Not so the men.
Some came in baggy trousers and jackets bought second-hand at the Indian or African shops in Rung’ei. The knees, small black heads, popped through the holes in the trousers as the men walked along the platform, flinging their legs carelessly but firmly, each step an unnecessary emphasis of their manhood.
Karanja stood apart from this moving throng. Jealousy crept into him, a surprise because he had always refused to consider Gikonyo a serious rival: how could the carpenter, without wit or any suavity, even dare? But now he knew that Gikonyo and Mumbi were together, alone, somewhere. He was angry at the knowledge. How could Mumbi make him pant and sweat in the sun, all for nothing? How could she make him trot ahead, like a child, so that she might remain behind with Gikonyo? He thought of rushing back, seek her out, humiliate her, force her to her knees in public, till she cried to him to save her. The impulse to effect this was so strong that he started walking away from the platform even as the thought was forming. Then he stopped, stood, debated whether he ought to run or not, as if the manner of his retreat from the platform would determine the degree of success in his self-appointed mission. What if he should find her in Gikonyo’s arms? He traced the carpenter’s rough hands on Mumbi’s body beginning from the breasts down to the navel and—No! He dare not, must not contemplate it; he swore, torturing his mind with more sordid images. No, not the carpenter, he shuddered, calling upon the Lord. Else let heaven fall, the earth tremble, people tumble, break their hips and moan (oh, the terrible moaning) down to the gaping vaults to suffering and death.
The violence of his own reactions surprised him and he tried to control the shuddering, reasoning that he had never, in any case, told Mumbi his love. And nothing perhaps had passed between Gikonyo and Mumbi. This reflection comforted him. He clung to it, elaborated it and supported it with numerous reasons. He even attempted to laugh to drive out the unease hovering at the edges of his new-found calm.
He moved to join a group of men a few yards away. He had made up his mind to act quickly and open his heart to Mumbi. The men crowded around Kihika and with animated faces listened to him speak. Further down the platform other men and women were strolling or standing in groups of varying sizes: the sight of men and women laughing together made Karanja miss Mumbi terribly.
Suddenly the whistle shrilled, the train pulled out of the station, and Karanja, who was watching it intently, had a strange experience. First the whistle shrilled and the coaches clinked into his flesh. (This sensation in fact tickled through him long after the train had gone.) Then he was standing on the edge of the platform and staring into a white blank abyss. He saw this clearly, he could swear afterwards. The rails, the people at the platform, the Rung’ei shops, the whole country went in circles, faster and faster, before his eyes and then abruptly stopped. People stopped talking. Nothing moved or made noise. Karanja was frightened by this absolute cessation of all motion and noise and he looked about him to confirm the truth of what he saw. But nothing had stopped. Everybody was running away as if each person feared the ground beneath his feet would collapse. They ran in every direction; men trampled on women; mothers forgot their children; the lame and the weak were abandoned on the platform. Each man was alone, with God. It was the clarity of the entire vision that shook him. Karanja braced himself for the struggle, the fight to live. I must clear out of this place, he told himself, without moving. The earth was going round again. I must run, he thought, it cannot be helped, why should I fear to trample on the children, the lame and the weak when others are doing it?
A man standing next to him quickly put his arms around Karanja preventing him from falling on the hard surface.
‘What is wrong, man? You drunk?’
‘I – I don’t know,’ Karanja said, rubbing his eyes like a man from sleep. Everything on the platform was normal. The train was just disappearing at the far corner. ‘It’s my head,’ he explained to the man who had helped him. ‘It was going round and round.’
‘It’s the sun. It makes people feel dizzy. Why don’t you sit under a shade and rest?’
‘I am all right,’ Karanja laughed uneasily and walked away to join the group around Kihika. Few had witnessed the little drama. Karanja found Kihika explaining something about Christ.
‘No struggle for Wiyathi can succeed without such a man. Take the case of India, Mahatma Gandhi won freedom for people and paid for it with his own blood.’
Karanja, slightly shaken by his recent vision, suddenly felt irritated with Kihika.
