He walked or cycled to his house, an outsider to their activities on the land, and he felt sad and a little abandoned.
The women only threw him hurried greetings as they rushed to the fields between bouts of heavy downpour.
But he tried to understand and he even made a lesson out of it all: ‘There is dignity in labour,’ he told the children. He made them sing even more fervently:
Cows are wealth
Work is health
Goats are wealth
Work is health
Crops are wealth
Work is health
Money is wealth
Work is health
God the Almighty Giver
God Bringer of rains!
So within six months he came to feel as if Ilmorog was his personal possession: he was a feudal head of a big house or a big mbari lord surveying his estate, but without the lord’s pain of working out losses and gains, the goats lost and the young goats born. When the rains had come and seeds sprouted and then, in June, flowers came he felt as if the whole of Ilmorog had put on a vast floral-patterned cloth to greet its lord and master.
He took the children out into the field to study nature, as he put it. He picked flowers and taught them the names of the various parts: the stigma, the pistil, pollen, the petals. He told them a little about fertilization. One child cried out:
‘Look. A flower with petals of blood.’
It was a solitary red beanflower in a field dominated by white, blue and violet flowers. No matter how you looked at it, it gave you the impression of a flow of blood. Munira bent over it and with a trembling hand plucked it. It had probably been the light playing upon it, for now it was just a red flower.
‘There is no colour called blood. What you mean is that it is red. You see? You must learn the names of the seven colours of the rainbow. Flowers are of different kinds, different colours. Now I want each one of you to pick a flower . . . Count the number of petals and pistils and show me its pollen . . .’
He stood looking at the flower he had plucked and then threw the lifeless petals away. Yet another boy cried:
‘I have found another. Petals of blood — I mean red . . . It has no stigma or pistils . . . nothing inside.’
He went to him and the others surrounded him:
‘No, you are wrong,’ he said, taking the flower. ‘This colour is not even red . . . it does not have the fullness of colour of the other one. This one is yellowish red. Now you say it has nothing inside. Look at the stem from which you got it. You see anything?’
‘Yes,’ cried the boys. ‘There is a worm – a green worm with several hands or legs.’
‘Right. This is a worm-eaten flower . . . It cannot bear fruit. That’s why we must always kill worms . . . A flower can also become this colour if it’s prevented from reaching the light.’
He was pleased with himself. But then the children started asking him awkward questions. Why did things eat each other? Why can’t the eaten eat back? Why did God allow this and that to happen? He had never bothered with those kind of questions and to silence them he told them that it was simply a law of nature. What was a law? What was nature? Was he a man? Was he God? A law was simply a law and nature was nature. What about men and God? Children, he told them, it’s time for a break.
Man . . . law . . . God . . . nature: he had never thought deeply about these things, and he swore that he would never again take the children to the fields. Enclosed in the four walls he was the master, aloof, dispensing knowledge to a concentration of faces looking up to him. There he could avoid being drawn in . . . But out in the fields, outside the walls, he felt insecure. He strolled to the acacia bush and started breaking its thorn-tips. He remembered that his first troubles in the place had started because of taking the children into the open. How Nyakinyua had frightened him! and at the thought, he instinctively looked to the spot where she had once stood and questioned him about the city and ladies in high heels.
For a few seconds Munira’s heart stood still: he could hardly believe his eyes. She left the village path and walked toward him. A bright coloured kitenge cloth, tied loose on the head, fell wide on her shoulders so that her face was half veiled from the sun.
‘Are you well, Mwalimu?’ she called out boldly. Her voice had a studied vibrant purity: the tone was rich and pleasant to his ears. There was a calculated submissive deference in her bearing as she stretched out a small hand and looked at him full in the eyes, suddenly lowering them in childlike shyness. He swallowed something before answering.
‘I am well. It is a bit hot, though.’
‘That is why I came here.’
‘Ilmorog?’
‘No. Here in your place. Have you any water to spare? I know that water is like thahabu in these parts.’
‘It has rained recently. Ilmorog river is full.’
‘I stopped at the right place then,’ she said cooingly. Her words and voice lingered in the air, caressing the heat-filled silence between them.
‘Come into the house,’ he said.
