by Peter Kimani
Table of Contents
___________________
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About Peter Kimani
Copyright & Credits
About Akashic Books
In memory of my mothers, Esther Wangari Kimani and Rebecca Njeri Ng’ang’a,
and
for Lisa, Samora, and Tumaini, who continue their lineage
PROLOGUE
In that year, the glowworms in the marshes were replaced by lightbulbs, villagers were roused out of their hamlets by a massive rumbling that many mistook for seismic shifts of the earth. These were not uncommon occurrences—locals experienced earthquakes across the Rift Valley so often they even had an explanation for it. They said it was God taking a walk in His universe. They believed this without needing to see it, but on that day the villagers saw the source of the noise as well. It was a monstrous, snakelike creature whose black head, erect like a cobra’s, pulled rusty brown boxes and slithered down the savanna, coughing spasmodically as it emitted blue-black smoke. The villagers clasped their hands and wailed: Yu kiini! Come and see the strips of iron that those strange men planted seasons earlier—which, left undisturbed, had grown into a monster gliding through the land.
The gigantic snake was a train and the year was 1901, an age when white men were still discovering the world for their kings and queens in faraway lands. So when the railway superintendent, or simply Master as he was known to many, peered out the window of his first-class cabin that misty morning, his mind did not register the dazzled villagers who dropped their hoes and took off, or led their herds away from the grazing fields in sheer terror of the strange creature cutting through their land. Neither did Master share in the tamasha booming from across the coaches where British, Indian, and African workers—all in their respective compartments—were celebrating the train’s maiden voyage. Instead, Master was absorbed by the landscape that looked remarkably different from how he remembered it from his previous trip.
The mass of water appeared to have grown from a pond into a large lake. Maybe his eyes were playing tricks on him; or maybe after crawling through that very same land on either donkey or zebra, his lofty perch on the train now afforded him a very different view. To the left, a spring spewed hot water, the vapor casting clouds of woolly nothingness above it. One of these should be named for Sally, Master thought—the idea eliciting a mélange of soreness and softness that always came with the memories of his English wife, now estranged for four years. She was the reason he was looking forward to returning to England. A ship was waiting at the port of Mombasa, some five hundred miles away, where the rail construction had begun. The railroad tracks ended at the head of what he had named Port Victoria, memorializing the lake there with the same name, in honor of the Queen of England. So the rail that started by the shores of the Indian Ocean now cut through the hinterland to the shores of Lake Victoria. This was the mission that had brought him to the British East Africa Protectorate, and it had now been accomplished. He had been discharged with full honor, the cable from London said, echoing the military jargon that had regulated his life for twenty-three years. The cable also said a letter with full details of his release had been dispatched on SS Britannia, the vessel that would then deliver him home to England. Master suppressed a smile at the thought, and further subverted the thought by pretending to scratch his pate, whose receding hairline merged with his forehead to form what looked like a small crater.
“Happy are the pure at heart,” Reverend Richard Turnbull, sitting beside Master, said over the rattling sounds of the train: Kukuru-kakara, kukuru-kakara. They held different sections of the shiny pole that served as passenger support, as though they were experienced pole dancers, though their bums never touched.
Master nodded and smiled ruefully but said nothing, retreating to the cemetery of his mind where memories unfurled. He wanted to absorb as much as he could from the land, a sudden burst of emotion clogging his throat. It was hard to imagine the space they were gliding through with such swiftness had been a blistering crawl that had taken them four years to complete. Four years in the wilderness. What had partly kept him going was the anticipation of the triumphant maiden ride. That moment had finally arrived, but Master felt somewhat deflated, the memories of his difficult past keeping him from fully enjoying the celebrations.
As if reading his mind, Reverend Turnbull bellowed, “Rejoice!” as the train approached a new township, which, like many other settlements they had encountered, seemed to have sprouted up out of the steps of the train station. On either side of the compartment, Indian and African workers, traveling in second and third class, made music from anything they could lay their hands on, rattling bottles with spoons, clapping, ululating. The walls that separated the different races were still up, just as they had been through the years of construction. The different racial groups, Master had written in one of his dispatches to London, remained separate like the rail tracks. Yet the rail was the product of their collective efforts—of black and brown and white hands.
The African and Indian workers on the train danced jubilantly and Reverend Turnbull joined them, nodding his head and waving excitedly. But Master remained unmoved through the razzmatazz. Still unable to savor the moment, he was still distracted, lost in his thoughts. He found it strange that he was starting to miss the land before even leaving it. He had anticipated this moment for four years, but now that it had come, the longing that he’d harbored fizzled into knots of anxiety—not just about the future and Sally’s place in his scheme of things, but also about the present that would soon become the past.
