This was overwhelming for a boy abandoned by his mother to the wolfish quirks of his dad’s wives. He held the plaque as if somebody were about to snatch it from him. The vendor, an old man with a thick mustache and little gray eyes, was intrigued. Serenity was his first customer that day, and how strangely he acted!
Thoracic and gastric locusts nibbled at Serenity with gusto. He almost forgot where he was, in a cramped side street with tourists in shorts and mini-skirts passing like paper ghosts all around him. A river of mud seemed to carry him away from these people and their city and their wares, past the tower of Ndere Parish and the swamps at the foot of Mpande Hill, back to the bosom of the village.
The vendor offered him a good discount if he bought three of the plaques. Serenity seemed to wake up. The vendor reminded him of the old Fiddler and the breasts between his legs. Barrel-organ music was coming from the end of the street. He remembered how he had wanted to learn to play the fiddle. The vendor repeated his offer, looking at Serenity closely and hiding his growing sense of unease behind a large smile. The message of the plaque was too personal for either Hajj Gimbi or Nakibuka to really comprehend. No, he wanted only one plaque, for himself alone.
The rest of his stay in Rome disappeared in a speedy haze. Time oscillated between lucid bursts of euphoric consciousness — say, when a painting talked to him — and a groggy flow of tide, traffic, people. The bus rides, the monuments, the holy masses, the visit to Lourdes — all had something surreal about them. He felt it all slip away.
Serenity had bought a gigantic, meter-long rosary with wooden beads as large as tomatoes. He hated the thing, and the clapping wooden noise it made as he walked, but it was the height of fashion: all his fellow pilgrims wore them to show that they were not common tourists. He lacked their sense of pride and conviction. He thought they all looked like walking billboards for clerical commercialism.
Serenity woke up in Israel. It was hot and dry, with a sandy-gray haze clinging to the air. He looked at the embattled city of Jerusalem, which had suffered violence from time immemorial. He envisioned its destruction and reconstruction, its rises and falls. He pictured the seesawing between peace and war that had gone on over the centuries. He wondered how the city contained the pressure of all that history within its walls.
Serenity flew to the Old Testament. He recalled some of the wars, the internal struggles and Moses’ leadership ordeals. As a leader himself, albeit of a much smaller caliber, he appreciated Moses’ impossible position, squashed as he was between the will of God and the wishes of the Israelites. He remembered the story of the Golden Calf, and the snakes, and he wondered why God chose to operate in such a climate of violence. Serenity now appreciated Jesus’ rebel credentials much more. Stories of the poor, the dispossessed, the victims of Roman colonialism and local greed, made an impression on him. The people of Jesus’ time needed a charismatic leader to chip away at the bedrock of oppression and misery.
Serenity felt a bit like Jesus. He wished he could also be mythologized. He wished the peasants of Uganda could tell stories about him and his family from one generation to another. He realized that his childhood wish to learn to play the fiddle had had grains of mythmaking desire in it. He had wanted to be somebody to outlast time, a Jesuslike ghost who would sprinkle his name on the sands of time, a free spirit who would inspire strangers with the universal seeds embedded in its home-grown fruit. But what did he have to offer the peasants of his village and the slum dwellers of his city in return for eternity? His exploits as treasurer of the postal union? His father’s chiefly acts? His late aunt’s baby-delivering achievements? What universal seeds lay embedded in the jackfruit called Serenity? he wondered.
Some pilgrims wept when they arrived in the Holy Land. It was almost too much for peasant folk who had never dreamed, as they dug in the fields, as they plucked their coffee, as they fed their goats and pigs, that they would ever come here. All the powerful people in the world had been here, and now, wonder of wonders, they were here too! They marveled at the power of modern technology which enabled Israelis to grow crops in the desert. It seemed miraculous, like many Biblical stories of their childhood. Serenity also marveled at the level of technology here, but he noticed that the owners of this capability had lost that precious sense of wonder. They took everything for granted, like a peasant finding beans in a pod. It seemed sad to him.
The nights were cool and calm, a far cry from the hot, hectic days, and he looked forward to them. They enabled him to withdraw and to rest. It was three weeks now since he had last touched Nakibuka. He felt the miracle of her fire burning, testing him to the limit.
Serenity’s arrival at Entebbe Airport was anti-climactic. Ugly meter-long rosary dangling round his neck, the knocking of wooden beads a monotonous, raucous song, the iron links clinking like dog chains, he and other returnees vacated the plane and headed for the check-in gate. On the second floor, overlooking the tarmac and the silver-gray lake in the distance, excited relatives and friends waved and cheered with a mixture of ululation, rapturous song and the shrill calling of names. Serenity waved like everybody else, a dazed expression on his face: home, he was back home. Padlock, Kawayida, Nakatu and Hajj Gimbi were among the people who surrounded him and smeared him with the oil of their happiness, relief and joy. The gloom that had enveloped him all night on the plane lifted and dissipated like morning mist.
General Idi Amin’s pragmatic fist had been cocked for more than a fortnight, and now it hit Serenity full in the face. During his absence, the general had made an additional four thousand places available, including foreign exchange benefits. Padlock had hardly slept a wink during the last five days: Mbale had secured her a place in their home parish! The suddenness of it all had thrust her into the immortal terror that something might go wrong to balance this unexpected good luck. She became gripped with the fear that Serenity would not return. Planes blew up or fell or hit rocks frequently these days, but now he was back! Alive! Where was he going to get the money for her journey, though? “We will see, we will see,” he had kept saying. The impatience in her bones and the fear of disappointment in her bosom made Padlock tongue-tied and a touch sullen amidst the joy of Serenity’s return. Blind faith had kept her going before Amin’s surprise turnaround, and it was blind faith she was counting on once again to seal her victory. Beyond it she dared not look: the lacuna of analysis and speculation was too deep and too vertiginous to dive into. Now the sight of Serenity, her Serenity, looking so distinguished made her proud. She tried to be happy, hoping that her happiness for him would be rewarded. Had he really been to Rome? And Lourdes? And the Holy Land?
The journey home was a bittersweet ordeal. Everyone was talking at once. Hajj Gimbi’s voice boomed, and Padlock was proud that pagans were giving praise to God: stones were indeed shouting. She felt an absence of hatred for this bearded fellow, for Kawayida and his wife, and for Nakatu, who remained a dull enigma to her.
At home there was cheerful pandemonium. A delegation of postal workers from the union was there, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, pagan. They had hijacked the occasion and taken over organizing the celebrations. The pagoda seemed to belong to them now. They barked orders and served drinks and food with ease. Now and then they burst into song. Padlock had looked forward to a low-key event, but these fellows had no regard for jet lag or anything else. They were here to eat and drink and dance and show allegiance to their new leader. As the drums rolled, both Serenity and Padlock found themselves thinking of their wedding day so many years ago. The celebrations gathered momentum rather quickly, and by the time night fell there were drunks swearing and cursing and brawls Serenity dared not break up for fear of annoying his constituency. He reveled in the cheerful disorder.