Petals of Blood

  Violence sickens me: I feel that now, I felt so then. But Wanja, who until then had been quiet, rapt in thought, could hardly sit still in her chair. I felt rather than saw her excitement. What I could not believe was the evidence of my eyes.

  ‘Karega! Karega!’ she called out. His raised bottle was arrested in the air. He turned his head away from the juke-box and his adversary. He stared in our direction: then he came to our table, trying with some difficulty to walk straight. He slumped into a chair opposite Wanja. ‘Thank you,’ he said to nobody in particular, ‘I could have smashed his head, see? Like that, and for what gain?’ He planted his elbows on the table and buried his head in his hands. Once he raised it and ejected a stream of saliva onto the cement floor. Then he resumed his sunken position.

  Someone had put a shilling in the slot machine and music once more blared out. The singer’s voice wafted sadness and regret into the whole room, advising, admonishing, gradually possessing the whole bar with the power of the voice. I listened, trying hard to make out the words.

  Watumaniirwo, Nyukwa ni murwaru

  You received a message that mother was ill

  Ui ugacokia, Kuu ndikinyaga

  You said, I never go home

  Nanii ngakwira ugwati nduri Njamba

  I am telling you, danger knows not the brave

  Ningi ngakwira, Mutino ni Muhiu

  I again tell you, an accident knows not the quick of hand

  Ninguigua Uru-i, ukiruma aciari aku

  I feel bad when you abuse your parents

  Ndaririkana ati ni makurerire

  When I remember how they brought you up

  Wakuagwo na Ngoi ugithaithagwo

  They carried you on their backs

  Ui ukiragwo, Mwana kira!

  Pleading with you, our little one do not cry!

  I happened at that point to look at Wanja. Her face was pained. Seeing my eyes on her, she tried, not too successfully, to smile away the grotesque expression on her face. She said:

  ‘Do you remember the night I told you how I went away from home?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I told you that mother sent me to throw manure in the shamba?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well. There is something else I did not tell you. The reason she begged me to help her was because she was ill in bed. Later she was in fact taken to the hospital and her appendix was removed. She almost died. I learnt this while dancing in a bar, and do you know, I laughed? I laughed!’

  The others had resumed their hip-gyrations, all facing the juke-box, almost as if they were fornicating with a woman hidden in the music box. What was in the words that could move the young so? For me there were no tender memories of my father and mother, only fear, a vague fear I had never quite learnt how to overcome. Karega snored through the song. Wanja watched him closely with that look I had once seen her bestow on Abdulla, as if they shared a common pain and common betrayal of hopes. My stomach tightened a little. I had that uncomfortable feeling of an intruder into a private act. I said to Wanja rather curtly: we can’t leave him here. I staggered out and got a taxi. We dragged him into it and he immediately slept. Wanja was quiet. The tension in my stomach remained. Kamiritho, where earlier I had reserved a room for two, was only a mile and a half from Limuru Town. But I felt as if we had driven a whole night. I paid the driver his three shillings. I tried to get an extra room for Karega. But by now all the rooms had been taken. I had no alternative but to share what I had already secured until he woke up from his drunken stupor. Wanja and I supported him up the stairs to our room and sat him on one of the beds. Again, he immediately slumped into it and slept. I sat on the edge of the bed, reviewing vaguely my mission and the events of the last three days since I left Ilmorog. How had I become involved in all this? I was happy in my previous slumbering state. Wanja sat on the other bed and made no effort to get into it. I would walk over and join her, I thought, desire rising. I pulled a blanket over Karega and covered him, head, feet and all, and I was about to walk over to where Wanja was sitting when he suddenly woke and sat up and anxiously looked around him without taking in anything. I sat down on the only chair in the room. By now I had sobered up, or rather the crisis had sobered me a little. I was also a little sad and guilty. For how could I forget that this drunken wreck had only eighteen months or so back – though it felt like ages past – been at my hideout in Ilmorog and I had let him go? How, now, how could the young, the bright and the hopeful deteriorate so? Was there no way of using their energies and dreams to a purpose higher than the bottle, the juke-box and sickness on a cement floor?

