‘All right. But don’t come again.’
On the following day, at about the same time, she would be there. She picked a saw or a hammer and examined it carefully as if it was a mysterious object. Gikonyo would be forced to laugh.
‘I believe you would have made a good carpenter, mother.’
‘Whatever we say, these people are truly clever. How did they think of such tools which can cut anything?’ Wangari always referred to white men as these people.
‘Go and cook. These things are beyond women.’
‘Do you need this piece here?’
‘Oh, mother!’
Gikonyo’s secret ambition was to own a piece of land where he could settle his mother. But this needed money. The ambition to acquire wealth increased whenever he saw or thought of Mumbi, a girl whose voice and face caused an anguished throb in him. But he thought his heart was beating in the wilderness. Surely Mumbi, the most beautiful girl on the ridge, would never deign to bring him a calabash filled with cool water and say: drink this for me. Nevertheless, he waited and groped his way slowly. He saw Mumbi moving in the country paths among the pea-flowers, and green beans and maize plants, and he braced himself to make his desires known. But courage failed him. He greeted her and passed on.
Mumbi’s father, Mbugua, was a well-known elder in the ridge. His home consisted of three huts and two granaries where crops were stored after harvests. A bush – a dense mass of creepers, brambles, thorn trees, nettles and other stinging plants – formed a natural hedge around the home. Old Thabai, in fact, was a village of such grass-thatched huts thinly scattered along the ridge. The hedges were hardly ever trimmed; wild animals used to make their lairs there. Mbugua had earned his standing in the village through his own achievements as a warrior and a farmer. His name alone, so it is said, sent fear quivering among the enemy tribes. Those were the days before the whiteman ended tribal wars to bring in world wars. But Mbugua’s reputation survived the peace. His word, in disputes brought to the council of elders for settlement, always carried weight. Wanjiku, his only wife, always called him her young warrior. She was a small woman, a striking contrast to her big-limbed warrior. Her voice was vibrant with warmth and kindness. It was her voice (she used to sing at dance gatherings in her day) that first captured Mbugua’s heart. Of their two sons, Kihika and Kariuki, Wanjiku liked Kariuki mainly because he was younger and the last born. Mbugua secretly admired Kihika as the one most likely to take after him in courage and a well-regulated arrogance.
Kariuki also admired and looked up to Kihika. The boy longed for the time when he would join the ranks of men and be free to touch the sharp breasts of the initiated girls who often came to their house at night. Kariuki attended school at Manguo, one of the earliest Gikuyu Independent schools in the country. He loved books and in the evening read by the light from the wood fire. But how could he concentrate when all the young men and women of his brother’s rika played and told wicked jokes and stories? He was not supposed to see or hear anything. ‘You’ll be thrown out of this house, you Kihii,’ the men would warn him when they caught him laughing. Gikonyo often brought him sweets and things. For this, Kariuki liked the carpenter. Gikonyo used to tell funny stories which Kariuki really enjoyed. But as months and years went on, Gikonyo became increasingly quiet and rarely spoke if Mumbi was present. It was Karanja, in fact, who took the stage and always sent women into fits of ribald laughter. Karanja had a way of telling stories and episodes so that even without saying so he emerged the hero. As a result Kariuki had come to admire him for bravery, wisdom, and versatility.
Homes, like Mumbi’s, with beautiful girls, were popular with young men and women. Wanjiku had to keep a regular supply of food. A home full of children is never lonely, she always said. When men arrived she excused herself and discreetly left the hut. ‘Give them food,’ she would tell Mumbi.
Mumbi often went to the station on Sundays. The rattling train always thrilled her. At times she longed to be the train itself. But she never went to the dances in the forest. She always came back home, after the train, and with one or two other girls, would cook, or undo and re-do their hair. Her dark eyes had a dreamy look that longed for something the village could not give. She lay in the sun and ardently yearned for a life in which love and heroism, suffering, and martyrdom were possible. She was young. She had fed on stories in which Gikuyu women braved the terrors of the forest to save people, of beautiful girls given to the gods as sacrifice before the rains. In the Old Testament she often saw herself as Esther: so she revelled in that moment when Esther finally answers King Ahasuerus’ question and dramatically points at Haman, saying: The adversary and enemy is the wicked Haman.
