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.

"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"

Where I Have Been

This will make little or no sense to you but it does to me. I used to be the writer of sad stories, I used to be the poet of longing. Sad eyes were my specialty. I knew all the windows in the neighbourhoods I used to walk in at night that would have bulbs of electricity lighting my stumbling strolls. I was the singer of frustrated desire, mystic channel of two lovers in two towns cut off for eternity.

All that is gone now.

You wonder at my silence?

I have not lost a part of me. I have been on journeys to find he who I lost when staring in the hall of mirrors, I walked with the muse of exquisite longing. She said if you it is something you must do then do it, I will only be whole when you’re whole, to whole go on your journey. So I went. To find he who I lost entranced by the muse of exquisite longing, he walked away, I went back for him.

Two people I have wished for happiness more than any others are happy. I was waiting for this without knowing, brooding Sphinx silent, uncertain if tears or laughter would rack me next. I have found him! Write happy tales now, walking around in your world, the world is young! Let me celebrate you.

I used to think loss was sadness, before you. Foolish me! There are some evenings I have had thinking about the things we talked about that still make me smile, I was not just holding your hand, we were holding each other up. You kept me walking when I thought through the rubble of these torn deserted towns; we could never reach safety again. I was more afraid than I told you. We have come through!

I’m sitting in this car facing a river deep in the night, not alone. She is here. I’m here. I’m about to tell you a happy story…

I Have Something To Declare

I have sat on dusty grounds looking puzzling out the brow of new worlds in afternoons that passed in silence. I have left behind wrinkles on stern faces that loved me and I knew to come here hoping for newness. I’m coming through the darkness, eyes squinting at the dash of light at the cave opening. I’m coming through again, dear reader!

KIM +14

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