People swarmed about. Roads were wider than she had ever seen. It was like a dream, but a dream without anyone to direct you where to go or what to do. And, like a dream, without edges to it – bare and patchy as it seemed in memory, everywhere you looked (even across the race course, even to the roads you had traversed the other side of the swampy river bed, even to the wide plains south of the railway workshops) it was still Nairobi.
All the same, she was getting tired. There was some money hidden away inside the kiondo but she did not know how to buy anything to eat from these strange buildings filled with men, or how to ask her way to a market. She did not understand most of what was being said around her, and began to see why people had said it would be hard to find anyone you knew in Nairobi (but in any case she did not know anyone). She had seen Indian shopkeepers in Nyeri, and an engineer or two coming to do repairs in the factory, but here there seemed to be Indians everywhere.
One of them pulled up a car near her and out of it stepped not another Indian, as she had at first thought, but a young Kikuyu man dressed in a suit such as the master would wear only on Sundays or for attending baraza in town, with a wide-brimmed hat and shiny European shoes. He shook hands with the driver of the car and started to walk away.
‘Thuku,’ a whisper went round the crowd, ‘Harry Thuku.’
Thuku! She had not seen him before but she knew he had been to Nyeri and they had all sung songs in praise of him because he had protested against the women’s road work and was going to free the people from forced labour and European taxes. This was seeing life indeed, and she felt an urgent need to participate, to make herself also known. She was about seventeen years old and she too was part of a new world. So she began to sing one of the praise songs, swaying in time with the music. Some people laughed, others clapped their hands out of beat, for which she did not see the reason. Thuku himself stopped and turned round.
‘So you know me?’ he asked with a smile.
‘Everyone knows you, sir, even if we did not see you when you came to Nyeri.’
‘But I do not know you. Who are you?’
‘My name is Wairimu wa Gichuru, sir.’
‘And what are you doing in Nairobi, Wairimu, if you come from Nyeri? Are your parents here, or do you have a husband?’
‘I came alone, sir, to see the city and find work.’
Some of the men laughed. A woman in European dress was about to take her arm.
‘Leave her,’ Thuku ordered. Then he spoke in another language to a man in the crowd.
‘Wairimu, you are brave, but you do not know how hard a thing you have undertaken. Your people ought to have explained to you. This friend of mine will take you to some Kiambu people who will teach you what you need to know. Perhaps they will give you some work for a while. Will you trust us to arrange that?’
‘Yes indeed, sir. Thank you, sir.’
He smiled again.
‘It is good to be brave and wise. People have said that I am brave. But sometimes it is wise to be a little afraid.’
The group dispersed as he walked away and the man he had pointed out signalled to Wairimu to follow. She went with him to a narrow, dirtier street and in it to a small corrugated iron building where men were eating and drinking tea. The foremen and clerks at the estate sometimes had tea and bread but she had never tasted any herself. The man indicated a bench she should sit on and a young boy brought her uji to drink and pieces of bread, at his command. The friend of Thuku – she later learned that he was called Tairara – went to talk to the man and wife, Samson and Nduta, who ran the tea room. Then he went away and left them to talk to her in Kikuyu.
First they asked whether she had run away from home, whether she had ever been married, if she had a baby or was expecting one. Well, they said, it was not according to their custom that she should be alone, but the world was changing and Nyeri was perhaps less strict than Kiambu. She could help them serve and wash the utensils: they would give her food and a corner to sleep in and, if she stayed, some money at the end of the month. They supposed she must know what Nairobi was like and how men were bound to pester her. That was her own affair but they did not want any trouble in the tea shop. Outside, they had no way to protect her, women being as few as they were and all the old rules set aside. Straight away she had better learn numbers in Swahili and the names of the main foodstuffs. This did not take long and she revelled in her own ability to learn.
