‘Aah, but that is the job of a barmaid. Really, Mwalimu! A barmaid is employed to get more customers. Or to make the few regulars drink more.’
‘Well, if you like it . . . have you worked as a barmaid before?’
‘But how do you think I came to know all the places that I have been talking about?’ and she suddenly jumped up from her seat. ‘Oh, I should make tea: let’s celebrate with tea without milk . . .’
She was very light on her feet. She started washing a sufuria and Munira’s eyes moved in rhythm with the motion of her full body and of her breasts. He was still puzzled: why was she so happy about such a job in Ilmorog when she could easily work in any of the cities she talked about? Even Ruwa-ini was much bigger and better for that kind of work. And why had she acted so oddly yesterday? But he could not help but be affected by the light, gay mood she generated. As they drank tea she once again changed from the childlike happiness to a sombre, quieter, composed self.
‘I feel I want to cry. I really feel so happy because Abdulla has bought Joseph clothes and a slate and books and now he can start school.’
‘That is good, Abdulla. At long last. Joseph looks a bright boy and I am sure he will do well.’
‘He should thank Wanja. It was her who made it possible.’
‘It was Munira’s story. It was so moving . . . really so moving,’ she said.
The Siriana incident had touched a chord in her past.
Munira was suddenly happy with himself. He turned to her:
‘You yourself . . . when you laugh . . . you look so young, you should be in school instead of working for Abdulla as a barmaid.’ She thought a little. She sipped some tea. She fingered her cup.
‘It is strange how one thing can lead to another. You yourself: maybe you are here because of that strike in your school. As for Abdulla – anyway I don’t know why you are here in Ilmorog. Maybe it is an accident that we are all here. Or an act of God. I don’t know . . . I don’t know . . . Do you remember the men who came to survey the road?’ she asked. ‘Do you remember the Engineer?’
She had started haltingly, but now she suddenly felt the need to tell of this one knot in her life. And they waited also, sensing this in the air. She stood up, pumped more pressure into the lamp to add to the light.
‘Do . . . you . . . know . . . him?’ Munira faltered.
‘No,’ she said and then added slowly, ‘but he reminded me of my past . . .’ She paused again and sat down hitting the empty cup with her foot. She picked it up and put it aside. ‘Yes, take me, for instance,’ she started again in an introspective tone, which was very captivating. ‘I sometimes ask myself: why should a silly happening . . . a boy’s visit . . . a girl’s and boy’s school affair . . . why should such a thing affect one’s life? You know such affairs — Abdulla talked about it the other night – a gift of a pencil, a stolen sweet, love-letters copied from books . . . all ending in the same way . . . maingi ni Thumu: manyinyi ni cukari . . . tear drops on paper circled with x x - kisses.’ She raised her head and laughed. ‘Maybe they are right: a lot of words is poison: a few words are sugar. Later I was to see cases of sugar words turning out to be poison. Now this boy. His name was Ritho. He and I were in the same class at Kinoo Primary School. Girls can be cruel. I used to read his letters to the other girls. We would giggle and laugh at him, all the way from Kinoo to Rungiri. But his gifts of pencils and sweets – these I did not tell to anybody. It was all childish and a game that amused us. And then we were late in school one Friday. We were watching a football match between our school and Rungiri. We called them KADU and we called ourselves KANU, which they resented. KANU lost to KADU. Ritho walked me home and we talked about the game. Then he talked about Uhuru. He said there would be increased chances, especially for poor people. Therefore he was going to work very hard: go to a secondary school . . . university . . . engineering. Yes, he was going to be an engineer . . . his ambition was to design and build a bridge over a road or over a river. Can you imagine this . . . at that age, then? It felt good. But boys were always more confident about the future than us girls. They seemed to know what they wanted to become later in life: whereas with us girls the future seemed vague . . . It was as if we knew that no matter what efforts we put into our studies, our road led to the kitchen and to the bedroom. That evening it felt so good to be with one who was so confident in his heart’s desires that I seemed to share in his ambitions. I thought I also could see a light and I swore to work harder. He did not appear so funny and clumsy and ridiculous any more and we held hands in the dark. A man coughed as he passed by: I thought he was shaped like my father – but I did not care. I ran home and hung my deerskin bag in its place on the wall and sat down: my mother asked me: why have you not changed into ordinary clothes? I said it was Friday and I would anyway be washing the school uniform the following day. And is