Brother Armand’s Apostasy

 

Beneath the earth there is rock and beneath the rock there is water and beneath the water there is something unknown, something violent and furious and unknown, that is no friend of living things. And when it stirs, the rock and water and earth fall away, and we die.

The first earthquake on record coincided with the arrival of the first White Fathers so it could have been a sign that the newcomers and their new god were not welcome. But the fathers were shrewd, so it became a sign that the judgment of their God was nigh.

That was then. Nowadays it was only Father Anatole and Brother Armand who remained to keep the faith.

This is a people who live in a valley just at the end of a mountain slope. They grow food and keep livestock. It is the 21st century so they are poor. Their health is precarious and their education scanty, their feet are rough and large and their skins hard. They gather themselves at night in low thatched huts at the bottom of the slope and these are their lives, a small huddle of thatch under a mountain.

When the things that happen, the things that afflict the poor, Brother Armand and Father Anatole are called in. They arrive at the village on their bicycles to perform their ministries. The sudden deaths of newborns. When the crops wilt even under the rain and hunger follows. When someone dies and needs burying. When someone weds. When someone leaves in search of hopes the city and when someone comes back having found none, the priests cycle down to the village to perform ministry.

There were old men who spoke of a second earthquake after the one that broke them away from their old gods and brought them into the fold of the new, and so this one was to be the third in record.

But first the slope would change. Time changes. The harvests were becoming weaker and the villagers needed more earth, more water, more wood and more land. So they moved upwards. The mountain god was defeated and they did not fear him anymore. They cut down his trees and tore up his earth. They planted their farms. They burnt his trees.

Then one night the rain came. The rain came down hard, as if with a hurt to avenge. It wailed and cursed as it blasted the village with grey. It was only as the houses fell that those in them knew that the houses were falling. The earth was breaking apart beneath the huts. The water above and the water beneath washed the huts down.

In the aftermath there were many to bury, and many already buried to remove from wreckage and lay down again in a way they could rest. There were questions. There were many questions. Where are our homes? Where is our food? What shall we do? Why did this happen?

The priests came down on their bicycles. They arrived at the pit of sinking homes to meet despondent men and women too torn to cry further and they trod over the mud through the village in silence for a long while. The two priests decided to separate their roles. Father Anatole would tend to the faithful. Brother Armand would tend to the falling.

One asked: “Brother Armand, why does God destroy those who love Him?”

“To test their faith,” the priest replied.

“Why does He test the faith of those whose faith is weak and will not stand the test?”

Another did not ask. She just said, “Brother Armand, there is nothing left to believe. It has all been washed away.” She picked up her mat, rolled it up and walked away.

An old man walked to him with a small boy holding his hand. “Brother Armand, it is the old gods. They have returned.”

There was one man who sat quietly on the ground for a long time, so long that Brother Armand thought he was silent until he noticed that his lips were moving. Brother Armand drew closer and he could hear that the man was whispering, as if he was just talking because words were leaking out of him and he did not care to stop them. His face was empty and his hands were blank.

About how he struggled through the shifting and swirling mud chasing to find his daughter. How he saw the back of a small body sink just out of arm’s reach. How just out of arm’s reach was the same as a world away. How he saw the black mud wash over the small body and take it below. How he yelled and how nothing heard. How he stood in the water and hoped it was not his child until he realized that even if it wasn’t, he was never going to see his child again and that hope was wasted breath.

“God will do what He will, no matter what I hope,” the man was saying. “I will praise His glory and I will praise His name. I will fear Him and I will keep His ways. But I cannot love Him,” said the man. The words left him and he remained hollow.

Brother Armand stood before this husk, this vacant thing that looked like a man and said, “My child,” and the reply, the whisper, was even more ghostly. “My child.” As if he had named something eternally distant. Forever away from him.

 

Ernest Bazanye

Ernest Bazanye Sempebwa is a Ugandan living and working in Kampala.

