"Fathers and Sons"

Part Two
@ Two Men

I once tried to leave her. Madeline. Before she became my wife, before we were married, before she was Tezira and Aaron’s mother, I tried to leave her. I was a week away from her. There has only been one other week that has been as bad as that week. That was the week my mother was ill in hospital, in dire need of an operation, the doctors waiting for her blood pressure to stabilize before they could operate, the hospital bill each evening higher and I had no money, no job, the golden evening sun at my back each evening, pleading at the Mengo hospital gate with the guard to let me in. I was never less a man than in that week.

I could not leave her. I wanted to leave her. Even before Madeline accepted to go out with me on our first date, I already had decided that I would leave her too. I thought I would leave her. My friends used to call her Marge the Barge because she was so fat. Is so fat. I used to laugh the loudest then. I had to. I was the first one to call her that. I had lasted a week away from her. It was the week I started drinking again, a year after I had tried to stop, two years before Mustafa died, knocked dead crossing a road, drunk. It was when I tried to leave Madeline that I discovered my heart had played a trick on me.

Tezira is like Madeline. Her eyes. Their eyes. Their eyes won’t leave me alone. Until Madeline, I could never understand why some men cannot not bear to tell a woman to her face that they are leaving. I had not told Madeline I was leaving her. I snuck away that week. And snuck back. I did not sleep many nights after that week. But it was better than the nights and days of the week when I was away.

Tezira was born the week my mother had her hernia operation. A day after. In the same hospital. Mengo. Their eyes…I could not get away from their eyes. Grandmother, mother and my daughter. Their eyes lying in their hospital beds. Their eyes on me. My left palm had throbbed for a week from gripping the iron headrest of Madeline’s bed so hard watching her and Tezira sleep, the morning she gave birth to her. Unable to sleep even after the doctor told me they were fine now. He did not expect any more complications.

Snapping open that green can of Heineken in the drinks aisle of Good Prices Supermarket on the afternoon when my mother came out of surgery, I had thought of Mustafa. She was in pain, she was delirious, she kept begging me for water I could not give her but she was going to live; after the operation. The snap of that Heineken was freedom.

“They get you through the women,” I remember Mustafa saying. It was at the mortuary that it had first occurred to me that maybe Charity had been Mustafa’s lover. Her distress when we saw his body on the white gurney had shocked me. With a wail she had tried to fling herself on him, cover his bloodied body with her own. Shrieking, hands slapping the restraining elderly mortuary attendant’s face, she had meant it. We had to buy the mortuary attendant new spectacles. Her grief smote. He should not have died the way he died. Charity would not be allowed to come to his funeral.

Tezira is not upto my knee when I’m seated but when she looks at me the way she is looking at me, demanding I play Snakes and Ladders with them, I cannot refuse her. “Alright! Get the board!” I say hoisting her onto my knee, Aaron running for it. I did not want a son but it was when Aaron was born that my mother and Madeline became friends. I see me in Aaron sometimes. He was such a quiet baby. An easy birth too. After Tezira, Madeline said that if she is to ever give birth again, she is praying for a boy. I hope it’s a girl.

“She’s not the one who doesn’t want to have my children,” Mustafa had said to me when we were standing outside the vestry on the chilly mid morning after Aaron’s baptism at Rubaga Cathedral. We were all going for a lunch party at our house then and I had been waiting for Madeline who with a heavily swathed Aaron were at the center of a laughing group of her friends from school and work just outside the main entrance of the cathedral. My mother and her parents were talking to the priest on the stairs. We were going to use Mustafa’s Carib because then I did not have a car. Hajjat Kasule, his wife, driving later to our house in Mustafa’s silver BMW. I had wanted Mustafa to be Aaron’s godfather but it had not been possible.

“I can’t have a son like you. I cut my things.” He had waited for our hired photographer to wander away to Madeline’s group, “It was a long time ago. There were no condoms.” I had watched Madeline turn to call her parents and my mother for a group photo, Aaron held against her hip, receiving with wide-eyed patience and a woolly white skullcap almost toppling off his head the coos from Madeline’s friends. “I never thought I would one day be able to afford a child. I never thought I might want children. It’s good you did not listen to me. Children are not expensive, life is!” and he had laughed. Ten years ago.

Aaron takes any game seriously. He relishes winning. Tezira simply likes playing. Gets bored easily if she loses too many times, but if she wants to win, she wins. Madeline named Aaron, I named Tezira. Aaron was conceived the week after I came back after I had tried to leave, on a Wednesday afternoon in her childhood bedroom when we should have been in class, when unexpectedly there was no one home at her parents’. The giggling maid with two hundred shillings from me, happily going to a kibanda down the road to leave us alone. It was the afternoon my life changed forever. My day of deviations. I knew she was pregnant right after.

