I was about to convince myself that this was Padlock’s ghost come back to torment me one last time when I heard her voice. The contempt and confusion registering on my face in that brief instant had made her believe that I was mourning her dead or empathizing in some spectacular way. I was not. Yes, I could water her plants for her. The tone of voice was not too supercilious or too matter-of-fact. It could be interpreted as vaguely friendly or indifferent. Of course I had met types who smiled just because they were bloody scared to death of you. She, on the other hand, was in command of herself. The remains of her makeup had trickled down her face with the serpentine configurations of a bush trail, but what lay underneath was quite attractive. My mixture of lame Dutch and perfect English seemed to disarm her. Given an ear, her mouth loosened and grief flowed out with the sinuousness of a sloughing serpent. Halfway through the flood, I started thinking it was probably the usual detoxifying confession to a stranger. However, I picked up a few vital strands of information: she had the jinx of being deserted by men. Her father and two brothers had died of cancer. We were standing at the grave of the latest victim, a brother. That shook me to the roots, but did not intimidate me. If the disease was perambulating her system the way the plague had hijacked Aunt Lwandeka’s body, what the hell, as long as it was not contagious. Death had brought me here; it might as well take me away. I fathomed what she must have been going through: all those deaths, all those fears. The winds of the dead bound us to each other with fearsome intensity. In a matter of weeks, we were together. I was plucked from the ghetto and the racket at Keema’s flat and placed in her roomy apartment on the outskirts of the great city. The front window looked out on part of the city, a collection of roofs and spires and towers. In the mist-laden distance I could feel the ghetto beckoning, pulling me back to Little Uganda. But deep down I knew that, having come this far, I was not going back. And I had never belonged there anyway.
Magdelein de Meer literally owned me: I was the first person she truly felt belonged to her. A few white men had passed through her life, all melting in the distance like ghosts. I believed most were scared off by the cancer in the family, especially those who wanted children. Me, I was a fantasy, a dream which, if carefully refrigerated, could be made to last and live up to expectations. I relished the role at first, expanding my horizons under the new skies. In a way, I thought the affair was a victory, then a revenge: revenge on the despots, on Lageau, on the white world, on the black world and so on. But through the ordinariness of two people trying to live together, it dawned on me that there was no revenge, no victory, just another chapter in life, just another psychological barrier broken down, scraped and found, like the glittering headboard, to be of plain wood.
Magdelein had a junior post in a local bank, but she spent like somebody living on borrowed time. She decked me out in fine clothes, which made me uncomfortable, and showed me off. I have never liked formal dress, stiff suits and hard leather shoes, and now I had to put them on at parties. In a place where people dressed informally, I was turned into a fish in a bowl. I was being watched instead of watching. I was often like the corpse at the last service: dressed for burial. She had good intentions and quite a degree of idealism. She did for me what she would not do for a white man, I guess. I was not required to spend my dirty money on anything, except on gifts and language courses. She cooked and cleaned, although she did the latter better than the former. I believed she was competing with mythical black women, invisible specters who could rob her of her dream by cleaning and cooking their way into my heart. Cunningly, I edited Eva from the story I fed her. As I watched Magdelein cooking and cleaning, I kept thinking that I had done as much for Eva. The irony often had me laughing in the bath. Magdelein had a good plan: to mother me and pamper me till I felt obligated to stay. A banker’s mind: long-term investment. Two of my white colleagues had me laughing in secret: they complained bitterly about their white wives, who apparently did not cook or do anything round the house.
I had a few more things to laugh about: before moving in with her, we had been obliged to register ourselves with the local police. I showed my British passport and the birth certificate. There was no hitch. She asked me about my passport, and I told her that I was born in Britain before my parents migrated to Uganda when it was still a garden of Eden. She swallowed the tale in good faith, and like many mythmakers, I felt my chest swell. I told her that Serenity worked with the Energy Board in a managerial capacity and that Padlock had been a primary school teacher (flashed by Cane after beating him into an erection). Then one day Serenity got picked up by Amin’s men, was locked up and driven from his job. He finally got a job in a small tool-making company, where he worked till his death. Magdelein was a curious woman, and I made sure that I kept the story simple to avoid catching myself in my own traps. I knew that one day she might want to visit the country, but since that was far into the future, I did not mind. It had not been my intention to lie to her; I just got carried away by the yarn. Her curiosity opened wells of imagination in my mind, and fictions flowed out.
She started telling me to stop working. She must have felt uncomfortable recalling the way we had met. There was also the possibility of another vulnerable mourner’s taking me off her hands. But it was the thought of my opening up crumbling graves during the day and her box of secrets at night that disorganized her self-image. It brought the idea of death too close to home.
For my part, I thought she just wanted to pull the noose tighter by making me totally dependent on her. On the other hand, I enjoyed what I was doing, especially because I did not have to do it. No two graves were the same; each contained its own secrets. The fire of the incinerator reminded me of my brewing days, and the fires that had raged through Serenity’s Abyssinia. There was something spiritual about the fire, a sublimating quality which liberated what was important from the past. I was comfortable in my job and saw no reason to give it up. There was also another side to it. What if she threw me out? I had no plans to get caught unawares and have to return to the ghetto. I resisted all attempts to hijack my independence. I was most irritated when she attempted to do that on the embers of a particularly good afterglow. Sex had never weakened my resolve or mental capabilities; it would not start making me do handstands now. I always found tenderness as a form of bribery particularly revolting, especially as it reminded me of Padlock’s attempts to extract confessions by way of slimy psalms.