 

Jacob Had A Brother. The last part of Christmas

Jacob had a brother. Long before this. A brother named Roger. Roger was taller, had tougher arms and legs, like thick rope, and a voice that spit words sharply. Roger was a mean kid and had a group of other mean kids around him. A crew of scowling thugs who bullied the neighbourhood.

This was long ago, when they were still very young. Jacob was seven and had just received a football for his birthday from an aunt visiting from Germany. She did not understand these things. She gave Jacob the ball and it was appropriated by Roger as soon as they were alone.

Because it was a rare thing in those days, a real football, one from Europe, leather pentagons stitched in place. So pneumatic. It bounced like magic. Roger and his gang organized a game and called up Jacob and the other smaller kids.

This was how football in large teams was played back then: there were attackers, defenders and the big boys. The defenders hung around the back, near the goal to make it less easy to just stroll up and score. It was usually the fat kid and the slowest kids. Attackers were the scrappiest ones, the ones most eager to get at least some chance of touching the ball and the ones who could take the most pain. They were sent to throw themselves at the other team and harass the ball away from them. If they succeeded, they would pass the ball to the bigger kids, the players. The ones who actually played. It wasn’t fair. But by the age of seven, a boy in this part of this city has learned that life isn’t fair. Between school, bigger kids, parents, and so many other things, you would be a fool to still think a boy was anything more than just the victim of whatever decided to assault him.

So Jacob accepted the invitation to play with his own football. He was chosen to attack. This was good. It meant a chance to actually kick the ball. If you grew up kicking sisal or plastic or paper balls, then finding real leather and rubber, it’s narcotic. It will make you mad. You will forget yourself. The way it bounces when your foot taps it, that you caused that, that thrill will take you away from yourself. Jacob dove after the ball, now a flailing maniac.

These games did not stop for fouls, but Jacob did not stop for fouls either. He wanted the ball. Stevo, Krinye, Osondo, they broke rank, let the ball slip away from their feet and Jacob barreled toward them. The speed in his mind was greater than the speed in his feet. Thoughts and sight were blurring. It was just the tip of the ball and the tip of his foot. That was where clarity was. They found that moment, met, and with all his might he kicked. The ball sailed up and it took his breath away.

It did not go to the goal. Jacob was not a good player and he had not bothered to even aim when he kicked. Close to the square where the boys played was the fenced home of an old man called Dinga. He had black dogs. This was a long time ago. They were much younger then. Back then fear treated us differently. It was in things like black dogs.

“Wewe ndio uli kick. Wewe ndio uta go uka get.”

“Manze na doggie? Kuna doggie jo.”

“Na ball? Wacha aende a get ball. Yeye ndio ali kick kwa doggie.”

“Doggie ziki ni get?”

“Wewe! Enda u get ball!”

“Wewe! Enda u get ball!”

“Wewe! Enda u get ball!”

The circle of boys surrounding him converged on that last chant. It was a command. Everybody told us that black dogs were fierce and dangerous. They didn’t tell us how fierce and evil, but we believed them, so we had to understand for ourselves how deadly they were. This means that all the things we properly understood to hurt and destroy, we took those notions and laid them upon the shanks of the black dogs. Black dogs, humiliation, black dogs, pain, black dogs, being hated and rejected, black dogs, sour and bitter things in the mouth, black dogs, teachers who caught you, black dogs breaking glass, black dogs, ends, destructions, shames.

So Jacob walked up to the gate and knocked like a kid going to ask for his ball back. But when it creaked open, he turned and ran, like a kid who heard the opening of a gate that held dogs. The path inclined upwards, and Jacob ran it furiously. His eyes were already watery, distorting his sight, but he could see Roger ahead of him. Maybe there is an instinct in us and that is what lead him to run to Roger. We run to our family. He was screaming.

“Doggie! Madoggie zina come!” His feet pounding the ground hard. He got to Roger and through the wetness in his eyes he saw Roger’s foot stretch out into the path he was running in. He heard Roger shout, “Ngwata!” Then his feet let go and he was in the air.

