The Tree We Argued About

Name: The Tree We Argued About: A Surveyor's Last Game, Five Sealed Envelopes and Five Families from Lake Victoria to the Nile, Searching for the Green Trunk Their Grandfathers Lost in 1975
Author: V. Ashtapad

A Surveyor's Last Game, Five Sealed Envelopes and Five Families from Lake Victoria to the Nile, Searching for the Green Trunk Their Grandfathers Lost in 1975

by V. Ashtapad

Foreword

This is a work of fiction. The shores of Lake Victoria, the great lakes of the Rift and the White Nile at Juba are real, as are the everyday food, music, boats, coffee, baskets and cattle camps of Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan that this story draws on. Survey Party Four, the lakes survey, the Kagera Star, the washing station, the boatyard and everyone in this book are invented.

For the ones who kept the road open while the others were being stubborn.

Benchmark

*CARD ONE. A benchmark is a point whose height and place are known and agreed. Everything else is measured from it. Rule one: no one digs alone. E. M.*

My grandfather has been trying to make me play his games since I was four years old, and I have been refusing since I was fourteen, so when he handed me a white card at his own lunch table with my cousin's chapati still warm on the plate, I put it face down beside my glass and went on eating.

"You did not read it," Babu said.

"I can see it is one of your cards."

"It is a card," he agreed. "It has words on it. Words are for reading."

He was eighty-five that year and had the same handwriting he had used on every field sheet of his working life: small, square capitals, a little slanted, the kind of writing that expects to be read in the rain. He sat at the head of the table under the mango tree with his walking stick hooked over the chair back and his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead where he always forgot them, and he looked at me the way he used to look at a theodolite that would not settle.

The lunch was not his birthday and not anyone's wedding. It was the first Saturday in July, the dry season, the sky over Mwanza the hard pale blue it goes when there has been no rain for six weeks, and we were eating outside because the house was too hot. My mother had made fish, a whole lake tilapia fried until its tail curled, with ugali and greens cooked down with tomato and a pile of fried dagaa, the little silver lake fish, salted and crisp, that you eat by the handful like groundnuts. There were mangoes from the tree on a tin plate, cut into cheeks and scored, though nobody ate them except Babu.

And there was the stranger.

She had arrived the evening before on the bus from Kampala with a steel trunk that took two of the neighbor's boys to lift off the roof, and she had slept in my old room, and she had sat beside Babu all morning while he went through the trunk paper by paper. Her name was Achol Deng. She was twenty-six. She taught mathematics at a secondary school in Juba, in South Sudan, and she was the granddaughter of a man called Deng Akech, who had died the November before at eighty-one, and who had been, fifty years ago, a member of the survey party my grandfather had led on the lakes.

That was all I knew at lunch. I knew it because my mother had told me on the phone the night before, in the voice she uses when she wants me to come home from the port and does not want to say why.

"Read the card, Neema," my mother said now.

I turned it over.

*RULE ONE. No one digs alone.*

"Who is digging?" I said.

"You are," said Babu. "All five of you."

---

The house in Mwanza is on the slope above the gulf on the south side of town, below the rocks. Mwanza is a city of rocks. Great gray granite boulders the size of houses sit on the hills and in the water as if a giant had been playing a game of stones and walked off before it was finished, and some of them balance on each other in ways that make visitors stop their cars. There is one in the gulf that stands on a smaller rock like an egg on a thumb, and every tourist photographs it, and every child in Mwanza has been told it will fall the day you stop believing in it.

Babu bought the house in 1976. Before that he rented it, from 1968, as the base camp for Survey Party Four of the lakes survey, which mapped the shorelines and the depths of Lake Victoria and then went west into the Rift to the long deep lakes of Kivu and Tanganyika. Five men lived in the house in those years when they were not in the field. They kept their instruments in the room that is now my mother's sewing room. They hung their wet boots on the veranda. They set a brass benchmark into the big granite rock at the corner of the yard, to practice on, and it is still there, a disc the size of a coin with an arrow and a number stamped into it, green at the edges. When I was small I thought it was a door for very small people.

The mango tree stands in the middle of the yard between the benchmark rock and the house. It is the biggest tree on the street. Its roots have lifted the edge of the concrete path, and in the season its fruit falls on the tin roof all night like someone knocking, and the fruit is not good. I want to say that clearly, because I said it often and I was right. The mangoes from Babu's tree are small and stringy and they taste of resin, as if someone had painted them. My mother says it is an old kind. My grandmother, when she was alive, used to say it was a tree only a surveyor could love, because it did not produce anything worth having and it was in the way.

Twice in my life I have said the tree should be cut down. The first time I was eleven, and Babu did not speak to me for the rest of the day. The second time was that Saturday, at lunch, when a mango fell from the branch above us and bounced off the tin plate and knocked my mother's water glass into her lap.

"That tree," I said, while my mother wiped her skirt, "is going to hurt someone."

"That tree," said Babu, "was saved by a better man than either of us. A friend of mine sat up all night once to keep it from me." He picked the mango off the table and looked at it with something close to affection. "It stays."

His dog, a short-legged brown animal called Chura because she squats like a frog, had come out from under the table at the sound of the fruit. She went to the foot of the tree, where the earth between two roots was always loose, and began to dig. She had been digging there for years. Babu clapped his hands once, without looking, and she stopped and lay down on the warm hole she had made.

Achol watched the dog. Then she watched Babu. Then she looked at me, and I saw that she was a person who noticed things and kept them, the way some people keep receipts.

---

After lunch Babu asked my mother to bring the coffee and asked the neighbor's boys to go home, and then he told me about the trunk.

Not Achol's trunk. The other one.

"You know about the boat fund," he said.

Everybody in my family knows about the boat fund. It is one of those stories that is told so often it stops being a story and becomes a piece of furniture. From 1969 to 1975, the five men of Survey Party Four saved part of their field allowances in a green steel trunk with a brass padlock. They were going to buy a boat. A proper lake boat, wooden, with an engine, and when the survey ended they were going to run it together, carrying passengers and cargo between the islands, five partners from five countries. In March 1975, when the survey was closing, the trunk vanished from this house. The money was never found. The partnership never happened. The five men went home to their own countries and, as far as I knew, never sat at the same table again.

My grandmother told it as a story about trust. My mother tells it as a story about men and money. Babu never told it at all. When anyone else told it in his hearing he went and checked something in the sewing room.

"The man who left the house the night the trunk was lost," Babu said, "was Deng Akech."

Achol's face did not change. She had heard this already, then. That morning, perhaps, over the papers.

"For fifty years," Babu said, "four families have believed one of the others took it. The Okello family in Uganda believed it was Gasana, in Rwanda, because Gasana kept the key to the padlock. The Gasana family believed it was Deng, because Deng left without a word. Ciza's family in Burundi, I think, believed it was everybody." He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on its saucer. "And I believed."

"Believed what?" I said.

"Some days, Deng. Some days, Gasana. Some days, nobody. I was the party chief. The trunk was in my house." He was quiet. "Deng wrote to me once, in 1976. A short letter. He said he hoped the boat was sailing well. I thought he was laughing at me. I never answered."

It was the longest speech about the boat fund I had heard my grandfather make in thirty-four years.

Achol reached into the canvas bag at her feet and took out a flat paper packet tied with red string. The string had been tied and untied many times; it had a kink in it. On the outside, in an old man's hand, it said: *For Elias Mwakalinga, Mwanza. If the boat was never built, ask Okello for my letter.*

"My grandfather kept this in the trunk under his bed," Achol said. Her voice was low and very even, with the clipped care of someone who speaks four languages and thinks in at least two of them. "I found it after the funeral. I didn't know who Elias Mwakalinga was. I found Mzee through his name on an old survey report, and then through his granddaughter."

"Through me?"

"Through the family page your mother keeps," Achol said, and my mother had the grace to look at the mango tree. "The one with the old photographs. The survey party is in one of them. Someone had written all five names under it."

I knew the photograph. Five men on the veranda of this house in 1970, squinting into the sun, one holding a level staff like a spear. My mother had scanned it and put it on the private page she had built for our family two years before, with the tree she had worked out back to Babu's grandfather in Mbeya and the recordings she had made of my grandmother telling stories in her last year. I had been invited to it. I had looked at it twice.

"So," I said. "Ask Okello for the letter."

"Okello died in 2019," said Babu. "His wife is alive in Jinja. Gasana died in 2016. His wife is alive, near Lake Kivu. Ciza is alive in Bujumbura, eighty-three and deaf in one ear. Deng you know." He took his glasses off his forehead and folded them. "Each of those houses has something that belonged to the party. I know some of what they have. Not all. I think the answer is in five pieces. I think it was always in five pieces. And I think it should be found the way the survey worked. Together. On the ground. By people who will listen to each other."

"Babu," I said, "you are eighty-five. You are not going to Jinja."

"No," he said. "You are."

Next chapter

Datum

*CARD TWO. A datum is the level everything is measured against. Ours was the lake on the first of January 1970. Rule two: every house you enter, you sit before you ask. E. M.*

I said no for two days.

I said it at the port on Monday, where I am second engineer on the MV Mwamba, a passenger ferry that runs from Mwanza out to the islands and back six days a week, carrying schoolteachers and fish traders and crates of soda and once, memorably, a bed with a woman still asleep in it. I said it to the chief engineer, Mzee Kasika, who has known me since I was an apprentice and who only laughed and said, "You have nine weeks of leave owing. Go and look for treasure."

"It isn't treasure. It's an old man's game."

"Old men's games are the only ones worth playing," said Mzee Kasika, who is sixty-seven. "Young men's games end in hospital."

I said it on Monday night to my mother, who was sitting at her machine in the old instrument room sewing a dress out of a kanga, the printed cotton cloth every woman in Tanzania wraps or wears or ties a baby on with. Every kanga has a saying printed along one edge, and you choose your kanga for what it says. My mother had chosen one for herself in yellow and black whose border said, in Swahili, *The patient hunter eats the fattest bird.* She had not chosen it for me. She did not have to.

"He is not well," she said, without taking her foot off the treadle.

"He is perfectly well. He walked to the market on Saturday."

"He is eighty-five. He is well for this year. You don't know about next year." She turned the cloth. "Your grandmother asked him for twenty years to find those families and he wouldn't. Now a girl comes from Juba with a packet tied in red string and he wants to. You can be angry about the twenty years or you can go."

"I can be both."

"You usually are," my mother said.

---

On Tuesday I went to find Achol. She was in the sewing room with Babu's old drafting table pulled under the window and Deng's papers laid out on it in rows, held down with stones from the yard. She had a pencil behind her ear and another in her hand and a third, I noticed, in her braids, which she had forgotten.

"He gave you the run of the house," I said.

"He gave me a problem," she said, and turned the lamp so I could see.

In the packet with the red string there had been three things. One was the photograph, a smaller print of the one on my mother's page, with *Party Four, base camp, 1970* on the back. One was a single page of yellow survey paper covered in pencil, rows and rows of what looked like field notes: numbers in pairs, bearings and distances, the kind of thing I had seen in Babu's old books all my life. The third was a card, cut from the stiff cover of a field book, with a grid ruled on it in ink. Across the top of the grid were the digits nought to nine. Down the side were the same. In the squares, letters.

"It's a cipher table," Achol said. "A simple one. Each letter is two digits, row and column. Your grandfather says the whole party used it. They wrote their private notes in it on the field sheets so the office clerks couldn't read their jokes."

"What jokes?"

"He wouldn't tell me." She almost smiled. "There's a problem, though." She touched the card. The right side of it was gone, torn away cleanly along a fold, so that only the first five columns were left. "Half the alphabet isn't here. Whoever made this table tore it in two."

"Why?"

"I asked Mzee. He said, 'Why does anybody tear anything in two? So that two people have to meet.'" She put the pencil down. "Then he went for a nap."

I sat on my mother's sewing stool and looked at her. She was small and very straight-backed, with a narrow face and a gap between her front teeth, and she wore a long green skirt and a white blouse that had been ironed in Juba and had held its creases on a two-day bus journey, which told me something about her too.

"You came a long way with a trunk of paper to meet an old man you had never seen," I said.

"I came a long way," she said, "because for six months people at my grandfather's funeral have been telling me what a good man he was, and his papers say that four families in four countries think he was a thief. I would like to know which is true." She picked the pencil back up. "And I like problems. I'm a mathematics teacher. Problems are the part of life that has answers."

That was when I decided. I didn't say so. I said, "The bus to Jinja takes two days with the border."

"I know. I came that way."

"There is a faster way across the lake."

---

That night Babu called us onto the veranda. The lake flies were out over the gulf, those great pale clouds of them that rise off the water at dusk and drift in toward the shore like smoke, and the fishermen's lamps were coming on one by one out on the water, and somewhere down the hill a radio was playing taarab, the old coastal music with the strings and the drum and the singer who sounds like she is telling the whole street her business. Babu had a bowl of roasted groundnuts on his knee and the card table set up in front of him, and on it he had laid five envelopes, each with a name.

*Okello. Gasana. Ciza. Deng. Mwakalinga.*

"One for each house," he said. "When you are sitting in that house, you open that envelope. Not before. You don't open the Ciza envelope in Rwanda because you are curious. You don't open Gasana in Jinja because you are in a hurry."

"And Mwakalinga?" I said.

"Last."

"Who is in this, Babu? You keep saying five."

"Five grandchildren," he said. "One from each house. Achol from Deng. You from me. In Jinja, Okello's grandson Opio, who takes tourists down the Nile on rubber boats and has, I am told, a loud laugh. In Rwanda, Gasana's granddaughter Uwase, who tastes coffee for her living. In Bujumbura, Ciza's grandson Gilbert, who builds boats." He ate a groundnut. "I have written to all of them. Three have answered. One said yes. One said maybe. One's mother said no."

"Which one said no?"

"Gasana's daughter," said Babu. "Mutoni. She said her father was accused of stealing in this house and she would not send her daughter to help the people who accused him." He looked out at the lamps. "She is right to be angry. Go and sit in her house and let her be angry at you, and listen."

"Me? Why me?"

"Because you are mine," he said. "And because you are the only one of the five who thinks I'm wrong about everything. That is useful. A survey needs someone who checks."

Achol laughed then, for the first time, a short surprised laugh with her hand over the gap in her teeth.

I took the envelopes from the table. They were heavier than I expected. At the bottom of the pile there was one more card, separate, and I turned it over.

*CARD THREE. Go to where the lake leaves home.*

"Jinja," Achol said at once. "Where the Nile leaves Lake Victoria."

"Too easy," I said.

"The first clue is always easy," said Babu. "So that you start."

Next chapter

Reconnaissance

*CARD FOUR. Reconnaissance is walking the ground before you measure it. Look at everything. Write down what surprises you. Rule three: the lake is not a road, it is a neighbor. E. M.*

There are no passenger boats from Mwanza to Jinja. There are cargo ships that carry railway wagons across the lake, a few of them, and one of them was the MV Kagera Star, whose chief engineer, Mr. Lyimo, had been at technical college with Mzee Kasika and owed him, Mzee Kasika said, for a matter involving a borrowed motorcycle in 1981. Two phone calls and a bag of oranges later, Achol and I were standing on the wagon deck at South Port on Wednesday evening, between rows of brown freight wagons chained to rails set into the steel, with our bags and a cooler of food from my mother and Deng's papers in a plastic folder inside Achol's blouse.

"Is this legal?" Achol asked.

"You are a guest of the engine room," I said. "Engine rooms have their own laws."

The Kagera Star sailed at seven. I have spent ten years on the lake and I still stand at the rail when we leave Mwanza, because the city at dusk from the water is one of the things I would show a stranger if I could show only one. The rocks go pink and then violet. The lights come on along the hills in uneven strings. The fish market on the shore smells of smoke and the cold green smell of the lake, and the fishing boats come home past you, long wooden canoes painted blue and red and yellow with names on their bows, *Patience*, *Mama Asha*, *Do Not Envy Me*, the men standing to pole the last stretch in. Behind us the egg-on-a-thumb rock went black against the sky.

Achol stood beside me with her arms folded in her cardigan. She had never been on a big boat.

"It's so wide," she said. "I thought it would be like the Nile. A river with a far bank. There isn't a far bank."

"There is. It's in Uganda. Fourteen hours."

"My grandfather used to say the lake came to visit him," she said. "In Juba. He used to stand on the bridge and say, this water was in Lake Victoria a month ago, this water has seen Mwanza. I thought he was making a joke about the river."

"It was a joke and it was true," I said. "Most of his jokes are, I think. Babu's are."

---

Mr. Lyimo gave us dinner in the engineers' mess, which was a steel room with a table bolted to the floor and a television nobody watched, and he and I talked about bearings and fuel injectors for an hour while Achol ate my mother's chapati and listened. Then he took us down to see his engines, because engineers cannot help themselves, and Achol stood in the hot oily roar of the engine room with her hands over her ears and her eyes very wide, looking at everything.

Later, on deck, she said, "You love it."

"The engines?"

"The boat. The work. You were different down there. Your face went quiet."

Nobody had ever said that to me, and I didn't know what to do with it, so I asked her about teaching.

