I Am the Bread of Life
You who come to Me shall not hunger
And who Believe in Me shall not thirst
No one can come to Me unless the Father Beckons
The priest’s voice rose powerfully above the organ music as he led the Mass into the soulful chorus:
And I will Raise You Up
And I Will Raise You Up
And I will Raise You Up on the Last Day
The church was crammed, and Sunday-goers spilled out into the yard at the front of the church, where speakers, mounted in the trees, intoned the Mass for those who were unable to see the pulpit. The priest proceeded to bless the congregation, and to drink from the holy cup, after which he blessed the Bible and the rosary—the latter which was made of pure gold, like the band on his right ring finger. When the blessings were done, the benevolent priest launched into the preparatory prayer with the steadiness and calm of old-school Blues singers.
“Oh, most merciful Jesus, with a contrite heart and penitent spirit, I bow down in profound humility before Thy divine majesty. I adore Thee, I hope in Thee, I love Thee above all things. I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, my Supreme and Only God. I resolve to amend my life, and although I am unworthy to obtain mercy, yet the sight of Thy cross, on which Thou didst die, inspires me with hope and consolation.…”
By the time the priest came to the final “Amen” a holy hush had settled over his flock, envisioning as they were the Way of the Cross that was to follow. The sermon focused on the need for redemption, urging churchgoers to examine their inner lives and reflect upon the values for which Christ gave his life. These readings, from the books of John 19 and Luke 23, set the stage for the subsequent procession to the Stations of the Cross. One of the altar boys, spying a quick gesture from the priest indicating his thirst, approached the lectern with a crystal glass and a carafe of water. He poured a healthy portion of “water”—in fact, vodka required by the priest to “steady his nerves”—into the glass from which the priest took a hefty swallow.
The priest then broke the bread and conducted sacrament. At the offering that followed, he urged everyone to yet again examine their consciences and give generously to God, as He had been generous to them. As the choir launched into song the altar boys brought out the bags and started collecting the offertory, carefully working the pews until everyone had been reached, including those gathered outside. After the priest had blessed the offerings, they were taken into the vestry and deposited in a particular bag.
The Way of the Cross began at the first of the two stations within the church compound where Jesus was condemned to death. The priest intoned in a deep and solemn voice, “We adore Thee, Oh Christ, and we praise Thee”—to which the flock genuflected, “Because by Thy holy cross Thou hast redeemed the world!”
“Christ” was represented by a solemn young man in starched white robes. The carpenter, who had been assigned the task of preparing the cross, had chosen a weighty mahogany and cut sharp edges that would dig into Christ’s shoulders as he dragged it through the streets of Jerusalem on his way to Calvary. First, however, the procession had to travel the busy Maai Mahiu Road, up into the hills to the old church. The traffic marshals waved their arms in an authoritative manner, ensuring that everyone marched in single file up the winding road, hewn out of the cliff by Italian prisoners of war decades before. Massive eighteen-wheelers bore down on them periodically in clouds of exhaust, rumbling on their way from Nairobi to Rironi and Narok. As for the motorists caught up in the mile-long snarl-up behind the flock, there was little they could do but lean on their steering wheels and wait for the solemn procession to reach Golgotha.
The church members initially assumed their destination to be the tiny chapel built into the scarp by the Italian prisoners—the smallest Catholic church in the world. But the priest, who was at the head of the procession, turned abruptly, following a narrow track that wound its way up the escarpment, a track that had been traditionally used by herders and charcoal burners. It was a steep climb, but the priest urged them on. “Think of Christ,” he told them, “who suffered for your sins.”
The track negotiated its way through the craggy acacia and euphorbia trees that clung to the steep slope, and ended in a wide clearing at the top of the scarp, where the herders brought their cattle to browse on the grey moor. It was a spectacular place, with the expansive azure sky above them, and the Rift Valley spreading out below like a painting on a canvas. They were on the edge of a cliff, with the whole world spread out at their feet.
