My father ran his hands over the curve. When he had heard of the slaughter at Kazinga Channel, he had let out his breath and shaken his head. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible.

“Do you want it? You can buy it.”

“It is legal,” another man offered, seeing my father’s expression. “The government can sell ivory.”

Confronted with a tooth, my father discovered that he wanted it. He wanted to own something so unique and magnificent. He ran his hand over the curve and was already imagining how he would use it as a prop at church. Certainly he would someday tell a hippo story and to have this tooth to show would be a wonderful thing. And so, for a pittance, my father bought two teeth (if you buy one, why not two?) and was given a certificate that stated that the ivory was legal. One was scrubbed clean, the other was dark with plaque.

Later, I would ask my father — a man who voted for the green party, who donated money to conservation efforts, who got up at night to feed a puppy with a cleft palate — “How could you? How could you buy them?”

“Don’t be such an idealist, Sari,” my father said. “They were already dead. All of them. There were no more hippos to kill in Uganda.”

We would stay in Uganda four more years. My mother would grow more alarmed. My father would grow more certain that he was obligated to stay with his students. My sister and I would continue to divide the things between us. My mother would keep reading Animals of East Africa. My parents would keep listening to the radio. They would stay together. Idi Ami would be overthrown, and the country would be engulfed in more violence. My mother would write to her father Here it is still the same and everything is a mess. And the fighting would continue.

And we would learn this about war: even those who are not involved in the killing somehow become accomplices.