"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…