Petals of Blood (58 page)

2 ~ She thought about her father: what was it that made some take the side of the people in a struggle and others sell out to foreign interests while still others stood precariously on the fence? What was it? And recalling Abdulla, Karega, Munira, her grandfather and all the other individuals who had been in and out of her life, she decided that maybe everything was simply a matter of love and hate. Love and hate – Siamese twins – back to back in a human heart. Because you loved you also hated: and because you hated you also loved. What you loved decided what you would have to hate in relation to what you loved. What you hated decided the possibilities of what you could love in relation to that which you hated. And how did one know what
one loved and hated? Again, thinking of the events in her life, she came back to the question of choice. You knew what you loved and what you hated by what you did, what actions, what side you had chosen. You could not, for instance, work with the colonists in suppressing the people and still say you loved the people. You could not stand on the fence in a struggle and still say you were on the side of those fighting the evil. Her father had wanted to make money and to accumulate property: he had chosen neutrality, and he hated any suggestion of being involved on the side of the people in case this ruined his chances of making money. The tragedy of her father, who by his neutrality had therefore chosen the side of the colonists, was that despite his selling out, despite his denial of self and of his father, he had ended up ruined anyway, the world disintegrating around him. His petty trade as a plumber was no match for the giant enterprises around him. She could see this clearly because of her own involvement in the petty transport trade and she knew what pressures were brought upon the petty trader, the matatu driver, the owner of one bus, the shopkeeper – all these and more. So what was the difference between her own position and that of her father? Had she not, like her father before her, also chosen her side in the struggle because she had latterly opted for her thing to love: money and money-making? She had chosen, then, the side of the Kimerias of post-Independence Kenya: how could she then blame her father? She now wished she had really known him: she wished she had talked with him at some length! But what could they have spoken about? Had she not, after all, added to his humiliation? It could not now be helped. But was there a time when she maybe could have helped it? She thought of her many attempts to return home and all the failures. There was the time she packed all her things and told the other girls that she was definitely quitting the life. The following day she found all her clothes stolen. She became scared of going home empty-handed. There was the time her father called her a prostitute and, in word if not in deed, had chased her out of the house! There was the time the lawyer had asked her to return home. She would have done it. She had taken the bus, determined to go back home. But on reaching her place she had suddenly changed her mind. She had been stabbed with guilt, not only
because of her being empty-handed but because of the memory of her very last encounter with her father. The memory wounded . . . it still hurt. She had, before her first visit to Ilmorog, decided to make it up with her parents and seek their blessing: who knows the effect of the power of the parental curse? She had reasoned. She had gone home at midday and found him lying on the grass under the barn. She saw from his emaciated face that he was very ill; she suddenly felt kindly toward him. He was all alone. He spoke to her with difficulty. He asked her for water. She went into the house and poured some water into a cup and took it to him. His hands trembled. He looked up at her. Then he slowly shook his head. ‘You look exactly like your mother when she was young,’ he said, and his voice was soft. Maybe, she had thought, maybe he was remembering a time when it was possible to love. And indeed in that second she too remembered the time when she used to sit on her father’s knees and he would sing to her. It was a brilliant sunny spot in her childhood before he became obsessed with the idea of making money. Her heart mellowed toward him. She wanted to confess all her failings and ask for forgiveness. He looked at her again. He said: ‘Have you any money? Five shillings? Twenty shillings?’ She picked up her handbag. She saw him suddenly beam bright on his face, his emaciated hands were trembling with eagerness. He started praising her in a most exaggerated tone, saying that he knew all the time she would later be his blessing in his old age. He complained to her how her mother treated him, cheating him out of his money. And not just his mother: it seemed as if all the neighbourhood had ganged up to deny him his share of the money in Kenya. Only Wanja was left. And suddenly her hands became frozen in the very act of pulling out a note. So only money, no matter how it was got, could redeem her in his eyes? And she had thought . . . She could not buy his love or his blessings or buy her way back to the home with money. She said: ‘I have nothing!’ and she shut the handbag. Then he started condemning everybody: he had known that all his children were useless . . . She walked away, went to the nearest bar and wept and drank all the money she had. Later she heard the news of his death and she did not cry. He had died of cancer.

