Strange
Fruit
By Monica Arac de Nyeko
copyright 2004 Monica Arac de Nyeko
Author
Bio
Click here to send comments
Click here if you'd like to exchange
critiques
This
story shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing - April 2004
~
Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Billie Holiday 1939
~
It’s evening in my dream. The Kitgum sun has disappeared behind the hills. Dry leaves crash under my bare feet as I race among the yaa trees at the foot of Kidi Guu hills, looking for Mwaka. Burnt tree stumps and thorn bushes let me through their sheltered trunks with a few scratches and cuts. The looming night falls upon the lush and short shrubs inch by inch. I am alone and frightened. I need to find my husband. I need to sniff that familiar fruity scent in his breath. I need to touch his unblemished face.
Mwaka emerges from behind the anthill, standing amidst a thicket of overgrown spear grass. The enormous acacia trees on the breasts of the hills sway and crack like the hinges of a breaking door. Darkness shields his face. In his heavy footsteps is the same man who went with the liberation war two years ago and drifted like the August tide of Aringa River. His feet carry him with the poise of a mountain spirit. I stretch out my hands. I beckon him to come to me. Every step releases him like a blooming hibiscus. I have waited so long for this moment. Nothing can spoil it. My heart gains the momentum of an orak drumbeat. Just like that day he held me in his arms under the full moon and released himself inside me.
Mwaka pulls closer. My head feels like a roaring flame of eucalyptus tree logs. I bury my face in my palms and close my eyes tight. His footsteps hasten away, over the dry leaves. I open my eyes and scan the darkness. There is no sign of him.
“Mwaka!” I call out.
His brisk strides fade faster than a sigh. He melts into the night. My cry spatters into the air.
“Maaadooooo! Mwaka!”
Mwaka’s motion is steady like a straight-line. He descends into the wilderness. I am left with no husband. No petal of mirth to call my own. No wind to carry my weight. My risen hope evaporates. My frail arms hash forward. I crash to the ground. I start to sink. At the end of this tunnel, the glimmer of light becomes a pencil point, and blinks to black. It leaves me with nothing, except Piloya’s hand at my feet and her scared voice, “M-a, wa-ke up! Wake up! Maaa, Maaaaaaaa…”
Piloya’s voice plunges me into her world. I stretch my hands and legs. Piloya kneels at the foot of my bed. She has left hers at the other corner of the room. Her little hands pass rapidly over my feet and make their way upwards searching for my hands. I release my fingers into her open palms. She squeezes gently. I read the words buried in her motion. I bend over and bring her off her knees into my bed. We say nothing. I swallow hard and pass my fingers over my arms. The roughness of the goose pimples settling upon my skin teases my fingertips. Piloya curls her body. She searches for my hand again. She finds it and leans her head upon my elbow. Her soft breathing comes through the darkness, tender and pure like rainwater.
I lie on my back and take heavy sighs to conjure calmness from the tip of every vein that runs through my body. The desperation as Mwaka disappeared has leapt into my consciousness. I feel a certain heaviness sit on my chest. I pull Piloya closer. I hold her tight. It’s a language she picks up quickly, and draws even closer to me. She places her hand upon my stomach to make sure I am by her side. It’s a habit she picked up when Mwaka was gone.
Safe like a secret, Piloya lets sleep immerse her and take her to another universe. For me it’s blink after blink with no sleep. My eyes travel to the corrugated iron sheets and to the little hole in the roof. The moon shines bright. I can see the headstrong woman in the moon staring at the earth below. She brings to life the Acoli folktale of her journey there. Her story has been told for generations. She was cast into her sky prison for going to the forest to pick firewood when her husband had refused to let her go. She makes me think of Mwaka before he was the man whose face hides behind the darkness in my dreams.
Mwaka was the young man whose voice soared with the tempo of the orak dance that night I first met him. He stamped his feet to the ground, raising fumes of brown dust up the other dancers’ noses in the dance arena. They shoved him with their dancing gourds. The girls crashed him between their bosoms. He struggled to make his way through. When he got to me, his feet sprung him up and down like a rapid eye blink. This was the orak dance of the New Year. Young men and women came with keen eyes to search for potential partners.