She taught Senior Two and Senior Four at a secondary school in Juba, forty-eight students in one class and fifty-three in the other, in a room with a tin roof that was so loud in the rains she had taught herself to write the whole lesson on the board and point. She had a brother who drove a minibus and a sister at nursing college, and a mother who sold tea and kisra, the thin sorghum pancakes, from a stall near the market. Her grandmother Abuk, Deng's widow, lived with them. Her grandfather had worked for the water department in Juba for thirty years after the survey and had spent his retirement, she said, making puzzles for his grandchildren out of matchboxes and string.

"Like Babu," I said.

"That's what I thought, when I saw the cards." She was quiet. "He taught me the cipher. Not this one, a different one, his own. When I was seven. We wrote notes to each other and hid them in my grandmother's sugar tin. My grandmother pretended she didn't know. He loved Mwanza. He talked about Mwanza all the time. The rocks. The fish. A house with a mango tree. He never said anything bad about anyone in the party. Not once. He said they were the best years of his working life."

"And he never came back."

"He never had money to come back. And then his father was ill, and then it was his mother, and then it was us." She looked at the dark water. "When I found the packet I thought, this is the one thing he never finished. He always finished everything. He finished my maths homework if I left it on the table."

---

We slept on folded blankets in the engineers' cabin while Mr. Lyimo took the watch, and in the gray before dawn I woke to the engines changing their note and went up on deck.

The lake was flat and white with mist. Small islands came out of it one by one, green and steep, with fishing camps on their shores, rows of nets drying on poles, smoke rising straight up from cooking fires, a woman bent over a basin, a boy running along a beach waving at the ship. On one island a whole hillside was white with dagaa spread out to dry on the rocks, millions of the little fish, so bright in the first sun it looked like snow. Pied kingfishers hovered over the water and plunged. A fish eagle sat on a dead tree with its white head turned to watch us, the way they do, as if you owe them money.

Achol came up with two cups of tea from the mess and stood beside me.

"I wrote something down," she said. "Because the card said to write down what surprises you."

"What surprised you?"

"That you didn't say anything for an hour and it wasn't uncomfortable." She gave me the tea. "And the dog."

"What dog?"

"Your grandfather's dog. She digs in the same place every day. Under the tree, between two roots. And he stops her. He doesn't stop her when she digs in the vegetable bed, I saw her dig up two onions yesterday and he laughed. He only stops her at the tree."

I looked at her. "So?"

"So nothing," said Achol. "It surprised me. I wrote it down."

---

We came into Jinja in the late morning. The northern shore of the lake is greener than ours, softer, with sugarcane on the hills and big trees along the water and red earth showing where the roads cut through. The ship slowed past the long low warehouses of the pier, and on the slope behind them I could see the old colonial town, white walls and tin roofs and flame trees, and to the west, beyond the town, the place where the lake narrows and starts, very quietly, to move.

On the pier, among the porters and the railway men and a woman selling boiled maize from a charcoal brazier, there was a young man in a red life vest with *RIVER GUIDE* printed on the back, holding up a piece of cardboard on which someone had written in marker:

*MWAKALINGA + DENG. WELCOME TO THE NILE. MY GRANDMOTHER IS ALREADY ANGRY THAT YOU ARE LATE.*

"That's Opio," said Achol.

"How do you know?"

"Mzee said he had a loud laugh," she said, and at that moment the young man saw us waving and laughed, and the porters on the pier all turned to look.

Next chapter

Station Two

*CARD FIVE, sealed: OKELLO. Open in the house. Okello was the chainman. He measured the ground with his feet and a chain of one hundred links, and he never once lost count. He could not read our cipher to save his life. E. M.*

Opio Okello was thirty and built like a man who lifts rafts over his head for a living, which he did, and he talked from the moment we stepped off the gangway to the moment we sat down in his grandmother's house, and possibly in his sleep.

"You came on the wagon ship? Nobody comes on the wagon ship. My uncle came on the wagon ship once in 1994 and he says he is still seasick. You are Neema? The engineer? My grandmother says you have a hard face in the photograph. You don't. You have a worried face. Achol, welcome, welcome, you are the mathematician, you will have to do all the thinking, I am only here to carry things and to make people laugh. Have you eaten? You haven't eaten. You're going to eat a rolex. Don't argue, nobody comes to Jinja without eating a rolex."

A rolex, it turned out, was not a watch. It was a chapati, fresh off a hot iron plate on a street corner, with an omelet cooked on the same plate, full of cabbage and tomato and onion, rolled up together in a sheet of newspaper, and it was the best thing I had eaten since my mother's fish. The man who made it, at a stall made of planks and a sheet of blue tarpaulin outside the market, was Opio's cousin, as was, it emerged over the next two days, roughly half of Jinja.

"Rolled eggs," Opio explained, chewing. "Rolled eggs, rolex. Say it fast. Every student in Uganda has lived on these. I lived on these. I live on these now."

We walked up from the market through the old town. The streets were wide and quiet and lined with old shopfronts with carved balconies and faded painted signs, a tailor, a hardware store, a bicycle repair under a mango tree with three boys waiting, a music shop playing loud bright guitar. Boda-boda motorcycles went by with women sitting sideways on the back holding baskets of matooke, the green cooking bananas, still on the stalk. Opio greeted everyone. Everyone greeted Opio.

His grandmother lived in a small brick house on a quiet street on the edge of town, with a fenced compound and a papaya tree and a line of washing, and a veranda painted green where she was sitting, very upright, in a chair with a cushion, in a long dress with puffed shoulders and a sash, the old formal dress of Ugandan women, the gomesi. She was eighty-two and very small and her face, as we came through the gate, was like a door being held shut.

"You are late," she said.

"Grandmother," said Opio, "the ship came at eleven, the ship was always going to come at eleven—"

"I have been dressed since seven." She looked at me. "You are Mwakalinga's."

"Yes, Mama."

"Sit down."

I remembered Babu's card. *Every house you enter, you sit before you ask.* I sat.

---

Lamunu Okello did not ask about the trunk. She asked about my mother, and my mother's tailoring, and whether my grandmother had suffered at the end, and whether Babu still sang, and when I said yes, at the table, every Sunday, she made a sound in her throat that might have been a laugh.

"He sang at my wedding," she said. "Nineteen sixty-nine. In Gulu. The whole survey party came, all five, in the survey vehicle, it took them three days. Elias stood up and sang a song from his home. In Nyakyusa. Nobody understood one word. It went on for a very long time." She paused. "He cannot sing."

"No, Mama."

"He has never been able to sing. Okello used to say, the party chief has a voice like a wheel with no grease." The door in her face had come open a little. "Okello loved him. Okello loved all of them. That was the trouble."

Opio's mother brought tea, milky and sweet, and a plate of roasted groundnuts and another of boiled sweet potatoes, orange inside, and then sat down at the end of the veranda with her arms folded to listen, the way women in every family I have ever known sit to listen when the old people talk about the past, as if in case they get it wrong.

Achol and I took turns. She told the story of the packet, and the red string, and the half-torn cipher card. I told about the five envelopes. Lamunu listened to all of it without moving. When Achol said *ask Okello for my letter*, the old woman closed her eyes.

"So," she said. "It was for him. All this time it was for him."

She got up, and Opio jumped to help her, and she waved him off and went into the house, and we heard her in the back room moving things. She came back carrying a flat tin box, the kind tea comes in from the shop, painted with faded pictures of hills and tea pickers. The lid had rusted at the corners.

"This came in 1977," she said, and sat down with it on her knees. "To the post office in Gulu. Two years late. It had been to the wrong Jinja, the wrong Okello, the wrong everything. The postmark was Mwanza, March 1975. Okello opened it at the post office and he sat down on the step. I remember he sat down on the step. It was all numbers. He said, this is Deng. This is the cipher. And I can't read it."

"He never learned it," said Achol softly.

"He never learned anything he could not count with his feet. He said Gasana could read it. Gasana knew the cipher best, Gasana and Deng made it. He said, I will take it to Gasana. And then he didn't." She looked down at the tin. "By then the families were not speaking. Somebody had said things. Okello said if he went to Rwanda with a letter from Deng, people would say he and Deng and Gasana had planned it all together. He said he would go next year. Then it was next year. Then it was the children. Then it was his knees." She opened the box. "He wrote on it so that someone would know."

Inside, on a folded cloth, there was an envelope gone the color of weak tea. Across the front, under the address, in pencil, in a different and heavier hand, someone had written: *FOR GASANA TO READ. KEEP DRY.*

It had not been kept dry. There was a brown tide mark across the bottom third of it, and the paper had cockled.

"The roof leaked in 1998," said Lamunu. "The El Niño rains. I'm sorry."

Achol didn't touch it. She looked at me.

"Open the envelope," I said. "Not that one. Babu's."

I took the envelope with *Okello* written on it out of my bag and opened it in the house, as I had been told. Inside there was one card and a strip of paper with a number on it.

*CARD SIX. You will want to read the letter at once. Read the woman first. Ask her where the party argued about a tree. Then measure what she tells you. E. M.*

The strip of paper said: *1 chain = 100 links = 66 feet. Okello's chain is in the house too. Ask.*

Opio leaned over my shoulder and read it, and for the first time since the pier he was quiet.

"There's a chain in our house?" he said.

"Behind the door of my bedroom," said his grandmother, "for fifty years. What did you think you were tripping over?"

Next chapter

Traverse

*A traverse is a line of measured legs, each one starting where the last one ended. Errors carry forward. So does luck. Field book of Okello Ojok, 1971, in Elias Mwakalinga's hand, because Okello would not write in it himself.*

The chain was behind the bedroom door, as she had said, hanging on a nail in a heavy loop under a raincoat: a hundred links of thick steel wire, each link a little longer than my hand, joined by rings, with a brass handle at each end and small brass tags every ten links, cut with notches so you could count them in the dark by touch. It was rusted brown in places and bright where hands had held it. When Opio lifted it off the nail it made a long low sound like water over stones.

"I thought it was for the goats," he said. "When I was small. I thought my grandfather tied up goats with it."

"Your grandfather," said Lamunu from the veranda, "never tied up a goat in his life. He was afraid of goats."

We laid it out in the yard, all sixty-six feet of it, from the papaya tree to the gate and beyond, while Opio's mother held the gate open and three children from next door came to watch. Opio walked its length with the handle in his fist, counting the tags under his breath, and at the end he turned around and looked back along the line of it in the afternoon sun, and his face was a face I had not seen on him yet.

"He walked the whole lake with this," he said.

"Most of it," I said. "Babu says Okello never lost count."

"He couldn't remember my name some days at the end," Opio said. "He called me by my father's name. But he could count anything. Steps, money, cows on a hill a kilometer away." He coiled the chain back in loops over his arm the way he must have seen it done when he was a child and had forgotten. "Grandmother. Tell them the tree story."

---

She told it after supper, which was matooke steamed in its own leaves until it went soft and yellow and was mashed on the plate, with a groundnut sauce the color of clay and pieces of chicken, and beans, and a dish of greens. We ate on the veranda with the lamp on and the moths coming to it and the sound from the street of someone's radio playing an old song by a Congolese guitar band that everyone in East Africa over fifty knows by heart.

"There was a tree," Lamunu said, "somewhere on the survey. Okello never said where. Some camp, some shore, they were always on some shore." She waved a hand at the whole lake. "A small tree. This high." She held her hand at the height of her chair arm. "Okello told this story at every wedding for forty years. Elias wanted to cut the tree. Deng said no. They argued for three days. Okello said they argued in English, in Swahili, in Arabic, and in numbers, and the numbers were the worst."

"What was the argument about?" Achol said.

"I don't know. Something about seeing. Elias said the tree was in the way of something. Deng said a tree is not in the way, a tree is the way. Okello said that made no sense and that he was going to bet on Elias, because Elias was the party chief, and he bet a week of his field allowance. With Ciza." She put her cup down. "He lost. The tree stayed. Okello said he paid Ciza in tins of sardines because the allowance was already in the trunk. That was the end of the story. Everybody laughed. Every wedding, they laughed."

"He lost a week's money," said Opio, "on a tree."

"He said it was the best money he ever lost." She was quiet. "He stopped telling it after the trunk. It wasn't a funny story anymore."

I wrote it down, all of it, in a notebook I had bought at the stationer's opposite the market that afternoon, a plain exercise book with a blue cover, because the card had said to write down what surprised me and because I had begun to suspect Babu meant it literally. I also recorded her telling it on my phone, with her permission, which she gave the way you would give permission to a doctor, and that night I put the recording on my mother's family page under Okello's name, beside the 1970 photograph. My mother had already made him a place on our tree with a dotted line, the way she marks people who are family but not by blood. She called me at ten o'clock to say she had listened to it twice.

---

Achol worked on the letter all evening, at the kitchen table, with the cipher card and the lamp and a pencil and a cup of tea she forgot to drink. She would not let anyone touch the letter itself. She unfolded it with the flat of a table knife and kept it between two sheets of clean paper, and she copied every pair of digits onto a ruled page before she tried to read any of it.

The letter was one page of yellow survey paper, the same paper as the page in Deng's packet, written in pencil in rows. The top two thirds were sharp and clear. The bottom third was under the brown tide mark, and there the pencil had gone soft and gray and in places had lifted away altogether.

"Every pair is row and column," Achol said, mostly to herself. "The card only has columns nought to four. So any pair ending in five to nine, I can't read." She wrote steadily. "That's about half the letters. But not half the words. You can read a lot of a sentence from half its letters, if you know what it's likely to say."

By eleven o'clock she had this, which she wrote out for us in capitals with gaps for the letters she didn't have:

*OKELLO. F_THER _ILL. I GO HO_E TONIGHT. HOUSE E_PTY, ELI_S IN _USO_A. THIEVES ON STREET. I _URIED THE TRUN_. _M7. TWO ONE TWO. THEN ..._*

"*I buried the trunk*," said Opio. "He buried it."

"*Father ill*," Achol said. "*I go home tonight. House empty. Elias in Musoma. Thieves on street.*" She put the pencil down and looked at her hands. "He didn't take it. He hid it. He was frightened someone would break in, and he hid it, and he went home because his father was ill."

Nobody said anything. Down the street a dog barked and another answered.

"*B M seven*," I said. "Benchmark seven. Two one two is a bearing. Two hundred and twelve degrees. Then a distance, which is under the water mark."

"We don't have the distance," Achol said.

"We don't have anything," I said. "Benchmark seven where? There are thousands of benchmarks around this lake."

Opio stood up so fast his chair scraped.

"There's one at the pier," he said. "An old survey pillar. Concrete, with a brass disc on top. Behind the warehouses, on the slope, my cousin Okot is the night watchman there, I've sat on it a hundred times. It has numbers on it. I think it has a seven." He looked from one of us to the other. "Grandfather worked at this pier. The party worked here. Why would Deng write to a man in Jinja about a benchmark in Mwanza?"

It was a good question. It was a terrible question, as it turned out, but it was a good one, and at eleven o'clock at night, with half a letter and a chain and two days of travel behind us, it sounded like the answer.

---

The warehouse manager was another cousin. Opio phoned him at half past eleven, and he said, in a voice we could hear across the kitchen, that Opio was mad, that his grandfather had been mad, and that if we wanted to dig a hole behind his warehouse in the middle of the night we could do it as long as we filled it in again and did not dig anywhere near the electrical cable, which ran, he thought, somewhere along the fence.

So at midnight we were on the slope behind the pier warehouses with the lake black below us and the lights of a cargo ship moving out across it and Okot the night watchman holding a torch, an old man in a long army greatcoat and a woolen hat though it was not cold. The survey pillar was there, a squat concrete post knee-high with a brass disc set into its top, and the disc did have a seven on it. It had a great many numbers on it. It also had an arrow.

"Two hundred and twelve degrees," I said, and set my compass on the pillar, and turned until the needle settled, and pointed into the dark. "That way."

That way was a patch of rough grass between the pillar and the fence. We had no distance, so we did the only thing we could: Opio laid out the chain from the pillar along the bearing, and we dug at every ten-link tag, a small test hole each time, a spade's depth. Opio dug. Okot held the torch. Achol stood at the pillar with the compass to keep us on the line, frowning. I dug when Opio's hands blistered.

At the fourth tag, at forty links, my spade struck something hard.

We all stopped. Okot brought the torch close. Opio got down on his knees and dug with his hands, and pulled out of the red earth a glass bottle, a brown one, with a metal cap rusted shut and a roll of paper inside.

Opio held it up to the torch. His face was shining.

Achol said, "It's too small."

"Maybe it's another clue—"

"It's a beer bottle," said Okot.

We broke the neck on the pillar, carefully, with a stone, and unrolled the paper. It was a page from an exercise book. In a child's careful handwriting, in blue ink, it said: *We are Primary Five at Jinja Lakeside School and this is our time capsule. The year is 1998. Our favorite song is on the radio every day. We hope in the future there are flying cars. If you find this, please write to us.* Underneath, eleven signatures.

Okot laughed until he had to sit on the pillar. After a moment Opio laughed too, sitting in the hole in the grass with the paper in his blistered hands. Achol didn't laugh. She looked at the paper for a long time and then she folded it and gave it to Opio.

