Promises

@ Two Men

Like all children I was afraid of my father, then I hated him, then I loved him, was indifferent to him, and I ended up pitying him. My father is dead now and I still don’t know what I feel about him. But I feel like I know him more. I’m still trying not to become the man I think he became. I still find it just as hard to talk about him with anyone as I find it difficult to talk about Mustafa.

In the beginning when we could talk about everything, Madeline used to be able to make me talk about my father. In late nights when we lay in bed, blanket curled on the floor like a big cat in the dark, naked, Friday night music thumping outside, Madeline’s head on my chest, playing with the hair on my chest, feeling the beating heart in her growing womb on the side of my stomach, we could talk about anything; in the those first months when I was deciding I was wanted to remain with her and our child she was carrying. She wanted to know about my father. I talked to her about my father, sometimes. Haltingly, stopping often, when I did not want to remember lying sometimes, when I remembered before I could help myself, the silences stretching and we would listen to the music and she would whisper, “It won’t be like that with us, I promise.”

She would shift from her comfortable position, hoist herself up on her elbow so that she was looking down at me and begin stroking my face, sometimes wiping nascent tears and she would kiss me tenderly, gently, like she was kissing a child. Kisses so sweet I wanted more of them and she was generous with them. Then we were not talking anymore but caressing turn on spots on our bodies and I was so glad we were not talking and she was begging me, “Please enter. Honey, please!” sometimes grabbing hold of my penis to guide it in, squatting, with her buttocks rubbing against my stomach, I had never had pillow talk like that.

We used to walk around naked after, me getting water for us to drink, sometimes juice, while she washed in the bathroom and it would be her talking, the splash of water making me listen harder. I don’t know if she was as happy as I was in those months, when my small apartment was still ours alone, before Aaron and Tezira were born; before every weekend afternoon was no longer ours but was to be spent at her friend’s or my friend’s or our families’ get togethers’. I was so happy in those moments, listening to her tell me the most extraordinary of intimacies she did not think extraordinary, falling in love with her, again.

Once she said she was so glad she was pregnant because I no longer needed to wear a condom. She enjoyed herself more when I did not wear one, and the condom wearing days reminded her of another phase of our relationship when, “I was so tired of reaching for my jeans when you were flashing down the condom because you wanted me out so you could go out drinking with your friends.” My friends: Mustafa. She hated Mustafa. Mustafa knew she hated him. She used to say Mustafa had insulted her. She said that he had told her once after watching her a long time at Gaba beach when I had walked through the sand to the bar to get us fresh drinks leaving them alone, “He must be head over heels over you because you have the softest butt he has ever felt. You carry promises of great nights.”

Mustafa never denied this. I never told him he was right. About her butt, about the nights. We talked about it once; we never talked about it again, on the balcony of A1, smoking, he had laughed, “The one woman of your women I should have impressed, I did not.” It was also the evening I had told him that Madeline was pregnant; I was going to become a father because she refused to abort. He had not said then, “They’ll get you through the women.” My father had.

I had told him that I had made a girl pregnant when we were standing on the steps of Buganda Road Courts, on a Monday morning, before the rushed bustle to the Police Prison’s bus would begin, when the photographers and the newspapers had lost interest in his embezzlement case because the end seemed nowhere in sight. He had stopped walking, looked at my mother, looked at me, and it was the first time I ever heard my father speak to me with adult bitterness, “How could you do this? How could you do this, now?” His hands were handcuffed infront of him and the khaki brown uniformed prison’s officer ordered, “Mzee, don’t stop walking,” but his instruction was not gruff and I was thankful.

I was walking alongside him in the line of prisoners headed into the bus and he had turned to me one more time, “Does she want to have the baby or….”

“She’s going to have the baby, Dad.”

Prison had aged my father and I could see the first grey hairs, it had also shrunken him. But it had not taken away the voice that I remember to this day having me in a giggling heap when I was a child, the voice that addressed me at the beginning of each school term, the voice that liked to drop honesty wisdoms from the 6 O’clock Uganda Television news broadcasts before I was sent to my algebra homework and bed, the voice I had heard so many times sending people I would never know in raptures when it was broadcast in radio broadcast snippets all over the country on the most contentious issues. Prison had not taken away that voice, cracked it or changed it. It was still intact.

He had looked at me, two people away from clambering onto the Luzira Maximum Prison’s bus, and said, “You have become a man, but are you ready to become a man?”

I had replied, because I did not want him to go with a question, “Yes, Dad, I’m ready.”

I was lying. To him. To myself. To Madeline. Making a promise Madeline had not yet asked me to suggest a name to, eight months before that dawn when the night nurse pointed him out in his cot in the ward where they kept the newborn babies apart and the nurse had said it was okay to cry, Madeline still passed out in her bed from all the medicines they had pumped in her. It was the dawn I stopped being me and I begun to learn how to love my father again.

In those hours standing before Aaron’s cot, where other father’s gradually joined me to look at their own, I knew for the first time, with definite certainty, I would never leave Madeline, would never want another woman to bear my children, like my father had, I knew you stop being young the moment you give birth to another life. Looking at Aaron, turning and making baby sounds in his cot, I was unafraid. Only his judgment seemed to matter. Only his judgment seemed to matter and he was my blood and I was his blood and I did not believe he would suggest they hang me like the courts of justice of the land were suggesting they kill my father. I was certain. Looking at the baby that was him. That dawn turning into morning. Making promises of a lifetime. I knew his name, Aaron, that morning, looking at him. I was born again the morning my son was born.