by Ian McDonald
For a few moments after the thing went over, no one knew what to do. Everyone was scared, but they were relieved at the same lime because, like the angel of death, it had passed over Gichichi. People were still crying, but tears of relief have a different sound. Someone got a radio from a house. Others fetched theirs, and soon we were all sitting in the middle of the road in the dark, grouped around our radios. An announcer interrupted the evening music show to bring a news flash. At twenty twenty eight a new biological package had struck in Central Province. At those words, a low keen went up from each group.
‘Be quiet!’ someone shouted, and there was quiet. Though the words would be terrible, they were better than the voices coming out of the dark.
The announcer said that the biological package had come down on the eastern slopes of the Nyandarua near to Tusha, a small Kikuyu village. Tusha was a name we knew. Some of us had relatives in Tusha. The country bus to Nyeri went through Tusha. From Gichichi to Tusha was twenty kilometres. There were cries. There were prayers. Most said nothing. But we all knew time had run out. In four years the Chaga had swallowed up Kilimanjaro, and Amboseli, and the border country of Namanga and was advancing up the A 104 on Kajiado and Nairobi. We had ignored it and gone on with our lives, believing that when it finally came, we would know what to do. Now it had dropped out of the sky twenty kilometres north of us and said, Twenty kilometres, four hundred days: that’s how long you’ve got to decide what you’re going to do.
Then Jackson who ran the Peugeot Service Office stood up. He cocked his head to one side. He held up a finger. Everyone fell silent. He looked to the sky. ‘Listen!’ I could hear nothing. He pointed to the south, and we all heard it: aircraft engines. Flashing lights lifted out of the dark tree-line on the far side of the valley. Behind it came others, then others, then ten, twenty, thirty more Helicopters swarmed over Gichichi like locusts. The sound of their engines filled the whole world. I wrapped my school shawl around my head and put my hands over my ears and yelled over the noise but it still felt like it would shatter my skull like a clay pot. Thirty five helicopters. They flew so low their down-wash rattled our tin roofs and sent dust swirling up around our faces. Some of the teenagers cheered and waved their torches and white school shirts to the pilots. They cheered the helicopters on, right over the ridge. They cheered until the noise of their engines was lost among the night-insects. Where the Chaga goes, the United Nations comes close behind, like a dog after a bitch.
A few hours later the trucks came through. The grinding of engines as they toiled up the winding road woke all Gichichi. ‘It’s three o’clock in the morning!’ Mrs Kuria shouted at the dusty white trucks with the blue symbol of UNECTA on the doors, but no one would sleep again. We lined the main road to watch them go through our village. I wonder what the drivers thought of all those faces and eyes suddenly appearing in their headlights as they rounded the bend. Some waved. The children waved back. They were still coming through as we went down to the shamba at dawn to milk the goats. They were a white snake coiling up and down the valley road as far as I could see. As they reached the top of the pass the low light from the east caught them and burned them to gold.
The trucks went up the road for two days. Then they stopped and the refugees started to come the other way, down the road. First the ones with the vehicles: matatus piled high with bedding and tools and animals, trucks with the family balanced in the back on top of all the things they had saved. A Toyota microbus, bursting with what looked like bolts of coloured cloth but which were women, jammed in next to each other. Ancient cars, motorbikes and mopeds vanishing beneath sagging bales of possessions. It was a race of poverty; the rich ones with machines took the lead. After motors came animals; donkey carts and ox-wagons, pedal-rickshaws. Most came in the last wave, the ones on foot. They pushed handcarts laden with pots and bedding rolls and boxes lashed with twine, or dragged trolleys on ropes or shoved frightened-faced old women in wheelbarrows. They struggled their burdens down the steep valley road. Some broke free and bounced over the edge down across the terraces, strewing clothes and tools and cooking things over the fields. Last of all came hands and heads. These people carried their possessions on their heads and backs and children’s shoulders.
My father opened the church to the refugees. There they could have rest, warm chai, some ugali, some beans. I helped stir the great pots of ugali over the open fire. The village doctor set up a treatment centre. Most of the cases were for damaged feet and hands, and dehydrated children. Not everyone in Gichichi agreed with my father’s charity. Some thought it would encourage the refugees to stay and take food from our mouths. The shopkeepers said he was ruining their trade by giving away what they should be selling. My father told them he was just trying to do what he thought Jesus would have done. They could not answer that, but I know he had another reason. He wanted to hear the refugee’s stories. They would be his story, soon enough.
What about Tusha?
The package missed us by a couple of kilometres. It hit a place called Kombé; two Kikuyu farms and some shit-caked cows. There was a big bang. Some of us from Tusha took a matatu to see what had happened to Kombé. They tell us there is nothing left. There they are, go, ask them.
This nothing, my brothers, what was it like? A hole?
No, it was something, but nothing we could recognise. The photographs? They only show the thing. They do not show how it happens. The houses, the fields, the fields and the track, they run like fat in a pan. We saw the soil itself melt and new things reach out of it like drowning men’s fingers.
What kind of things?