  ‘Where am I? Where am I?’ he was asking.

  ‘It is all right. It is only me – or don’t you recognize me?’

  ‘Aaah, so it is Mwalimu? I feel bad . . . this is – this is a real shame!’

  ‘What happened, Karega?’ I asked him. He looked about him, bewildered, without taking in much. Then he bent his head and he talked, staring at the floor most of the time.

  ‘I do not understand it, the whole thing. The beginning so clear . . . or was it an illusion? And the end so hazy that the beginning and the idea behind the beginning were buried in a mist of bitterness, the recrimination and cruel, blind vengeance. Massacres of hopes and dreams and beauty. The bright beginning . . . the bitter end. For a time I was determined to make it. I had after all a good school certificate. I said: Chui and the school can eject me . . . but the country: there is room for all of us at the meeting point of a victorious struggle. Fruits of Uhuru. You do my bit . . . I do my bit . . . we move a mountain . . . why not? There was the big city. I walked from office to office and everywhere, it was the same. No Vacancy. Hakuna Kazi. Occasionally they would ask you: who sent you? My face became familiar to the door-keepers who sympathized and asked: don’t you know anyone big? A big brother, somebody . . . Mkono mtupu haulambwi, eh? Hakuna Kazi . . . no vacancy . . . and in one place . . . For Vacancy Come Tomorrow . . . how inventive! At times I thought of going back to Siriana, intending to burn Chui’s place or something. For I would say to myself: why should he be sleeping comfortably when it was he who was in the wrong? Why should I suffer for mistakes made by another? Do you know what I did in the end? I started selling sheepskins, fruits, mushrooms, by the roadside. You should see us, the roadboys as they call us. We scramble for any car that might stop: buy mine, it is better, shines more, and mine, mine, mine. Sometimes they throw coins in the air to see us dive and scratch one another for them. They laugh. Mark you, you got to be smart, quick, and pretend not to see, or hear insults. Tourists . . . watalii . . . we love them. We pray for them to come by with their silver coins and notes and curse them afterward. Please take this . . . good . . . am hungry, mister . . . school fees, mister . . . And they laugh to see us plead misery and plead for charity, harambee.

  ‘It has been a difficult life,’ he continued, staring at the floor. ‘It has been hard, Mwalimu . . . I have let my mother down. Utterly. Can you not see my mother? Old Mariamu they called her. You probably remember her. She was a squatter on your father’s land, the oldest squatter. A devout woman. She has scratched and scratched the earth for her son’s education and she is saying to herself, maybe muttering it in her prayers, all is well, all is well, for in my old age he will prop me up: for where is the house with a he-child where the head of a he-goat shall not be eaten? She was always the earliest traveller to tea and coffee plantations, to pull out thangari grass. And she is saying – in my old age is my joy. She once said to me: “It’s good you want to go to school, Karega, look at the children of Koinange, look at the children of Elder Ezekieli Waweru, they all got education.” And so I went to school, her voice and another with me. Manguo, Kamandura, Siriana – glory? And now look at her son . . . fighting . . . extracting every ounce of juice from the juke-box. I tell you, I have been unable to face her. She never would lash at me with harsh words. She simply told me: “You have never disobeyed me: How could you rise against your teachers?”

  ‘
I would picture her in my mind even as I sold sheepskin and pleaded for charity from watalii. But after a while, I was tired of charity.

  ‘Charity . . . charity . . . we are a nation that believes in charity . . . and I was fed up with charity. Why should I be the object of anybody’s charity? Why should I continue an object of charity from foreigners in my own land? Then I remembered you. You had gone through a similar experience. So I came to Ilmorog to seek advice. I thought . . . I thought I was being childish, that you would only laugh at me . . . excuse me . . . but that was what I thought you were doing . . . pleading ignorance and mock surprise in a matter that was life and death to me. I asked myself: why should he treat me like a child? Then there was the pale light in the woman’s room. I was alone. I just walked out into the night. Then the moon came out . . . a cold moon . . . but it lit my way. I came back to my sheepskins and fruits and watalii. I said one day: I will drink . . . like other people . . . Do you despise me, Mwalimu? Do you? Ha ha ha. Wouldn’t you like to buy one of my sheepskins? Nice, shiny, fleecy rugs? Or some oranges and pears? Oranges cheap today . . . You pay me in advance . . . I am a man of my word. Truth of God. Then maybe I can buy you a drink . . . to . . . to thank you . . . you see I try to sell sheepskins and oranges wherever I am. God bless watalii. They help keep our bones and skins together.’

