14.

Wednesday, April 14, 2004

The thanksgiving party with the locals lasted throughout Monday night. Most clan members left Kiyiika on Tuesday morning but by Wednesday afternoon when Isaac wound everything up some cousins, especially the elderly ones, still lingered. Isaac promised the local councillors that as soon as the elders found time to meet and come up with a plan for Nnakato’s site they would be informed. All the clan elders had left earlier on Tuesday to attend the burial of Mzei Miisi’s son in Bulemeezi. But then at midday, Kalema had rung to say that Mzei Kanani had died and Isaac knew that from Bulemeezi, the elders would go to Bukesa to keep Kalema company during the vigil. Bweeza had already taken Suubi home. Isaac sighed. The medium had warned them: Ntwire was leaving, but he was not going empty-handed.

As Isaac drove through Buddu, he tried to maintain the sense of elation of the weekend. He had only been in the county for a week, but the landscape was familiar—Buddu felt as if it had been his home county all his life. But then Masaka Town receded from his rearview mirror and the euphoria started to wear off. Slowly, reality began to crystallize. The reunion had been a screen behind which he had hidden. With Masaka and Nyendo Towns now behind him, the screen was falling away. As o Lwera’s desolation rushed toward him, he had no option but to contemplate the future he was driving into. He glanced over at Kizza. He lay back in the seat dreamy-eyed, perhaps falling asleep, perhaps regretting that the numerous playmates the reunion had brought were gone.

After Lukaya, a town in o Lwera, Isaac became peculiarly aware of the oncoming traffic. As the vehicles drove past, the noise of the engines seemed to cut right through him. He was aware of the mad run of their tires. The very speed of the vehicles seemed so close that he could touch the danger. Some cars had extended bonnets, yet the taxis, which were speedy and light on the ground, had no bonnets at all. Coaches charged like bull elephants, as if the roads belonged to them alone, yet they carried ridiculously overloaded rooftop luggage racks that would easily topple them in a curve. Family cars were less intimidating but once they came level with Isaac, he looked at the passengers and wondered who was waiting for them at home.

He liked lorries; their growl was no-nonsense. They had single front tires and the drivers were elevated twice as high as his truck. They did not have much of a bonnet for a buffer but the fact that the drivers were elevated so high was reassuring. He started to look out for lorries, especially Tatas, which were used by the army, the articulated ones and those with trailers.

After Kayabwe, Isaac became impatient. Lorries were scarce on the road; perhaps merchandise transporters traveled at night. Still there would be one or two on the road soon, he told himself. He first saw one with potential as he drew to Mpigi Town. He accelerated. Four hundred meters away from him, the lorry slowed down and turned off the road. Then he was in Mpigi Town and running out of road distance. He slowed down so much that cars behind him hooted indignantly as they overtook him. He came up to the rise in Nsangi and saw, coming below, a lorry with a trailer. He decided that he was not going to look at the occupants. He realized too late after glancing at Kizza that he shouldn’t have. Luckily, Kizza was asleep. As he came down the incline, Isaac accelerated. He did not need to because the incline seemed to pull the truck down. As he came down into the valley, a long hoot came from the lorry. The sound triggered the image of the trains in South Africa, then the train tracks, then the room he trained in, then his grandmother saying that certificates don’t rot they just collect dust, Mr. Kintu loved cakes, Sasa’s deejay clothes on a hanger . . .

He lay on the road. A lot of feet were running around him.

“Tie the wound on the head.”

Isaac’s head moved of its own accord, no matter how hard he tried to keep it still, it moved as if it were not attached to him. He did not feel it.

A voice shouted, “Stay down.”

That voice was in a dream.

“Omwana.”

“The child is fine. Stay down.”

“Omwana.”

“He was luckier than you. The car threw him right through the windscreen into the swamp.”

“Omwana.”

“Owange,” the voice called. “Bring the child here. His father will not stay still on the ground until he sees him.”

“That is shock speaking,” the other voice said.

“Omwana,” Isaac said again.

