The Present Moment
Page 8
‘Nine years I stayed in that place. The men surged round me with offers because I was the youngest, bright and not all that much used, flaunting my town dresses and telling my stories of Thuku and Nairobi. I told them that for marriage they must consult my father, who was far away, but I shared house for a long time with James, one of the drivers, because he was handsome and cheerful and took the trouble to teach me to read a little. As yet no church people were coming to the farms to teach us reading. I said to him, “Because I am like a man I can choose how I live. Let us try for a while.”
‘But after more than two years there was still no baby, and he was moving to another job, so I told him just to go. No one would approve a marriage after that, and I had no need to share my house with another woman who would crow over me. We parted friends and one of my questions had been answered.
‘It was then that I decided to go home. I had been waiting for the railway to take me all the way, but in fact I still had to get off at Sagana. I think it was late in 1926. I had filled up my work tickets and told the clerk I had not been home for a long time. He told the white boss and the white boss said I was a good worker and had not taken much time off sick, so I could be taken on again if I wished. All the same he offered me a letter in case I decided to look for work nearer home. I told him I wanted to come back, but it is always a good thing to have a letter. When I went to collect it I was also given an old cardigan belonging to the boss’s wife because they thought I had forgotten how cold it was up the mountain. I thanked him, but of course I rolled it up in my kiondo and hoped the letter included a “receipt” in case anyone thought I had stolen it. Sweaters were rare then, but right up to Independence, you remember, people liked to have a “receipt” for anything that looked valuable enough to steal, in case they should be charged with being in possession of it.
‘They let me ride into town on the back of a lorry and I went to the station to book. For third class, of course, there were no reserved places: you had to scramble in as you do now. Even with my big ideas it never occurred to me that I could go any other way than third, and I found it exciting. I had never been on a train before. One thing that puzzled me was that the Thika line had always been called a tramway, and trams, someone had told me, ran flat along the streets among the motor cars. But I afterwards found out that it was quite an ordinary railway. The word had only been used to evade some British Government regulation about building new railways. I have learned a lot since then about how the world works!
‘But at the time I thought I had reached the peak of knowledge, sitting in a corner seat with my big bundles among a lot of men and a few families going about their business. I don’t think there were any passenger buses going to Nyeri then, though there was still a freight service going ahead of the railway at its various stages. One or two young Kikuyu had started a kind of taxi service, but ordinary people could not pay that much. It was a help to the missionaries. Even after the Second World War, very few Africans could afford to use the buses which the Indian traders – they did not yet have cars – used to bring their stock in trade from Nairobi. But there was never any doubt that the railway was meant for all of us – you only had to look at the 1,2,3 marked on the carriages.
‘The third class was not very comfortable, even compared with crowded plantation quarters, but I liked being on the move and when they told me we were getting near Sagana I went to the toilet and put on one of my dresses and my scarf and canvas shoes so as to go home in style. I was disappointed that the train did not go right to Nyeri, which had been laid out in communal sections since I left, but when I saw it again, with its high pavements and dusty streets, it looked dull after Nairobi. Meanwhile I did not really know where I was, except when I caught a glimpse of Mount Kenya behind the clouds to let me know I was home. I got directions and found I should have a walk of nearly twenty miles, so I thought I had better put my shoes away again rather than spoil them but before I had organised my bundles two white nuns came along in a truck with a driver and said they could give me a lift part of the way. They spoke perfect Kikuyu and were very surprised to hear that I did not know my way home. They asked me if I had been educated somewhere else – I suppose because of the way I was dressed. I explained that I had never been to school but had worked near Nairobi and learned Swahili. It seemed they had spread their work out near my village in the five years I had been away, and knew some of my friends.
‘They did not know my parents, and I suddenly realised that in all those six years I had imagined things just the same at home (if I ever thought of home), not thinking that the baby would be a big girl now and my brother perhaps married. I had not thought, either, that the land might have been seized or exchanged. Since it was so hilly, I had taken it for granted that it would always be “in the reserve”, and indeed it was so. Belatedly I began to worry, during the hour or so it took me to walk from where they dropped me, not recognising anybody till I got close to home, and then trying to avoid long explanations of where I had been.
‘The homestead looked just the same from the outside. I was not comparing it with others. For all those years I had not set foot in a family home. I found myself running, crying, “Mother, mother!” A big girl came out of the smoky house holding a toddler by the hand. She stood still and stared at me.
‘ “Is it Kanini?”
‘ “Yes, I am Kanini. Who are you?”
‘ “I am Wairimu. Do you not recognise me? And is this Njoki?” They looked puzzled and seemed afraid to embrace me, fingering the hem of my dress, the little one hanging her head.
‘ “No, of course not,” said Kanini crossly. “Njoki is a big girl now. There was a boy that followed her, but he died. This is our brother’s child. Wairimu, you frighten me. I thought you were lost for ever.”
‘ “Well, you see I’m not lost. Where is mother now? Go and call her quickly. And father?”
