Читать книгу Let's Tell This Story Properly - Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi - Страница 6

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

Let’s Tell This Story Properly

If you go inside Nnam’s house right now the smell of paint will choke you, but she enjoys it. She enjoys it the way her mother loved the smell of the outside toilet, a pit latrine, when she was pregnant. Her mother would sit a little distance away from the toilet, whiff-ward, doing her chores, eating and disgusting everyone until the baby was born. But Nnam is not pregnant. She enjoys the smell of paint because though her husband Kayita died a year ago, his scent lingered, his image stayed on objects and his voice was absorbed in the bedroom walls: every time Nnam lay down to sleep, the walls played back his voice like a disc. This past week, the paint has drowned Kayita’s odour and the bedroom walls have been quiet. Today, Nnam plans to wipe his image off the objects.

A week ago Nnam took a month off work and sent her sons, Lumumba and Sankara, to her parents in Uganda for Kayita’s last funeral rites. That is why she is naked. Being naked, alone with silence in the house, is therapy. Now Nnam understands why when people lose their minds the first impulse is to strip off. Clothes are constricting but you don’t realize that until you have walked naked in your house all day, every day, for a week.

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Kayita died in the bathroom with his pants down. He was forty-five years old and should have pulled up his pants before he collapsed. The more shame because it was Easter. Who dies naked on Easter?

That morning, he got up and swung his legs out of bed. He stood but then sat down again as if he had been pulled back. Then he put his hand on his chest and listened. Nnam, lying next to the wall, propped her head on her elbow and said, “What?”

“I guess I’ve not woken up yet.” He yawned.

“Then come back to bed.”

But Kayita stood up and wrapped a towel around his waist. At the door he turned to Nnam and said, “Go back to sleep. I’ll give the children their breakfast.”