I had escaped from home to come and stare at village dating and courtship with city disdain. I was the nineteen-year-old city girl from Kampala, come with Ma and Pa to spend Christmas with the family. Mwaka was the village boy who enchanted all metropolitan care and class out of me. He had enormous strength in limbs and danced with the lightness of a feather. I stared at him, and then focused my eyes on the woman in the moon. As a child, Ma had told me the moon woman’s story. I gave her a name from the Acoli word for moon- dwe. Her name was Nyadwe: daughter of the moon.
Nyadwe never aged. Puberty pimples spread upon my face like black beans. I kissed goodbye to my childhood. She was still as young. Nyadwe was as enchanting as she had been when I first saw her. Through the years, I stared up in the skies. I imagined she could hear me. I felt sorry for her as much as I did for myself. We developed an intimacy of deprived souls, in our nightly symposiums of morbid revelations. I whispered to her the contempt I felt for my parents whose concept of discipline was synonymous with whip lashing. Nyadwe knew those things about me I had never told to anyone. When the moon did not adorn the sky during some nights, I missed her dreadfully. I stared aimlessly at the heavens waiting for her to pop out of the clouds.
As Mwaka’s eyes settled upon my waist beads, I looked up to her for an answer. Nyadwe was smiling right above my head. She was brighter than I had ever seen her before. I joined the dance and surrendered to the dance rhythm. I cast my hands in the air and laughed delightfully. Mwaka came so close to me. I could feel his breath upon my neck. It was a sweet and fruity scent, like ripe mango. He placed his palms upon my hips. I swayed and gyrated to the tempo of the drums. Our voices rose robustly with the rest of the dancers in this heated celebration of youth. The obscene lyrics slid out of our vocal codes with a carelessness that belonged to puberty only:
eyo eyo eyo
open your wrapper
let the big mortar in!
eyo eyo eyo
shake it shake it
The tune poured into the night. It was not just melody; it was ecstatic passion that sprung Mwaka and me to the long grass under the trees. The moon shone generously upon our naked bodies. We yielded ourselves to the night. We let it take us beyond the music and the darkness.
I had met Kiden my loud-mouthed cousin at the dance. I did not find her when Mwaka and I got back. I came back home in the morning with a pot pretending that I had been at the river to collect water. The dance arena dust still clung to my feet. My hair was full of grass twigs. I had forgotten to pick them out in my haste to get home before anyone woke up.
Ma stood by the door to the main house. She had her hands at her waist. The morning splendour dissolved in an instant. My heart, which had danced with the morning dew on my way home, now thumped inside my chest like orak drums turned sour. Every muscle in Ma’s face busted with anger. Her hands shook. She grabbed me by my collar and took me inside the house. Ma pushed me to sit on the floor. She summoned Pa in the house, like she always did when she learned something bad I had done, before he did.
“You are from Kampala. Kampala for God’s sake,” she shouted.
That was Ma. Always going on and on about the city and how different people from the city should be when they come to the village. Pa looked at me fidgeting with my fingers and staring at the floor.
“Don’t do it again.” He said in his faint voice.
Pa’s voice had always been faint. He looked at me. My eyes trickled with humiliation. The floor felt hot. My teeth cluttered the way they do when it is too cold.
“Don’t do it again.” Pa repeated sternly.
I nodded.
“She won’t do it again,” he said to Ma.
Pa got up slowly and went outside. I was shocked. So was Ma. She slapped the mahogany table, moving her head with so much force. Those dangling wooden earrings she never took off, swung like ripe fruits in the gusts of June. She swallowed hard. Ma stormed out of the house, banging the door behind her. She snapped at everyone the whole day, including Pa.
I thought she had even forgotten all about it. In the night she came to me. I was already asleep. She shook hard at my feet. I woke up, sat up and rubbed my eyes. Ma spoke in a tone barely audible to herself.
“Lakidi,” she started.
She rarely called me Lakidi. I dreaded it when she did. Ma had given me the name herself. Lakidi meant stone. Ma believed I could shoot up the sky one day and twinkle like a star. I hated that my name was a constant reminder of Ma’s hopes in me. Ma’s eyes burnt like a flame when she spoke of me sometimes. Her words sounded almost magical at such moments. She said there was much more in me than I gave. That buried deep within me was subtle warmth that could blossom in the driest season and survive a long drought like a cassava stem. But, when I did something wrong, Ma’s magical voice grew harsh and sharp. It fell upon my body like thorns.
