Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

When I thought about it, the idea of guerrilla warfare impressed me. I liked the risk, the odds, the guts and the sticking of pins into a despot’s backside. I realized that what I was doing to Padlock was nothing short of guerrilla activity. It was not terrorism, as I had once called it; since my village days, I had associated that word with dead dogs and Muslim converts living in fear of incurable penis ulcers. “Guerrilla warfare” sounded better.

I decided to raid Padlock’s Command Post and incapacitate her sewing machine. To begin with, I had never benefitted from the machine: my clothes always got last priority, even if I reported first. I also wanted to bring Serenity into the equation: he was getting off too easily for my liking. If the raid succeeded, I knew that he would be the one to buy the spare parts for the Singer. I also knew that the Singer agent had already gone back to Bombay, Nairobi or London, which meant that Serenity would have to import the parts. This time I was going to reap revenge plus a bit of money too, but basically I wanted Padlock to realize that brute force had its glaring limits. Moreover, I could not stand the way the despots moaned about Amin and his rule, the firing squads, the rising prices, the instability of the economy and the brutality of some soldiers.

Elsewhere, events were taking place that linked me with a woman whose house I would later occupy, whose keyhole I would peep through in a bid to assuage sex hormones gone mad and whose fatherless children I would try to parent. As I penetrated the Command Post, General Amin’s men were penetrating the woman’s house and whisking her off to an unknown destination.

I knocked a tin over in the darkness, held my breath and proceeded. The Command Post smelled of cotton cloth, Singer lubricant, wood and trapped nocturnal heat. In the darkness, the sewing machine resembled a medieval instrument of torture on which sinners were punished by sadistic clergymen and their followers for holy purposes. A perverse joy kicked in my breast and offset the fear in my bones. “She is not your real mother,” I could almost hear Lusanani say in the darkness, her breath tickling my ear. What was she doing now? Would I ever be alone with her in the darkness? It would be wonderful to raid the secret of her petticoats right here, in Padlock’s holy of holies.

I moved forward. I touched the clothes in the basket, mostly women’s clothes: Padlock-made dresses, blouses and bras. The cylindrical wicker basket’s bottle-cap-like cover was under the cutting board, just inches from the underbelly of the Singer. I stuck my finger in a small cavern, slippery with lubricant. Polished steel felt perversely smooth in the darkness. I extracted the bobbin. It felt like a steel lemon, and I kept rolling it over and over in my fingers.

As Padlock prepared to enter her Command Post, we got the news that Lwandeka, her youngest sister, had got into trouble with the State Research Bureau. Her whereabouts were still unknown. Fearing the worst, Padlock left immediately. For four whole days, the house felt pleasantly light and birds sang in the nearby trees. Suddenly everyone was breathing pure air, as if a cadaverous stench had just been carried off by a cleansing wind. The shitters chased each other all over the place, threw things, besmirched their clothes, shouted and called each other names. I enjoyed my role as indulgent nanny or surrogate parent and let them have their way, provided they did not do anything to annoy me or land me in trouble. Play reached its climax an hour before Serenity’s return from work. In time, selected shitters started cleaning up so that by the time the self-effacing despot arrived home, everything was in order. Serenity was more relaxed. The network of worry wrinkles in his face was shallower than usual, and he seemed keen to put everyone at ease. He let it be known that as long as order was maintained, homework done, school attended, everyone could take a breather.

I was the second-in-command. I relished the power and the chance to do things my way. I was leading my own revolution. By showing the shitters a different way of doing things, with words rather than guava switches, I was turning them against Padlock and the way of life they had been reared in. The squeamish shitter, who now followed me like a puppy, carried out voluntary surveillance work, reporting misdemeanors, which I pretended to note so as not to decapitate his initiative. He was the one who supervised the cooking, listening to the gurgling sounds of the cooking pot, making sure that there was just enough water, not too much so as to waterlog the food or too little so as to burn it. In case of emergency, he had to call me.

I took time off to hold long conversations with Lusanani. She came over, entered the house for some minutes, but left before I could give her a tour of the Command Post. I felt disappointed. I thought that the magic of my dreams would keep her in Padlock’s holy of holies, and maybe even voluntarily make her surrender some of the secrets of her rustling petticoats. As she walked away I wondered whether Grandpa had secured himself a girl like this to take care of him. There was an official news blackout I could not circumvent to find out how he was doing.

Four days away from her kingdom seemed like a lifetime to Padlock. Four days under somebody else’s roof, following somebody else’s schedule, eating somebody else’s meals and sleeping under makeshift conditions felt like four eternities squandered in purgatory. The talk her relatives indulged in shocked her with its randomness and lack of serious content. They seemed to be blowing chicken feathers in the air and relishing the effort of catching them. Padlock found herself isolated on an island of dead seriousness, fact and humorless analysis of the tragedy while all around her teemed levity in the face of disaster. Her brothers and other sister made deep forays into the sands and bogs of childhood, history she preferred to leave undisturbed. After stirring mirthful mud pools full of toothless old men, gap-toothed old women, old clothes, Sunday masses, heavy Christmas meals and childhood escapades, they clung to the only topic that interested her: “First children turned out right, later children did not; are parents fully to blame?”

“Lwandeka was a typical last child,” Mbale said at length. “She took advantage of Mam and Dad’s weakness and grew up thinking that the whole universe revolved around her.”

“We are told that the State Research Bureau arrested her for corresponding with German saboteurs. Why did she do that? Didn’t she know that Amin meant business? Didn’t she know that it was dangerous to write letters to Germans?” somebody asked.

“All of us who were raised right turned out right,” Padlock joined in. “You who had it easy are now paying for earlier freedom.” She looked at her second sister, Kasawo.

In Padlock’s eyes, both her sisters were whores. To begin with, Lwandeka had failed to find a man to marry her, shaming the family by breeding children in sin. Kasawo, the fatter and elder of the two, had not done any better. She ran amok during her teen days; she rebelled against her parents; and she eloped with a crooked man who drank heavily and beat her, almost killing her. She too had missed the honor of holy matrimony, and was now a market woman, that halfway station between a white-collar whore and an eternal mistress.

Padlock blamed her parents for neglecting their duty, especially for sparing the rod on the girls, and she felt that they deserved all the humiliations life dished out to them. At the peak of their rebellion, both girls had gone against parental will, returned home whenever they wanted, dated older men, dropped out of school and refused to do anything at home. Now they wallowed in sin like pigs in shit and made the same mistakes, like dogs eating their own vomit. Padlock was of the view that imprisonment could be the best thing that ever happened to her youngest sister, provided she didn’t get raped. Imprisonment would cure her of the urge to correspond with spoiled German women, most probably whores, who did not fear God and fomented rebellion.