She enjoyed the admiration she excited in men’s eyes. When she laughed, she threw back her head and her neck would gleam in the firelight. At such a time, Gikonyo would not trust himself to speak. It was said that Richard, son of the Rev. Jackson, had proposed to Mumbi. Jackson was a leading clergyman in Kihingo. It was also rumoured that Richard, who was then in his last year at Siriana Secondary School, would later go to Uganda or England to complete his learning. Anyway, Mumbi declined the offer without hurting his pride so that they remained good friends. Richard often stole from home at night to go and see Mumbi at Thabai. So Gikonyo would ask himself: if she has refused such a man, what chance have I?
He threw himself into work. He made chairs for Thabai people; he repaired their broken cupboards; he fixed new doors and windows to their huts. A woman brought him a broken chair: she wanted a new leg fixed. He looked at it carefully, whistling a popular tune.
‘Three shillings,’ he said.
‘What, three shillings, my son?’
‘We cannot make it for nothing, you know.’
‘My son. I am your mother. Let me give you a shilling.’
‘All right,’ he said, knowing that she probably would not pay him, even a shilling.
And the woman would go away knowing that he would eventually repair the chair (it might take him two months or more) and she would probably only pay him half the amount quoted. If she paid him at all, she would spread out the paying over a number of months.
‘At this rate, I shall die poor,’ he would complain to his mother.
‘It’s nothing,’ Wangari often told him. ‘You know if they had money, they would pay you.’
Feeling tired, he one day brought out his guitar and started to play. He had spent the morning and afternoon making furniture for a couple recently married. The man had promised to pay at the end of the month. Gikonyo liked his guitar. It was an old one, but he had paid quite a lot of money for it to the Indian trader.
He played softly, singing to himself, trying a new tune. Soon he was absorbed in his voice and playing, and the hardness began to leave his muscles. The sun was settling, the lengthened shadows of trees and houses were slowly merging.
Then the shavings rustled. Gikonyo started, and was a little embarrassed and excited at seeing Mumbi: she was working a piece of knitting tucked under her arm.
‘Why did you stop?’ she smiled.
‘Oh, I didn’t want you to hear my carpenter’s voice and see my hands destroying both the song and the strings.’
‘Is that why you never speak when you come to our place?’ There was a malicious twinkle in her eyes.
‘Don’t I?’
‘You should know … Anyway, I stood there all the time and heard you sing and play. It was good.’
‘My voice or hands?’
‘Both!’
‘How do you know whether my playing is good or bad? You never come to the dances on Sunday.’
‘Aah, true I never do. But do you think all other men are as mean as you? Karanja often plays to me alone at home. I sit. I knit my pullover, he plays. He is a good player.’
‘He is a good player,’ Gikonyo agreed curtly. Mumbi did not notice Gikonyo swallowing something in his throat. For at that time her mood had changed from playfulness to seriousness.
‘B
ut you also played – I never knew you could play so – and it was moving perhaps because you were playing to yourself,’ she said with a frankness that pleased Gikonyo.
‘Maybe sometimes I can play for you.’
‘Play now, please play it to me,’ she said eagerly. Gikonyo took this for a challenge, he feared strength would desert him.
‘Then you must sing as I play. Your voice is so nice,’ he said, and took the instrument.
But he found his hands were shaking. He strummed the strings a little, trying to steady himself. Mumbi waited for him to play the tune. As his confidence rose, Gikonyo felt Thabai come under his thumb. Mumbi’s voice sent a shudder down his back. His fingers and heart were full. So he groped, slowly, surely, in the dark, towards Mumbi. He struck, he appealed, he knew his heart fed power to his fingers. He felt light, almost gay.
And Mumbi’s voice trembled with passion as she weaved it round the vibrating strings. She felt the workshop, Thabai, earth, heaven, felt their unity. Then suddenly her heart was whipped up, she now rode on strange waves: alone defying the wind and the rain; alone fighting hunger and thirst in the desert; alone, struggling with strange demons in the forest, bringing glad tidings to her people.
The song ended. Gikonyo could almost touch the solid twilight calm.
‘How is it the country is so quiet and peaceful now?’ she asked.
‘It is always so before darkness falls.’