  What a day! What a night! Waweru’s son: Mariamu’s son: Nyakinyua’s granddaughter, now in the same hole! It was now the hour of dawn! He had started quietly, soberly, his head lowered, but at the end he was shouting at an invisible presence. He raised his head and looked at me with a bitter sarcastic smile on the edges of dry lips. He then turned away and the smile suddenly froze on his half-open lips. He must have caught her big eyes resting on him; he seemed to be aware of her for the first time. ‘You . . . you . . .’ he whispered as if he was looking at a ghost of a familiar face from the past. They looked at one another in silence.

  The constriction in my stomach tightened, for in that instant, in that minute, I knew that – but what? A strange thing. A burning pool in my stomach. Fire-tongues of stinging nettles. Spilt bile. Water. I was alone. A spectator.

  ‘Come to Ilmorog,’ she said with submissive authority.

  ‘Yes!’ Karega answered, hypnotized.

  Chapter Six

  1 ~ They returned to Ilmorog, this time driven neither by idealism nor the search for a personal cure but by an overriding necessity to escape. They used Munira’s bicycle. Sometimes all three would walk, one person pushing the bicycle. Sometimes all three would ride the bicycle with Munira on the saddle, Karega on the frame and Wanja on the carrier. But mostly they rode in a kind of relay. Karega would walk. Munira would take Wanja for a mile or so and leave her to walk on. He would come back for Karega and take him a mile or so past Wanja. Then Munira would walk. Karega would take the bicycle and go back for Wanja. Soon they all looked like the earth on which they trod, enveloped by an enormous sky of white and blue.

  As he walked, Munira was struck over and over by the oddity of the present situation. He felt as if he had been away for three years instead of only three days. So many things he did not understand: his father’s action and attitudes . . . the mystery of Mukami’s death . . . his father’s cryptic reference to Mariamu . . . what was the connection? And here he was with Mariamu’s son – the teacher he had recruited from a bar – and Wanja, all going to seek a home in Ilmorog. It is the way of the world, he decided, and looked forward to his new arrival in Ilmorog. He was convinced of some sort of hero’s welcome: eager questioning and grateful faces from at least Abdulla and Nyakinyua.

  But he remembered the two men in a Land Rover and their suggestive hints and menacing faces and their talk of 12/50 and KCO and all that. He suddenly saw the connection between the two men’s visit, the ordeal he had undergone, and the gigantic deception being played on a whole people by a few who had made it, often in alliance with foreigners. He was once again stabbed by a different kind of guilt: he had himself actively participated in an oath of national betrayal. He had not shown the courage shown by Ilmorog women, or by the worker who protested, or by all those men and women in the country who were openly criticizing the whole thing at the risk of their lives. Then he thought: but what could he have done? And thus he stilled the inner doubt that would have awakened him to life. He turned to Wanja. He thought of telling her about his own experience, then stopped.

  Wanja had made a pact with herself. She would have a completely new beginning in Ilmorog. Since she left Ilmorog she had had two humiliating and shameful experiences. She would now break with that past and make something of herself in Ilmorog. As an evidence of her cleansed spirit, she resolved that she would not again obey the power of her body over men; that any involvement was out until she had defeated the past through a new flowering of self.

