MyWeku

How Shall We Kill the Bishop? has been nominated for the 2010 Caine Prize for African Writing. Fellow shortlisted writers include: Ken Barris (South Africa), Namwali Serpell (Zambia), Alex Smith (South Africa) and Olufemi Terry (Sierra Leone).  Lily has kindly granted us permission to publish her shortlisted story here on MyWeku.

It was Fr. Yasin Lordman who had asked the question—nothing more than a joke. A most inappropriate joke since he loved the bishop. It was Easter besides. But the three other priests in the vicarage heard him. Dafala, the cook who had set a breakfast in keeping with Holy Saturday, heard him. Perhaps it was the weak kettle of black sugarless tea that was to blame, or the sleep raging in his mind, or the pain in his knees for bearing his weight all night, or his fellow priests who would not join him for their usual morning cigarette.

“I’m fasting cigarettes today,” the youngest priest, Fr. Ahmed, had declared. He had been ordained at the beginning of the year and had been trying to quit smoking since.

“The bishop would want us to,” Fr. Seif had said. He smoked more for the company than anything else.

“He is ill and he is watching us, Yasin. What do you think he says to the Archbishop in Nairobi, to the Nuncio, to Rome?” Fr. Dugo had asked.

“He is the problem, then, I suppose,” Fr. Yasin had said. “Tell me, how shall we rid ourselves of him? How shall we kill the bishop?”

The three were now staring at him under the flickering light of a candle, which was set at the middle of the dinning table. The generator had been shut down on Maundy Thursday and the vicarage stood dark and pensive like the arid land surrounding it. “You should whip yourself,” Fr. Dugo said.

Fr. Yasin rose from the table and walked into the kitchen. Dafala retrieved the bishop’s breakfast tray from the wood oven. Dafala was almost as old as the bishop. In his lengthy white kanzu, regularly mistaken for a priest’s frock, he was no less of a priest than any of them. His life was single-mindedly devoted to the vicarage. He had no property that he could call his own. He was celibate. He was a man who had lived out his priesthood unwittingly, Fr. Yasin thought. With his conscientious hands, Dafala now covered the bishop’s sconce and scrambled eggs with a purple crocheted napkin. Next to them he placed a flask of tea and Chinaware. Then a small glass vase, often used in the chapel, with a single purple rose stem. Dafala had roses for all occasions and kept a kitchen garden even in the worst of droughts. He skimped on everybody’s drinking water if he had to. He handed the tray to Fr. Yasin without a word.

Fr. Yasin knocked on the bishop’s door twice before entering. The knock was perfunctory. The bishop was knelt on a prie-dieu at one end of his room. There the wall jutted out like an apse and served as his own private chapel. He was awake and fully dressed as usual. His bed was made even though he had taken to returning to it by midmorning. Fr. Yasin had begun judging his daily disposition by the length of his random siestas. The bishop’s broad back was to him and he stared at it under the smoky yellow light of the candelabrum burning on his desk. It was a back still unbent by age or illness, and his neck rose from it like a ship’s mast. Above his white shirt collar was the familiar edge of his hairline from which it was so easy to see a clear throbbing vein under the sun. He was always the last man to break into a sweat on the hockey pitch. He looked very much his old self from the back, but his face had begun to change—it resembled his father’s more and more each day, Fr. Yasin thought.

There was a photo of the bishop’s father on his desk. Having one made a difference, Fr. Yasin had always felt. It was the only thing he envied in other men. Perhaps that was the reason he loved this photo. Raji Lal Sandhu stood there beside his Kenyan wife in his white turban and generous Sikh moustache. He had the face of a man who had worked hard his entire life; a man who, in exchange for a piece of land that he could call his own, had left the Sikh units of the Indian Colonial Army for the ballast pits feeding the construction of the Kenya-Uganda railway. Every time Fr. Yasin looked at this photo, he noticed something new. Holding the bishop’s breakfast tray that morning, for instance, he noticed that here was a man who had determined to forget India.

It was the condition of man he was inclined to think. Fr. Ahmed, for example, was hard bent on forgetting cigarettes; Fr. Seif, in his determination to forget the woman he loved, intruded on everyone’s quiet time because he could not stand his own; Fr. Dugo determined to forget that the bishop had tested him most before admission; and Dafala determined to forget that the bishop was sick at all and carried on as usual. If the bishop ever determined to forget anything, though, it was sealed in his heart, well hidden beneath the surface of his face.