Did I kill my father? Yes, I killed my father.

TO BE CONTINUED…

"When They Catch You"

This story is for Ishta, a girl who asked me for more, and wouldn't stop.

@Two Men

“When they catch you, and they will catch you, they never let you go,” He used to tell me, his short stubby fingers with stained nails caressing the neck of his Pilsner, “They caught me.” His wet fingers would stop short of the blue Pilsner sticker and slide their way up the neck of the bottle again. Seated opposite him, I was glad for the afternoon beer, wishing it was evening though, because then I had scruples about drinking beer in the afternoon in Kisenyi.

He knew about my scruples. The first time he had suddenly suggested we skip one of our afternoon lectures and go have a drink, my startled, “Now?” had made him throw his head back, belly nearly popping out of his untidily tucked in white shirt, laugh so hard that the other students lounging under trees and leaning against the Faculty of Gender Studies had turned around to look at us. He had told me then, as we walked toward the university’s main gate, my long steps slowed down to his panting short ones, why he liked to drink any chance he got, and why afternoon drinking was his favourite. Indifferent to the gaping students with one ear phone in their ears, fiddling with large screened fancy phones like video games we were walking through that set my heart racing.

“My lips are not red for nothing; my eyes are not this colour because I was born with them like that. There was a time when the only drink I could get were the ones I made myself when I was so poor I was not ashamed to steal beggars’ clothes. No one can tell me I don’t deserve my drinks and to drink when I want, can they?” he had a loud, shrill voice, but it was a friend of his at the funeral who had told me that I was the only person Mustafa ever talked to like he was questioning himself.

I wonder if they have got me. It does not feel like they have. But I wonder if when they get you, you never realize that they have got you because you’re too busy thinking you are happy or maybe you’re too occupied in seeing to everyone’s happiness, you never get a chance to think, be alone and see. But it does not feel that way. God, I hope am not deluding myself.

Nakato’s Bar was the rich man’s bar in Kisenyi. It was not Nakato’s Bar anymore when Mustafa started bringing me here. She was dead by then. But it had been her bar though and I had been told how she had started it up and how she had died. Mustafa was part of her story but whenever I asked him about her, he became silent, a rare thing, and turned his face away from me, fingers pulling at his lower lip. He would never talk about her but this was the only bar he ever brought me to when we came drinking in Kisenyi, where he was happiest, always sitting in a special inner room that doubled as a room for an hour lovers. A small room with brown threadbare couches, low wooden coffee table so stained with drinks that it was turning black and two exits.

Mustafa loved this room in the afternoon, downloading his stout softening bulk into the corner of the sofa that was opposite one of the locked metal doors so the sunlight from the window through the dirty white lace curtains could flood his face. Sighing, undoing the button of his trouser. Charity, Nakato’s younger sister, grinning, asking us what we wanted, knowing Mustafa would explode, “But Kyality! Upto now you’re still asking us what we want? This woman is difficult!” he would shove away the coffee table with his foot against the sofa opposite us, the sight of it inducing more outbursts, “Naye when you’re getting us a new coffee table? This one is now only good for firewood! You shouldn’t be complaining that you have no newspapers to light the sigiri, you have this! I’m not bringing you anymore newspapers!”

“When they catch you, at first you think it is you who has caught them!” Mustafa would say, slashing the air between us with a fierce sword finger, “That is their magezi! They make you think they’re the ones who are giving up, kumbe, it is you!”

He would drop back into the hollow of his corner, rubbing his gleaming clean shaven head against the wall, as if before his eyes, on the askew coffee table, it was all happening again before him. He next short sip he would take from his Pilsner, bottle lifted off the dusty, cracked cement floor, would seem resentful; the bitterness of beer on his face like he was a first time drinker. “But you will see, you will see yourself. You and I are not different.”

It had seemed then like we were so different. Not to me. To everyone who knew us then. I liked to think that I was going to be the man he failed to become. That I was the better version of him. Tezira’s joyful screaming comes pealing through the house to me in this room like a bounding beach netball. Aaron is teasing her with our ten month old kitten again. My daughter and my son. They will soon be climbing all over me, pleading for a game of snakes & ladders and my pirate haaarrr!

It was when he was drunkest that Mustafa would bring his face close to me, voice lowered, saying, “They get you through the women.” I used to wonder if he was talking about Nakato or his wife whose photograph was in The New Vision and The Monitor newspapers nearly every week at some NGO gifting. I used to wonder why we could not just get drunk, why he would not get drunk like I was drunk then, leave me be, but he would shake me awake, spilling his life’s wisdom, “All our stories are women’s stories even if we do not like to admit it. They are!” I still see his eyes, saying that.

Tezira is in the room, laughing, “Daddy, snakes! Daddy, snakes!”

TO BE CONTINUED….

"I Start Again"