"You should write to them," she said. "They asked."

We filled in all four holes, as the warehouse manager had told us. It was half past two when we walked back up through the empty town. I was tired in my shoulders and in the backs of my legs and somewhere else too, deeper, where I had let myself think for two hours that we would find a green steel trunk on the first night and go home.

"Errors carry forward," Achol said beside me, very quietly, as if she had been reading over my shoulder. "So does luck. We'll find the error."

Next chapter

Back Sight

*A back sight is a look back at the point you came from, to check you have not wandered. Take one at every station. It costs a minute and saves a week. Field book of Elias Mwakalinga, 1969.*

Opio woke us at five.

"You can't come to Jinja," he said through the bedroom door, "and not see where the river starts. Get up. Bring the letter. Bring the field book. My grandmother says bring the field book."

The field book had been in the tea tin under the letter. It was Okello's, from 1971, the one with the note on the first page about Okello refusing to write in it, and Achol had set it aside the night before because the letter had seemed more important. We took it in a plastic bag with the letter and the cipher card, and we climbed into the back of a minibus with Opio's rafting company painted on the side, and we drove out through the cane fields in the dark to the river.

The source of the Nile is not dramatic. I had expected something, a waterfall, a gorge. It is a wide place where the lake becomes a river. There is a grassy bank with tall trees, and a little landing with wooden boats, and the water, which is brown-green and very calm, simply begins to slide. You can see it if you look: a long smooth tongue of water moving out of the lake between the banks, faster in the middle, with small swirls on its surface. On the far side there is a place where a spring comes up from below and makes the surface boil a little, softly, all the time.

Opio rowed us out in one of the wooden boats as the sun came up. Kingfishers. A monitor lizard on a rock, gray and long as a man, which did not move. Cormorants drying their wings on a dead tree, black against the pink sky. Fishermen in canoes with long nets, who called out to Opio by name.

"This water," Opio said, resting the oars, "goes to Egypt. Three months. Six thousand kilometers. Through my country, through Achol's country, through Sudan. It goes over the rapids where I take tourists. It goes past Juba."

"It goes past my grandmother's house," said Achol. "A month from here, maybe. My grandfather said a month."

"Then let's send her something," said Opio, and took a groundnut out of his pocket and dropped it in the water, and Achol laughed and took one from him and threw it after, and I watched the two of them watching the groundnuts turn slowly in the current and slide away toward the river.

---

On the bank afterward, sitting on the grass with sweet tea from a vacuum flask and a bag of mandazi, the triangles of fried dough that are breakfast from Mombasa to Kigali, Achol opened Okello's field book.

It was mostly in Babu's handwriting, page after page of distances and bearings and small sketches: a shoreline, a hill, a rock with an arrow. Okello had walked the chain, and Babu had written down what he called out. But on some pages there were other hands, and in the back there was a list headed *BENCHMARKS SET, PARTY FOUR*.

Achol ran her finger down it, and stopped, and ran it down again.

"They aren't numbered all together," she said. "Look. Each one has a letter first. *O1, O2, O3*. Those are Okello's. *G1, G2*. Gasana. *C1*. *E1* to *E9*. *D1* to *D11*." She looked up. "They each numbered their own. Every man set his own benchmarks and gave them his own letter."

"*O3, Jinja pier,*" Opio read over her shoulder. "Grandfather's. So the pillar was his."

"Then *BM7* in Deng's letter isn't the seventh benchmark of the party," Achol said. "It's somebody's seventh. And there's a letter in front of the seven in the letter that I couldn't read last night. I thought it was a smudge." She opened the plastic folder, and the letter, and looked. "It's not a smudge. It's a pair of digits with a column above four. It's a letter in the half of the card we don't have."

"So it could be D," I said. "Deng's seventh."

"It could be any of the letters from the second half of the alphabet."

"D isn't in the second half," Opio said.

"It is on this card," said Achol. "They didn't put the alphabet in order. Of course they didn't. They were surveyors with nothing to do in the evenings."

I took the field book from her and found *D7*. In the column beside it, where the others had places written, *Jinja pier*, *Musoma school*, *Bukoba hill*, there was nothing. Just *D7* and a little drawing: a circle, an arrow, and three wavy lines.

"Water," said Opio. "That's what Grandfather drew for water. He couldn't spell much, but he drew."

"Base camp was on the water," I said. "Babu's house is above the gulf."

"So are a thousand places," Achol said, but she was looking at the drawing the way she had looked at the dog.

---

We would have sat there all morning if Lamunu had not sent Opio's mother to the river to bring us back, because there was something she had forgotten to say.

She was on the veranda in a plainer dress with a kanga around her shoulders. She had a shoebox on her knee, and in it, tied in bundles with rubber bands that had gone hard and cracked, there were letters. Dozens of them. Blue airmail envelopes with Rwandan stamps.

"Mukamurenzi," she said. "Gasana's wife. We write at the New Year. Every year since 1970. Even after the men stopped." She took out a bundle. "We agreed in 1976. We wrote: we will not talk about the trunk. We will talk about children and food and illness and funerals. That is what women do when the men are being stupid. We keep the road open."

I looked at the shoebox. Fifty years of New Year letters between two women who had met, I worked out later, three times in their lives.

"In 1995," Lamunu said, "she wrote me that Gasana's eyes were going. Cataracts. He was afraid he would forget the party's code. It was a game for him, all his life, he wrote notes in it to her. So she wove it for him. Into a basket. The black and the natural straw, in rows. She said he could read it with his fingers when he could not read it with his eyes. She was proud of it." She held out a letter. "Here. Read it yourselves. I will not have you saying an old woman made it up."

The letter was in English, in a round schoolteacher's hand. *My dear sister Lamunu, I have done a strange thing this year. I have woven Gasana's whole numbers alphabet into a basket for him, with the lid. He says it is the most beautiful thing I have made, and he only says that about food.*

"His whole alphabet," said Achol. "The whole card."

She turned to me, and for the first time since the beer bottle, she was smiling with all of her face.

"Babu knew," I said. "He knew the other half was in Rwanda. That's why the card said to read the woman before the letter."

"Of course he knew," said Lamunu. "Mukamurenzi wrote to him also, in 2016, when Gasana died. He told her he was sorry. That's all he said. He was sorry." She put the lid on the shoebox. "Opio. You are going with them."

"Grandmother, I have tourists on Saturday—"

"Your cousin can take the tourists. You are going to Rwanda. You are taking your grandfather's chain. You are going to sit in Mukamurenzi's house and tell her that Okello was a coward about the letter for forty-nine years, and that his widow is ashamed, and that she sends her love."

---

The bus to Kigali left from Kampala in the evening. We spent the afternoon getting there, an hour and a half in a shared taxi through the green hills and the brick kilns and the roadside stalls of pineapples piled in pyramids, and then Kampala itself, which I had never seen and which came at me all at once: seven hills of red roofs and towers and traffic, boda-bodas in swarms, hawkers walking between the stopped cars selling everything from phone chargers to roasted maize to whole bunches of matooke balanced on their heads, music from every second doorway.

On the long road southwest, after dark, the bus stopped at a place on the highway where a white painted line ran across the tarmac and a concrete ring stood on each side of the road, and a sign said *EQUATOR*. The driver gave us ten minutes. The other passengers bought grilled meat on sticks and roasted plantain from the women with charcoal stoves.

I stood on the line. I had crossed the equator many times on the lake without seeing it. A surveyor's granddaughter: you would think I would have known what it felt like. It felt like nothing. It felt like a line of paint on a road in the dark with a woman at my elbow trying to sell me a stick of goat.

"Babu would like this," I said.

"Take a picture," said Achol. "Send it to him."

I did. He answered in four minutes, which meant he had been holding the phone. *Zero degrees, zero minutes. Everything starts somewhere. Take a back sight. What have you learned?*

I wrote back: *That every man had his own seven.* Then I put the phone in my pocket and bought the stick of goat.

Next chapter

Station Three

*CARD SEVEN, sealed: GASANA. Open in the house. Gasana was our computer. In 1970 a computer was a man with a pencil who did the long sums. He never made a mistake, and he never forgave one, including his own. E. M.*

We crossed into Rwanda at dawn, and the country began at once to fold.

That is the only way I can say it. Uganda had been green and rolling. Rwanda was green and steep, hills on hills on hills, every one of them terraced and planted to the very top, bananas and beans and maize and tea, the fields like the lines on the palm of your hand, and red roads winding up and over them, and houses scattered along every ridge, and people walking. People walking everywhere, at six in the morning, up the roadsides and along the ridges, women with loads on their heads, men pushing bicycles stacked with jerrycans of milk, children in blue school uniforms, all of them walking up.

"It's so clean," said Opio, pressing his face to the window. "Look at the roadside. There's nothing on it."

Kigali was clean too, and quiet, and climbing on its own hills, with wide roads and flowerbeds in the roundabouts and moto-taxi riders in green vests with numbered helmets, and we did not stay. We changed to a minibus going west, three hours toward the lake, the road going up and up into the hills where it was cool enough in the early morning that Achol put on her cardigan and Opio, who had brought nothing warmer than a life vest, borrowed my mother's kanga and wrapped himself in it, to the great interest of an old man in the seat in front of us, who looked at the saying on it and laughed and told him it suited him.

"What does it say?" said Opio.

"*The patient hunter eats the fattest bird*," I said.

"That's fine," said Opio. "I'm very patient."

Then the road came over a last ridge and Lake Kivu was below us, and all three of us stopped talking.

It is not like our lake. Victoria is wide and brown-green and shallow, a sky of water. Kivu is deep, deep as the Rift is deep, and it lies in folds between the mountains, blue-black and still, with steep green islands standing out of it and long arms of water going away into the hills, and mist lying on the far shore in the morning. It is very quiet. On our lake there is always something moving. Kivu holds still like a held breath, and the hills go straight down into it.

---

The washing station was on a hillside above the water, a cluster of long raised drying tables under the sky, covered with a thin layer of coffee beans in their pale parchment skins, and a row of concrete tanks and channels where water ran, and a low building with a tin roof. Women in aprons were walking slowly along the tables, turning the beans with their hands, picking out the bad ones. The air smelled of something sweet and sour, like fruit going over, which I learned later was the cherries fermenting in the tanks.

Uwase came down the slope to meet us in a white coat with her sleeves rolled up and a pair of rubber boots, and she was laughing before she reached us, at Opio in the kanga.

She was twenty-eight and tall, with her hair cut very short and a long neck and a way of walking downhill fast as if the hill had been put there to amuse her. Her English was careful and quick, and her French, when she spoke to the women at the tables, was quicker, and her Kinyarwanda, when she called to a boy by the tanks, was quickest of all.

"Neema," she said, and shook my hand with both of hers. "Achol. And you must be the one who makes the noise. Opio. Welcome. Muraho. My mother says I am not to help you, so you will have to come and help me." She looked at our bags. "You came straight from the bus. You haven't eaten. First you will taste coffee."

She was a cupper. I didn't know what that meant until she showed us. In a white room in the low building there was a long table with rows of small glass bowls on it, each with a heap of fresh-ground coffee, and a kettle, and a tray of silver spoons. Uwase poured hot water into each bowl and the grounds rose to the top in a crust, and she waited, and then she bent over each bowl and broke the crust with the back of a spoon and put her face almost into the steam and breathed in. Then she took a spoonful and slurped it, loudly, with a sound like a child with soup, so that it sprayed across her tongue.

Opio laughed so hard he had to go outside.

"It's the only way," said Uwase, not at all offended. "You must get it everywhere in the mouth at once. Try." She gave me a spoon.

I tried. It was hot and bright and tasted, very faintly, of something I could not name. "Tomato?" I said, embarrassed.

"Red fruit," she said. "Yes. That's this hill. You see? You have a palate. All engineers have palates; they just don't use them for anything." She wrote something on a card. "This lot will go to a buyer in Europe who pays well because of that red fruit. Every hill tastes different. My grandfather used to say every hill had its own sum." She looked at the bowls. "He was a surveyor. You know that. He came home from the lakes and he couldn't stop measuring. He measured the whole hillside for the cooperative when they built this station. Every terrace. For nothing."

"He was the party's computer," said Achol.

"He was the best man I knew," said Uwase, and then, in a different voice, lower, "and my mother thinks your grandfathers killed him."

---

Not killed. She explained it while we sat on a bench outside the cupping room eating isombe, cassava leaves pounded and cooked down for hours with eggplant and onion and a little palm oil until they were soft and dark and green-black, with boiled potatoes and beans, from a tin bucket a woman had brought up from the village. Not killed. Shamed.

"When he came back in 1975," Uwase said, "people talked. Someone wrote from Mwanza to the survey office in Kigali. A man in the office had a cousin in our village. You know how it goes. The man who held the key to the money trunk. The trunk is gone. The key is in his pocket. He never went back to Tanzania. He never went to a wedding of any of the party. He stopped writing in his code to anyone but my grandmother. He measured hills for the cooperative for nothing for thirty years because, my mother says, he wanted every person in this village to see him working for nothing." She put down her plate. "He died with that. My mother sat with him. She says he said, at the end, *ask Elias if he ever found the error*. She thinks that means he died still wondering if Elias thought he was a thief."

"Babu wondered," I said. It was the hardest thing I have ever said to a stranger. "Some days. He told me so on Saturday."

Uwase looked at me for a long time.

"Then you must tell my mother that," she said. "In those words. Not in nicer ones." She stood up and brushed off her coat. "She has said she won't let you in the house. But she is my mother, and she has made dinner for five."

Next chapter

Closing Error

*When the traverse comes back to its starting point, it never closes exactly. The difference is the closing error. You do not hide it. You divide it fairly among the legs. Field book of Gasana Jean-Paul, 1972, in his own hand.*

Mutoni Gasana did let us in the house. She let us in the way the lake lets in a boat in a crosswind: because she could not, in the end, keep us out, and because she was a Rwandan woman of fifty-four with a house on a hill and a guest's right to food was older than her anger.

The house was on the ridge above the washing station, a square brick house with a red-painted door and a yard swept clean in curving lines and a cow in a shed at the back, and a view down to the lake that I would have given a year's wages for. Inside, the sitting room had a low table with a lace cloth on it, and photographs along the wall, and on a shelf by itself, a basket.

I knew it was the basket before anyone said so. It was tall, perhaps the height of my forearm, round, woven of fine dry grass and sisal so tight it could have held water, with a tall pointed lid like a little hat. It was pale gold, and around and around it went bands of black, zigzags and diamonds and lines of small triangles, so fine and regular that they looked printed. Every Rwandan family has baskets like it, Uwase told me later. They are the baskets brides carry and the baskets that hold gifts; women weave them sitting together, and teach their daughters, and each one takes weeks. This one had a small chip in its lid and a darker patch on one side where a hand had held it, over and over, in the same place.

Mutoni sat down under it. She wore a long patterned wrap and a matching cloth across one shoulder and her hair under a scarf, and she did not offer her hand.

"Sit," she said.

We sat. I had been sitting in every house I entered for a week, and I thought I knew how to do it. I didn't. I had been sitting and waiting for the moment I could ask. That night I sat, and listened, and did not ask anything, for two hours.

---

She told it in Kinyarwanda first, to Uwase, very fast, and Uwase translated, and then halfway through Mutoni turned to me and told it again in English, slowly, as if she had decided the words needed to come straight to me and not through her daughter.

She told about being a girl of three when her father came home from the lakes, and that he was thin and quiet and did not sing anymore. About the man from the survey office who came to the village and asked questions in a loud voice outside the cooperative store so the whole hill could hear. About her mother crying in the kitchen. About going to school and a boy saying her father was the thief from Tanzania, and her father hearing of it and going to the boy's father, not to fight, but to sit with him, and sitting with him for an afternoon, and coming home, and never mentioning it again. About the hills he measured for nothing. About his eyes going, and her mother's basket. About the hospital in Kigali in 2016, and his hand, and *ask Elias if he ever found the error*.

"He was a man who could not bear an error," she said. "Not in a sum. Not in a person. Not in himself. And there was an error he could not find, for forty years, and it was in his own name."

I didn't say anything. Not because of a card. Because there was nothing I had that was worth putting in the space she had made.

When she was finished, she looked at me and said, "Well? You are Mwakalinga's. What does he say?"

I said, "He says that some days he believed it was Deng, and some days he believed it was your father, and some days he believed it was nobody. He told me so on Saturday. He was the party chief and the trunk was in his house, and he let people talk. He didn't stop them. He didn't write to your father. He never asked your father anything." I made myself go on. "He's eighty-five and he is ashamed of it. He didn't say ashamed. But that's what it was."

Mutoni was quiet for a long time. Achol had her hands folded tight in her lap. Opio, beside her, was looking at the floor.

Then Mutoni said, "Your phone. Does it make the video?"

"Yes."

"Call him."

It was nine o'clock in Rwanda, ten in Mwanza. He answered on the second ring, in his reading glasses, with the lamp behind him and the mango tree black through the window. I gave the phone to Mutoni.

