Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

Refreshments were served with great care amidst a silence that seemed to howl and oppress both the house and the afternoon itself. Tiida looked in her glass and saw minute pieces of squashed orange swimming in the yellow liquid. It occurred to her that her mind was in the same liquid state, unable to form a plan of attack or defense. It also occurred to her that her brother’s wife had not even asked about her children. Was this because they were now living in the city, where village civilities didn’t rule, and where housewives behaved like little queens? Or was it because Tiida was married to a Muslim and her male children had been circumcised, and her brother’s Catholic wife did not approve? This kind of treatment was new to Tiida, and it made her very angry. She remembered that a certain nurse at the hospital where her husband worked had tried to disrespect her and to undermine her position, possibly with fancy dreams of taking Dr. Ssali off her hands. Tiida had confronted the woman only once. The next she heard, the woman had asked for a transfer. All she had told her was to keep her dirty hands off the good doctor if she treasured them. What did the woman think? That she was going to chop them off? Anyway, it had worked, but nothing seemed to work now; even her mounting wave of anger seemed self-defeating.

The sight of the richly dressed but highly confounded Tiida strengthened Padlock’s resolve to go to Rome. This woman had to be shown that poverty could be defeated with honest labor, and that Catholicism was still the paramount religion in society. She wanted to show this woman, together with Kawayida’s wife, that she was powerful in her own right. Padlock remembered clearly that on the day Tiida and her husband had visited Kawayida and his wife in their newly acquired Peugeot, Kawayida’s wife had said, “It is a shame that Nakkazi does not have the brains to make dresses out of chicken feathers. It is the only way they can get a car, if you ask me.” The same woman lamented that Padlock’s brothers lacked the brains to use turkey shit to make bricks and tiles and build a respectable kitchen for their parents. Padlock was awaiting a confession from Tiida, but Tiida was not about to weaken her already precarious position by kowtowing to her brother’s terrible wife. She had her pride, lots of it; kowtowing to peasants was where she drew the line.

Padlock made her intentions clear by backing out of the sitting room as soon as she had served the refreshments. Leaving Tiida on her own, she retired to the Command Post and sent the sewing machine chugging. As the needle bit into cloth, the Singer filled the house with the monotonous, train-like sound of its immobile journey, sprinkling the compound with the joyous revenge of its mistress. When the children came home from school, she ordered them to maintain a deathly silence and not disturb the guest for any reason or else she would tear the skin off their backs. After long stretches of time, Padlock would go into the sitting room to check on her visitor, the way one checked on a poisonous snake coiled inside one’s precious china pot. She would mutter a few words of mock civility, then leave Tiida to languish in the heat of her discomfiture.

At five o’clock, when the national television program began, Padlock deigned to ease her sister-in-law’s solitude by switching on the stinking Toshiba. Tiida got annoyed with the fleeting nonsense of American cartoons and their nasal chatter, which was all mumbo jumbo because she didn’t understand a word of it. The black-and-white things flew, collided with each other, clobbered each other, ran themselves over with cars and did all sorts of stupid things only a child or a moron could appreciate. To soothe her biting rage, Tiida thought about Dr. Ssali. She wished he would come for her. She wished he would run her brother’s wife over with their Peugeot. She wished he were rich enough to finance Grandpa’s journey on his own and save her the humiliation of dealing with her brother’s peasant wife.

By the time Serenity returned home, in the evening, Tiida was silently mourning the fact that she had decided to stay and wait for her brother. Her usually clear eyes were bloodshot. There was perspiration on her brow and on the bridge of her nose. She wanted to scream and to call her brother’s wife all the names that swept through her head. But she was so enraged that she could hardly speak, let alone order her thoughts.

Serenity took his sister for a walk. Night was falling. A thin mist was descending in the distance, hovering over the tops of tall buildings and on the peaks of distant hills. They did not go toward the gas station, because Serenity did not want to introduce her to his friends. Serenity explained that he was very tired because he was in the middle of campaigns for the post of treasurer to the Postal Workers’ Union. He talked about long meetings, canvassing drives and visits to workers’ homes. He said that the campaign had robbed him of his sense of reality. He complained about his insomnia. He expressed his wish to win and gain access to extra resources. He was angry that somebody had edged him out for the chairmanship, but he could not really complain, because Hajj Gimbi’s invisible friends had intervened, pushed aside a Muslim candidate and supported his candidacy for treasurer.

Serenity monopolized the conversation and lectured his sister as never before. Tiida found herself playing second fiddle. She was amazed at how eloquent her younger brother had become; he had finally come into his own. She could now see him representing other people, a bit edgy but capable. Before she could say why she had come to see him, he told her that he had absolutely no money to spare. He was going to Rome to boost his leadership image, he said. Tiida agreed with everything he said, sadly wondering whether the first thing she had met that morning had been a woman or a dog: this was too much bad luck to be coincidental.

“Is your wife also going?” she valiantly asked, seething with suppressed rage.

“She wants to, but she has neither the money nor a parish to register in.”

“They have never been strong, money-wise,” Tiida couldn’t help chipping in.

“But her younger brother has registered himself,” Serenity said proudly.

“Where did he get the money?”

“He is going to fly on his pigs,” Serenity said, laughing, remembering a joke about flying pigs, but his sister totally missed it. She flinched, because in her husband’s religion a pig was a filthy animal. She found herself thinking that her brother’s wife’s family were like pigs to her: she did not want to have anything to do with them.

The crushing sense of defeat Tiida felt was almost akin to that dating back to the days of the plague of flies, the dogs’ heads and the villagers’ claim that her husband’s conversion to Islam was a curse. She wished she had not come. She felt encumbered by the bad news she had to bear, and by the ballast of spurious negotiating power and insulted personal charm she had to jettison. She heard Serenity ask again how they had finally won the car, and she felt angry. He was just asking for the sake of softening the hard edges of her defeat.

“Conversion Committee politics. Heads rolled, and the new man cleared the backlog during the euphoria following his victory,” she said, languidly thinking about Nakatu. She had probably foreseen the defeat, and that was why she had refused to come along.

Tiida’s visit only served to highlight Serenity’s almost impossible financial position. Where was the money going to come from? He had a sneaking feeling that Hajj Gimbi could be of help, but how could he go to him after all he had already done? Serenity was like a viper eyeing a juicy rabbit: in order to swallow it, he would have to break his own jaws and suffer the pain of ingesting the animal and of realigning his jaws afterward. Was he ready to take the risk? Serenity felt he was, but how was he going to broach the issue? There were also more worrying considerations: What if Hajj’s friends got fed up this time and asked Serenity to do something grisly in return? What if they asked him to transfer big amounts of union money to secret accounts? Serenity was tormented for weeks.