Petals of Blood

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  He is trembling with anger with his inability to reach them and he shouts a few obscenities at Nderi and all the followers, all the gunbearers, of Goode and Livingstone and Rhodes and Gordon and Meinertzhagen and Henderson and Johnson and Nixon. If he could get at them, he shouts and suddenly wakes up, sweating.

  He sat up and looked about him and was relieved to find that it was only Munira standing beside him.

  ‘I did not mean to wake you . . . but you have slept a whole day yesterday and a whole night. And now it’s about ten o’clock.’

  ‘Have I? Is it so?’ he asked, yawning.

  ‘Yes. You did not even bolt your door.’

  ‘There are no thieves yet, else the policemen and the churchmen would already have occupied the buildings they have just completed.’

  Munira paced about the room and then stopped. He tried to say something and then seemed to hold back the words.

  Karega was puzzled by Munira’s behaviour. He looked at him more closely. Munira had resumed his pacing about the room, hands folded at the back, clenching and unclenching his fingers. Even through the fatigue that comes from oversleeping, Karega could sense that Munira was troubled by something and he felt concerned.

  ‘What is it, Mwalimu?’ He yawned again. ‘Aah, my sleep. Do excuse me my yawning. It is an aftermath of that illusion-inducing Theng’eta stuff. You don’t think it is dangerous? I feel fine and clear in the head, clear in the body. But I had such a terrible nightmare.’

  ‘It is nothing. Nothing. I also feel fine. Strong, clear. No hangover even. Oh, no, I don’t think it is dangerous. It is only that in your what you call nightmare, you kept on shouting names. Some were rather incomprehensible. But some were clear.’

  ‘I hope I did not give away any secrets.’

  ‘No, no, no secrets. You whispered Mukami and Wanja . . . that kind of thing . . .’

  Munira suddenly halted his nervous walkabout. He leaned against the wall. Then he went to the bookshelf, picked out a book, Facing Mount Kenya, opened a few pages and put it back. He picked out, Not Yet Uhuru, again opened a few more pages and returned it to the shelf without reading it. Composed, he turned to Karega and cleared his throat.

  ‘Mr Karega!’ he said, rather abruptly. The tone made Karega look up, rather sharply. Munira seemed to be summoning enough courage to proceed. ‘Mr Karega, I don’t know how to put this, but – eh – you have now been here for about two years. But we could say that you came as a refugee and I did my best to welcome you. We have lived in the same compound and a few things, some pleasant, others not so pleasant, have happened to us. But after what has happened . . . I mean . . . after your own confessions about my sister, my family and all that, don’t you think it is time, eh, don’t you think it will be a little difficult our staying in the same place?’

  ‘Are you, Mr Munira, suggesting that . . . but I can’t understand what has brought this into your head . . . are you suggesting that I leave my job?’

  ‘You are putting it rather strongly. But you will agree that your confession has made things rather awkward. We cannot after all escape from our separate though linked pasts. I mean one has memories . . . responsibilities even though only to one’s own self-respect. Now, in a manner of speaking, it could be said, couldn’t it, that you drove Mukami to her suicide.’

  ‘Munira!’

  ‘Alas, it is you who after all had eaten more salt than she had. And one thing more, Mr Karega. It is not very flattering to me, even though it may only be in a nightmare, to have my own dear sister compared to . . . well . . . mentioned in the same breath with a prostitute, even though a Very Important Prostitute!’

  Karega sprang out of the bed and rushed at Munira. Munira moved a step to the side, and Karega almost hit into the wall. As suddenly, Karega’s hands became limp in the air, and then he let them fall by his side. But his eyes were still red with intense anger and loathing. He weakened with pain, with his own impotence for instant vengeance: this man had been his teacher, he was certainly older than he was, and even for that alone he deserved his respect. But he had welcomed him here, had even found him a job, and besides, did he but know, had touched a sensitive guilty core at the heart of Karega’s being. So he only stood and fought to hold back hot tears threatening at the edges.

