Petals of Blood (40 page)

‘Nding’uri, son of my aunt. I never saw him again. A week later, they hanged him at Githunguri.

‘Millet, power of God. I prayed: “Spare me, spare me, oh Lord, so that I can one day get that louse.”

‘And what did I do when I came out? I, Abdulla, forgot my vow to the Lord . . . I was busy looking for money . . . and even came to hide in Ilmorog.’

He broke off, choked, and for a few seconds he was lost to them. Karega’s eyes were fixed on Abdulla. Nyakinyua raised her head and looked at all of them in turn as if she alone could see things hidden from them, as if she alone could read signs in the enigmatic gloom in the hut.

5 ~ For years, Munira was to remember that night of Theng’eta drinking. Later in his statement he tried to sketch the scene, just the outline, of those puzzled faces, to capture in words Wanja’s troubled voice, as she broke into their thoughts with the question that lay beneath the confessions, the memories, the inner wrestling with contradictory impulses, of that first night of contact with the
Theng’eta, the spirit, in its purest form. Was she, he had then wondered, trying to save the occasion by changing the subject? And yet it was appropriate, directed at the only person who could show them the light out of their darkness.

‘Tell us, mother, tell us this: what did your man see that changed him? What made him no longer the same? Did he tell you the meaning of what he saw?’

‘In the glare of that light?’ she had asked as if she had all along expected the question and had readied herself for it. ‘What he saw in the glare of that light, he tried to tell me many times. But something always blocked him, his throat, in the beginning of telling it, and he could not continue. But then came the second big war, and once again our children, our sons, your father among them, were taken away and we heard strange names when they came back: Abithinia, Bama, India, Boboi, Njiovani, Njirimani, and others. And this time our sons were actually holding the guns and helping, unwillingly, in the general slaughter of human lives. My man would whisper all these things to me late at night and the fever would seize him and he would tremble so and I would hold him to still him. And one night he told it to me in words that were then strange and lacked meaning. Even this, even this slaughter is not what I saw. I tried him again: tell me what you saw, what is it that has troubled you these many years? Is it your son? Then he trembled again and I could see there were tears in his eyes and I held him to reassure him. He told me this: You see, woman mine . . . when the animal, bigger it was than the famed Ndamathia remember, when it spat out the light, I thought I saw sons and daughters of black people of the centuries rise up as one to harness the power of that light, and the white man who was with us was frightened by what would happen when that power was in the hands of these black gods. He turned his wiles on us: he turned his poison tongue at us: do you remember Wakarwigi, the white man we called the hawk? He would run to Agikuyu and tell them: The Masai are coming to steal your cows and they are armed to the teeth: and he would then run to the Masai and tell them: Wagikuyu are coming to steal your cows and your daughters and they are armed to the teeth. Do you remember how we almost slaughtered one another, with
Wakarwigi coming in at the last minute as peacemaker? And when that finally failed, he turned his guns to the black children, who, having grown wiser, retreated to the forests and to the mountains, to reform their broken lines. They came back no longer trembling slaves, but itungati warriors armed with pangas, and spears and guns and faith. Yes, woman, and faith which was another kind of light. There were a few traitors among them, those who wanted to remain porters at the gate, collectors of the fallout from the white man’s control of that power and of the human energies which worked it. But in the main they remained together . . . and there was much blood, many motherless, many maimed legs, many broken homes and all because a few hungry souls sick with greed wanted everything for themselves. They took the virtues that arise from that as true virtues of the human heart. They practised charity, pity; they even made laws and rules of good conduct for those they had made motherless, for those they had driven into the streets. Tell me, woman: would we need pity, charity, generosity, kindness if there were no poor and miserable to pity and be kind to? And did they think that we would continue to be the receivers of their kindness and charity, when the power worked by us was enough to feed and clothe us all with the strength and infinite wisdom and love of a human being? And so there was this groaning, woman, this groaning in the fiery fury of the struggle. That, woman, was a terrible sight and sound to see and to hear, and it has kept me awake or in restless sleep this many a night, and I feared to tell you . . .’