She was amazed by her luck. Although supposed to be working most daylight hours, she was soon able to find pretexts for going out to buy provisions or help someone with a load to the station. She was fascinated by the streets, where ox-carts still mingled with the motor cars and at night big lights (just as the turn-boy had told her at Ruiru) shone from poles along the wayside.
In shop windows there were white people standing and sitting to display the clothes – it took her some time to realise they were not alive – and some of the buildings were higher than the tallest tree. Inside, people said, you walked up stair after stair, like the four that led up to master’s bungalow at the coffee. Water came out of pipes – not many of them: you had to queue for a turn to fill your bucket. Some people preferred to go down to the river, but Nduta refused to use river water for tea or cooking. When you slopped through the marsh and reeds to get to the bank (for there was nowhere else you could decently have a bath, and even so there would be men prowling about) you could see why. For this was not like the river that came down from the mountain and people had not respected it. Sewage and hospital waste poured into it, rubbish and dead cats floated in it, rats invaded the garbage heaps left beside it, the only natural life connected with it was the loud croaking of the frogs at night. It was only after heavy rain, which could fall even out of season in Nairobi, that its pace would increase and the water might seem clean as it gurgled along, but then it would overflow its banks and still more refuse would be carried into the stream when the water subsided again.
She learned in a rough and ready way to recognise the different kinds of people. There were arrogant Somali, with their elaborate headscarves and bony features: some of them condescended to oversee labour on the estates, demanding enamel dishes, tea and special times to pray, but now she saw their women for the first time and learned a new concept of elegance. There were big, black Luos, Uganda people with white robes and commanding eyes, Kamba porters and woodworkers with their pointed teeth – good mechanics, they were reckoned up country – Goans, like brown Europeans, deft, jerky, decorative, and Hindu and Muslim Indians in every kind of dress and every walk of life. Arabs and coast people came often to the tea room, speaking in a way the inland people seemed to understand but did not imitate: Nduta said they avoided bars because of their religion. The men were very clean; there were only a few women, but Wairimu was studying them carefully. Then there were the Europeans, hundreds of them, it seemed, in the middle of town, because many of them had work there instead of being hidden away in kitchens and workshops like the other races. By complexion, tilt of the head, clothing, tools carried and, most especially, by the state of their boots, you gradually got to identify European official, farmer, soldier, railwayman, police. The women all seemed to be young – though people said the ones with the shortest hair and skirts were the youngest – but even here you could soon learn the difference between a visiting farmer and a town wife. Many of them were not married at all, she was told, but served in shops (European shops, of course) or wrote things in offices, earned their own money, bought dresses or cooking pans or groceries for themselves (you could see the parcels being carried out by shop attendants to a waiting vehicle), some even drove their own cars. Indeed there was a lot to think about.
Wairimu delighted in the different food smells, horse smells, tobacco smells and cosmetic smells that wafted across the pavement from each group. She was interested and amazed by the skin colours and textures, more various than she had dreamed of, and the voices that ranged from gruff and guttural to shrill and stacc
ato like those the old people said you used to hear at night when the forests were thick and full of life.
She was summoned from her reverie by the kitchen attendant. Clothes would be brought tomorrow, they were told. Everyone was expected to be very clean and to be wearing something decent underneath so that they could be fitted without making anybody ashamed. Please remind everyone to be ready early in the morning. Well, there was some pleasure still in getting a new dress, just as there used to be in selecting the six goatskins, turning and matching them this way and that to make the best of the colours and the patterns. Of course she would remind the ladies and inspect them too. Seventy-eight years had never yet taught her to mind her own business.
