Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

The irony or perverse logic of the situation was that it was an army doctor who worked on Kasawo and helped her through the medical part of the ordeal. The same doctor went on to ask her who she thought her attackers were, and she said that she did not know. He asked her what language they spoke, and she said she did not remember. Had she seen any of them? She only remembered seeing a straw hat, a white T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans. Had they taken her money? No. She refused to answer any more questions. She had already decided to get the demons of rape and trauma exorcised by a famous medicine man and not to waste any time in highly embarrassing investigations. How would one hold one’s head high in such a little place when everyone knew that one had been raped by seven soldiers? Aunt Kasawo was no one’s fool. As her childhood parish priest used to say, silence was golden.

A fortnight after Grandpa’s burial, Aunt Kasawo put on her best clothes and her fanciest jewelry, ready to go. She was picked up from her home by a Postal Service van sent by Serenity. It drove her to the city and from there to the place where Padlock had been living for the last two years. She looked at the soldiers with a smile full of ill will. She was happy that they were being sent back home to Tanzania, where she hoped they would rape their sisters and mothers. She wondered where the soldiers she knew in Amin’s time were now. One had offered her money in exchange for shelter. One had proposed marriage. One had cried in her house the whole night, begging her to smuggle him to the islands in Lake Victoria and to hide him there till the end of the war. The trio had sold her goods, which she peddled on the black market, up to the time the Tanzanians captured the town. Where were those men? Her guess was that they were hiding in northern Uganda, in Sudan or even in Kenya. The sense of inviolability their friendship had given her made her realize how low she had sunk. It dawned on her that the times had changed and that her bad luck with men, which for years she thought she had overcome, was still dogging her.

Kasawo was impressed by the bungalow and the chunk of land owned by her sister. She had always wanted to own a house, a little place she could paint and decorate as she wanted. She greatly admired Serenity’s sense of vision: buying this land and building this house just in time. Many people who had made money in Amin’s time were now languishing in poverty because they had foolishly believed that Amin would be in power forever and had not saved anything for a rainy day. She, for one, could have built a big house with the money she had made off the black market, but she kept procrastinating. Now she felt ashamed that she was still renting the same place after a dozen years.

Kasawo was struck by the bronze plaque depicting the legend of Romulus and Remus. It had acquired more meaning here. On the dining table was a plastic bottle made in the likeness of the Virgin, with crown, heart on the chest, clouds and all. She felt envious of her sister, who had been to Rome, Lourdes, Jerusalem and many other places in the Bible. The girl they used to call Nakaza, Nakaze, Nakazi, Nakazo, Nakazu! Time had not diminished Padlock’s achievement. Aunt Kasawo kept thinking that Padlock was lucky not only with men, but also with children and money.

The place was run like a military barracks. The courtyard was very clean; the children obeyed their mother’s orders without question and knew exactly what was expected of them. One after the other, they all knelt down and welcomed their visiting maternal aunt properly. They did their homework quietly, and Kasawo noticed that their grades were very good, even the relatively dim shitter’s. As she watched her sister wield the scepter, she remembered the conversation they had had about aging parents years ago when Lwandeka was abducted. Padlock was an exception: age had not undermined her disciplinarian tendencies in the least. If the last-born child was going to get any leeway in comparison with the firstborn, it was not going to be by much. Padlock still used the guava switch with grim determination and was not above sending a defaulter to bed on an empty stomach.

A beneficiary of parental laxity, who at the eldest shitter’s age was drinking alcohol, keeping late hours and refusing to mess up her hot-comb-straightened hair by carrying water pots on it, Kasawo could hardly believe her eyes. This kind of cast-iron discipline she had not seen in a long time, and she wondered how her sister was able to keep it up.

As a guest, Kasawo did not have to do anything but eat and sleep. The shitters surprised her with the quality of their cooking, and if she had not seen the two boys peeling the bananas, thatching them in banana leaves and preparing the fire, she would have credited her sister for the meal. The shitters were at her beck and call, and warmed her bathwater whenever she wanted it. In the afternoon, she went for short walks. There had been no looting here, and the shops were running. She felt tempted to step inside the dispensary and get a quick examination by a civilian doctor. It was a whim, for she was all right and the pain had long gone. Kasawo got irritated by the fine Kiswahili spoken by the liberators. It reminded her too much of the decoy who had led her into the trap. She wished she could blow up the shop building the liberators used for military detachments.

The most significant change in her since the ordeal was her tendency to blow up over little things and to belabor insignificant points. If, say, there was too much salt in the food, she would go on and on about it the whole day, unearthing obscure plots to starve her by killing her appetite, dehydrating her and giving her ulcers.

Aunt Kasawo went over the why-me aspect of the rape so many times that she almost drove the stoic ex-nun crazy. It resulted in a visible hardening of feelings on the latter’s part. Two opposing forces had met. Padlock had God and Catholic stoicism in her bag, while Kasawo had only her stubbornness, her anger, a vague sense of justice and the belief that the exorcist would solve her psychological problems. Padlock devised the system of letting her sister belabor the whys for something like thirty minutes and then cut in with an unhelpful “It is God’s will.” This had the adverse effect of infuriating Kasawo and making her more recalcitrant and strident. Kasawo eventually got the impression that her sister thought she had deserved the violation. Padlock viewed the deed as part of a divine plan to save Kasawo’s soul. Kasawo felt that she was being listened to but not heard, that her sister was like a know-all doctor ready with the cure before the patient even opened his mouth. She was enraged by the realization that her sister was viewing her as a potential convert to conservative Catholicism. Padlock was talking to her in the patronizing tones of a church elder, and it made her feel like hollering. She was now sure that Padlock believed herself far better than Kasawo.

She was not wrong. After her twelfth child, Padlock had given up even the little sex she used to have, and felt that she was better than all the people around who smeared themselves with devil snot. Secure inside the armor of die-hard Catholicism, she climbed up onto a pedestal, from which she looked down on those wallowing in sins of the flesh. Now firmly installed on her puritanical throne, she felt it was her duty to judge the sinners in the hope that they would cling to the tentacles of her verdict and personal example and pull themselves up from the cesspit of their doomed lives. As Kasawo retold her woeful tale, divulging details of her ensnarement, violation and abandonment; as she recounted her struggle to get up and crawl out of the dungeon of defilement; as she gave details of how she lay half-dead in the path, Padlock felt sublime delight coursing through her. At her feet lay the body of a sinner stripped naked, crawling out of the sty of sin into the path of salvation.