Wizard of the Crow (6 page)

The cathedral became a popular spot packed every Sunday with people eager for titillating details about the couple’s lust and engagement with Satan. There was not even standing room left inside, and many would simply gather outside the doors and windows the better to catch glimpses of the heroic couple as they told their story.

It was bound to happen that this story would reach the desks of
news editors, and one newspaper, the
Daily Gossip,
increased sales severalfold when it started carrying versions of Maritha and Mariko’s serial confessions; and the war against Satan became the subject of talk at crossroads, marketplaces, shopping centers, and bars. Whenever and wherever young men and women met, they would say half in jest: Oh, my dear, you have afflicted me with a severe case of Maritha and Mariko, or I feel a Mariko and a Maritha for you—what do you say to that r

To the dwellers of Eldares, particularly those living in Santalucia, the story of Maritha and Mariko and their epic battle against the Satan of Lust became bigger than even the arrival of the Global Bank mission to study the feasibility of funding the proposed Marching to Heaven. The story of an ordinary man and woman standing up to the mighty Satan gripped their imagination, curious as they were as to how it would all end.

On the fortieth day of Maritha and Mariko’s first confession to visitation by the Devil, people flocked to All Saints as never before. Forty was significant. It was after the same number of days that Jesus Christ had returned home from the desert victorious over Satan. But when Maritha and Mariko gave witness to the Lord and confessed that Satan was still after them, people, and especially the young, were confused, some clearly upset. Why hadn’t Satan taken on his equals in Hell instead of relentlessly pursuing Maritha and Mariko? What particularly annoyed them were Satan’s cowardly tactics: preying on old Maritha and Mariko when alone or just about to close their eyes. Satan is a big bully, they said. He dare not come here.

But others cautioned the congregation not to become complacent; the only reason Satan had not dared to come back to soil the holy grounds was because the ignominious exit forced on him by Bishop Tireless Kanogori only a few months before was still fresh in his memory.

The youth, especially the recently saved, took up the challenge
and after the service remained behind to put their heads together, quickly vowing to do for Santalucia what the bishop had done for All Saints. They would comb every nook and creek in Santalucia to ferret Satan out, and if they failed to catch him they would at least scare the shit out of him.

So, they took on the name Soldiers of Christ and vowed to fight till the Devil let Maritha and Mariko live their lives in peace. They would arm themselves with the Bible for a shield, a hymnbook for a diet, and the cross doubling as a walking stick and a cane with which to chase out Satan. The Evil One must move or be made to move. They broke into a call-and-response battle hymn.

They strode with hope and confidence that other young men and women would answer their clarion call to war and join them in their hunt for Satan.

The Soldiers of Christ did not at first know exactly where or how to begin their hunt for Satan.

Tourists, beggars, and prostitutes dogged one another in the streets during the day and met again in the evenings outside seven-star hotels, as if these shrines of luxury belonged equally to the rich, the tourist, the beggar, and the prostitute, the major difference being that at night the rich, the tourist, and prostitute stayed in while the beggar found himself out in the open, enduring rain or cold. But as soon as dawn broke they all reconnected.

Every beggar knew one or two words of English, German, Japanese, Italian, and French, though Kiswahili dominated their speech.
Help the poor.
Saidia Maskini. Bakheesh.
There were a few who played music on homemade guitars and drums, while others performed comic sketches that now and then lured a coin or two from an amused tourist. They tried to station themselves on streets most frequented by tourists, resulting in a lot of pushing and shoving for advantage.

Sometimes the police raided the beggars, but just for show, for Aburlria’s prisons were already full. Most beggars would have been quite happy to be jailed for the meal and a bed. The government also had to be mindful not to upset tourism by sweeping too many beggars off the streets. Pictures of beggars or wild animals were what many tourists sent back home as proof of having been in Africa. In Aburlria, wild animals were becoming rare because of dwindling forests and poaching, and tourist pictures of beggars or children with kwashior-kor and flies massing around their runny noses and sore eyes were prized for their authenticity. If there were no beggars in the streets, tourists might start doubting whether Aburlria was an authentic African country.