that why you have come home late? I kept quiet. I recalled Ritho’s letters . . . my love is as uncountable as the sands of the sea, the trees in the forest, or the stars in the sky or the cells of my body . . . and his ambitions and now I wanted to laugh and tell my mother about Ritho and his dreams of becoming an engineer. I said: I was late watching a football match at school. We were supposed to stay and cheer our side — And with whom were you just now? My boy friend, I said just like that and now I laughed. Mother, he — I started. But the look in her eyes killed the words. My father said: She is now a woman, she even talks to her mother as equals. They locked me in my room and they both beat me, my father with his belt and my mother with a cowhide strap we used for tying and carrying things. This will teach you to come home holding hands with boys! This will teach you to be talking like equals to your mother. It was so unfair and I was determined not to cry. This seemed to add to their anger. They were now beating to make me cry. At last I screamed for help. I cried: you are people of God: have you no mercy? They now stopped. I continued crying bitterly. I silently cursed at this world. I could not see that I had done anything wrong. I did not feel guilty. When they warned me never to be seen with pagan boys — I don’t know — I felt then that they were beating me not just because I was with a boy but because he came from a family even poorer than ours. I also felt that the way they beat me – it was as if they were working out something between them. I had known that my father and mother were drifting apart because of something else that had happened almost at the beginning of the emergency. I also knew that my father was facing hard times. But I resented that they should use me as a path for their coming together. That time, they whispered long into the night.
‘For days and weeks I planned vengeance. My parents had often beaten me, but it was the first time I was so rebellious in my thoughts. How could I get my own back? Was it a sin to be poor? We ourselves were not rich: were we sinners? Was it a sin even not to be a Christian? At the same time I hated the young man who had been the cause of my suffering. I nursed the pain in my soul. I am a hard woman and I know I can carry things inside my heart for a long time. I wanted to find something that would really hurt them and humiliate them as they had done to me. But I was young, the pain faded and thoughts of vengeance were buried by the call of daily living. But I also knew that since that night I, my home, school, the world, nothing was any longer the same. I was aware of a growing impatience with the school and learning: it was as if these were keeping me from a world, a more interesting world beyond the school and the village. Out there, there was life. This was also the years preceding independence when there was a lot of talk of how different life would be . . . Aah, you see how I talk as if all this was ages ago. Yet only a few years . . . Yes, a few years.
‘At about this time a certain man came and bought a plot very near our home, and he put up a stone building with a huge iron tank for catching rainwater. He was married, with two girls. His example was soon followed by others, but his remained the best known for setting the trend. It was also seen as a sign of things to come. Maybe, soon, after independence, everyone would have at least a corrugated-
iron roofed house and a tank in which they would catch rainwater. He was also the proud owner of a small lorry and a bus. We did not know where he had come from, but he was probably the first such big man in our village in the last years of the emergency, you know, when Africans started acquiring businesses. He was so different from my father: he was tall and strong and wealthy and envied and respected by every one. I was drawn to him from the very first time I saw him in his bus acting as a conductor. He did not charge me any fare the second time, saying you are the daughter of so and so, and of course I felt good that he knew me. He came home once or twice and my father, whose fortune had declined over the years, was so proud I felt ashamed. He became friends with my father and he soon became a frequent visitor at home. During Christmas he brought us all gifts. He gave me a floral dress and called me his daughter and I looked, or thought I looked, like a cousin of mine who had gone to the city a long time back. Later he gave me a lift in his lorry and took me to an afternoon film show at the Royal Cinema in the city. School could never thereafter be the same. Whenever he came to visit us, I would deliberately go to bed early as if I was shy of company. But his visit was always a sign between us that he wanted to see me the following afternoon. I would put the floral dress into my bag with books on top. In the city I would go to a latrine and change into the floral dress and hide my school uniform in the bag. At four or five I would go back home, of course in my school uniform.
