Two little Class 13 shunting engines plied back and forth through the yard, finding the most serviceable of the remaining cars and lining them up on one track, where the yardmen hooked up the couplers and the hydraulic hoses for the brakes. (The electrical systems had broken down in so many of the cars that it wasn’t worthwhile even to attach those cables.) On the side of each chosen car a yardman scrawled with white chalk KAHAWA—coffee in large scraggly letters.
Finally the coal-burning locomotive, the Arusha, was backed into place at the head of the line of cars, and the last couplers and hoses were attached. The engineer and fireman took their positions in the locomotive cab, and just before noon the engineer pressed down the long lever and the Arusha moved slowly forward, the complicated network of bars that connected the big wheels lifting and falling, the shiny-rimmed wheels turning almost delicately along the track. (Far above, the Uganda Skytours plane flew over, its nasal roar buried in the chuff-chuff of the straining Arusha.)
A series of crashing jolts ran back through the thirty-three empty cars, as the couplers down the line lost their slack and one after the other the cars reluctantly but obediently joined the march. As the yardmen walked away, thinking about their lunches, the coffee train moved slowly out of the yard and onto the main line.
Gathering speed, black smoke and white steam angling back against the blue sky, Arusha and her children ran north toward Mbale, twenty-five miles away. From there, she would angle on a great curve northwestward through the waist of the country, traveling from the Kenyan border on the east up through Soroti and Lira and Gulu and then curving around southwestward to Pakwach on the Zaire border in the west, where the Victoria Nile from Lake Victoria meets with the Albert Nile from what used to be Lake Albert but is now Lake Mobutu Sese Seko. (There was also now a Lake Idi Amin, farther south toward the Tanzanian border region of West Lake, whence the forces would eventually come to overthrow Amin.)
The distance to be covered by the train was just over three hundred miles. The rail line itself continued on from Pakwach, turning northward again and running a further fifty miles up to Arua, from where Idi Amin had originally come. But there was little coffee up that way, closer to the Sahel, that sub-Saharan area of dryness and frequent drought, where the desert is on the move southward.
The train being empty and the land for the most part relatively flat, they made very good time when in motion, running at sixty miles an hour through the lush Ugandan landscape, the empty cars rattling and chattering along the way. But from Mbale on, they had to make frequent stops, dropping off cars at every freight station they came to. By Friday, on their return, these cars would be full to capacity with sacks of coffee.
Wednesday night they lay over in Gulu, two thirds of the way to Pakwach. In the morning they would finish the western journey, and tomorrow afternoon they would start the return.
35
The night Patricia confessed she was a spy was also the night Sir Denis proposed marriage. The proposal came first, with them together in his bed at the Nile Mansions Hotel, and her immediate thought was: How they’ll laugh when they listen to the tape! “Don’t, my dear!” she said, trying to cover his mouth with her hand, but the damage was done. The words were on the tape, forever.
Also the words before that. She didn’t need to give him the doped wine anymore; he was willing, and more than willing, to tell her whatever she asked. Was it because he was naive, or because he understood she was spying on him and he was willing to pay this price to keep her? She knew he was in love with her, and for the first time in her life a man’s love had made her feel guilt.
When they were apart, it was easy to be dismissive and scornful about his love, to disbelieve in it and remain unaffected. After all, he was thirty years older than she, he was white, he was an English aristocrat. His “love” for her could be nothing but lust, mixed with that famous English craving for degradation.
But when they were together, she knew the love was real. She had another human being’s life and happiness in her hands, and she didn’t want them. She wanted power, but not this way. She wanted control, but not if it was only to destroy.
Patricia was also an aristocrat, though she would never tell that to Sir Denis, fearing he would fail to understand and would be condescending to her. For what did the English understand of royal lines outside Europe; except, perhaps, for India? But Uganda too had noble families, a history of kings and courts.
In the old days, the largest and most powerful tribe in the area now Uganda was the Baganda, which controlled the land on the north side of the lake. The Baganda lived in cities, wore fine clothing, had established a sophisticated legal system, possessed excellent houses rather than the mud huts of the tribes down in the Rift Valley. The king of the Baganda was called the Kabaka; it was Kabaka Mutesa II who, in accepting the gift of a rifle from the English explorer Speke, sent a page from his court outside with it to shoot a bystander to see how well the weapon worked. And it was from the line of Mutesa II that Patricia Kamin was collaterally descended.
When the British took over Uganda, it was the Baganda tribe from the southern half of the country who provided the civil servants, later the university professors, the doctors and lawyers, and the local political power. And when eventually the British departed, leaving the Nubians from northern Uganda in control of the Army, it was to a very great extent the Baganda who controlled the government. The later accession of Idi Amin was originally seen by many Ugandans approvingly as the revolt of the poorer-educated northern underclass against the oppressive aristocracy of the southern Baganda.
Patricia’s father had been a literature professor at Makerere University—English literature, naturally, not African. She had grown up in an atmosphere of combined luxury and tension. She was among the select few on the inside, while the unshod many were always visible wherever one turned. Some people were struck to pity by this circumstance; some became embarrassed and fled to London or Paris or New York. Patricia became hardened.
She had spent three years in London finishing her education, but the clammy climate and the color of her skin kept her from settling there. At home she was the right color, but more than that, at home she was an aristocrat, and everybody knew it.
Independence had made it more difficult to be ostentatiously an aristocrat. Whatever might be said against the colonizers—and a lot could be said against them—they had more or less effectively kept the lid on tribal conflicts and bloodlusts during the three generations of colonial rule. The removal of that overseeing power had quickly shown that three generations weren’t enough; the old hatreds, the old feuds, were as alive and virulent as ever.
Patricia’s father had died, of natural causes, and quite coolly she had looked for another protector, finding him in an Army colonel, a Langi named Walter Unbule. He had looked up to her as the blue-blood she was, and throughout the Obote years his own star had seemed to be in the ascendant. But then Amin came in, and Colonel Unbule had been among those massacred at Jinja Barracks in 1971.