Petals of Blood

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  ‘Is that what you were thinking about just now? I followed you for quite a distance and you did not seem to be aware of being stalked. Or are you now worried about the journey to the city?’

  ‘Not that. I was thinking about Nyakinyua’s story.’

  ‘About Ndemi?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why. Do you believe it?’

  ‘It must be true. Why not? If not the details, then at least the idea.’

  ‘What idea?’

  ‘Of a past. A great past. A past when Ilmorog, or all Africa, controlled its own earth.’

  ‘You are a funny young man,’ she said, and laughed a little, a bit guiltily, remembering the night Karega ran away from the hut.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, the things you do and say. One day you say you don’t touch drinks. You drink milk or water. Yet the very next time, you are drunk and fighting in a bar.’

  He felt a little embarrassed by this. He fidgeted on his feet. He looked at the hill in the distance.

  ‘I don’t know how I succumbed to it. I think I just wanted to lose myself. So many things hitting at you on every side. You want to forget.’

  ‘Forget? Then look at this journey. You said you suffered in the city. I think I know what you meant. I felt with you. The city can be a cruel place. But what made you think it will now be different? I fear for you. The past few days my heart bled because so many men and women and children were willing to join us. I was even more touched by the songs of hope that we sang. Don’t you think they will sing with bitterness against you should the city slap them in the face the way it did you?’

  ‘I must confess I never thought about that. We can but try. Why should we fail, though? We are now going as a community. The voice of the people is truly the voice of God. And who is an MP? Isn’t he the people’s voice in the ruling house? He cannot ignore us. He cannot refuse to see us.’

  ‘You have a touching faith in people. This is maybe a good thing. But I wonder . . . I wonder.’

  They both paused and for a time withdrew into their separate and private thoughts. The moon shone over them. The moon shone over the plains. Wanja was turning over in her mind words she had once heard from a Nairobi lawyer. Karega gazed at the solitary hill but his mind was on the journey and the doubts that Wanja had raised. ‘Let us sit down,’ he suggested, suddenly feeling weary. ‘Isn’t it strange that that hill should have stood when all else collapsed?’

  ‘That! It is called the hill of the uncircumcised boys. It is said that if a boy runs right round it, he will turn into a girl and a girl will turn into a boy. Do you believe that too?’

  ‘No, I don’t. We should have heard of cases of some who had tried and were changed into their opposites.’

  ‘I wish it were true!’ she said rather fiercely, almost bitterly.

  Wanja had sworn that she would really make something of herself in Ilmorog. And as a measure of her determination, she would not, she would never again sleep with another man, until she had achieved something. Love-play, love-making would then only be in celebration of her victory and success. What it is she wanted to achieve was vague in her mind. The very sight of Ilmorog threatened by thirst, hunger and the drought was enough to discourage anyone. Where in that Ilmorog was she to begin? At Abdulla’s village bar and shop? One might well run round the hill and be changed into a man, like Karega she thought, and wondered about her vow.

  Karega was thinking of another hill, in another plain. Manguo marshes flashed across his vision and he felt a thrill of pleasure and bitterness at the memory. Triumph and defeat; success and miserable failure . . . which was which? He had tried not to think of Mukami who had so dominated his life, but in so trying he had only admitted her absolute hold on him, his total being even after her death. He had involved himself in books, in literature, in history, in philosophy, desperately looking for the meaning of the riddle at the meeting-point of the ironies of history, appearance and reality, expectation and actual achievement. He had thrown his weight into one cause after another, one work-activity after another, seeking, in the process, a rebirth of something he could never quite define – innocence? Hope? At times, he missed her: and he would worship her memory, celebrating in his mind the dawn of innocence and hope before succumbing to gloom as, in his mind, he stood at the top of the hill, facing Manguo marshes, and watched with a sinking, sickening feeling, the failure of purity and innocence. Once, in Siriana, falling into such a mood, he sat down to write: but he captured not the bitterness he felt, but a strange unsettled nervousness, the pessimism at the bottom, at the remembrance of Mukami’s suicide.

  My heart is heavy. There is ulcerous pain in my belly. How is it that small things, the screech of a cricket, the touch of a grass-hopper, make me suddenly start and look about me? Why do I look at her, my soul-image of truth, and become frightened for tomorrow? Why, why, why should I not be secure in the knowledge that once on the hippo hump of Manguo marshes two hearts refused to hate and beat each to each?

  That was just before he left Siriana, a bitter fulfilment, as he thought later, as he thought now, still looking at the solitary hill under the immensity of the moon, of what at the time of writing was only a premonition. Chui came to the school. The rest was history.

  Wanja asked him:

  ‘Tell me, Karega, do you always think about the past?’

  The question startled him and he now stared at her: was she reading his mind? In some ways Wanja reminded him so much about Mukami: He stirred himself to answer.

  ‘To understand the present . . . you must understand the past. To know where you are, you must know where you came from, don’t you think?’

  ‘How? I look at it this way. Drought and thirst and hunger are hanging over Ilmorog! What use is Ndemi’s story? I am drowning: what use would be my looking back to the shore from which I fell?’