Kizza’s head came into view. His hair shimmered in the sun. Isaac looked again: Kizza’s head was covered in little grains of sparkling glass. He wanted to rebuke him for playing with glass. There were small grazes on his forehead. His knees were covered in mud. Isaac tried to sit up, to ask Kizza why he was so dirty. Kizza cried half-heartedly. Isaac held Kizza’s hand as he lay back. He thought, I have spoiled this boy! He is crying for nothing, but he held onto Kizza’s hand tight because he wanted to sleep and he had to hold his son’s hand. He closed his eyes but the voices around him would not let him rest. He opened his eyes and looked around. There was shock on people’s faces when they looked at him. He felt incredibly heavy. Then it felt cold on his right temple as if cold air was blowing just on that spot. He raised his hand to feel it. It was wet. He looked at his hand and saw blood. That was when he got frightened that he was going to die. He now felt that his head had been tied. He lifted his hand and touched a cloth. He gave up because his hand was heavy; he lay down.

“Yii the rich are not human bannange: none of the cars will stop to take them to hospital!”

“Kitalo kino! A person will die on the roadside because rich people won’t help.”

“You can’t blame them. You take them to hospital, police stop you to ask questions, or want money to let you go because you might have caused the accident.”

The view of the world lying on the ground was funny. People above him looked like ghosts. Voices floated above him. Cars ground the road heavily. Bicycles crunched the gravel on the sidewalks. People’s feet pata pata-ed the ground ineffectively as if they were cats. The sun was too bright. Now noise, further away, of men shouting as if they were heaving something heavy, came. “Push, put it in reverse, nyola zenno.” And then the distinct revving of his truck. Isaac came alive.

He lifted his head but the ground was a magnet. It pulled the flesh on his left temple off his face. He held his face in place so it did not pour off as he sat up. His face settled back in place once he was upright. He was dizzy and stiff but now he knew what was happening. He held Kizza in one hand. Someone stupid was still saying stay down. He looked for the revving noise but could only see the back of his truck. The truck’s nose was down in a ditch below the road. Someone must be in the driver’s seat, men must be standing in front of the truck trying to push it back into the road, but the mud made the tires, which hardly touched the ground, spin, spraying mud. The truck revved on. The men shouted. I must tell them to leave it alone, Isaac thought.

Just then, someone excited arrived. “Bring them, bring them, fast. This kind gentleman has agreed to take them to hospital.”

Isaac was helped up. Now his whole body felt as if it had been padded with weight while he lay down. They were not listening to him about the car. Someone could steal his car. He checked his pockets. His wallet was gone. So was his phone.

“I can’t find my wallet; I need to call Mother. The car. I need my mother.”

But the man thrust him toward the car and spoke over him to the driver. “Go quickly, he is getting weaker.”

It was such a big effort to speak and he was lucky someone was taking him to hospital and Kizza was next to him and Kizza must get in the car first and then he got in. One of the men—he identified himself as a Local Councillor—also got in the car. Isaac gave the local councillor his mother’s number, the digits were distinct in his mind as he said them. The man was shouting into the phone.

“Mukadde, don’t cry, your son and the boy they are fine. I am here with them. I am taking them to hospital my very self. We are heading for Mpigi Hospital Casualty. Maama don’t cry. Crying for the living is taboo.”

The LC turned to Isaac and said, “Don’t sleep. Your mother is hysterical. Say something to her,” and he held the phone close to Isaac’s ear.

“Maama,” Isaac said. “Come, please.”

As they were about to drive away a man came with an envelope and the car logbook. He threw them on Isaac’s lap through the window and said, “These were in the glove compartment. Take them with you.”

Isaac looked down and saw the results envelope.

“What about the bags?” he looked up at the man.

“Bags? Eh, eh forget those! Let’s focus on saving your life.”

As they drove away the LC shook his head and said, “Those are our people. They come to help and to help themselves.”

When Isaac opened his eyes, his mother stood above him fussing over the bedding. The room was crowded with his half-siblings looking disconsolate. He tried to sit up but every inch of him hurt. He fell asleep again.

The next time Isaac woke up he felt lighter and rested. His mother smiled, got off the chair, ran out and called, “Musawo, my patient has woken up,” and she ran back beaming.

“The doctor is coming. He told me to call him when you wake up,” she explained as she came to the bedside. “But now how do you feel yourself, inside?”