“If your father thinks men pulling at your breasts in those stupid dances is okay, I don’t.” Ma said, “Do it again and I will tie your feet to iron bars and lock you inside the house until it’s time to go back to the city.”
“Maaaaa,” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing,”
“What was that tone?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you think I am stupid? You think I did not hear that tone, huh? Yesterday God knows what you did in that stupid dance. Today you don’t respect your parents. What will you do next, huh?”
I shut my mouth. I held the blanket to my chest and pressed it closer. At such moments I regretted that when the temptation arose I had not poured hot water on her vegetable seedlings in her nursery beds in Kampala.
“Answer me, huh?”
Ma’s voice rose sharper. She sounded like she was about to burst into tears. That is how Ma was. After raising her voice, she always cried. Ma cried if anything got her very mad. I hated listening to her outbursts. She slapped her hands upon her thighs and rocked her body to and fro crying, “Aii aii.” Listening to her at such times was worse than any whiplash.
“Talk to me,” Ma repeated.
I got out of the bed and tried to make my way outside amidst the darkness.
“Where are you going, huh?”
“I am just going outside to the toilet.”
“Oh… toilet? I see. If I hadn’t woken you up, would you be thinking of a toilet, huh? Is that all you can think of when I am talking to you?”
I walked past her, brushing her shoulder. Pa’s voice was right at the door.
“What is going on in there?”
Ma pulled me back by the shoulder. I staggered and almost fell.
“Slut, slut!” she cried.
“What is going on in here?” Pa asked again.
I heard several other voices outside.
“Look at your daughter. Aiii aii aiii. Lutwaaa!” Ma wailed in Acoli.
“What is this, all about?” Pa asked.
Ma continued to wail loudly.
“Aaii aiii aii.”
“What is wrong in there?”
“She does not even respect me anymore. Slut, you think I did not hear what happened, with that stupid boy Mwaka. I sat the whole day today trying to tell myself you are smarter than that. Do you know how I felt the whole day, huh? Do you?”
I stomped out of the house. Pa tried to hold me back. I busted through the door and almost knocked him down.
“Why did you start all this now?” Pa said to Ma.
My cousins were all outside, even Kiden. They all stared at me like I was covered in shit. I ran in my petticoat. I did not know where my destination was. My feet just brushed the grasses along the way. I went with the flow of the night. Nyadwe was not there in the skies. She would have led me to a safe haven. She would have calmed me.
Then it hit me, Mwaka!
It took me a while to find his place. When I did, I banged on his door. He took one look at me and held me into his arms for a while. He did not ask any questions. Gradually, he released me. He took my hand and led me to his bed. He got into the bed and put his hands around me, like a fragile object that should not get tarnished. His sweet mango breath was upon my neck, so fresh, so warm. It calmed the tears, the shame, and the anger.
Pa came early the next morning. He stood by the door like a chicken beaten by hailstorms. He said nothing except, “Lakidi, everyone expects you home.”
I insisted Mwaka take me home with Pa. Mwaka did not argue. I was so afraid that Pa would lose his calm and beat me up along the way. Ma refused to come out when we got home. She refused to talk to me for days. Everyone said very little. But it was Pa’s silence that worried me. I would have preferred that he snapped at me and his eyes burnt with anger. He did not. I felt guilty. It did not feel right. He caught me looking at him often trying to seek the words behind his silence. He smiled lightly and passed his hand upon his beard and looked at something else.
The following days, Pa let Mwaka come home. He had learned that I met him at the church gardens. Mwaka loved bougainvillea with a passion I could not understand. The church gardens were full of well-pruned bougainvillea plants in different shapes and sizes. They stood and held up their green leaves and pink petals to the heavens. In some parts of the gardens, red and white roses bloomed. The thorns never let me pick a single rose bud, without a prick. Mwaka liked it. He took my bleeding finger into his mouth and licked. It was strange. But he said it was a pact. That it meant we would always be together. The thought of Mwaka and me forever lighted my eyes. When he spoke like that, I felt like I was lying on a carpet of morning glory petals and floating over Lake Victoria.
Mwaka’s passion for the flowers was replaced with the love of card games with Pa when he started to invite him over. Pa laughed softly. He did not say much. Sometimes he joked with Mwaka and they seemed at ease with each other. I did not see Ma anywhere in the compound when Mwaka was around. One day as I passed by their room, later in the night, I heard Pa and Ma talk.
