migrate and leave the dead to bury themselves became even more urgent. It had to happen soon. She was the new wine which needed new bags, but she feared that the old bags into which she had been put on her wedding day would taint her before she got the chance to tear them up.

When she was alone in the house, it seemed to swell, and to press down on her with its old ghosts, old secrets, jealousies and hatreds. When she entered the bedroom, she was hit by a rancid-milk smell mixed with the funk of Serenity’s ten years of bachelor exploits, making her aware, once again, of the tainted bed on which she had sacrificed her holy hymen. The bed, with its infernal squeaking springs, seemed to be the source of the unholy smells, the gangrenous sore sowing cancer everywhere. She cringed at the thought that she had allowed herself to become one of its victims. That same bed reminded her that Serenity had not been a virgin on their wedding day, and that his sin was incarnate in that daughter of his, whom he did not talk about but who was somewhere in the countryside, doubtless mocking her and her children. Padlock was happy that the child of sin was a girl, who could never become an heir, but she shuddered to think that one day the girl would perpetuate her sin by having her own offspring, mostly likely out of wedlock.

Padlock kept going back to the days before the wedding. She saw herself being smeared with butter oil by Aunt Nakibuka, who ordered her not to move, not to do anything, because the oil had to be driven deep into the skin by the fire of the sun. While she suffered the smell, the anxiety, the heat, the dehydration, Serenity, tainted as he was, was only having a haircut and a long bath. She would have wanted to thrust him in hot oil and scald all the women from his skin and his mind. She would have wanted to use molten soap, hot like liquid fire, and burn all the sin from his pores, and make him say many prayers, and give him many enemas with holy water. Then and only then would he be ready to take somebody’s virginity. But it was too late. This degraded house had to be abandoned, if only for the sake of the children. She had already given Serenity enough time to work things out; now she was going to threaten to tear this stained, stinking bag of a house down.

“When are we going to leave this place?” Padlock, sitting on a fine red mat, asked. She was watching Serenity eat banana plantain with meat. Or was it sweet potatoes with fish?

“I am doing my best,” he replied without looking at her. He was satisfied with the way she ran the house, but he was uneasy about important matters being thrust at him during mealtime. Some women, like Kasiko, did this sort of thing in bed; Padlock did it at lunch or at suppertime, and he resented it. “I am waiting for job interviews.”

“You have been waiting for a long time. It is almost two years now. Maybe the post office is letting you down by misplacing your mail. Or maybe somebody at school is sabotaging you by sitting on your incoming mail.”

“I am going to look into all that,” he said flatly, struck by the irony of being let down by an institution he wanted to work for. How many application letters had he sent to the Postal Workers’ Union? Very many. He watched as I ineffectually chewed a piece of meat. Two more children and the Serenity Trinity would be complete, he thought. He would then concentrate on his job, and on getting enough money to send his children to the best schools. What more could a father do?

In the midst of his daydream he was struck by something: the second sex drought was already on! The vomiting and clay nibblings had already started! His original plan had been a child every three years in order to ease financial pressures. Now it was too late for that plan.

“Any invitations for job interviews this week, this month?” Padlock asked, a residue of clay on her gums. Last time the swamp from which this clay came conspired against her by drowning the car which should have taken her and her unborn son to the hospital. What was it going to do this time? Was it going to punish her for stealing its clay by instigating a miscarriage or a stillbirth?

Serenity wondered which contraceptive method she would prefer: the condom, the diaphragm … “I am planning to go to the city to inquire.”

“I am not going to rear my children here,” she said rather sternly, the last word dropping like a huge chunk of clay in a basin of water.

“I know,” he replied, thinking that she had made “children” sound like a crowd, not just three little individuals. He got up to clean his bicycle. Oh, it needed a proper wash. He put two rags in a bucket, strapped it on the carrier and cycled down to the stream at the other end of the village. Five kilometers in that direction lay the church, the missionary hospital and the school. He cycled past Fingers the leper’s house and two others. Children waved at him from the muddy courtyards, their bare feet smudged, their bellies peeping from loosely hanging shirts. They reminded him of his school, poorer than the Catholic school in Ndere Hill, struggling to keep up. It was time to leave it all behind. He had given six whole years of his life to that school, and he felt that enough was enough. He had to leave before he became too old, before it was too late. Quite a few of his colleagues had missed their chances, had aged, compromised their dreams and become stuck like trucks drowned in mud swamps.