I don't know everything they said. I went out to the yard with Opio and Achol and we stood by the cow shed in the cold and looked at the lake, where lights were moving on the water, and from very far below we could hear singing. Uwase came out after a while and stood beside us.

"The fishermen," she said. "They go out at dusk in threes, three boats tied together with long poles, and they sing to keep the paddles together. All night they fish for the little sambaza with lamps. In the morning they sing coming home." She listened. "My grandfather used to stand here every night and listen. He said it was the only sum on the lake that always came out right."

Through the window I could see Mutoni in the lamplight with the phone held out in front of her face, and I could see that she was weeping, and that she was talking, and that on the little screen my grandfather had taken off his glasses and was not saying anything at all. He was listening. I had not known he could.

---

In the morning Mutoni's mother came to the house.

Mukamurenzi was eighty and lived with Mutoni's brother on the next ridge, and she walked the half hour over the hill with a stick and a granddaughter on each side, and she arrived at seven with the dew still on the hem of her wrap, and she went straight to Opio and took his face in both her hands.

"Lamunu's grandson," she said in English. "You look like her. That's lucky for you. Okello was very ugly."

Opio laughed, and then, to everyone's surprise, especially his own, he cried a little, and Mukamurenzi patted his face and said something in Kinyarwanda that made Uwase laugh.

"She says he's too big to cry standing up," Uwase said. "He should sit."

She sat too. They brought tea, with milk from the cow, hot and thick, and a bowl of ikivuguto, the soured milk Rwandans drink cold in the mornings, thick as yogurt, which Achol loved at once and Opio could not get down. Then Mukamurenzi took the basket off the shelf herself, and set it on the lace cloth, and took off the lid.

"Every row is one letter," she said. "From the bottom. Gasana told me the numbers, and I made each one a pattern. A black triangle is one. A small diamond is five. A line is nought." She ran her finger up the side of the basket, over the black and gold. "Here is two-two. Here is two-three. He would hold it in the evening and touch it and tell me what it said. He said, Muka, you have made me a book I can read in the dark."

Achol had gone very still.

"Can you read me the columns," she said, "from five to nine?"

Mukamurenzi read them, slowly, her finger on the weave. Achol wrote them down. When she was finished she laid her half card beside the page, and I saw the two halves of the table come together, the torn half that had been missing for fifty years woven into a bride's basket on a hill above Lake Kivu.

"Look," Achol said, and her voice was not steady. "Row seven, column eight. *D*."

"*D7*," I said.

"*Deng's seventh*," said Achol. "He doesn't say where. He thought Okello would know." She was reading straight from the letter now, the parts that had been gaps. "*Two one two, by Ciza's compass. Ciza knows his compass.* Then the water mark. Then there's one more line I can read, at the very end, under the stain, where the pencil pressed hard." She bent close. "*The tree we argued about. Tell Elias I kept it for him.*"

"*Ciza's compass*," said Opio. "Why Ciza's compass?"

Nobody answered. We were all looking at Mutoni, who had taken the letter from the table with the flat of her hand, carefully, the way Achol did, and was reading the decoded lines for herself. She read them three times. Then she put the letter down and put her hand over her mouth.

"He didn't take it," she said. "Nobody took it."

"Nobody took it," said Achol.

"He left it in the ground. For fifty years. Under a tree." She was laughing now, and crying, and the cow in the shed outside was lowing, and the fishermen's song came up from the lake as the boats came home. "My father measured this whole hill for nothing because of a tree."

Uwase went to her mother and held her. Over her mother's shoulder she looked at me and said, "Bujumbura. Ciza's compass. I'm coming."

"You have the harvest," Mutoni said into her shoulder.

"The harvest has two hundred women and a manager," said Uwase. "This has five grandchildren. And you are coming to Mwanza at the end. With Nyogokuru. And the basket."

Mutoni looked at her mother. Mukamurenzi put the lid back on the basket and settled her hands on top of it.

"Lamunu will be there," the old woman said. "I have known her for fifty-seven years and I have seen her three times. I am eighty. I am going."

Next chapter

Offset

*An offset is a short measurement taken at a right angle from the main line, to fix something that is not on it: a tree, a rock, a house. Most of what matters on a map is an offset. Field book of Gasana Jean-Paul, 1973.*

Before we left the ridge, Mukamurenzi told us her version of the tree.

She told it on the bench outside the red door, with the basket on her knees and her stick against the wall and the sun just coming over the hills behind us so that the lake below went from black to steel to blue while she talked. Mutoni had gone in to pack, which she did as if packing were an argument she intended to win. Uwase sat on the step at her grandmother's feet. Opio and Achol sat on the low wall. I wrote.

"Gasana told me about a tree," she said. "Many times. He laughed every time. It was a mango. A young one, he said, in the place where they lived. And it was the kind of mango that tastes of turpentine. You know this kind? Old trees, from the coast. The fruit is small and full of strings and it tastes like paint for a door." She made a face. "Gasana said only Deng would fight for a tree whose fruit nobody could eat. He said Deng sat up a whole night beside it with a lamp so nobody could cut it while he slept. In the morning Elias came out and found him there with his blanket and his lamp and gave up."

"Why?" said Achol. "Why did he want it so much?"

"Gasana said Deng said a man from his country does not let a young thing be killed for being in the way. He said, you move your instrument, you don't move the tree." She smiled. "Gasana said that was the only argument Elias ever lost."

I wrote *turpentine mango* in the blue notebook, and underlined it, and looked at it.

I thought, like Babu's. I thought it clearly, in those words. And then I thought, as clearly, that half the old mangoes from Mwanza to the coast taste of turpentine, that the party had lived in a hundred camps on a hundred shores in seven years, that there was no reason in the world to think a young tree in a story from 1970 was the great ugly thing that knocked my mother's water glass into her lap. And I closed the notebook, and Mutoni came out with three bags and a cooler, and that was the end of it, for then.

---

The road from Kivu to Bujumbura goes south along the spine of the country and then down, a long way down, into the Rift.

Mutoni's brother drove us in his pickup as far as Huye, the old university town in the south, with its wide streets and its jacaranda trees and its students in pressed shirts. Uwase sat in the front and talked to her uncle in Kinyarwanda about the harvest and the price of parchment coffee and someone's wedding. In the back, under a canvas cover, Opio and Achol and I sat on the bags with the basket in its cloth between my knees, because Mukamurenzi had looked at the three of us and decided I was the one least likely to let it fall.

At Huye we said goodbye to the uncle and took a bus, a big one, full, with a television over the driver's seat showing music videos with the sound up. Opio knew every song. The woman next to him, a trader from Huye with two sacks of beans and a crate of eggs, knew every song too, and by the time we reached the border they were singing together and she had told him three times that he should marry her niece.

"I'm spoken for," Opio said.

"By whom?" said Uwase from the seat behind, very interested.

"By the Nile," said Opio, and the trader laughed so much she nearly broke an egg.

Achol sat beside me with the letter in its plastic folder on her knees, reading it over and over.

"Two one two by Ciza's compass," she said. "Why say whose compass? A bearing is a bearing."

"Not with an old compass," I said. "Every compass is a little wrong. The needle is pulled by any iron near it, the case, the screws, a truck. A ship's compass has a card beside it telling you how wrong it is on each heading. On the Mwamba ours reads three degrees high going north. If you steer by it without the card you end up in Kenya."

Achol turned to look at me.

"So if Deng took his bearing with Ciza's compass, and Ciza's compass was wrong—"

"Then two one two isn't really two one two. It's two one two on that one needle. To find the line, you'd need the same compass, or you'd need to know how wrong it was."

"Ciza knows his compass," said Achol, reading it again. She smiled slowly. "That's not an apology. That's an instruction."

---

The border was a low building in green hills with a barrier across the road and a long line of trucks, and it took two hours, and in the middle of them Uwase bought us all brochettes of goat from a man with a grill made of an old wheel rim, and a paper cone of roasted bananas, and we ate on the grass beside a field of maize while a herd of cows with enormous curving horns came past on the road behind a boy with a stick.

On the far side the country changed again. Burundi is hills too, but wilder, the green deeper and the forests thicker on the tops, the roadside crowded with bicycles carrying impossible loads, a bed frame, six sacks of charcoal, a whole bunch of bananas taller than the man pushing it. Villages of brick and thatch. Children who ran beside the bus shouting the one word *muzungu* at Uwase, because she was the tallest and wore sunglasses, and she laughed and shouted back in Kirundi, which is so close to her own language that she said it was like hearing your cousin speak.

Then, in the late afternoon, the road came out of the hills at the top of the escarpment, and the Rift opened below us.

I have spent my life on a lake and I thought I knew what a lake looked like. I did not know this. From the top of the escarpment the land falls away for a thousand meters in great folded slopes, green and brown and red, and at the bottom there is a plain, and on the plain there is a city, and beyond the city, filling everything to the west and south, so big that its far side was only a darker blue line along the sky, there was Lake Tanganyika. Behind the far shore there were mountains, blue on blue, other mountains, another country. The water was silver where the sun hit it. It went south out of sight and kept going.

"It's six hundred and fifty kilometers long," said Achol, who had read it somewhere. "It's the second deepest lake in the world. It's older than almost anything."

Nobody answered her. Opio had his hand flat on the window. Uwase had taken off her sunglasses. The bus driver, who must have seen it a thousand times, slowed down.

"Babu walked down this," I said. "With the instruments. In 1973."

"With my grandfather," said Uwase. "And Deng. And Okello carrying the chain."

"And Ciza," said Opio. "Carrying the compass."

---

Gilbert was waiting at the bus park in Bujumbura with a wooden sign he had carved, painted in blue and white, which said *PARTY FOUR*.

He was thirty-eight, broad and quiet, with a short beard going gray at the chin and forearms crossed with old white scars, a boatbuilder's arms, and he wore a faded blue work shirt and a cap and a carpenter's pencil behind his ear. Beside him, holding his hand and swinging on it, was a girl of about nine in a yellow school dress, who looked at the four of us with the deep suspicion of the very young.

"This is Kami," said Gilbert. "She did the painting on the sign. I did the letters." He shook our hands one by one, slowly, as if he wanted to remember the shape of each. "Amahoro. Welcome. You are tired. My grandfather is waiting at the yard, and he is not patient. He has been waiting since 1975, he says."

"Amahoro," said Uwase, and Gilbert smiled at her.

"You speak Kirundi."

"I speak Kinyarwanda. You'll understand me if you try."

"I'll try," said Gilbert. "Kami. Say hello."

Kami looked us over. Then she let go of her father's hand and went straight to Achol, the smallest of us, and said in careful English, "Are you the one who reads the numbers?"

"Yes," said Achol.

"My great-grandfather says you will need to read his numbers too," said Kami. "He says they are very bad numbers. He says nobody has looked at them for fifty years." She took Achol's hand and turned toward the road. "Come on. He's going to tell you about the tree. He tells everybody about the tree."

Next chapter

Station Four

*CARD EIGHT, sealed: CIZA. Open in the house. Ciza was our instrument man and our boatman. He could hold a level steady in a canoe in a crosswind. He could also hold a grudge, and so could I. E. M.*

The boatyard was on the beach north of the port, where the city thins out into sand and palms, and it smelled of cut wood and tar and the lake, which here smells different from ours, cleaner, with something mineral in it, like water from a deep well.

There were three boats on the sand under a roof of corrugated iron on poles. Two were long narrow hulls of pale new wood, planked and ribbed, with men working on them, one with an adze, one with a plane, the shavings curling off in long gold ribbons onto the sand. The third was finished: a boat made of three hulls side by side, joined by heavy timbers across, painted white and blue, with tall poles standing up from the crossbeams, and on the poles, hung in a row, six lamps.

"For the night fishing," said Gilbert. "The ndagala, the little fish, they come up to the light. You go out at dusk with the lamps lit and you hang them low over the water and they come up from the deep in the dark, millions, and you net them under the lamps. All along the lake, every night, you'll see the lights. Like a town on the water." He laid his hand on one of the hulls. "My grandfather built these. Then my father. Now me. But the old man still tells me where I'm wrong."

"You're wrong there," said a voice from inside the shed.

Ciza Léonce sat in a wooden chair just inside the shade, by a workbench, with a radio and a thermos and a small wooden box on the bench beside him. He was eighty-three, long and thin, with very white hair cut close and a face all bone, and enormous hands lying still on his knees. He wore a white shirt buttoned to the neck and pressed trousers and a pair of sandals made from an old tire. He was looking not at us but at the boat.

"The third hull is two centimeters lower than the other two," he said in French, and then, in English, for us, "Two centimeters. You put a level on it, you will see. Ciza's grandson cannot build a straight boat."

"I am Ciza's grandson," said Gilbert peacefully, "and you put that hull on, Sogokuru, in March, when I was in Rumonge."

"Even worse," said the old man, and then he looked at us at last, one by one, turning his head so his good ear was toward us. He looked longest at me.

"Mwakalinga," he said.

"Yes, Sogokuru."

"You have his chin. It's a pity." He held out one of the enormous hands, and I took it. It was dry and hard and very warm. "Sit. Sit. Gilbert, chairs. Kami, tell your mother they're here. Sit before you ask. Did he give you that? The card about sitting? He used to say that to us. He said it before we went into any village on the whole lake. *Sit before you ask.* He was always right about villages." He let go of my hand. "He was never right about people."

---

His house was behind the yard, a long low house with a veranda facing the water, and his grandson's wife Ange brought supper out to us there as the sun went down behind the mountains across the lake and turned the whole western sky orange and then a dark smoky red.

We ate ndagala, the little fish from the night boats, fried crisp in palm oil with onion and tomato, and a bigger fish, a mukeke, a lake fish with firm white flesh, grilled whole on charcoal and served with lemon and hot pepper, and boiled green bananas and a dish of beans cooked with palm oil so that they were orange and rich, and cassava bread, the dense white loaf you tear with your fingers. Gilbert opened bottles of a beer made from bananas, sweet and cloudy, in a calabash for the old man and in glasses for us.

Kami sat next to Achol and watched her eat and corrected her when she got the fish bones wrong.

After supper Ciza had Gilbert bring a guitar, an old one with a crack in its top mended with glue and a strip of wood, and he did not play it; Gilbert did. He played well, quietly, a kind of rolling picking pattern, and Ciza sang. His voice was thin and cracked and exactly on the note.

"That's for the lake," he said when it was done. "An old song. About a man who goes out to fish and his wife waits on the shore with a lamp. She says, I keep the light lit so you can find the way." He drank from his calabash. "Elias used to sing too. You know this?"

"Every Sunday, Sogokuru."

"He has a voice like a goat in a ditch," said Ciza with great satisfaction. "Okello used to say a wheel with no grease. Okello was being kind."

"Tell them about the tree," said Kami.

"I'm getting to the tree."

"You always get to the tree."

"Because it's a good story." He set down the calabash. "All right. All right. The tree."

---

He told it differently from the others. Lamunu had told it as a joke about a bet. Mukamurenzi had told it as a story about Deng's heart. Ciza told it as an instrument man.

"At base camp," he said, "we set benchmarks, to practice, for the new men. Deng set one in a rock, a big granite rock. And from that benchmark, we sighted across the gulf to a trig point on a hill on the other side, a white pillar, so the new men could learn to take an angle. And in between, right on the sight line, a little mango was growing. This high." He held his hand at his knee. "Every month it was higher. Soon you could not see the pillar from the benchmark. Elias said, cut it. It's in the line. Deng said no. Deng said, move the instrument. Elias said, the benchmark is in a rock, you cannot move a rock. Deng said then move the line. They went on like this for three days. In the end Deng sat by that tree all night with a lamp." He laughed, high and creaking. "I won a week of Okello's money. He paid me in sardines."

"Base camp," I said. My voice was odd. "Sogokuru. When you say base camp—"

"Mwanza, of course. The house. Elias's house." He looked at me, surprised. "Where else? We all lived there."

It went through me like cold water. I sat with my hand on my glass of banana beer and I did not move.

Achol had gone still beside me. On the other side of the table Uwase had her hand flat on the cloth. Only Opio had not understood yet; he was looking from one face to another.

"A mango," I said. "A turpentine mango. In the yard. Between the benchmark rock and the house."

"Yes," said Ciza. "You know it? Is it still there?"

"It's still there," I said. "It's the biggest tree on the street. Babu will not let anyone cut it. His dog digs under it every day and he stops her." I put the glass down very carefully. "A friend of mine sat up all night once to keep it from me. That's what he said. At lunch. Eight days ago."

"*The tree we argued about*," said Achol softly. "*Tell Elias I kept it for him.*"

"He knew," said Opio. He had got there. He was staring at me. "Your grandfather knew. When he read the packet. He knew the minute he read *ask Okello for my letter*. He knew where it was."

"Maybe," I said. "Maybe he guessed."

"He sent us across five countries," said Opio, "for a tree in his own yard."

Nobody said anything. Then, from the end of the table, Ciza began to laugh. He laughed until he had to hold onto the arms of his chair, until Ange came out from the kitchen to see if he was choking, until Kami got up and stood beside him with her hand on his back, patting, the way you would burp a baby.

"Of course he did," the old man said when he could speak. "Of course he did. Oh, Elias. He always did love a long traverse."

