Petals of Blood (13 page)

But Wanja did not hear the compliment. She was looking at the still serious face of Karega.

‘Karega . . .’ she said aloud. ‘What a funny name!’

‘Ritwa ni mbukio,’ Karega quoted the proverb. ‘Somebody a long time ago asked the question: What’s in a name? And he answered that a rose would still be a rose even by another name.’

Talking as if from a book, again thought Munira. Wanja countered:

‘Oh, then it would not be a rose. It would be that other name, don’t you think? A rose is a rose.’

‘Names are actually funny. My real name is not Abdulla. It is Murira. But I baptized myself Abdulla. Now everybody calls me Abdulla.’

‘You mean, you thought Abdulla was a Christian name?’ Wanja asked.

‘Yes. Yes.’

They all laughed. Even Karega. Abdulla took another bottle to open. Munira said: ‘Let me try: I too might become an assistant bottle-opener.’

‘Oh, Mwalimu,’ she cried in ecstasy. She was really in high spirits with not a trace of the troubled voice and face of yesterday or of the earlier part of the evening. ‘Abdulla has been telling me such impossible stories. Did you know that he actually fought in the forest? He used to go for days and days without food and water: they had trained their bodies to accept little. I am sure I would have died. Abdulla, you were going to tell a story about Dedan – Dedan Kimathi.’

Munira’s stomach tightened a little at the revelation. He always felt this generalized fear about this period of war: he also felt guilty, as if there was something he should have done but didn’t do. It was the guilt of omission: other young men of his time had participated: they had taken sides: this defined them as a people who had gone through the test and either failed or passed. But he had not taken the final test. Just like in Siriana. He looked at Karega who had today brought back that other past. He still held the two bottles. Karega sat up: his body was taut with curiosity. He gazed at Abdulla: he was once again ready to devour the past from one who was then present. Wanja looked at Abdulla: she thought that now he would tell the secret behind his
crippled leg. Abdulla cleared his throat. His face changed. He suddenly seemed to have gone to a land hidden from them, a land way back in a past only he could understand. He cleared his throat, a prolonged slow roar. Suddenly a bottle-top flew from Munira’s hand. Wanja and Karega threw up their arms to their faces and in the process somebody must have hit the table on which the lamp stood. It fell down with the sound of broken glass. The light went out. They were plunged in darkness. Abdulla was the first to see the other light: a small flame had caught the folded curtain. Wanja in a voice of terror shouted ‘Fire!’ but by this time Abdulla had sprung up and put out the flames. It all happened so quickly. Munira struck a match. Wanja said: ‘Behind you, Karega, there’s a Nyitira.’ Karega gave the Nyitira to Munira who lit it: but this was a poor substitute for the pressure-lamp. The light was pale and their faces and their shadows on the wall were large and grotesque. Wanja collected the glass and the pressure-lamp and put it aside and then turned to Munira.

‘It is nothing. You will get me another one and also a box of wicks. Abdulla . . . we must do something about the stock in your shop.’

Her voice was shaky and she stopped, cold silence in the hut. The shadows on the wall kept on moving in a grotesque rhythm to the erratic movement of the smoking thin flame from the Nyitira. Wanja poured the drinks. Munira wanted to tell of an advertising slogan about beer so that they could resume their drinking and small irrelevancies, but he changed his mind. The drink remained untouched. Karega hopefully waited for Abdulla to tell the story of Dedan Kimathi. But Abdulla suddenly stood up, excused himself and said it was time to go. He might find Joseph’s leg pulled by a hyena. Karega was disappointed and stared to the ground as if with Abdulla’s departure he had lost interest in the company. Wanja looked at him and something, a small puzzled frown, came to her face and then passed away. She stood up, looked for her shawl which she now draped round her head, letting it fall onto her shoulders. She once again turned to Karega and for a flickering second her eyes were laughing. Karega felt his blood suddenly rush through his veins. But her voice was serious, and genuinely gentle. ‘Please, Mr Karega, keep the house for me for a few minutes.’ Then to Munira and a note of slight impatience crept into
her voice: ‘Come, Mwalimu, take me for a walk, just a little walk. I have a knot only you can untie!’