Then his whole body was on the ground. His face was in the dust. The dust turning into a film of thin mud on his face where his tears were and around his groin where he had urinated on himself. Roger was laughing loudly and the other big boys joined him. The other kids, the smaller ones, kept away. Jacob lay down long enough to hear and understand that there was no dog. Nothing had chased him.

Everyone was laughing. “Roger bratha wako ame kupiga ngwata.” Ngwata in those days. It meant a tackle, or a trip.<<< Jacob went home, wet soil on his clothes and cheeks. Like all of us he grew up and grew out of his fear of black dogs. But he never grew out of the way he felt about his brother.

Christmas Tale Part V

It started when she was eighteen and he was seventeen. So he told her he was nineteen. It started with him lying and proceeded with her letting him lie and it went on the way that type of adolescent romance does. Fumbling along through uncertain awkward, clumsy moments. Lost footholds, accidental brushes, misplaced hands and glances caught in the wrong place, lingering looks, laughter held too long. Anxiety adds weight to trifles and gestures and words made and said and maybe not so well understood. Love is a foreign language to everyone who speaks it. It is never properly understood. So that is how it started. Maybe it started later. Maybe it started to end there.

I want to tell you how they would meet. I have been carrying this notebook around for two months trying to write it. I wanted to show you the whole thing: the sloping path down to her home, which he would walk down in the evening after school. How the sun would fall while they were talking, then he would point at stars and tell her their names and she would repeat them, and he didn’t feel dorky about it because she would not let him, and then the hour would turn again and the nightflowers from the hedge around her neighbour’s house would explode and the air would be fragrant… I wanted to show you all that, step by step, word by word, how everything … but I have failed to. I don’t know why. I know the story so well, but I can’t tell it. Maybe because I have already seen the end. I know there is hatred in the end so I cannot tell you about love.
Maria doesn’t believe in love. He is why.
I can’t tell you but I can tell you what they said. Not what words they spoke, but what they said.

Jacob: This sucks. Why is everything so empty? Why does the air feel empty? The air. It feels empty. As if something isn’t in the air that should be there. I hate this, this feeling that you are not there. You make things empty even when they shouldn’t be. It is just being without you and it is being without anything. I hate this. Leave me alone. Let me walk streets the way other men walk streets, without the streets feeling endless and the walking in vain because it is not to you or from you. Leave me alone. Can’t I just walk a fucking street?

Or don’t leave me. Come to me. Come to me. Fill these spaces.
Maria: You know what I need? Just one thing. A single, polar, absolute. An axis. Just there to mark the centre. Everything will revolve around it, everything will emanate from it, and it will always be there, like the certain unchangeable meaning, the answer, that thing. I need that.

There has been too much chaos, too much, even now, so little of what I am or what the world is blurs and whizzes around me and I can’t hold onto it.

I dreamt once, maybe more than once, maybe I keep having this dream then forgetting it when I wake up because I cannot remember when I dreamt it, but I remember it vividly. In this dream I was in a pitch black place. Pitch black. Total darkness. But I was moving. Really fast. I think that dream lasted for like just a few seconds, but I remember it often. Pitch black, not even knowing whether I am falling or flying.

That’s what you were to me. You came in like this light. You were so sure of the things you said to me that I believed you. I believe them still. I believe them about me, and I believe them about you. You will be my pole star. you will be my anchor. You will be the light I fly up to, or fall down to. I will believe you.

From The Wreckage

African cities move so fast. But they would have to—to have all the shit of western urbanization with hardly enough money, with hardly enough space, in hardly enough time, it squeezes everything and makes it so tense. African cities are tense. People talk rapidly, eyes dart, fingers are nimble and agile and clay and cement piles upon ground casting shadows that slide from one side of a highway all the way to another in just one sudden rapid day. So fast, gone so soon, hardly enough to remember.