Trying to rid himself of his anxiety, Master glanced outside. “That’s where we left that Indian bastard,” he said to Reverend Turnbull, his forefinger arching into a crooked arrow that pointed to a spot where rows of mud-and-wattle rondavels stood. The walls were plastered with white clay and the shingles on the roofs were aligned neatly, like rows of corn.
“The runaway father?”
“Yes, the f—the bastard,” Master replied, checking himself just in time before cursing in front of a man of God.
“We have all come short of the glory of God,” Reverend Turnbull said quietly, glancing outside, the rondavels almost out of sight. “I’m glad I took the baby into my care.”
“Was our suspicion borne out?”
“What suspicion?”
“That it was his child?”
Reverend Turnbull shook his head quietly.
Master turned to face him. “What does that mean?”
“No.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing.”
“Why?”
“That’s a secret only known to the child’s mother.”
Master opened his mouth, then sighed and shrugged. “Was the child Indian or Caucasian?”
“What’s the difference?”
“Hair? Nose? I thought it was pretty obvious . . .”
“Nothing in life is that obvious.”
“So, are you confirming the child was Indian or Caucasian?”
“What does it matter?”
“It does.”
“Why?”
Master opened his mouth, flashed a wan smile. “Because . . .”
“What’s done is done,” Reverend Turnbull said. “I’m now the girl’s father. I will raise her as my own.”
Master opened his mouth again but kept quiet. He had burdened the man of God with enough secrets.
Both men returned to gazing out the window. Their arms were tangled around the shiny pole and their faces nearly touched as they craned their necks to peek outside—their bums still as far from each other as possible—stretched out at awkward angles so that they resembled ducks. The lake was almost out of view, only a sliver of light visible where it stood, and the clouds above the hot water spring appeared to have shifted.
“Reverend,” Master said, facing him, “I know your Bible says heaven is somewhere else, but I think it must be close by.”
Reverend Turnbull smiled, loosened his collar, and responded, “I’m afraid so.”
“Why are you afraid?”
“Because God shouldn’t live so close to heathens.”
HOUSE OF MUSIC
1
God’s Country was how Reverend Turnbull described the land in 1893 when he wrote his first pastoral letter to the mother church in England. He wrote about the marvels that he had witnessed during his travels—from the gentleness of the sands on the pristine coastal beaches, to the stunning lakes that seemingly appeared out of nowhere in the middle of forests, to the dramatic plunge of what European geographers had named the Rift Valley.
Although the natives do not know God, the perfection of their land raises serious doubts as to how this could have been created by heathen deities, Reverend Turnbull confided in his letters. What he failed to elaborate on was whether or not it was his mere presence that elevated the heathen land to God’s dominion—but then again, it was pointless to state the obvious. In that age, God and the white man were one and the same; in fact, even the locals had an expression for it: Muthungu na Ngai no undu umwe.
When Reverend Turnbull started preaching in Nakuru, he liked to refer to his mission as God-ordained, for he was not destined to be there in the first place. He used the locals’ idiom of the train as a snake to recall the story of Jonah, God’s servant who had defied His call only to be swallowed by a whale and spat out in the city of Nineveh, where he was meant to be in the first place to spread the word of God. Reverend Turnbull told his congregations that Nakuru was his Nineveh, where he had emerged from the belly of the iron snake.
The Nineveh narrative was a white lie. Reverend Turnbull simply appropriated a line that Master had used to describe the dramatic events that followed upon reaching Mombasa to commence his return trip to England. The letter of Master’s discharge from the colonial service was there all right, but it contained an unexpected gift. He had lobbied heavily for a knighthood for his service to the empire, and the letter from London indicated his bosses had acquiesced to his request and had granted him a title. But when the letter elaborated upon the details of his title, he realized his was a different kind altogether: it was a title deed to a parcel of land of his choice, anywhere in the colony. The only condition was that the portion of land had to lie between two natural boundaries for easy demarcation.
Master instantly recognized this as a bureaucratic slip that would be corrected in due time. But since he was already attached to the land, he saw it as his chance to kill two birds with one stone; he would accept the land, but this would not stop him from pushing for knighthood. He remembered the breathtaking hot water spring and the lake in the Rift Valley, and he decided that would be the land he would claim. Reverend Turnbull offered to accompany him on the trip back to the valley.
“This is your road to Damascus,” Reverend Turnbull intoned, to which Master replied, “Feels more like that Nineveh fellow, reverend.”
“Jonah?”
“Yes, Jonah must be his name. Here I am in the belly of what locals call the snake, destined for England, but fate conspires to return me to the African wilds.”
Reverend Turnbull smiled and touched his collar, and said, “I hear you,” which was his way of saying he had deferred participating in the conversation because he was distracted by a pressing thought. He was thinking Nineveh sounded both profound and spiritual. He committed it to memory for future use.