‘You know, I felt like Ruth gathering sheaves to herself in the field.’
‘I believe you’ll go to heaven. You always talk the Bible.’
‘Don’t mock,’ she went on seriously. ‘Do you think it will always be like this, I mean the land?’
‘I don’t know, Mumbi,’ he answered, catching the solemnity from her. ‘Haven’t you heard the new song?’
‘Which? Sing it.’
‘You know it too. I believe it is Kihika who introduced it here. I only remember the words of the chorus:
‘Gikuyu na Mumbi,
Gikuyu na Mumbi,
Gikuyu na Mumbi,
Nikihiu ngwatiro.’
It was Mumbi who now broke the solemnity. She was laughing quietly.
‘What is it?’
‘Oh, Carpenter, Carpenter. So you know why I came?’
‘I don’t!’ he said, puzzled.
‘But you sing to me and Gikuyu telling us it is burnt at the handle.’
At that point Wangari, who had gone to fetch water from the river appeared on the scene. She was pleased to see Mumbi.
‘You should have born a girl instead of having a lazy male,’ Mumbi teased her.
‘It’s my misfortune,’ Wangari answered back, laughing. ‘But it’s nothing. The needs of an old woman are few. And that man is so lazy that he never wastes water in washing himself or his clothes.’
‘You are unfair to me, mother. You’ll make all the girls run away from me.’
‘Shall I make you a cup of tea?’
‘No,’ Mumbi said quickly. ‘I must be home before darkness falls.’
She turned to a small basket she was carrying and took out a panga.
‘You see this panga needs a wooden handle. The old one was burnt in the fire by mistake. My mother wants it quickly because it is the only one she has got for cultivating.’
Gikonyo took the panga and examined it critically.
‘How much?’ Mumbi asked.
‘Don’t break your heart over that. This is nothing.’
‘But you cannot work for nothing?’
‘I am not an Indian shopkeeper,’ he said irritably.
Karanja, Kihika and Gitogo and one other man came. Gikonyo’s workshop was another place where young men used to gather for gossip. Karanja called out to Wangari.
‘Mother of men, we have come. Make us tea.’
‘Wait a little,’ Wangari’s voice reached them from the hut. ‘Water is already on the fire.’
Mumbi, who was chatting with Gitogo, using hand signs, said she was going home. The men protested in chorus. But she insisted on getting away.
‘All right. I will see you off,’ Karanja offered gallantly.
‘Come, my faithful,’ Mumbi sang out to him. Soon Karanja and Mumbi were lost in the gathering darkness.
‘Let us go into the hut,’ Gikonyo told the others, his voice unusually low. He was envious of Karanja’s ease and general assurance in the presence of women. Even the thought that Karanja played his guitar to Mumbi gnawed at him unpleasantly.
When Karanja returned, everyone noticed that he was quiet and thoughtful.
‘Heh, man,’ the man sitting next to him teased him, ‘have you fallen in love with that girl?’
Everybody, except Gikonyo, laughed. Even Karanja grinned.
Early the next day Gikonyo started work on the handle. Low waves of excitement left his heart in a glow as he chose a piece of wood on which to work. The touch of wood always made him want to create something. But now he felt as if his life depended on giving himself wholly to the present job. His hands were firm. He drove the plane (he had recently bought it) against the rough surface, peeling off rolls and rolls of shavings. Gikonyo saw Mumbi’s gait, her very gestures, in the feel and movement of the plane. Her voice was in the air as he bent down and traced the shape of the panga on the wood. Her breath gave him power.
And now he exerted that power on the podo-wood. He chiselled and scooped out the unwanted parts to make two pieces of the right shape. He took particular pains over boring the holes. Worms of wood wriggled along the cyclic grooves of the drill-bit and heaved themselves on to the table. The holes were ready. Next he cut three nails with which he riveted the two pieces of wood to the panga. As he hammered the thin ends of the nails into caps, another wave of power swept through him. New strength entered his right hand. He brought the hammer down, up, and brought the hammer down. He felt free. Everything, Thabai, the whole world was under the control of his hand. Suddenly the wave of power broke into an ecstasy, an exultation. Peace settled in his heart. He felt a holy calm; he was in love with all the earth.
