A Grain of Wheat

For a time, it was as if a load had been lifted from his heart; but immediately Gikonyo felt slightly ashamed at letting himself go. Gatu’s silence following his own gush of words and feeling was like a rebuke. Gatu then turned his eyes from Gikonyo, and as he gazed into the shimmering distance, spoke in a voice clear, colourless, and not raised above a whisper.

  ‘A certain man, the only son of his parents, once wanted a woman. And the woman also wanted to marry him and have children. But the man kept on putting off the marriage because he wanted to build a new hut so that children would be born in a different hut. “We can build it together,” she often told him. In the end, she was tired of waiting and letting life dry in her. She married another man. The first man went on trying to build the hut. It was never finished. Our people say that building a house is a life-long process. As a result the man never had a woman or children to continue his family fire.’ He then rested his eyes on Gikonyo and continued as if he was talking straight into Gikonyo’s heart. ‘So, you see, we all have our separate losses … for the cause. We have to, we must remain strong together!’

  As soon as he had finished his story, Gatu stood up, and walked away from Gikonyo. ‘Weak, weak like any of us,’ Gikonyo at first murmured inside, filled with pity. Gatu had seemed so sure, so secure, so able to laugh at himself and others. Then suddenly Gikonyo’s pity changed into hatred, so strong he could not understand it. ‘So that’s why he’s so strong. He has no woman like Mumbi. How dare he talk to me about collective strength?’

  The soldiers came for Gatu in the quarry. That very evening the others found his body hanging against the wall of his cell. ‘Hanged himself …’ the commandant told them, laughing. ‘Guilt, you see! Unless you confess, you’ll end up like him.’ Gloom fell on Yala. They could not agree on a common united response to Gatu’s murder. The event shook Gikonyo. ‘I should have known it was coming,’ he told himself, scared of his own weakness.

  Nights followed days with a severe regularity. So Gikonyo started walking round the compound in the evenings before the sun set. The walls of each compound into which the camp was divided were buttressed with barbed-wired; the wall around the whole camp was covered with barbed-wire. In the morning they went away from the barbed-wire to the roads and quarries; in the evening they returned to the barbed-wire. Barbed-wire, barbed-wire everywhere. So it was today, so it would be tomorrow. The barbed-wire blurred his vision. ‘There was nothing beyond it. Human voices had stopped. The world, outside, was dead. No, perhaps, he thought as he went towards the wall of barbed-wire, it was his ears that had gone dumb, his eyes blind. For days he went without food, he lived on water, and did not feel hungry or weak.

  He blankly stared into the wire one evening, and with sudden excitement, wanted to cry or laugh, but did neither. Slowly and deliberately (he stood outside himself and watched his actions as from a distance) he pushed his right hand into the wire and pressed his flesh into the sharp metallic thorns. Gikonyo felt the prick into the flesh, but not the pain. He withdrew the hand and watched the blood ooze; he shuddered and enjoyed a strange exhilaration.

  The warder held the gun firmly, waiting for Gikonyo to attempt to break, and seeing that he did not, called him. Gikonyo heard the voice, a distant echo, and walked towards it, elated by his new experience. He suddenly stood before the warder, stared insolently into his face and then raised the hand for the warder to see the blood and perhaps become envious. The warder (one of the few gentle ones) saw the glaze in Gikonyo’s eyes. ‘Go in and rest,’ he told him and abruptly turned and walked away, almost running from Gikonyo’s weird laughter. In his cell, Gikonyo found that everything – the barbed-wired, Yala Camp, Thabai – was dissolved into a colourless mist. He struggled to recall the outline of Mumbi’s face without success, there was only a succession of images each one cancelling out the one immediately preceding it. Was he dead? He put his hand on his chest, felt the heart-beat and knew that he was alive. Why then couldn’t he fix a permanent outline of Mumbi in his mind? Perhaps she too had dissolved into the mist. He tried to relive the scene in the wood and was surprised to see he could not experience anything; the desire, the full manhood, the haunting voice of Mumbi, the explosion, no feeling came even as a thing of the past. And all this time, Gikonyo watched himself act – his every gesture, his flow of thought. He was both in and outside himself – in a trance, considering everything calmly, and only mildly puzzled by the failure of his memory. Maybe I’m weary, the thought crossed his mind. If I stand up, everything that makes me what I am will rush back into activity. So he stood up and indeed things seemed to rush back into activity. The room for instance went round and round – he attempted to walk; panic suddenly seized him, he staggered against the wall, a grunt emitted from his mouth as he slumped back on to the floor, into total darkness.