---

Later, when the others had gone to bed, I sat on the veranda alone with my phone and looked at Babu's name for a long time.

The lake was black. Out on it, all along the shore in both directions, as far as I could see, the night boats had lit their lamps. Hundreds of them. Small white lights, low on the water, in clusters of six and eight, some still and some moving, the whole lake strung with them like a town that went on for a hundred kilometers, and their reflections under them, and the stars above.

I wrote, *Ciza told us the tree story. Base camp.* I looked at it. Then I added nothing and took nothing back and sent it.

He answered after a long time.

*Yes. Now you see why I could not dig it alone.*

I wrote, *You could have. It's twenty steps from your chair.*

*It is fifty years from my chair*, he wrote. *Open Ciza's envelope. You did not open it yet.*

I hadn't. I had forgotten it entirely. I went inside to the room where Uwase and Achol were asleep, and found my bag by feel in the dark, and took out the envelope with *Ciza* on it, and went back out to the lamps.

*CARD NINE. You know where it is now. You do not yet know why it stayed there. Ask Ciza who wrote to the office in Kigali in 1975. Then ask him for the compass. E. M.*

Next chapter

Stadia

*Distances over water are taken with the stadia, the marks on the instrument's glass, because you cannot walk a chain across a lake. They are less certain than distances on land. Allow for it. Field book of Ciza Léonce, 1972.*

I didn't ask him that night. I asked him the next evening, on the water.

Gilbert took us out on the white-and-blue boat at dusk, because, he said, you could not come to Bujumbura and not see the lake from the lamps, and because his grandfather had not been out at night for three years and had announced at breakfast that he was going, and nobody in the family had been able to change his mind.

So at six o'clock we were all on the beach, Gilbert and two of his men, a pair of brothers called Bosco and Didier who fished the boat most nights, and Opio, Uwase, Achol, and me, and Kami, who had not been invited and came anyway, and the old man in a heavy wool jacket and a knitted hat, carried down the sand by Gilbert and Opio in his chair and set in the middle of the crossbeams like a king on a barge.

They paddled out, the brothers standing in the outer hulls, long slow strokes. The beach went dark behind us. The palms were black. The city climbed the hill behind them in its lights, and above it the escarpment we had come down, a great dark wall against a sky still green at the top.

A kilometer out, the brothers lit the lamps. Pressure lamps, hissing, a hard white light with a smell of paraffin, and they lowered them on their poles until they hung just over the water, and the lake under them went green and clear, and you could see down into it, and there was nothing, and then there was something: a shimmer, a flicker, and then thousands, silver, the little fish rising toward the light in the dark water like sparks going the wrong way.

"Look," said Kami to Achol, leaning over the side. "Look. They think it's the moon."

Bosco began to sing, low, and Didier answered him. It was the same kind of song I had heard on Kivu, a call and an answer, slow, with the strokes of the net. Gilbert sang the answer too. Ciza, in his chair, did not sing, but he tapped the crossbeam with one finger.

---

When the net was in and the first catch was silver in the bottom of the hull, I went and sat on the beam beside the old man. His good ear was on my side. I had thought about it all day: how to ask. In the end I asked it plainly, because Babu's card had been plain.

"Sogokuru. Who wrote to the survey office in Kigali in 1975?"

He didn't answer for a long time. The lamps hissed. The fish flickered in the bottom of the boat. Across the water, a kilometer away, another boat had lit its lamps, and another beyond that.

"I did," he said.

I waited.

"Gasana had the key to the padlock," he said. "We all knew it. Deng was gone that night with no word. Elias was in Musoma. I came back from Bukoba and the house was empty and the trunk was gone and Gasana was standing in the kitchen with the key on its string around his neck." He looked at his hands. "I was angry. It was my money too. Two years of my money. I was going to build a boat with it. My own boat, with the others, a partner. I was thirty-two. I said things to Gasana in that kitchen that I should not have said. And then when I went home I wrote to the office in Kigali, to a man I knew there. I said the man who held the key should be asked about it. That's all I wrote. That's all. One line."

"It went to his village," I said. "A man in the office had a cousin. They asked him in front of the cooperative store. His daughter was three. A boy at her school called her father a thief."

The old man closed his eyes.

"I know," he said. "I didn't know then. I knew later. Mukamurenzi wrote to Lamunu, and Lamunu said something to my wife once, at a funeral, in 1990. My wife never forgave me. She said, you wrote one line and you broke a man's name for forty years." He opened his eyes and looked at the lamps. "I built boats. All my life I built boats. Good boats. Every boat on this beach I built thinking, this is the boat I would have built with the trunk. And I never wrote to Gasana. And he died. And now his granddaughter is sitting on my beam eating my fish."

Uwase had heard. She was three meters away on the far hull, holding a lamp pole, and she had heard every word, because the lake was quiet and the old man's voice carried the way old men's voices do when they have stopped trying to hide them.

She put the pole down and came along the crossbeam, carefully, in the dark, and sat on the other side of him.

"My grandmother is coming to Mwanza," she said. "At the end. She'll be at Mzee Mwakalinga's house. You should come too."

"To Mwanza." He laughed, without much in it. "I'm eighty-three. I'm deaf. I haven't been out of Burundi since 1999."

"You came out on a boat at night," said Uwase. "In a chair. Against your family."

The old man turned his head and looked at her for a long time with his good ear and his bad one and his whole bony face.

"You have his chin too," he said finally. "Gasana's. Stubborn." He held out his enormous hand, palm up, on his knee. Uwase looked at it. Then she put her hand in it, and he closed his fingers over hers, and they sat like that, on the crossbeam, under the hissing lamps, with the fish rising, and nobody else said anything at all. Kami came and leaned on her great-grandfather's other shoulder and was not sent away.

---

Coming back, with the lamps out and the catch in the hull and the beach a long dark line ahead of us with a single fire where Ange was waiting with tea, the brothers began to sing the coming-home song. Ciza sang this one. So did Gilbert. So, after a verse, did Uwase, who had worked out the words.

Opio sat beside me on the beam with his elbows on his knees.

"That's three families," he said. "Lamunu wouldn't speak of the trunk for fifty years. Mutoni wouldn't let us in. The old man wrote the letter." He shook his head. "When Mzee said five pieces I thought he meant five clues. Like a game for children."

"Babu doesn't make games for children," I said. "He makes them for whoever is there."

"What's the fifth piece, then? If we already know it's the tree."

"We know it's the tree," I said. "We don't know where under the tree. The tree is enormous. The roots go halfway across the yard. We have a bearing from a benchmark we haven't found, measured on a compass that's wrong by an amount we don't know, and a distance that was under a leaking roof in Gulu." I watched the fire on the beach get bigger. "And we don't know if it's still there. A lot can happen to a box in the ground in fifty years."

"So the fifth piece is in Juba."

"The fifth piece is in Juba," said Achol from the far hull, where she had been listening with Kami asleep across her lap. "My grandmother has his field book. The last one. She keeps it by her bed. She would not give it to me when I came to Mwanza. She said, if it matters, bring them here."

Next chapter

Magnetic North

*The needle does not point to the top of the world. It points to a place the earth chooses, which wanders. Near the equator, on our lakes, it wanders very little. Old needles in old cases wander more. Write the error on the lid. Field book of Ciza Léonce, 1974.*

The compass was in the small wooden box on Ciza's workbench, where it had been, Gilbert told me, for as long as he could remember. He had never been allowed to touch it.

In the morning the old man opened the box himself, on the veranda, in the clear early light with the lake flat and pale behind him and a flock of white egrets standing on the sand at the edge of the water.

It was a prismatic compass, the kind surveyors carried in the field before the electronic instruments: a heavy brass case the size of a big pocket watch, a hinged lid with a sighting wire across a window, a small prism on the other side that you put to your eye, and inside, under glass, a card marked in degrees that swung on a jeweled pivot. It was dull with age and fingerprints. On the inside of the lid, glued in place, there was a small square of yellowed card, and on it, in tiny ink figures, a column of numbers.

"Deviation," said Ciza. "Every compass has its own. I tested this one against the sun and the stars at base camp, every year, on New Year's Day. Each heading, how far it reads wrong." He touched the card. "Here. Between two hundred and two hundred and twenty-five. Plus seven. It reads seven degrees too much in that quarter. Because of the screw in the hinge, I think. I never found it."

"So two one two on this compass," I said, "is really two zero five."

"On this compass, from that rock, in 1975, yes. Magnetic north has walked a little since then. Not much, at Mwanza. Less than a degree. You can look it up." He closed the lid. "Or you can take this one and stand where Deng stood and turn until it reads two one two, and you will be pointing where he pointed. Same needle. Same error. That's what he meant. *Ciza knows his compass.* He meant, use mine."

He held the box out to me.

"No, Sogokuru," I said. "You bring it. To Mwanza. You hold it on the rock."

He looked at me, and at the box, and at Gilbert, who was standing in the doorway with his arms folded and his face very carefully saying nothing.

"Gilbert has three boats to finish," the old man said.

"Gilbert has two men who can finish three boats," said Gilbert. "And a wife who says if I don't take you to Mwanza myself, she will, and she gets seasick on a bus."

---

We had three days before the flights. Opio had found them: Bujumbura to Entebbe, Entebbe to Juba, a thing that cost more than any of us wanted to say and that Gilbert, Uwase and Opio split four ways with me while Achol protested and was outvoted. My mother, when I told her on the phone, put a note in the family calendar, *Party Four, all houses, Mwanza, the week after next*, so that everyone on her page got a reminder, including several aunts who did not yet know what Party Four was and rang her to ask.

In those three days I learned more about Bujumbura than I expected to.

I learned the central market at seven in the morning, a great roofed hall and the streets around it full of women with baskets of tomatoes and onions and small sweet bananas, and dried fish in pyramids, and sacks of beans of a dozen colors, red and white and speckled and purple-black, and cassava flour, and palm oil in yellow jerrycans, and secondhand shoes in long rows, and a man selling nothing but padlocks. Ange took Uwase and me and bought beans the way my mother buys cloth: slowly, with long negotiation, and three tastings of the raw bean, and a story about the seller's mother.

I learned the drums, though only from a distance. On the second evening, Gilbert took us to a hillside on the edge of the city where a group of young men were practicing, a long line of tall drums painted in stripes, carried on their heads and then set down, and the men leaping, and the sound so big that I felt it in my ribs and in the bones of my face. Kami stood with her hands over her ears and her mouth open. "Everyone knows our drums," said Gilbert. "Nobody knows our boats." He said it with a smile, but I wrote it down.

I learned that Gilbert's men called him *Patron* and he hated it. That he had trained as an accountant for two years in his twenties and quit to come back to the beach. That he and Ange had met at a wedding where he was the one who carried the gifts and she was the one who counted them. That he had a second daughter who had died in her first year, eleven years ago, and that every boat he had built since had a small carved bird on its stern post, very small, where you would only see it if you looked. I saw it on the white-and-blue boat on the third morning and asked, and he told me, standing in the shavings with the plane in his hand, and then went back to work.

And I learned the old man.

Ciza did not talk about the trunk again. He talked about boats and the lake and the survey. He talked about the years from 1968 to 1975 as if they had been the only years that were entirely in color. He made Gilbert bring out a tin box of photographs, black-and-white prints with deckled edges, and went through them with Achol, who was the only one of us with the patience to wait while he remembered every name. Here was Okello with the chain on his shoulder on a beach at Bukoba. Here was Gasana under an umbrella doing sums on a folding table, his glasses on the end of his nose. Here was Deng, tall and thin, with the lines of his home marked across his forehead and a level staff over his shoulder like a spear, laughing at something off the edge of the picture. Here was Babu, young, with a cigarette and the same square jaw I see in the mirror, standing on a rock with his hands on his hips like the king of the lake.

"He was very vain," said Ciza with deep affection. "He combed his hair before he took a bearing."

Achol photographed every print with her phone and put them, that evening, into the album on my mother's page, each one with the name and the place and the year Ciza had given, and when I looked in the morning there were already comments under them, from Lamunu's daughter in Jinja and from Mutoni, who had written under the picture of Gasana with his umbrella: *My father. He hated the sun.*

---

On the last night Babu called, on the video, and asked for Ciza.

I took the phone to the old man on the veranda, and he held it at arm's length in his huge hand, squinting, and then the two of them looked at each other across fifty-one years and eleven hundred kilometers.

"You got old," said Ciza.

"You were always old," said Babu.

"Your granddaughter has your chin."

"She has her grandmother's sense, luckily."

"She asked me about the letter to Kigali," said Ciza.

Babu didn't answer at once. On the small screen I could see him take his glasses off and hold them.

"I know," he said. "I told her to. I'm sorry, Ciza."

"You're sorry? I wrote it."

"I knew you wrote it. I knew in 1976. I could have stopped it. I could have written to Kigali myself and said the party chief vouches for every man in his party. I didn't. I was angry too. I let it stand." He was quiet. "I let a lot of things stand."

The old man looked at the screen for a long time.

"Well," he said finally. "We're both coming to the tree, then. Bring a chair for me. A good one. Not one of yours."

When he gave me back the phone his hand was shaking a little, and he said, to nobody in particular, in French and then in English, "That man still cannot apologize without making it into a speech." And then he asked Gilbert for the guitar.

Next chapter

Station Five

*CARD TEN, sealed: DENG. Open in the house. Deng was our leveler and our draftsman. He drew every map the party made, and he drew them beautifully, and he put a small mango tree in the corner of every one. The office made him take them out. He put them back. E. M.*

Juba came up out of the plane window flat and brown and green, a city of low roofs and wide dirt streets and trees, a great many trees, along the curve of a river much bigger than I had expected.

"There," said Achol, with her face against the glass. "There's the Nile. There's the bridge. There's my school, the long roof. There's the market." She was talking very fast. She had been quiet on both flights, and quiet in the transit hall at Entebbe, where Opio had bought everyone ice cream and Ciza had refused his and then eaten half of Kami's. Now she was talking like Opio. "There's the road to my house. Look, you can see the mango trees. Everybody in Juba has a mango tree."

"Of course they do," said Uwase, and Gilbert laughed, and Achol turned around in her seat and for a moment looked as if she might cry or hit her.

The heat came in when the door opened, a dry, enormous heat, heavier than ours on the lake, with dust in it and the smell of charcoal smoke and diesel and, under those, something green, the river. Ciza stood at the top of the steps in his wool jacket and his tire sandals and said, in French, something I did not understand, and Gilbert took his arm and said, "He says it's hotter than the inside of a boiler."

"It is," I said. "I would know."

Achol's brother Garang met us outside the airport in his minibus, which was white with a blue stripe and had a sign in the windscreen listing every neighborhood in Juba and a string of red and green beads hanging from the mirror, and he hugged his sister so hard he lifted her off the ground, and then he shook hands with all of us, including Kami, very formally, and put Ciza in the front seat as if he were a minister.

"Grandmother has been cooking since yesterday," he said. "She says if you don't eat everything, she will be ashamed in front of Tanzania."

---

Achol's family lived on the east side of the city in a compound with a tin fence painted green and a gate that rattled. Inside there was a square house of cement block with a veranda and a round house with a conical thatched roof beside it, the old kind, which Achol said her grandmother preferred to sleep in because it was cooler. There was a mango tree, a big one, with a mat under it and plastic chairs. There was a charcoal stove going with a kettle on it and a woman in a bright headwrap tending it, Achol's mother, who sold tea at the market in the mornings and had stayed home today. Chickens. A goat tied to the fence post. A small boy, a cousin, who stared at Opio as if he were a tree that had walked in.

Abuk was under the mango tree.

She was seventy-eight and very tall, even sitting, taller than her grandsons, with a long neck and a long face and close gray hair, and she wore a long dress of deep blue and around her neck several strings of small glass beads, red and white and yellow. She did not get up. She looked at each of us as we came through the gate, and when she got to Achol she held out both arms, and Achol went and knelt beside the chair and put her head on her grandmother's lap like a child.

We stood in the yard. Nobody moved. Then Abuk lifted one hand from her granddaughter's hair and pointed at the plastic chairs, one by one, at each of us, and we went and sat down in them.

"Sit before you ask," whispered Opio.

"He wrote that one for her," I whispered back.

---

There was no question of asking that day. There was food.

Achol's mother brought it out in relays, on enamel trays, and set it on a low table in the shade. There was kisra, the thin sorghum pancake, pale and spongy and slightly sour, folded in quarters in a stack as high as a book. There was a stew of okra, green and slippery and rich, cooked down with dried fish and onion and a little peanut paste, which Achol said you ate by tearing a piece of kisra and pinching up the stew with it. There was a whole Nile fish, grilled over charcoal, split open and brown and crisp at the edges. There was asida, a firm smooth porridge of sorghum turned out of the pot in a dome, with a dark sauce of dried meat and tomato poured into a well in its top. There were fried pieces of dough, light and sweet. There was sweet tea, very strong, with ginger and cinnamon and a great deal of sugar, poured from the kettle from a height so it foamed.

We ate with our right hands. Kami, who had never eaten okra, made a face at the first bite and then ate four pieces of kisra and asked for more.