‘ “Mother is in the sweet potato field. Why don’t you go to her there? I am not supposed to leave the fire. Father has gone to the Better Farming meeting. He will come at night. Njoki has gone to school. Our brother is working in Nyeri and his wife has gone to hospital with the small baby.”
‘ “The baby is sick?”
‘ “Oh no. These days you go to hospital before being sick. Do you not know this? Where have you been? Are you married? Do you have children? You must be quite old now. Father says I need no longer wait for you to be married first.”
‘ “You are a child,” I said, upset all the same by being so lightly tossed aside. “It is not for you to question me. Do you think you are old enough to be married?”
‘ “I am as old as you were when you went away,” replied Kanini pertly, “and I do not think I shall get to your age without becoming a mother.”
‘ “Perhaps not,” I barked. Kanini did not understand my sharpness. “Don’t touch my bundle, now. I’ll go to find mother myself.”
‘Mother wept for joy, of course, but there was still a little reserve between us. Father interrogated me about each place I had been, the work, the housing conditions, the transport, the kind of people, but he did not, that first day, refer to marriage or future plans. I found that the girls were now sleeping in a separate house in the parents’ homestead, not in the communal dormitory any more. The sister-in-law was a slant-eyed, bare-shouldered girl. I wondered how such a one, smooth-skinned and soft-spoken as she was, could interest a man who had been to Nairobi and seen the world. But she knew about her husband’s work, even what he was paid, had stayed with him in Nyeri town and could tell you the price of sugar and of the petrol tins you nowadays used for carrying water. Also the two children seemed closer in age than custom allowed – perhaps that had something to do with it. I did not expect to be so uneasy at watching the little boy sucking from the still firm and shapely breast. My sleep was troubled, and I seemed to hear my parents’ voices rising and falling in the next building long after the usual hour of rest.
‘Njoki was up early the next morn
ing, getting her chores done before she put on a European-style cotton dress which was her school uniform. I had bought a scarf for my mother, tobacco for my father, yellow cloth which I was going to cut with a razor blade to fit the two sisters, but now it was far too small, a wooden comb for my brother and tea and sugar for them all. My mother already knew how to prepare the tea, and she boiled it up with milk. There were matches in the house, and condensed milk tins to use as cups. Father was wearing khaki shorts and a sleeveless shirt. This made him look younger than before, but he spoke with more authority than I remembered. He talked to me of roots and seeds as though I were a boy, and of terracing steep slopes against the rain. My mother had to do her share of this work, though they were too far up the mountain for her to have been called out for the women’s roadwork before I went away. That second evening they wanted to hear about my meeting with Harry Thuku, about what happened outside the police lines and the consequences. Now, somehow, I was detained when the younger girls had gone off to their sleeping quarters and my sister-in-law to settle the children down in her own house.
‘I thought I was the one who made choices, but it seemed mothers and fathers still had power of manipulation. The firelight was dim, just as I remembered it. The elaborate trellis under the thatch was blackened by smoke and kept mosquitoes off. I was back in the world before the dream, for though there had been other dark nights and low fires since, they had not enclosed me like this. If Njoki continued at school, I thought, out of random knowledge, she will need a light to study by. In the brother’s house there was a tiny lamp, though not for everyday use. That is how things would be, how light, indirectly, increased.
‘ “Have you come back for us to find you a husband on the ridge?” my father asked, embarrassed, staring into the fire. This was not the way these matters had ever been discussed.
‘ “That was not in my mind, father.”
‘ “The time, you see, is past,” he went on gravely. “It would be difficult. And I hear that out there people make their own marriages.”
‘ “There have always been some who married outside the ridge,” I replied quietly. “Did not Thaira give his daughter to a Maasai? And Nyambura is the daughter of a Kamba woman.”
‘ “That is so, but that is not what I meant. Is no one offering me dowry? Do they take you so cheap? I do not think you have had a child. Or can you live alone, like a man?”
‘ “I can if I must, father. I had to go away to find this out. I was young – I am sorry if it hurt you more than I thought. I should have been away from you in any case as soon as you had got me married.”
‘ “Was it something wrong with the boy?” my mother asked, in pain. “I remember speaking about it before when you were so miserable. I hoped you might be happy somewhere else rather than sitting at home as though your head were lost in the mountain mists.”
‘ “It was not the boy’s fault, mother. It was just that I had another – dream, let us say, not to do with dowry or with babies. There was a man long after that who would have offered you dowry, father, but I did not – that is to say, if there had been a child he might have been satisfied. You understand? And so it would be with others.”
‘ “So you are going back?”
‘Was this what I had meant by being free, like a boy? If so, I was glad to be a woman instead. On the whole I have always been glad.
‘ “I am going back to the work, father, but not to that man. He has moved elsewhere. I refused to go with him. I like it better there at Kabete.”
‘ “You are sure, my daughter?” my mother asked. “I know that you might be humiliated by other wives, flaunting their children, but sometimes it is better to be humiliated than to be alone. And there are wise women who can sometimes open the way for you.”
‘ “I am sure, mother.”
‘ “He got you so cheap, then.”
