Some passengers were talking about the visit of the Ruler to America and how well it was going. How would they react, he wondered, were he to tell them that the Ruler was suffering from some kind of self-induced expansion? What if I were to tell them that I have just come back from America, that I have just left the Ruler and his entourage at the VIP Hotel between Fifth and Sixth avenues in Manhattan, near Washington Square and New York University?
It was early in the morning when he got to Santalucia. The bliss of a future with Nyawlra possessed him, and now, at the nearness of their reunion, he wondered how he would react on seeing her and how things had gone at the shrine. Should he run and embrace her, or should he hide behind the hedge and then walk stealthily behind her and put his hands over her eyes?
About two hundred yards away, he suddenly stopped and rubbed his eyes. Was he not seeing properly? He looked again. Did I take the wrong turn? But surely even if he were blind he would still know the way home. He hurried along. But the closer he got to the site, the more he felt strength draining from his legs and arms. He now stood dead in his tracks.
The site where once stood the house that he and Nyawlra had built together, his home, his shrine, was a mass of burnt black debris.
3
A cat stood some yards away, staring at him with green eyes as he walked about listlessly, picking up one thing and another and then letting them drop. Where do I begin the search for her? he asked himself as he sat down again to work out what he would do next. And what if the fire had not been an accident?
He would ask his neighbors what had happened, but the nearest were some distance away. He had to approach them circumspectly so as not to raise suspicions about who he was and his interest in the matter.
The reactions of the neighbors he approached were all disconcerting. He would start with greetings, which were met with friendly responses, but the moment he mentioned the shrine of the Wizard of the Crow, their faces and demeanors would change—friendly eyes would assume the look of fear. I don’t know what you are talking about, they would say as they scampered away or reverted to their chores or shut the door in his face. He stopped knocking at people’s doors and took to the streets.
He met an old man carrying a parcel dangling from one end of a stick over his shoulder. Kamltl dispensed with politeness and asked him about the burned-down shrine. The old man took to his heels, shouting as if he wanted the whole world to know that he was running: My heels are smoking; witness my heels smoking from the swiftness of my running! In happier times, Kamltl would have burst out laughing.
He sat down on a mound of earth and covered his face with his hands as if to hold back tears. He felt defeated. He had called her from America but had found the line dead, not unusual for telephones in Aburlria. He had thought nothing of it. Now he wished he and Nyawlra had taken advantage of mobile phones.
Suddenly he became aware of a presence near him. He opened his eyes and was startled to see the old man standing there; he had heard no footsteps.
“Why did you ask me about that house?” the old man asked.
“I just wanted to know what happened,” Kamltl answered.
“Why? Can’t you see that the house is burnt down?”
“Who burned it?”
“Do you believe in God?” the old man asked.
Kamltl was about to say something rude, but he restrained himself.
“Yes, I do.”
“And you believe that he is the Lord, Ruler of Heaven and Earth?”
“I am not into religions, but that’s correct.”
“Praise the Lord,” the old man said, raising his voice as if he wanted passersby to hear him.
“Was it an accident or arson?” Kamltl asked irritably.
“Accident? Praise the Lord,” the old man repeated.
“Were there any casualties?” Kamltl asked, thinking that the man was crazed.
But instead of answering him the old man bent forward a little, looked Kamltl in the eye, and spoke in whispers.
“Didn’t you just now say that you believe in God, the Lord above?”
“Why? How many Gods are there?” Kamltl asked impatiently.
“That’s the question. There is only one God. But there are many Lords. Have you ever thought about that?”
“Please don’t speak to me in riddles. Say directly what you are trying to tell me.”
“I just wanted to assure you that the God above is just and wise.”
“And therefore?”
“He works in mysterious ways.”
“So what?” Kamltl asked desperately.
“Praise the Lord and thank the Almighty that dwells high above us,” he mumbled, and started walking away, shouting, “Praise the Lord!” He soon disappeared.
4
What was the man trying to tell him? The Lord could be heavenly or earthly. The people who had burned the shrine down had some connection to the Ruler. Praise the Lord. There had been no casualties: so Praise the Lord. This interpretation was a relief. Nyawlra was very much alive. But where was she? Was she hurt or not? Was she in the hospital, or had she been captured? How would he find out? Where would he begin his search? But if Nyawlra had been captured, the story would have been in the newspapers. He combed through the archives of the Eldares Times in vain: no recent references to Nyawlra, the Movement for the Voice of the People, or arson. He went to the police headquarters under the guise of a reporter from the Eldares Times to learn of recent arrests or accidents in the different regions of the country, but again he came up empty. He visited hospitals only to learn nothing.
As the days and weeks of his search went by, he grew thin and began to look a far different person from the one who had come back home from America. Because his search had yielded no bad news, there were times when he was certain that Nyawlra was alive and free. At other times, he wondered whether she was in the custody of the secret police controlled by Minister Sikiokuu. When he had divined for Sikiokuu he always saw Nyawlra as ending up in a crowd, and so he started looking for her wherever people gathered to do good.