“She is not young. She got her teacher certificate you know.” Pa said.
Ma grunted and jeered.
“Anyone but not him.”
~
The marriage did not come as a surprise to anybody. Not even Ma. But she did say it would not last.
“Not even this planting season.” She said and laughed the way she does when she wants to get people angry.
She came to see me often after the marriage. She coaxed me to reveal any problems I was having.
“That’s what mothers are for dear,” she said sweetly and smiled.
Year after year, it was the same words from Ma. I hated the way Mwaka bought every useless thing that caught his whim, and our accounts suffered. I loathed his snoring in the night. We fought about so many things that seemed stupid. Sometimes I refused to talk to him when he got me so mad. One time I packed my things and threatened to leave with Piloya when he sold a cow after I told him it was not necessary. He came home that evening with a dress. I had seen it once before, at a shop window. I commented on how nice it looked. Mwaka bought it and handed it to me. I tried to look even angrier. I broke down and laughed. I took the dress from his hand and went to try it on.
“It won’t work next time!” I shouted from the bedroom.
“There won’t be a next time,” he said and laughed.
When Ma came, she always seemed disappointed that we joked and laughed. She was astonished that Mwaka held my hand and stroked my face when she was around. Mwaka came home as soon as he had rounded off the accounts as the chief cashier at the Acoli Farmers Association.
“Look at him,” Ma, said with contempt, “at home all the time, trying to impress me, isn’t he?”
“Ma, that’s him, he comes home every day like that.”
“Well I don’t buy any of it. He does not deserve you. Lakidi, you could have…”
“Maaaa,”
“Oh I see, I am not even allowed to say anything about him, am I?” she said and called Piloya. Ma started to tell her a tale of a time long ago, when elephant refused to listen to his mother and lost his long beautiful tail.
In the night Mwaka whispered in my ear the funny names she had called him. Her favourite one was obibi. Ma called him that even when I was there. She stopped when Piloya asked her, “Is that Pa’s name? Ogre?”
~
One day however, Ma came to see me without sending word.
It was one of those days when the sun fell upon the skin like red-hot charcoal. March had ripened the millet in the fields. Every inch of our compound was spread with sunflower, groundnuts, and sorghum, all ready to be stored away in the granary. Mwaka’s favourite mango tree stood in the front of the house, carrying drying leaves that poured to the ground with the slightest breeze. Piloya’s lips cracked. They even dripped blood sometimes. Her dark skin grew too pale and she was tired all the time. Ma cowered from the car that had brought her to our compound, hunched and sweating. Without sitting down, Ma walked towards me and clumped her hands on my shoulders.
“You have to come to the city, everyone says so, even your Pa.”
“Ma, not that again,” I frowned lightly and hugged her.
“No no, this is serious.”
“Maaaa, come on, we have talked about that before.”
“Yes, but…”
Ma had come because of the rumours. Every one was talking about the rebels. Strange stories had penetrated the market places and the churchyard on Sundays. After village meetings, people gathered in small circles. They whispered stories they had heard from other people. At the river, women stayed longer and spoke of men who came and abducted men and young boys to force them to fight. The same kind of stories had infiltrated the radio stations and newspapers like a plague.
“Everyone is talking about it; this is serious,” Ma said.
Mwaka spoke to her himself. Ma listened and did not grunt or pass foul comments.
“Everyone is okay, like they have always been; radios are full of lies, and everyone knows that. The rebels are not fighting us. It’s the government they want. ” Mwaka said.
“They say it’s different this time, it’s different, they changed tactics…”
“Nothing will happen, give it time, you will see, we have heard rumours like this for years and nothing has happened.”
Later in the day, Ma smiled and said, “ He is not so bad, you know.”
Mwaka always spoke about the rebels with a lot of contempt. Sometimes he lost his temper and lamented about how stupid they must be to follow a guerrilla leader who had no formal education at all but wanted to form a new government. When he spoke to Ma, his voice was calm. He paused in between his sentences beautifully. I was so proud of him.
~
A month later, I was in the family cemetery weeding my uncle’s grave. I heard voices chanting "Harambe Harambe!"
