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

  Also by Anton Piatigorsky

  Plays

  Breath In Between

  The Kabbalistic Psychoanalysis of Adam R. Tzaddik

  Easy Lenny Lazmon and the Great Western Ascension

  The Offering

  Eternal Hydra

  Copyright © 2013 Anton Piatigorsky

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  First published in Canada in 2012 by Goose Lane Editions

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to:

  Steerforth Press L.L.C., 45 Lyme Road, Suite 208,

  Hanover, New Hampshire 03755

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

  eISBN: 978-1-58642-219-6

  v3.1

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  TEA IS BETTER THAN PEPSI

  Idi Amin (1946)

  A PLAYTHING FOR THE KING’S SUPERFLUOUS WIVES

  Pol Pot (1939)

  THE CONSUMMATION

  Mao Tse-Tung (1908)

  LADO’S DISCIPLE

  Josef Stalin (1895)

  BOTTLE CAP

  Rafael Trujillo (1908)

  INCENSED

  Adolf Hitler (1905)

  Acknowledgements

  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-sti
ck 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.

  “I’m sick of this place and these stupid soldiers,” his mother tearfully replied. “We’re moving back to Bombo to live with Uncle Yusuf.”

  Idi knew it was a lie. He knew that his mother’s failure with Pepsi was at the root of their dismissal. For a moment he stood stunned, but when she repeated her command, Idi stood his ground, scowling and refusing to pack a bag, his arms crossed against his chest. Although he had never before acted with such disobedience, Idi suddenly felt ready to abandon his failure of a mother, ready to live on his own—if only he could remain here, in the barrack, where men wore clean and pressed uniforms, sometimes festooned with medals and ribbons and fancy regalia, and not the rags and filthy shirts worn everywhere else in East Africa. He didn’t want his life ruined by his mother’s absurd and fraudulent sorcery, behaviour that seemed all the more strange and embarrassing when juxtaposed with the military precision of the finest troops in the British Empire—the King’s African Rifles.

  Idi told his mother that he would rather stay with Corporal Yasin and all the other proud askaris, but she only laughed at him. “Good luck,” she said, as she threw her things into a beat-up suitcase. “Go on and try. See what happens. Yasin won’t let you sleep here for one night.”

  Idi knew she was right. The gruff corporal had never made any attempt at hospitality and would surely have rejected a plea from Assa’s tall and plainly stupid son. Still, these were men here in the barrack, real men, brave and strong and competent, all of the askaris in the ranks of the King’s African Rifles. Idi had lived amongst these soldiers for so long, had been so steeped in their ethos, that he’d begun to think of dark-skinned Africans outside the grasp of the British military as uncivilized, apelike creatures—primitives, for lack of a better word—even though he was one of them. They could not walk, sit, or speak with any dignity. They were wild animals, never comfortable outside the forest, desert, or grassland of their birth, whereas askaris might travel to Kenya or Egypt, or even someday north to the great city of London, where they would have tea with the King. No matter, Idi couldn’t stay with them.

  When Idi and Assa Aatta lugged their few belongings onto the Bombo bus, the boy could see through the rusting barrack gates the elaborate drills and marches and exercises of the Fourth Battalion, the only men in his life, his spiritual fathers. Already, on that bus to Bombo, Idi knew that the Magamaga barrack in Jinja was more of a home than any place he’d ever lived. He vowed to return.

  Now, in his dirty apron at the mess hall door, Idi knows that if his mother had turned that Pepsi woman away, he’d be an askari by now, not just some miserable dupi. His mother ruined him. Idi downs the remaining cola and tosses the empty bottle into the rocks and dry dirt outside the mess hall, not unaware of the symbolism. He resolves to return to his barrack and spend the night polishing his boots and steaming his cook’s clothing so that when morning comes he will look more like a soldier than any of these disheveled askaris, despite his lack of a proper uniform. He removes his apron and returns to the kitchen to hang it on a hook.

  “Amin,” calls Joseph, the senior cook on duty. “Don’t you take that apron off.” Joseph approaches with a plate in one hand and a scowl across his lips. “Look at this,” he says, as he holds the filthy dish inches from Idi’s nose, exposing bits of drying beef and mashed cassava stuck to the porcelain. “Are you trying to give the askaris dysentery?”

  Idi, who can barely comprehend the man’s rapid Swahili, clutches his apron and shrugs.

  “You can answer my questions with either a yes or a no.”

  “No,” says Idi.

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “I am sure.”

  “Then get back into the kitchen and wash this one and the others. Now, Amin! I want to go home.”

  “Yes, sir,” says Idi, as he grabs the plate from Joseph’s hand. “I’m sorry. I’ll do it.”

  Idi fills a bucket of fresh water from the faucet behind the kitchen. He pours it into the sink and then adds a kettle’s worth of hot water and soap. His eyes sting from the chalky cleaning powder wafting into the air. As he sifts through the clean plates, sighing and extracting the dozen or so that need to be rewashed, he wonders if there is any job less fierce or manly than his. With his forearms and elbows submerged in sudsy water, his aching back bent at a sink built for short men, Idi can’t resist comparing his life as a dupi with that of a real KAR soldier. Instead of a gun, a sharp panga, and proper training with mortars, signals, and bayonets, he has a sponge, a spatula, and complete knowledge of the evening’s routine for sterilization.

  Two years ago, when the young askaris of the Fourth Battalion battled the Japanese in the thick jungle of Burma’s Kabaw Valley, Idi owed his allegiance not to glorious King George or any of his colonial representatives, but rather to the balding and bespectacled manager of Kampala’s Imperial Hotel, a coward known more for his oversized paunch and
squeaky voice than any proficiency with a Sten gun. Idi’s uniform in those days was the standard red jacket and juvenile cap of a common bellboy, an inherently comic outfit that looked outright absurd on a teenager of his immense stature. His major responsibility during that great war of the world was lugging Europeans’ trunks up the stairs for a spare coin or two. Now he’s nineteen, almost twenty, cleaning dishes in the heat. Is this a man? Is this a Kakwa? Not at all.

  He overheard a conversation earlier in the evening between several older askaris and a recent recruit that emphasized the difference between an assistant cook and a soldier. Idi lingered in the dining room, clearing dirty plates and filing standard-issue cutlery, drawing out each of his motions so he might extend his opportunity to eavesdrop on their tale.

  “He wore blackface,” said the sergeant, who crossed his legs under the long table just like an Englishman. “It came from a special cream—very dark and very sooty—so the Japanese couldn’t tell who was the European in charge.”

  “He’s always the one to kill first,” explained a corporal.

  “It’s something they made in England especially for that occasion,” added another.

  “It made them look silly,” the sergeant chuckled. “Bwana Robertson, with his English blue eyes, but his face as black as any Nubian.”

  “So what happened?” asked the recruit.

  “On patrol that morning we reached the river, which was wide and deep and fast—and remember, the jungle was so thick in that valley that the river was the only place where we could be seen by the enemy. They set up their ambush beside it.”

  “By the bridge,” said a corporal. “The little rope bridge.”

  “Which we never used,” added the sergeant. “We always waded. But halfway to the other side, the Japanese started shooting.”

  “They had their trench thirty feet away.”

  “Thirty feet!”

  The askaris broke their conversation to sip their tea from European cups with handles. Idi could barely resist turning to regard those brave corporals and sergeants, their faces weathered by gunpowder, disease, and exploding shrapnel, one with a nine-inch scar in his cheek that extended all the way down to his neck.