Petals of Blood (11 page)

‘Work? I don’t do any . . . no job yet . . . I’ve been all over the city . . . well, that is why I have come . . . you see, until a year or so ago, I used to go to school—’

‘Which school?’

‘Siriana!’

‘Please help yourself to another cup,’ I found myself saying, looking at him with renewed interest. He was fingering his empty cup, looking to the ground as if about to continue talking but not knowing how to proceed. I handed him the mbirika and he poured tea into his cup. The face, his face, now formed a faint silhouette in the memory.

‘I am afraid I can’t quite – eeh—?’

‘It’s a long time. My name is Karega. But I don’t expect that you would immediately remember me. I think I have grown a bit. I used to pick pyrethrum flowers in your father’s shambas.’

He paused but he sensed that I was still unable to place him. He continued:

‘My mother was Mariamu and before we moved to the new Emergency village in 1955, we used to live on your father’s farm. Ahoi . . .’

‘Mariamu,’ I said. ‘Are you Mariamu’s son?’

‘Yes.’

‘I cannot recall . . . but . . . I knew your brother Nding’uri. He used to be a playmate. We even went hunting antelopes together, running
through thorny bush in my father’s forest. We never caught any . . . But that was long before 1952.’

‘I didn’t know him . . . I have only a vague, misty impression . . . but I recently heard about him and I built a few more details of him . . . but only in imagination.’

‘I am sorry about what happened . . .’

‘You mean his being hanged at Githunguri? It was a collective sacrifice. A few had to die for our freedom . . . But it is strange . . . now that you say you knew him . . . I did not even know that I had a brother . . . that he had died – until Mukami told me.’

‘Mukami!’

‘Yes . . . just before she died.’

‘Mukami . . . my sister . . . did you . . . but how could she . . . ?’

‘Your father I believe had told her.’

I tried to figure out all this: what had this stranger to do with my father and Mukami and Nding’uri’s death of years before? I wanted to know more – to know where or how Karega came into all this . . . but how could I ask a stranger, and a boy at that, about a mystery involving my own family?

It was he who changed the subject and talked as if the revelations were incidental to his visit.

‘But that is not why I came . . .’

‘Yes . . .’

‘I have come to you because you taught me at Manguo. Don’t you remember?’

An urgent insistence had crept into his voice. But how could I remember? So many people had worked on my father’s farm and lived there as ahoi. So many pupils had passed through the schools where I had previously taught. A few I could maybe remember. But this young man before me? Ah! who was I to keep a storehouse for all the eyes I had taught? I turned the silhouette in my mind, this way, that way. I looked at Karega. His face was pained, young, eager, and suddenly from the mist his outline, as he was seven or nine years back, rose before me. He was my pupil at Manguo and was one of the first to get a place in Siriana. This was considered a great honour to the school and the region. Although he knew that I was not the headmaster, he
had come to me with papers demanding the signature of a responsible elder who could testify to the candidate’s character, etc. Who was I to grade people’s morality? But for him I suppose it must have been a way of showing comradeship: I who had been there before him had to be a witness of his departure to higher realms. I put my name to the documents and shrugged off the nagging thought that if they ever checked records my name would work against him. And now, many years after, he was back, maybe to tell me of a new departure for even higher realms. Indeed this was the real compensation in teaching: occasionally you found one who later had gone beyond your wildest dreams, beyond your fondest hope, such a one returned to thank you and you were glad. I was suddenly in a light euphoric mood. I forgot my fatigue and Wanja. I put on one side thoughts about Mukami and my father and all that. I seemed to like him better, indeed I felt honoured by a visit from a university scholar.

‘And you successfully smashed your way through Siriana? Did you go to Makerere or Nairobi? How is life at the university? You don’t know how lucky you are: Uhuru has really increased chances for us black people. How many universities now? Three. In our time we only counted that number of high schools. So which university? If I went to university I would like to study law or medicine: nothing else for me – just law and medicine – an advocate or a doctor. You know you can make a lot of money in those professions – but a teacher? We only work for God. I suppose you roamed the Big City looking for vacational employment? Pocket money . . . I know how it is. At Siriana my father used to give me two shillings. What do you study?’

