12.

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

The eighth hour of the day, two o’ clock in the afternoon, was approaching. This was the time when the Ganda committed the dead to earth and turned their backs on them. Kamu’s coffin was carried through the front door then around the house to the path that led to the family cemetery. Mourners fell behind the coffin and walked out of the house. Miisi gripped Kusi’s hand. His wife and sister wailed loudly but the rest of the mourners bowed their heads in silence.

Miisi, against Kusi’s advice, had insisted on examining Kamu’s remains. He did so at that moment of wrapping the dead when all mourners are sent out of the house and the body remains with only the heads of the clan, when all the synthetic objects, clothing, jewelry, hair extensions, or weaves are removed from the body—so that it can go back to earth the way it came into the world—and it is then wrapped in barkcloth. One of Kamu’s front teeth, after the milk teeth fell out, had arrived before the other and grew so wide that his siblings had nicknamed him “Axe.” When the other tooth arrived, it squeezed into a small gap upsetting the arrangement of his teeth. Miisi hoped that this would help him identify Kamu.

He was therefore surprised to find the real Kamu in the coffin, the whole of him—one eye swollen, puffed lip, nose and ears plugged with cotton and the head bandaged—but he was as whole as if he had died the day before. Miisi could not believe that the Mulago Hospital that he knew—corrupt and indifferent to human suffering—could have so preserved the body of an unknown person. He was both glad and heartbroken. It was Kamu in the coffin but it meant that Kamu was truly dead. Miisi stood up and stared, trying to arrange his feelings. He should have felt relief first and then heartbreak but he had a sense of floating. After the death of his daughter the previous year, he had thought that he would never be able to take the death of another child. Yet here he was staring at Kamu’s bandaged head without clear emotions.

“He is my son,” he said to the clan leader.

“All right then, step outside now, leave him to us.”

Now he understood why Kusi did not want him to see the corpse. She had lied about robbers. That attack on Kamu had been sustained; robbers hit to disable so they can get away. Kamu was targeted. It was premeditated murder. He was now sure that Kusi, for all her “I don’t know what happened,” had not told him the whole truth surrounding Kamu’s death. Apparently, she had spent the week leading up to Easter trying to contact Kamu so that they could come to the reunion together. Failing to raise him on the phone, she drove to Nabugabo Road where Kamu sold hardware. The men on the street had said, “Kamu Kintu? Wuuwi, he’s long gone.”

Kusi had said that she found out that day, in Bwaise, that Kamu had been attacked on the night of the 5th of January as he returned home but she did not know why. Frightened, the woman who lived with him at the time had fled. This did not make sense to Miisi. Why would Kamu’s woman be frightened? Why did she not try to find Kamu’s people? But all Kusi had said was that the woman probably did not know where to find them. When Kusi found her, the woman had told her of the people she suspected of killing Kamu but when Kusi turned up to interrogate the men, she found them dead. That was on Good Friday.

“Are they the same councillors in the Bwaise massacre?” Miisi had asked.

“I think so.” But Kusi could not look straight in his eyes. “You never know what people get up to—local councillors in the day, thugs in the night.”

Now, as he walked behind Kamu’s coffin, realization crept on him. Kusi had killed the men in Bwaise. She would not flinch at administering her sense of justice. Miisi waited for the whole horror of what Kusi had done to overwhelm him. Instead, a spark of satisfaction with her swift execution of justice shot through his heart and his mouth twitched. That was when horror gripped him, at the surge of pride and satisfaction. His decay had set in, Miisi realized. Other people would call it becoming numb but to Miisi it was decaying and to decay was to die.

Miisi remembered the fifth of January clearly. While Kamu lay dead somewhere, the bees saw it fit to lodge in his house. He had laughed at Kato saying that dead bees announced death. Why were the gods so good at displaying omens? Surely if they stopped tragedies, there would be no need for omens?

At two o’ clock, when Kamu’s coffin was lowered into the grave, Miisi’s grip on reality slackened. A new reality was slowly overwriting the existing one. It had happened before. Miisi had gallstone problems, a doctor friend recommended codeine, but when he swallowed the two prescribed tablets he did not feel any relief. After two hours he took another two, which made him sleep fitfully. At one point when he woke up, the floor in his bedroom was a lawn. It was frightening to realize that eyes could lie.

Now, in his mind, the reality of Kamu being buried was like thin white paint. But a new reality, a thick red paint, was spreading over it. Miisi closed his eyes to clear his vision, but it stayed. He had a sense of floating in two worlds. In one, his wife was crying out to Kamu, which meant that he was awake and that Kamu was really dead. In the other, the coffin being lowered held his father’s body and Miisi was a child. There were cousins all around but the bush was Kiyiika, which meant he was dreaming. Miisi turned and saw Kusi standing close to him. Recognizing her, he grabbed her hand and the invading reality fled. He recognized the residents—Kaleebu was in charge of the burial, Nyago and his wife minded the grandchildren, the house was behind him rising above the matooke plantations, and the ten graves of concrete slabs before them were his children. Miisi heaved a sigh of relief; he had almost lost his mind.

Miisi is walking away from the grave. He is relieved that his father has been committed to the underworld. Mourners are streaming back to the house. Miisi whispers to the woman holding his hand, “I’m lucky he’s dead. I won’t be sacrificed.”

“What?” The woman is puzzled.

“Shhh, keep your voice down. He sacrificed my older brother, Baale. I was next.”

“Father?”

“Shhh, they’ll hear you!”

“Father, it’s me, Kusi.”

Miisi hesitates, then shakes his head. “How can I be your father? I am just a child.”

The woman becomes agitated. She leads him to a double-story house. Mourners stare. Others are still crying for his father.

“Don’t cry for him,” Miisi shouts at them. “He was going to kill me too.” Another woman, old, joins them and leads him through the back door, through a dining area, and up a staircase.

“Where are you taking me? Are you in league with him?”

“No, he’s dead,” the old woman says, but the woman who had been holding his hand is crying.

Miisi smiles in relief. The old woman is joined by another old woman. They lead him up the stairs to a bedroom at the end of the corridor. As they enter the bedroom, Miisi sees his father’s shirts and trousers in the wardrobe. He panics.

“This is his bedroom.”

The women turn onto a balcony and into the room on the right. It is small; the bed is made up with white sheets. He collapses on the bed and realizes that he is too exhausted to keep his eyes open.

Miisi wakes up in a dark room. It is night and the house is silent. He does not know how he got into this room. He sits up and sees a woman sleeping on the floor. A guard. He has been abducted. His father must have brought him here to sacrifice him.

Carefully, he picks up his clothes, steps over the woman, and slips out of the room. The corridor and stairs are familiar but downstairs is a puzzle. The house is dead. There are people sleeping everywhere on the floor but no one wakes up as he walks past. Miisi lifts the heavy bar across the door, then opens the latch and runs out of the house heading toward a hedge. He looks back: he has never known a double-storied shrine. He ducks through the bushes under a mango tree and then runs as fast as he can.