That face was now cast upwards, to the crucifix nailed onto the innermost recess of the apse. This was the only crucifix still standing in the vicarage. The rest had all been taken down and replaced with bare wooden crosses the evening before. The bishop’s crucifix, however, was still standing: Christ’s head like a drooping flower, his cranium a framework of metal petals crowned with barbed wire; his cheekbones high and pointed above the hollow flesh; his nose a sharp edge of metal; his beard an emerald mixture of rust and solder; his splayed hands broken at the joints, with ragged strips for fingers; his chest the very semblance of a fallen warrior’s breastplate—severely punished and bloodied; below that a gaping hole, as jagged as a cave’s mouth, exposing a metal vertebrae blackened with soot; his penis a small and humble-looking rod of metal, placed at an odd angle, as though the sculptor had considered leaving it out all together and then, upon further pondering the matter, had realized that it could hardly be ignored, that it would be more visible in its absence than actuality; and his legs, of course, those corroded buttresses that still held up the church long after Golgotha.

“Fr. Yasin.”

“Your Grace?”

“Have breakfast with me,” the bishop said, rising from his knees. There was a faint smile on his thin face. “And what has Dafala made this morning?”

Fr. Yasin placed the breakfast tray on a table facing the patio and lifted the purple napkin.

“Hmmm. There is no cook like Dafala, don’t you agree, Yasin?” he asked. “In his mind’s handbook are an explicit set of rules on how to cook for a sick priest, a disobedient priest, a vain priest, a good priest …”

Fr. Yasin laughed and pulled him a chair.

“How is his garden faring?”

“Well, let’s say that the birds will have none of it and neither will the locusts if they come this year. They would need pliers for teeth from the way he’s been working the wire mesh.”

The bishop chuckled, but his brown eyes seemed tired and somewhat sunken, like a drying riverbed slowly shrinking away from its banks.

“He’d rather be telling you this himself, of course,” Fr. Yasin said. He opened the flask and poured the bishop a cup of tea. “He’s not used to having someone else bring in your breakfast.”

The bishop sipped his tea and said nothing. He was weaning Dafala from himself, Fr. Yasin suspected. When he had been posted to this Kenyan northern frontier town thirty years ago, he had come with two things: his mule and Dafala. A young pregnant Borana prostitute, groaning with labor pangs, had stumbled into their camp the very first morning. The bishop had carried her to his sleeping bag, Dafala had boiled some hot water, and Yasin Lordman had been born. He had a mulatto skin for which the only logical explanation out here was a white soldier from the British military training base. The base was a remnant of the colonial legacy standing amongst stunted Acacia trees and withered shrubs of Solanum. The stunts of sparse grass surrounding the base were too brittle for cattle to graze on—too brittle even for the camels. There were no Doum palms close by either, and Dafala always explained this by stating that sacred plants could not flourish near the base.

When Fr. Yasin stepped into the patio and lit his cigarette, he could see the old military base with its floodlights beaming out towards the rising sun, which burned dark purple and red, its brow on the dunned horizon as yellow as ostrich yolk. With time, additional military bases had cropped up, government bases that periodically filled with local troops. They were like Roman garrisons, ever sending out legions through this gateway town into the troubled desert beyond. Rumor had it that there was a huge battalion on the way. It was the talk of the town, a distraction from the sick dogs that would not stop howling, from the dry animal carcasses in the bush, and watering holes caked with mud. He should have informed the bishop, but there was no need to tell him right away. He had enough to worry about with the emptying school, falling church attendance, and the overcrowded hospital. Fr. Yasin wanted him to enjoy his breakfast. If the battalion was arriving today, he would hear it.

The bishop joined him on the patio, a cup of tea in one hand. “The Lord should give us peace for he has given us all else, Yasin. It was what Augustine prayed for at the end.”