They drew closer and filled the air. The chants echoed with a kind of intensity that made me very unsettled. It was one of the slogans the Mau Mau fighters in neighbouring Kenya had used, when fighting the British before independence. It was a pledge of togetherness, but something about this chant was different. The voices rose with the thumps of heavy gumboots. Then the bullets started. The wind held still as the air filled with skittering bullets that made my head pound and ears ring. When Mwaka heard the guns, he followed me to the cemetery. He found me darting through the massive undergrowth in the gardens making towards the house. He grabbed my hand. We all rushed inside. A few minutes later, men and young boys busted into the compound like hailstorms flung by lightening. The heaviness of their footsteps echoed their number. They were many.
“Toka nje, la sivyo tutaichoma nyumba yako.” Come out or we burn the house.
Silence.
“Tunajua kwamba uko ndani.” We know you are there.
We remained silent, engulfed in a fear that could drill holes through the ground. Mwaka held my hand. Piloya, only eleven then, lay under our wooden bed without any movement. The voices outside rose sharper than Waragi Extra Strong Spirit as they started to chant:
“Death to the traitors! Death to the traitors!”
People had spoken about such things. They said the rebels considered every male a traitor if he refused to join the liberation war. He was an enemy of the Acoli people, and the great rebellion to oust the government. Mwaka held my hand and squeezed it till it hurt. He raised his feet where we lay and covered ourselves with blankets and other things. Mwaka never said anything more. He went to the door and opened it. Daylight rushed in. Hands raised, he walked towards them and I knew it was real. These locusts, who had desecrated distant villages, swarmed several homes and seemed so alien to me, had come to take my husband. I held Piloya’s hand. It stuck in mine like glue. I tried to block the voices out of my ears, but they glided through too eagerly.
"Je, kuna wanaume wengine ndani ya nyumba?” They asked.
“Only my daughter and wife.” Mwaka said.
"Watowe nje."
Mwaka did not come. A young boy who stunk like a he-goat came, stood before me, pointed his barrel at my head and stammered, “Ge ge ge ge geee-t out!”
Piloya and I scampered out of the house. We stood near the door. Most of the young boys had new green army uniforms that were tacked into their gumboots at the ankles. The endless sight before me was of guns slung on shoulders, a knife on the waist, a few pistols here and there, and new gumboots whose black plastic was caked in dust that seemed to have risen to their hair and turned it brown.
I remember standing there and getting ready to find myself in the next life. If my daughter and I should die, I prayed that it should be quick and painless. A young man held his AK47 to our heads. Piloya soaked herself in urine. She held onto to my hand while her eyes flapped around like a duck about to be slaughtered. She had never seen so many men like that. The endless number of men overwhelmed her. She cast her eyes upon the earth. The number of young boys was greater than the adults. Some boys even seemed weighed down by the size of their guns. Their blood-shot eyes scared me. The air was heavy and stuffy. Everything smelt rotten.
Some of the boys hit at dry mango leaves with their guns. Mwaka always said the tree had saved his grandfather from the Karamojong cattle rustlers. He climbed up on it and the leaves hid him. The Karomojong could not figure out where he was. Mwaka carried his grandfather’s name. He had a very strong attachment to the old man. He said, when the man died, he came to him in a dream and said the tree was special and he would be its guiding spirit. The rebels broke off branches and they dropped to the ground. Mwaka glared at them and tried to look away. That tree was as good as his grandfather.
The others walked around laughing in loud voices with several rounds of ammunition rolled around their waists. Except for the fear threatening to pound my heart out of my chest, everything remained calmer than I expected. I did not speak. Just in case I said the wrong thing, and they sliced my guts and I woke up in a pool of blood covered with flies and maggots.
If there was someone in command, I did not put much effort in trying to notice. A boy, who looked not more than eleven, searched our house. He came out, smiling at me and revealed teeth, which I imagined, smelled worse than our pit latrine. He said to me, “Harambe!” and offered his hand for me to shake. I shook it and quickly clasped my hands together.
An older man announced that they should be on their way. A good number had started to drift away, taking the route of the cattle kraal, towards sunset. Mwaka’s animals had filled the kraal enclosure before the notorious Karamojong rustlers who believed all cows in the world belonged to them raided it empty. The rebels did not bother with Piloya and I. One punch on his back and Mwaka started to walk slowly away.