‘ “Not very cheap, father. He taught me to read. That is not a little thing. He taught me how to live in a cement house and keep it clean. That is also something people pay money for their daughters to learn. And how to wash and iron heavy clothes for men. I could earn a lot of money if I went to work in a European house, knowing these things. But I prefer to be more free. I will go back to the coffee. And since the dowry of learning has been paid to me rather than to you, from time to time I will send you money out of what I have learned through my brother in Nyeri. It is not all you would have wished, but it is better than nothing.”
‘ “I do not understand all this,” said my father heavily. “But it is better that you go back. Your brother was able to go and return and build a life here, but for a young woman there is still not that kind of freedom.”
‘ “I will send a present for Nduta who helped you in Nairobi,” said my mother, acquiescing. “There is no way to keep a grown-up daughter like you at home, Wairimu. But I am glad you came to see us. Please stay a bit longer to greet old friends.”
‘I stayed for a fortnight, visiting my agemates, most of them mothers of families now. I called on aunties and grannies with twists of tobacco and sugar, went to hospital with my sister-in-law, a shady place where they weighed the babies, out of earshot of death and groaning, and once walked into Nyeri town to see my brother and go to the shops. I went over Njoki’s standard two lessons with her and had a look round the school. But I could see that I was neither child nor woman in other people’s eyes and was soon restless to be off. Having finished my money, I walked the three days to Nairobi, changing companions from time to time – women going to market at Mbiri, or Fort Hall as people called it, men going down to Thika to work on the sisal plantations, workers from Thika going to Nairobi to see the sights and look for a better job, so long as their passes were signed off. In Nairobi I visited Nduta and picked up a friend here and there, but pretty soon I went back to Kabete and signed on for another ticket.’
CHAPTER FIVE
Some days later the soldier came right into the Refuge. The gate was not manned in the daytime and not locked unless one of the residents was going through a depressive phase or particularly likely to wander away. This did not often happen. Although those who knew Bessie’s old habits were at first afraid of her taking them up and forgetting where she now lived, she had become twice as timid since being deprived of her shanty, and never went out unless tailing meekly after one or more of the others. They wondered whether she had quite forgotten where she was and thought herself transported into some totally strange place, except that she could always identify the Maternity Hospital with talk of babies. Clearly, however, her own lost baby had been born with the minimum of help in a detention camp, and it was unlikely that Bessie had ever set foot in a hospital in her life.
The soldier marched straight up to the house. The kitchen help walked out to intercept him and ask him what he wanted. He said that he had heard there was a home for retired officers and wished to put his name down. Persuaded that no men’s home was available, he still stood surveying the scene and several of the old ladies came out frankly to have a look. It was the slack time of the afternoon when they were making tea or uji, and those who had shared an ambitious lunch were still sleeping it off. A mandasi or a cup of soup was really enough for them, but once in a while it cheered them to put their heads together and, with an onion from one, a handful of beans from another, flour from a third and the wisdom of generations, make a morning pass over the charcoal burner and review their little bits of household possessions. Supper and morning porridge were provided, more efficiently, as Matron was always pointing out, but with a distasteful briskness in the institution’s dining room.
‘Hallo,’ said Mama Chungu cheerfully.
‘Oh, this is your new place, is it?’
You remember him, he may reasonably remember you. But it is better not to be remembered. Mama Chungu had experience in making herself unobtrusive. The habit stays with you, and seldom provokes generosity from passers-by, but it is better than attracting attention and still finding someone ungenerous.
‘You looking for a good billet?’ asked Wairimu. ‘This one is ladies only, you see. Besides, you’re young enough to look after yourself. Haven’t you got a wife to cook for you?’
‘Women have been no good to me.’
‘Perhaps you haven’t been good enough to them,’ said Nekesa. ‘Are you visiting anyone in particular?’
‘Just inspecting, madam. Have to put a guard on, you know. But there was another one – one with a bad leg. I used to see her with you at the gate.’
‘She’s lying down,’ answered Nekesa quickly, before one of the others should interfere with her pet theory. ‘She hasn’t been very well. We aren’t supposed to disturb her. Apudo, you mean?’
‘How would I know your names, woman. Garrison check, that’s all.’
‘They took her to the hospital,’ cried Sophia. ‘They let the medical students practise on her so now she’s worse than when she went in.’
‘Not worse,’ Nekesa insisted, ‘only not much better yet. Rahel will mend. She’s a tough one, from an army family.’
The soldier seemed to have stopped listening. He made an elaborate mimicry of presenting arms, then turned on his heel and marched off down the path, counting to himself. Nekesa had already begun a campaign to get Rahel out in a wheelchair on sunny days so that she could be roused a bit and put on display if the man should come again. But the next week he arrived one evening after Suleiman had come on duty, and failed to get admission. He did not argue but eyed the watchman nervously and strode away. A third time he started to come in one morning when Rahel was dozing in her wheelchair but Sophia headed him off.
‘Don’t go near her,’ she shouted. ‘She’s only interested in real serving soldiers. We’ve seen enough of the other sort.’ Nekesa was out and not able to intervene. Priscilla was a little more circumspect.