Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

Kaanders’ battered body bore the scars of his long battle with the polygamists of Jinja Diocese. In the midst of his running battles with paganism, polygamy and ignorance on the marshy, tsetse-fly-laden eastern shores of Lake Victoria, he had contracted the sleeping sickness. The disease and the nervous breakdown that followed had both been treated and pronounced cured, but in his dotage the tsetse fly struck back, reminding him of its residual juice in his blood. Nowadays he dozed off in mass, in class, on the toilet seat, in the library, anywhere. He could be teaching us French, and out the lights would go. We would watch him with boyish glee, his head tipped precariously forward, loose mouth open with a string of saliva in one corner, arms on his thighs, sleeping. He would wake up as suddenly as he had knocked off, and would say, “Boy, oh boy, boy, that fly … Where were we?”

During mass, especially in the course of a very long Sunday sermon, he would float off to dreamland on the wings of the fly. The sermon would end, everyone would rise and he would stay seated, chin dug into his chest, a puddle of saliva on his seat. Somebody would finally nudge him, and his lips would begin to work. Kaanders was very bad at remembering names, except those of great writers. He hardly knew the names of his fellow staff members; however, he clearly remembered the name of the boy who cleaned his office.

Amnesia made Kaanders the most popular priest with students, and most especially with truants and other chronic rule breakers. Whenever he caught somebody doing wrong, he would ask the name, which he faithfully wrote down and presented to the rector, saying, “Boy, this boy was breaking rules, oh boy, boy.” The rector would make a show of seriousness while suppressing laughter, for none of the names were known to him. Sometimes he was presented with names of army officers, famous singers or other characters the boys had come up with at the time of their apprehension. Whenever he was in the mood after a Kaanders visit, he would mimic the old man: “Oh boy, boy, I found Captain Jona, Father Adriga and Sister Pants behind the fences … Oh boy, boy, what bad things they were doing there, boy!” He would laugh, hammer his desk with his fists and tap his feet on the floor as he rocked.

On his bad days, Kaanders would totter under a hood of amnesia so strong that he would forget that he had already had his breakfast. He would return to the dining room and ask any priest he found there, “Who has used my cup, boy? Oh boy, boy, nobody has any respect anymore, boy. My cup! I have used it for the last twenty years, and somebody has used it and forgotten to wash it and replace it. Boy, oh boy!” Most priests would just look at him, shrug resignedly and let him simmer in his own quaint soups. He would pace the room back and forth, coming very close to the wall on one side and the fridge on the other, before stopping and saying, “Boy, somebody ate my cheese, too! Oh, boy!”

It was remarkable that Kaanders never forgot or confused French grades. It seemed as if his mind went out of its way to accommodate French. He spotted each and every mistake and underlined it in red ink and penalized it with half a point. He taught us the following seven French adjectives in song form, which became his nickname: “Bon mauvais méchant / grand petit joli gros.”

It all went well when the boys were in the mood for such little songs. When they were not, especially before lunch, they would deliberately mess up the sequence of words and almost drive him crazy with red-faced, foot-stamping frustration.

Every other afternoon at the library, at opening or closing time, he would ask me my name and spend a minute or so turning it over in his head, stretching every syllable phlegmatically in an attempt to wrestle it down, but there were so many small holes in his sieve-like brain that, come next time, he would ask me again what my name was. He memorized my face, though. That was not too difficult, since every other day, during manual labor time, I went to the library, swept, checked in books returned, made a list of those overdue and set aside those destined for repair.

As other boys toiled in the fields, mowed grass in the compound, scrubbed the refectory floor, hunted cockroaches in the scullery, killed rats in the food store and did one hundred and one other chores, I nursed the books and ministered to the needs of the library.

At first I was bored. I had achieved my goal. I did not really like books. The dust tended to get on my nerves by irritating my nose and making me sneeze. I dreaded the time when Kaanders repaired worn-out volumes: all the measuring, the cutting, the gluing, all the pressing and the caressing and the breaking of dry, crisp, newly repaired volumes consumed so much time and energy that it drove me crazy. Kaanders’ eyes watered slightly when he surveyed the work of his hands. He had given a new lease on life to a mutilated object. He had given an anonymous treasure hunter a chance to dig into those refurbished volumes. The perverse joy of it made him whistle and stroke the books like lapdogs.

In the meantime, I was busy hatching a scheme to get rid of Lwendo. I wanted to blackmail him and maintain a stranglehold on his dirty neck. I eventually intended to focus my attention on some particularly nasty staff members, whom I was deliberately ignoring for the moment because I wanted to set my house in order first. It was my belief that as long as I was dominated by that shaggy rat Lwendo, I could not be free to do other things.

Long before I was asked to work in the library, Lwendo was in charge of the charcoal store. This made him a very important person, because we all needed his services on Saturday afternoon, when we ironed our clothes for Sunday mass and the whole week. We all flocked to his barn, a small, faded brick-red building with a large rectangular chimney, which had been a kitchen in the days when seminaries were seminaries and priests had balls of steel. Lwendo, the man of the moment, had to fill everyone’s box with live charcoal, but the demand was usually greater than the supply, and both competition and discrimination were high. Second-year students got first priority, those they recommended second. The Bushmen who had no one to vouch for them got the last small half-dead charcoals, often served with more ash than fire.

Whenever he wanted a bit of fun, especially on wet days, when he found it hard to gather enough wood to make enough charcoal for everyone, Lwendo would withdraw after serving the privileged ones and let the Bushmen jostle and nudge and fight over the remaining half-dead coals. He would stand outside in the trampled grass, spade in hand, sweat dripping down his face, and watch the scrum and laugh till tears trickled from his eyes. “The Bushmen are killing each other over charcoal, ha ha ha haaa, hehehee …,” he would go, joined along the way by a few other second-year students whose ironing needs had already been catered to by newcomers in return for protection. Lwendo was lucky that no one got seriously burned in the scrums, and that the boy who got pushed into the hot ash never put the blame on him.

Lwendo’s job gave him freedom and brought him in contact with the nuns who cooked for the staff and for us. During manual labor he was to be found in the kitchen chatting up a nun or two, pretending to be making plans for his Saturday chores. In between visits to the kitchen, he would gather firewood, old sticks of furniture and anything else he needed, or pretended to need, for lighting the Saturday fire. Lwendo also spent much time with the pigsty gang, boys who looked after the seminary’s pigs and were responsible for slaughtering them on chosen Saturdays for the fathers’ table. Leaders of this group kept back some pork and smuggled it in buckets to Lwendo’s barn, where it was later roasted and devoured. All this was illegal and could lead to one’s immediate suspension or expulsion, but no one was eager to report these crimes.