The water was in a clay pot in a corner of the sitting-room under a bookshelf. She drank from a cup and he watched the slight motion of her Adam’s apple along the bow-tightness thrust toward him. Her neck was long and graceful: she-gazelle of the Ilmorog plains.
‘Some more, if there is,’ she said, panting a little.
‘Perhaps you would like some tea,’ he said. ‘They say tea heats the blood in cold weather and cools it in hot weather.’
‘Tea and water go down different gullets. I would like another cup of water. As for tea, don’t trouble yourself. I will make it.’
He gave her another cup of water. He showed her where the different things were. He felt a little generous within, even a bit warm. But he was suddenly shaken out of this mood by her vigorous laughter. He instinctively looked at the zip of his trousers and he found it in place.
‘Men, men,’ she was saying. ‘So it is true, what they say of you in the village. You are indeed a bachelor boy. One saucepan, one plate, one knife, two spoons, two cups: don’t you ever get visitors? Don’t you have a teacher’s darling girl?’ she asked, a wicked glint in her eyes.
‘Why! How long have you been here?’
‘I came yesterday evening.’
Yesterday! and she already knew about him! He was tense . . . he felt his six months’ security threatened: what did they really say about him in the village? Was there nothing that could cleanse him from doubts, this unknowing? He excused himself and walked toward the classroom. Let her spy on him, on his doings, the defiant thought gave him momentary relief: what did it matter? He was only an outsider, fated to watch, adrift, but never one to make things happen.
He heard feet bustling and books rustling. The brats had been watching the whole scene through windows and cracks in the wall. Their exaggerated concentration on their books confirmed his suspicion. He now put the question to himself: what did the children really think of him? Then he dismissed it with another: what did it matter one way or the other? He had taught for so many years now – teaching ready-made stuff must be in his blood – and one did all right as long as one was careful not to be dragged into . . . into . . . an area of darkness . . . Yes . . . darkness unknown, unknowable . . . like the flowers with petals of blood and questions about God, law . . . things like that. He could not teach now: he dismissed the class a few minutes before time and went back to the house. He wanted to ask the stranger girl more questions: what was her name? Where did she come from? And so on, carefully, gingerly toward the inevitable: had she been sent by Mzigo to spy on him? But why was he scared of being seen?
He found the floor swept: the dishes were washed and placed on two sticks as a rack on the floor to dry. But she herself was not there.
2 ~ Munira’s life in Ilmorog had up to now been one unbroken twilight. It was not only the high esteem in which the village held him: he cherished and was often thrilled by the sight of women scratching the earth because they
seemed at one with the green land. He would always remember that period when the rains came and everybody was in the muddy fields, sacks on their heads – not to protect them really from rain but to cushion its fall on the body – and they were all busy putting seeds in the soil, and he had watched them from the safety of his classroom or of Abdulla’s shop! There was a cruel side: this he had to admit. A few roads and a reliable water system would have improved their lives. A dispensary might have been a useful addition.
The children especially were often a nauseating sight: flies swarming around the sore eyes and mucus-blocked noses. Most had only tattered calicoes for clothing.
But transcending this absurdity was the care they had for one another. He would often meet them, a handsome trio: one rocked a crying baby strapped on the back; the third would pat-pat the crying baby to the rhythm with a rocking lullaby:
Do not cry, our little one.
Whoever dares beat our little one,
May he be cursed with thorns in his flesh.
If you stop crying, child of our mother,
She will soon come home from the fields
And bring you gitete-calabash of milk.
Their voices – two, three or more – raised in unison emphasized the solitude he associated with his rural cloister. It reminded him of similar scenes of rocking, lullaby-singing children on his father’s pyrethrum fields before the Mau Mau violence.
Otherwise the village never intruded into his life: why should he – stranger-watchman at the gate – interfere in theirs?
Today as he walked to Abdulla’s place he felt slightly uncomfortable at the elusive shadow that had earlier crossed his path. Yet Ilmorog ridge was quiet, serene: let it be, let it be, world without end, he murmured.
As he was about to knock at the back door to Abdulla’s shop, he felt blood rush to his head: for a second he felt as if his brain was drugged . . . perhaps . . . not too old . . . oh hell . . . yes . . . hell is woman . . . heaven is woman. He steeled himself and entered:
‘This is your other hiding-place, Mwalimu,’ she said. ‘You see, I am finding out all about your secrets.’
