Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

Nowadays, when he joined his cronies at the gas station, he spent long periods of time brooding, saying nothing, responding late to jokes and exhibiting a surly absentmindedness that annoyed his friends.

“I never knew that treasurers slept during the day and counted money during the night,” Mariko, a Protestant friend who talked little himself but won most card games, teased. They all laughed, Serenity too.

Hajj Gimbi started talking about his pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina five years back. As he talked he became very animated, as if each sentence brought him closer and closer to the glowing heart of the pilgrimage and its significance to him: “People were like grains of sand on a gigantic plain!”

“And all dressed in white!” Serenity wondered aloud. He felt alive for the first time in weeks. He pictured angels milling around on some celestial plain.

“Tell us, what does it look like in Rome?” Hajj asked.

“I wish I knew,” Serenity said.

“Tell us about all those women in short dresses who mill around anxiously waiting to see the pope,” Hajj pressed on, smiling mischievously.

“Well …”

“By the way, why don’t you go and find out? We could always use eyewitness accounts. Buy a camera and take some nice colored pictures for your cronies,” Hajj suggested, to immediate corroboration from the others.

“Money,” Serenity said uneasily, to the roar of laughter.

“There is always some obstacle, money or whatever. Look, your pilgrimage comes only once in …”

“Twenty-five years,” Serenity said.

“Yes, twenty-five years. Ours is annual. What will you tell your grandchildren? That you failed to go because of money? There is always money, but chances come only once in a lifetime.”

Everyone agreed.

“I have an idea,” Hajj said, his little eyes sparkling.

“Yes?” Serenity jerked forward. It was clear that he wanted it to be a secret between him and Hajj, but Hajj was no lover of secrets. He had nothing to hide, he always said.

“Apply for three thousand rolls of cloth from the government textile mill at Jinja in the name of the union. Sell the cloth on the black market, and fly ‘Hajjati’ to Rome with you,” he said, referring to Padlock. They all laughed.

“Money,” Serenity said unhappily.

“Money!” Hajj Gimbi zoomed in ironically with his booming voice.

“Money,” the other two cronies said together.

“To be on the safe side, apply for five thousand rolls. Don’t worry about money. You only have to sell the delivery note to the black-marketeers. They do the rest.”

“The State Research Bureau …,” Serenity said, half with levity, half with genuine fear.

“The State Research?” Hajj asked, as if he had never heard of them.

“The State Research!” The others took up the joke, and the laughter too.

“You are a real leader, with many delusions of grandeur,” Hajj said to Serenity. “Those boys are too busy doing more important things to notice you. Ha, ha, ha, haaaa!”

Like a good husband and a sensible man, Serenity kept everything secret. Padlock, stung by his apparent indifference to her anxiety, was pressuring him to listen to her and do something before it was too late.

“You have not even registered!” he countered as he wondered whether the next morning State Research boys were going to drag him out of his office, jam him into the trunk of a waiting car and take him to a forest, or a river, or a filthy cell.

“Do something.”

“We will see,” he said.

“ ‘We will see’ is not good enough. You know that.”

“We will see,” he reiterated for the umpteenth time. “I said, we will see.”

General Amin played his cards well. He knew that if he allowed Catholics total access to subsidized government-priced dollars from the Bank of Uganda, he would lose vital political capital. He wanted Catholics, for once, to acknowledge his importance in their life, and especially in this pilgrimage. He devised three quotas. In the first quota, he placed five thousand people, who received the necessary travel documents and dollars and were made to understand that they were the country’s official representatives. Unofficial government sources gradually let it be known that there were extra places for those who could secure foreign currency on their own; this was the second quota, composed of the elite, people with both money and connections.

The government sources warned that if any pilgrims sold government-priced dollars on the black market, they would be arrested and their passports torn to pieces. Catholics felt insulted that the government could suspect them of doing something so base. Serenity was exhilarated, Padlock dejected. The chosen five thousand were going without having to sell the clothes on their backs to pay for foreign currency! Being among the chosen ones, Serenity was in seventh heaven. The deal had paid off: he had sold the delivery note and secured the cash, and the buyers had neither pointed guns at him nor pushed him into the trunk of a car! It had been a revelation. In gratitude, he had bought Hajj Gimbi a very large goat with teats hanging almost to the ground. He also spent a weekend with Nakibuka. He bought her clothes and gifts for her children, but he did not tell her how he had made the money.

Serenity boarded an Alitalia jumbo jet with three hundred forty-nine other passengers one late afternoon. The most impressive sight he remembered was a view of Lake Victoria as they rose in the air: the lake resembled an oblong pool of quicksilver. The next morning he was in Rome, reborn, his life transformed. The city was alive, sighing and heaving under the crush of pilgrims from the world over, the ubiquitous tourists and its own dwellers.

Serenity was very interested in ancient sites, the Colosseum, the museums, the cathedrals, anything that could breathe new life into the characters he had encountered in the history lessons of his childhood. The Renaissance, the Reformation, the early Church and the Roman Empire all came alive now in a living context that linked past and present. Serenity felt strangely at home.

He stood in crowded St. Peter’s Square. Filled with wonder, Serenity ate holy bread from the hands of the aging pope, marvelling at his hooked nose and the glamour that still failed to dispel the dimness of his features, and found it hard to believe that so delicate a creature could be the head of so vast and powerful a corporation as the Catholic Church. What did this man know about him? What did he know about Catholics in Uganda? What did he know about the people who took him most seriously? Apart from feeding them dogma, what had he really ever done for them? Yet he influenced their lives as though he knew them personally!

In Serenity’s mind, the man resembled an armadillo that controlled his territory from underground, crawling occasionally to the surface, carapaced in dogma, to be seen and to confirm that he was still in control. Loaded with layers of exquisite garments and priceless jewelry, this monstrous armadillo seemed to have emerged from his hole ready to shine. He spoke with the calculated sloth of those assured of an eternal audience, and his magnificent raiment had the gleam of garments washed clean in the blood of imperial power. The holy armadillo moved with arthritic grace. His body breathed the air of sublime indifference. His demeanor oozed with the contradiction of preaching sadistic negation of the body while bedecking oneself in gold. He operated in the supremely detached ambience of holy dictators, tyrants who feared nothing, imperial despots who controlled the lives of hundreds of millions of people far away.