The local donors’ committee had come up with thirty dresses and two of the ladies had come down to distribute them. It was an occasion they always enjoyed, an opportunity to give pleasure through their generosity and to show how free they were with the old women, patting them on the shoulder and helping to pull the garments over their flabby chests. It was an agony for Matron, who knew that the gifts got together must vary greatly in their appeal and durability, and also that at least half of them would be too small. One of the ladies was an Asian diplomat’s wife, the other a Kenyan lawyer, glad to find excuses to get out of the house during her maternity leave. She had hopefully brought along a sewing kit for alterations, but Matron was envisaging long weeks of complaint as she presided, smiling, over the coffee and biscuits. She wrote out a list of the residents under the headings large, medium and small and advised the visitors to divide the dresses in the same way to reduce the area of dispute, and to call in ten ladies at a time. Then she firmly withdrew. Let the charge of favouritism land on other heads for the time being.
Of course the residents enjoyed themselves at first, holding up and fitting, admiring themselves in a mirror brought for the purpose from Matron’s quarters, having photographs taken. But as the actual allocations were made discontent began to show. In the large category Rahel was no problem: if it was long enough, not much else mattered. Priscilla was so used to fitting into things that the shirt-waist that was too narrow for any of the other tall women suited her very well: it happened, in fact, to be trimly cut and sedate in colour. Sophia got hold of the most glamorous dress of all.
‘You’ll be able to put a buibui over it when it wears into holes,’ Mama Chungu commented acidly.
Bessie was easy-going in the medium class. She was used to regarding a dress as a raw item that would go through various metamorphoses before it dropped into grey and musty rags. Nekesa was satisfied with the print dress she got, though they had to borrow a wide belt from another outfit to cover the gap at the waist fastening. The ‘small’ group were the most constrained, most having substantial muscles, in spite of their apparent skinniness, compared with the teachers and secretaries from whom the clothes had come, but Wairimu managed to land a sturdy dress with red and purple flowers by leaving the zip undone under her shuka.
‘You see,’ she said next day, pouting, ‘Sophia got the best of the dresses. She always comes in for favours.’
‘It fitted her,’ Priscilla answered patiently. ‘I liked it, but it would have hung like a sack on me. And you are shorter – it would not fit you.’
‘I am not saying I wanted it. But they favour her. Just because she is a convert. Why didn’t they send her back to Mombasa?’
‘Why didn’t they send you and me back to Nyeri? Because there is no one to look after us there. But for her it is worse, because she is now a Christian and some of the family would take revenge on her. I hear that her son will not even have her name mentioned in his house.’
‘Sophia, Sophia,’ repeated Wairimu. ‘We hear it often enough for goodness sake. Fat and flabby and flaunting herself like a young girl. Look at her hands – never did a hard day’s work in her life. And all those bangles – jingili, jingili, jingili!’
Wairimu tossed her head in a way that might once have been called flaunting and remembered just in time that it was forbidden to spit on the cement floor.
‘Work for them is different,’ said Priscilla gently. She did not feel at all gentle, remembering how long it was since she had held a hoe herself. Remembering that she was as tall as Sophia and had once had heavy limbs and loins that would have rounded out with bearing children, breasts that were eager to be filled and fill again.
She had seen Mombasa several times, the first long ago in the war days when Jim was a baby and she had gone down with Mrs Bateson during the school holidays to help. Mr Bateson was busy on the farm and could not go. She had seen, even then, that the women worked. Those outside the town dug their vegetables and kept their chickens and goats, but inside were people who lived on money like Europeans. They traded, made sweets or mandazi for sale, sewed, plaited mats or baskets, bargained at great length, looked after their homes with satisfaction. True, in that hot sun and staying close to home, you might have thought them lazy in movement. But they were not lazy in the things that concerned them.
Sophia was pleased with the new dress. It had cunning pleats and big sleeves and a pattern of sequins. Some diplomatic lady of mature age and figure had once had it made for cocktails, for leisurely hours on ships or terraces. She felt queenly in it, as she remembered in her young womanhood poring for hours over materials in the bazaar and making them up with such long delight to emphasise every good point in her figure. So that one shuddered with pleasure, even under the modest buibui, waiting for the other women to pull and touch and handle the fine work. This one would be hard to wash, she knew, especially in cold water, to dry in a dusty compound, but one could not always be prudent, and in a place like this death stalked around the corner: one need not for ever be thinking of making things last.