Abuk ate a little and watched us. When Ciza, across the table, took a piece of kisra and folded it the right way without being shown, she said something to Achol in Dinka.

"She asks how you know," said Achol.

"Deng," said the old man. "Deng taught us. In the field. He made it on a tin sheet over a fire on every shore of the lake. Nobody else could get it thin. Gasana tried once and made a kind of hat."

Achol translated. And Abuk laughed, a big low laugh, and put her hand over her mouth, and said something, and laughed again.

"She says he made it for her on their wedding day," said Achol, "because she was too nervous to cook and he said that was all right, he would do it, he had cooked for four men from four countries for seven years and none of them had died."

---

In the evening Achol took us to the river.

We walked down through the neighborhood in the last of the light, past tea ladies on low stools at their charcoal stoves along the roadsides with their glasses lined up on wooden trays, past a carpenter's shop where a man was planing a door by lamplight and Gilbert stopped to look at his tools, past a group of young men under a tree playing dominoes on an upturned crate and slapping the tiles down so hard the crate jumped, past a church and a mosque and a school and a shop selling only plastic basins in every color. Boda-bodas. Dust gold in the low sun. Music from a dozen phones and radios, all different.

Then the road came out on the bank, and the Nile was there, wide and brown and fast, with green islands in it and reeds and a long iron bridge, and the sun going down huge and red over the far side.

It was the same water. That was what I kept thinking. Somewhere in that brown flood was water I had sailed on two weeks before, that had slid past the spring at Jinja where Opio rowed us at dawn. Somewhere in it, very possibly, was a groundnut.

Achol stood at the rail of the bridge where her grandfather used to stand.

"He'd say, this was in Mwanza," she said. "This was in the lake with Elias. And I'd say, Grandfather, that's not how water works, it mixes, you can't say which water. And he'd say, a mathematician should know that everything that went in is still in." She turned and leaned her back against the rail. "I think he was talking about the trunk. I think every time he said it he was talking about the trunk. He thought they'd found it and built the boat and forgotten him."

"They never forgot him," I said. "They thought he was a thief. That's a kind of remembering."

"That's worse," said Achol.

"I know," I said. "That's why we're here."

She opened the envelope that night, under the mango tree, with her grandmother beside her and all of us around, in the light of a single bulb on a cord hung from a branch with moths circling it. It was the shortest card of all.

*CARD ELEVEN. Ask Abuk for the song first. Then the book. E. M.*

Next chapter

Field Book

*Field book of Deng Akech, Survey Party Four, last entries, March 1975. Pencil, in the party cipher, decoded by his granddaughter, July 2026.*

The song came first because Abuk would not give us the book until we had heard it.

It was early morning, before the heat, and we were sitting on mats in front of the round house with tea, and Abuk was sitting in her chair with her hands folded on her knees and her eyes closed. Achol knelt beside her.

"Among our people," Achol said to us, quietly, "a man has an ox that is his own. His song ox. He names it, and he takes its name, and he makes songs for it. About its color and its horns and how it walks. And about his life. His family, his travels, the things he's done and the people he loves. He sings them at the cattle camp in the evening. Men compete. Everyone knows everyone's songs." She looked at her grandmother. "My grandfather's ox was white, with horns that went up and back like this. He called it Mabior, the white one. He made songs for Mabior all his life, even after he moved to the city and had no ox anymore. Grandmother knows them all."

Abuk began to sing.

I can't give you the sound. It was low and strong and steady, without much tune that I could hear at first, more like speech that had been stretched and given a shape, and her voice was rough in the low places and very clear in the high ones, and she sang with her eyes closed and one hand moving a little on her knee, keeping a time I couldn't feel. The cousin stopped playing in the dirt to listen. Achol's mother stood still at the stove with the kettle in her hand. Ciza, who was deaf in one ear and did not understand one word of Dinka, sat forward in his chair with his eyes shut.

When it was done Achol translated it for us, slowly, line by line, in English, and I wrote it down. I give it as she gave it.

*My white ox walks like a man who owns the river.*
*His horns are a boat with no water under it.*
*I went to the great lake and counted its edges with four brothers.*
*One counted with his feet, one counted with his pencil,*
*one counted with a glass that sees far,*
*one counted with his voice like a goat in a ditch.*
*I saved a young tree from the blade of my brother who cannot sing.*
*I sat with it all night with a lamp, my white ox, I sat as you sit.*
*In the morning the tree was still standing and so was I.*
*Under it I left what we had gathered, my white ox, when my father called.*
*I left it to my brother who cannot sing, I sent him the way to it.*
*Has the boat been built? Is it on the water? Tell me, my white ox.*

Nobody spoke.

Then Ciza, who had not understood one word until Achol translated, began very softly to laugh and to cry at the same time.

"*Voice like a goat in a ditch*," he said. "That's mine. That's what I used to say. He put my joke in his song."

Abuk opened her eyes. She said something to Achol.

"She says he sang that every night for fifty years," said Achol. "Every single night, before he slept. She thought it was about the cattle camp. She thought the lake was a story. She didn't know until I read her Mzee's cards that the tree was real."

---

Then Abuk gave us the book.

It was in a cloth bag in the round house, at the head of her bed, under the pillow. A field book like Okello's, with a stiff cover gone soft at the corners, the pages lined in faint blue and the spine mended with tape. She held it on her knees a long time before she gave it to Achol, and when she did she put her hand flat on top of it for a moment, the same way Mukamurenzi had put her hand on the basket's lid.

Most of the book was survey work, bearings and levels and a hundred small maps of shorelines, beautifully drawn, every one of them with a tiny mango tree in the corner. But the last pages were not. The last pages were in the cipher, close-written in pencil, and dated, and Achol, with the whole card now, both halves, copied from the basket into her own notebook in Kivu, read them straight off at the table under the tree while the rest of us sat and did not move.

This is what they said. Achol's translation, which I copied into my notebook word for word.

*Fourteenth March. Telegram at the post office. Father very ill. Come at once. Elias is in Musoma until the twentieth. Gasana and Okello on leave. Ciza in Bukoba. I am alone at base camp.*

*Fifteenth March. Two houses on the street broken into this week. The trunk is too heavy to carry to Bor. I cannot leave it in an empty house. I cannot take it to the bank, the bank asks whose money, there are five names, they want five signatures. I will put it in the ground.*

*Fifteenth March, night. Done. Under the tree, on the side away from the house, where the soil is soft. Two feet. Wrapped in the green canvas from the level. Measured from D7, my pin in the back face of the granite, low, facing the tree, under the lip of the rock where only a short man looks, because Elias's disc is on the top and he never looks down. Bearing two one two by Ciza's compass, which I borrowed and must leave in his box, he will be angry. One chain fifteen links.*

*Sixteenth March. Wrote to Okello in our code because it is money and the rule is money letters go to the treasurer in code. He reads nothing but he will take it to Gasana. Posted it at the main post office. Leave for Bor on the evening bus. Left Ciza's compass in its box. Left the key to the trunk with Gasana as always.*

*I am sorry to go without seeing my brothers. I think I will come back in June.*

Under that, in a different pencil, softer, and not in the cipher but in English, in a hand that had grown older and less steady, there was one more line.

*1976. Wrote to Elias. Asked if the boat was sailing. He did not answer. Perhaps he is busy. Perhaps it is sailing.*

---

Achol put the book down on the table.

She did not cry. I had seen her nearly cry twice, on the plane and on the bridge, and this time she did not. She sat very straight, with her hands flat on either side of the open book, and looked at the last line for a long time.

"*Perhaps it is sailing*," she said.

Abuk reached out and took her hand.

"He waited for an answer," Achol said. "And when no answer came, he decided it was because they were happy. Because they had built the boat and they were busy sailing it." She looked up at me. "He didn't think he'd been accused. He thought he'd been forgotten, and he decided that was all right. He decided they were happy and that was all right."

"He was a better man than any of us," said Ciza. "I said so in 1975 and then I forgot it."

"No," said Achol. "You were angry. You didn't forget. You were angry."

Opio said, "*Where only a short man looks*."

We all turned.

"The pin," he said. "D7. He put it low on the back of the rock, under the lip, where only a short man looks, because Mzee's disc is on top." He looked at me. "Your grandfather's tall?"

"He's tall."

"So he never looked down." Opio sat back. "Fifty years. It's been under the lip of his own rock fifty years and he's never looked down at it."

"He has now," I said. "He must have. He knew where the tree was. He knew from *ask Okello for my letter*. But he can't have known the line without the letter and the compass and the book. He wouldn't have known how far from the tree. Or which side." I looked at the page. "*On the side away from the house*."

"Where the dog digs," said Achol.

We looked at each other.

"Where the dog digs," I said.

Next chapter

Resection

*A resection fixes your own position by taking bearings on three points you already know. You do not need to know where you are. You only need to know where three other things are, and trust them. Field book of Elias Mwakalinga, 1970.*

I called Babu from the riverbank at dawn the next morning, alone.

I had not slept much. The round house was cool and Uwase and Kami and I had slept on mats in the main house's front room, and I had lain awake and listened to the city: dogs, a generator, someone's radio, a truck grinding its gears on the main road, and very late, from far off, so faint I thought I'd dreamed it, a man singing in a long low voice that rose and fell, the same kind of song Abuk had sung.

At five I got up and walked down to the river by myself. The tea ladies were setting up their stoves. Smoke from the charcoal hung low in the gray air. On the bank, fishermen were pushing long wooden canoes out into the brown water, and a woman was washing clothes on a flat rock, and a boy was leading two goats along the path with a string. The Nile was slate colored and fast and very wide.

I sat on a rock and called him.

He answered at once, which told me he had been up too.

"You read the book," he said.

"Achol read the book. *Perhaps it is sailing*." I waited. "You never answered his letter."

"No."

"Why?"

He was quiet for so long I thought the call had dropped out.

"Because I was the party chief," he said finally, "and the money was in my house, and I wanted somebody else to be the reason it was gone. Because if Deng had taken it, then it was not my fault. Because I was thirty-four and very proud, and a short letter from a man who had left without a word looked to me like a man laughing. I read it once and I put it in a drawer, and I left it in that drawer for fifty years." His voice was very even. "That is all. There is no better reason. I looked for one for a long time."

"You sent us around five countries."

"Yes."

"For a tree in your yard. Twenty steps from your chair. You could have dug it up in an afternoon. You knew, Babu. You knew on the first night."

"I knew where the tree was," he said. "I didn't know the line. And I knew Mutoni would hear it from me on the telephone and not believe it, because why would she believe the man who let her father be shamed. And I knew Ciza would die with his letter to Kigali on him like a stone. And I knew Lamunu had a letter in a tin that her husband was too ashamed to take to Rwanda. And I knew Abuk had a song she didn't understand." He stopped. "And I knew you would not come if I asked you to come and sit with me while I dug a hole under a tree and said sorry to a dead man."

The river went past. The boy with the goats had stopped to watch me.

"That's not fair," I said.

"No," said Babu. "It's true, though."

---

I should explain about fourteen.

When I was fourteen my father left. He took a job in Dar es Salaam, and then he did not come back from Dar es Salaam, and then there was a woman there, and then there was a letter. My mother read it at the kitchen table in Babu's house and went into the sewing room and shut the door. And the next morning, my grandfather, who did not know what to say to a fourteen-year-old girl whose father had gone, made me a treasure hunt. Cards around the house and the yard. A clue under the benchmark rock, a clue in the instrument cupboard, a clue in the sugar tin. At the end of it, in a box under my bed, there was a new pair of school shoes and a card that said *You are not the one who left.*

I threw the shoes at him. I said, *Why can't you just say things?* I said, *Everything is a game with you.* I said things to him that I am not going to write here. And I never did one of his hunts again, and I stopped going to the Sunday table for a year, and when I came back I made sure he knew that I had come for my grandmother.

I told this to Achol that afternoon, sitting under the mango tree in her grandmother's yard, while the others slept through the worst of the heat. I hadn't told anyone. I don't know why I told her. Perhaps because she had read her grandfather's last line aloud in front of all of us without crying, and I thought she would know what to do with mine.

She listened. She didn't say anything until I was finished.

"Did he ever say it straight?" she said. "After?"

"No. He made more cards."

"And you never went on another hunt."

"Not until this one."

She was quiet. Then she said, "Resection. Your grandfather's card this morning. You fix your own position by three things you already know." She counted on her fingers. "You know he's a man who can't say things straight. You know he made you a hunt when your father left, because it was the only way he knew to tell you he wasn't leaving. And you know he sent you across five countries to sit in five houses and listen to people who had been hurt, before you were allowed to find anything." She looked at me. "Where does that put you?"

I didn't answer.

"It puts you," said Achol, "in a family where an old man says sorry with a map."

---

In the late afternoon, when the heat broke, Achol's uncle Majok came with his motorbike and his brother's motorbike, and he took Opio, Gilbert and me out of the city on the road north along the river, with Uwase and Achol and Kami following in Garang's minibus, to a cattle camp.

I had seen cattle all my life. I had never seen anything like this.

They were on open ground by the river, among scattered trees, and there were hundreds of them: tall white and gray and dun cattle with enormous horns, some curving up and out like a great lyre, some swept back, some carved by their owners when they were young into strange beautiful shapes, one forward and one back. Smoke rose over the whole camp from slow smoldering fires of dung, a sweet thick smoke that kept off the flies, and the cattle stood in it, and the young men and boys who looked after them moved among them, tall and thin, some with their skin gray with ash from the fires to keep off the insects, calling to the animals by name. Every animal had a name. Every animal knew it. A boy called, and a huge white cow turned her head from fifty meters away.

Majok, who was forty-five and worked as a mechanic in Juba and came out to the camp on weekends, walked us through it with his hand on the flank of every ox he passed.

"This is my song ox," he said, stopping by a dark gray animal with horns that swept back like a gazelle's. "Majok means gray with white patches. I took his name when I was seventeen." He scratched the ox under the jaw, and it leaned into his hand. "My father, Deng, had a white one. Mabior. When he went to the city he gave Mabior to his brother. But he never stopped singing for him."

"Can you sing your father's songs?" I asked.

"Some. Not like my mother. She has them all." He looked at the river. "He would be glad," he said. "You know? That they came. All of them. He would be so glad that they came."

On the way back to the city, on the back of Majok's motorbike, with the sun going down red behind us and the smoke of the cattle camp in a long gray line along the river, I took out my phone and wrote to Babu.

*Abuk is coming to Mwanza. So is Majok. That makes everyone. Have the chairs ready. Have yours ready. You are going to sit by the rock and hold the end of the chain.*

He wrote back: *Yes.*

Then, after a moment: *Thank you for going.*

It was the most straightforward thing he had said to me in twenty years. I held the phone against my chest all the way back into Juba.

Next chapter

Return Leg

*Do not hurry the return leg. Most errors are made on the way home, by tired people who think the work is done. Field book of Elias Mwakalinga, 1971.*

We flew home in three groups, because no plane in East Africa could have taken us all and because, as Gilbert said, if everyone sat together there would be no one left to come and find the wreckage.

My mother, by then, had become what she always becomes when there is a gathering: a general. She had made a list on her family page and pinned it to the top, with every name and every flight and every arrival time and who was meeting whom, and beside it a small map of the house with every bed and mat and borrowed mattress marked, and she messaged each of us twice a day to check it. She found a cousin with a car for each arrival. She found three neighbors who would lend rooms. She found, from somewhere, eleven folding chairs and a tarpaulin, and a man who would put up the tarpaulin for nothing if he could stay for the food.

"Twenty-three people," she said to me on the phone on the last night in Juba. "Twenty-three, for four nights, and your grandfather has asked me if we have enough mangoes."

"We have a tree full of terrible mangoes."

"That," said my mother, "is exactly what I told him."

---

Opio went first, on the morning flight to Entebbe, to fetch his grandmother and his mother from Jinja, and then, because Lamunu would not fly ("I am eighty-two, I have never been in the sky and I am not starting now"), the three of them took the overland bus around the lake, two days, and arrived in Mwanza tired and dusty and triumphant on the Monday evening with Lamunu in her gomesi and the tea tin on her knees.

Uwase went second, to Kigali, to bring her mother and grandmother. Mutoni had decided that Mukamurenzi would fly. Mukamurenzi had decided she would not. They argued about it, Uwase reported, for two days, in Kinyarwanda, in the yard, in front of the cow, and in the end Mutoni won by the simple method of buying the tickets and putting them on the table under the basket. They came by Kigali and Entebbe and arrived on the Tuesday, Mukamurenzi with her stick and her daughter and granddaughter and her fine woven basket in a cloth in her lap the whole way. She said the plane was louder than a drum but not as well played.

Gilbert, Ciza, Kami, Achol, Abuk, Majok and I came last, on the Tuesday afternoon, through Entebbe, on a small plane that went down the length of the lake low enough to see it.

I had flown over the lake before, but never like that. Never with a man beside me pressing his face to the window who had sailed it in 1972 with a level on his knee. Ciza named everything. The islands. The bays. A point where the party had camped for a month in the rains. A town where they had bought a goat for Okello's birthday and the goat had escaped and Okello had been the only one too afraid to chase it. He put his finger on the window and drew the shoreline as it went by underneath, and he was right about every bend, fifty years later, from above.