We do not have the words to describe them. Things like you see in the television programs about the reefs on the coast, only the size of houses, and striped like zebras. Things like fists punching out of the ground, reaching up to the sky and opening like fingers. Things like fans, and springs, and balloons, and footballs.
So fast?
Oh yes. So fast that even as we watched, it took our matatu. It came up the tyres and over the bumper and across the paintwork like a lizard up a wall and the whole thing came out in thousands of tiny yellow buds.
What did you do?
What do you think we did? We ran for our lives.
The people of Kombé?
When we brought back help from Tusha, we were slopped by helicopters. Soldiers, everywhere. Everyone must leave, this is a quarantine area. You have twenty four hours.
Twenty four hours!
Yes, they order you to pack up a life in twenty four hours. The Blue Berets brought in all these engineers who started building some great construction, all tracks and engines. The night was like day with welding torches. They ploughed Kiyamba under with bulldozers to make a new airstrip. They were going to bring in jets there. And before they let us go they made everyone take medical tests. We lined up and went past these men in while coats and masks at tables.
Why?
I think they were testing to see if the Chaga-stuff had got into us.
What did they do, that you think that?
Pastor, some they would Lap on the shoulder, just like this. Like Judas and the Lord, so gentle. Then a soldier would take them to the side.
What then?
I do not know, pastor. I have not seen them since. No one has.
These stories troubled my father greatly. They troubled the people he told them to, even Most High, who had been so thrilled by the coming of the alien to our land. They especially troubled the United Nations. Two days later a team came up from Nairobi in five army hummers. The first thing they did was tell my father and the doctor to close down their aid station. The official UNHCR refugee centre was Muranga. No one could stay here in Gichichi, everyone must go.
In private they told my father that a man of his standing should not be sowing rumours and half truths in vulnerable communities. To make sure that we knew the real truth, UNECTA called a meeting in the church. Everyone packed on to the benches, even the Muslims. People stood all the wa
y around the walls; others outside, lifted out the louvres to listen in at the windows. My father sat with the doctor and our local chief at a table. With them was a government man, a white soldier and an Asian woman in civilian dress who looked scared. She was a scientist, a xenologist. She did most of the talking; the government man from Nairobi twirled his pencil between his fingers and tapped it on the table until he broke the point. The soldier, a French general with experience of humanitarian crises, sat motionless.
The xenologist told us that the Chaga was humanity’s first contact with life from beyond the Earth. The nature of this contact was unclear; it did not follow any of the communication programs we had predicted. This contact was the physical transformation of our native landscape and vegetation. But what was in the package was not seeds and spores. The things that had consumed Kombé and were now consuming Tusha were more like tiny machines, breaking down the things of this world to pieces and rebuilding them in strange new forms. The Chaga responded to stimuli and adapted to counter attacks on itself. UNECTA had tried fire, poison, radioactive dusting, genetically modified diseases. Each had been quickly routed by the Chaga. However, it was not apparent if it was intelligent, or the tool of an as-yet unseen intelligence.
‘And Gichichi?’ Ismail the barber asked.
The French general spoke now.
‘You will all be evacuated in plenty of time.’
‘But what if we do not want to be evacuated?’ Most High asked. ‘What if we decide we want to stay here and take our chances with the Chaga?’
‘You will all be evacuated,’ the general said again.
‘This is our village, this is our country. Who are you to tell us what we must do in our own country?’ Most High was indignant now. We all applauded, even my father up there with the UNECTA people. The Nairobi political looked vexed.
‘UNECTA, UNHCR and the UN East Africa Protection Force operate with the informed consent of the Kenyan government. The Chaga has been deemed a threat to human life. We’re doing this for your own good.’
Most High drove on. ‘A threat? Who ‘deems’ it so? UNECTA? An organisation that is eighty percent funded by the United States of America? I have heard different, that it doesn’t harm people or animals. There are people living inside the Chaga; it’s true, isn’t it?’
The politician looked at the French general, who shrugged. The Asian scientist answered.
‘Officially, we have no data.’
Then my father stood up and cut her short.
‘What about the people who are being taken away?’
‘I don’t know anything…’ the UNECTA scientist began but my father would not be stopped.
‘What about the people from Kombé? What are these tests you are carrying out?’
The woman scientist looked flustered. The French general spoke.
‘I’m a soldier, not a scientist. I’ve served in Kosovo and Iraq and East Timor. I can only answer your questions as a soldier. On the fourteenth of June next year, it will come down that road. At about seven thirty in the evening, it will come through this church. By Tuesday night, there will be no sign that a place called Gichichi ever existed.’
And that was the end of the meeting. As the UNECTA people left the church, the Christians of Gichichi crowded around my father. What should they believe? Was Jesus come again, or was it anti-Christ? These aliens, were they angels, or fallen creatures like ourselves? Did they know Jesus? What was God’s plan in this? Question after question after question.
My father’s voice was tired and thin and driven, like a leopard harried by beaters towards guns. Like that leopard, he turned on his hunters.
‘I don’t know!’ he shouted. ‘You think I have answers to all these things? No. I have no answers. I have no authority to speak on these things. No one does. Why are you asking these silly silly questions? Do you think a country pastor has the answers that will stop the Chaga in its tracks and drive it back where it came from? No. I am making them up as I go along, like everyone else.’