‘You say one thing now. The next hour you say another,’ he said, addressing Kihika. ‘This morning you said Jesus had failed. And now you say we need Christ. Are you becoming a revivalist?’
Karanja’s contemptuous tone of unbelief and slightly derisive laughter hurt Kihika. He hesitated a little, not knowing how to react to this public challenge from a friend. People came closer and nodded their heads to see if Kihika had really been silenced. Kihika controlled his anger with difficulty and went on:
‘Yes – I said he had failed because his death did not change anything, it did not make his people find a centre in the cross. All oppressed people have a cross to bear. The Jews refused to carry it and were scattered like dust all over the earth. Had Christ’s death a meaning for the Children of Israel? In Kenya we want deaths which will change things, that is to say, we want true sacrifice. But first we have to be ready to carry the cross. I die for you, you die for me, we become a sacrifice for one another. So I can say that you, Karanja, are Christ. I am Christ. Everybody who takes the Oath of Unity to change things in Kenya is a Christ. Christ then is not one person. All those who take up the cross of liberating Kenya are the true Christs for us Kenyan people.’
Njeri and Wambuku, with a few other girls, came and joined the group. The political talk ended, most of the young men impressed with Kihika’s mind. The intensity on their faces broke as they smiled and laughed with the girls.
Karanja and Kihika, however, remained abstracted, for different reasons, and without either of them planning it, mutually avoided one another. They remained quiet all the way to the dance in the wood.
It was quiet and cool in Kinenie Forest. Again the men and women fell into groups and laughed and buzzed, animating the wood. Somebody thrust a guitar into Karanja’s hands. ‘Play,’ the girls shouted. When he played his own guitar, Karanja always felt the strings’ immediate response to the touch of his fingers. Today he had not brought his own instrument, but he was excited as he tried to establish similar dominion over this guitar. The excitement, caught in the strings, reached the people who had already started dancing. The first few dances were free.
Wambuku and Kihika danced together. The music thrilled her and she moved closer to Kihika, her head hung back, looking at him with eyes that sparkled. Her pointed breasts heaved back and forth, rippled into Kihika so that he forgot the incident at the station. Seeing them dance so closely, Karanja remembered Mumbi. He had once or twice played to her at her home. Now he wanted to play to her again and this desire awakened wires in the blood whose delicate vibration went to his fingers. The strings would say his heart. The appeal of pregnant desire would surely go beyond the forest, to the village, to Mumbi.
Karanja played differently from Gikonyo. Gikonyo went into the instrument with a kind of dark fury. At times the instrument possessed him and his playing had crude power. But Karanja stood above the instrument; he controlled it, like the carpenter with his tools, so that his playing was more sure and more finished.
A man walked to where Njeri was standing. She declined to dance with a dreamy shake of the head. Her eyes followed Kihika and Wambuku weaving their way round the silent trees, their feet shuffling through the fallen leaves. The tree-trunks also seemed to move among the dancing couples. Karanja sang in sad exultation. Now the men and the forest belonged to him. But he only wanted Mumbi to hear him; she would hear the mad desire in his voice. She would run to him, she must surely follow him. For how could she throw her
self on the carpenter? This brought back the pain, and Karanja’s voice and guitar ended in mid-air, and to an abrupt profound silence. Then big applause and exclamations of delight tore the silence into shreds.
Kihika and Wambuku found an open place in the sun. The thick part of the forest, the dancers in the wood, and the hungry eyes of Njeri were behind them. Here green wattle trees and bush sloped steeply into the valley below. The valley sprawled flat for a distance and then bounced into the ridge of small hills. Beyond, and to the right, Kihika could just trace the outlines of Mahee Police Station, a symbol of that might which dominated Kenya to the door of every hut.
‘Destroy that, and the whiteman is gone,’ Kihika thought. ‘He rules with the gun, the lives of all the black people of Kenya.’ A light danced in Kihika’s eyes, his heart dilated with the intensity of this vision, exulting in it, for a time forgetting the woman beside him. But he was aware of her breathing, and it seemed she had come here so that he might show her this thing. He took her hand in his hand his eyes still fixed on Mahee and the Rift Valley.
