She was just sixteen, and still under her mother’s wing, when William Wamala first came to town with his bright bolts of cloth. He was a trader from the North, and he’d come across the vast gray plane of the lake so early in the morning he was like a ghost rising from the mist. Picture him there, out on the lake, the cylinders of rich cotton batik hanging limp over the prow of the invisible boat as if suspended in ether, no movement discernible but for the distant dip and rise of his arms, and all the birds crying out, startled, while the naked statue of his torso levitated above the still and glassy surface. The fishermen were the first to see him coming. They were the eyes of the village, just as the dogs were its nose, and as they cast their nets for dagaa they raised their palms in silent greeting.
Miriam—she was the only child of Ann Namirimu and the late Joseph Namirimu, who had been struck by lightning and scorched out of this existence when she was an infant strapped to her mother’s back—was at first unaware that the trader had arrived in town with a new season’s patterns. She was asleep at such an hour, crushed under the weight of her sixteen years and the disco dance she’d attended the night before with her Aunt Abusaga and Uncle Milton Metembe. Uncle Milton’s special friend, Gladys Makuma, had been there, and he danced with her all night while Aunt Abusaga danced with Miriam and a mural of boys and men painted themselves to the walls, alive only in their eyes. People were smoking and drinking beer and whiskey. The music thumped with a percussive bass, and the beat held steady except in those intervals when the electricity faltered and people fell laughing into each other’s arms. It was like Heaven, a picture-book Heaven, and Miriam, asleep, lived only to go back there and dance till her feet got so heavy she couldn’t lift them.
Coffee woke her. And griddle cakes. And the crowing of fugitive cocks. Her mother, richly draped in last year’s kanga and exuding a smell of warm sheets and butter, was fixing breakfast preparatory to her departure to the government office where she worked as a secretary. Miriam got up, and her dog got up with her. She ate with her mother in silence, sitting at the polished wooden table as if she were chained to it.
When her mother had left for work, Miriam dug a pack of cigarettes from an innocent-looking fold of her bedclothes and stuck one experimentally in the corner of her mouth. They were Top Club cigarettes (“For Men Whose Decisions Are Final”) and they’d been slipped into her hand at the disco dance, right there in the middle of the floor, while she was rolling her hips and cranking her shoulders in synch with the beat. And who had slipped them to her, unlooked for and unasked for, as a kind of tribute? A boy she’d known all her life, James Kariango, who was eighteen years old and as tall and wide-shouldered as any man. She felt a hand touch hers as everyone moved in a blur of limbs through sweat that was like a wall, the fumes of whiskey rose from the makeshift bar, and the shadowy blue clouds of smoke hung like curtains around imaginary windows, and there he was, dancing with a woman she’d never seen before and eclipsing his left eye in a sly wink.
She had never smoked a cigarette. Her mother wouldn’t allow it. Cigarettes were for common people, and Ann Namirimu was no common person—educated in the capital and sister to one of the president’s top advisers—and neither was her daughter. Her daughter was a lady, one of only eight girls in the village to go on to high school, and she would conduct herself like a lady at all times or suffer the rolling thunder and sudden strikes of her mother’s wrath, and, while Aunt Abusaga and Uncle Milton Metembe might have thought a disco dance appropriate for a young lady, Ann Namirimu certainly did not, and it was against her better judgment that Miriam had been allowed to go at all. Still, once Miriam had stuck the cigarette in her mouth and studied herself in the mirror from various angles, she couldn’t help putting a match to the tip of it and letting the sweet stinging smoke invade her mouth and swell out her cheeks until she exhaled like a veteran. She never took the smoke into her lungs, and she didn’t really like the taste of it, but she smoked the cigarette down to a nub, watching herself in the mirror all the while, and then she went out into the yard and carefully buried the remnant where her mother wouldn’t find it.
She fed her dog, swept the mats, and dressed for school in a dream oriented around the pulse of disco music and the movement of liberated bodies. Then she went off to school, barefoot, carrying her shoes in one hand and her satchel of books and papers in the other, thinking she might just have a peek at the market on her way.