For a moment the whole congregation was silent. I remember feeling that I must die from embarrassment. My mother touched my father’s arm. He had been shaking. He excused himself to his people. They stood back to let us out of the church. We stopped on the lintel, amazed. A rapture had indeed come. All the refugees were gone from the church compound. Their goods, their bundles, their carts and animals. Even their excrement had been swept away.
As we walked back to the house, I saw the woman scientist brush past Most High as she went to the UNECTA hummer. I heard her whisper, ‘About the people. It’s true. But they’re changed.’
‘How?’ Most High asked but the door was closed. Two blue berets lifted mad Gikombe from in front of the hummer and it drove off slowly through the throng of people. I remembered that the UNECTA woman looked frightened.
That afternoon my father rode off on the red Yamaha and did not come back for almost a week.
I learned something about my father’s faith that day. It was that it was strong in the small, local questions because it was weak in the great ones. It believed in singing and teaching the people and the disciplines of personal prayer and meditation, because you could see them in the lives of others. In the big beliefs, the ones you could not see, it fell.
That meeting was the wound through which Gichichi slowly bled to death. ‘This is our village, this is our country,’ Most High had declared, but before the end of the week the first family had tied their things on to the back of their pick-up and joined the flow of refugees down the road to the south. After that a week did not pass that someone from our village would not close their doors a last Lime and leave Gichichi. The abandoned homes soon went to ruin. Water got in, roofs collapsed, then rude boys set fire to them. The dead houses were like empty skulls. Dogs fell into toilet pits and drowned. One day when we went down to the shamba there were no names and stones from the Ukerewe house. Within a month its windows were empty, smoke-stained sockets.
With no one to tend them, the shambas went to wild and weeds. Goats and cows grazed where they would, the terrace walls crumbled, the rains washed the soil down the valley in great red tears. Fields that had fed families for generations vanished in a night. No one cared for the women’s tree any more, to give the images their cups of beer. Hope stopped working in Gichichi. Always in the minds of the ones who remained was the day when we would look up the road and see the spines and fans and twisted spires of the Chaga standing along the ridge-line like warriors.
I remember the morning I was woken by the sound of voices from the Muthiga house. Men’s voices, speaking softly so as not to waken anyone, for it was still dark, but they woke me. I put on my things and went out into the compound. Grace and Ruth were carrying cardboard boxes from the house, their father and a couple of other men from the village were loading them on to a Nissan pick-up. They had started early, and the pick-up was well laden. The children were gathering up the last few things.
‘Ah, Tendeléo,’ Mr Muthiga said, sadly. ‘We had hoped to get away before anyone was around.’
‘Can I talk to Grace?’ I asked.
I did not talk to her. I shouted at her. I would be all alone when she went. I would be abandoned. She asked me a question. She said, ‘You say we must not go. Tell me, Tendeléo, why must you stay?’
I did not have an answer to that. I had always presumed that it was because a pastor must stay with his people, but the bishop had made several offers to my father to relocate us to a new parish in Eldoret.
Grace and her family left as it was getting light. Their red tail lights swung into the slow stream of refugees. I heard the horn hooting to warn stragglers and animals all the way down the valley. I tried to keep the house good and safe but two weeks later a gang of rude boys from another village broke in, took what they could and burned the rest. They were a new thing in what the radio called the ‘sub-terminum’, gangs of raiders and looters stripping the corpses of the dead towns.
‘Vultures, is
what they are,’ my mother said.
Grace’s question was a dark parting gift to me. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that I must see this thing that had forced such decisions on us. The television and newspaper pictures were not enough. I had to see it with my own eyes. I had to look at its face and ask it its reasons. Little Egg became my lieutenant. We slipped money from the collection plate, and we gathered up secret bundles of food. A schoolday was the best to go. We did not go straight up the road, where we would have been noticed. We caught a matatu to Kinangop in the Nyandarua valley where nobody knew us. There was still a lively traffic; the matatu was full of country people with goods to sell and chickens tied together by the feet stowed under the bench. We sat in the back and ate nuts from a paper cone folded from a page of the Bible. Everywhere were dirty white United Nations vehicles. One by one the people got out and were not replaced. By Ndunyu there was only me and Little Egg, jolting around in the back of the car.
The driver’s mate turned around and said, ‘So, where for, girls?’
I said, ‘We want to look at the Chaga.’
‘Sure, won’t the Chaga be coming to look at you soon enough?’
‘Can you take us there?’ I showed him Church shillings.
‘It would take a lot more than that.’ He talked to the driver a moment. ‘We can drop you at Njeru. You can walk from there, it’s under seven kilometres.’
Njeru was what awaited Gichichi, when only the weak and poor and mad remained. I was glad to leave it. The road to the Chaga was easy to find, it was the direction no one else was going in. We set off the up the red dirt road towards the mountains. We must have looked very strange, two girls walking through a ruined land with their lunches wrapped in kangas. If anyone had been there to watch.
The soldiers caught us within two kilometres of Njeru. I had heard the sound of their engine for some minutes, behind us. It was a big eight wheeled troop carrier of the South African army.