‘And this road, too, this is the road the whiteman followed into the heart of the land,’ he said slowly, thinking of the railway line which could just be seen running along the slopes of the Escarpment into the Valley.
‘Do you never forget politics, Kihika?’ Wambuku asked impatiently, the question poised between angry warning and desire.
Wambuku was not beautiful, except when she laughed or was animated with passion. Then, with her eyes dilated, her lips parted in expectation, and with her dark face glowing, she could be irresistibly attractive. A woman gifted with tremendous capacity for life, she lived for the moment, exploring and devouring its alluring possibilities. She really wanted life with Kihika, but he always stood on the edge of declaration. When alone together, she would wait expectantly, her heart beating with fear of unrevealed knowledge. Kihika would not take the plunge. He was a man following an idea. Wambuku saw it as a demon pulling him away from her. If only she understood it, if only she came face to face with the demon, then she would know how to fight with her woman’s strength. Had the demon not assumed the rival woman to her? But how could she fight with a demon who never put on the flesh of a woman? How could she fight with things hidden in darkness?
‘It is not politics, Wambuku,’ he said, ‘it is life. Is he a man who lets another take away his land and freedom? Has a slave life?’
He now spoke in a tortured voice, articulating words as if he sought answers to questions inside him. Wambuku impatiently removed her hand from his as if she would not link her fate with his.
‘You have got land, Kihika. Mbugua’s land is also yours. In any case, the land in the Rift Valley did not belong to our tribe?’
‘My father’s ten acres? That is not the important thing. Kenya belongs to black people. Can’t you see that Cain was wrong? I am my brother’s keeper. In any case, whether the land was stolen from Gikuyu, Ukabi or Nandi, it does not belong to the whiteman. And even if it did, shouldn’t everybody have a share in the common shamba, our Kenya? This soil belongs to Kenyan people. Nobody has the right to sell or buy it. It is our mother and we her children are all equal before her. She is our common inheritance. Take your whiteman, anywhere, in the settled area. He owns hundreds and hundreds of acres of land. What about the black men who squat there, who sweat dry on the farms to grow coffee, tea, sisal, wheat and yet only get ten shillings a month?’
Kihika spoke with his hands as to a large audience in front of him. Wambuku suddenly felt she had to grapple with the demon now. She took his hand and gently pressed, so that Kihika looked at her. But words would not form in her mouth to express her heart.
‘Let us not talk about these things now,’ she said, sensing her failure. Kihika returned the pressure of her hand, experiencing the exquisite delight of a man who has found a comforting soul in his set course of action. He wanted to tell her his gratitude: had she not alone among all the people believed wholly in him, in his ideas? If she had not said as much before, she had now said everything, spoken in that gentle pressure of her hand.
‘You’ll not go away from me. You’ll not leave me alone,’ she said in desperation.
‘Never!’ Kihika cried in ecstasy, seeing Wambuku at his side always. When the call for action came, he alone among the other men would have a woman he loved fighting at his side.
His one word like a knife stabbed Wambuku, thrilling her into a momentary vision of happiness now and ever; would Kihika now leave the demon alone, content with life in the village like the other men?
They walked back to the dancers in the wood, hands linked, their faces lit, both happy, for the moment, in their separate delusions.
Gikonyo never forgot the scene in the wood; while in detention, yearning for things and places beyond the reach of hope, he lived in detail every moment of that experience, a ritual myth of a forgotten land, long ago.
‘It was like being born again,’ he recalled in the presence of Mugo, speaking in a low, even voice, groping for the word which would contain the reality of his experience. The fire in the hearth marked off by three stones, had ebbed into a dull glow; the oil-lamp fluttered, playing with shadows in corners, without clearly lighting the faces of Mugo and Gikonyo.
‘I felt whole, renewed … I had made love to many a woman, but I never had felt like that before.’