The priest did not allow the flock to admire the scenery for long. Raising his voice in the thin mountain air he reminded them that they were in the Lord’s presence, and that they had to remove their shoes and prostrate themselves, lest they be smitten down. It was here that Jesus—so weary he could barely stand—was to be stripped of his garments in readiness to be nailed to the cross. “Simon of Cyrene” emerged from the acacia thickets, dragging the heavy mahogany cross behind him.
“Fac ut ardeat cor meum…in amando Christum Deum…” the priest passionately declaimed as he gestured for the flock to prostrate themselves at the foot of the cross, their foreheads in the sand. In this focal moment around which the institution of the Church was built he found himself slipping easily into the language in which he had mastered the scriptures. The remaining parishioners, emerging from the thickets, gazed upon the afflicted Christ, his head crowned in thorns, his face streaked with tomato paste, and they were so overcome with emotion that they fell to the ground without instruction.
“We are on Golgotha, in the presence of our Lord’s torment,” the priest continued. “Lose yourself in prayer and you will surely feel the Lord’s presence in this holy place; and if you should feel your body shaking or hands moving on your back, do not be afraid. Keep your head down and pray for repentance, for you are in the presence of our Lord and the heavenly angels will deliver you of your sins, which will be driven into the wild swine that live in the valley.”
The altar boy, observing the strain on the priest’s face, poured him another glass of “water,” which the holy functionary drained in one deep swallow, readying himself for the penultimate stage of the Passion of the Christ. “Sancta Mater istud agas,” he continued, his face a film of sweat, his voice quivering with a passionate dedication to his task. “Crucifixi fige plagas…” The faithful lay prostrate in neat rows, their heads buried in the moor, each lost in their own personal meditation with God.
When the first pilgrim at the head of the file—a prominent butcher who owned several shops in Rironi, Narok, and Naivasha, in addition to a number of other enterprises he wished the church to know nothing about—felt the hands of the angels moving deftly upon his body, he tensed and became very still; when he felt them dart into his pockets and coax his wallet out of his back pocket, he became alarmed. Raising his head to look upon God’s angel, the butcher found himself face to face with the business end of a 9mm Luger. The gun, which had materialized from the priest’s vestments, was held at a professional hip level. The butcher had once been a thief, too, during the “coffee boom” years in the 1970s, when he had made his money across the Uganda border before laundering the proceeds to fund a legitimate business. He still possessed an acute instinct for danger.
“Tui nati vulnerati,” chanted the priest as he loomed above the flock. “Jam dignati pro me pati…” His expression was taut and strained, the monocle glittering in his ashen face like a sapphire in the ocular cavity of a skull. From the corner of his eye, the butcher saw an altar boy holding an Uzi sub-machine gun, standing guard over the prostrate pilgrims. The butcher silently lowered his gaze to the shiny tips of the priest’s patent leather shoes, and the fingers of the angel who straddled him resumed a delicate caress of his body, darting in and out of hidden crevices to retrieve unholy items and purge the butcher of his sins.
The entire operation lasted just about an h
our; the angels meticulously frisked every pilgrim, relieving them of their wallets, purses, cellphones, watches, and jewelry. When the task was completed, the priest stepped back and signaled with a raised hand. A car engine revved from within the thickets, and a beige van emerged. The angels, moving backward toward the van, kept the churchgoers covered with their Uzis.
Before climbing into the van, the priest stopped by the dazed-looking Christ who rested against the propped-up cross in his undergarments, awaiting his fate. The priest removed his golden rosary and dropped to one knee.
“Remember me with this when you get there,” he whispered softly, his gaze locked with Christ’s. “And please say a prayer for me and my sins. I now understand why the crowd chose you over the thief. All of us secretly crave to see the blood of an innocent man shed. It is a dark yearning that we all harbor inside. Have mercy on our poor souls, for we mortals are weak. Until we meet again in that place yonder, fare thee well.”
