Abyssinian Chronicles Read Online Free

Long and pendulous, the penis rubbed against the cloth of his skirt or sometimes of his wrapper; thread bit into the wound, and hairs somehow got embedded in the crust. Consequently, sitting, sleeping and standing became endless torture sessions. Sometimes a scab formed round the edges of theulcer, covering the terrible pink and angry red, giving him surges of hope, and then, devil of devils, he would get a nocturnal erection and the scab would burst. Painful urination would begin all over again, thread would bite into the wound and caustic medicine would bring tears to his eyes. He shaved every other day, and the itching of incipient pubic hair added to the ulcer made his hours trickle with murderous sloth. He had himself tested for blood poisoning and various blood cancers, but the doctors returned negative results each time. He was as healthy as a bull. The doctors ascribed his ulcer to age, although he was only in his forties.
    On top of all that came the flies. Tiida went out one morning and let out the scream of her life. The two avocado trees behind the house were full of flies, large green things the size of coffee beans. She dropped the basinful of soaked clothes in her hands on the ground. Ssali came to the door and his skin crawled as if it were being peeled off. It was as if a goat or a pig were rotting at the foot of the trees. The connotation of putrescence made Tiida vomit onto the clothes. Ssali, who had been about to make her go find out what was happening, decided to do it himself. With legs spread wide apart, he hobbled to the foot of the trees. There he found a large heap of chicken entrails.
    Normally, the flies would have clustered on the entrails, and maybe on the lower reaches of the trees, but now they were high up in the leaves. With a sick feeling in his stomach, Ssali returned to his bedroom and sent for a laborer. The man dug a pit and buried the entrails. The flies lingered on for a day and disappeared with the dusk.
    Four days later Tiida saw the flies again. This time a heap of dog entrails was buried, and the flies went away. A week later another heap of dog entrails was buried. This was very worrying to Ssali: somebody was sacrificing dogs to bring disaster on his house at such a difficult moment in his life. Goat and sheep were understandable sacrifices, but dogs! With blood-caked dog heads left on the heap of entrails to make sure that he knew which animals were being killed! This was a warning, a naked act of terrorism. And it could only be coming from one person: the mother of the man who had sold him the land on which he had built his house.
    He had bought the land five years before with the intention of raising cattle. At the time he did not know of the disputes inside the land-seller’s family. The purchase had been aboveboard, with nobribery or any form of corruption involved. It was only after the purchase had been ratified that the troubles surfaced. The mother of the seller appeared, with claims that her son had stolen the title deed and changed his father’s will to suit his greedy ends. The claims did not stand in court, and the woman had threatened to fight to her death to regain the land. That she had chosen this particular moment to strike back irked the convalescent very much. Did she think that he was too enervated to fight back? That he would just surrender or lie down and die? He sent her a delegation asking for peace, but she dismissed it out of hand, offended that he could even think her capable of sacrificing dogs to the gods of terrorism.
    Ssali employed a guard to look out for whoever brought the heads and the entrails, but in vain. The terrorist struck with impunity. Some said it was a curse, a punishment meted out by a dead relative to avenge Ssali’s defection to Allah. The convert was at his wits’ end. He tried running away for weeks. But the heads kept coming, and the ulcer kept crusting and bursting. The mere presence of flies and their insinuation of filth