He paused, puzzled in wonder, as if words had suddenly eluded him. Slowly he lifted his right hand from his knee, the fingers a little spread, and then let it slump back into its former position.
‘Before, I was nothing. Now, I was a man. During our short period of married life, Mumbi made me feel it was all important … suddenly I discovered … no, it was as if I had made a covenant with God to be happy. How shall I say it? I took the woman in my arms – do you know a banana stem? I peeled off layer after layer, and I put out my hand, my trembling hand, to reach the Kiana coiled inside.
‘Every day I found a new Mumbi. Together we plunged into the forest. And I was not afraid of the darkness …’
Wangari, his mother, was also happy. She had found a daughter in Mumbi with whom, even without the medium of speech, she could share a woman’s joys and troubles. The two went to the shamba together, they fetched water from the river in turns, and cooked in the same pot. The soul of the mother warmed towards the young woman crossing the abyss of silence no words could reach, revelling in the tension of new recognition. Together they looked beyond the hut to the workshop, where the man held a saw or a plane. They listened to the carpenter’s voice singing with the tools and their hearts were full to bursting.
Soon, however, Wangari and Mumbi, like the other women in Thabai, noticed a change in the man. He now sang with defiance, carelessly flinging an open challenge to those beyond Thabai, to the whiteman in Nairobi and any other places where Gikuyu ancestors used to dwell. Karanja, Kihika and others joined Gikonyo and they sang sad songs of hope. They laughed and told stories, but their laughter was no longer the same; it carried mocking and expectation at the corners of their mouths. They went less to the train, the dance sessions in the forest turned into meetings where plans for the day of reckoning were drawn. They also met in huts in dark places late at night, and whispered together, later breaking into belligerent laughter and fighting songs. The hearts of the women fluttered; they caught the sadness at the edge of the songs and feared for their children.
The air was pregnant with expectation.
One night it happened. Jomo Kenyatta and other leaders of the land were rounded up; Governor Baring had declared a State of Emergency over Kenya.
A few months after the declaration, Mumbi stood outside her hut looking dreamily at the land. Gikonyo was not at the workshop and Wangari had gone to the river. The untrimmed hedges surrounding the scattered homesteads made the ridge appear one endless, untamed bush, but for the curling wisps of smoke from the many huts which made the land homely and peaceful. The sun was about to set. The small hedge outside Mumbi’s new
home rippled with the breeze. She silently revelled in the scene before her.
She saw Kariuki, her younger brother, walking in the fields. Mumbi was suffused with warmth; she felt happy the boy was coming to visit her. She loved Kariuki and before her marriage always washed and pressed his clothes with care. In the morning she always woke up early and made tea for him before he went to school. Though she liked Kihika, admired him and leaned on him, the stronger, without understanding him, it was on Kariuki that she poured a sisterly care. She and Kariuki often went for walks in the country together. She listened to the boy’s prattles about anything, from school to women. She would rebuke him, without conviction, whenever he made comments on grown men and women. Then Kariuki would make comic faces and Mumbi’s secret smile would break into open laughter.
Kariuki had his school clothes on, and as he came near, Mumbi was alarmed by the solemnity on his face. The light in her eyes faded, the revelry inside melted into anxiety and she was all set for activity.
‘What is it, Kariuki? Has anything bad happened at home?’
‘Is Gikonyo in?’ Kariuki asked, avoiding her eyes, and her question.
‘No, he is not in. But what’s wrong? How your face alarmed me!’
‘Nothing. Only my father sent me to tell Gikonyo to come home with me. You too.’
The boy was looking down. His voice had faded into a whisper though it could be seen he was trying to keep it strong. Now Kariuki looked up at Mumbi and something like tears glittered in his eyes.
‘It is our brother, Kihika … Oh, Mumbi, Kihika has run to the forest to fight,’ he added, and fell into Mumbi’s arms. For a moment sister clasped brother; Thabai went round and round beneath Mumbi’s feet. Then the earth became still again, and almost peaceful.