As a child she had been taught to be careful, but not too careful. In her pleasure at the new dress she dared to think back to those days – endlessly warm days; even when the rain pelted down and made streams of the alleys of the old town, pools all over the too-flat roads of the new town, you were paddling in warm water, still comfortable. You were always crowded, but not in want, and the air was fragrant with spices, oiled bodies, coffee, fish, salt, tar. Perhaps this was why the Refuge always felt so empty, the vacant atmosphere of disinfectant and boiled potatoes, the clean earthy smell that clung to these Kikuyu women and the sour, outlandish, yesterday’s gruel of those others from the west. It was not that she did not like them, but they seemed to lack any notion of pattern, ordered their words in grunts and cackles.
She remembered as a little girl the excitement of people always coming and going. The rails still ran through the streets all the way down to Kilindini port, with trolleys pushed by men in uniform, carrying Europeans and other important people or crates and parcels for the big ships. In spite of the conflict between Arab and Swahili, everyone took notice when the town crier went round, with his buffalo horn and little stick, to make the announcements, or when the elders turned out richly dressed for the seasonal religious ceremonies. She remembered the lamplight procession and the fireworks after they heard that the Great War was over and that King George had won it, and the other time, when she was about ten years old, that Swahili and Somali had all at once been lumped together with the ‘natives’ from inland and had to carry passes. At least Mombasa prided itself on still having more civilised men than other places, exempt from some of the ‘native’ ordinances because they could read and write, interpret from Arabic to Swahili or English, and were engaged in government service or skilled in the law.
She did not go to madrasa with her brothers but learned at home to read a little in the old script and count for trading purposes. So when, long afterwards, they wanted her to read the Bible (she who had a memory like Scheherezade and could have driven them crazy with story-telling from the five books and other ancient memories) it was not too hard to learn the new letters with their intrusive a-e-i-o-u, all starting unpropitiously from the left side.
By the time she matured she w
as expert in weaving the mats which her mother took to market. Around this time her uncle, the one who carried his coffee-pot round the town, clinking the cups together in advertisement as nowadays the ice-cream man rings his bell on hot days, married a young wife who was expert in sewing and from her Fatuma – she was not yet Sophia – learned the art of needlework.
Her first marriage occurred at the time when the port grew dull for lack of business, sisal and coffee fetching so little that it was not worth buying sacks and putting them on the train. This did not prevent the customary ceremonies and the formal dowry payment. Fatuma made no objection to the match and, after the public proclamation that her virginity had been demonstrated, the couple were not reluctant to be enclosed for the seven days traditional fungate honeymoon. Ali had managed to keep his job as a clerk at the docks and had furnished a neat apartment for her, two upstairs rooms, where his friends would come to drink coffee and read the newspapers, one of them even to play the accordion. This surprised her, for it was generally considered to be a Christian instrument, used to accompany the seductive and debilitating beat of the waltz or quickstep. She was more accustomed to vigorous group dances, to the high wail of the long trumpet or massed drums, heard behind canvas screens when a ceremony was going on in the old town. But keeping a job was no joke in those days, and Ali was always having to pay out to assist some less fortunate colleague or sometimes, she suspected, to protect his seat in the rickety office where there were fewer and fewer invoices to write. (But in retrospect the old crafts and diets of the island survived in perpetual sunshine, as they had survived many another trial of history.)
Ali was lean and muscular, dressed ordinarily in white shirt and shorts, with the white embroidered cap pressed firmly on his curly hair. On Fridays he would expect his long white robe to be spotless and would take Hassan, similarly dressed, to the mosque while she stayed behind with the little girls. Before each Idd he would give her money for the fabrics, embroidery thread, whatever else she needed to turn them out smartly to his credit.
The Present Moment Page 4