The Iron Bridge: Short Stories of 20th Century Dictators as Teenagers

Plays
Breath In Between
The Kabbalistic Psychoanalysis of Adam R. Tzaddik
Easy Lenny Lazmon and the Great Western Ascension
The Offering
Eternal Hydra

Everything inhuman is senseless and worthless

—Vasily Grossman

Just inside the threshold of
the company mess hall, wearing an apron smeared dark with Worcestershire sauce, maize meal, and other detritus from the evening meal, stands Idi, tall and slender—the newly recruited assistant cook. He’s watching the rowdy
askaris
from Company E of the Fourth Battalion of the King’s African Rifles as they laugh and kick a soccer ball around the dusty main square of the Jinja barracks. With their black chests exposed through open, untucked shirts, the enlisted men plow through beers purchased in the company canteen and top them off with sips of their forbidden
waragi
liquor.

It’s the last Friday of the month. Payday. There will be no sleep tonight for this weary young assistant cook. The yelling and kicking mass will storm around the field for hours, keeping everyone awake. At dawn the drunken soldiers will stumble back to their huts, crooning and cursing each other, vomiting in the bushes, just when
dupis
like Idi have to rise for their kitchen duties. He has finished cleaning dishes and wouldn’t mind a beer himself, but a
dupi
can’t drink all night. He has real responsibilities, as the platoon sergeant has made perfectly clear on several occasions. Who else will cook for the fighting men?

The camaraderie of these soldiers—heavy drinking and informal soccer—that’s Idi’s idea of utopia. The cook submerges himself in shadow so the others can’t see him. His pinched eyes follow the game’s every turn, an eager child in silent study of the adults he longs to join.

Idi’s big greasy hand clutches a bottle of cola. He gulps a mouthful of sweetness and fizz, the carbonated tingle rising through his nasal cavity and exploding inside his nostrils. He burps and opens his wide mouth to let the gas escape. Holding the bottle before him, Idi studies the distinctive red-and-blue logo that proudly declares the brand. He can’t read the words, but he knows what it says: Pepsi-Cola. Same as her. All those years ago. That woman who, along with his own mother, ruined his chances. Together, they got him cast out of paradise. Together, they destroyed his future.

Pepsi-Cola was dragged before Mama during that blissful summer when they lived in Corporal Yasin’s tiny hut in the Nubian compound outside the gates of Magamaga barrack, no more than a few kilometres from this same mess hall. Pepsi had a torn pink shirt, blackened and unwashed, and knotted cords of thick hair, red from
murram
dust. Sunglasses with one lens that she refused to remove, a skirt sewn together from a discarded burlap sack, and all those dangling, clanking, cracked bottles of Pepsi-Cola attached by little nooses to her frayed rope belt. Did her father bring her to them? No, she was too old for that; it must have been her brother. Yes, Pepsi was hauled before Mama by some ashamed and angry sibling, whose tight fingers dug into his sister’s forearm as he meekly inquired whether
Mama was indeed Assa Aatta, the famous Lugbara sorcerer, as all the rumours declared. Idi remembers his mother’s proud confirmation: “Yes, I’m full Lugbara. Yes, I’m a true diviner”—for God had visited her in adolescence and cast her trembling and naked out of her tiny village into the wild fields of the West Nile for three whole days and three whole nights—“And yes, although a female, I’m a competent oracle who can, as the rumours claim, determine the source of your Pepsi’s illness—be it simple ghost vengeance or the more mysterious work of
adro yaya
, the one who makes humans tremble—and prescribe a proper treatment for any debilitating disease.” If only his mother had turned that woman away. Idi, ten years old, stood on the porch of Corporal Yasin’s dim hut, holding a tray of sweet
mandazi
biscuits that he’d intended to sell by the roadside, thinking:
This client, this Pepsi-Cola, is worth waiting for
. He followed them through the front door of the hut and stood in darkness by the wall.

He remembers the horror and shame on that poor brother’s face when Pepsi sat on the earthen floor and parted her cola bottles to either side, flipped up the front of her skirt, and began to twiddle and whack and flick at her vagina with surprising aggression. She spread it wide, stuck her fingers inside, and extracted them with grunts and howls like a screeching monkey. Idi laughed so hard his small, bony shoulders shook and his biscuits fell to the ground. His mother silenced him with a wave of her hand. Pepsi hunched over, chanting a garbled and curious mixture of Lugbara and English and some entirely made-up language into that
open vagina, as if it were a separate sentient creature that needed convincing.

“She has shamed me,” said the brother. “She has shamed my kin.”

