Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

Outside the barracks, everything was fine; inside, the men left behind to guard the town got bored. With boredom, repressed, deep-frozen demons thawed, throbbed into life and started pounding on internal doors. Consequently, more and more soldiers thought they could do with a little booze and a little sex. After all, they were about to go to the front line, and this could be their last chance. Anyway, hadn’t they put their lives on the line for these very booze makers and booze sellers and booze-drinking women? They pounded on the glass wall that separated them from the juicy, big-bummed women they had come all the way from Tanzania to liberate and protect, but whom they could not touch without getting whipped, incarcerated or even shot dead like their two comrades.

It was one hundred and fifty days since the seven brothers had had their last meal. They had been ten brothers at the time: three of them had died while fighting Amin’s forces in Masaka. The seven remaining formed a close-knit unit that planned its moves with the care and patience of a weaver. They were a family, and family was more important than its constituent members. They had sworn on their life that if one of them ever got caught, he would shoulder the blame on behalf of the whole group. Originally, they operated in two groups of five, but after the death of their brothers, they had merged into a single unit. For the moment, they watched as stupid soldiers escaped to drink booze and get laid, only to be caught and brought back in handcuffs for incarceration or dispatch to Masaka or back home to Tanzania. The seven brothers had watched the execution of two soldiers with sadness. What a waste! In effect, that was the fifth execution since the beginning of the war. They had no intention of getting caught; they would not act with the clumsiness of Amin’s men.

The brothers had decided years ago that quality and quantity were not mutually exclusive factors. Every year they made do with a certain number of meals whose heaviness compensated for the dry periods. While stupid soldiers thought in terms of women, they thought of one woman, a single meal. Hastily gotten women talked, resulting in lineups and floggings. A woman feasted on by the brothers had trouble pinpointing the responsible parties because of the way the whole thing was organized. They had never been caught and could not see themselves getting caught here in this little town.

When Aunt Kasawo went out to try her luck on the black market one afternoon, she walked into a well-set trap. Behind a line of unroofed edifices originally meant to house Amin’s army personnel, a soft-spoken young man in jeans, a clean T-shirt and a straw hat stopped her. He offered to sell her quality rice, beans and beef at a price she could not refuse.

“Beef from America! Real beef, madame. Rice from Japan, thick-grained, factory-washed rice that goes straight into the cooking pan! I will give you a discount, madame.”

Kasawo liked this affable young man with his clear skin, his clean teeth and his unscented breath. She liked being called “madame,” and he was the first person to say the word like he meant it. She enjoyed the young man’s enthusiasm. She wanted black-marketeers to work and to smile for their money the way she worked and smiled for hers.

“I am not here to buy air, young man,” she said, assuming a superior air. “Show me the goods.”

“At your service, madame,” he said with a cute smile. He picked up samples from his raffia bag. “Bite on that fat-grained rice, madame. See! Look at that beef: a whole bull crammed into this small tin! A word of advice: open the tin carefully, you don’t want to be getting gored in the face by an American bull.”

Kasawo was impressed by the sense of humor, the quality of the samples and the price asked. The young man should not have wasted any more words, but, like all starving souls, he could not believe that a meal was standing in front of him begging to be taken. The brothers had been warned about the arrogance of Ugandan women, which made the speed of this victory even more astounding. Then again, Aunt Kasawo had not been the first woman to come by. The man had let quite a few pass by because the vibes were wrong.

“I have not sold a thing today, madame. God must have sent you in answer to my prayers,” he said, flashing his white teeth. Aunt Kasawo liked the clear pink gums too.

By the look of things, he was her lucky star too. She was buying low and was going to sell high. She thought about establishing regular contact with him and sidestepping the black-marketeer who took every chance to hike prices by hoarding commodities and creating artificial scarcity.

“Show me the rest of the goods, young man,” Kasawo, still not believing her luck, said with mock brusqueness.

“They are in that building,” he said, pointing with a long, beautiful finger.

“Afraid of army raids, are we?” she said with the complacency and complicity of a black-marketeer.

“You said it, madame. Those liberators accuse us of selling their beef, but they don’t ask themselves how we get it.” He smiled and then broke into a belly laugh.

For the first time in fifteen years, Aunt Kasawo thought about the son she had disowned after his father’s attempt on her life. He must be big now. Was he this articulate, polite and smart? She hoped he wasn’t. His father did not deserve such a son. He deserved a three-foot, drum-headed dwarf. She stood outside the edifice, looked around to make sure that no one was coming, and waited. The black market was built on trust. How she trusted this young man! When establishing risky business contacts, Kasawo worked on instinct, and this one felt right. She heard him ask from inside the number of kilos she wanted. He showed her a five-kilo bag of rice and a carton of canned beef. She decided to enter and make sure that she was not getting shortchanged. Give a black-marketeer a finger, and he will rip off the whole hand. Aunt Kasawo remembered her childhood parish priest cautioning his flock on Sundays against the Devil.

One moment she was thinking of asking him to become her regular supplier; the next, she was engulfed in the darkness of the tomb. Launched by a leg sweep, she was suspended in air, the vertigo amplified by the darkness of the bag over her head. Still calling her madame, the young man asked her not to make noise. She twitched and kicked and thrashed about on the sleeping bag she was lying on. The cold feel of a knife put an end to her efforts. She felt two extra pairs of hands on her, disrobing her. This was organization at its most efficient. She interviewed herself: How many men violated you? Two, three, four or more? I do not know. Think, make a guess, madame. The army is against all acts of aggression on civilians, and we will punish anybody you identify. Can you tell us what the man you saw was wearing? He was wearing a hat and a T-shirt and jeans … Any more clues? No.

First there were one, two, three, four, five, six, seven explosive, thick-porridge-like spurts. Then there were one, two, three, four, five, six, seven not-so-explosive, not-so-thick leakings. Last, there were one, two, three, four, five, six, seven protracted, non-explosive thin leakings. The grim statistics showed half a liter of semen discharged in sixty-eight minutes of non-stop action. The cervix got addressed more than two thousand three hundred times. The breasts got pinched one hundred ninety-five times. The clitoris was touched a paltry five times.

The seven brothers vacated the scene one by one. The decoy left first in order to make his alibi foolproof. They arrived at the barracks in time for the evening roll call. The picture that kept going through their mind was the lightning cross-border attack Amin’s forces had made on the Kagera Triangle a few months back.