But nights are different. Nights are eternal. You can sit down and stare in silence at night. You can believe that night is the same way it has been under these hills for hundreds of years, wild, full, completely itself, giving a fuck about you.

You can sit in a small, cheap, bedsit, alone at midnight and fuck yourself up. No one would care about you.

So Duncan Mugalu, as midnight gathers, in turn, gathers his equipment before him.

LHR to EBB

You can’t go home again. You never can. Because every day you are away, home moves further back from where you left it.

You can have your small cargo of Samsonite bags wound tight and tagged at Heathrow. You can watch them with an abrasive hint of suspicion as the broad-shouldered man in the uniform grabs first one, then another and then whisks them off into the secret airport cargo hold. You may not trust their secrets, but there is nothing you can do to stop the bags vanishing. You will turn the suspicion of your gaze to the woman at the ticket counter who shall parry it away expertly by smiling a very pretty smile, the kind of smile that makes you want to love aunts, and observing that you have very little luggage for a person with a British passport and a one-way ticket to Africa.

 

This Christmas

What do you want for Christmas was being discussed at the back of the pickup. A hilux doluble cabin that had been specially customized for this journey. This was their feat of engineering: a set of old tyres had been placed on the pickup’s bed and a sofa had been placed on top of these. The tyres absorbed the shakes from the road. On the sofa two men sat, smug and proud of their ingenuity. They were not worried about rain on the journey because it never rained on Christmas. On the topic at hand, that is, what each would want for Christmas, the leaner one replied, “Maria.” He said it again after a pause.” I think I will get Maria back.”

“Why?” asked his paunchier friend in the attitude of one who did not believe a satisfactory ansnwer to the question was even possible. “Because she’s an idiot?”

“She will take me back because she is an idiot. But I want her back…I want her back, because, in spite of everything, she is better than this, this hole of wind, this what is left without her. Maybe I hate her, but maybe that is what love is. Someone you can’t live without because life without them is so much worse.”

The Home Of My Rival

Does he have blood in him?” asked the first one.

“They all do,” said the second one. He did not wait for me to answer. He spoke for me.

“Then we shall bleed him,” said the first one. His face was made of a hard flesh that looked like wood. It was a face set in that shape. That mouth, that brow, those lines running down from temple to cheek, knowing none of the things that soften other men’s faces, that make other men’s skins ripple and shake. “Then we shall bleed him.”

After I gave them their money I returned to my home. I left them in that part of life where such dark things writhe and smoulder and I stood once again in light and saw colour. My television set was on and my family was watching it. The children were eating from plates on the carpet before them. They sat cross legged and their knees formed a triangle of space for the plates. They carried spoonfuls from the plates to their mouths without looking down. They watched only they screen. The perfection of television’s white men and women. They laughed in unison with the crackle and rush sound from the TV. They did not know what I had done.

Blue Light

On Saturday night, when the rest of our clan leave their homes to hunt down the yellow and red lights of a young city on a weekend night, the four of us, Kaijenga, Awana, Rom and myself turned down another direction. Wa had said that he knew where we should find another light. A pale blue light. And we followed him. There are people like that: when you put people like us next to people like that, we slip from ranks adjacent to them into files behind them.  We spilled out of a taxi on the edge of the fine blacktop and let the van curve back towards the towers of the city, and we dove after him into the narrow, crooked, cracked mudroads into the slums. Ragged walls and rusty tin and rotting planks, deeper and deeper into the slums.

It was darker here at this hour than it would be uptown, and the flashes that were caught in the slimy puddles beneath our sneakers were fugitive; they darted away from our eyes as we approached. We padded through with our puffy sneakers firmer than the ground and Kai laughed. Tuli mu ghetto! he proclaimed.

A Guy Gets A Call From His Best Friend’s Girlfriend. She Asks Him To Do Her A Favour

It was a weak morning, it was the reason I hate waking up before eight. The sun climbing with weary effort up the black hills of Mengo, nudging into a grey sky streaked with long, thin clouds. It made me think of lines of vomit in a puddle outside a bar after a storm. I hate waking up before eight. I don’t want to see this crap.

