THE THINGS WE ALREADY KNOW

By Alex Ssali

Mariam walks into Masaka Central Police station determined to report the case. She has thought it through and is convinced her husband would want her to do exactly that: seek justice. Those murderers shouldn’t just go free without consequences. But her mind seems to be occupied by a train of thoughts that keep gnawing at her and she can’t quite concentrate on anything at once. She lands her right step into the pothole at the entrance to the station and the officer at the gate shouts:
“Madam, watch your step. You people have turned alcohol into water.”

She barely pays attention to the police officer, who shouts again, more angrily this time:

“Madam, wash hands. Corona is real. And push mask above nose.”

She pushes the grey-black cloth mask above her sweaty nose, her eyes almost sinking beneath her sockets. She looks fatigued from the walking- Ndegeya is a good number of kilometers away that, if she had had an extra two thousand shillings, a boda boda would have made the journey easier. But she had decided to start planning for every shilling if she was going to manage, by any happenstance, all on her own, from now onwards.

Just Yesterday, she did not feel compelled to plan much beyond organizing her house and taking care of her four sons. But things are different now. If she’s lucky and the system works in her favor, perhaps it will become a little easier.

There’s a long line at the entrance to the lobby, a congested square room partitioned with plywood so as to have police officers on the side take up an office-like arrangement.

“The sun is really hot today. I think it’s going to rain one of these days,” says the older lady standing next to her in the now double-line fattened queue.

She does not answer. Her feet are sore and dusty, and her breasts are swollen and aching underneath her green gomesi. She wants to squeeze them to ease the pain, but she knows she’d only be making her chest wetter. Her mind instead lingers over the events that happened just yesterday. Just yesterday, she had had four boys. Kyakuwa was still a breastfeeding four months old baby. She could not have left him home, even if she had wanted to. She wants to re-imagine a scenario in which at least the innocent boy wasn’t involved, and maybe forgive herself, but she can’t. The boy had been sitting on his father’s lap in the back seat of the car when an explosive sound emanated from the car tyres. In the moment of the shock, his blood was already flowing in his father’s hands.

“Muwala, daughter, please help me. My phone is ringing. Read for me the name of the caller,” the old lady cries out.

Mariam snaps out of her thoughts and reads the name to her.

“It must be him. He’s the young man who gives out loans. I haven’t been able to pay the monthly installments for the past four months dear. This Corona messed up everything. It’s a shame an old woman like me is going to jail. I’ll die before I get there…”
She wants to tell the old lady not to joke about death in such a way. But she imagines the old woman has had her own fair share of the world’s bludgeonings, and so goes back to her own train of thoughts.

The queue is now under the shade of the roof at the doorway. She hopes the cooling effect represses the sadness, and rekindles the happier memories. Was she not a hopeful woman, just yesterday?

Musa, even in the midst of the Corona pandemic, had still managed to provide for her and her children. When the president had announced that schools would be closed indefinitely, they were both worried about survival. The beginning had indeed been tough. For three months teachers had not been paid. The man who had once been used to looking forward to every day had now turned into a barber. A mobile barber on his bicycle.

Mariam thinks that’s how he even learned how to drink.

She recalls how his breath reeked of the disgusting smell of waragi while they made love, but then gratitude had taught her better not to complain. The drinking habit had peaked on the day he came home one night, singing in his slurred voice and waltzing about the house aimlessly. He had called the children out of the beds to come dance for him as he ate his supper. That’s when Mariam knew that something had to be done about it.

“You are buried in thought, muwala. Everything okay? Why didn’t you carry your baby? Your gomesi is all soiled…” the old lady blubbered on.

Two young men are brought out of a cell into the lobby. Their faces are swollen and their eyes surrounded with rings of black. Their knuckles and heals are visibly bruised with fresh clots all around. A smart gentleman who seems to be their father or guardian appears to gesture to the guard and they move into a corner. Mariam notices the small khaki envelope that is exchanged during the handshake but then just rolls her eyes over to the opposite side.

“Curfew. Must be the curfew. Young boys are losing their limbs when they move past the curfew time, I’m telling you. The LDUs are killing more children than the Corona has, muwala. My grandson is now a regular at the traditional bone-setter. Terrible times I’m telling you…”

She doesn’t say anything that Mariam doesn’t already know. Her own husband Musa had worried her sick every time it clocked seven o’clock in the evening and he wasn’t home.

“The curfew is in your heads, and only the poor ones are affected by the curfew,” he’d always say when Mariam expressed her concerns. But she knew that’s just something most men said especially as they hid in bars that operated illegally against the president’s orders. Was it not true that only people who sold liquor were now the only ones who could afford to miss lining up for the free maize flour and beans that the government distributed?

Her own husband had approached the village chairman to enroll as an official distributor. She wanted to feel proud of herself because it was her idea so he could cut down on the drinking. But she equally feels like she’s to blame for everything that happened afterwards.

“How old is he? Is it a she? She must be hungry, muwala.”

“Only four months. He made four months on Monday last week, ” She says between moments of choking on her own saliva. She wipes the tears with her hands.

