Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

Despite my efforts at rationalization, not ruling out the possibility of my mind playing mean tricks on me, I could not erase the feeling that the bad dreams were somehow caused by Padlock.

In the mornings, as I knelt to proffer my greetings, I would search her face for clues as to whether she remembered dressing herself as the Virgin Mary or disguising herself as Jesus and coming to me, but she betrayed no emotion, no inkling that she knew of my nocturnal terrors. With the weight of night after night of gory visions sitting on my mind, I wondered what I had to do to break the cycle. I wanted her to know that the guilt stuff would not wash with me — it was too late for that. I also wanted her to know that it was better for us to work together, as adults and partners, than to decapitate our endeavors with spurious violence.

I started thinking that she might be one of those people who, when possessed by ancestral spirits, sat in fire, ran around naked, climbed very tall trees, fought and destroyed things with diabolical fury, then denied everything when the spirits left them. Grandma would probably have helped me verify my suspicions, or at least dismiss them. I decided to tell Lusanani about them, but around that time the nightmares dwindled and stopped.

The lasting effect of the bad dreams was to unburden me of the millstone of heavy sleep. I now slept lightly and woke early, before Padlock barked in my ear or doused me in cold water or struck me with her guava switch. I reverted to the schedule of the village, where periodic tranquillity was interrupted by the sudden advent of babies. It felt wonderful to lie awake at night and imagine the world in slumber. It gave you the feeling that you were living in a different time zone, in a different universe, in a place where people awoke as you went to bed and put on their nighties as you slipped on your school uniform.

I sometimes felt the urge to go out and wander through the streets, dark lanes and piss-sodden alleyways, or negotiate my way to the taxi park and watch its midnight emptiness. I wanted to gauge its actual size, walk its length and breadth alone and fill it with my imagination, but it was unsafe. The caverns of darkness crawled with robbers. The mysterious depths of the night hid wrongdoers on the prowl. The length and breadth were alive with soldiers on patrol, in search of nocturnal excitement and illicit adventure. The sky was alive with ghosts of people killed in the coup, killed before the coup, killed during the state of emergency, killed at the dawn of independence as politics wore hideous masks and became bloodier all the time. The night was full of ghosts redolent with earthly smells, ghosts in search of the next world, ghosts saying endless, faceless goodbyes, ghosts flying about for one last glimpse of their beloved, ghosts marking their loved ones with batlike claws. Grandma was one of those ghosts. It was better to spend the night in the same place, in case she located me, in case she smelled me, in case she chose this particular night to reveal herself to me.

Lying awake on my back, I would think about her, and about the despots’ lack of bitterness, joy and excitement. Accustomed to the afternoon brawls in which Grandpa and Grandma thrashed every subject under the sun with heat and passion, giving the impression that every line of argument and every word mattered, I found the dull harmony of the dictators sickeningly lacking. They seemed to enter each other’s heads telepathically, suck out the necessary information and imbibe it, rendering words superfluous. It seemed like a trick, a clever ploy to monopolize power by keeping everyone else guessing. Could two despots be in such perfect harmony? It was possible, but it was also possible that there was something I did not know, something under my nose, hidden from me by my inexperience or blindness.

I delved into the depths of the latter possibility with the intensity of obsession. I rose to such high plateaus of nocturnal contemplation that when I heard sharp voices one night, my first reaction was to think that I was dreaming, of a fight at the African shops, perhaps, or at the sand patch behind the school playgrounds, where long-jumpers held practice sessions and school toughs held dramatic fights to establish their supremacy.

As the words whistled and the air vibrated with the suppressed hostility of so many heaped frustrations, I realized that I had stumbled onto something. I quickly got out of bed. The shitters, immersed in childish sleep this side of bliss, emitted dull farts and little snorts and innocent groans, as if in lamentation for missing my discovery. I slipped into the sitting room, the smell of tilapia fish eaten that evening kicking my palate. I ventured past the fat green sofas, past the redwood dining set where Serenity ate alone, overlooking us as we sat on the floor, and I was soon at the connecting door which led to the epicenter of the salvoes. This door was usually left ajar to allow the nocturnal cries of the shitters to be heard from the sanctuary of Padlock’s bedroom. Now it was open a little wider, and my parents were at each other’s throats because they were sure that everyone was asleep. This was tradition transplanted from the village into the present garden of marital strife.

As I stood on the rim of this seething crater, my mind careered off into the realm of probabilities. Had somebody fetched a weapon from the sitting room or the kitchen, and in murderous haste forgotten to close the door? And if so, what damage had been done to the other party? How long had this been going on? Had Serenity finally found the courage to discipline his enforcer? Or was it Padlock dishing out the hard blows? I was trembling with excitement. The sound of breaking glass brought me back to my senses. There were additional heaves, gasps, sighs. A curtain of darkness effectively cut me off from the action, but the thought alone of the despots hitting, clawing and choking each other made it all very real in my mind. I was flabbergasted to learn, when the noise had subsided, that it was Loverboy at the center of the conflagration.

I remembered the day I saw Loverboy sitting on a stool, his arm on the cutting board on which lines of violets were twitching as Padlock sewed two pieces of material together to make a dress. His face carried the merest suggestion of a smile, and Padlock’s glowed with the finest patina I had ever seen on her countenance. At that moment she seemed to be in seventh heaven. No one living or dead, apart from Loverboy, had ever taken her that high.

On the strength of that evidence, I couldn’t blame Serenity for feeling jealous and hurt by Loverboy’s visits. I could see lazy clouds of vicious rumor circling round his head. Townspeople were no different from villagers. They all loved gossip. Except that whereas the latter swigged it from tumblers, the former sipped it from thimbles.

Serenity, who had had his failed trial marriage to Kasiko, could not help feeling that his wife was doing whatever she wanted with Boy, as he called Loverboy, to show him what it felt like when the shoe was on the other foot. Suspected revenge and misguided jealousy had thrust the crocodile and the buffalo onto the treacherous sands.

“You love that boy, don’t you?” Serenity asked, quivering like a crocodile with its vulnerable underbelly exposed to the destructive capabilities of a buffalo’s horns.

“Not in the way you think,” Padlock replied icily. “He is just nice to have around.” The words had resurrected her voice and impregnated it with a vein of warmth.

“Why can’t you tell the truth about this boy of yours? Do not think that I am a fool.”

“I told you the truth. He is just a customer of mine who happens to say things that make me laugh.”

Serenity, old shop and shopkeeper prejudices filed to a fine sharp point, momentarily wondered why he had succumbed to the demands of his wife and brought the commercial devilry of sewing machines and customers into his home.