Abdulla was actually groaning and it was this that interrupted her narrative of the vision passed to her by her man, whose meaning they thought they understood: for had it not already happened? But Abdulla continued groaning and shouting obscenities at faces only he could see, and they thought that it was probably the memory of it that moved him so. Wanja rested her hand on his shoulders and he stopped writhing and groaning with pain and looked up into her eyes; then he turned away with a strange incomprehensible expression on his face. She too had a slightly contorted look of pain on her face and she bit her lower lip as if holding back further tears.

The old woman got off her stool by the Theng’eta pot. She looked at them all and Munira had the impression of tremendous compassion
and gentleness and eagerness to heal on her emaciated face. ‘Go home, children. Go home and sleep. You have all read the good God’s own book . . . vengeance is mine, and I say, is it any man’s job to do God’s justice and vengeance? Sleep, and let it be, let it be, for there are still so many karwigis in our midst. Sleep.’

I keep on asking myself, now that it has happened, what it was she was trying to tell us that night, Munira scribbled with the inner fury of trying to understand. Would it have stopped what has now happened if it, whatever it was, had been heeded? By whom? Abdulla was the first to go out, he remembered, followed by Wanja and Karega. Wanja walked with Abdulla for a little distance and then came back and joined Karega where he was standing. And Munira could still recall distinctly the feeling he then had of being excluded from something that bound the others together. He would anyway have liked to be alone, with his thoughts, but Wanja’s action somehow increased his smouldering wrath at his own uncertainties. He called her and she came to him. He thought he should hold back his words, but they were out, speaking his bitterness and the frustration of the many months she had kept him at a distance, playing with his emotions, memories, and expectations.

‘Why did you come to Ilmorog? There was more peace before you came here.’

‘The peace of nothing happening?’ she retorted, and he, Munira, waited for her to continue, to say more, but she had already danced to Karega’s side.

I left them standing together and I walked home, alone, wrestling – with my own thoughts and inner anxieties. Theng’eta . . . Ilmorog . . . Karega’s story. During his telling it, my past had flashed across the dark abyss of my present. It was as if before tonight I had never known my family, my past. I remembered my only too recent conversation with my father and his apparent change in attitude. I remembered his missing ear. I had never, I confessed to myself, cared much for my father although I was slightly scared of him. I had never really known any of my sisters or brothers most of whom had married into wealth
or had acquired wealth. Others had even gone to England for training as nurses, doctors and engineers. I had been an outsider, a distant spectator, who could only guess what was happening through hastily dropped hints, through earnest conversations that were abruptly stopped on my arrival at the scene. Why, my father had even run my home for me, and my wife had looked up to him for orders and approval. What now pained me, I don’t know how to put it, was a feeling that Karega was more of an insider even in my family. Had he not already affected the course of its history? Mukami, although I had never known her beyond the fact that she was my sister and pupil, was of my blood: had he come all this way to throw her death in my face? Was this why he had come to Ilmorog, hiding the real motive behind past pupilship and desire for advice and help? Was there not a note of triumph at the edges of his narrative?

I argued with myself: my father was after all my father. What I felt was a strange feeling, an uncomfortable eerie sensation, disagreeably sitting in my stomach, of a son who had wined and dined with those who had deformed his father, blood of his blood, and brought death to the family. It was this I could not now justify in my own mind. I remembered Abdulla’s words calling on the Lord to bring him face to face one day with Nding’uri’s real murderer. How short a time it took me to forget Nyakinyua’s words of wisdom and compassion! I cried in my heart: Give me the strength, Lord, give me a steadfast will. I felt, may the Lord forgive us all, that I had to take a drastic step that would restore me to my usurped history, my usurped inheritance, that would reconnect me with my history. Something to enable me to claim my father. And Karega loomed large in the way.

To say the truth, I did not know, I was not quite sure, whom I wanted to avenge: myself, Mukami, my father: but I only felt driven to do something to give me a sense of belonging. I was tired of being a spectator, an outsider.

