Given the faking, the pretense and the fear that stool pigeons were lurking everywhere, collecting news, marking every critical word one said, books offered a reliable escape route into a safer reality crammed with fantasy and ideas.
As in most dictatorships, secular books were unpopular in the seminary; they were considered subversive. Good seminarians distrusted such books, because they contained demons that made you critical of the good fathers and of Mother Church. They made you rebellious and arrogant, deaf to your vocation. They gave you a mind of your own and made you ask the wrong questions.
I remembered World War II and the men Grandpa had conscripted. I spent days looking through war records to see if the local contribution had been recorded. All I learned was that Africans had died in that war. There was nothing specific about the Ugandan contribution to the effort. The slaughter of tens of millions of people in Europe just nineteen years after the end of World War I, plus the deaths of the twenty million who had succumbed to the Spanish flu soon after, apparently did not include blacks and seemed another of the whitewashed versions of modern civilization sold to us here. It was as lopsided as the gloss the Church put on the carnage of the Crusades, and on all the other Church wars right up to our own Religious Wars at the turn of the century.
Fr. Kaanders gradually began to make sense to me. He had spent a good part of his youth fighting polygamy to uphold standards he believed were universal and crucial, and had ended up almost dead from exhaustion and sleeping sickness. It was while in the grip of death that he had realized the forlornness of his attempts, the stupidity of his sacrifice and the impracticability of putting the clock forward thousands of hours. Wisely, he decided to freeze the clock and let time take care of itself. I would do the same. I would embrace death in a timeless hold, look it in the face and turn it into an ally. I was delighted. I ruminated on my discovery for days.
It was on one such woolgathering day that Fr. Mindi caught me reading during prayer time. In fact, the bell had just rung. The boys had just started marching to the chapel, and I think he was smarting to get somebody. I hadn’t moved quickly enough or shown any sign that I would. He had already put the painting job behind him and had reverted to spying and stalking around the compound with a vengeance, as if to say he would not be forced to change by a bunch of snotty boys. Now he stood before me, the cassock making him look taller than he really was.
At the end of the morning I went to his office for my punishment. Music was playing in his cozy little office, the pop sound fluttering in the background like butterflies on a windowpane. I thought about Sr. Bison and wondered whether this was the music he played as she made her maddening fucking sounds. All the furniture was in good order, covered with clean cloths to avoid staining. I lay down to take my punishment. The hairy carpet tickled my fingers and took me back to the infernal carpet at the pagoda.
I got my three on “government meat.” The memory of my painting job anesthetized me totally. I was struck by the fact that this man had learned nothing. He was knowledge itself, thus ineducable. I thanked him for punishing me with a docile, contrite look on my face. His eyes lit up.
“Good boy. You are very quiet, very humble, and you never cause trouble. I am sure that one day you will make a very good priest.” I could hardly believe what was coming out of the mouth of this Urban University alumnus, but I politely said, “Thank you, Father.”
The main topic of conversation among us was still food: it was becoming worse. The posho was half-cooked, or simply bad, made as it was from wormy maize flour bought in bulk and stored for too long. The beans were weevilled and hardly responded to the cajoling of boiler fire. They remained hard and indigestible, and made us fart like hippos. The staff constantly complained about ill-mannered boys who farted in church, in class and in the hallways. Served them right. Truancy increased, and the price of black-market pawpaws, sugarcane and pancakes skyrocketed.
The drought came, turned the grass from green to gold, terrorized our water supply and made the smuggling in of foodstuffs a little easier. As we trekked the one kilometer down to the seminary well with our buckets, basins and jerry cans, the experts slipped into the bushes to meet waiting vendors. Some smuggled the contraband home inside their water containers. Others hid the stuff in secret places and fetched it during supper time or night study. That was how the unlucky ones fell into Fr. Mindi’s net.
There were two expulsions, one from Sing-Sing, one from Mecca. They were accompanied by a plethora of curses aimed at Fr. Mindi. There were idle threats to beat him up and set fire to the garage in order to punish the whole staff. Nothing of the kind happened, despite the genuine belief that all our suffering was the main responsibility of Fr. Mindi, the seminary bursar, embezzler and torturer.
Since the finances of the seminary were a mystery to me, my main concern was to discourage Fr. Mindi from spying and persecuting black-market food traffickers. If he stopped getting in our way, well, I felt we could let him do his own thing, but the man was like a demon, driven with the blind insistence of a psychopath. The only way to deal with him was on his own terms.
For a librarian, stalking a priest was as simple as pie. The library was at the end of the office block. I could always go along the offices and see which priest was in or out. I was free to go to the fathers’ residences, even those behind the offices, in fictitious pursuit of Fr. Kaanders. I knew for sure that Mindi’s favorite spying hour was from nine to ten in the evening, when every seminarian had to be in class for the night study. It was actually the safest time to tackle him, with little chance of unexpected intervention.
There was a network of paths through the football fields behind Sing-Sing which led to idle, overgrown seminary land, all the way down the valley, into the forest, up to the main road and the villages beyond. The main road was one kilometer away; one part of it led to Jinja Diocese, the theater of Kaanders’ old nightmares, the other to Kampala Archdiocese, under whose wing the seminary was. Fr. Mindi had worked in the archdiocese for six years before getting posted here. He had had less trouble from archdiocesan polygamists, who, unlike their die-hard counterparts in Jinja Diocese, kept quiet about their second or third wives. His scourge had been bold women who, fired by his good looks and his football prowess, openly solicited him.
Now, in the midst of the drought, Mindi was always out, enjoying the cool night air while waiting for his prey. These nocturnal walks reminded him of parish work, which had entailed waking up at night to go and give last sacraments to dying parishioners. Fr. Mindi was fiercely proud of his profession, and he firmly believed that priesthood was the noblest profession on earth. He had more or less worked out the next ten years of his career. He envisaged four more years here, after which he would return to the parish, grow maize and beans to sell and make enough money to live a comfortable life independent of parish funds. In his spare time, he would coach the parish football team and drive it slowly to the top of the interparish league. He regularly fantasized about his shambas, watching the maize grow and the bean leaves turn from green to gold. He dreamed of bumper crops and rich financial rewards.
His current thoughts, however, were rudely interrupted by sounds emanating from the other side of the pine fence, a stone’s throw away from the acacia trees. He heard a hiss and wondered whether it was a snake. The second hiss was human, deliberate, insolent. This was something new: truants always ran away from him and never drew his attention. Who could this person be? The night watchman, whom he had chastised for letting his car get vandalized? Yes, he had even threatened the man with dismissal if he did not stop sleeping instead of keeping watch. The next sound was a dog whistle. Somebody was whistling at him as though he were a dog! He was nobody’s dog. Not here, not even in Italy. He stopped and weighed the temptation to jump over the fence and tackle this bastard from the air in one lithe move. Much to his surprise, the whistler shook a pine tree to make his position clear. Having decided to jump, Fr. Mindi moved closer. He raised his head above the fence to see what was really going on, and to make sure there was a safe landing. He sensed the obnoxious stench too late.