“You can build Sally a house,” Reverend Turnbull said to Master when they arrived in Nakuru. “A castle between the spring and the lake.”
Master thought that would be blasphemous but he did not voice his concern—building a house between two marvels of nature was like challenging God’s creation.
It was the talk about the Indian who got away, the one who Master was reticent about, the one whose child Reverend Turnbull was raising, that helped clarify things.
“God says we should love our enemies, and He has brought you close to the Indian to test your faith,” Reverend Turnbull said, adding immediately: “Build Sally a monument to love like that beautiful building in India . . .”
“The Taj Mahal,” Master said triumphantly, as though the sheer intensity of feeling would somehow will such a majestic building into existence.
“And those Indian workers must know how to build such monuments.”
“Technically, they are still under my command,” Master reminded.
“Then command them to action!”
* * *
The legend about the house that Master built is that the construction went on for so long that babies born during that time were toddlers when the work was completed. Others said construction went on around the clock, with shimmering lightbulbs suspended off the trees to illuminate the workers’ paths at night. Yet other villagers claimed they slept one night and woke up the following morning to find the towering structure sneering down upon them.
But the reason Master became a legend in his own lifetime was because of what happened with the house. Soon after its completion, the windows of the Monument to Love were shuttered so that no light streamed in as Master mourned and villagers whispered of the loss of his mysterious love, who had dropped him like a piece of hot ugali. Some villagers disputed this, saying it was impossible for one to hide that long, burrowed like a huko—a rodent—and devised ways to test if anybody was home. A typical test entailed picking wild eggs from the lake that gave the township its name, letting them cook in the hot water spring, and then hurling them at the wooden shutters. Cooked eggs, the villagers said, bounced off better than raw ones, their intention being not to defile the building but to rouse the aggrieved Master—ngombo ya wendo, or the love slave, as they nicknamed him—from his slumber. Nobody appeared, so they concluded that Master was no more.
Then one day, as a gentle sun rose in the east, the shutters were flung aside, the windows slid open, and throaty shouts were heard to mark the reopening. Master had overcome his grief, but only after issuing a decree of a most intriguing nature: he posted notices around the property warning that females caught trespassing on the land would be shot on sight. He and women were done, kabisa. But since very few locals could read at all, and those who did were protective of the white man, it was hard to tell which aspects of Master’s life and the house that he built were fact and which were fiction.
What happened for a fact is that Master turned his castle into a farmhouse and brought in dairy animals. He patrolled the large expanse on horseback watching his animals graze. This was a downgrade, as Master had spent years watching over humans at work and, like Jesus, rode a mule. The mule was preceded by a zebra, whose mouth was muzzled to ensure it did not bite Master. The dairy animals, beautiful in their brown, white, and black skins, grazed with white pelicans perched on their backs who watched as they mowed grass. Imagine an uninterrupted stillness of bovine bliss, the low hum of munching animals enhanced by whistling thorns in the distance. The stillness is broken by the muffled s
ound of a cow scratching where a tick has attached itself, but even that seems to be part of the natural ambiance. A pelican in soundless flight from the muscle twitch of its host, before relanding, the soft drops of dung at calculated intervals opening a floodgate of urine.
An electric fence surrounded the farm, dividing the animal kingdom. Wild animals that often streamed to the nearby watering hole would be jolted to their senses whenever they touched the fence, and most learned to keep their distance. By dusk, if the dairy animals had not been milked, their udders would swell and the drip-drop of milk from their teats would grow into a steady trickle, soaking the black-cotton soil to evoke notions of that ancient land where milk and honey flowed.
The wild animals watched the milky spectacle but none dared to touch the fluid, even when it formed a rivulet and coursed beyond the fence. They had the sense to stick to the pond water that they knew. A deer would mount another after quenching its thirst, which appeared to trigger other thirsts, while the hyena, convinced that Master’s arm would fall from its rapid swings, stalked him on the other side of the fence, giggling at the prospect of a meal that never materialized. The giraffes would trot through the brown savanna, and the zebras, with their black-white zigzags, brayed for Master’s attention, yearning to cross the line and leave the wilderness for his domestic dominion.
But that was before a plague wiped out the entire dairy herd yet afflicted none of the wild animals; they appeared to thrive through that period of strife.
The farmhouse was turned into a private club where white men in wide-brimmed black hats and knee-high boots sat in high-backed seats and waited, with guns at the ready, for wildlife streaming to the watering hole. They seemed to begrudge the wild animals for the plague that scuttled the Pipe Dream, as Master had called his grandiose plan to lay pipes across the country and supply milk in place of water. There would be plenty of milk for all to drink, Master had declared; even natives would have enough to drink and wash their dark skin if they so desired—it might just whiten them.