  Gradually he heard a faint sound of feet rustling through dry leaves in a forest. He strained his ears to catch the sound, which turned into Mumbi’s voice. He raised his head and saw her angel’s smile and her hands carried a flaming torch that dispelled the darkness in front of her. She wanted to lift him up, she who appeared so pure, an incorruptible reality in a world of changing shadows. Her purity crushed him, tumbled him, awed him. I know my redeemer liveth, he cried to her, kneeling before her, when suddenly new ecstasy swept through him and he desired to die into her as on that day in the wood, so that dying he might live. Surely she would receive him, he thought, as, still possessed by the ecstasy, Gikonyo sank into heavy sleep.

  He woke up in the morning and found that he was extremely hungry. His right hand, swollen at the wrist, ached. He could not clearly remember what happened the night before. He only knew that he had woken from an unreal dream in which he had walked and walked ever since Gatu was hanged. His desire to see Mumbi was there. His mind was clear and he knew without guilt, what he was going to do. Word went round. All the detainees of Yala crowded to the walls of their compounds and watched him with chilled hostility. Gikonyo fixed his mind on Mumbi fearing that strength would leave his knees under the silent stare of all the other detainees. He walked on and the sound of his feet on the pavement leading to the office where screening, interrogations and confessions were made, seemed, in the absence of other noise, unnecessarily loud. The door closed behind him. The other detainees walked back to their rooms to wait for another journey to the quarry …

  As Gikonyo left the road and took a path into the fields, he could still hear the echo of his steps on the cement pavement four years back. The steps had followed him all through the pipeline, for in spite of the confession, Gikonyo was not released immediately. Screened, he had refused to name anybody involved in oath administration. Would the steps always follow him, he wondered, suddenly scared of meeting someone he had known in the old days. He did not feel victorious, less so a hero. The green leaves were not for him. But then, Gikonyo did not want them. He only wanted to see his Mumbi and take up the thread of life where he had left it.

  In the streets, naked and half-naked children played throwing dust at one another. Some of the dust entered Gikonyo’s eyes and throat; he rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand (water streamed from his eyes) and he coughed with irritation. He stopped women whose faces he could not recognize and asked them for Wangari’s hut. Some stared at him with open hostility and others shook their heads with indifference, making him both impatient and angry. At last a small boy pointed the way to the hut. Walking towards it, Gikonyo wondered what he would do when he stood face to face with Mumbi. Doubt followed excitement; what if Mumbi was at the river or the shops when he arrived. Could he possibly wait for another hour or two before he could see her?

  Actually he almost hit into her at the door. She looked at him for a second or two, gave an involuntary cry, almost hoarse, and with her mouth still parted, moved back a step as if to let him in. Gikonyo saw a child securely strapped on her back. His raised arms remained frozen in the air. Then they slowly slumped back to his sides. A lump blocked his throat.

  ‘R
eally you?’ Mumbi was the first to speak.

  ‘Yes. Whom did you expect?’ he whispered. Smoke gushed from the hut into his face so that he had to back a step from the door widening the gap between him and Mumbi. The child started to cry. Mumbi gave it a quick mother’s glance, before looking back at her husband.

  ‘You?’ She asked again. ‘I knew you would come, but I did not expect you so soon.’

  ‘So soon?’ Gikonyo echoed her words, his inner eye scanning the distance of six years. Nothing seemed real. He could not grasp the significance of what she said.

  Aroused by the voices, Wangari came out of the hut and rushed to Gikonyo.

  ‘My son!’ she cried, her arms round his waist, tears running down her emaciated face.