  ‘The fact that they did things, that they refused to drown: shouldn’t that give us hope and pride?’

  ‘No, I would feel better if a rope was thrown at me. Something I can catch on to . . .’ she was silent for a few seconds. Then she said in a changed tone of voice. ‘Sometimes there is no greatness in the past. Sometimes one would like to hide the past even from oneself.’

  Karega suddenly realized that she was not talking about an abstract past.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She did not answer him at once. She made as if to move and she nestled close to him. He felt her near warmth in his lungs, warm against his ribs. Life quickened in an unwilled expectation. She sniffed once and he realized that she was crying.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ he asked, puzzled.

  ‘I don’t know . . . I don’t know . . . Please don’t mind me,’ she said, trying unsuccessfully to smile between her tears. ‘My past is full of evil. Today, now, when I look back, I only see the wasted years . . .’

  ‘Was it . . . was it hard, then?’ he asked, concerned, but felt, at the same time, the triteness of the question. What did he know about her? What could he know about a woman who kept on metamorphosing into different shapes and beings before one’s very eyes? When he first had met her in the hut, she was master of the men around her. She had seemed so sure in her movements and glances. Once or twice she had sought his eyes above the heads of Abdulla and Munira, but he had instinctively recoiled from the light in her own eyes. When they next met in Limuru it was he who had sunk into the lower depths of falsity, the attempt to escape from oneself, and she had thrown him a lifeline. Her voice, as she called him out of the depths, sounded genuine, concerned, softened with the pity and sympathy of recognition. Over the last few weeks, he had witnessed the gradual withering away of her earlier calculated smoothness, the practised light in the eyes, and the slow birth of a broken-nailed, lean beauty. And here she was now, crying! But even amidst these thoughts he noticed her slight hesitation at his question, as if she did not know how to respond to it or how to approach the answer.

  Which was true?

 
For somehow she could not, she realized suddenly as she was about to say something, bring herself to tell him of her involvement with Kimeria the man who had ruined her life.

  But she briefly told him about her work in the many bars which had mushroomed everywhere since independence.

  ‘We barmaids never settle in one place. Sometimes you are dismissed because you refused to sleep with your boss. Or your face may become too well known in one place. You want a new territory. Do you know, it is so funny that when you go to a new place the men treat you as if you were a virgin. They will outdo one another to buy you beers. Each wants to be the first. So you will find us, barmaids, wherever there is a bar in Kenya. Even in Ilmorog.’

  She laughed. Somebody coughed behind them. They were both relieved to see that it was only Munira.

  ‘You came to hide here. And we all thought that you had been eaten up by wild animals,’ he called out in a jovial voice, slightly exaggerated.

  ‘It is difficult to sleep early in such a vast wilderness,’ Karega said.

  ‘Wanja is telling you about her life in the bar wilderness?’ he asked as he sat down so that Wanja was between them.

  ‘She had only started,’ Karega said.

  Karega had had glimpses of this world when he was a seller of sheepskins and mushrooms by the roadside. He knew of many boys who after a hard day’s labour would later empty all their earnings on the waiting laps of a barmaid who probably had two or three children to feed.