I had so enthused on his success that I interpreted his fidgeting as a sign of modesty. He fingered his cup and then put it on the bench.

‘The point is – well, I have not been to anybody’s university – well – except maybe the university of the streets. I was expelled from Siriana.’

‘Expelled?’

‘Yes.’

‘From school – Siriana?’

‘Yes.’

‘But why?’

He was quiet, absorbed in himself, as if seeking some nervous energy for the leap.

‘It is a long story. You heard about the strike?’

‘Strike? Which one – I mean where?’

‘It was last year, toward the end. There were editorials on it in the newspapers – all the dailies.’

I was never really a great one for reading newspapers or for listening to the radio. Whenever I bought a newspaper I just glanced at the headlines: I never read editorial comments or any other features or news stories, especially of a political nature, only advertisements and court stories, especially on murder. Those I would read avidly, sometimes over and over again. Now that he had said it I thought that I had heard something about a strike in Siriana, but in my mind it had got mixed up with the past I would rather forget and I never followed up the matter. I told him:

‘I hardly ever read newspapers. I have lived in a world to myself. I did hear something about a strike over food or something.’

‘They always attribute every students’ grievance to food,’ he said rather bitterly. ‘And the newspapers never wrote anything about our case: only editorials blaming us – you know, the usual homilies: so much taxpayers’ money spent, and all they care about is their stomachs! It comforts them in their blindness. But no doubt you read about Fraudsham?’

‘Fraudsham, Cambridge Fraudsham?’

‘Yes. You know he went away?’

Gone! Cambridge Fraudsham gone? How? I could hardly believe this: Fraudsham was Siriana and Siriana was Fraudsham. I cursed my lack of interest in newspapers. I suppose if he had been murdered or something – but Fraudsham! My obvious ignorance was to Karega like cold water thrown over a guest on his entering a house. His excited enthusiasm subsided even as my curiosity and excitement rose. Another strike involving Fraudsham, ending in his defeat and final departure!

I have since that night read Karega’s own incredulous reaction to the man’s departure. His words carried poetry and beauty and sadness and momentary triumph:

But at that moment, sitting in the midst of the neutral gloom of my house, I just felt strange inside: here I was, embers of curiosity stoked to a glowing intensity by his revelations, yet I was unable to ask questions. It was Karega who now unleashed question after question, hardly giving me breathing-time to answer or to react: what years had I been in Siriana? I told him. Did I really know Cambridge Fraudsham? Yes, a little. Well, I must have known Chui – Shakespeare or Joe Louis. I stood up despite myself. What? Chui? I had that eerie feeling of a dead past suddenly being resurrected before me who had been totally unprepared for the second coming. I knew at the same time that I had irretrievably let Karega down, I who must appear an impostor, a cheat, before his interrogating eyes. He too was now on his feet. I tried but could not make him resume his seat. So I stood at the door and watched him go. The sun about to set left shadows of grass and bush long on the ground. What else had he wanted to find out?

I was once again surprised at the depth of my concern. Had I not done away with Fraudshams, Chuis, Sirianas, strikes and politics, the whole lot, years ago? Now and then one occasionally would hear of Siriana’s brilliant success at state examinations under its eccentric headmaster, but I could never really become involved in the glory of a school which had rejected me. Why should it follow me to Ilmorog? I felt a sudden nostalgia for that time, not so long ago, when my school and Abdulla’s place were my whole life in Ilmorog.

I thought I should make myself another cup of tea before walking
over to Abdulla’s for the celebration. Tea was a good stimulant, Reverend Hallowes Ironmonger used to say, and he always thought of heaven as a place where there would be an unlimited quantity of tea and sausages. There! I was drifting back to the same past. It had started with Wanja and this last month my life had been lived in broken
cups
of memory between this ghost of a school, the backyard of Abdulla’s shop and Wanja’s hearth.