  Karega was not sure what he really expected of the place and the people. He had responded to Wanja’s call as if he were accepting his destiny. Yes, a covenant with fate, he thought, for the future seemed a yawning blank without a break or an opening, like the sky above them. But what was it that stirred, rippled dormant pools of blood at the sight of Wanja? Why this sudden pain at a presence that was really only a memory? Fate, he again decided, remembering Mukami, and he was seized with sadness and vague bitterness. But he was grateful to Munira that he had said he would hire him as a teacher. From a seller of sheepskins in Limuru to a teacher of children in Ilmorog: that anyway was a beginning.

  Munira also explained to him why Ilmorog school was without teachers. During the colonial days African teachers could only teach in African schools. All the African schools were of much the same standard: poorly equipped, poor houses, and limited aids. But at least they got the best of the African teachers available.

  But after internal self-government, the colour bar in schools admissions and the allocation of teachers was removed. The result was that while the former African schools remained equally poorly equipped, they now also lost the best of the African teachers. These were attracted to the former Asian and European schools which remained as high-cost schools with better houses, equipment, teaching aids. Some schools in remote places like Ilmorog were almost completely abandoned to their own rural fate.

  Karega felt good: his teaching career would have added significance. Cambridge Fraudsham used to tell them that teaching was a calling, a vocation, and hence satisfying to the soul. Karega swore to give everything he had to the children in Ilmorog.

  But the Ilmorog they now came to was one of sun, dust, and sand. Wanja and Karega were especially struck by the change in the face of Ilmorog countryside.

  ‘So green in the past,’ she said. ‘So green and hopeful . . . and now this.’

  ‘A season of drought . . . so soon . . . so soon!’ echoed Karega, remembering past flowers of promise.

  ‘It is the way of the world,’ said Munira as they stood by the bicycle, skins glazed dry, coughing and sneezing out dust from cracked throats and noses, watching specks of dry maize-stalk whirled to the sky.

  They found Nyakinyua and Abdulla and Joseph standing outside the shop.

  They evinced no surprise or curiosity at seeing them and Munira felt a slight deflation of the spirits. Not even a question!

  ‘We were discussing Abdulla’s donkey,’ Nyakinyua explained by way of welcome.

  ‘What has happened to it?’ Wanja asked quickly, noticing the heaviness on Abdulla’s face. Was this the place where she was hoping to make a new mark?

  ‘The elders want it killed,’ she continued. ‘Some think they should beat it and then let it loose in the plains to carry this plague away.’

  ‘A donkey? I thought that only a goat was used in the ritual?’ Karega said.

  ‘Who is this one?’ Nyakinyua asked.

  ‘He is Karega,’ Wanja explained. ‘He comes from Abdulla’s place, Limuru, and he will help in the school.’

  ‘Our new teacher,’ added Munira.

  ‘In this drought? God bless you,’ she s
aid.

  They all sat down outside Abdulla’s shop and Munira asked for a beer to wash down the dust in his throat.

  ‘That donkey is my other leg,’ Abdulla moaned. ‘They want me to cut it off and throw it away. A second sacrifice.’

  ‘But a donkey has no influence on the weather,’ Karega commented, and he too asked for a drink.

  ‘Joseph, bring another beer for your new teacher,’ said Abdulla. ‘I thought you didn’t drink.’

  ‘Things have changed,’ Karega said thoughtfully, remembering their last encounter in Wanja’s hut six months back. ‘I should say times have changed,’ he added.

  ‘It is the drought . . .’ Nyakinyua was explaining. ‘Grass is scarce, only a few stems will soon be left. The question is this: to whom shall we give it, donkeys or goats?’

  ‘The one carried on his mother’s stomach: and the other carried on his mother’s back: how can we choose between them? Aren’t they all our children?’ Abdulla countered.

  What a homecoming! A second homecoming to an argument about droughts, Munira was thinking, and no questions about the drama they left behind.

  ‘The drought will pass away. This is only March,’ Munira said. ‘We might drive away the rains by this talk.’

  ‘Yes. It will rain in March and grass will grow,’ echoed Wanja, hopefully, eagerly: it had to rain otherwise they were ruined; the whole community would be ruined. ‘Abdulla,’ she called out, ‘aren’t you glad to see your barmaid return?’