Ijuka’s heartbeats threatened to burst his chest open and his legs felt so weak he feared he might collapse. He whispered hoarsely, “Yes, I am. Why do you ask?”
“My name is Wange,” the stranger said, purposely omitting his rank of ‘captain’. “Can I come in? I have some news concerning your son,” he added abruptly. Obviously, he did not relish his mission and wanted to get it over with as soon as possible.
Ijuka slid outside and closed the door behind him. He said in a fearful and panicky voice, “My wife’s there.”
“So much the better; she should also hear what I have to say,” the stranger said matter-of-factly and moved forward as if to lead the way. Ijuka turned and dragged his feet back to the door in time to turn the handle and hold it open for the young man to enter.
“He wants to come in,” he said irrelevantly to Mirembe who sat moulded in her chair, her eyes fixed on the stranger.
The two men looked at her, waiting for her reaction. It was Wange who spoke first, addressing Ijuka, “It would be better if you sat down.” But either Ijuka did not hear him or preferred not to follow his advice. Instead, he went and stood by his wife’s chair as if to draw comfort from her closeness or confer some to her in face of whatever was to come.
Wange looked at the middle-aged couple irresolutely, his heart full of compassion. He was not prepared for the resemblance of the staring woman’s eyes and those of the dying young man in the forest. There was a quality in them that evoked dissatisfaction in him with the order of things and set him asking the question why? Why must people die young? Why must people suffer? Why must people kill each other in the name of liberty?
He regretted his coming but reminded himself that a promise was a promise and one made to a dying man was sacrosanct.
His memory suddenly took him back to that day termed The Nsagazi Victory in the protracted fight against the rebels led by the self-styled Gen. Irungu-rya-Ntongo. The government forces had pursued the rebels, the so-called United Liberation Front across River Nyage and through Miti forest at the bottom of Atunga Hills, killing more than a dozen, wounding several and capturing a good number of them.
That last day of the Nsagazi Battle, Wange, who was in charge of the operation, put a halt to the mopping up exercise when it started getting dark. He told his men to retreat to Landeke, five kilometres away where they had pitched camp. But before leaving the battleground, he needed to scout around the area, mostly bush and forest, to confirm the number of rebels killed. The government side had lost only two men whose bodies would be delivered to their families in due course. Thankfully, they had no badly wounded fighters on their side but he had to make sure that all the fallen rebels were indeed dead and not playing dead. A surprise attack at this juncture would be a major setback.
Wange called Gudio, his second in command, to join him in a thorough check of the place. “Take a couple of men and comb the upper approach, starting south-east of the river. I’ll take the opposite side. Any wounded among them, with chances of survival, we’ll take to one of the military detaches for medical treatment, and questioning. You know what to do with those beyond saving but I doubt there are any in either category.”
Wange went alone, preferring to use the time away from the troops for a breather. The thick undergrowth and the fast creeping in darkness slowed down his search. He had taken only about fifty metres inside the forest when he heard what sounded like a groan. He stopped and listened. But only the moaning sound of the wind, as it clashed with treetops in a show of might, filled the air. He moved on, thinking the sound of a person in pain was only in his mind but it came again, this time, more distinctly.
He moved forward cautiously, his gun cocked. “Who’s there?” he called out. Nobody answered. Only multiplied echoes of his voice answered back. Quietly, he started to creep in the direction the sound of the groan had come from and almost stumbled over the body of a man before he saw it. It was partially hidden by underbrush from open view.
The man, who looked like a boy hardly out of his teens, lay on his back, his eyes staring and frightened. Wange regarded him impassively, noting that a bullet had caught him in the abdomen, resulting in a darkened patch around his middle that was beginning to attract flies. His right leg too seemed to have been shattered and lay almost detached from the rest of his body.
Obviously, he was not one of theirs, although he was dressed in the same camouflage fatigues, and perhaps had carried the same issue of gun, courtesy of the rampant corruption in the ministry. He was still breathing although Wange did not think he had much longer to live.
Wange pushed back the few tentative qualms that were threatening to interfere with his duty, lowered his gun and squatted by the man ready to extract whatever information he could. “Who’re you?” he asked.