The Soldiers of Christ took stock of the situation. What kind of places was Satan likely to haunt? In what guise? He is full of tricks, for, as they would remind themselves, was he, Lucifer, not born before even the world came to be? If he could turn himself into a snake and crawl through the walls of the Garden of Eden under God’s surveillance, what was to prevent him now from assuming the form of a human, another animal, or even a stone? Why were Maritha and Mariko unable to name the objects of their desire? Because it was Satan himself who appeared to them in different guises. Maybe Satan had now disguised himself as a tourist, a prostitute, a beggar, or any of the hundreds milling the streets, or …

“Look,” one of the soldiers shouted, pointing a finger at something across the street, a sculpture of the Ruler on horseback. The Soldiers of Christ quickly read his mind, for the bronze sculpture reminded them of the not so distant spectacle of the Devil worshipper riding a donkey in imitation of Christ, an act of sacrilege for sure. But why did the vision appear to them at this moment? In their hour of need? They recalled that God had forbidden the Children of Israel to make graven images. Why? Because Satan could easily hide in a sculpted image. Inspecting the sculptures of the Ruler was no easy task, as
they soon found out. The Ruler’s monuments were all over every street in Eldares.

There he is on a horse in full flight and on others cantering. Here he is standing on a pedestal with hands raised in a gesture of benediction over passersby There the commander in chief in military garb, a sword raised as if inspecting a guard of honor, and on another as if leading a charge. Here he is, the great teacher in a university cap and gown. There the thoughtful ruler in a moody pose.

They did not find Satan among the sculptures. They looked inside high-rise and low-rise buildings, side by side with shacks made of discarded cardboard and sheets of plastic. Italian, Chinese, Indian, and Greek restaurants faced kiosks serving soul food of collard greens and
ugali.
From the big restaurants issued the smell of sizzling steaks; from the sidewalks came the smell of cracking corn and hazelnuts on charcoal.

Results were not good. Like the wise men from the East who encountered numerous difficulties on their way to see the infant in the manger, the Soldiers of Christ endured many hardships in their search for Satan inside the many buildings of Eldares. In some bars they were met with derisive laughter, and once some drunks threw orange peels at their faces. In the seven-star hotels they were often thrown out and eventually banned as nauseating to guests. And outside, in the streets, where sleek Mercedes-Benzes, donkey carts, and hand-pulled carriages competed for space and the right of way in pot-holed roads, the sun and dust were not anymore merciful; not to speak of the police who sometimes chased them, suspecting them of being beggars, and tourists who ran after them with cameras, taking them to be holy beggars. They were often hungry and thirsty and tired, and the stench in the streets of Eldares did not improve matters.

Those were the days when instead of being lined with trees the streets of Eldares were lined on either side with mountains of garbage. Some shop owners paid private garbage collectors to clear access to their premises, so that here and there, particularly in the central business zone, there were some clean patches. In many other streets there was nothing but flies, worms, and the stench of rot.

Was this stench part of Satan’s arsenal with which to drive us away? they wondered. For all we know he could be hiding in the
garbage hills, laughing at us even as we look for him among people, buildings, and the sculptures of the Ruler? No, he is not going to stink us out of our search, they said defiantly.

But no matter how brave they felt, the more they talked about the wiles of Satan, the more they came to realize that fighting with someone they could not actually see with their own eyes was not easy. In these low moments, they would remind themselves that they were Soldiers of Christ, and as the Bible says, they had to fight the good fight. Happy are they who suffer for my sake. Revived by such thoughts, they would hold their crosses aloft with renewed vigor and sing themselves hoarse.