‘It was the maths teacher who found me out. I used to be his best student and he had set his eyes on me. My breasts were a little bit more developed than those of the other girls and I had a full body. He used all sorts of excuses to detain me a little longer in school: Go and light a fire in my house: take these exercise books to my house: why didn’t you clean your nails, see me after four . . . and all sorts of things. Once, I had reported him to my mother and my mother was cross and had threatened to take up the matter with a higher authority. Now he noticed my frequent absences: he spied on me, and he found out. He called me into his house and talked love and said he wanted me and would I? I refused and he confronted me with his knowledge. Either I let him, or I would face my angry parents. I refused. He told my parents. My mother who all along had shown a marked dislike for the man was so shocked she could not even beat me. At first I felt – it has hurt them. But she cried and held me to herself as if she would protect me from a hostile world, and I felt guilty and I wept. This brought their final rupture. She told my father with a tone that cut deep: he was your wealthy friend, after all: and my father was so humiliated and looked so small I felt sorry for him too. My mother threatened that should that man ever set his dirty feet and hypocritical face in the house, she would pour hot water on him. Otherwise they did not say a word to me and for that reason I swore not to see the man again. I became a little more studious and even endured the leering triumphant laughter and snide comments of the maths teacher. I was surprised, and the teacher was probably surprised, when in the mock-CPE results I was number two in the whole area with the best maths results. My awkward boy friend was fifth. Everybody now thought that the actual exams would be a ‘walkover’ for me, and the teachers started talking of the high schools they would like me to try . . . But the results of my vengeance also followed me. I started vomiting and feeling a little tired. So I was pregnant? I ran back to my lover. I will marry you all right, he assured me, if you don’t mind being a second wife, and my first is so harsh she will make you her slave. I thought him a little light-hearted on a matter that was life and death to me. And I knew that my mother would soon find out. No, I could not bear it. I would not be there when she found out. My mind was set. I would force the issue.
‘I will always remember that day with shame and guilt. My mother lay in bed, and as I was going to school she told me . . . you see, we had two goats in a pen . . . she told me – go and throw the dry dung in the shamba. Here was my chance. I put all my nice clothes under a basket and covered the top with dry dung manure. And I ran away from home . . . to him. He looked at me once and suddenly he started laughing. He told me not to be funny, he was old enough to be my father, and anyway he was a Christian. Something blocked my throat: I could not cry. I just whimpered once and I went to my cousin in Eastleigh.’
She had lowered her voice a little as she said the last words and Munira could somehow imagine a tortured soul’s journey through valleys of guilt and humiliation and the long sleepless nights of looking back to the origins of the whole journey. She broke into his thoughts with a cynical little laughter.
‘Yes. Many were the times I used to think that I could hear a Lamb’s voice calling me across a deep deep valley: come unto me, all ye that are lonely, and I’ll give you the final rest. It was really tempting and my cousin could see through me as she tried to make me face the reality I had chosen. And yet had I chosen it? I fought hard against both the Lamb’s voice and my cousin’s suggestion. I would live to have my vengeance. I was young: I would not go her way. I have tried my hands at various jobs, but work in bars seems to be the one readily available to us girls – dropouts from school and CPE failures and even some dropouts from high schools.’
The sad, bitter note dominated the silence for a few seconds. It was clear that no matter what a fight she had put up she had not forgotten the original wound. She had somehow drawn Abdulla and Munira into her world and they seemed also to experience this wound, or maybe it reminded them of their own wounds. Now she suddenly bounced back to life:
‘That is why it always pains me to see children unable to go to school . . . and that is why tomorrow at the shop we must celebrate Joseph’s return to school. Abdulla, I am so happy. Munira, you’ll come tomorrow please, you must. It will be my first night as a barmaid in Ilmorog.’