The rebel’s mouth trembled and made sounds but nothing intelligible came out. His hand crept forward towards Wange, palm open upwards. For one crazy moment, Wange thought the man wanted to give him ‘a high-five’, sign such as children do in congratulatory gestures. Strangely, he did not feel angry or repulsed. He stretched his own free hand and gently clasped the dying man’s. The man ceased to be a rebel the minute their hands met in a brotherly gesture. He was a comrade-in-arms, a young man caught up in the web of conflicting egos at his most susceptible, his most vulnerable. Like the rest of them, he was chasing shadows, looking for answers where there were none. Wange did not know whether to pity or envy him for they were all destined for the same end; his had come sooner rather than later.
His thoughts momentarily turned to his friend, Opando, similarly prematurely cut down like a diseased tree; what is the difference between the two young men or the thousands of young lives sacrificed at the altar of ‘liberation’? Words from a poem by one of the thousands of dead soldiers came to his mind unbidden:
With an end in mind
We joined
With an end in sight
We dreamed
Now with no end to mind
We still dare to hope
Dare to hope; dare to hope for what? The end is long in coming, he appended his own sequel.
He bent down, his face close to the dying man and asked again, urgently, “What’s your name?”
“I…I…I’m Aguma…Aguma John,” the young man said with a great deal of effort. He stopped and coughed, letting out jets of blood that almost hit Wange in the face.
“Look, Aguma, don’t give up; we’ll take you for treatment; you’ll be all right,” he said, his words sounding hollow even to his own ears. He had seen too many fatally wounded people to predict this one had only moments to live. I should put a bullet in his head and be done with it, Wange told himself. That was the standard practice in military operations like this but somehow, the fallen youth’s desperate look got to him and compelled him to deviate from the norm.
“My…pa…re…nts…tell…them…I’m sorry…” the dying man whispered faintly.
Wange bent close to him again and asked, “Who’re your parents?” But as he waited for the answer, he heard the familiar rattling sound, followed by a mighty spasmodic heave of the body upward and then silence: utter dead silence.
Wange remained on his knees for some time, his eyes on the still body but his thoughts were busy with his usual unresolved arguments, looking for answers to that eternal question, why? Why can’t people realise that there is no person who has the magic formula to create a heaven on earth? With the ushering in of every new conqueror, every new regime, the country got more and more fragmented and that less strong and secure to withstand future storms.
A gust of wind stirred through the thick foliage, sending birds in treetops flapping and chirping nervously. Wange too was coldly whipped back from his momentary pensive trip. In this type of business, personal feelings were extraneous and not encouraged. He tried to peep at the sky to gauge its immediate intentions but it was completely shrouded from his view by an almost impenetrable canopy of tree branches. However, the twitch in his bad knee indicated it would rain soon; a bad time to run into an ambush.
He cast one last look at the dead rebel; so young, so very young and alone. He swallowed a lump in his throat threatening to choke him to tears and put his hand on the sightless eyes, gently bringing the final curtain down.
A few paces away from the scene of death, he stopped and looked back, the words of the dying man piteously echoing in his head, ‘Tell my parents…I’m sorry…’ But he died before he could reveal his parents’ names. Too bad for the parents for there was no way Wange could ever find them. There were hundreds of jobless young men like this one flocking to the bush to join the ULF in the fight against what they termed a dictatorial regime…Wange quickly reined himself in before his thoughts began to roam the paradoxical realms of Truth and Justice.
He took a couple of steps forward but felt a twinge of conscience that he was leaving the body so exposed to predatory forest creatures. He retraced his movements and looked around for something to cover the body with. He shouldered his gun, got his pen knife from the inside of his heavy-duty gum boots, unsheathed it and reached for bowed tree branches and bushes that could make a rough shroud for Aguma. After he had collected a heap, he lifted the body and laid it face downward.
He had no idea why he thought that was the best position; he just found himself doing it. And it was in the course of lifting the body that he stepped on something squeaky. He looked down and there at his feet, half hidden by the thick carpet of undergrowth was a small travelling bag. He stooped and picked it up and slung it over his shoulder without thinking. After he finished covering the body, he hurried away to the rendezvous with his men to start the retreat to their camp before it got completely dark.
As he walked, the small leather bag bumped against his back as if to remind him of its presence. He reached for it and felt it; it was empty or so it felt to his cursory search. All the same he did not throw it away, feeling it might have a story to tell.
****
Tell my parents that I’m sorry… why did that plaintive voice haunt him? Tell my parents that…how much to tell them and how much to omit? How would knowing the way he died help them? Did they know he was fighting the government alongside ULF? Did they encourage him? He doubted that very much.