“Oh dear. Is he your first? The emotions are still managing you…but it’s a boy. Those ones feed. By tomorrow morning, the breasts won’t hurt like that anymore…”

Mariam smiles down at the old lady. She wishes that by tomorrow all the pain would be gone. Yet she knows that that’s all she can do- wish.

“Why are you here, mukadde?” she asks her.

“Police letter. You can’t go anywhere without it these days. My other grandchild has a bad cough in the nights. I need to take him to the hospital. The village chairman asked for my identity card but it must be the rats in the house. I can’t find the small thing. I came with the truck  that carries  matooke to Kampala. I’m from Bugabira, muwala. This curfew better not find me here.”

She recalls that only a few days ago, she had herself been here with Musa to process documents for him to travel to Kampala. It had been the organizer of the food distribution team that had brought the suggestion to Musa. She remembers how ecstatic he had been when he brought the news home.

“I’m going to put the barber thing on hold for now. The minister who’s running for office needs people at his crowds. You know these things, poor Mariam, don’t you. And I’m going to be one of the cheerleaders. Twenty thousand shillings per day isn’t bad in these times, is it? Does it matter whether I support him or not?”

The old lady is now the next one in line. As she starts to move forward, another young lady in heels skips the queue and walks past them up to the counter.

“Muwala, it’s the airtime. If you don’t have airtime money, you make the queues. They say things here are free but only when you have airtime money,” she says in very audible whispers and the people behind them in the queue all turn and nod with disappointment in their faces.

The police officer behind the counter now looked impatiently at the old lady, before ordering:

“Be quick, ma’am. We don’t have all day. If you don’t photocopies of your village chairman’s letters first get them. And buy 5 pieces of duplicating paper too, we’re out…”

The old lady starts to arrange her documents. The lady behind the counter says work will resume after lunch. Mariam wonders what she is going to tell her. She wonders if the officer behind the counter is the right person to tell such kind of information, information that even she could not sieve delicately.

“And you, my dear, why are you here?” the old lady asks.

She wants to tell the old lady that Musa was the proverbial Kamwakabi from the Luganda saying, only collateral damage. And that she has only come here to seek justice for Musa.

Musa had attended the rallies for a week and he had since returned home a jolly man, with a bag of sugar or soap or meat each time. Only until just the day before yesterday. Only until the day of the elections. She wonders if Musa had told her the story in its entirety. On the evening before yesterday, Musa came back at two in the morning. He only spoke in whispers. He went to his children’s room and whispered I love you’s as they soundly slept. He held out a khaki envelope and showed it to Mariam and told her he was going to set this country straight. He was going to go down in history as a man who wanted justice and fairness to prevail. He wanted to go to a national television and show the whole world how the tallies had been made on paper, that the man who was opposing the minister had won, but instead the minister had been declared the winner. He said the envelope had photographic evidence as well, and that there was no way a man who had less that twenty people lined up behind him was going to win. Musa had looked at Mariam and told her, his eyes painted with fear and his lips trembling:

“The minister had fainted in his car. I saw with my two God-given eyes, Mariam. His body guard shot at the man counting the tallies. There was a stampede and when I realized that the opposing groups had resorted to jostling against each other, I took these valuables. Besides the justice, this will be good money. I’m going to quit teaching…”

The only problem was that the bodyguard had seen Musa run away, too. And Musa had spent the rest of that evening in hiding.

“What are these people eating that’s stopping them from working on us?” the old lady snaps.

There’s more buzzing from the people behind. The lady behind the counter returns with a bottle of Rwenzori mineral water in her hands and a toothpick between her lips.
The old lady looks on with disgust.

“You haven’t really told me why you’re here, muwala. And you’re too quiet. These people don’t care about the noise, so discipline doesn’t really help here…”

Mariam’s mind can only flash back to the night before yesterday. She had arranged for a private car and a letter from the chairman that permitted her to transport her sick  husband to a hospital. She wonders if hiding a few more days would have made any difference. She wonders if the chairman sold them out to the murderers. But she knew all too well that her musings were not going to change the fact that when the explosive sound came from the tyre, the car stopped suddenly. The driver was the first one to get shot at. The man then aimed his gun at the four months old baby, before shooting twice through Musa’s brains. Mariam only regained her consciousness minutes later when the envelope was gone, and her husband and son were merely lifeless bodies sinking in pools of blood.

“I want to report a case. My husband was murdered and I saw the murderer!” she finally says in barely audible whispers. “And the boy, too. I lied.” She whimpers.

Staring longingly at the ceiling and the walls of the lobby, she scans the room for answers on how to start her case. Her eyes peer at the big portrait of the president hanging from the wall just across the room from where she now sits on long bench. The clock keeps ticking, the short hand almost touching the figure five. The television now runs a breaking story: MINISTER’S SUPPORTERS AND A CHILD MURDERED IN MASAKA…

Mariam glares at the zoomed-in image of her husband during the rallies, and then the face of the minister who swears to seek justice for ‘these innocent souls’.

“How may we help you, ma’am?” the officer behind the counter calls out.
Mariam hugs the old woman as she lets out a few silent sobs before storming out of the station.