The Caldina hummed sedately, switching to a calm purr on corners as we rolled down empty roads into the curves and valleys of Nateete. We had given up on small talk, Desire and I. I had tried, but my early
morning sullenness was too heavy to lift off with just a couple of flippant remarks and that perkiness of hers that I had come to expect was completely absent.
There had been a trace of it when I arrived at The Agency (forgive me; I didn’t bother to get its name) hugging my shoulders and frowning.
The cab driver who brought me, totally insensitive to my irritable state, had turned on that station I hate, and I had been buffeted by Country music all the way from Nateete. She was already seated in the passenger seat of her car. She leaned
out and waved me over.

Drops of Jupiter by Train and Ernest Bazanye

The wind is mean. A mean, dark wind spilling and spiraling over wet ground. It falls against my forearms and neck and temples and brow. I snug my collar closer around me and wince to draw my thoughts away from the fresh memory of my last hit and thoughts of next hit. I’m dreaming in spite of myself … I try to draw my thoughts away but they keep slipping back and I keep looking up to the corner for to see if I shall catch the arrival of the shadow in a trenchcoat with the vials of lies hidden in any of a dozen pockets.

It is the sudden sound of rubber on wet concrete that makes me turn away from the cracked yellow of the dim streetlight. Squelch on ancient pave, squelch over crack, silent as it leaps daintily over a puddle and lands with a smaller sound on the other end, squelch and squelch and it finally arrives. That leap was a small effort for a woman who we know knew could fly. I look up to see the return of my cosmic traveler, who merely grins.

And for all the things she has that she could say she chooses just hi.

She hugs her shoulders closer to herself and she shakes the stardust out of her hair and just says hi.

Of all the things I could say I just say four words. “So, how was it?”

She stops against this wild black wind as a painting does and then nudges my shoulder with her hip and I scoot over because she also doesn’t want to go indoors and she sits down next to me and doesn’t answer my question.

It feels like it always has to be next to her on this perch. I ask again. “How was it? Tell me.”

Did the wind sweep you off your feet? Did you sail across the sun? Did you make it to the milky way and find the lights all faded?

She sighs and a small smile seep slow sad stories. The matron with the lazy eye and the starched white uniform, the grass that never grew, the fruit trees that never bloomed, Neptune with his phantom rings, the moons, all eleven of them, of Jupiter, the asteroid that plummeted straight into the belly of Phobos. There was an orderly with the stutter who suffered so badly and the light of Alpha Centauri was so cold.

Again I turn to the streetlight and my skin itches for that nanosecond of pain. It wants to break, it wants to break to yield to a needle, to suck in the pale juice that destroyed us both.

Mountains crumbled over us every night before they came and took her away.

I look to the streetlight for the arrival of the traitor who looked just like saviors do when he rode up in his trenchoat.

She talks about how white the walls were and how everyone spoke in low voices. The flat plastic beds and the neverending asphalt of the Milky Way.

Tell me, I ask, “Did you miss me?”

Remember the mad rushes of our veins collapsing and the sweet folding in of our spirits before they were unfurled and how the next day our tastebuds were burnt and we could not tell that the soy latte we were sipping was the best one ever and how I took bullets for you before you were bundled into the spaceship and shot into another world called away from me.

Orion blazes and Sirius flashes a signal in the wrong language.

I know that when we hugged her and said we wished her the best, I didn’t. I didn’t want to be left alone, not here. I didn’t want her to come back clean because then it wouldn’t be coming back.

There is another sound. The wind brings it to me. Under the streetlight, boots and the faint clatter of glass against glass. The trenchcoat is here. Before I will close my eyes and surrender and get up and walk over to him and hand him a ball of crumpled notes I ask again that she tells me.

“Did you miss me?”

She sighs again.

“I will,” she says.