She again carried them along with her boundless energy and enthusiasm. She had a way of making a man’s heart palpitate with different emotions and expectations at the same time.
‘I am going to see Mzigo at Ruwa-ini tomorrow . . .’
‘No, you must come,’ she interrupted him imperiously. ‘And bring me a pound of the long-grained rice. Abdulla saw me home tonight. Tomorrow it is your turn. Or are you afraid of the dark? Look. The moon will be out. It will announce the first day of harvest. Tomorrow . . . so many hopes to celebrate!’
Afraid? No, not tomorrow night nor any other night with you, his heart sang joyfully.
‘Thank you, Abdulla . . . thank you, Munira . . .’ she cooed as they stood up to go and each felt as if it was said with a special meaning, to him, alone.
Munira said ‘Keep well’ to Abdulla and continued in the dark. But he would be there tomorrow, he said to himself, he would surely see her home tomorrow, and he was now smiling to himself. Beautiful petals: beautiful flowers: tomorrow would indeed be the beginning of a harvest.
Chapter Three
1 ~ Twelve years later, on a Sunday, Godfrey Munira tried to reconstruct that scene in a statement to the police, a statement in which he was meant to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing else but the truth. But he found that although it was still alive in the memory, the night of Wanja’s first narrative, with all its suggestion of inexplicable doom and violence, eluded exact formulation in words. He sat on a hard bench, his elbows planted on the table, his eyes occasionally darting to the Aspro-calendar, the only decoration on otherwise bare walls. But mostly he rested his eyes on the face of the officer: he must be new in the Force, Munira thought. Ilmorog was probably his first big station and he was probably nervous or impatient or both. He tapped the floor with his right foot and drummed the table a little with his fingers. He was losing patience and Munira tried to understand: who could not feel the subterranean currents of unrest in the country? Schoolboys and girls on strike and locking up their recalcitrant, authoritarian headmasters and headmistresses in office cupboards: workers downing their tools and refusing the temporary consolation of tripartite agreements; housewives holding processions and shouting obscene slogans in protest against the high fo
od prices; armed robbers holding up banks in daylight with crowds cheering; women refusing to be relegated to the kitchen and the bedroom, demanding equal places in men’s former citadel of power and privilege – all these could try the nerves of those entrusted by the ruling classes of this world with maintaining man’s ordained order and law. They trusted too much in the wisdom of this world: they would not open the book of God to see that these things had been prophesied a long time ago. Karega and his following of Theng’eta factory workers were not any different: they had rejected it is true mere brotherhood of the skin, region and community of origins and said no to both black and white and Indian employers of labour. But they too would fail: because they had also rejected the most important brotherhood – the only brotherhood – of religion, of being born anew in the Lord of the universe and of the eternal kingdom. What other truth did the officer want? Munira wanted to show him that Wanja was the ‘She’ mentioned by the Prophets, extracting obedience from men, making them deviate from the path, and all the time with a voice that had the suggestive qualities of suffering and protest, hope and terror and above all of promises of escape through the power of the flesh. But the officer – the wise man of this world – he only stood and walked about the room, turning cold eyes on Munira. What had a silly barmaid’s cry eleven years back – before a single stone building, let alone an international highway, had been built in Ilmorog – to do with the present? He might as well open that book and start with Adam and Eve. But would it not be better – it would surely save time and energy – if he skipped the years and did not indulge a rather – well – a rather vivid memory? That was exactly the point, Munira thought, slightly amused by the officer’s outburst. It – the cry – the scene had everything to do with it: for if Munira had not been blinded by that voice he could have seen the signs, the evil web being spun around him, around Abdulla, around Ilmorog. He tried another approach: he begged for pen and paper and appealed for time: he would write a statement in his own hand and in his own way and later the policeman could ask questions – and with the help of the Lord . . . The officer suddenly banged the table, all patience gone: he wanted facts, not history; facts, not sermons or poetry. Murder was not irio or njohi, he said and called out to the warders: Lock him in.
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