One Friday afternoon in the outskirts of Santamaria as they were feeling good about themselves, three men ran toward them shouting in pure terror, Satan! Satan! They hid behind the banner of the Soldiers of Christ. Please help us … Satan is after us …

The soldiers, who had been singing and speaking in tongues, were struck by the irony of the situation. When they were thinking only of Satan, they did not find him. But now, at the height of joy and consciousness of Grace Abounding, when they were thinking only of Jesus, they heard news of Satan.

“What are you talking about?” they asked in unison.

“Satan … he is giving us hell! Help us!”

“Where is he?” asked the Soldiers of Christ excitedly, though still baffled and a little frightened by this dramatic turn of events.

Perhaps battling Satan in the spirit was less daunting than facing him in the flesh … but this was their moment and they were not about to shun the call.

He was tired, hungry, and thirsty and felt beaten down by the sun. He wanted to climb to the top, when suddenly he felt very weak in the knees and collapsed at the foot of the mountain of garbage. He could not tell whether he was in a temporary coma or a deep sleep, but when a slight breeze blew it lifted him out of himself to the sky, where he now floated. He could still see his own body lying on the ground and the mountain of garbage, where children and dogs fought over signs of meat on white bones. The body needs a rest from you and you need a rest from the body, he heard himself saying to himself. He decided to let his body lie there in the sun, and, free of the body, he wandered Aburiria—why leave the exploration and enjoyment of our country to tourists? he said with a chuckle to himself—comparing the conditions in the different towns and regions of the country.

This is really funny, he said to himself when he saw that he looked like a bird and floated like a bird; he enjoyed the rush of cold air against his wings. He now recalled a Christian song he had once heard:

He started to sing but because he could not open his beak as wide as his mouth what came out was a whistling reminiscent of the song of the birds he had listened to in the mornings in the wilderness.

From his vantage point, he had a bird’s-eye view of the northern, southern, eastern, western, and central regions of Aburiria. The landscape ranged from the coastal plains to the region of the great lakes; to the arid bushlands in the east; to the central highlands and northern mountains. People differed as much in the languages they spoke as in the clothes they wore and how they eked out a living. Some
fished, others herded cattle and goats, and others worked on the land, but everywhere, particularly in towns, the contours of life were the same as those of Eldares. Everywhere people were hungry, thirsty, and in rags. In most towns, shelters made out of cardboard, scrap metal, old tires, and plastic were home to hundreds of children and adults. He found it ironic that, as in Eldares, these shacks stood side by side with mansions of tile, stone, glass, and concrete. Similarly, in the environs of cities and towns huge plantations of coffee, tea, cocoa, cotton, sisal, and rubber shared borders with exhausted strips of land cultivated by peasants. Cows with udders full with milk grazed on lush lands as scrawny others ambled on thorny and stony grounds.

So I am not alone, he heard himself say to his bird self. Maybe he should abandon his human form and remain a bird, floating effortlessly in the sky, bathing in the fresh air of Skyland, but then he started sneezing as a whiff of gases from the factories below reached him. Is there no place on earth or in the sky where a person might escape this poison? A bit confused, he thought that before making any decision about the form in which he would lead the rest of his life he should return to his body lying in the sun to recover and review the shocks of the day. But what if his body had been completely scorched by the sun? At the thought he flapped his wings and hurried back to Eldares.

He arrived not a minute too early. A rotation truck full of garbage had just pulled up at the foot of the trash mountain. He was about to reenter his body but he held himself in check and floated a bit longer to see what they would do with his shell.

The driver and two men got out and looked at the body for a few seconds. Then one of them bent, put his ear to the chest, and proclaimed the body dead, provoking an exchange as to what they should do with the corpse. They did not want to call the police; it would take the cops a whole day to come, and they had work to do. In any case they did not want to get caught up in endless court proceedings. There was always the possibility that they might be accused of murder and end up in prison or have their heads chopped off or lose a lot of money to bribe their way out. But to leave the body there might result in as much.