“I am fine, just weak.” He raised his hand to touch his forehead. Now his whole face hurt.

“You banged your head badly.”

The doctor walked in and shook Isaac’s hand. She smiled and said, “How do you feel, Mr. Kintu?”

“Just the wound on the head. Everything else is fine.”

“Good, good. That is very good. We can give the head some tablets to calm the pain down as we wait for the swelling to go down. We need to x-ray everything to make sure that nothing else is wrong. But before we give you any other medicine; do you have any other complications?”

“Nothing,” Isaac said. Then he remembered. “Oh, I have HIV.”

“OK,” the doctor wrote on the clipboard. “When were you diagnosed?”

Isaac sighed and moved his hands in helpless gesture. He knew that he was going to sound foolish.

“I went for the blood test but I have not—” anticipating that the doctor was going to ask: How do you know then? Isaac added quickly, “In fact the envelope with the results, it must be somewhere, I had it.”

He turned and saw it in the locker next to the bed. He passed it to the doctor without opening it.

The doctor looked at the envelope and then at him.

Isaac smiled sheepishly. “I could not bring myself to open it but you want to know so go ahead.”

The doctor unsealed the envelope wordlessly. Isaac studied her face. A strip of paper, yellow, slipped out first. The doctor looked at it. Her face was emotionless. She looked inside the envelope and retrieved two folded A4 sheets. She unfolded them and read with an impassive face. Isaac’s heart pumped like it was flooding. He felt blood in his mouth, nose, and ears. The doctor passed him the yellow strips first. The word negative caught his eyes. It was written three times in bold and in capital letters. The doctor passed him the A4 papers and looked at him with a smile. Isaac opened the large sheets but could not focus.

“Maama,” he called Nnamata who had stepped outside during the consultation.

She came in and he passed the sheets and the strips to her without a word because he was blinded by tears. Nnamata fidgeted with the slips and papers expecting the worst until the doctor put her out of her misery.

“Your son is in the clear.”

And Nnamata scowled at the sheets and then made to hug Isaac but there was nowhere to hold because he was all swollen. She embraced the doctor, rocked and thanked her over and over because she needed someone to hold on to and vent her emotions. The doctor extricated herself from Nnamata and said, “I will come back when you are composed.”

She opened the screen and closed it and Isaac and his mother cried.

Isaac was kept in Mpigi Hospital for five days. He arrived in Kampala via Mmengo. His friend, Kaaya, was driving. It was already dark. At the tipping point, where Namirembe Hill drops into a sharp decline, Isaac asked Kaaya to stop the car. He had never seen the city look so beautiful. He stepped out and crossed the road. He thrust his arms in the pockets of his jacket and stared across the valley. There was no load-shedding, when electricity was rationed, and the whole city was a garden of stars. Kampala’s hills rose and fell before him. Even at this time of the night, a sense of expectation hung over the hills. Kampala was going somewhere and he, Isaac, was going along with it. He could stay here and watch the city all night because he had forever. He thought of Kintu and tears came to his eyes. He did not believe that Kintu had made the results negative but Isaac was sure that his ancestor had swerved the truck to save him.

He remembered the moment when he rang Kaaya to tell him the good news. Kaaya had not been surprised.

“Why do you think I was pushing you to have the tests? From the sound of the symptoms you described, I suspected that Nnayiga had died of Lupus but I didn’t want to get your hopes up.”

“Lupus, is that a new disease too?”

“No,” Kaaya laughed.

“Is it contagious?”

“No, it runs in families.”

“What? So Kizza might have it!”

“Oh, Isaac! Why don’t you take a breath, recover from the accident and from the HIV anxiety, and then take on Lupus later?”

“But—”

“Nine out of ten sufferers are women. Lupus is triggered later in life. Children don’t suffer from it.”

Now Isaac turned away from the city and walked back to the car. Kaaya smiled with understanding.

“You know, Kaaya, right now you would give me the most beautiful woman in the world and pay me millions and give me an aeroplane on top but I would not stick it into her without a condom.”

Kaaya laughed out loud. “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.”

“I mean it, Kaaya. I’ve been snatched out of a crocodile’s mouth. From now on, it is me and my son. Sex is not worth it.”