I stayed with the feeling that Mwaka had gone to work and the evening sunset would bring him home to me. As he disappeared among the figures, Mwaka stole a glance at Piloya and me. Then he looked straight ahead, walking on, never wavering until there was no single figure I could pick out from the distance. I stood there and refused to acknowledge that although Mwaka was a strong man, he was not a fighter at all. He would not survive the forests. Mwaka was wearing his sapphire blue and red striped Acoli Farmers Cooperation uniform. That image of him stuck in my mind like a portrait. When I see him often in my dreams, the merge of blue and red seems calm and tranquil, but I cannot embrace its beauty and let it envelop me. It is always too remote for me to reach.
We stood there and watched him march out of our lives. The men and boys chanted with vigilance. The earth moaned softly beneath. Only the luckiest of men escaped. The rebels descended back to the wilderness, which had released them, chanting. "Harambe! Harambe! Harambe!"
Morning came without Mwaka. Piloya cried for her father. She hated that the schools had closed. She had to stay home every day. Words got lost in my mouth, like a child’s burble, uttered and gone. My heart started to soak in a maze of unspeakable gloom. I sought a smile behind the shadows of my grey clouds. I found one, in the vague memory of a meaningless childhood song:
thunder thunder
the king has sent me to fetch his son thunder
oh you bigheaded one, give him back thunder
or else this shall surely end in jail
Day after day, the song became remote like distant raa smoke. Weeks later the dreams started. Sometimes I was looking for Mwaka’s whisper in the bougainvillaea petals in the church gardens. Other times I was a ripple in the ocean growing bigger and bigger. Most times, I was at the foot of Kidi Guu hills, looking for him among the acacia. In the mornings, I woke up and stretched out my hands, searching for him. Any sign of him, his sweet mango breath, his laughter, anything.
Sondra and I used to teach together at Lacep Primary School, before it was closed down. Her husband was taken the day Mwaka was taken too. She came to me often. We sang folksongs under the mango tree until we fell asleep. As soon as her husband was taken, her face did not have any scars. He used to beat her up thoroughly. When anyone on the staff asked about the scars on her face, she always said she had fallen down.
In the days after Mwaka and her husband were taken, we went down to the river to wash clothes like many other women and girls often did. Like the rest, we sat by the bank waiting for our clothes to dry. Sometimes even when they had dried, we remained seated a little longer. We said very little. Most women came to the river too often. Some came even when they had almost no clothes to wash. Sometimes laughter came through, but it was dry and lifeless.
The Aringa River was a seasonal tributary of the Nile. It passed through distant lands, filled with man-eating crocodiles and grouchy hippos that sliced people in two. Sometimes, the water brought with it blood sucking leeches that stuck to the skin. They did not fall off until they had siphoned enough blood. Very often when people swam, the leeches found their way into their noses. They lived there unnoticed for weeks sucking blood painlessly out of their unsuspecting host. Once found, people conquered their thirst for blood by sticking sharp thorns into their slippery black bodies. Then they sent them back to the water as dead beings to be cast away by the tide.
On one of those days when we went to the river to wash a couple of clothes, Sondra started to hum a funeral song. Then she buried her face in her hands. She had never done that before. I moved over to her and held her in my arms. She lifted her head up. Her eyes were red. Tears flowed down her cheeks.
“I don’t want to, but I miss him,” she said and sprung up.
Sondra went over to the mvule tree a distance from the river. I thought she wanted to be alone for a while. But, she started to hit at the trunk instead. Her braids swung upon her head. She shook like something was driving her to harm herself. I ran up to her and grabbed her by the blouse. Her hands were badly bruised and there was blood.
“Sondra, Sondra,” I shouted.
Her eyes stared at me blank. Piloya was scared. I held Sondra and shook her.
“Sondra, Sondra.”
She stared at me, even blanker. I slapped her hard across the face more than once. She dropped on the ground. I sat down beside her and lifted her head to my lap and stroked her head.
When I lay on my bed that night, I thought of my own tears and I buried them even deeper. They begged to be let out. If I cried, it meant I had surrendered. That time had not yet come. Not yet. I looked at Mwaka’s metal case. If I could just get my hands to open it, I could sniff his presence. Maybe then the gathering tears would go away. But I could not bring myself to open his case. Everyone said luck lay there. Opening his case would scatter his luck away and expose it to the wind or bad spirits. They could snatch it away. If there was anything Mwaka needed so bad, it was his luck! The case would stay that way.