What Augustine had actually prayed for, Fr. Yasin thought, and what the bishop was perhaps praying for, was what Augustine had penned after those words—the peace that is repose, the peace of the Sabbath, and the peace that knows no evening. One hardly forgot Augustine, Fr. Yasin felt; not if you read him with passion and plenty of time on your hands like he had while on a pre-ordination retreat at the Red Sea port of Massawa. The heat in Massawa was as exhausting as it was here, as exhausting as it must have been for Augustine farther along that North African shoreline. Sometimes days would go by with hardly a breeze finding its way over the water. At such times red algae would appear suddenly and bloom endlessly, miles and miles of it, as if from the very Suez to the Strait of Bab al Mandeb, like streaks of thick camel blood that would not dissolve away. Then it would die, unexpectedly, and the sea would turn from red to rusty. Eventually Fr. Yasin would wake up one morning and find the algae gone altogether, the sea blue-green again.

That was how droughts ended here: when you least expected. Out of the blue. You simply awoke one morning to the sound of rainfall. The grass, like it always did, would have budded overnight and the women, who always showed up at sunrise for maize rations, indeed, who were already at the gates, would show up as usual, but with their long hair wet, their clothes dripping wet, their faces already nourished.

“The need to confess overwhelms me today, Father,” the bishop said.

His words startled Fr. Yasin, and he looked away in embarrassment, unprepared for such access to the bishop’s heart even though he had been contemplating it only a moment ago. “I’m hardly the man for it, Your Grace,” he said. “I could place a call to the Nuncio, if you like. He’s your old friend. He knows you best.”

The bishop remained silent for a while, gazing at the sunrise. “I cannot speak to Felice right now, but I have a letter for him. There, on my desk. Mail it for me.”

By its weight, Fr. Yasin could tell on his way to his room, it was several pages long. He was going to mail it later in the day when the post office opened. There was no hurry. Sometimes it took almost a month for a letter to reach Nairobi. Dafala had poured half a pail of water into the washbasin. He used it to shave and bathe. Then he lay on his bed and slept.

The rumble of diesel engines and the labored rotation of crankshafts woke him up. The air was already tinged with the smell of dust, hot rubber, and exhausted clutches. It was the battalion slowly pouring in. Soldiers’ voices and soldiers’ hard combat boots, hitting the dry sandy ground in unbroken descent, could be heard alongside the rolling machinery.

When Fr. Yasin emerged from the vicarage, there were soldiers everywhere, milling about in desert camouflage fatigues and standard issue rifles. The town, generally sleepy and desolate, was now an anthill of tough unfamiliar faces from other provinces. Fr. Yasin made his way towards the post office slowly, the bishop’s letter in his shirt pocket, the smell of soldiers’ sweat in his nose, as old and as rank as a nomad’s. He was standing at the doors of the post office when he saw the altar girl, Salima, across the street. Their regular set of altar boys had left town with their families when the drought had began in search of more reliable waterholes for their livestock; they were deep in the sun scorched land where wars were fought over whatever little water and pasture remained. Salima had landed their job inadvertently when she had scaled the vicarage’s walls and Fr. Ahmed, taking an early evening walk, had spied her in Dafala’s garden. It had taken two mad dashes around the vicarage for him to corner her. Her penance, it was decided, was to serve as an altar girl and join the priests every Sunday afternoon in the chapel where they practiced the hymn “Salve Festa Dies” in preparation for Holy Saturday. It was Fr. Dugo who had come up with the idea—to surprise the bishop. Without the altar boys their in-house choir had somewhat diminished in strength not to mention that they were sorely lacking in the alto department. Salima was the panacea. Such was the strength of her soprano! It was amazing that it could be found in so scrawny a creature. Added onto that was the fact that she had memorized the entire Gregorian melody, in Latin no less, during the first practice while they, to learn it, had been listening to a taped version the entire Lent. For her prodigious memory, they had dabbed her Giordano Bruno.

Salima, however, had not shown up for the last choir practice. Fr. Ahmed was convinced that her family had moved. Fr. Seif differed and revealed that he had sent her home with excess rations every time she had shown up for practice. Fr. Dugo, distrusting the exact excessiveness of Fr. Seif’s rations, had told him off. Fr. Yasin thought that they were all unnecessarily worried, but did not have adequate conviction for his opinion. Consequently, when he saw her milling in the chaos of that afternoon, his heart lurched, and he screamed her name. She did not seem to hear him and as he pushed against the soldiers to cross the street, she disappeared into the dilapidated clip joint his mother had worked in till her death.

The two men at the door, designated to shake up tightfisted clients, absconding clients, and the like, let him through because they were too surprised to stop him. A huge strobe light rotated from the iron sheet ceiling and dancing soldiers bumped against him under its intermittent glaring lights, swirling about to the music like they would to a war dance: in a frenzy of waving hands, kicking feet, and faces as dark and gleaming as Dafala’s egg plants.

