Mafuta had put on his best clothes, well ironed by his wife; he had put on his best black shoes, polished to a shine with his very own hands. But Bat’s friends were probably going to be talking about Italian shoes, English clothes, as if Drapers were still on Kampala Road, as if in the bygone days everyone had access to chic shops and the goods they sold. Now he felt happy that Amin had chased the Indian and British merchants away. It has not made everybody equal, but it has removed the alluring, unattainable goods from the public’s eye, and whoever wants them has to take the trouble to go to London, which most people can’t afford to do, Mafuta thought with some satisfaction. The soldiers are in power, flaunting their wealth, but it is transient and they lack style, which makes few jealous of them.
Mafuta had grown up with no materialistic instincts, and he still did not care very much, but when in good company he did not want to feel locked out. It made his bulk feel cumbersome, like a heap of stones, with his heart palpitating inside like a fisted frog. It seemed he had been too optimistic in going into old-fashioned town-planning in the fifties, when it looked as if the country was going to expand its modern tentacles aggressively. But then again, he hadn’t had the grades for medicine or economics. Why was he brooding over spilt milk? Because some Cambridge-educated bastard had refused to accept him? Because he did not fit in with the bastard’s friends? Because he sold cattle?
Brooding at such a time seemed ridiculous. He felt a little bit guilty. He wondered why it never bothered his wife that she did not know some of the things the Kalandas went on about. They had accepted her because of her brother. They even felt protective of her.
“We are going first to the Kalandas. .” his wife was saying.
“I know,” he said rather loudly, with a touch of unfriendliness.
The city looked hospitable when he had money to milk from it, cows to offload at a profit. Now it looked desolate, as if half its occupants had died, as if the remnants were combatting ghoulish fevers. Soldiers were joyriding down the streets in open Stinger jeeps, guns and bums sticking out. State Research Bureau boys were prominently displaying bell-bottom trousers wide as tents, platform shoes high as ladders, silver sunglasses shiny as chrome and walkie-talkies bulky as phone booths. Looking at them, spectral as scorched trees and menacing as bee-stung bulldogs, one might get the impression that an arrest was taking place every minute, the country locked in a spastic daze. They made this look like another city, compared with the earlier Kampala— accursed, dirty, haunted.
In the villages where he had just been, these boys were absent. Cattle farmers went about their business seemingly oblivious to the crisis in the city. Stepping from the horizon-kissed grasslands into urban filth, violence, uncertainty, was to step into a broken, alien world. But they were two thinly joined worlds, flying the same flag, using the same inflated currency, ruled by the same scum. To most villagers Marshal Amin was a spectre floating on rumour, occasionally projecting from a feeble radio speaker, never seen, never touched. Mafuta started feeling that he had made the right decision. Living in this atmosphere was not conducive to one’s health, sanity, equilibrium. How he now itched to go back to the cattle trail, where a heap of dung meant that cows were in the vicinity. Here they were in the city, chasing a trail of human dung, but without the certainty that there was a human being, living or dead, at the end of it.
The stay at the Kalandas’ was as agonizing as he had imagined. The two women went off to another room and talked for ages. He studied the pictures on the wall, the furniture, the trees outside, till he gave up. Meanwhile, Mr. Kalanda arrived and they struck up a conversation. There were no new developments. Contacts had been made far and wide, but nobody seemed to have seen Bat on the fateful day or afterwards. There was a conspiracy of silence at the ministry, which nobody had managed to crack. The car had been sighted at the Nile Perch Hotel, but the police were holding it as evidence.
At long last Sister emerged and announced that she had been trying to call Bat’s friend in London. A politician with an unpronounceable name.
“What is he going to do? He is in London, and we are here trapped in the mire,” Mafuta said irritably, getting more and more wound up and drawing looks of disapproval from the formidable Mrs. Kalanda. He had heard of the fellow, another Cambridge product. Amin has little respect for such foreigners and rightly so, Mafuta thought with some relief. He had jerked them around like dolls on a string on many occasions. This one too seemed destined for the same treatment, if he had the time to invest in the venture.
“Every possible avenue has to be explored,” Mr. Kalanda said diplomatically. He knew that the two in-laws did not get along; he did not want to make things worse.
“Right,” Mafuta said grudgingly, redundancy biting at him.
It was agreed that if there were no new developments in the next few days, they would have to start searching dumping sites.
“Are we going to wade in the ooze and turn the remains over ourselves?” Mafuta said, feeling sick and beginning to enjoy his position as outsider, asking the hard questions or at least making his hosts think, or explain things which did not need much explanation.
“There are people paid to do that. They know all the places. They are called surgeons,” Mrs. Kalanda explained, using a superior tone, as if talking to a wayward child.
“Let us hire one and get going,” Mafuta said, using the same tone and noticing that Mrs. Kalanda was more worked up about the disappearance than even his wife.
“We have to wait for Tayari and Babit to join us,” Sister explained to no one in particular, tears appearing in her eyes and voice.
Mafuta’s opinion of the city was not improved by the nightly shooting sprees. They would begin with single shots, as if somebody were alerting his comrades to get ready to party, and deteriorate into rapid volleys coming from all directions. The hours after midnight were the worst; it felt like a fire was raging over the city, and houses and people were exploding. The mind wandered to war, past and future. It stumbled onto the armed robbers who had terrorized the city at the end of the sixties, before the army put them down. It stumbled on all kinds of real and imaginary situations in which the gun was used to victimize unarmed people.
The strange thing was that in the morning nothing was heard of the shooting. Nobody talked about it. They talked about the weather, the fluctuating prices, inflation, but never about guns. It felt like a conspiracy. It was as if the shooting took place inside his head and was only heard by his drugged ears. His wife wasn’t too bothered by it. It was as if she expected drunken or frustrated soldiers to behave that way. The arrival of Bat’s brother did not alleviate Mafuta’s tension. The young man spoke only when spoken to, preferring to maintain silence or go for long walks by himself.
Mafuta’s burden lightened when he accompanied his wife to see Victoria and her child to get any information she might have. He was struck by the woman’s beauty, but he felt there was something hard and dangerous about her. She expressed much grief, but there was something superficial, overdone about it. Is it simply that she has too much energy or is there something wrong with her? Mafuta asked himself as he watched her, irked by the fact that it was rich or powerful men like his in-law who played around with such women. He had expected a spurned woman to be cool, restrained, dignified in her loss. Victoria, on the other hand, looked like a house on fire, barely holding back its zeal to consume itself. Maybe the bastard has a way of bringing hardness, insanity, out of people, Mafuta thought. Victoria’s child kept walking about, pulling things, going off to play, and coming back to interrupt conversation. He wondered what his child would look like.