It was early still, the sun long in the trees and all the striped and spotted dogs of the town stretching and yawning in the street, but it might as well have been noon in the marketplace. Everyone was there. Farmwives with their yams and tomatoes arranged in baskets and laid out on straw mats, a man selling smoked colobus monkey and pangas honed to a killing edge, the fishermen with their fresh-caught tilapia and tiger fish, the game and cattle butchers and the convocation of flies that had gathered to taste the wet sweetness of the carcasses dangling from metal hooks. And the crafts merchants, too—the women selling bright orange and yellow plastic bowls, pottery, mats and rugs and cloth. Cloth especially. And that was where Miriam found him, William Wamala, the smiling, handsome, persuasive young man and budding entrepreneur from the North, and his fine print cotton cloth, his Juliana cloth.
For that was what they christened it that morning, the crowd gathered around his stall that was nothing more than a rickety table set up at the far end of the marketplace where no one bothered about anything: Juliana cloth. William Wamala stood behind the table with his measuring tape and shears and the bolts of cloth in a blue so deep you fell into it, with slashes of pale papaya and bright arterial red for contrast. “How much for the Juliana cloth?” one woman asked, and they all knew the name was right as soon as she’d pronounced it. Because this print, unlike any they’d seen before, didn’t feature flowers or birds or palm fronds or the geometric patterns that had become so popular in the last few years but a name—a name in English, a big, bold name spelled out in the aforementioned colors that ran in crazy zigzags all over the deep-blue field. “Juliana,” it read. “Juliana, Juliana, Juliana.”
Miriam wanted the cloth as soon as she saw it. Everyone wanted it. Everyone wanted to be the first to appear in the streets or at the disco dance in a kanga cut from this scintillating and enticing cloth. But it was expensive. Very expensive. And exclusive to William Wamala. Who proved ultimately to be a very understanding and affectionate young man, willing to barter and trade if shillings were unavailable, accepting pots of honey, dried dagaa, beer, whiskey, and cigarettes in payment, and especially, when it came to the beauties of the town, exchanging his Juliana cloth for what might be considered their most precious commodity, a commodity that cost them nothing but pleasure in the trading.
When Miriam stopped in the market two mornings later, he was there still, but the crowd around him was smaller and the bolts of cloth much depleted. He sat back now in a new cane chair, his splayed feet crossed at the ankles and looming large over the scrap-strewn table, his smile a bit haggard, a beer pressed like a jewel to his lips. “Hello, Little Miss,” he crooned in a booming basso when he saw her standing there with her satchel between two fat-armed women wrapped in kangas that were as ancient as dust and not much prettier.
She looked him in the eye. There was nothing to be afraid of: Beryl Obote, fifteen and resplendent in Juliana cloth, had told her all about him, how he hummed and sang while removing a girl’s clothes and how insatiable he was, as if that very day were his last on earth. “Hello,” Miriam said, smiling widely. “I was just wondering how much the Juliana cloth is today?”
“For you?” He never even bothered to remove his feet from the table, and she could see the faintest glimmer of interest rising from the deeps of his eyes like a lonely fish, only to sink back down again into the murk. He was satiated, bloated with drink and drugs and rich food, rubbed so raw between his legs he could scarcely walk, and she was no beauty, she knew that. She made her eyes big. She held her breath. Finally, while the fat-armed women bickered over something in thin piping voices and the sun vaulted through the trees to take hold of her face, he quoted her a price. In shillings.
The first to fall ill was Gladys Makuma, Uncle Milton Metembe’s special friend. It was during the long rains in April, and many people were sick with one thing or another, and no one thought much about it at first. “Let her rest,” Miriam’s mother insisted from her long slab of an aristocrat’s face. “Give her tea with lemon and honey and an herbal broth in the evenings, and she’ll soon be on her feet again.” But Miriam’s mother was wrong.
Miriam went with Aunt Abusaga and Uncle Milton to Gladys Makuma’s neat mud-and-clapboard house to bring her beef tea and what comfort they could, and when they stepped into the yard there was Lucy Mawenzi, doyenne of the local healers, coming gray and shaken through the door. Inside was a wake, though Gladys Makuma wasn’t dead yet. Surrounded by her children, her husband, and his stone-faced sisters, she had shrunk into herself like some artifact in the dirt. All you could see of her face was nostrils and teeth, no flesh but the flesh of a mummy, and her hands on the sheets like claws. There would be no more disco-dancing for her, no more sharing a pint of whiskey with Uncle Milton Metembe in a dark boat on the dark, pitching lake. Even an optimist could see that, and Miriam was an optimist—her mother insisted on it.