They walked in silence through the yards of the village, through lanes between the various shambas. They caught one or two voices of mothers shouting to the children to ‘hurry up and finish – why did you have to stuff yourself so? – or else you’ll be eaten by hyenas’. Otherwise the ridge was generally quiet except for the dogs of the village which kept on barking. In Munira’s mind buzzed many thoughts: who was Abdulla? Who was Karega? Who was Wanja? What did she want now? He felt guilty because of his clumsiness which had lowered everybody’s spirits. But as they sat down on the grass on Ilmorog hill, his heartbeats drove away unpleasant thoughts, warmth started suffusing his body, as he felt her breathing so powerfully near in the dark. Of all his thoughts the one that came out in words was mundane and sounded odd in the dark.

‘I bought you two kilos of the long-grained rice. But I forgot to bring it along.’

‘It’s all right,’ she said in a quiet distant voice. ‘You can always bring it along tomorrow. And anyway you had a visitor. Who is he?’

‘It was very strange. Some weeks ago I told you about Siriana, and Chui – all that. Today comes this young man whom I once taught in a school in Limuru and he tells me about Siriana and a strike and mentions Chui. Almost a repeat story of my past. But unfortunately he did not finish it.’

And he told her a little about his earlier encounter with Karega. But he omitted all references to Nding’uri and to Mukami. Karega had a knowledge about Munira’s past – how could Munira tell Wanja about the fears awakened in him by Karega’s visit? ‘It was strange his having been to the same school as I had attended and he ending in a similar fate,’ Munira concluded and waited for Wanja’s response.

But she was only half listening. She sat holding her knees together with both hands so that her chin rested on them as she gazed toward Ilmorog plains below. She was contemplating live mental images of places and scenes to which she had once been. Though she tried to hide this to herself she knew that these scenes were indelibly embedded
in her deepest memories of pain and loss, past victories and defeats, momentary conquests and humiliations, resolutions of new beginnings that were only false starts to nowhere. She now spoke quietly, to herself it seemed, holding a dialogue with a self that was only one of a myriad selves.

‘You talk of the past coming to visit you . . . There is one picture that always comes to mind. Wherever I go, whatever I do . . . well . . . it follows me. It is a long way back. In 1954 or ’55, anyway the year that we were moved into the villages and others into “lines”. You know that some people in Kabete side did not go exactly into villages but they built on either side of roads close to one another, but we still called them villages. My cousin – but let me first tell you about her. She had married a man who kept on beating her. There was nothing that she could do right. He would always find an excuse to beat her. He accused her of going about with men. If she had money through working on the land, he would take it away from her and he would drink it all and come home to beat her. So one day she just took her clothes and ran away to the city. Later her husband became a white-man’s spear-bearer – you know – Home Guard – and he was notorious for his cruelty and for eating other people’s chickens and choice goats or sheep after accusing them of being Mau Mau . . . Anyway my cousin would come from the city and she glittered in new clothes and earrings. All the men, the ones who had remained, eyed her with desire. Her husband, it is said, trembled and wept before her as he asked for forgiveness. She had with disdain dismissed his several approaches. We, the children, liked her because she would bring us things . . . rice . . . sugar . . . sweets . . . and those were lean years for us all. One Saturday she came home with her usual gifts. Now my aunt – my mother’s true sister – traded in the market. That day she must have been delayed in the market. So my cousin came to our house. We all admired her dress, her white high heels – how we would often follow her in the streets – her everything. She looked very much like the pictures of European women we saw in books. Even her gait and the way she held up her chin as she spoke, had “staili”. It was now dark. My cousin stood and she said that she was going out to the latrine and also to see if her mother had come back
from the market. My mother who was strangely quiet looked at her gait and I could tell disapproval in the eyes. All at once we heard a scream. It was – it was – it chilled words – blood – it’s difficult to describe it because it was not like a human cry at all. My father and my mother and us children rushed outside. At the sight a few yards away, my mother screamed, but I couldn’t scream or cry, just urine trickled down my legs. “My sister, my only sister,” cried my mother as she rushed forward toward the burning figure of my aunt. There she stood, outside her burning hut, and she aflame and not uttering a sound at all . . . just . . . just animal silence. Now were other screams and hurrying feet and noises . . . “put out the light . . . put out the light,” were her last words.’

Munira looked about him, a little uneasy. It was as if this was happening now in Ilmorog. He felt the terror in Wanja’s voice, felt the desperation hidden in the very offhand tone she had adopted in telling it.