No, I must not lose my hold on the present. My earlier trip to Ruwa-ini for instance. Would Mzigo ever make it to Ilmorog? I didn’t care now if he came or not, though only recently I had feared he might suddenly turn up and, finding no pupils, or seeing that they were so few or that each class took only half the day, he would transfer me back to places and people I had left behind, denying me the challenge of nation-building in remote Ilmorog, my new-found kingdom.

Try as I might, I could not dismiss from my mind that inconsequential visit by a former pupil. The visit had left too many questions unanswered: what really was the secret purpose of the visit? What could have been behind the strike at Siriana? Behind Fraudsham’s departure and Chui’s equally sudden return? A cold fear of Karega’s visit settled uncomfortably in my belly. But what was it that scared me? That I would have to face something I had forever left behind? Or was I simply afraid of being drawn into somebody else’s life and inner struggles, an unwilling witness of another’s wrestling with God? . . . and Jacob was left alone and a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob he touched the hollow of his thigh, and Jacob’s thigh was put out of joint as he wrestled with him and then he said I will not let you go unless you bless me . . . Let me go, let me go, I cried to myself: why awaken voices from the past?

I closed the door and went out. I would now go over to Abdulla’s place. As if it read my mind, Abdulla’s donkey howled through the air, and it somehow startled me. I stopped. Where would Karega get a matatu at this hour? On the impulse, I went back to the house, took my bicycle from against the wall and raced after him. He might as well shelter here for the night. I would find out more about him:
Siriana, Mukami, everything. But I felt what I had felt on my first encounter with Wanja, that this was another threat to my self-imposed peace in this land.

4 ~ Wanja, too, twelve years later, recovering in the New Ilmorog Hospital, tried to recall this period: the night of her first narrative and her anxious vigil the following day loomed large in her troubled mind.

The idea of celebrating Joseph’s return to school; the beginning of the harvest; her own expectation, had all been her own created drama. Now, in hospital, she recollected the details of that day, long ago.

She had woken up early and accompanied her grandmother to the shamba. It was always good to pull out beans in the morning before the sun became too hot. On this occasion they had additional shade from the maize plants which seemed too slow in maturing and ripening. There were not many bean plants to pull out and to thrash and by late the same morning they had finished winnowing. The beans could hardly fill up a sisal sack.

‘What a harvest!’ Nyakinyua exclaimed. ‘Our soil seems tired. It did not receive enough water to quench its thirst. Long ago land the size of this piece could yield eight to ten containers each the size of this sack here.’

‘Maybe the maize will yield more,’ Wanja ventured to say.

‘These strings!’ Nyakinyua said deprecatingly, and did not add another word.

They took home their harvest. Nyakinyua walked across to other fields to see if her neighbours were faring any better.

Wanja went to Abdulla’s shop. It was in the afternoon. She knew that no customers would have arrived yet. But she wanted to start her work as a barmaid in Ilmorog and also to kill time, so anxious she was for the celebration before the moonrise at midnight.

Throughout the afternoon Wanja arranged and rearranged things and parcels on the shelves. It was a busy afternoon with the three of them – Abdulla, Joseph and Wanja – somehow finding something to do. Joseph had not started school: it was closed for the day because of Munira’s absence in Ruwa-ini. It was a thorough cleaning-up operation. Wanja demanded that Abdulla repair a few of the shelves and
also the table in one of the back rooms in the shop that served as the bar. Abdulla said that he himself would do that some day soon. Wanja and Joseph swept the floor of the bar-room and splashed water on the dust. Outside the building she had put up a signboard: SHOP + BAR CLOSED THIS AFTERNOON – STOCKTAKING. But there was very little stock to take and customers, especially in an afternoon, were few and far between. Nevertheless Abdulla was pleased with Wanja’s innovations and especially the professional seriousness with which she did her job. She was in command of the situation and she was so involved in dusting up here and there, and writing up things in an exercise book, that she forgot the fatigue of the morning bean harvest. Abdulla could only marvel: so his shop and bar could be something after all.