  ‘It is not a very beautiful wilderness,’ Wanja said. ‘But it is not all bad. For a woman, anyway, it is a good feeling when a thousand eyes turn toward you and you feel that it is your body that is giving orders to all those hearts. Sometimes you see what is wrong. You want to get out: you also want to remain. You keep on saying to yourself: tomorrow . . . tomorrow. I know some who tried. One became a housemaid. She did all the work in the house. She woke up at five . . . She helped in milking the cows. She cooked breakfast. She cleaned the house. She went to the shop or to the field to fetch food to cook lunch. She also looked after the little children. She made afternoon tea; she made supper, washed the children . . . and when the wife was away the man wanted to share her bed. And all for what? Seventy shillings a month! She ran away. Another tried picking tea leaves and coffee beans for the new African landlords. And for what amount of pay? And so in the end they all return to the world where they have friends and where they know the rules: where they know what is honest and what is not honest; what is truth and what is not truth; what is good and what is not good. For example. It was not good and it was not honest not to make a man spend his money on you. A girl was once beaten because she was careless about this: why did she have to spoil the market for the others? Me? I too have tried to get out. Once I went home. My father said: “I do not want a prostitute in the house!” It hurt me coming from a father. A barmaid does not take herself to be a prostitute. We are girls in search of work and men. I returned to bar life. I have been lucky. I have had good friendships. I like people’s faces: I like new places: and I even find counting figures, arranging things in certain patterns, enjoyable. Sitting behind a counter I say to myself: if that face was put on those shoulders . . . if that nose was on that head . . . if that . . . if that . . . and people and places do look suddenly funny and very interesting. Other girls would say: Wanja, what are you always thinking about? It was difficult to explain. But at the same time, I was lonely. I liked people, yes. I liked the noise and the music and the fights – oh yes, even the fights – and unexpected happenings, but I was lonely. I travelled from place to place. I was looking for something. I came to Ilmorog. I did not find what I was looking for. After a few months I felt I wanted to go away. I did not know where. I did not want to return to the life of a barmaid. One gets tired of being everybody’s barmaid. I said: I will not go back to the same job. I said to myself: Ilmorog is a good place. Why don’t I make some money very quickly and go back, build a house there and live there for all time! I wanted to return to the village – but a rich woman. I don’t know where this thought came from. As I said, I depended more on friendships, and I never had cared much for tomorrow. To live . . . to live . . . I liked buying clothes . . . colours move me . . . I try to attach a meaning to every dress that I buy. But now I said: No more friendships. I’ll never marry anyway. So why not become rich? How? And the answer came. Nairobi. Europeans. Now this thought surprised me . . . because I could never bring myself to go with a white man. Once I went with a Kalasingh. He was a police inspector. He arrested us because we were selling beer late at a bar in Kikuyu town, and when he searched the boys he found they had bhang. I was frightened. He put the boys in jail. He took me to his house. Well, I saved myself that way. The boys were locked up for five years. That was the first and the only time. There was this woman. She was very rich. She had a farm in the settled area. She also had houses in Nairobi. But she was lonely for friendship. She would come to where I used to work in Lower Kabete. She would say: Wanja, I can get you a European boy friend. She herself had been a teacher and then a secretary. But she made money after office hours. Anyway she had married a very old European . . . over seventy years . . . people said that after she had made him make a will, she had thrown him down the steps in the house. She got all his wealth. When she told me that, I would only laugh. I could not tell her that I thought of Europeans as naked bodies like the skin of pigs . . . or that of frogs that had lain buried in the ground for a long time . . . But now I said: this is going to be business. In a business you don’t say who your customers are going to be. It would anyway only be for a month or two months. For Europeans only. So when I left Ilmorog I haunted all the doors of the big hotels. Hilton. Ambassador. New Stanley. Serena. Norfolk. Inter-Continental. Fair View. Six Eighty. May Fair. Grosvenor. Pan-Africa, plums. I had never thought there could be so many big hotels in one place. But I was trembling and without the knowledge. I didn’t have the right sort of dresses I saw the other girls in: and I could not paint my lips red and my eyelids mercury green and wear wigs. And with Europeans I did not know how to use my eyes. In a bar, especially when I was behind the counter, I could have talked to all the men in the bar without once moving my lips. But Nairobi . . . For two nights following I ended up with Africans. At the College Inn, I met a girl I once worked with in a bar in Eldoret. She it was who told me about Starlight and Hallian’s Night Clubs. There you can make even a thousand shillings if it is your week. I went to Starlight. There were such changing colours of blue and red and green I could not see anything clearly. My heart had sunk low. I could not jump to the music. I know you are surprised about this, but bar life is slightly different. But one thing I would say for Starlight: it was full of Europeans. I sat in a corner, and I was feeling now I would like to jump over the enclosing bamboo walls and run all the way back to Bolibo. Anyway I saw this one throwing me many eyes. I returned a smile. He was tall, with a pipe in his mouth, and he did not look as old as the others whose face-skins fell into many folds. He spoke Swahili well, but in a funny way, and would add one or two English words. He was a Mtalii from Germany and he had come to the country on a special mission. He was looking for a certain girl from Kabete. She had been taken to Germany by another German with promises of marriage. But she found that she had been tricked and he had wanted her to start a trade with her, for he and others had figured that if watalii could pay all that money for aeroplanes and for hotels at Malindi on account of having seen an advertisement of an aged white man with a young African woman with the words: For only so much you can have this: they would pay even more willingly if Malindi was instead brought to Germany. Did I know of her? I said: how could I know of her? Why did he want her anyway, was she not in Germany? Because, he told me, the man who had brought her had treated her badly, he had beaten her and such things and this might cause bad feelings between Germany and Africa. She had managed to run away and returned to Kenya and she had left a baby behind. The man was refusing to take care of the baby, and this group who
cared about black people and feelings between Germany and Africa had come together and collected money to send him to Africa to find the girl and collect evidence which could be used against the man in a court of law. Did I know her? Anyway, I said again: how could I know her, there being so many girls in the country? He said exactly; that was why he was going round most of the bars and night spots to see if he could trace her. Would I like to be his companion in the search? He would pay me well, and if we were successful in finding her I would be flown to Germany as a witness in the trial. It was a strange story, and at first I thought he was wrong in the head, but he looked all right and he talked all right, and I had heard that some Europeans were stealing girls so they could trade with them in Italy and Germany. Well, you can see how busy my mind was counting this, counting that and I said to myself: yesterday I was a barmaid without pay at Abdulla’s place. And now? By the time we finished the search I would be a rich woman and I would buy a guitar and a flute. You don’t maybe believe me, but I like music and I can see blue waves of the sea when music is being played and sometimes I am riding on orange and blue and red clouds: on acres of green fields when certain flutes are played. Choral voices of birds can also lift me from a depression, and you know sometimes in my head I can hear a solitary orange tune later joined by many tunes like streams of colours from nowhere . . . anyway it’s rather childish of me and I am ashamed of it . . . but I am running away from the story. Just now I was telling you about the counting in my head as he drove me to his home for the night. Really I didn’t mind Europeans any more.