  ‘If you had not once been . . . if you had not been, if you . . .’

  He could not finish the sentence. He sat back on the bed for a time choked into silence by a mixture of guilt, bitterness, inward rage and incomprehension. He just stared past Munira, through the door, to the schoolyard and beyond, as if he would seek an answer out there where life, real life, was being played out, and not in this wretched corner of idleness and dreams and memories. He now spoke as if to a world outside Ilmorog.

  ‘Only two nights ago we all drank Theng’eta together to celebrate a harvest and the successful ending of what was certainly a difficult year in Ilmorog. It was a good harvest and you’ll agree with me that such sense of a common destiny, a collective spirit, is rare. That is why the old woman rightly called it a drink of peace. Now it has turned out to be a drink of strife. I suppose this had to be, though I still don’t understand it. You had your reasons for coming here, I had mine. You say that we cannot after all escape from our pasts and with that I agree. But we do not have to heap insults on others. We are all prostitutes, for in a world of grab and take, in a world built on a structure of inequality and injustice, in a world where some can eat while others can only toil, some can send their children to schools and others cannot, in a world where a prince, a monarch, a businessman can sit on billions while people starve or hit their heads against church walls for divine deliverance from hunger, yes, in a world where a man who has never set foot on this land can sit in a New York or London office and determine what I shall eat, read, think, do, only because he sits on a heap of billions taken from the world’s poor, in such a world, we are all prostituted. For as long as there’s a man in prison, I am also in prison: for as long as there is a man who goes hungry and without clothes, I am also hungry and without clothes. Why then need a victim hurl insults at another victim? Least of all need we pour vileness and meanness on the memory of those who were once dear to us, those rare few who rejected the class snobbery of their group, those who had faith and love and truth and beauty and only wanted free unfettered human contact and growth.’

  There followed another moment of silence embarrassing to Munira because once again he felt on trial, that he had been placed on a moral balance and had been found wanting.

  ‘My father is a church elder and so you can imagine that one can grow a little tired of sermons and moral platitudes,’ Munira said, and felt slightly pleased with that rejoinder.

  ‘I know he is – and more—’ Karega said, and now he sharply looked at Munira, who winced a little at the piercing eyes. ‘But I was not trying to preach. I was only thinking of those who chose and preferred to die for their chosen cause. But I shall not resign from this school. It will be hard, our working together, but I don’t intend to go away.’

  ‘We shall see, we shall see,’ Munira said, ominously.

  ‘About one thing, you are right, though,’ Karega continued. ‘I feel like I have been hiding from something. Do you know why I first came to look for you? You were her brother. You taught her. You taught me. And quite apart from needing help, I honestly thought you could unravel the Siriana mystery and make me understand the root cause of Chui’s behaviour and actions. But during the journey, I saw many more Chuis and I am not sure if I want to understand it any more. One must grow. History after all is not a gallery of dashing heroes. But I intend to stay here and look about me. I want to choose my side in the struggle to come,’ he added, remembering the lawyer’s letter.

  ‘We shall see,’ Munira added with greater menace, ‘but if I were you I would start thinking of employment elsewhere! or better still how to get a place at a Teacher Training College.’

  Chapter Nine

  1 ~ Happy New Year.
Grass was full. The wandering herdsmen had once again come back to the plains. Rain will rain. More grass will grow. More crops will grow. We shall eat our fill and forget the drought of the year before. But we shall not forget Munira and Karega and Abdulla and Wanja and the donkey – yes, Abdulla’s donkey. They saved us. Their knowledge of the city, their contacts in the city, their unselfish involvement in our lives: all this saved us. Abdulla’s donkey wandered everywhere and women and children competed in giving it maize to eat from their own hands. This time nobody – not even Njuguna – complained about its eating habits. We often hired it to transport our things and foods and wares to and from the big markets at Ruwa-ini. So for a small fee it had become our donkey. People said that Abdulla was a good man. May the Lord bless him. Look at what he had done to Joseph. Sent him to school. And he, the unsung hero of our fight for freedom, is doing all the work in the shop on one leg and he never complains. He was at times withdrawn into himself, and we understood. In his relaxed moods, when in a good humour, he more than made up for it by his stories which were becoming part of Ilmorog lore.

  Yes, it will rain. Crops will grow. We shall always remember the heroes in our midst. We shall always sing about the journey in the plains. May the Lord bless the old woman. But the drought will soon be a faint dream in a distant landscape. We say that the hunger of a thousand years is satisfied with one day’s cooking. May ill thoughts and frightening memories go with the drought! Only the epic journey. That would always be a thing to remember, and our MP had never come to explain, even. So let it be, we said in the opening months of the new year: we did not then know that within a year the journey, like a God who cannot let his generosity be forgotten, would send its emissaries from the past, to transform Ilmorog and change our lives utterly, Ilmorog and us utterly changed.

  That was yet to come. But at the time, well, at the beginning of the momentous period, we talked and whispered and gossiped about the chief and the policemen who would come and stay at the post for a week or so and then would go away. We also laughed at the churchmen who came all the way from the city or beyond to preach a sermon to empty benches. For nobody from Ilmorog would agree to go inside the new building.

  2 ~ Godfrey Munira, who for a long time had abandoned his iron horse, was one day seen on it galloping furiously across Ilmorog, his shirt untucked at the back, flowing stiffly behind him, like a bird’s broken wing in the winds. He kept to himself mostly and was rarely seen even at Abdulla’s place.

  These days Karega was to be seen mostly with Wanja: what had happened between him and the teacher? It was strange, very strange, we said without understanding fully what was the matter.

  But we were soon intrigued, fascinated, moved by the entwinement and flowering of youthful love and life and we whispered: see the wonder-gift of God. Crops will sprout luxuriant and green. We shall eat our fill and drink Theng’eta at harvest-time.

  3 ~ Later, years later, in Ilmorog Police Station, Munira was to try and recreate the feel of this period in Ilmorog which was completely dominated by the involvement of Wanja and Karega. And he used the same phrase, almost answering the question that underlay their waiting and watching as the drama unfolded before their eyes, making even the old relive the past of their youth, making love under leleshwa bush or under the millet fingers.

  ‘Yes, I could have tried to save him,’ he scribbled on, trying to interpret the facts in the light of the intervening time and events.

  ‘I could maybe have saved him. It is this feeling that most pains me. That I might have saved him, he who only sought for peace and truthful connection between things. Instead, I threw him even more firmly into that fatal embrace that has been the ruin of many a great man across the centuries. I should know. For was I not later caught in the same heart-perfumed embrace?

  ‘I tried, I struggled to extricate myself but I could not. I had, remember, watched her gradually receding from me into a neutral territory, standing, for a long time, distant to all our suits and seeking eyes, ever since Karega arrived in Ilmorog. It did not matter, I had reassured myself. It could never matter to me, for was I not really past these things? I was God’s watchman in a twilight gloom somewhere between sleeping and waking, and should I not rest there, and not trouble the twilight stillness with passionate insistence? At first I thought that I was only fascinated by her transformation. She was no longer restless, savouring people with wide assessing eyes that hid maybe bitterness behind their dilating surface softness. Within a short time of her contact with the soil and the preparations for the journey to the city, her eyes had become less exaggeratedly bright, more subdued, with a different kind of softness, no longer caressing people in the first hour of contact. She had become a less fully fleshed beauty, more of an angular beauty of a peasant woman. It had pained me that when once or twice I wanted her again as on the night of the big moon she refused or somehow put me off. But I then thought that I understood. For had I not been the recipient of her stories of her past and recent suffering in the city? She needed time to recover, I consoled myself, and thought that I would get my chance during the journey to the city. I waited . . . waited only to get the great slap on the face, the shock, during the night of Theng’eta drinking. For a day and a half, as Karega slept in his house as if drugged, I thought over the whole affair and I decided that I had really been too timid, hesitant. It was time that I took the initiative, took a step, however small, to start things in motion. I gradually worked myself into a rage and I really felt wronged over Mukami and over my father. But what was I to do about it? Could I resurrect the past and connect myself to it, graft myself on the stem of history even if it was only my family’s history outside of which I had grown? And would the stem really grow, sprouting branches with me as part of the great resurgence of life? But I also knew that I did not want to admit to myself that I could be seriously affected by Wanja’s defection. After all, I argued, I had never wanted to have more than a carnal link with her. I knew too much about her past to feel free and uninhibited with her. Yet, yet I wanted to have it out with Karega and my action had now driven her further away from me.

  I watched her after the night of Theng’eta drinking, after my quarrel with Karega, I watched her undergo yet another change. It was a new youthful, life-full, luscious growth after the rains.

  It pained me that the luscious growth was beyond my reach, that I could not eat it, my share even.

  The further she moved away from me, the more she drew me to her, until with months she had wrapped my soul in twists and knots around her. The security and the defences around my lifelong twilight slumber were being cut at the roots and I felt the pain of blood-sap trickling through heart’s veins and arteries awaking from years of numbness.

  I could not help it. I spied on them, watching them through the corner of my eyes, and what I saw would make me regret the more that I had hastily thrown him out of my orbit.

  Of an evening I saw them together running across the fields, stumbling over mikengeria creepers, over yellow merry-golden flowers, over the tall thangari stem grass, bringing back thistles on the back and the front and the sides of their clothes. Often, they would walk across Ilmorog ridge, two distant shadows against the golden glow of the setting sun, and disappear behind the hill to come back in the darkness or in the moonlight.

  Their love seemed to grow with the new crops of the year.

  This thing that I cannot describe, that I thought could never possess me, now grew roots and shoots and alas began to flower.

  The very movement of her skirt was a razor-sharp knife in my inside. And yet the knife seemed to cut deeper and sharper when I did not see the skirt. But still coming suddenly across it, or seeing it flit by in the sunlight or against the evening cool skies, I would feel, no longer the knife, but a thousand tiny needles in my belly, in my flesh. I sought her very shadow. Her steps in the sand agitated me, her presence occasioned thunderous palpitations of hope for the unattainable. Torturous angels.

  To see her be
came a need. Yet seeing her was a quick act of torment. I hated it that I could not control myself. I would attempt a level voice when speaking to her or to Karega to convince myself that I could still hold myself together. Why had she come to Ilmorog? Why had Karega come to Ilmorog? Could Ilmorog contain the three of us?

  I cycled to Limuru to recruit more teachers. This time I was lucky and got two with EACE passes from Kinyogori Harambee School and one who had failed his school certificate but had had his junior certificate at Ngenia High School. Three new teachers at a go!

  I rushed back to my watch, now not so alone.

  They were still a-wandering across Ilmorog country, always together in the fields, on the mountain-top, in the plains, their love blossoming in the wind, as if both were re-enacting broken possibilities in their pasts. A second chance. A second chance for him to get at me. First it was Mukami. Now it was Wanja.

  I started finding faults in his teaching, with the level of his preparations, with the content of his lessons, with the kind of literature he introduced to the tender minds. But really, there was little to criticize.

  I even started moralizing, to myself of course, about the effect of their unmarried liaison on the children.

  Crops ripened: came new harvests.

  One afternoon, I invited all the teachers for a drink at Abdulla’s place. It was in the middle of the third term.

  I steered the conversation to the school and the teaching of certain subjects like history and civics.

  ‘You see, the children have very impressionable minds. They like to copy. They take the opinion of their teachers as a Bible-sanctioned truth. That is why we should be careful, don’t you think?’ I asked, turning to Karega. They were all listening and I felt the power of my own argument.