  Gikonyo felt his body stiffen at his mother’s embrace. He knew without being told that the child strapped on Mumbi’s back was from another man’s seed. Mumbi had gone to bed with other men in his absence. The years of waiting, the pious hopes, the steps on the pavement, all came rushing into his heart to mock him. Kill her and the child … end all misery, he thought. He actually disengaged himself from Wangari’s embrace to do this in the heat of the moment. But he remained rooted to the ground. Wangari glanced in the direction of Mumbi, who had already gone into the hut, where her voice could be heard trying to hush the weeping child.

  ‘Come into the hut,’ Wangari invited him. Gikonyo allowed himself to be led into the smoke-filled hut as if his own will to act had been drugged. Inside, Mumbi held the child in her arms and fed him from her breasts. Gikonyo sat on a chair. Now and then she stole glances at him. She is mocking me, he thought.

  His eyes rolled from Wangari to Mumbi and then around the hut, trying to pick an object which might capture his concentration. The quick, bitter pang he had experienced a few minutes earlier was now replaced by a heavy dullness. Life had no colour. It was one endless blank sheet, so flat. There were no valleys, no streams, no trees – nothing. And who had thought of life as a thread one could continue weaving into a pattern of one’s choice? He was remotely conscious that he was tired. And somewhere in that remote region of his mind, hidden, words formed. Gikonyo mechanically moved his lips and the words came out, clearly, carrying no emotion except perhaps disinterested curiosity:

  ‘Whose child?’

  Mumbi just looked at Gikonyo and the wall opposite. Wangari felt the pain of the son and the misery of the daughter. She searched her own heart for the healing word. She had always known that the knowledge would be hard to bear: now, she willed a mother’s strength and tenderness go to him as she let out the truth.

  ‘Karanja’s child!’ she said bluntly. She waited calmly for the thing to happen. She had prepared herself for a groan, a scream or an attempt on Mumbi’s life. But not this, not this animal dumbness.

  ‘Karanja, my friend?’ he asked in the same detached voice, more puzzled than pained.

  ‘Yes. These things happen,’ she again said, and waited.

  The child now slept on Mumbi’s thighs, Mumbi leaning forward, her left hand delicately but firmly supporting the child’s back and head. Her right arm bent at the elbow, rested on her knee, her small finger slightly pressing down the lower lip, revealed her milk-white teeth.

  Gikonyo did not move. He only sat, leaning backwards, against a post behind him, his eyes now immobile, now rolling, without registering anything. Even the thought that Mumbi had been to other men’s beds every night for the last six years seemed not to disturb him. As if drugged, Gikonyo did not feel the wound; and could not tell what caused this terrible exhaustion.

  ‘I’m tired, Mother. I have come a long way and I want to sleep,’ he said. Wangari did not understand. And now Mumbi wept.

  He failed to sleep. Gikonyo lay on his back and stared into the darkness, every minute conscious of the heavy breathing from the two women. Six years he had waited for this day; six years through seven detention camps had he longed for it, feeling, all the time, that life’s meaning was contained in his final return to Mumbi. Nothing else had mattered: the camps, mountains, valleys, everything could have been wiped from the face of the earth and Gikonyo would have watched this, without flinching, if he had known that he would, in the end, go back to the woman he had left behind. Little did he then think, never thought it could ever be a return to silence. Could the valley of silence between him and the woman be now crossed? To what end the crossing since he would reach the other side to find a woman who had hardly waited for him to disappear round the corner, before she rushed back to bed with another man? No, this silence was eternal. In his workshop he used to hold without words a dialogue with Wangari; he looked at her eyes and understood her fears and anxieties, and ambitions for him. She moved in the old hut with a mother’s pride and assurance, which he trusted. He knew when she went to the river, to the shops or the shamba. Mumbi had come and fitted into the scheme, bringing into the dialogue, into the life of the home, a new vitality. It was Mumbi, in bed, her head on his breast, or breathing near him, who had taught him, who had made him understand there was nothing like the touch of a woman. What was there beyond this touch, this communion, which, for him had given life a meaning, a clarity? Then wealth and power were not important unless they enriched that silent communion from which living things heaved and opened to the sun. The silence to which he had now returned was dead. He lay thus in bed and watched the endless images tossing from his heated brain. Perhaps daylight would show the way.