‘Later it was said she had maybe caught fire while lighting the Nyitira which spilt out oil and flames on her clothes. But it was clear that my cousin’s husband must have done it. He may have thought that the town wife who had rejected him was inside the hut.’

‘But it’s a horrible death . . . the pain . . . the helpless terror.’

‘There is no death, unless of old age, without pain. For some reason, I have not wanted to believe that it was my cousin’s husband who did it. I have not wanted to believe that any man could be so cruel. I have – it really is so childish of me – but I have liked to believe that she burnt herself like the Buddhists do, which then makes me think of the water and the fire of the beginning and the water and the fire of the second coming to cleanse and bring purity to our earth of human cruelty and loneliness. Mwalimu. I will tell you. There are times – not too many times – but a few times – when I remember a few things – that I have felt as if I could set myself on fire. And I would then run to the mountain top so that everyone can see me cleansed to my bones.’

‘Wanja . . . stop that . . . what are you talking about?’

‘My aunt was a clean woman though,’ she continued. ‘She was very good to us children. Her husband was a hard-core Mau Mau. I was
even more proud of her when later I learnt that she used to carry guns and bullets to the forest hidden in baskets full of unga. She was not a Christian and used to laugh at my mother’s Jesus ways. But they somehow loved one another. My mother respected her in a certain kind of way – and her death – well – it really affected her. My father once said: “It’s probably an act of God . . . for helping the terrorists.” That was the beginning of their falling apart of which I was later to become a victim.’

She stopped. For a few seconds she dwelt alone within that inward gaze.

‘No,’ she said as if she was continuing a dialogue with one of her several selves . . . ‘I don’t think I can ever burn myself. Did I frighten you? It was a way of talking. I am terrified of fires. That’s why I was upset in the hut when I saw the fire. What I would like is to get a job.’

‘Wanja . . . tell me: what happened to your child?’

He felt rather than saw her body shudder. He wished he had not asked her the question. He did not know how to cope with her silent sobbing.

‘Wanja: what’s the matter?’ he asked anxiously.

‘I don’t know. I just feel feverish. I thought the moon would come out tonight. What a fruitless vigil on a mountain! Please take me home.’

They went back as they had come – in silence. They found the light was out. And Karega had gone. He struck a match and lit the Nyitira. Wanja said: ‘Please put it out.’ They both stood at the door looking out. He knew Karega could not have gone to the house because he did not have the keys. Munira felt cold sweat on his face. The fear he had earlier experienced came back. Karega had gone as mysteriously as he had appeared. He fixed his eyes to the dark outside hoping to pierce the mystery and so dispel his inner terror.

Twelve years later Munira was to pick on this night as yet another example of Wanja’s cunning and devilry.

‘Looking back on that night on Ilmorog Hill,’ he wrote, ‘I can see the devil at work in the magic and wonder and perplexity I felt at that fatal meeting between Karega, Wanja, Abdulla and myself; an encounter dominated by people who were not there with us, who
were now only voices in the past. But also for me, then, the night had the changing colours of a rainbow. For even before I could wish her goodbye and go home, I saw emerging from the far horizon a big orange moon half veiled by a mixture of dark and grey clouds. We watched it rise, growing bigger and bigger, dominating the horizon, and my heart was full and I searched for the slogan which would contain the experience – Moon in a Grey Rain Drop, or something like that. Wanja, who only a few minutes back was crying, was now excited like a little child at the first drops of rain and she cried out in ecstasy: The moon . . . the orange moon. Please, Mwalimu . . . stay here tonight . . . Break the moon over me.’ Her pleading voice had startled Munira out of his thoughts. He too wanted to stay the night. He would stay the night. A joyous trembling coursed through his body. Aah, my harvest. To hell with Karega and all the unpleasant memories of yesterday, he thought as he followed Wanja into the hut.

1 ~ If Wanja had been patient and had waited for the new moon to appear on Ilmorog ridge – as indeed she had been instructed by Mwathi wa Mugo – she and Munira would have witnessed one of the most glorious and joyous sights in all the land, with the ridges and the plains draped by a level sheet of shimmering moonlit mist into a harmony of peace and silence: a human soul would have to be restless and raging beyond reach of hope and salvation for it not to be momentarily overwhelmed and stilled by the sight and the atmosphere.