"How do you remember?" said Kami.

"Because we drew it," said her great-grandfather. "When you draw a thing, it goes in here." He tapped his forehead. "And it stays."

Abuk sat by the other window with her hands folded and did not look out at all. Achol held her hand. Majok, behind them, slept with his mouth open.

Then the gulf, and the rocks, the egg on its thumb, and the long hill of the south side, and I saw, for a second, before the plane banked, the dark round crown of a tree in a yard above the water.

---

He was at the airport. I had told him not to come. He came.

He was standing in the arrivals hall in his good jacket and his reading glasses on his forehead, with his walking stick in one hand and my mother on his other side, and when Ciza came through the door in his wool jacket and his tire sandals, with Gilbert on one side of him and Kami on the other, the two old men stopped and looked at each other across ten meters of shiny floor and a crowd of people with trolleys.

Neither of them said anything. Ciza let go of Gilbert's arm. He walked the ten meters by himself, slowly, and Babu walked the other way, and they met in the middle, and they stood there, a meter apart, two very old men, tall and thin, one with his head turned so his good ear was toward the other.

"You still can't sing," said Ciza.

"You still can't hear," said Babu.

Then they held each other, there in the middle of the arrivals hall, for a long time, while the people with trolleys went around them and a cleaner with a mop stopped and leaned on it and watched with great interest.

Then Babu let go, and stepped back, and turned, and saw Abuk.

She had come through the door behind us, tall and slow, on Majok's arm, in her blue dress and her beads, and she had stopped. She was looking at him. He was looking at her. They had never met. She had heard his voice every night for fifty years in a song about a goat in a ditch. He had read one letter from her husband and put it in a drawer.

He walked to her. He did not hurry. When he reached her, he bent, quite low, a long way down for a tall old man with a stick, and took her right hand in both of his.

"I am Elias," he said. "I didn't answer him. I'm sorry."

Achol translated it. Abuk looked at him for a long time. Then she said something, quite short.

"She says," said Achol, "*He thought it was sailing.*"

Babu bent his head lower, over her hand, and did not move, and I saw his shoulders begin to shake, and I had never in my life seen my grandfather cry, and I went and stood beside him, and I put my hand on his back, and I left it there.

---

It was dark when we got to the house. The tarpaulin was up over the yard, strung between the mango tree and the veranda posts and the corner of the benchmark rock, with a bulb hung under it on a long cord. The folding chairs were in rows. My mother's sewing room had become a dormitory. Lamunu was already on the veranda in the best chair with her tea tin, and Mukamurenzi was beside her with the basket, and they were holding hands and talking in English and in their own languages at the same time, which seemed to work perfectly well. They had met, by their own count, three times in fifty-seven years. This was the fourth.

Chura came out from under the veranda, saw twenty-three strangers, considered them, and went straight to the foot of the mango tree and began to dig.

"Chura," said Babu, without looking, and clapped once.

She stopped. She lay down on the hole. She looked up at us, all of us, the five families standing in the yard under the tarpaulin with our bags still in our hands, as if she had been waiting fifty years for someone to ask her what she knew.

"Tomorrow," said Babu. "Tomorrow, in the morning. When it is cool. Tonight we eat."

Next chapter

Setting Up

*Before the first reading, set up the instrument over the mark. Level it. Check it. Check it again. Most of the work is in the setting up, and most people want to skip it. E. M.*

That night five kitchens cooked in one yard.

My mother had planned one supper. She had not planned for Lamunu, who walked into the kitchen at four o'clock, looked at the pots, and sent Opio to the market for matooke and groundnuts and a chicken; or for Mutoni, who had brought dried cassava leaves from Rwanda wrapped in newspaper in her suitcase, and a bag of her own coffee, and who took over the second burner without asking anybody; or for Abuk, who sat in the yard under the tarpaulin and asked through Achol for a flat sheet of tin and a fire, and then for sorghum flour, which my mother did not have and which Majok went out in the dark and found at a shop near the bus stand kept, it turned out, by a man from Juba.

So we ate everything. We ate my mother's tilapia, fried until the tail curled, and her ugali, and a great heap of crisp dagaa. We ate Lamunu's matooke, steamed in its leaves in the big pot on the charcoal and mashed yellow on the plate, with groundnut sauce and chicken. We ate Mutoni's isombe, dark and soft and green, and her small brochettes of goat that Uwase grilled on the wire rack over the coals. We ate kisra, thin as paper, made by Abuk on a tin sheet over a fire in the yard, the way Deng had made it on every shore of the lake, pouring the batter in a circle and spreading it with one sweep of a flat piece of gourd and lifting it off in one piece, and folding it into quarters, again and again, until there was a stack as high as a book. Gilbert fried our lake's little fish the way he fried the ndagala at home, crisp in palm oil with onion and tomato, and Ciza ate them and said they were the wrong fish but the right idea.

And we ate mangoes. Babu insisted. He went out with a long pole and a hook in the last of the light and brought down a dozen from his tree, and cut them into cheeks on the tin plate and scored them, and offered them around.

Lamunu took one bite and made a face. Mukamurenzi took one bite and laughed until she coughed. Ciza took one bite and said, "Turpentine. Exactly the same. Fifty years and it still tastes like a door."

"It's a good tree," said Babu.

"It's a terrible tree," said everyone, all at once, in five languages, and Babu, for the first time I could remember, laughed at himself.

---

After supper, under the tarpaulin, with the bulb swinging on its cord and the moths going round it and the lake flies drifting in from the gulf, we told the tree.

It was Achol's idea. She said that every family had told it differently and that before we measured anything we should hear all of them, one after another, in the same place, with the tree standing there over us. I set my phone on the table to record, and my mother sat beside it with her own phone, making notes for her page; she had already built a branch on the family tree she called simply *Party Four*, with five houses hanging from it, and she wanted every version filed under the right man's name.

Lamunu went first. She told the bet: three days of arguing in four languages and in numbers, and Okello losing a week of his allowance to Ciza, and paying in sardines. Opio's mother laughed at the sardines. So did Ciza, who said he still had the taste of them.

Mukamurenzi went second. She told the turpentine, and the lamp, and Deng sitting up all night in his blanket, and Elias coming out in the morning and giving up. She said Gasana told it every year at the New Year, and every year he ended it the same way: *It was the only argument Elias ever lost.*

Ciza went third. He told it as an instrument man: the benchmark in the granite, the sight line across the gulf to the white trig pillar on the far hill, the sapling coming up into the line, a little higher every month.

Abuk went fourth. She sang the song of the white ox, the whole of it, low and steady under the tarpaulin, and Achol gave it to us in English, line by line, as she had in Juba. When she reached *I saved a young tree from the blade of my brother who cannot sing*, everyone turned and looked at Babu, and he sat with his hands on top of his stick and his eyes on the tree and took it.

Then it was his turn.

He was quiet so long that Kami, who was sitting on the ground at Ciza's feet, said, "Is he going to tell it?"

"He's getting to it," said Ciza. "They always take a long time to get to it. Old men."

"I wanted the line," Babu said. "That's all. I was the party chief, and the new men had to learn to take an angle, and the sight line from the rock to the pillar across the gulf was the best line we had, clean, over water. And a mango came up in it. A seedling. Somebody had eaten a mango on the veranda and spat the stone in the yard. I said, pull it up. It's in the line. Deng said no." He turned his stick a little in his hands. "I was twenty-nine years old. I'd been chief for a year. A man in my own party said no to me in front of the others. I didn't care about the tree. I cared about being told no. So I said I'd cut it myself in the morning, and he sat up all night with a lamp."

"Why?" said Kami. "Why did he care?"

"He said a young thing should not be killed for being in the way," said Babu. "He said, move your instrument. In the morning I came out with the panga, and there he was, in his blanket, with the lamp burning down, and he looked at me." He paused. "So I moved the instrument. I moved the whole station two meters to the left and took the line from there, and the new men learned to take an angle around a tree, which was more useful anyway." He looked up into the branches. "I have been sitting under this tree for fifty-six years. I have never once let anyone cut it. I didn't let myself know why."

---

It was late when Mukamurenzi stood up.

She stood up slowly, with her stick, and Uwase stood with her. She took from inside the collar of her dress a string, a thin cord, old and dark with wear, with something on the end of it that had lain for years against her skin, and lifted it over her head.

It was a key. A small brass padlock key, worn smooth.

"Gasana wore it," she said, "from the day the trunk was lost until the day he died. He never took it off. He said, if anyone ever finds the trunk, I will be the one to open it, so that they see I did not have it." She held it out on her palm. "When he died, I took it off him. I have worn it for ten years. I didn't know why. Now I know."

Nobody under that tarpaulin said anything at all.

She turned and gave it to Uwase. And Uwase stood holding it, with her grandmother's hand still around hers, and looked across the yard at the dark crown of the mango, and at the foot of the tree, where Chura lay asleep on her hole with her nose on her paws.

"Tomorrow," said Babu again, very gently. "When it is cool."

Next chapter

The Line

*CARD TWELVE, sealed: MWAKALINGA. Open in the yard. Rule four, the last one: the shortest of you finds the mark. Rule one still applies. E. M.*

At six in the morning the yard was gray and cool, and smelled of last night's charcoal and the lake, and everyone was there.

Nobody had needed waking. The old people had been up since five, sitting in a row of chairs along the veranda in coats and wraps with tea, like a committee. Majok and Garang's cousin had set up the chairs. Opio had the chain over his shoulder in its loops. Gilbert had his tool roll, laid out on the edge of the veranda: two trowels, a small hand fork, a soft brush, a pruning saw, a short pry bar. My mother had her phone. Kami had a flashlight, though it was already light, because she had been told she might need it.

I opened Babu's last envelope in the yard, and read the card aloud, and everybody looked at Kami.

"Me?" she said. "I'm the shortest."

"*Where only a short man looks*," said Opio.

"I'm not a man."

"Neither was the rule," said Babu from his chair. "Go on, child. The back of the rock. Low. Under the lip, facing the tree."

---

The benchmark rock is a great gray hump of granite at the corner of the yard, higher than my head at its top, with lichen on it in pale green rosettes and black streaks where the rain runs off. Babu's disc, the one I thought was a door for very small people, is on its top surface, where anyone standing could see it. The back of the rock, the side that faces into the yard toward the tree, curves outward near the top and then in, so that along its foot there is a kind of lip, a low overhang, a hand's width of shadow where leaves collect and Chura sometimes sleeps in the heat.

Kami got down on her stomach in the leaves with the flashlight. Achol knelt beside her. Everyone else stood back.

"There's moss," said Kami. "There's a beetle. There's—" She put her hand under the lip and brushed. "There's a lot of moss."

"Brush it gently," said Gilbert, and passed her the soft brush.

She brushed. The leaves came out, and a pale beetle, and then the gray-green moss in soft wet pieces, and then, under the moss, a hand's breadth in from the edge of the overhang, where you would never see it unless your face was on the ground, the flashlight caught something that was not rock.

A brass pin. The head of it no bigger than a thumbnail, set flush into a drilled hole in the granite, green with fifty years of damp. And beside it, scratched into the rock with something hard, a nail perhaps, the strokes uneven but perfectly clear: *D7.*

Kami sat up with moss on her chin.

"It's here," she said. "It says D7."

Behind me, on the veranda, Abuk said something very quietly, and Majok put his hand on his mother's shoulder.

---

Then the setting up, which took an hour, because Ciza would have it no other way.

He came down off the veranda on Gilbert's arm and stood over the pin. He was too old to lie in the leaves, so we made him a seat, a folded blanket on a low stool right against the rock, and he sat on it with his knees up, and he took the brass compass from its box, and opened the lid, and laid it on the granite just above the pin, as low as he could get it, and sighted.

"Too low," he said. "I can't see."

So Kami lay in the leaves again, on her side, with her cheek against the rock, and held the compass flat on the lip directly over the pin, and Ciza bent over her and told her what to do.

"Look through the slot. You see the wire across the window? Turn yourself, slowly, slowly, until the numbers on the card say two one two under the wire. Not two one one. Not two one three. Two one two. Take your time. The needle has to stop shaking."

Kami turned the compass a little, and a little more, and held her breath, and the card swung and swung on its jewel and slowly settled.

"Two one two," she said.

"Now look through the slot, over the top of it. What do you see?"

She looked. "The tree."

"Which part?"

"Between two of the big roots. On the side away from the house. Where the dog is."

Chura, lying on her hole, raised her head.

"Opio," said Ciza.

Opio brought the chain. Babu had come down from the veranda now too, slowly, on his stick and on my mother's arm, and he lowered himself onto a chair someone set for him beside the rock, and Opio put the brass handle of the chain into his hand.

"You hold the zero," said Opio. "On the pin. Like my grandfather would have."

"Your grandfather would never have let me hold the zero," said Babu. "He said I wobbled."

"Don't wobble, then," said Opio, and walked out along the line Kami called from the compass, uncoiling the chain as he went, over the leaves and across the swept earth of the yard toward the tree, counting the brass tags under his breath. Uwase walked beside the chain with a stick to keep it straight and off the roots. Achol stood at the halfway point with my mother's tape measure, checking.

"One chain," said Opio, at the end of the hundredth link, at the very edge of the mango's shade.

"And fifteen links," said Achol, and Opio took the chain back on itself, link by link, *eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen*, until he stood just under the canopy, between two great gray roots as thick as a man's thigh that came out of the trunk and dived into the earth on the side of the tree away from the house.

Exactly where the dog dug.

Opio looked down. Chura looked up at him. Then she got up, stretched, and walked a few steps away, and sat, and waited, with the air of an animal who has been asked to step aside for professionals.

---

We dug for three hours, and nobody dug alone.

That was the rule, and we kept it. Two at a time, by turns. Gilbert and I first, because the roots frightened me and I wanted the boatbuilder's hands beside mine: we cut the turf away with the trowels and lifted it in pieces, and then the dark soft soil underneath, loose and easy for the first hand's depth where Chura had been turning it for years. Then Opio and Uwase. Then Achol and Majok. Then the old people, one by one, each with Kami or a grandchild beside them on their knees, each taking just one trowelful of soil out of the hole and setting it on the tarpaulin we had spread, because Babu said that every house must put its hand in the ground. Lamunu took hers in her gomesi, on a cushion. Mukamurenzi took hers with her stick laid across her knees. Ciza took his and threw it over his shoulder like a boy and Gilbert told him off. Abuk knelt by the hole with Achol holding her arm, and put her long hand down into the earth under the tree her husband had saved, and held it there for a while before she brought it out.

Babu took his last. He got down on his knees, which I had not seen him do in ten years, and my mother and I held him on each side, and he took a small trowelful of earth from the bottom of the hole and set it on the tarpaulin with the others, and then he stayed there on his knees, with his hand flat on the soil, looking down.

The roots came in from the sides, smaller ones, the thickness of a finger, of a wrist. We didn't cut them unless we had to. Gilbert worked around them with the hand fork and the brush, and twice used the little saw, very carefully, on roots that crossed the bottom of the hole, and painted the cut ends with tar from a tin, and said to the tree in Kirundi, quite seriously, that he was sorry.

At a little over two feet, in the soft brown earth between the roots, his trowel touched something that was not soil.

He stopped.

He brushed. A rag of something came up, brown and gray and rotten, that had once been canvas, green canvas, and under it, as the brush went back and forth, a flat dark surface, rough with rust, with a raised edge.

The lid of a steel trunk.

Next chapter

Recovery

*Recovery: the finding again of a mark set long ago. Record its condition. Record who found it, and when, and with whom. Field book of Survey Party Four, 1970, rules page, all five hands.*

It took six of us to lift it.

We dug out around it first, all four sides, Gilbert and Opio and Majok on their knees, freeing it from the roots that had grown against it and around it, one root that had gone right over the top of the lid in a curve like an arm and that Gilbert would not cut. In the end we slid the trunk out from underneath that root, on two planks Gilbert laid down for it, inch by inch, and then lifted, and then it was on the tarpaulin in the morning sun under the tree with all of us around it, and nobody was saying anything.

It was smaller than I had imagined all my life. That was the first thing. The trunk of the boat fund, which had been a piece of furniture in my family's story for as long as I had been alive, was the size of a small suitcase, dark green under the rust, with brass corners gone black and a brass hasp, and on the hasp, a padlock, also brass, swollen with corrosion. Someone had painted on the lid, in white, very long ago, letters you could only just read now under the dirt.

*PARTY 4.*

Babu sat in the chair by it with his hand flat on the lid.

"Uwase," he said.

She knelt. She took the key from around her neck, where she had worn it all night, Gasana's key on Gasana's cord. She tried it in the lock. It went in halfway and stopped.

"Rust," I said, and ran for the house, and came back with a can of light oil I keep for my bicycle and a long thin screwdriver, and Gilbert and I worked the oil into the lock a little at a time and waited, and worked it again. Uwase tried it again. It went in three-quarters. She tried a fourth time, very slowly, with both hands, her grandmother holding her shoulder, and the key went home.