With Beryl Obote, it was even worse, because Beryl was her coeval, a girl with skinny legs and saucer eyes who wore her hair untamed and had a laugh so infectious she could bring chaos to a classroom merely by opening her mouth. Miriam was coming back from the market one afternoon, the streets a soup of mud and an army of beetles crawling over every fixed surface, when she spotted Beryl in the crowd ahead of her, the Juliana cloth like the ocean come to life and her hair a dark storm brooding over it. But something was wrong. She was lurching from side to side, taking little circumscribed steps, and people were making way for her as if she were drunk. She wasn’t drunk, though when she fell to the ground, subsiding into the mud as if her legs had dissolved beneath her, Miriam saw that her eyes were as red as any drunkard’s. Miriam tried to help her up—never mind the yellow tub of matoke, rice and beans her mother had sent her for—but Beryl couldn’t find her feet, and there was a terrible smell about her. “I’m so embarrassed,” she said, and if you couldn’t smell it you could see it, the diarrhea and the blood seeping through the deep blue cloth into the fetid trodden mud.
After that everyone fell sick: the women who’d bought the Juliana cloth with their favors, their husbands, and their husbands’ special friends, not to mention all the men who had consorted with a certain barmaid at the disco—the one who wore a kanga in the blue, red, and papaya of decay. It was a hex, that was what people believed at first, a spell put on them by William Wamala, who had come all the way across the lake from the homeland of their ancestral enemies—he was a sorcerer, a practitioner of the black arts, an evil spirit in the guise of a handsome and affectionate young man. But it soon became apparent that no hex, no matter how potent and far-reaching, could affect so many. No, this was a disease, one among a host of diseases in a region surfeited with them, and it seemed only natural that they call it Juliana’s disease, after the cloth that had brought it to them.
Typically, it began with a headache and chills; then there was the loosening of the bowels and the progressive wasting. It could have been malaria or tuberculosis or marasmus, but it wasn’t. It was something new. Something no one had ever seen before, and all who caught it—women and men in their prime, girls like Beryl Obote—were eventually wrapped up in bark cloth and sent to the grave before the breath of two months’ time had been exhausted.
Uncle Milton Metembe and Aunt Abusaga contracted it at the same time, almost to the day, and Miriam moved into their house to tend them, afraid in her heart that the taint would spread to her. She cooked them soup and rice through the reek of their excrement, which flowed like stained water; she swept the house and changed their soiled sheets and read to them from the comic papers and the Bible. At night, the rats rustled in the thatch, and the things of the dark raised their voices in an unholy howl, and Miriam fell away deep into herself and listened to her aunt and uncle’s tortured breathing.
The doctors came then from America, France, and England, white people in white coats, and a few who were almost white and even stranger for that, as if they’d been incompletely dipped into the milk of white life. They drew blood like vampires, vial after vial, till the sick and weary trembled at the sight of them, and still there was no cause or cure in sight, the corpses mounting, the orphans wailing; then one day the doctors went away and the government made an announcement over the radio and in the newspapers. Juliana’s disease, the government said, was something new indeed, very virulent and always fatal, and it was transmitted not through cloth or hexes but through sexual contact. Distribution of condoms was being made possible by immediate implementation in every town and village, through the strenuous efforts of the government, and every man and woman, every wife and girl and special friend, should be sure of them every time sexual union was achieved. There was no other way and no other hope, short of monkhood, spinsterhood, or abstinence.
The news rocked the village. It was unthinkable. They were poor people who didn’t have theaters or supermarkets or shiny big cars for diversion—they had only a plate of dagaa, a glass of beer, and sex, and every special friend had a special friend and there was no stopping it, even on pain of death. Besides which, the promised condoms never arrived, as if any true man or sensitive woman would allow a cold loop of latex rubber to come between them and pleasure in any event. People went on, almost defiantly, tempting fate, challenging it, unshakable in their conviction that though the whole world might wilt and die at their feet, they themselves would remain inviolate. The disco was as crowded as ever, the sales of beer and palm wine skyrocketed, and the corpses were shunted in a steady procession from sickbed to grave. Whatever else it might have been, it was a time of denial.
