Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

One evening, I got a message that the rector wanted to see me. My heart palpitated. Was the game up? Had somebody really seen me executing the second attack? For sure I did not care about the seminary, but I did not want to be dismissed mid-term. I wanted to go at the end of the year after taking the national certificate examinations. Ah, Lusanani might have written. If so, what was I going to tell the rector? What clever lie was going to save me? Trepidation took over.

“You look scared,” the rector said before I could even open my mouth. “Did you do something wrong?”

“No, Father, but …”

“But what?” He was in a talkative mood tonight despite all the paperwork strewn on his desk. There was a pile of open letters, and I wondered why this man was going through our mail. Did he really believe that it was wrong for boys of our age to communicate with girls? Did he really believe that ordained virgins made the best priests? What did those people in Rome think they were doing, giving such directives? Here was a man approaching middle age, quite a likeable fellow with a good sense of humor, reading our mail like a dirty old man in search of cheap titillation. He always told us funny little stories, and we liked him for that. Now I wondered whether he did not garner some ideas from our letters. “Have you got something on your conscience?” he asked, dramatically raising his brows.

“Don’t we all?” I bravely said. “I lied to somebody yesterday. I took a new exercise book from his desk and used it without telling him. He asked who had taken his book, and I said I did not know. I replaced the book in the evening, but I could not confess to him what I had done because of his temper.” This was pure bullshit, but plausible bullshit in our situation. This was the kind of calculated lie we told in the confessional. We usually first discussed among ourselves the kinds of sins to confess: lying, calling others names, using other people’s things without permission … Now I was looking for an opening, baiting him with my putative frankness.

“How do you like your job in the library?”

Relieved, but also aware that he was looking for an opening, I said, “I like it very much. My grades have improved greatly since taking the job.”

“Any problems?”

“Sometimes we cannot trace who steals our books.”

“Have you done your best to plug all the holes?”

“The most annoying thing is when some boys steal books borrowed by others.”

“I guess you hear a lot of things in the library.”

“Sometimes.”

“Did you hear about the terrible thing that happened to Fr. Mindi?”

“Yes, the vandalization of his car was a shame to all of us aspiring to become priests.”

“I did not mean that. I meant what happened to him recently.”

“No. Yes. I heard he has got an ulcer.”

“Didn’t you hear about the attack?”

“No, Father. What attack?”

“Haven’t you heard anybody talking about it?”

“No, everyone is talking about the ulcer and how the bursar must be working too hard.”

“I am not talking about ulcers. I am talking about a physical attack.”

“No, Father, I haven’t heard anything to that effect. Fathers are above such things.”

“In our day, lawbreakers used to brag about their exploits. That was how they got caught. Are you sure that you have heard nobody bragging about teaching Fr. Mindi a lesson? Don’t think I am not aware that some boys don’t like the bursar.”

“I have not heard anything, Father. But I am sure the culprits will get caught. Last time the net got them. This time too they will not escape.”

The rector seemed to think that my answers were too glib. He also knew that I knew that he did not know who had carried out the attack. He resented the fact that he could do nothing to extract a clean confession from me or from anybody else.

“If you hear anything, come and tell me. This kind of appalling behavior cannot be allowed to go on. The seminary cannot be allowed to degenerate into anarchy like some secular school. This is in your interests too. If priests get attacked, seminarians will be attacked as well. And if such people escape, what kind of priests will they make? Who would want to serve in the same parish with them?”

I wanted to say that every newcomer had been the subject of physical attacks for a whole year, and had been forced to jerk off at two or three in the morning at one time or other when the priests were in bed enjoying wet dreams. I wanted to say that maybe a priest getting attacked was just a case of chickens coming home to roost. I was aware that I could not say that without getting expelled. I pitied the man for underestimating me. I was nobody’s stool pigeon.

“Oh, some other matter,” he said, showing me the letter I had written to Aunt Lwandeka. “Why did you seal this letter? Is it a bad letter?”

“No, Father. I just forgot. I must have been absentminded at the time. The addressee is my maternal aunt. There is nothing bad or secretive in the letter.”

“You forgot? Do you often forget to post your letters through the right channels?”

“No, Father.”

“What is in this one?”

“Amin’s men arrested her once and she gets nightmares about them. I wrote to advise her to say novenas to St. Jude Thaddeus.”

“Should I open it?”

“You are welcome,” I said, putting on a brave face. There was nothing in it about the notorious St. Jude Thaddeus, but I took my chances.

“All right, you can go. But if you hear anything, don’t hesitate to inform me. I am relying on you, son.”

“I will do my best, Father,” I said as a way of telling him to cut out the father-son bullshit.

I was very relieved. Thank God it was not a letter from Lusanani. How would I have explained my relationship with a married Muslim girl in this most Catholic of places?

Starved of rumors which could give us a clue as to what was going on with the bursar-cum-discipline master, the boys started targeting individual staff members. They asked them leading questions during lessons. The black priests, veterans at this kind of trickery, left us high and dry. I interpreted that as a sign of solidarity with their suffering colleague. It was also revenge on us, for surely they knew that whoever had punished Fr. Mindi had come from within our fakely smiling, open-faced ranks.

It was Fr. Kaanders who came to our rescue. After the usual bon/mauvais/méchant nonsense, when his mind was clear of its formidable fogs, boys lurched in and asked him what was going on. After much sweeping back of the few strands of hair on top of his domed head, he said, “Oh boy, boy, boy … Father Mean-dee is going away, boys.” Naturally, there was an inquiry as to where the bursar was going. After a series of “Oh boy, boy, boy”s, he informed us that Mindi had been transferred to the parish. What intrigued me was that the old man seemed to be in some anguish over the question. I kept wondering whether he had learned the details of the grisly contents of that plastic bag and was just wondering who among us had planned and executed the attack. We tried to ask him who was going to replace the bursar, but he would not tell us.

A week later, the vicar general paid us a surprise visit. He was a tall, fat man with a hanging belly, large buttocks and a clumsy gait. He spoke too quickly, disguising a lisp and a stammer, and it was hard to hear what he had to say. Despite his less than satisfactory locution, he loved the sound of his own voice. He slapped us with a fifty-minute sermon, to which we listened woodenly and throughout which Kaanders slept soundly. We were inundated with the same drivel about our vocation and what it meant to be a priest, how special we were, how we had to preserve our honor and the like. Many of us agreed that the vicar general had sweet, albeit empty, words to say, but we were irked that our breakfast had been terrible — thin, wormy porridge with dry bread — while the staff had feasted on goodies that had filled the corridor with wonderful smells. Here, the importance of a visitor was gauged by the changes his presence effected on our table. When the bishop came, the bursar gave us the best meals, because the big man often came to look in on what we ate. We wondered if he was dumb enough to believe that what he saw us eating was what we usually ate or if he just wanted to see whether we were grateful for not eating the usual hog feed. This guy, though, had not bothered to look at what we were being fed, and for that reason most of us did not care a damn about the wise words he had to say in his lispy, stammering sermon. The chapel came alive only once, when he failed to wrestle down the word “boss” and slid precariously: “Jesuth is the both, I–I mean the bosh, er, th-the boss of this inshtitution.” After that he spoke very slowly. We were overjoyed when the mass ended.