She turned it. It would not turn. She turned harder, and it moved a little and stopped, and then, with a small grinding crack that everyone heard, it turned all the way, and the padlock fell open in her hand.

Mukamurenzi said something in Kinyarwanda, quite loudly, to the sky.

"She says, *There, Gasana*," said Uwase, and wiped her face with the back of her hand. "*There. You opened it.*"

---

Inside, the trunk was dry.

Whatever else Deng had done that night in 1975, he had done this well: he had wrapped the trunk in the waxed green canvas cover from the party's level, and inside the trunk everything had been wrapped again, in oilcloth, in bundles, and the bundles had been packed tight with dry newspaper, and the newspaper was yellow and brittle and dated March 1975 and, Achol noticed, had the football results on the top sheet, and Opio read them out, and Ciza said that the team from Bukoba had been robbed.

Under the newspaper there were the bundles.

Money. A great deal of it, in banknotes, tied with string and wrapped in oilcloth, in piles. Tanzanian shillings. Ugandan shillings. Rwandan francs, Burundian francs. A thin bundle of Sudanese pounds. And in a cloth bag, heavy, coins. And on top of it all, in a waterproof tobacco tin, a small ruled book, the trunk's own ledger, every deposit in Gasana's neat hand, dated, with the initials of the man who had put it in. *E. M. 40/-. O. O. 25/-. G. J.-P. 30/-. C. L. 35/-. D. A. 30/-.* Month after month, from October 1969 to February 1975. On the last page, the total, ruled off twice and initialed by all five, in five different hands.

Gilbert, who had trained as an accountant before he came back to the beach, picked up a banknote and turned it over and looked at it in the sun for a long time.

"How much is it worth?" said Opio.

"Now?" Gilbert put the note down. "As money? Nothing. All of these have been withdrawn. Every one. You couldn't buy a mango with them." He looked at the pile. "To a collector, a little. Some of them are rare now. Enough, perhaps, for some good timber."

Nobody said anything. Then Ciza began to laugh.

It started small, a creak, and grew, until he was holding his ribs on his stool by the hole, and then Lamunu began, and then Mukamurenzi, and then, I swear it, Abuk, her long low laugh behind her hand. And then Babu. My grandfather laughed until he had to take his glasses off his forehead. And then all of us. All twenty-three, under the tarpaulin, around a green tin trunk full of money that could not buy a mango, in the shade of a tree whose fruit tasted like a door.

"Fifty years," said Ciza, wiping his eyes. "Fifty years, I was angry about nothing."

"Not about nothing," said Mutoni.

He stopped laughing. He looked at her. She was standing at the edge of the tarpaulin, very straight, with her arms folded, not laughing.

"About my father's name," she said. "That was not nothing."

"No," said Ciza. "No. You're right." He was quiet. "That was everything."

---

At the bottom of the trunk, under the last bundle, there was an envelope.

It was thick, made of the party's yellow survey paper folded and sealed with tape that had gone brown, and on the front, in Deng's hand, not in the cipher, it said: *For the boat. When it is built.*

Babu didn't open it. He handed it to Achol, and Achol gave it to Abuk, and Abuk held it, and then, without looking at anyone, gave it back to Babu.

"She says you," said Achol. "She says he wrote the outside to all of you, but he would want his brother who cannot sing to open it."

He opened it with his thumb, slowly, the way he opens everything.

Inside there were five sheets of yellow paper, folded in four. Maps. Each one drawn by Deng, in ink, with the same beautiful hand as every shoreline in the field books, and each one with a small mango tree in the corner.

The first was a hillside of terraces, very steep, with a lake below it, and a house with a cow shed, and a man under an umbrella at a folding table. *Gasana's hill*, it said, *as he tells it.* The second was a town of tin roofs and a long road north, with a market and a wedding party in a vehicle. *Okello's Gulu, as he tells it, with the goats he is afraid of.* The third was a beach with palms and boats, and a man holding a level in a canoe in a crosswind. *Ciza's beach, as he tells it, every boat straight.* The fourth was green hills going up into mountains, with tea and bananas and a river, and small round houses. *Elias's Mbeya, as he tells it, with his mother's kitchen.* And the fifth was flat land by a wide river, with cattle, hundreds of them, tiny, every one drawn, and a white ox with tall horns in the foreground, and smoke from the camp fires going up in a long gray line. *My Bor. As I tell it.*

At the bottom of the fifth sheet, in small letters:

*We told each other our homes every night at the fire for seven years. I drew them so that when the boat is built, each of us can hang the others' homes in the cabin, and never forget where his brothers came from. — D. A., base camp, March 1975.*

I watched my grandfather read that. I watched him read it twice. Then he folded the five sheets and held them on his knee and looked at the hole under the tree, and the root that had grown over the lid like an arm.

"I knew," he said.

Everyone turned.

"Not where. I knew the tree. From the first line of the packet. And on the Sunday night, after Neema said no the first time, I went out with my old steel probe, the long one, from the instrument cupboard, and I put it into the ground there, where the dog digs. And at two feet it touched metal." He looked at me. "I didn't dig. I sat out here with a lamp until morning. It seemed the right thing. In the morning I wrote the cards."

"Babu," I said.

"I knew it was there," he said. "I didn't know what else was. I didn't know about the song, or the basket, or the letter to Kigali, or the tin in Gulu. I didn't know there were five maps." He held up the folded sheets. "I thought I was sending you to find the trunk. I was sending you to find this. I didn't know it until now."

I went and knelt by his chair, in the dirt, and put my head against his knee, like Achol had with her grandmother in Juba, and he put his hand on my hair, and neither of us said anything at all.

Next chapter

Closing the Traverse

*When the last leg comes home to the first mark, add up the legs. If the sum is close, sign the page, all hands, and the work is done. If the sum is not close, go back and walk it again. Field book of Survey Party Four, rules page.*

That afternoon we did what the party would have done. We sat at the table and argued.

Not about the money. The money, everybody agreed in five minutes, was not money anymore. It was a thing to keep. Lamunu said put it in a frame. Mutoni said put it in a museum. Gilbert said sell the rare notes to a collector he knew in Nairobi and use the rest as wallpaper. In the end we divided it into five bundles, by the ledger, each house's share exactly as Gasana had recorded it, to the shilling, and each family took its own, and Achol photographed every note and every page of the ledger and put the pictures on the *Party Four* branch of my mother's page, under each man's name, with the date and the place of recovery and the names of everyone who had put a hand in the ground. My mother cried while she typed them in. She said it was the dust.

We argued about the boat.

Because it was obvious. As soon as Babu had read *For the boat, when it is built*, it was obvious to every one of us, and nobody would say it first, because whoever said it first would have to do it. In the end it was Kami, who was nine and had no sense of danger, who said it.

"Are you going to build the boat?"

Gilbert looked at his hands. "I build boats," he said.

"I keep engines," I said.

"I take people on water," said Opio. "That's what I do."

"I can sell coffee to anyone," said Uwase. "On the water, off the water."

"I can do the sums," said Achol. "Somebody has to do the sums. My grandfather and yours did the sums. Gasana did the sums."

We looked at each other around the table under the tarpaulin, five grandchildren from five houses, the shortest of us nine years old.

"Not a big boat," said Gilbert slowly. "A good one. Wood. Thirty-two feet. A cabin. An engine. For the islands. Passengers and cargo, the way they wanted. I can build it here. Not in Bujumbura, it would never get here. Here, on the beach below the house. Three months, with my two men." He looked at Ciza. "And with you. Telling me where I'm wrong."

"You'll be wrong everywhere," said the old man happily.

"I have nine weeks' leave owing," I said. "Seven weeks now. And Mzee Kasika at the port will know where the engine is. He always knows where the engine is."

The money we would raise. It would not be much: a share from each house, small, what each could spare, and Gilbert's collector for the rare notes, and Uwase, who said she knew a coffee buyer in Europe who paid well for red fruit and stories and would pay better for this one. Achol drew up a page of sums on the back of my blue notebook, five columns, one per house, and at the bottom ruled it off twice, and passed it round, and we all initialed it, five different hands.

Babu watched us do it. He didn't say anything. When it came round to him, last, he took the pen and didn't initial it. Instead he wrote, in his small square field-sheet capitals, under all of ours: *Party Four. Second generation. Signed off.*

---

In the evening, with the sun going down behind the rocks and the gulf going pink and the fishing boats coming home past the egg on its thumb, Ciza asked Mutoni to sit with him.

I wasn't meant to hear, and I didn't hear most of it. I was on the veranda with my mother and Lamunu, and they were down by the benchmark rock on two chairs, the old man and the Rwandan woman, with the hole under the mango still open beside them and the root curving over it. He talked for a long time with his head bent. She listened. She did not interrupt him once. I saw him take his hands out of his lap and hold them open toward her, palms up, the way he had held one hand open on the boat for Uwase.

When he had finished, Mutoni sat for a while without speaking. Then she said something short. Then she reached out and put one of her hands, just one, into his open hands, and left it there.

Later, at the table, I asked Uwase what her mother had said.

"She said, *My father would have forgiven you in the first year if you had asked*," said Uwase. "*He wasn't a man who could hold a grudge. He was a man who couldn't bear an error. You were the error. Now you're corrected.*" Uwase smiled a little. "Then she said, *I am not my father. It will take me longer.* And then she gave him her hand."

---

That night, last of all, Babu gave me a card.

It was on my pillow when I went to bed, in the room that had been mine when I was small and that I had given to Achol and Abuk, who had insisted I take it back for one night because they were going to sleep in the yard under the tree with Majok and a lamp. It was one of his white cards, in his square hand. I sat on the edge of the bed and turned it over, ready for a rule.

There wasn't a rule. There wasn't a clue.

*Neema. I am proud of you. I was proud of you when you were fourteen and threw the shoes. I'm sorry that I could only ever say it with a map. I love you. That's all. — Babu.*

I read it four times. Then I went out to the veranda in my nightdress and found him there, as I knew I would, in his chair in the dark, looking at the tree, where under the canopy a small lamp was burning and three figures were lying on mats beside the open hole, Abuk and Achol and Majok, and Abuk was singing, very quietly, about a white ox who walked like a man who owned the river.

I sat in the chair beside him. He didn't look at me.

"That one was straight," I said.

"I practiced," he said. "Seven drafts."

"It was good."

"It was too short."

"It was exactly the right length, Babu."

He was quiet. Then he reached across without looking and found my hand on the arm of the chair, and held it, and we sat there together on the veranda in the dark and listened to a song about a tree.

Next chapter

New Benchmark

*CARD ONE. A benchmark is a point whose place is known and agreed. Everything else is measured from it. Rule one: no one digs alone. N. M., for K. C., December.*

Gilbert built the boat on the beach below the house in fourteen weeks, not twelve, because Ciza made him take the third plank off the starboard side twice.

She was thirty-two feet, as he had said, of hardwood from a timber merchant in Mwanza whom Mzee Kasika knew, planked and ribbed on the sand under a roof of corrugated iron on poles, the same kind of roof as the yard in Bujumbura. The two brothers came from Burundi, Bosco and Didier, and lodged in the instrument room, and fished the gulf at night with a borrowed lamp to keep their hands in, and declared our dagaa acceptable but not as good as theirs. Kami came for the school holidays and swept shavings. Opio came from Jinja three times on the overland bus and once on the wagon ship, and the second time brought a letter from a woman in Jinja who had been in Primary Five at Jinja Lakeside School in 1998, who had found his reply in her old school's office and written back to say that there were still no flying cars.

I found the engine. Mzee Kasika knew where it was, as I had said he would: a good secondhand marine diesel in a yard at the port, from a fishing boat that had been retired, and he and I rebuilt it on two weekends in the engine shop with the radio on and his apprentice handing us the tools in the wrong order. Uwase's coffee buyer in Europe paid for the timber, and more than the timber, and asked only for the story, in writing, which Achol wrote and I corrected and Babu corrected again, with a red pen, until it was nearly as long as this.

Achol came in December, on the bus, with Abuk.

---

We launched her on the third Saturday in December, early, when it was cool.

Everyone came who could come. Lamunu came on the overland bus with Opio and his mother, and complained the whole way, and was radiant. Mukamurenzi came with Mutoni and Uwase, and this time she flew without being asked. Ciza had never really left; he had been on the beach since September in a chair under the iron roof, telling his grandson where he was wrong. Majok came, with a nephew. My mother came down the hill with a basket of food enough for a hundred and a phone in her other hand, because the family page was going to show the launch to everyone who could not be there: Lamunu's daughter in Kampala, Ange in Bujumbura, Garang in his minibus in Juba with his phone propped on the dashboard, an aunt of mine in Dar, a cousin of Uwase's in Brussels, the woman from Primary Five.

She was painted white with a blue stripe, like the night boats on Tanganyika. On her stern post, very small, where you would only see it if you looked, Gilbert had carved a bird. Inside the cabin, framed under glass on the bulkhead, in a row, hung five yellow maps, each with a small mango tree in the corner, so that whoever sat in that cabin would know where each of the brothers came from. On her bow, in black letters, Kami had painted her name.

We argued about the name for three days. Opio wanted *Two One Two*. Uwase wanted *Gasana's Key*. Achol wanted *Perhaps It Is Sailing*, which was too long and made everyone cry. Ciza wanted something unrepeatable in French. Babu wanted *Party Four*. In the end, on the third evening, Abuk said one word, in Swahili, which she had learned in Mwanza, and everyone stopped arguing at once, because it was obviously right and because it was the only argument any of us could see Babu losing gracefully.

*Mwembe.* Mango tree.

---

Babu went out on her first. He was eighty-five still, eighty-six in March, and he had to be helped down the beach on one side by me and on the other by Opio, and lifted into the boat by Gilbert and Majok together, and set in a chair by the wheel, which he did not touch. Ciza was lifted in beside him. Abuk sat in the bow in her blue dress with her beads, facing forward, toward the water.

I started the engine. It caught first time, as I had known it would, a low clean steady sound, and I stood with my hand on the throttle and my face, Achol told me afterward, gone quiet.

We went out across the gulf in the cool of the morning, past the egg on its thumb, past the fishing canoes coming home with their catch, *Patience* and *Mama Asha* and *Do Not Envy Me*, and the fishermen stood up in their canoes and shouted and waved, and a fish eagle sat on a dead tree on an island with its white head turned and watched us as if we owed it money. The water was pale green and flat and went on to the horizon, where Uganda was, fourteen hours away.

And it was only then, out on the lake, with the engine steady under my hand and the rocks of Mwanza going pink behind us, that I saw Achol go forward to her grandmother in the bow and kneel beside her and say something in her ear. And I saw Abuk lift her head and look at the wide water all round us, and lift one long hand, and say, in a voice that carried right back down the boat to the wheel, over the sound of the engine, one sentence in Dinka.

"What did she say?" said Uwase.

Achol came back along the deck. Her face was wet and she did not wipe it.

"She said, *Tell him. It's sailing.*"

---

That afternoon, when we came back in, we set a new benchmark.

It was Babu's idea, and Ciza's design, and Gilbert's work with a drill and a hammer. A brass disc, bigger than the old one, set into the top of the granite rock beside Babu's old disc, so that anyone standing could see it. Five letters around its rim, *E O G C D*, the party's five. And in the center, instead of a number, a small stamped tree.

Then Kami, who had been watching, went around to the back of the rock, under the lip, where only a short person looks, and got down in the leaves with Gilbert's smallest drill, and with her father's hand on hers, set a second, smaller pin, low, beside Deng's. Beside it she scratched, very carefully, with a nail: *K1.*

"For the next one," she said.

"What next one?" said her father.

She didn't answer. She looked at me.

So in the evening, when everyone was eating under the tarpaulin and the lake flies were drifting in from the gulf and Babu was singing, terribly, in Nyakyusa, with Ciza conducting with a fish bone, I went into the sewing room and sat at the old drafting table and took a white card from Babu's box and wrote on it, in square capitals, the kind of writing that expects to be read in the rain.

*CARD ONE.*

I put it on Kami's pillow. And I went back out to the yard, and sat down in the chair beside my grandfather, under the tree, before I asked anything at all.

About this book

Neema Mwakalinga keeps engines running on a Lake Victoria ferry and stopped playing her grandfather's games when she was fourteen. Then a mathematics teacher arrives in Mwanza from Juba with a steel trunk of her late grandfather's papers, a packet tied in red string and half of a torn cipher card, and Babu, eighty-five years old, sets out five sealed envelopes on the veranda table.

In 1975 the five men of Survey Party Four, from five countries, lost the green trunk that held their savings for a boat they meant to run together. For fifty years their families have quietly blamed one another. Now one grandchild from each house must open each envelope only inside that house, sit before asking, and listen.

The trail runs by wagon ship to the source of the Nile at Jinja, up the folded hills to a coffee washing station above Lake Kivu, down the Rift to the lantern boats of Lake Tanganyika and on to a cattle camp beside the Nile at Juba. It runs through a water-stained letter in a tea tin, a code woven into a wedding basket, a brass compass that reads seven degrees wrong and an old man's song about a white ox. And every family tells the same story about a tree a little differently.

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