She rested on her bed in the old hut, turning over these things in
her head . . . these silhouettes from the past . . . these images that refused to be burnt right out of her life and memory. She wanted a new life . . . clean . . . she felt this was the meaning of her recent escape! Already she felt the stirrings of a new person . . . she had after all been baptized by fire. And to think that it was Munira and Abdulla who were instrumental in her double narrow escapes, in her getting yet another chance to try out new paths, new possibilities? Yet would there now be any better chance for her? Whatever would happen to her she would always shiver at the horror of that moment . . . she still wondered how or from where she could have got the strength to do what she had done . . .

Somebody knocked at the door. Who could it be? There was another knock, then the door opened and—

‘Mother!’ Wanja gasped.

‘My child . . . fire again!’ her now aged mother cried out. They wept together, maybe both weeping out their different memories.

‘A whole month, and I did not know. I heard about it only the other day and that from a mere stranger!’

And she explained how an acquaintance had asked after Wanja’s health, whether she had recovered from the fire. And Wanja’s mother had felt very weak at the knees and she was only able to stand and walk because of her faith in the mercy and the infinite justice of Christ.

For the next few weeks they just talked, softly, treading toward the past, but never quite bringing it into the open. The only thing they discussed at length was their refusal to go to Tea. Wanja was thinking: maybe nobody could really escape his fate. Maybe life was a series of false starts, which, once discovered, called for more renewed efforts at yet another beginning. Suddenly she could no longer keep her fears and hopes from the elder woman:

‘I think . . . I am . . . I think I am with child. No, I am sure of it, mother.’

Her mother was silent for a few seconds.

‘Whose . . . whose child?’

Wanja got a piece of charcoal and a piece of cardboard. For one hour or so she remained completely absorbed in her sketching. And suddenly she felt lifted out of her own self, she felt waves of emotion
she had never before experienced. The figure began to take shape on the board. It was a combination of the sculpture she once saw at the lawyer’s place in Nairobi and images of Kimathi in his moments of triumph and laughter and sorrow and terror – but without one limb. When it was over, she felt a tremendous calm, a kind of inner assurance of the possibilities of a new kind of power. She handed the picture to her mother.

‘Who . . . who is this . . . with . . . with so much pain and suffering on his face? And why is he laughing at the same time?’

3 ~ Abdulla and Joseph sat outside their hovel in the New Jerusalem, talking. Joseph was now a tall youth in a neat uniform of khaki shirt and shorts. He held Sembene Ousmane’s novel,
God’s Bits of Wood
, in his hands but he was not reading much. The sun was brilliantly warm over Ilmorog but it also made the smell of urine and rotting garbage waft through the air to where they sat. But they were used to the smells. Joseph was saying that he was confident of passing his exams. He would have liked to go to another school for his Higher School Certificate but this was not possible because he had not applied to move. Abdulla’s mind was elsewhere. He was glad he had saved Wanja. But he still did not know what to make of the experience. So Munira was capable of such an act? He did not know whether to admire or to be angry with him: to loathe his sneaking cowardice or to praise his courage. After all, he had carried out what he, Abdulla, had contemplated doing without ever bringing himself to do it. Joseph was still chattering:

‘It’s very strange,’ he said. ‘It’s very strange that Chui was killed at the time he was killed.’

‘Why?’ asked Abdulla perfunctorily. But he was jolted by Joseph’s reply.

‘Because the students were planning another strike.’

‘Another strike? Why?’

‘Chui ran the school from golf clubs and the board-rooms of the various companies of which he was a director, or else from his numerous wheatfields in the Rift Valley. The junior staff – the workers on the school compound – were going to join us. And one or two
teachers were sympathetic. They too had grievances, about pay and conditions of work and Chui’s neglect . . . This time we were going to demand that the school should be run by a committee of students, staff and workers . . . But even now we are determined to put to an end the whole prefect system . . . And that all our studies should be related to the liberation of our people . . .’