He thought of taking the panga on Sunday morning. Came the time and doubts began to stab his complacency. He found faults; the smoothness and the fitting had fallen short of the vision in his mind. The handle appeared ordinary, the sort of thing that any carpenter could make. And the wood? It would surely blister a woman’s hands within a few minutes of use. He changed into a defiant mood. What did it matter if Mumbi liked it or not? If she did not like the clumsy offering, she ought to do the carpenter’s work herself or ask Karanja to help her. In any case she might not be at home. Yes. He would love to find her absent. But as he came to the narrow path leading into the yard through the hedge, he began fearing that she might not be at home; his work would not be complete without her participation.
He found her sitting on a four-legged stool outside her mother’s hut. Gikonyo affected a nonchalant air.
‘Is your mother in?’ he asked casually, his hands itching to show the panga to Mumbi.
‘What do you want with mother? Don’t you know that she has got a husband?’ Her eyes were laughing at him. Gikonyo would not respond to her smile. He became more solemn, with difficulty.
‘Sit down,’ she said, rising to give him her seat. Then she saw the panga. She rushed forward and took it from his hands. For a moment she stood there, admiring the new handle. Suddenly she pranced towards the hut shouting, ‘Mother! Mother! come and see!’
Sweet warmth swelled up in Gikonyo. Joy pained him. His work was done. For Mumbi’s smile, for that look of appreciation, he would go on making chairs, tables, cupboards; restore leaking roofs and falling houses; repair doors and windows in all Thabai without a cent in return. He would never make money, he would remain poor, but he would have her.
He was still standing, revelling in the vague resolutions, when Mumbi came out with another chair and again invited him to sit.
‘I am in a great hurry,’ he protested without conviction.
&nb
sp; ‘Are you going to a wedding?’
‘No, not unless yours!’ he laughed, but remembering Karanja, he stopped and sat down without another word.
‘Why all the hurry? We are not going to eat you,’ she said, vainly attempting to summon anger to her voice, which pleased Gikonyo.
He watched Mumbi make her hair: how he longed to touch it, and at the thought blood rushed to his finger-tips. A small mirror was propped between Mumbi’s knees; her hands, bent at the elbows, met over her head and the fingers played with the hair. Occasionally she gave Gikonyo a quick under-glance and a smile. Gikonyo drank all in.
Then Kihika and Karanja arrived at the scene, and Gikonyo hated them for challenging his monopoly over Mumbi’s attentions: why did they have to appear at that moment? Resigning himself to the inevitable, Gikonyo joined in the talk which unerringly led to politics and the gathering storm in the land.
Kihika’s interest in politics began when he was a small boy and sat under the feet of Warui listening to stories of how the land was taken from black people. That was before the Second World War, that is, before Africans were conscripted to fight with Britain against Hitler in a war that was never their own. Warui needed only a listener: he recounted the deeds of Waiyaki and other warriors, who, by 1900 had been killed in the struggle to drive out the whiteman from the land; of Young Harry and the fate that befell the 1923 Procession; of Muthirigu and the mission schools that forbade circumcision in order to eat, like insects, both the roots and the stem of the Gikuyu society. Unknown to those around him, Kihika’s heart hardened towards ‘these people’, long before he had even encountered a white face. Soldiers came back from the war and told stories of what they had seen in Burma, Egypt, Palestine and India; wasn’t Mahatma Gandhi, the saint, leading the Indian people against British rule? Kihika fed on these stories: his imagination and daily observation told him the rest; from early on, he had visions of himself, a saint, leading Kenyan people to freedom and power.
Kihika was first sent to Mahiga, a Church of Scotland school not far from Thabai, on the advice of the Rev. Jackson Kigondu. Jackson, as he was popularly called, was a friend of Mbugua, who liked visiting people’s houses and in the course of an evening talk, would slip in a word or two about Christ. Whenever he came to Thabai, he would call on Mbugua, and preach to him about the Christian faith. ‘Ngai, the Gikuyu God, is the same One God who sent Christ, the Son, to come and lead the way from darkness into the light,’ Jackson would reason out, trying to show that the Christian faith had roots in the very traditions revered by the Gikuyu. Mbugua would listen carefully, then he would go into a corner, bring out a calabash-pot of beer and offer it to Jackson.