1 ~ Karega walked ahead, in the dark, as if he would be happy, alone, with just his thoughts for a shadowy companion. But Wanja followed him without a word. Karega’s head was ablaze with what had gone on in Nyakinyua’s hut. Tonight, tonight he had lived more conflicting experiences than ever before in his life. He had lost Mukami and he found, in telling the story, that the pain and the self-accusation had not lessened with the years. But he had also discovered his brother, who had been only a silhouette buried deep in his childhood’s earliest memories. He now reclaimed him in pride and gratitude: had he not handled live bullets, ready to die, which was the ultimate measure of one’s commitment to the cause of a people’s liberation? He felt, at the same time, a little awed by the man and also by Abdulla: from whence that courage and inner assurance, when a whole world laughed at the threats of a peasant armed with only a rusty panga and a home-made gun? From where did that faith and that belief in justice come so close to absolute certainty? Abdulla had now become in Karega’s eyes the best self of the community, symbol of Kenya’s truest courage. And the history he had tried to teach as romantic adventures, the essence of black struggle apprehended in the imagination at the level of mere possibilities, had tonight acquired immediate flesh and blood.

The dark night about them was filled with the power of a blood-nearness. He stopped as if to let her catch up, but the path was too narrow for two abreast, and he continued in front. He did not know what he wanted to tell her, but he felt all the same that there were thoughts and feelings elusively clear in his head and heart which would not take the shape of words. They went toward Ilmorog hill and Wanja was inwardly struck by this repetition of an earlier
experience. She also had a vague feeling inside of an inevitability, as if all the numerous accidents, coincidences, and vicissitudes of the past were leading to this: to what? What was the animal within, stretching and struggling to be born? They stood side by side, looking onto the plains they could no longer see clearly. Karega sat down on the grass and she followed. She too had many things she wanted to tell, to say, to ask, and yet none would come.

‘You must have the blood of rebels in your family,’ she said, without knowing that she had touched the very chord of his thoughts.

‘Why?’

‘Your brother, to begin with. Did he look like you? But of course you could not have known him. And then you. At Siriana you twice organized a strike.’

‘So did Munira,’ he said, rather absent-mindedly, for he was thinking of his brother and of Abdulla and what it meant to fight in the forest.

‘Yes. But in his case it was different. He says that he was only a spectator, a bystander, who happened to be thrown into the stampede and the mělée.’

‘How do you know? You were not there.’

‘He told us.’

She told the story of Munira and Chui as Munira had once told it.

‘He talked as if he had become frozen with the memory of that event. By the road, you tried to organize the sellers of sheepskins and fruits. In Ilmorog you suggested and organized the journey to the city and saved us from famine. Is that not something?’

He liked the cooing vibrancy of her voice. Her fingers which occasionally brushed against his filled him with warmth of blood at his fingertips. But his mind was in quick turns on Abdulla, Nyakinyua, Mukami, everything else but schools and strikes and his own part in them, for they now looked so trivial and irrelevant placed against the larger theatre of events that had created the true undying spirit of Kenya.

‘Do you think he told us everything?’ he asked, again mostly for the sake of saying something.

‘Who?’

‘Abdulla.’

‘As Nyakinyua said: there is a lot more hidden in that stump of a leg. But then who does not have something to hide?’

‘Do you have anything to hide?’

‘Yes,’ she said quietly.

‘Why? Haven’t you told me everything?’

‘I suppose I should tell how I too came to leave school.’

And she told him about her first love: her search for vengeance; and the subsequent seduction from school.

He listened and then he asked her: ‘Is he – is he the same one we met on our way to the city?’

‘Yes. Yes . . . But I try not to think too hard about it. It’s nothing.’

‘Nothing? Wanja, nothing? No. Nothing is nothing.’

‘But why should I become a prisoner of a past defeat? Why should it always be held against me?’

She had raised her voice a little, protesting against what she thought was an accusation in his voice. He was taken aback, startled by the vehemence of her protest: who was he, a victim, to pass judgment on another victim?