Abdulla lost interest in Joseph’s catalogue of ills at Siriana. He was reviewing his own life. He recalled his own childhood at Kinyogori, remembered the many elders, men and women who used to come and talk long into the night. Ngang’a wa Riunge. Johanna Kiraka. Naftali Michuki. Ziporah Ndiri. True patriots of Kenya. They would talk and whisper long into the night, reviewing the history of Limuru, denouncing those who had sold out to the white foreign interests like Luka, but praising those who had stood up and fought against settler encroachment. They talked about how in years to come all the land in the area would be returned to all the mbari ya Limuru, the children of the soil. KCA. KAU. They talked about all this and they would end up singing songs of hope and songs of struggle. How Abdulla had loved those songs. How they had moved him to heights of glory to come! He saw Nding’uri, he reviewed his own narrow escape, his flight to the forest, his arrest and detention, his return home to loss and to a kind of gain. And suddenly Abdulla felt he should tell Joseph the truth about his past. He felt guilty when he remembered how he used to curse at Joseph, taking out his frustrations on the little one, and the little one bearing it, thinking that maybe it came from his returned brother. It was strange how Joseph had never asked him about ‘their’ parents and, except for his delirium during the journey to the city, never referred to his childhood. Maybe he knew the truth. Maybe . . .

‘Joseph,’ Abdulla suddenly said, as if he had not heard about the strike in Siriana. ‘If I have treated you wrong in the past, forgive me.’

‘Why? There’s nothing to forgive,’ Joseph replied, struck by Abdulla’s sudden change of subject and tone. ‘I am very grateful for what you have done for me. And also Munira and Wanja and Karega. When I grow up and finish school and university I want to be like you: I would like to feel proud that I had done something for our
people. You fought for the political independence of this country: I would like to contribute to the liberation of the people of this country. I have been reading a lot about Mau Mau: I hope that one day we shall make Karuna-ini, where Kimathi was born, and Othaya, where J. M. was born, national shrines. And build a theatre in memory of Kimathi, because as a teacher he organized the Gichamu Theatre Movement in Tetu . . . I have been reading a lot about what the workers and peasants of other lands have done in history. I have read about the people’s revolutions in China, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Angola, Guinea, Mozambique . . . Oh yes, and the works of Lenin and Mao . . .’

He was talking like Karega, Abdulla thought, but he did not say anything. Maybe . . . maybe, he thought, history was a dance in a huge arena of God. You played your part, whatever your chosen part, and then you left the arena, swept aside by the waves of a new step, a new movement in the dance. Other dancers, younger, brighter, more inventive came and played with even greater skill, with more complicated footwork, before they too were swept aside by yet a greater tide in the movement they had helped to create, and other dancers were thrown up to carry the dance to even newer heights and possibilities undreamt of by an earlier generation. Let it be . . . Let it be . . . His time was over. He was fated by the present circumstances to remain a petty fruit-seller on the verge of ruin. But he was glad that he had saved a life when he was on a mission of taking one, and he would be happy to know that Wanja was happy and that sometimes she remembered him.

4 ~ Just before the trial, Munira’s father and mother and his wife, accompanied by Rev. Jerrod, came to see him. They all found it difficult to hit on an appropriate subject of conversation. Munira looked at his tall father who, despite having traversed Kenya’s colonial history – he was more than 75 years old – was still very strong and healthy. What did he really think of this world? He who had seen the pre-colonial, feudal clan-heads and houses decline and fall; who had witnessed the coming of missionaries; of the railway; the first and second war; the Mau-Mau upheavals; the post-Independence trials –
the murders of Pinto, Mboya, Kungu Karumba, J. M., the detention of Shikuku, Seroney, oathings to protect properties – all this: what did he think of it? Munira inquired about his brothers and his sisters and it was as if they were not blood relations at all, so remote and removed they seemed to be from the present circumstances: