Wizard of the Crow

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong

  The woman looked and sounded so serious that Tajirika felt he was about to piss on himself as he let out a single involuntary groan. Suppose these women were actually crazy? Possessed of female daemons intent on destroying man? It was much safer for him to go along with their so-called court proceeding. He would keep them busy while figuring out how to escape.

  “Please get off my back; let us talk. There is no court of law that decides cases solely on the basis of a plaintiff’s story, and especially one who is not even present.”

  “Let’s give him a chance to defend himself.”

  They allowed him to take his seat again but warned him not to show contempt, or else…

  “Listen to me,” he said in a disingenuous respectful tone. “I don’t know who you are. And I don’t even know who has accused me of wife beating. Vinjinia and I are one of the happiest couples in the world. I don’t believe in domestic violence. Ours is a Christian home, and we belong to the middle class. Wife beating is for the poor pagans, you know, people without any understanding of what it means to be modern. I suspect that all this talk of my wife beating and whatnot may have come about when some neighbors saw my wife with a swollen face and a few scratches sustained when she slipped and fell on the cement floor. You are women, and you know how clumsy your kind can be sometimes. I really despise neighbors who have nothing better to do than poke their noses into other people’s affairs.”

  “There are only two people who know what happened. You and your wife. You say she is clumsy and she fell on the cement floor. So we are now asking you: do you want us to summon her here?”

  Tajirika was taken aback. This was the last thing he expected, the summons of his wife. But he believed that Vinjinia would never say anything untoward about their domestic affairs to perfect strangers. The Vinjinia he knew was the key to his freedom, and he was sure that she would stand by her man.

  “Yes, call her,” he said with braggadocio.

  “Give us directions and describe her to us,” one of the women said, to indicate that they were not in league with Vinjinia. “We know only about you.”

  After an hour or so Vinjinia was in the room. The women seated her opposite her husband. One of the women chaired the council. The others were the jury. Vinjinia had covered her head with a shawl. Her eyes showed fear, and she did not look at her husband directly. Tajirika gave her a stern look, which he tried to hide with a false smile.

  “Tell them the truth that I did not touch you,” Tajirika hastened to say before the chairperson could utter a word. “Is it not a fact that your swollen face resulted from your falling on the cement floor?”

  The judge told her to speak her truth as she knew it. The silence in the room was riveting. Vinjinia glanced at Tajirika, at the women, and then looked away.

  “I fell on the cement floor,” she said, in a barely audible voice.

  The women looked stunned. Tajirika made no attempt to hide his triumph.

  “You have heard for yourselves,” he crowed, openly arrogant.

  “There is nothing more to say about this sad affair,” the judge said.

  Tajirika wished he had the means to wreak instant vengeance on these women. At the door he put his arms around his wife and whispered: “You did well. Anything else and the last beating would have paled in comparison with the one I would have given you tonight.”

  Vinjinia trembled. He simply had gone too far. If he could threaten her just outside the hearing of these women, what was he not capable of at home? If she was going to die, at least let there be witnesses. She quickly disengaged herself from him and turned around.

  “I am sorry” she said, directing her remarks to the judge. “I have lied to you, and lied to myself while lying for my husband. This man rains fists on me whenever it suits his temper. If he has a disagreement with others in his workplace or in a bar, he takes it out on me. The heart of my husband is as hard as a concrete floor.”

  Tajirika lost it before the woman who had just betrayed his manhood. He jumped on her and was going to beat her yet again, but the women were too quick for him. They restrained him before he landed a blow. But even as they dragged him away from his wife, Tajirika continued wagging his finger at her.

  “You wait till I get you home! Just you wait!” he shouted at her, throwing caution to the wind.

  “But who told you that you are going home?” the machete-wielding woman said as she rushed toward him, waving the machete in the air menacingly. Tajirika jumped back a step, convinced that these women were prepared to kill him if he gave them the slightest cause.

  The judge told them to sit down, which they all did, including Tajirika, who was inwardly grateful to the judge for keeping the machete woman at bay.

  “You,” the judge said, pointing at Tajirika. Your own actions before our very eyes confirm what we’ve heard. But this court will not condemn you without giving you a chance to defend yourself. Why did you beat your wife?”

  “Don’t call her my wife,” Tajirika said, panting with frustration at his inability to teach his wife a lesson. “This woman is a hypocrite. When the police detained me recently, she seized the opportunity to hire dancing prostitutes and gangsters to entertain her.”

  Vinjinia, who had not the slightest clue what Tajirika was talking about, shook her head in disbelief. But the mention of dancing women made her recall the women who had forced the government to admit that it was holding Tajirika.

  “Who lied to you that I did nothing about your arrest? That I was partying with women dancers? Some people are truly incapable of gratitude. When the police arrested me a while ago, this man did nothing. I even came across a press statement in which he was going to denounce me. But when he was arrested and held in secrecy, there was no police precinct, hospital, or newspaper office I did not set foot in to find out what his so-called friends had done to him. But when he came out of his tomb, instead of asking me how it was at home when he was away, he went about sniffing for gossip, and whatever his drunken friends told him he took as the gospel truth and sound basis for killing blows.”

  “The woman has asked you a question,” the judge said, turning to Tajirika. Who made allegations against her? Tell us so that we may fetch him and bring him here to testify.”

  Tajirika remembered that Sikiokuu had forbidden him to talk about the photographs or the dancing women because of ongoing security investigations. He did not respond.

  “Do you have anything else that you want to tell this council?” the judge asked Vinjinia.

  “I just want to say before you all that I will not accept blows on my body anymore.”

  “Stop lying, woman. I have never touched you with these hands the way a real man should,” Tajirika shouted, standing up and clenching his fists.

  The women pushed him back to his seat.

  “Your actions before our very eyes testify against you,” the judge told Tajirika. “We have enough evidence for the jury to issue a just verdict. Vinjinia will be taken back to her place,” the judge said with a tone of finality.

  As he saw Vinjinia being escorted out of the room, Tajirika felt like crying out to Vinjinia: Please don’t leave me here with these crazy women! But he did not. How could he, a man, call on his wife, a woman, to save him from other women?

  The judge fixed her eyes on Tajirika.

  “You are sentenced to receive as many blows as you rained on your wife.”

  “But if you ever appear before us again, you will not leave here with your penis dangling between your legs,” said the woman with the machete as she did a little war jig while brandishing her weapon. Even as the women pummeled him, his eyes were focused on the machete. His pain was dull; his stare was blank.

  4

  When Tajirika finally found himself outside the gates of his residence, he simply could not believe it. Had they let him go? Was he really safe at Golden Heights? His initial impulse was to enter the house and immediately set upon Vinjinia and break her legs and arms. But the last words he remembered
hearing were unambiguous: “Bemember: resume your wife beating and you will surely feel the full force of female daemons.” So he had been right, after all, about who the women really were. As he imagined them suddenly emerging from the surrounding cornfields for retribution, he started trembling, overcome by a mixture of relief, shame, anger, and helplessness.

  Instead of opening the door, Tajirika leaned against it and started to sob. Tears raced down his cheeks and fell onto the veranda. They increasingly became bigger and faster, soon turning into torrents that gushed down as from a broken dam, making two tunnels on the earth just outside the veranda. But he was not aware of the tunnels as he eventually opened the door and quickly locked it from the inside.

  5

  The drama of the female daemons was not something Tajirika was overly eager to shout from the rooftops. He could imagine the nasty derisive comments of passersby: There goes the man beaten by women. So he confined himself within the walls of his house and ran his business over the phone.

  Vinjinia was also keen to avoid questions about her bruised face, and, like him, she stayed indoors.

  Thus they found themselves spending their nights and days inside the house, avoiding each other. They even tried to hide their bruised faces from each other, Tajirika by donning a wide-brimmed hat and Vinjinia with a cloth over her head.

  Vinjinia had been so sure that Tajirika would exact vengeance that she became more worried when after a few days no violence had surfaced. But, under the cover of silence and calculated indifference, was he planning something more sinister? After a few days of this, Vinjinia started wondering: What did those women do to him? Did they cut his manhood off?

  She resorted to stalking him, casting surreptious glances in his direction, hoping to catch him naked as he emerged from the bathroom or the toilet. Once or twice she opened the door to his bedroom at a time she thought he might be changing into his nightclothes but, finding him fully clothed, she closed the door quickly, as if she had made a mistake through force of habit.

  Tajirika had also started feeling restless and perplexed by several questions for which he had no satisfactory answer.

  Some of them were prompted by his ego: to be captured, sat upon, put on trial, and beaten by women defied all that he knew about the world. At such moments he wished he had the means to annihilate them, but weren’t they creatures from the netherworld? Anyway, who had told them about him and Vinjinia? Wife beating in Aburlria, after all, was so common as not to be noticed. What made for a peaceful home was not the absence of such blows but the ability of a couple to keep the knowledge of the violence within the confines of the walls of their house.

  What fascinated and irritated him at the same time was the knowledge that there was not a single falsehood in the women’s allegations, forcing him to brood on his conduct of this affair. Why had he not checked Sikiokuu’s story with Vinjinia?

  He also could not deny the truth of Vinjinia’s claim that he had not done much for her when she herself was arrested, and now he felt ashamed for not having been man enough to stand by his woman.

  And what to make of her claims that she had left no stone unturned in search of him? Was this true? He wanted to know more, but how could he break the silence without demeaning himself? He, too, started stalking her, casting surreptitious glances at her to see if he could detect a sign of any softening in her.

  The two started circling each other, often finding themselves in the same part of the house, both looking for an opening to satisfy their respective curiosities about one another. One afternoon they encountered each other on the veranda and were struck by the same surprise: starting from just outside the veranda wall were two tunnels. What rains have done this? they loudly asked in unison. Yet they were not aware of any rains recently. With each walking along one of the tunnels, they followed them through the cornfields, all the way down the valley. And then? The second surprise.

  On the boggy, marshy valley floor, a pool had formed. They stared at each other. They each dipped a finger into the pool and tasted the liquid. It was salty, like tears. Neither of them could believe the evidence of their tongues. Needing confirmation, they returned their fingers to the pool and now placed a finger on each other’s tongue. The water was still salty. They giggled a little, in unison. They quickly put their fingers back in the pool, each hoping to be the first to place more salty water in the other’s mouth. But it was as if they had read each other’s intentions. Vinjinia dashed into the cornfields, with Tajirika following her in a playful chase.

  They at once succumbed to the fatigue of it all and suddenly felt the kind of warmth they used to arouse in each other in the days of their youth: for a moment they stood looking at each other, mesmerized by what was happening to them. They knew rather than talked about it. But there in the open fields, under the corn leaves, it felt good, very good, and for a few minutes the pain of the bruises on their faces and in their hearts seemed soothed away by the sweetness that whistled tunes ending in a rapturous crescendo.

  6

  Neither Tajirika nor Vinjinia could have dreamt that out of the tears of sorrow could come such intense screams of joy. But the scream that next issued from Vinjinia’s mouth was not joy or sorrow, and for a few seconds she could not utter a word. Tajirika looked to see what she was pointing at. The sight made him tense up also: a flock of birds was frozen in flight above the lake. Some yards into the pool, a dog, barking at the birds, suddenly froze before their very eyes.

  Tajirika and Vinjinia took to their heels and did not once look back until they reached the house. The valley floor used to shake as if hollow below. What had brought the waters to the surface? What of the arrested motion of beings r

  They came back the following day, hoping the whole thing had vanished. It had not, and now, in addition to the birds, were bees and butterflies also in frozen flight. On the surface, ducks and chickens, including a cock trying to mount a hen, were all frozen in motion. So also two antelopes, one in the air and the other about to jump.

  They gave up trying to unravel the mystery. When Gacirü and Gaclgua came for holidays, Tajirika and Vinjinia forbid them to go anywhere near the valley or talk about it, reinforcing the ban with stories of daemons that lured children into a pool in the valley and swallowed them. But Gacirü and Gaclgua whispered the stories to their friends, and eventually the stories reached the ears of parents, who sternly warned their children to avoid the area.

  Parents added their bits to the scary lore: The pool became a lake that turned any living thing that touched its surface or flew over it into stone. Even looking in its direction or looking at it, others added, could turn somebody into stone, which made people walk with their eyes facing away from its supposed location. Silence about the lake ensued.

  But Tajirika and Vinjinia were attracted to the lake like a moth to the light. They found a spot from where they could see it, especially in the evenings, because when light fell on the motionless objects the things would change colors dramatically, depending on the intensity and angle of the sun.

  Tajirika and Vinjinia named the scene Museum of Arrested Motion.

  7

  It was while seated in their usual place facing the Museum of Arrested Motion that Tajirika, out of nowhere, asked Vinjinia how she had come to be the guest of honor at a women’s ceremonial dance, warning her not to lie because he had seen, with his own eyes, photographs of the occasion. She assumed he meant press photos, although she had not seen any. Without mentioning her visit to the Wizard of the Crow, she described her fruitless search for Tajirika and finally her decision to confront Sikiokuu at the official opening of Kaniürü’s office, where some women dancers whom she had never met forced his hand. But it did not really matter that she had never met them, and all he should know was that but for those dancers he would never have been found alive.

  It was Tajirika’s turn, and he too omitted any reference to his encounter with the Wizard of the Crow in prison, his commanding a whole camp with only a
bucket of shit, and his bargaining his way to freedom by betraying his friend and benefactor Machokali. Instead, Tajirika described how he defied those who had arrested him and threatened to report their criminal mistreatment of him to the Ruler. It was then that the officials told him that the involvement of his wife with subversive female elements was the real reason they had arrested him, and, to prove it, they showed him photographs of Vin-jinia seated in front of the dancers.

  The shock on Vinjinia’s face made Tajirika believe that she knew nothing about the pictures. She did not deny that there were people with cameras there, but she had assumed that they were from the newspapers. And why would newspaper people take the pictures of her and the dancers and erase the images of Sikiokuu and Kan-iürü from the scene, since they were the chief dignitaries at the ceremony?

  “There is more to these pictures than meets the eye,” said Vin-jinia, shaking her head from side to side.

  Her words stung Tajirika into silence. So that was why Sikiokuu did not want him to talk to Vinjinia about the pictures? So that’s why he had forbidden him to beat her? Now he recalled how Sikiokuu had recently put the phone down while Tajirika was about to seek permission to beat Vinjinia. His anger drove the matter of his abduction into the background.

  “Let me get ahold of Minister Sikiokuu, and I will teach him never to toy with me again,” he said at last.

  He could not figure out the form the vengeance would take. He even thought of hiring professional assassins to finish off Sikiokuu, but he had no clue as to where to find them. Besides, that was risky and would take time to arrange; he wanted instant vengeance. Tajirika’s failure to settle on a course of action made Sikiokuu’s lies burn even more. Why had he lied to him? To make him cooperate against…