Grandma had long moved to the city. Ma promised to come to see me from Kampala. She said she was coming to take me home. She said the village was killing me. Mwaka was dead. I should get that straight, cry over him and move to the city where I belonged from the start. I agreed. The following day, I was going to lay four large stones in the cemetery to evoke Mwaka’s spirit back home to rest with his ancestors under the big kituba tree and leave for Kampala with Ma. Ma had not seen me for a while. When she finally came, she took one look at me and shrieked in Acoli, which rolled off her tongue like the edge of a sharp butcher knife.
“If you had not married that village boy, you would be in the city where none of this stupid nonsense exists. Nothing would be driving you to the verge of a nervous breakdown! Look at you! Woi woi woi ma weee… Allah! Allah!”
She clapped her hands upon her mouth. Ma started to cry heaping curses upon the war, the village and anything else she could think of. She called the night I had met Mwaka, the impotent night, which should be flung into the river with shit, shit and shit! She sat on the ground and slapped at it with both her hands raising them to the heavens and shouting my name like I was dead. Piloya burst into tears and ran inside the house.
That night, as Ma slept, there was a knock on the door. I knew the rebels did not knock. They barged in. But I opened it ready to expect anything. A young man stood in the darkness. He refused to come in or look at me. He stammered. There was a memory of such a stammer somewhere inside my head.
“Me me me me sa-ge.”
He held out his hand. I picked out the little paper that sat in it. I held it up to the kerosene lamp inside the house. It was Mwaka’s handwriting. Meet me by the river, tonight, urgently.
It was one year and two months since he had been taken from me. I put my hands upon my chest and swathed myself in the hope of seeing him again. After I had buried him, there was a promise of his resurrection, by the river. I was glory triumphing to glory. Each hope, which had faded, sprouted up like dying sunflower stems blessed with life after the long awaited rains finally come. I held out my hands to Nyadwe and spoke with her. The universe still granted wishes, smiles and fresh water springs after all. I saw Nyadwe that night in a new light. She was not the headstrong woman of Acoli folklore. Nyadwe was earthquake. Nyadwe was lightening. Nyadwe was time. Nyadwe was power. She had watched over my husband each night like I beseeched her. She had brought him back to me. Nyadwe had sat in the night sky defying wind and darkness to torch up memories such as mine. When I looked at her, Nyadwe promised me a future, she promised me new memoirs not stained with blood.
Sitting by the river I waited for my husband. My hands were curved tight around my folded legs as I rested my chin upon my knees. I tapped my toes lightly upon the sand under my bare feet. The Aringa River reflected a glassy smoothness from the skies. Each ray of moonlight fell upon the water surface, sharp and fresh in a fuse of red, gold and white beams. When I listened carefully, I could hear the still and quiet water flow slowly by. It reminded me of a time before the war, when I came to the river and Piloya had barely started to crawl. I sat her by the waters and let her hit at it with infant excitement. Bare-chested woman dived into the river and emerged with small streams of water sliding down their naked bodies like gods performing a purification ritual. Children’s voices floated about. Aringa flowed; heading towards horizons whose end only the sky knew. A few women tried to catch fish in the full waters with their hand-woven baskets. They laughed with each catch and their voices could reach the sacred caves at Kilak. During those days before the war, the legend of the Aringa River Bridge as it is told now, did not house so many troubled spirits under it. The river was not filled with too many leeches like it is now. Lost souls did not cry in the night begging for rescue. Our dreams rolled us into tomorrow with promises of rainbows, seas, corals and mollusks.
I did not hear Mwaka come until I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to look. There was my husband before me; resurrected from the dead debris where I had buried him. His woolly hair stood like a crown of untamed fur. He had grown much thinner and looked ragged holding his rifle under his arm. He never kept his beard when I had known him. Now it was plaited into one lock of hair. It hung like a small rope. There was a huge burn scar just across his forehead. It sparkled like it had been massaged with simsim oil.
“Min ot,” he said in Acoli the way he always referred to me: Mother of the house.
Mwaka threw his rifle on the sand when I could not stop staring.
“Are you okay?” I managed to say when he sat near me.
“Are you okay?” he asked back.
I nodded. I was at a loss of words. My heart raced like the first time I had just met him. He breathed softly. He had come along with other men who slouched around us like fallen angels. In hypnotic craze, I tried very hard to see only him and me under the clear night sky by the river in this reunion of two lost lovers.