The priest kissed the rosary and wrapped it around Christ’s bloodied right hand, looping the tiny crucifix through the crook of his thumb so that it rested in his palm. “Quando corpus morietur. Fac ut animae donetur. Paradisi gloria. Amen.” He rose, made the sign of the cross, and hurried over into the van, which soon after sped off down a cattle track with a jolting rattle.
That evening, in a cottage on the banks of Lake Naivasha, the gang shared a bottle of Famous Grouse as they watched the sun set over the flame-tinged lake.
“You abandoned your flock on Golgotha, Cherie?” a lad by name of Saidi asked. Saidi had long since shed the altar boy’s garments for jeans and a T-shirt. The rest of the gang was similarly attired, save for their leader, who wore his usual Italian suit and silk shirt, open at the neck to expose his gold necklace.
Without his monocle, moustache, and grey wig—which he had discarded to reveal a clean-shaven head—Cherie looked like an altogether different man. He might have been a Hollywood star on the evening of the Oscars. He took a long pull on his cigar and gave his men a crafty smile. “‘Crucified’ them is the word, I think,” he said softly.
“You truly will burn in hell for this one, Cherie. You took it too far this time. Why, even I was starting to believe in all that Latino stuff you were mumbling!” Saidi exclaimed.
“You forget that I am a priest,” Cherie returned quietly. “And you forget your own part in the drama. If that day of vengeance ever comes, you can be sure that you will be roasting right next to me in the leaping flames. I would have been baptizing lost swine like you, if it were not for the sins of the flesh.” By “sins of the flesh,” Cherie meant women and liquor, both of which had proved irresistible prior to his being ordained. These particular failings were not uncommon among boarding school boys who proceeded to the seminary immediately upon graduation.
As the imposters relaxed by Lake Naivasha, it seemed likely that the faithful at Nyambari Parish Catholic Church had discovered their real priest and altar boys gagged and tied hand and foot in the vestry. The real panic, however, would doubtless come the following morning when the church members went to the bank. The gang’s accomplice and IT consultant was at that very moment busy cleaning out the bank accounts of those whose ATM and ID cards had been pilfered by angelic hands—over two hundred in all. Apparently the gang had stumbled onto a goldmine with the wealth these churchgoers had kept hidden from God. If they had freely given ten percent of their wealth as prescribed by the Bible, the Catholics could have built a new church in a new parish every week!
When the shit eventually hit the fan, it was the same IT specialist who would be called in by flustered bank managers to help fix the mess he had created—and get paid for it. And his was the work of a genius where it was difficult to tell where the lie ended and reality began. For when the butcher, among others, checked his monthly bank statement—which would be unusually long—he would find the December purchase of a truckload of sheep from the nearby Bidii Farm in his Rironi neighbourhood. The puzzle is that he had indeed bought sheep from this farmer in December, but only two in number rather than the truckload that amounted to thirty or more.
The IT technician, and talented architect of the electronic scam, was the only one who could disentangle the fine mess he had created in a multitude of client accounts. After several days of strenuous labor attempting to rectify the inexplicable accounting disaster, he would join his accomplices on a well-deserved holiday in Malindi as they planned their next big heist.
Mercedes
Mugure sat at the counter of her simu ya jamii70 booth and watched the street. With the cost of mobile phones falling and cell ownership on the rise, fewer people relied upon the community phone to make their calls. To make matters worse, the simu ya jamii was no longer the novelty investment concept in the low-income market that it had been in years past. Every one with a little cash to spare had rushed to open their own community phone booth, and now they dotted the street corners like mushrooms on a moist dung heap. Customers were few and far between, the competition cutthroat. These early investors were now grumbling that they should have invested in a sukuma-wiki kiosk instead, which consistently fetched considerably higher revenue—people had to eat, after all.
Perhaps it had not been such a bright idea after all, Mugure acknowledged, uncomfortably conscious of the fact that the booth had been her idea. When her stone-mason husband, Gichamba, had suggested she occupy herself with some line of business while he was away at the quarry, the phone business had immediately come to mind. Mugure’s friend and neighbor, who ran her own simu ya jamii at the local market, made two hundred shillings on a bad day. At least that was what she had confided to Mugure.
