Short Story: All I Have

Short Story: All I Have

This piece has not been edited by the ShortbreadStories team.

When Private Samson Agaba was discharged a few years after helping the Rwandese reclaim their country from Gen. Juvenal Habyarimana, he had nothing to do. He had served the NRA since 1983 as a child soldier after his whole family was gunned down one evening while having supper. There were many kids like him who did not have anyone to take care of them and felt they had to get back at the UNLA for the atrocities they were committing, making them the most ferocious and fearless fighters in the National Resistance Army. With very little to live for, they felt they could die for anything.

Two and a half years later, Kampala fell to Andrew Kayira`s FEDEMU and the NRA. Eight years later the Rwandese (mostly Tutsi), always agitating for a return to their country, made a break for it in 1994. They deserted the NRA and took with them a lot of machinery and munitions and ordinance and Ugandan personnel. The NRA, soon to become UPDF, turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to this mass desertion and large scale robbery.

He had then deserted together with thousands of other Ugandans who wanted to see Rwanda liberated; joining Fred Rwijema and company. When Rwijema was assassinated on suspected French involvement, it looked for a while like the RPF/A would lose focus, and ultimately, the war.

But then President Museveni (himself having fought in Mozambique and Angola and supporting the ANC) stepped in, pulling Paul Kagame (then a high ranking Ugandan Military Intel Officer) out of school to come and head the Rwandese Patriotic Front/Army. Two years after that Kigali had fallen; a relief to many a Ugandan fish eater because the Interahamwe (Rwandan militia) had a habit of dumping dead Tutsis into Lake Nalubaale (formerly Victoria). Of course this was after being given difficult choices: die fast by a bullet (shot in the head); slower by a machete (chopped to pieces); even slower by a club (battered to death); or be drowned with a weight. Of course your eventual cause of death was greatly reliant on the size of your wallet (what was not yet stolen from you), how convincing your tongue was, and the temperament of your murderer. He came back home only to volunteer for Congo duty a few years later. For one year he fought alongside other NRA/UPDF and RPF/A soldiers and then Kinshasa fell. The survivors of the 1981-86 war always prided themselves of making a quicker job of new assignments. They took Kampala after five years; Kigali after three; Kinshasa after one. They always joked that if Kenya ever put their money where their mouth was in regard to threatening to attack Uganda, they would be in Mombasa in two weeks!

After walking thousands of kilometers to return to Uganda (probably being the first conquering army in Africa to march that distance back home), Private Agaba requested to be deployed to the north where Kony was once again becoming a menace. In 2001, after serving the army for nineteen years, he retired at twenty five.

He had stopped school in primary two so could neither write English nor speak it. All he knew in life was fighting and liberating African lands. He had no other skill apart from killing and maybe repairing T-54s; hardly the skills that any civilian felt proud of.

When he went back to Luweero, his family land had been taken over by unknown people and they even had a land title for it. So he blew his package (twelve million shillings) in two years and came to Kampala.

He refused to use his skills to rob or kill people so he ended up mostly begging from known sympathizers to the regime. Every now and again he landed on some contract work and so he survived; mostly on driving gigs. Soon he got fed up of `civilians` (traffic cops) always stopping him and demanding a driving license and bribes, and so he quit.

He slept on the streets, in places where he knew the cops couldn’t patrol and the bad guys couldn’t fuck with him; washed his clothes in a small laundry place where he had a girlfriend who only saw him when his clothes needed washing or when he needed sex. After reconnoitering four marriages and spawning twelve kids, the woman knew enough about life to take what she could when she could. Besides, she always wondered what a fourth hand woman like could really expect from the male species. And anyhow, the veteran wasn`t the only one pecking her wood as it were.

One day as early evening commuters went home, a successful looking lady had a flat and the other motorists, instead of helping her, started hurling abuse at her. He rushed to her rescue, changed the flat and she insisted they go somewhere for a drink. He insisted he didn’t drink and she said that in that case she would cook tea for him.

He shrugged and got in. One hour later they were in a swanky neighborhood. At a maroon gate she honked twice and a cop opened for her. That`s when he asked her what she did for a living. She said business woman; and laughed at his raised eyebrows.

“I pay the cop five thousand a day and his bosses one fifty a month. Any Ugandan can have a cop working guard for them if they can afford it.”

He was mighty surprised. Maybe he should think of working as a guard, if it could get him such pay. But then again, he no longer had a gun.

She tried to sleep with him that evening and he declined her ill concealed offer. She asked to drop him off then and he said he would walk back to the city. Where did he stay and he said the truth, nowhere and also volunteered the crucial info that he was jobless and mostly unemployable. Within minutes, she had extracted his life story from him and was offering him a driving job, a furnished garage, dinner in the main house and three hundred thousand shillings.

It was a no contest for him. He had been earning that amount albeit in situations that were ninety percent of the time unsurvivable, sleeping in vermin infested places, seeing blood and drawing it all the time. He could have worked for meals and boarding only. She told him he started immediately and in the morning he would receive his first bonus so he could shop for more `agreeable` clothes.

He tried to mildly object to the bonus thing but she said he deserved it for standing up for her and helping her with the flat, telling him most women in Kampala did know a lug nut from a jack. He actually laughed when she added, “And I don’t know what I have just described!”