He visited Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches; Muslim mosques; and Hindu, Sikh, Jain, and Jewish temples throughout the country: there were no signs of Nyawlra in these places of worship.
It was then that he came across some queues, slow, inexorable processions, and he did not know if they were new or a continuation of the old ones. But whether old or new, it did not matter to him: he saw only a gathering of people where the spirit of Nyawlra might dwell and so started looking for her among them. He himself did not fall in line. He ran beside each queue, his face turned to the right or left depending on which side of the line he ran along. Since every day and everywhere the queues were multiplying, this severely strained his neck.
Once he bumped into a procession that seemed better organized than any he had come across so far, its clear sense of purpose expressed in a song:
The people have spoken
The people have spoken
Give me back my voice
The people have spoken
Give me back the voice you took from me
The scene changed daily; increasingly he met more people singing about the people’s voice and heading for Eldares. Still, he persisted in his search, tagging along most of them but, like the motorcycle riders, finding that they had no beginning or end.
It came out of nowhere: What if Nyawlra had left him and taken up with another, maybe one of her young comrades? He recalled how Margaret Wariara, later a victim of the deadly virus, had left him. Was there something about him that drove the people he most loved away from him? But try as he might, he could not imagine Nyawlra leaving him without saying good-bye. But then again, had he ever imagined that Wariara, a homely woman, would prostitute herself among tourists in big hotels?
This image of Wariara jolted him into looking for Nyawlra in the bars mushrooming all over the country. They sold all brands of beer and liquor, and fights often erupted as drinkers made
claims and counterclaims about the superiority of their brand. He felt awkward just standing around or sitting in a corner without a drink, at least a soda.
He started having a little taste now and then to blend with the drinking crowd. At first he confined himself to one glass a day. But with every passing day, the amount of alcohol he consumed grew. The beer was now his temple. On waking up from a drunken stupor, his reality threatening to engulf him, he would rush back to the temple for salvation. Alcohol never disappointed, always keeping his worries at bay.
His resources were depleted, and he now spent his days looking for cheaper but more potent brew instead of Nyawlra. He would come to think of Nyawlra and even the Wizard of the Crow as characters in a dream in another country far away and long ago. He now had new friends, drunkards like him, and when he had no money he would beg them for a shot or two.
There was much storytelling and ribald joking among the drinking crowd. One day in a bar he found a man reading to a crowded bar from a book he called Devil on the Cross. Whenever he emptied his glass, he would stop and announce that his beak needed wetting. He would resume only after his glass had been replenished by those around him. Inspired by the man’s success in procuring free drinks, Kamltl himself became a talemonger. He told how once he had left his body in a garbage dump and flown high above it as a bird before returning to it just as garbage collectors were about to bury it. The crowd was not impressed with Kamltl’s tales, except for a drunk who always sat by himself in a corner as if in hiding. He who hardly ever said anything now suddenly raised his voice: What did you sayr
The other drunks were surprised to hear the man’s voice, and they asked one another: Has Baalam’s donkey found his voice at lastr Thinking that he was finally beginning to attract an interested audience, Kamltl repeated his story. The drunk, known as Mr. Walking Stick—he sported one with a cross-shaped handle—walked over and gazed at him with something like terror in his eyes, shook his head, and walked back, mumbling, No, it cannot be, he does not carry a bag on his back like the other one. And he has no horns. Nevertheless, the drunk, who had been a permanent fixture in that bar, changed location and thereafter moved from bar to bar, saying to inquisitive tongues, Too long a stay in one seat tires the buttocks.
On another occasion Kamrö told the same drinking crowd how he became a bird and visited all of Africa and the Caribbean Islands, and this was too much for his listeners, who told him to take his naked lies to gullible fools elsewhere. Somehow his stories or the manner of their telling lacked the power that carried people to worlds they had never visited, that showed them wonders they had never seen, that made them forget, for a time, the familiar milieu of endless misery, and so they did not bring many replenishments of drinks. He gave up storytelling, though grudgingly. With not much flowing into his glass, he sometimes left the bars early for what had now become his home, his razed shrine, where he would wake up to find a cat snuggling against him, the same cat that he saw when he first came to the charred ruins. As on that day the cat would mew once and walk away, leaving him wondering if he should follow it but without once bringing himself to do so.
One night, as he was walking out of his favorite bar, he noticed a poster on the wall and something about it made him stop in his tracks. It bore a vague resemblance to him, at least to how he looked before alcohol had taken over his mind and body. No, it was not his face, then or now, because he had never grown his hair long, and the beard made him look like some kind of black Jesus. As he went nearer and touched the poster, the face depicted now slightly suggested Sikiokuu. The writing declared THE WIZARD OF THE CROW, WANTED FOR A PRIZE. He rubbed his eyes and looked at it again. There was a number to call. Why a prize? For what? Was the prize for him, or for whomever turned him in? He was completely at a loss to know what to do, especially when in the days that followed he found other posters with conflicting messages.