“Piloya,” he said.
“She is a woman now.” I said.
I studied him stealthily. In his soldier uniform, Mwaka looked like an image I had seen before but could not recognize anymore. The youthfulness that had glowed upon his face was gone. There was no sweet honey in his reckless bandit-like poise. I thought he smelt of gunpowder and decay. He touched me lightly. His fingers did not burst with life. My hands clung to each other, unsure of what to do. He was so distant, like he had been in my recurrent dream, impossible to reach among the acacia trees at the foot of Kidi Guu hills.
“What have they done to you?” I asked, my palms tracing his cheeks. I brought them back quickly and tucked them safely in my cardigan. He articulated every word. He sounded distinctly Mwaka, but I could not find him underneath his whisper. The valour of his voice had grown molds. He cleared his voice.
“I came to let you know I am okay.”
I looked at him and said nothing.
“You don’t talk much these days,” he said.
Mwaka had risen to the ranks and was now a commander. I was ashamed that I had thought a single day in the forests would crush him into pebbles that get washed away by a slight drizzle. He was far from that. Mwaka was rock. He saw his tomorrow bursting alive like an amplified electric guitar. He saw himself as part of the ascension leading the country to a Promised Land. Canaan was so near.
“I smell it!' he said and spread his fingers before me.
“Our harvest is coming soon, very soon,” his breath came close, and I smelt something sour, something I couldn’t quite place, like the smell of rotting vegetation in forests perhaps. I’d smelt it before, on another soldier. The question formulated itself slowly through the dark and silence.
“Have you taken the oath of allegiance?”
“Yes.”
So that was the smell on his breath. He’d tasted human blood, licked at it, and smeared it upon his body.
“They made you?” I gasped.
“No. I chose it. It will bring us a big harvest after the long struggles of the war.”
I looked away, stretching my hand across my stomach.
“Come back home with me Mwaka, you do not belong there. What have they done to you?”
My voice was low and unsure like a baby’s first steps on cement. None of us said anything for a long while. Mwaka stood up, kicked at the sand and avoided looking my way. Our silence carried no single grain of seed to the panicles of my famished wishes.
“You have to wait for me. You have to wait for me. I will come to you when it’s over.”
For a moment I thought he was going to break into tears. His voice bore a crack of emotion I had not felt until then. Without saying anything more to me, he turned away.
“Harambe,” he shouted.
His few companions echoed it back and they started to move. Mwaka walked away from the river, onto the upward stretch that leads to the main road busting out of Kitgum town. They disappeared just above the bridge. I watched him and the men till I started to see faint ghostly figures coming and going over and over again. I made my way home almost invisible to myself. I had no tears in my eyes. They had just been buried under silt and shadows had cast a spell upon them. I told Ma about the meeting when I got back. Her surprise gave way to a loss of words, then to anger.
“Obibi!” she shouted. “Are you going to stay?”
“He is my husband,” I said, nodding my head up and down and carefully avoiding her eyes.
“If I ever set my eyes on him, I will toss him in the river with shit, shit and shit. That’s where he belongs!” She said and soaked herself in tears the whole night.
Ma left the following morning. I thought I saw something in her eyes. A certain fear, that she had lost me and would never find me. She did not see my point, but staying in my marital home was a battle I had chosen to fight even with no promise of a victory.
~
Days, weeks, months passed by.
Then tonight I put off the cooking fire in the kitchen and got ready to go to the main house, where Piloya was already asleep. A voice suggested itself from the darkness under the mango tree as I passed. A voice which swished with the leaves in the night breeze. A voice such as his.
“Don’t cry,” he said as I rushed at him, the bulge of his white eyes finally betraying where he stood in the shadow of the tree. My hands went up to his face, feeling for the scar. Was this the old Mwaka returned? But he smelled of gunfire, decay and something else I could not figure out. That smell of blood in his breath again. I lowered my hands from his face and neck.
“Just hide me in the old house with a jar full of water, don’t come there, I will be okay,” he said.
He refused to look my way like he always did. He kept insisting I should hide him away and go to sleep immediately. I stood there, an eerie presence hanging suspended in the air. My knees were weak. My ears rung and my head spun like someone was pulling at the nerves on my neck and forehead.
He had run from a battle at Kilak. He said they had a mole in his commanding camp. Someone had been feeding government troops with intelligence information. Someone in his batta