Within a week he had shifted from the garage to the master bedroom and she knew her business well; and he was not talking about the one that had her raking in millions a month. By the third week they were practically an item and had dispensed with condoms, which he had never liked in the first place: he was a soldier, albeit a retired one, but one just the same. He still thought like one, though. A soldier`s life could end in the shortest mini-second so wrapping pleasure in a latex thingy did not cut it for most. No wonder many of them were dropping off like fish out of water.

Trouble came to paradise when she fired the maid, apparently for looking at him `funny`. He waited for her to hire another to no avail. Then she started `requesting` him to do the laundry after dinner (they had a washing machine) and hang it in the morning before he washed the dishes and drove her to work. This worked for a few days then it began to get on his mortar-smoked nerves. The African man in him started to rear its head.

He told her he was going to hire a new maid and pay her out of his salary. She said he was not going to have his salary for ever. He asked her what she meant by that. She said they were living together now, why should she pay him? She then added, “I bought this house, pay the bills and buy you everything.”

No much of fighter except when there was a combatant within his sights, he decided to simplify the equation for her.

“You know you found me on the streets, right?” he asked.

“Of course, and all I`m trying to do is make you a real man.”

“I was, am and shall continue to be a real man, with or without you. But what I wanted you to remember is that the streets are still there, waiting for men such as I.”

“What are you saying?” there was a worried tone to her voice, which she was trying to disguise. She was thirty four, had never married and desperately wanted kids. Tick tock. That would be the biological clock.

“You brought me here because I was a man…if you don’t stop treating me as less than that, I will up and leave. And don’t worry, I will leave the clothes and shoes and your money, which I haven’t spent a dime of.”

He walked away and that night slept in the garage—or tried to because she kept banging on the steel door asking him to open up, begging him to come back to the main house. In the morning after his ritual morning drills, he made her breakfast and drove her to her business headquarters. He told her he had to do some stuff and handed her the keys. Perhaps fearing he wouldn’t come back after the row last night, she told him to keep the car and even gave him a card for fuel.

He spent the whole morning and early afternoon hunting for a job. It`s funny how people regard someone driving a flashy Japanese number. He got offered a job as a security consultant for a firm run by a veteran such as himself. He would earn one and a half times what his girlfriend was offering.

That evening he broke the news and she cried the whole night, talking about how he was deserting her to work for strangers, yet he could help her build `their` business empire. She promised to buy him a car and double his salary. He declined, then untactfully reminded her of her threat to stop paying him. Besides, he added, as a man he needed some independency and nothing brought that like a check at the end of the month knowing it was from one`s own sweat.

His first day at work he asked one of the secretaries to take dictation and after two hours, he handed the project to his new boss. He liked how he was looking at the company and the idea of opening branches throughout East and Central Africa. He had also included contact and possible employable persons in those areas, most of them veterans or soldiers ready to quit the uniform.

His boss, a retired captain, asked him to meet him for lunch. At lunch, three other men joined them and he was asked to sign papers making him an equal partner in the firm. The captain did not want anyone taking him away.

He was entitled to a company car, his own office with a secretary and a bodyguard in the new deal. He also got to get a furnished house and a guard but had to pay his own bills and household staff. His picture was taken and within minutes he had a photo ID and a charge card. The captain insisted that dress code for him was as he wanted it to be.

“After all, we are soldier, not bean counters!” he added. They laughed, slapping hands. Then they exchanged war stories for an hour and parted company.

Agaba picked his girlfriend and on the way home told her about his new job. She went ballistic, almost physically attacking him. She ranted about betrayal and a lack of appreciation on his part. Talked about how she was planning to set him up with his own business and buy him a house, etc, etc.

“Would that mean after the house chores I would get to go to my own place of work?” he asked calmly.

“We shall get maids, as many as you want, just stay with me, please” she pleaded.

“I am staying with you, I just don’t want to work for you or with you, at least not at this material time.”

“And the house?”

“What about the house?” He paused. “Which one, I think I should be asking?”

“The one your new partner at Alpha Security Consult gave you.”

“Oh, we shall use it. I will feel better if we live in a house I feel I am paying for. We can rent out yours.”

That started her on another tirade. She was not that cheap, why did she always choose losers for mates, why was he thinking more of money than their relationship, he wanted to stay in the other house because he knew she wanted to stay in hers…that way he would `import` as many women as he wished.

She spoke, hardly taking the time to breathe, for almost forty minutes. By this time they were approaching the last bottleneck before her house and they always wasted about fifteen minutes here stuck in traffic.

When traffic ahead piled up and the wait started, he shifted into `park`, engaged the emergency brake, undid his seatbelt and slipped out of the car before she knew what was happening. He walked back the way they had come, taking very fast long steps. With her matronly size, there was no way she could ever catch up…and that would be if she decided to abandon the car, which he was betting she wouldn’t.

She didn’t follow. She turned up at his work place the next day but was denied access and threatened with legal consequences if she turned up there again. Because she was semi-literate, a fake judge`s order was waved in her face and she fled.

Private Samson Agaba thus started a new life at twenty six, a life he had never dreamed of. He went to adult school in the evenings and weekends and in two years had made so much improvement in writing and speaking English that the captain felt comfortable letting him attend international seminars on security. At thirty three he had a diploma in the English language, and an associate degree in business administration.

At thirty five he met a twenty seven year old gulf veteran from Manchester and they were married three months later. They now are the proud possessors of four chocolate-colored kids, a six bedroom mansion and half an international security company.