“The guards at the door swear that you’ve lost your mind, Father.” It was a woman who spoke to him, a woman like his mother, the kind of woman he always determined to forget.

“I’m looking for someone … a little girl. Her name is Salima.”

She put her arms around his neck – little stick arms that came from a little stick body. He could break it, he felt, by merely resting his hands on its sides. It spoke of paucity: conceived and breed as such into the natural state of her being.

“A desert man always thinks of the going out before he enters,” she said.

She talked like Dafala and her long hair smelt like his mother’s: of ancient Cushitic perfume encrypted into his pre-oedipal senses. “I have to find her,” he said.

“You would need money.”

The only thing in his pocket was the bishop’s letter. “I have none,” he said.

“A trick then,” she suggested, “something to fool a drunken soldier’s eyes for a little while.”

“And you?” he asked, reaching for the bishop’s letter. “Doesn’t a desert woman also think of the going out before she enters?”

“Me? I am like a Doum palm, father. My head is always in the fire, but my feet run in the water.”

He opened the bishop’s letter, removed its contents, and handed her the empty envelope. She let go of his neck and smiled—a little broken half smile that would always remain with him.

“Go back,” she said. “I shall send her to you.”

In the vicarage living room, after lunch, and after the bishop’s afternoon siesta, they sang him the poet Sedulius’ 5th century Easter poem: Hail, festival day, venerable throughout all ages, in which God vanquished hell and took possession of the Heavens/ Behold, the beauty of the reborn world bears witness to the fact that all the gifts of the Lord have returned with Him/ He who was crucified is God, and behold, He reigns over all things; let all creation lift its prayers unto the Creator/ O Christ, Savior of all things, good Creator and Redeemer, only begotten of God the Father.

The bishop was in full regalia—his pink cap on the middle of his head, the bishop’s ring on his hand. He smiled at the tiny set of dust prints across the red floor, which Fr. Ahmed had polished to a gleam. The prints ended at Salima’s bare feet. Tears welled in his eyes whenever she chorused salve festa dies … Dafala cried. Fr. Ahmed, Fr. Seif, and Fr. Dugo cried. They all cried because they had never seen the bishop so moved.

But Fr. Yasin did not really cry until sunset when he was lighting the sacred fire from which the paschal candle would be lit. When he knelt onto the dry sand, arranged the dry pieces of wood together, and lit them up, tears brimmed in his eyes. He wept then for the bishop, whom he loved. He wept for Dafala’s pain. He wept for the woman with a little broken half smile who reminded him of his mother. He wept until a hard rubber boot bit into the back of his neck and yoked his head still. With bleary eyes he saw a familiar envelope fall before his face and into the fire. At that moment he remembered what the woman with a little broken half smile had said to him—that she was like a Doum palm with her head in the fire but her feet running in water.

A rifle barrel dug into his spine and the pressure at the back of his neck increased, forcing his face closer to the fire. The hair on his face singed all at once and the flames danced and leapt higher as they consumed the crumpled envelope. The hot ash beneath exploded. Something more than mortal man seemed to be holding him down. He faced, then, a fear that is only known to a nomad as he comes to the realization that he is too deep out in the desert to make it across or to turn back.

Then the boot on his neck lifted unexpectedly and with it the rifle barrel. As Fr. Yasin reeled away from the fire, smoke and heat in his lungs, he saw the bishop on the other side. He was standing very still, the desert sunset reflected so deep in his eyes that it seemed to be flaring from within him. In his hands was the towering white paschal candle. Engraved on it, in golden letters, was the alpha at the top and the omega at the bottom. In between the letters were five red grains of glowing incense, one for each holy wound. When the volley of bullets exploded over Fr. Yasin’s head, the paschal candle suddenly glowed with hundreds more; they sparkled red like rubies. The paschal candle remained standing even as the bishop let go and Fr. Yasin blindly reached for his punctured body. It stood, stoic, the candle, at that eerie moment when the dark figure was scaling the vicarage walls and the church bells were pealing to the rhythm of abrupt thunder rumbling from afar.

Published in Wasafiri, Volume 23, Number 1, Issue 53, Spring (March) 2008 ©