One afternoon he went to his bar, Sell-Me-Death, and although he was already totally drunk he still hoped for one more glass. He saw a riderless red motorcycle against the wall where one of the posters of the beard of Jesus Christ on Sikiokuu’s face hung, but this did not bother him; in fact, the war of posters no longer worried him.
What made him envious, even in his drunken state, was the sight of people crowded around a storyteller whose tales and manner of telling them captured the imagination of the audience so much so that some of them had even forgotten that they had come here to drink. The climax came when the storyteller lowered his voice and made hints about knowing something about the pregnancy of a president. People whistled. Then silence, waiting for more. A pregnant president?
“It’s true! Haki ya Mungu!” said the storyteller in a raised voice.
5
Kamltl could not see the face of the storyteller clearly. But the phrase True, Haki ya Mungu jolted him out of a slumberous languor. When and where did he last hear that phraser
“Even the white doctors were baffled by the strange happening,” the storyteller continued. “But the Wizard of the Crow? Oh, no, not him. I was in the plane when the letter was read and I heard everything. Mr. President, the letter said, you are pregnant and nobody knows what you will bear.”
Who is this man who is mouthing my words? thought Kamltl. And why is he distorting them? Why is he turning them into lies? He felt that he could not let the storymonger go on twisting the meaning of his words. He felt like a writer whose work has been lifted by another only to skew its form and content. Despite being drunk, he felt a need to insist on his writing integrity.
“Hapana! That was not how it went!” he heard himself speaking out, to the consternation of the audience.
They turned toward Kamltl. Those who knew him from this or other bars simply dismissed him as the same drunk who was always trying to spoil a good story. The storyteller was both intrigued and bemused by the intervention. Who was this who had questioned his story in a way that no other listener had done in all the places he had told his tale? “Hapana! It is not how it was. Machokali is my witness. I left him a note there, at the reception, yes, of the, I mean at the reception of the hotel—uh, what did they call it? VIP. New York, yes, Very Important People Hotel, New York, with so many yellow taxis and black garbage bags. Why yellow? Why black? Don’t ask me. Now, what was I saying? My note was addressed to one person and one person only, Machokali, the Minister for Foreigners, I mean, Affairs. And I just wanted to tell him one thing only. One thing. Take care of yourself. Why? I will say it again. This country is pregnant, and what it will bear, nobody knows. That was all. I cannot take this war on my words anymore. I am leaving …”
Kamltl staggered toward the door. But even before he reached it, a few listeners had blurted, This drunk has spoken the truth. There is something not right about this country. Then they suddenly ceased to speak, so mesmerized were they by what was unfolding before them. The storyteller, shaking with terror, was running, trying to catch up to the drunk.
“Wizard of the Crow,” the storyteller called out. “Don’t you remember me? I am Arigaigai Gathere, alias A.G.”
Still more wonders were to come. A man who had just arrived at the bar called out: “Wizard of the Crow! I am Elijah Njoya, the one who took you to the airport, remember?”
Kamltl showed no sign of recognition.
The roar of a motorcycle outside was heard, and within seconds its rider was standing at the door, panting. “Wizard of the Crow,” he said, “I am Peter Kahiga. You remember me, don’t you?”
Kamltl did not so much as open his mouth.
The three men, A.G., Kahiga, and Njoya, now said in unison: You are wanted at the State House!
But Kamltl wa Karlmlri, alias the Wizard of the Crow, did not seem to hear the trio but continued staggering toward the door, followed by the three police, who were in turn followed by the bar crowd. He went outside, stumbled a bit along the road, stopped, and threw up on the grass by the roadside. He fell and lay in the vomit; almost immediately he started snoring.
For his part, the Wizard of the Crow heard none of this. He showed no sign of consciousness, not even when tied to the backseat of A.G.’s motorcycle. With Njoya in front and Kahiga at the rear, the three motorcyclists zoomed triumphantly toward the State House.
6
Those left behind at the bar fell into a heated dispute as to what had just happened, each trying to impose his version on others, all except one, who hid behind the door, clutching a cross-shaped walking stick as if to defend himself, his mind absorbed by the drama outside. He was Mr. Walking Stick, a wanderer from bar to bar after he had heard Kamltl teil how he had once floated in the sky while his body reposed on a dumpsite. Now the very apparition he had tried to avoid had found him. Stricken with terror, as soon as he saw the motorcycles vanish in the distance, he quietly left the bar, clutching his walking stick, not quite believing his own luck. Once on the road he started running in the opposite direction.
Wizard of the Crow Page 67