Miriam’s mother was outraged. To her mind, the town’s reaction was nothing short of suicidal. Through her position at the government office she had been put in charge of the local campaign for safe sex, and it was her job to disseminate the unwelcome news. Though the condoms remained forever only forthcoming because of logistical problems in the capital, Miriam’s mother typed a sheet of warning and reproduced it a thousand times, and a facsimile of this original soon sagged damply from every tree and post and hoarding in town. “Love Carefully,” it advised, and “Zero Grazing,” a somewhat confusing command borrowed from one of the innumerable local agricultural campaigns. In fine print, it described the ravages of this very small and very dangerous thing, this virus (an entity for which there was no name in the local dialect), and what it was doing to the people of the village, the countryside, and even the capital. No one could have missed these ubiquitous sheets of warning and exhortation, and they would have had to be blind in any case to remain unaware of the plague in their midst. And deaf, too. Because the chorus of lament never ceased, day or night, and you could hear it from any corner of the village and even out in the mists of the lake—a thin, steady insectile wail broken only by the desperate beat of the disco.
“Suicide,” Miriam’s mother snarled over breakfast one morning, while Miriam, back now from her aunt and uncle’s because there was no longer any reason to be there, tried to bury her eyes in her porridge. “Irresponsible, filthy behavior. You’d think everybody in town had gone mad.” The day was still fresh, standing fully revealed in the lacy limbs of the yellow-bark acacia in the front yard. Miriam’s dog looked up guiltily from the mat in the corner. Somewhere a cock crowed.
A long minute ticked by, punctuated by the scrape of spoon and bowl, and then her mother rose angrily from the table and slammed her cup into the wash-up tub. All her fury was directed at Miriam, as if fury alone could erect a wall between an adolescent girl and James Kariango of the nicotine-stained fingers. “No better than animals in the bush,” she hissed, stamping across the floorboards with hunched shoulders and ricocheting eyes, talking to the walls, to the dense, mosquito-hung air, “and no shred of self-restraint or respect even.”
Miriam wasn’t listening. Her mother’s rhetoric was as empty as a bucket in a dry well. What did she know? Sex to her mother was a memory. “That itch,” she called it, as if it were something you caught from a poisonous leaf or a clump of nettles, but she never itched and as far as Miriam could see she’d as soon have a hyena in the house as a special friend. Miriam understood what her mother was telling her, she heard the fear seeping through the fierceness of that repetitive and concussive voice, and she knew how immortally lucky she was that William Wamala hadn’t found her pretty enough to bother with. She understood all that and she was scared, the pleading eyes of Beryl Obote, Aunt Abusaga, Uncle Milton Metembe, and all the rest unsettling her dreams and quickening her pace through the market, but when James Kariango crept around back of the house fifteen minutes later and raised two yellowed fingers to his lips and whistled like an innocuous little bird, she was out the door before the sweat had time to sprout under her arms.
The first time he’d come around, indestructible with his new shoulders, jaunty and confident and fingering a thin silver chain at his throat, Miriam’s mother had chased him down the front steps at the point of a paring knife, cursing into the trees till every head in the neighborhood was turned and every ear attuned. Tending Aunt Abusaga and Uncle Milton Metembe had in its way been Miriam’s penance for attracting such a boy—any boy—and she’d been safe there among the walking dead and the weight of their sorrows. But now she was home and the months had gone by and James Kariango, that perfect specimen, was irresistible.
Her mother had gone off to work. Her dog was asleep. The eyes of the world were turned to the market and the laundry and a hundred other things. It was very, very early, and the taste of James Kariango’s lips was like the taste of the sweetest fruit, mango and papaya and the sweet dripping syrup of fresh-cut pineapple. She kissed him there, behind the house, where the flowers grew thick and the lizards scuttered through the dirt and held their tails high in sign of some fleeting triumph. And then, after a long while, every pore of her body opening up like a desert plant at the first hint of rain, she led him inside.
He was very solemn. Very gentle. Every touch was electric, his fingers plugged into some internal socket, his face glowing like the ball at the disco. She let him strip off her clothes and she watched in fear and anticipation as he stepped out of his shorts and revealed himself to her. The fear was real. It was palpable. It meant the whole world and all of life. But then he laid her down in the familiar cradle of her bed and hovered over her in all of his glory, and, oh, it felt so good.
(1997)