Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

The day he appeared on her doorstep, his clothes smelling of the evening air, his shoes coated with dust, dogs howling in the background, she could hardly hide her shock. She hid in the bedroom for a long time, calming herself, preparing to accept rejection, negative reports about Padlock and pleas for her intervention to save his marriage. Rejection had to be taken with dignity; she was ready. Back in the room with Serenity, conversation flowed naturally and almost careened out of control when she discovered that it was not her intervention he craved but her caress. She was not looking for a husband, nor was he looking for a wife. They had both been looking for lovers. With her husband out of the way, they were left to themselves, the dogs in the background harbingers of things to come. There was no going back now. She could not give up Serenity, and neither would he give her up.

The unexpected undercurrent of sweet guilt at this first meeting with Padlock made the older woman’s voice shake a bit, but since it was not taboo for them to share a man, she managed to look her niece in the eye. The friction and resistance she read there were expected. A maternal uncle robbed of his wife by his nephew would have worked up the same frustrated intensity, sorry that the robbery was not traditionally taboo. By now Nakibuka had admitted to herself that she was Padlock’s rival. Better-looking and more confident, she could afford to be generous and nice to her beleaguered niece, who looked worn, like an old boot. The younger woman was being courted by premarital, post-convent winds, which made her look as if she were shouldering all the world’s tragedies. If she did not take care, Nakibuka thought, soon birds would be nesting in her hair, baby hippos snorting in her belly and hyenas rubbing their rumps in her armpits.

Nakibuka concluded that Padlock worried too much, thrived on pressure and misery, and that it was too late to change her. She had learned her lessons badly and controlled her man too openly; no wonder he had turned his back on her. Nakibuka was happy that it was all in the family. If Padlock did not want to share Serenity, she could go to hell.

Padlock did not say much, preferring to keep her feelings to herself, happy to keep Nakibuka guessing. Serenity had betrayed her; so had this woman. She had not taken Serenity to task; she saw no use in quarreling with this whore. The next twenty hours were so wretched that they reminded her of the floating, gorging feeling she had experienced when Sr. John Chrysostom chucked her out of the convent so many years ago. She wanted to wring this whore’s neck, but she couldn’t stoop that low. She put her tribulations at the feet of Jesus, thinking of Judas Iscariot. The proximity of her whoring aunt made the hours wail with chilly desolation and isolation amidst this crowd of laughing, romanticizing, reminiscing relatives. Each minute sank into her with the force of an eagle’s talon. She fought time with her only cherished weapon: thoughts of home, her own home, where she was supreme ruler. The rest — her relatives, their voices, the food, the noise in the distance — became blurred, sealed in a miasma of endless fog.

At night Padlock lingered in the darkness, watching the stars. She suddenly remembered Mbaziira and the Miss Singer letter. What if it was Nakibuka who had engineered the plot? But how had she come to know about Mbaziira? Impossible.

Padlock noticed no one on the bus home; she had not noticed her relatives when they bid her farewell. Vendors assaulted her somewhere along the way, pushing things in her sightless face, but she didn’t see them. By the time she entered her pagoda, Padlock was shaking with excitement, as though she had just eluded drooling devils stationed all along the road. The house smelled slightly of fish and of washing soap, but that did not matter: smells, like pests, could always be annihilated. She checked the rooms to make sure that nothing was missing. Everything was intact: she was impressed. She had not expected Serenity to do such a good job, what with his nose always in a book and his heart with his cronies at the gas station. This was real power, she thought, a system which worked despite its enforcer’s absence. The stench of diapers drove her from the bathroom; her nose longed for the more cultured smell of sewing-machine lubricant. Her head was already buzzing with the sound of the machine, savoring what inexperienced ears called dreary monotony. The sound reminded her of a train, safe in its singular track, unstoppable in its purpose, single-minded in its labor toward its destination. She felt like a train. She dared Nakibuka to destroy her family: she would be reduced to bits, like any other whore suicidal enough to stand in Padlock’s way.

Her nerves fully assuaged with the sounds and smells of home, she contemplated her following task with ease; she had to make a dress for a girl who was going to be baptized in two days’ time. If there was enough time, she could also make a dress for a woman who was going to attend a wedding in a week’s time. There was various repair work she had to do. Her life was back on track. The girl had top priority: she would probably become a nun, Padlock thought wistfully. Nunhood, the convent and the vows were things that would speak to her for the rest of her life. Nunhood, she said to the walls, makes a woman a woman among women, a priestess, a goddess, a queen of heaven.

If Padlock had not been such a control freak, and had lacked delusions of infallibility, the devastation which befell her when she discovered the theft of her bobbin would have been proportionate. Singer’s cold indifference to her coaxing would have been in the realm of possibility.

How in the world could her bobbin go missing? A mere bobbin, and not the precious gray head, the clothes or the scissors, but the bobbin! The cold calculation of it! The devilish timing of it! The humiliating simplicity of the crime! Her head spun with bewilderment and incomprehension. She must have inserted her finger a dozen times into the empty bobbin hole. Once or twice, she almost mangled her index finger as she absentmindedly pedaled, but the hole remained empty.

She overturned every box, every container, she shook every piece of cloth and moved every stick of furniture, but the ultimate insult, the ultimate anti-miracle, continued to stare her coldly in the face.

If armed robbers or drunken soldiers had marched in, ordered her off her throne, taken her money and commanded her to remove the gray head, put it in a gunnysack and hand it over to them with a servile thank-you-for-robbing-me-sirs, she would have understood. Brute force and raw power she understood very well, and appreciated how they worked, but not sneaky wit; especially not when her Command Post still had inviolability written all over it. The excision of the heart from her machine, and the bloodless insult of it all, made her head swell dangerously with a murderous rage.

If Padlock had been a woman of words, she would have cursed holes into the roof and drowned the room in the saliva of her invective, but that was not like her. She just sat on her desecrated throne and let all the anger, the sorrow and the frustration course through her, not bothering to wipe away the despair which mingled itself freely with her tears. She wanted to do something terrible, something horribly cathartic, in order to wash away the debilitating feeling of human weakness.

What kind of animal, human or devilish, could do this just a week after she had beaten the piss, the goo and the blood out of two thieves? What kind of devilish maggot was stirring in this thief’s rotten mind? Was this imperviousness to pain or love of pain at work? She shuddered at the thought, at the fleeting possibility, that this monster could have burst onto the planet from her belly, carried for nine months in her womb and suckled on her breasts.