In the end he contented himself with a sketchy account of his and Aguma’s encounter. “He died quickly; he did not suffer much,” he added, biting his tongue as he fell on the usual platitude. Lying did not come easily to a person of his nature. “But before he died,” he continued hastily, “he asked me to deliver a message to you both…” Here he stopped and stole a look at the couple. They stared at him with incomprehension as if he spoke a foreign language, Christ Almighty!
He deliberately lifted the polythene bag he had placed on the floor beside him and pulled out the small brown bag, looking worse for wear after accompanying him on further expeditions for five whole months. At the sight of the familiar object, Mirembe gave a sharp piercing scream as if she had just been confronted with the body of her dead son, erasing whatever residual of hope she might have still been clinging to.
“O Aguma, my baby…o…o…o, where are you? Why did you leave me, why? Eleven months ago, you walked out of that door and never came back, why, o why?” she keened, slapping her thighs with her open palms, rivulets of tears running down her round face. Her husband, whose frame seemed to have shrunken even more in the last few minutes, alternated between his ineffective attempts to comfort her and casting accusing looks at Wange.
Wange felt like the intruder he was. He had accomplished his mission; it was time for him to leave Aguma’s parents to mourn their loss in private. There was nothing more he could do for him here.
He got up, carefully put the small brown bag on the centre table, with an envelope in which he had enclosed a twenty-thousand-shilling note, the traditional mabugo. Then he walked out of the house and out of their lives, after successfully laying the ghost, he hoped. He believed he would not be haunted by the echo of the plaintive voice again…Tell my parents I’m sorry…he turned and re-entered the house.
****
Mirembe watched her husband with a smile as he dressed carefully for the government function they had both been invited to. This was the first time since their son Aguma disappeared and was later confirmed dead that she had seen him look truly happy. They had gone through all the stages of loss of a loved one, in their case an only child too. Ijuka had chosen to deaden his pain through drink while Mirembe had sought her solace in eating until her weight stopped being just ungainly and turned into a medical problem.
At first their grief drew them closer to each other, but after sometime, the edge of pain began to wear off, leaving behind a sense of emptiness. The bickering, the accusations and counter accusations then started, turning the house that once reverberated with love and happiness into a shack of misery. Day after day Mirembe asked herself why she was allowing herself to be imprisoned in the joyless pile of bricks called home, with cobwebs, cockroaches and painful memories for company. Ijuka, on his part, settled to cultivating a closer relationship with his new-found friend, the bottle, operating in a haze of stupor most of the time.
Their turning point came when, three years after Aguma’s death, the rebels overthrew the government, sending shockwaves across the country. If our Aguma had been alive was the sentiment that passed through both their minds, jolting them back to their senses. They felt exultant that their son had not died in vain.
Ijuka and Mirembe were not very political and viewed every new regime, which in their lifetime numbered four, with the irritation a traveller views a bus speeding past that is not heading to their destination. However, the United Liberation Front’s assumption of power took on a new dimension for them as compared to the previous political changeovers; they conceived it from a different perspective, the perspective of personally having a stake in it since their son had been part of the action.
“Our son fought and died for the liberation of the country,” they boasted.
“Indeed, he was a hero,” was the gratifying response.
Apparently, President Irungu-rya-Ntongo held the same view for when the list of heroes to be recognised came out on the second anniversary of the ULF victory John Aguma’s name was among the brave young fighters who had died in the struggle to liberate their country. The invitation for Mr and Mrs Ijuka to the Commemoration Day at Victory Grounds came a week before the occasion bearing the country’s emblem of an eagle with its wings spread out as if in preparation to fly (or attack).
The invitation was delivered by a uniformed smart young soldier who introduced himself as Captain Doma. He looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties. “Just about what Aguma would be if he had lived,” Mirembe remarked to her husband with nostalgia afterwards. “It reminds me of that other young man who brought the news of Aguma’s death – what was his name again?”
“Wange,” Ijuka supplied unhesitatingly.
“Yes, Wange; I wonder where he is now. He was such a nice young man. I hope he was not killed in the war.”
“What do you think? He was on the enemy side,” Ijuka said brusquely.
“He was on the government side and our son was on the rebels’ side,” Mirembe corrected her husband gently. “Don’t forget that the enemies of today are the heroes of tomorrow; when will it all end?” she speculated aloud as she stretched her hands to straighten her husband’s orange and black tie, the party colours of ULF.
—–
Image: sheikho_07 Pixabay remixed