Pepsi confirmed his claim by waving desultory arms and hissing through closed teeth and letting drool slide down her chin.

The brother’s eyes implored Idi’s mother for answers. Assa Aatta dropped to her hands and knees and peered intently at Pepsi-Cola as if there were a door between them and the patient could only be seen through a tiny keyhole. “It’s possible,” said Assa, “that it’s a case of ghostly vengeance. But then it’s the worst I’ve ever seen.”

“Hyenas come,” howled Pepsi, either to her brother or to herself, no one could be certain. “Bite and rip to bits! Hah hah hah!” With the rounded base of a cola bottle, Pepsi rubbed her clitoris and moaned.

“Ack,” winced the brother, turning away in pain. He kicked Pepsi, knocking her over. “You can have her. I don’t want her! She has brought shame to my family. My own daughter is barren because of her sins. This woman is not my sister!”

“Shhh!” commanded Assa, still on all fours, studying the strange possession of Pepsi-Cola. The brother quieted down, but he was unable to bear the sight of his sister. He turned to face the wall.

His mother’s first interrogation of Pepsi-Cola’s brother amazed and impressed Idi. Assa Aatta seemed so wise—that she could find such significance in a string of seemingly pointless questions posed to an enraged relative. She
inquired into some disagreement between a grandfather and great-uncle. “These are clues,” his mother said, “clues to the trauma in lineage that resulted in this curse.” Idi had faith that his mother would deduce the problem. He assumed she would solve the case quickly.

Now he knows he was wrong. Now he knows the truth: that drawn-out investigation was the beginning of the end. As the days passed, his mother learned nothing. She used every technique at her disposal, from rubbing-stick and chicken oracles to spittle application with
larigbi
and
ajibgi
leaves to procedures of more dubious origin, such as the study of the victim’s excrement. “I think she was poisoned with snakehead powder,” his mother said one morning. “Or maybe a tincture extracted from rotten placenta.” Uncertainty began to infect her voice as the patient’s illness progressed. There was an all-night shrieking fit outside Corporal Yasin’s hut, an episode of stone-throwing that blinded a private’s left eye, continuing bouts of public masturbation, and the capture and near strangling of a neighbourhood dog.
Why doesn’t she cure this woman?
Idi wondered each day, as he left to sell his biscuits. People were starting to talk.

Days stretched into weeks. Although Idi’s mother flashed lights and rang bells and induced trances inside Corporal Yasin’s darkened hut, nothing worked. Pepsi emerged each night from her treatments to loiter in their rocky yard, mumbling to herself and threatening passersby.

Several weeks later, Mama called in Pepsi’s distraught brother to inform him that all was lost. She said that his only hope was to assemble the scattered members of his ruined
family and journey en masse back to their abandoned village just beyond the Sudanese border. There, at the family shrine, they could sacrifice a goat and hope that the resulting meat and blood would appease whatever irate ancestor was behind this unyielding plague. Young Idi knew, as he stood by the wall with his tray of biscuits listening to his mother, that she was an utter failure. He’d heard Corporal Yasin and his friends mocking Mama and her failed sorcery, as they got drunk on the porch. Idi was ashamed of her. He stopped meeting his customers’ eyes.

Nine years later, as Idi sips his Pepsi and studies the soldiers playing soccer on the dusty field, he doesn’t know why he ever expected anything better from his crazy mother. He watches a trim
askari
kick the ball into an ad hoc goal and hoot with drunken pleasure. All Lugbaran people are frauds. They always have been and always will be.

As a child, Idi never fully understood his mother’s Lugbaran ways. He didn’t grow up in Assa Aatta’s West Nile village, never made an offering at her family shrine, and, as the spurned child of a Kakwa father, could never have made a reasonable claim to her Lugbara lineage even if he had wanted to. He held no sway with her revered ancestors. Idi knew that he was worthless to his mother’s people, superfluous, not even human. “You are a thing to me.” That’s what the
‘ba wara
said to him on his sole visit back to her arid village. “A
thing
,” that village elder had said to the gangly adolescent.

“Never mind him,” his mother replied as they walked away. “You’re my son and you’re Lugbara no matter what the
‘ba wara
says.”

“No,” Idi says out loud, to his memory of her comment.

One morning, six weeks after Pepsi’s arrival, Idi’s cursing and bawling mother kicked the rough pallet on which he was sleeping and commanded the boy to pack his bag. In a drunken fit the previous night, Corporal Yasin, his mother’s lover, had ordered the sorcerer and her idiot son to leave the Magamaga barrack. “We have to leave?” Idi mumbled, as a pit opened in his stomach and swallowed all his strength.