  But the sun did not bring relief. Early in the morning the child shrieked for attention, Mumbi lit the fire and again held the child to her breasts. The child went on whimpering, tearing into Gikonyo’s nerves. Smash the child on to the floor, haul the dirty thing into silence, he thought, without attempting to rise from the bed. He did not want to see Mumbi’s eyes, nose, mouth – and yet how that face had pleasantly tortured him in detention? Now he recoiled within, at the passing thought of Mumbi’s hands on his body. The child stopped crying and whimpering as it suckled its mother’s breasts. Perhaps it was not right to kill the child; the situation that had created the child would always gnaw at his mind: Mumbi had walked to another man’s bed, had allowed, actually held another man’s dangling thing between her thighs, her flesh, had rapturously welcomed the explosion of that man’s seeds into her. And this not once but every night for the last six years. She had betrayed the bond, the secret, between them: or perhaps there had never been any communion between them, nothing could grow between any two people. One lived alone, and like Gatu, went into the grave alone. Gikonyo greedily sucked sour pleasure from this reflection which he saw as a terrible revelation. To live and die alone was the ultimate truth.

  He went out of the hut – how it reeked with heavy smoke – and wandered through the New Thabai village where one street led into another and dust trailed behind at his heels. The very air choked him; Thabai was just another detention camp; would he ever get out of it? But go where? He followed the tarmac road which led him into Rung’ei. The Indian shops had been moved into a new centre; the tall buildings were made of stones; electric lights and tarmac streets made the place appear as a slice of the big city. The sewage smelt; it had not been cleaned for a year. He went on and came to the African shops in Rung’ei; they were all closed; tall grass and wild bush clambered around the walls of the rusty buildings and covered the ground that was once the market place. Most of the buildings had battered walls with large gaping holes, smashed and splintered doors that stared at him – ruins that gave only hints of an earlier civilization. At the door of one building, Gikonyo picked up a broken plank; the fading letters on it, capitals, had lost their legs and hands; but after careful scrutiny he made out the word HOTEL. Inside was a mound of soil; bits of broken china, saucers and glasses were scattered on top. He tapped, pecked and poked the wall with the sharp end of the broken plank; suddenly cement and soil tumbled down, hollow, in increasing quantity, it seemed the wall would break and fall. Gikonyo rushed out, afraid of the building, of ghost-ridden Rung’e
i and did not stop running until he entered the fields. The African shops, as he learnt later, had been forced to shut as a collective punishment to the ridges. Gikonyo followed the paths in the neatly hedged fields – a result of land consolidation – but Gikonyo tried to shut his eyes to any more changes. Whenever anything touched him, shrubs or grass, Gikonyo would start and shiver. At the ridge he stopped and again looked at the new village – huts, grass, lives crammed together. Blue smoke from a few huts was lost in the bright midday sun. Last night it was different; then, smoke curling from the roofs of the various huts had gathered into a still, unruffled canopy above the village. Beyond, the blood-red streaks from the setting sun had spread out from the centre and broken into varying shades of brown and yellow at the edges, further on dissolving into dark grey. Nothing in the new village now attracted him; the huts did not make his heart rise and flap as on the night before. Was there anywhere else to go, could he go to another country? The steps in the pavement, the weeping child, and the image of the mother suckling the child, would always haunt him.

  Gikonyo suddenly remembered that he was expected to report his arrival in the village to the Chief. The State of Emergency was not yet over: the whiteman still coughed and people everwhere danced to the tune, however rough. He had no difficulty in finding the Chief’s house. It was inside the compound of the Thabai Homeguard Post. On the other side of the post, below it, ran the long tarmac road from Nakuru to the big city.

  He stood at the door of the Chief’s house and the ground below him began to move. Gikonyo stared at the stern face of the Chief. Fate was mocking him. This could not be.

  ‘Come right in,’ Karanja said. Gikonyo was shaken with bitter incomprehension – Karanja, a Chief, Karanja sitting erect behind a table, now lowering his eyebrows, the frown adding severity to his face.

  ‘I said come in,’ Karanja repeated in a voice, unnecessarily loud.