Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

“He wants to intimidate the Church and keep people on tenterhooks,” Serenity suggested.

“If there are snakes in your house, or if you think there are, you smoke it. Your household may have to stay outside for hours, but you do what you have to do,” Hajj said, raising his palms in the air. “I am afraid that is how our leaders think.”

The trio watched the television appearance of the three detainees on Serenity’s stinking Toshiba. There seemed to be hundreds of soldiers everywhere. On display were the neat piles of arms the plotters had intended to use. The meeting took place on the lawn of a famous hotel, which some people said was also partly a torture chamber. The arms displayed had been found near the archbishop’s house. Other collaborators had been arrested, but the three men were the lynchpins. A letter written by Obote, implicating them in the plot, was read. At the end of the meeting, the soldiers said they wanted the three men dead, and indeed they died in a car crash while trying to overpower the army officer who was driving them. Of the four people in the vehicle, only the driver survived the crash, escaping with minor injuries.

Serenity and his friends, like the majority of people, read between the lines, but they still felt very sad. This was history writing itself in front of their eyes. It was a nasty experience. These were some of the saddest days in the history of the country; worse things had occurred, but it was the small happenings that exposed the extent of the rot.

Aunt Lwandeka was demoralized for a day or two. It was not that the country had lost its political virginity — that had happened long ago — but that it was tottering on the brink of brinks and everyone seemed to have an idea of what was going to happen next. The general lesson was very clear: if it could happen to the big fish, it could happen to the small fish anytime, anywhere.

The three friends did not have any more words to say about the incident. They just sat and played cards or talked about other things. Hajj and Serenity drove the builders harder than before, and it was not very long before their houses were completed and they moved their families away from the eye of the storm.

The move from the city to the village was Padlock’s dream come true. She had hated the city, its noise, its profanity and its disorder from the beginning. She had had a love-hate relationship with the pagoda. She felt that the house, like Serenity’s bachelor bed, was tainted, this time by the pagan spirit of the Indians who had been there first. Over the years, she hankered for something pure, something virgin, something she could fill with her own spirit. The violence of the city, the kidnappings, the rapes and the insecurity had disgusted her village sensibilities. The absence of punishment for offenders almost drove her mad with outrage. In her book, crime always meant punishment, and yet here was a situation where sin was being tolerated with impunity, even rewarded.

For years she had lived in fear of being raped. She had a feeling that the soldiers would do it one day. Consequently, she tensed up when she saw those tall, dark figures walking or driving by. Her head swam whenever they stopped a vehicle she was travelling in. She felt asphyxiated. One time, she almost jumped out of a taxi van when a soldier popped his head inside to take a closer look. She happened to be sitting near the door. The man never noticed her and never asked her to show her identity card. He concentrated on other passengers. Yet she felt terrified. She broke into a sweat, her eyes reddened and her lungs strained for air. The feeling of beleaguerment had worsened after the pilgrimage. She feared that her holiness was about to be obliterated. She feared that her name was about to be erased from the book of saints. She feared that a group of soldiers would do terrible things to her, decapitate her and drag her defiled body through the streets. She feared the effect the deed would have on her children. At the height of her fear, ambivalence insinuated itself into her thoughts. The dropping-eagle syndrome recurred. She started feeling purged. She started feeling bad about getting purged. The purges made her afraid that the Devil was winning. When the fear came without concomitant purges, she felt driven close to the edge. When the soldiers ignored her, as they always did, she wondered if they were not standing in the way of destiny. When they seemed to notice her, she quaked and asked that the cup pass from her. She suffered in silence.

All this confusion left her hankering for a place in a village: a virginal place she could impose her will on, a peaceful place where she could pray and meditate. She thought of herself as a desert plant, a cactus which defied the desolation, and when she moved into the new house, she felt that her very deep roots had sunk into the foundation and permeated the land. Virtue would triumph over decay, the cactus would prosper in desert sand even if the water had to be sucked from tens of kilometers away. The local priest could not come to bless the house; he deputized the catechist, who sprinkled the house and the compound and the garden with the water she had brought from Lourdes in a plastic bottle made in the shape of the Virgin Mary. The meter-long rosary hanging in the sitting room was her talisman against evil, the leather-bound Bible her sword and shield against the enemy. She felt that she had entered the house she had been born to live in.

The size of the little town suited her purposes well. It was a small, one-street, one-market, one-dispensary trading center serving a small population. Nobody stood out, or at least not by much. The children went to a good school four kilometers away. The teachers kept their pupils under constant observation and were quick to report if the latter misbehaved. Padlock could not have asked for more. The Catholic subparish church was one kilometer away, and the priest visited once a month to hear confessions and to say holy mass. The catechist, a hardworking man of Rwandan origin, treated her family with respect and Christian love. Padlock liked the man and was generous to his six children. She made them dresses and shirts at no cost from remnant pieces of cloth. Whenever the priest visited, Padlock got a place in front of the altar. It made her feel that the priest was talking directly and exclusively to her. She watched everything he did. She listened carefully to every song the choir sang. It was her show. She contributed to the big meal cooked for the priest on such occasions. She liked being consulted by the catechist on various matters. She liked her new position in life. She had finally found her center, and she had no plans to relinquish it.

Serenity, on the other hand, was a townsman and remained behind in Kampala during the week. He vacated the pagoda and moved into a smaller house with one bedroom, a sitting room, a kitchen and a bathroom. It was linked to two other houses of the same type, all wrapped inside a fence. His neighbors were people in their forties and fifties, looking for peace amidst the turmoil of the city. Now Serenity could enjoy the anonymity of the city with the convenience of being at the center of things. In the evening he read his books and listened to the radio, mostly BBC or Voice of America. During the day, he dealt with trade-union affairs at the office or at meeting places in town. He never invited colleagues home: it was his own private space. He usually ate at a small restaurant in town, and only prepared himself tea when he returned home in the evening. Nakibuka came for a few days each week and served him carefully prepared meals, as though she were courting him. On the weekend he would board a bus to visit Padlock and the children, taking them commodities they needed. Serenity fulfilled the duties of a provider with guilt-laden efficiency, floating between the world of the married and the unmarried and bouncing between wife and lover with somnolent ease.