Now, however, they were committed to the business. Construction work had been hard to find lately, and Gichamba’s casual jobs at the quarry would not produce enough capital to start another business anytime soon. As Mugure contemplated her future with Gichamba her eyes strayed from the stream of villagers making their way along the dusty path to the glossy promotional poster pasted on her booth by the company that provided the mobile phone service. An E-Class brand-new Mercedes Benz leapt out of the poster amid thick wads of cash—the phone company’s latest promotional prize to be given to one lucky recipient who submitted the winning SMS. A thin smile played upon Magure’s lips. How could someone give away all that money? she wondered. They must be mad. Millions of shillings in prize money just for sending a simple text message? Perhaps it was some sort of scam, she mused. She had heard of countless cases where con artists had used mobile phones to defraud people, often netting millions.
Mugure, grappling with her own financial woes, could not help but wonder what she would do with all those millions if they were to come her way; daydreaming, after all, was free of charge. Just what would she do with all that money? Ngai! All those millions just for sending an SMS worth ten shillings.…
The thought refused to leave her mind, and toward midday, feeling bored and drowsy—hardly anyone had come along to buy a scratch card or make a phone call—she reached for the phone to check how many call units remained on her account. There wasn’t much money left in their account, and shaving ten shillings off would sink them even deeper in the red. But despite these thoughts, Mugure lowered her finger to the keyboard and started typing the text message.
A month had passed, and Mugure had long forgotten about the competition. The green poster, with the silver Mercedes leaping out of a wad of cash, had collected dust and curled and peeled off the kiosk wall in the stifling heat. The phone call came on a hot and drowsy afternoon, the heat just as oppressive as it had been on the day she’d first sent the text message, and her mood just as disgruntled. She had not had a single customer and was about to depart for a nearby food kiosk to buy some githeri71 on credit.
“We are calling to inform you that the final draw of our recent retailers’ promotion has just been concluded, and that we now have t
he winner of our grand prize. We would like you to confirm to us…”
Mugure gazed, bewildered, at the phone for a time, wondering if the caller had mistaken her for someone else. This is a joke, and a cruel one at that, she thought.
“Hello…hello…are you still there?” The voice had a tinny, unreal quality, when heard through the phone’s cheap speaker, but there was no doubting what the man had said. Her finger descended, and without a second thought, she pressed the tiny red button, cutting off the persistent caller.
Mugure remained immobile for a while, her lunch forgotten, her breath hissing, her gaze unseeing. Still, in the depths of her mind, the caller’s voice buzzed in her head like a fly hurling itself against a closed window pane. A hoax—the word played over and over in her mind as the silky smooth voice of the caller replayed in her mind like a stuck audio track. She had received phony text messages like this before, informing her she was the lucky winner of half-a-million shillings in some phone promotion or another. These messages were typically followed by a request for the lucky winner to send the small sum of money—a hundred shillings or so—by mobile phone money transfer in order to “facilitate the processing of the big cheque.” This insignificant sum was from just one of the gullible millions who had fallen for the trick, their hundred bob contributing to a multi-million kitty. Some said that these scams were hatched at Kamiti Maximum Prison by canny convicts, who used the same mobile phone service to collect the money. Well, she would be daft to fall for it. Still, her pulse raced with every passing second, her thoughts a whirl, the voice of the caller still echoing in her mind. “We are calling to inform you…”
Mugure tore her gaze away from the dusty road and looked down at the cheap phone that was the source of her turmoil. And as if on cue the little LCD screen lit up and the handset started trilling. Prrrrrrrr!…prrrrrrrr!…prrrrrrrr! The ring tone was crisp and piercing, refusing to be ignored. It unnerved her. She flipped open the dog-eared exercise book in which she had logged the four calls of the morning, bringing in fifty-two shillings—dented, stained coins that had undoubtedly spent time in a poker game or tossed around in a beggar’s bowl. She fingered them idly, her thoughts whirring. Prrrrrrrrrr!…prrrrrrrrrr!
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