‘This . . . no secret . . .’ he said as he sat. ‘I only come to wet my throat.’
‘Your tea chased away my thirst. It was really good—’
‘But beer is better than tea. Ask Abdulla. He tells me: Baada ya kazi, jiburudishe na Tusker. Won’t you have another?’
‘That I’ll not refuse,’ she said, laughing, throwing back her head, breasts thrust out in a fatal challenge. She turned to Abdulla. ‘They say that if you don’t drink your share on earth, in heaven you will have too much in stock.’
Abdulla shouted at Joseph to bring in more beer. He himself hobbled about and brought a paraffin lamp, cleaned the glass and lit the lamp, and sat down to drink.
‘What is your name?’ Munira was asking the woman.
‘Wanja.’
‘Wanja Kahii?’ Abdulla joined in.
‘How did you know that? It is what they used to call me at school. I often wrestled with the boys. I also did some drills only done by boys. Freewheeling. Walking on my hands. Wheelbarrow. I would tuck in my skirt and hold it tight between my legs. I also climbed up trees.’
‘Wanja . . . Wanja . . .’ repeated Munira. ‘And you don’t have another?’
‘I have never asked: maybe I should. Why not? My grandmother here would know.’
‘Who is your grandmother?’ Abdulla asked.
‘Nyakinyua . . . don’t you know her? She it is who told me about you two: that you are strangers to Ilmorog.’
‘She is well known,’ Munira said uncertainly.
‘We know her,’ Abdulla responded.
‘I suppose you have come to visit her?’ added Munira.
‘Yes,’ she said quietly, almost inaudibly. There followed a silence. Abdulla coughed, cleared his throat and turned to Munira . . . beginning to lean toward him, putting on that intimate air of conspiracy. Munira’s stomach tightened as he saw the malicious glint in Abdulla’s eyes. Does he need to tell the story? Does he? He suddenly felt a murderous hatred well up in him: at the same time, he desperately searched for fitting words with which to ward off the blow.
‘Do you, Mwalimu, think I am too old to join your school?’ Abdulla unexpectedly asked, almost as an afterthought. And Munira was grateful, so relieved that he could not help a loud sigh. ‘Then I can persuade Wanja also to join the school. I would not mind wrestling her to the ground, or playing wheelbarrows together.’
Wanja laughed and turned a grave face to Munira.
‘This one – with a crippled leg . . . he is wicked. But I would floor him a thousand times.’
Joseph brought them more drinks.
What fascinated Munira was the subtle, quick changes on her face: from a suggestion of open laughter to an unconscious gravity and back again, yet the face somehow remaining basically unruffled.
‘What can I teach a big man and a big woman?’
‘Read . . . write . . . speak English through the nose,’ Abdulla retorted.
‘And geography and the history of lands far away from here,’ chimed in Wanja.
‘What good would you do the school? You would turn the children into rebels. One of my teachers used to say: Discipline maketh a school.’
‘Make us prefects,’ said Abdulla.
‘Class monitors. Write down the names of those that make noise.’
‘Or those that backbite their teachers.’
‘Or those that smoke.’
‘Or those that write letters to girls . . . but I know why Mwalimu is scared of enrolling us. We might lead a strike. We might tear books and beat up the teachers. Down with our teachers . . . There will be a riot, the school will close and . . .’
Abdulla became absorbed in his mythical school strike. He unrolled idea after idea: image after image.
‘Why,’ he went on, ‘I know of a school where the children went on strike because a teacher had confiscated a love-letter.’
And suddenly he was seized with an irresistible urge to tell that story of a school which almost closed because the headmaster had been suspected of erecting a mountain of shit. He was about to start when he remembered that Nyakinyua was Wanja’s grandmother. He also noticed that Wanja and Munira were quiet, very quiet. They seemed to have inexplicably withdrawn from the drunken irrelevance of a few minutes before. He looked from one face to the other: what had gone wrong? The lamplight flickered. Shadows passed over the walls: shadows passed over the faces. Maybe also over their lives, Abdulla thought: the two after all were strangers to him, and only Ilmorog had brought them together. Munira’s voice when later he broke through the shadow of silence was reflective, sober, but underneath it, bitter.
3 ~ To be made a prefect, Munira started slowly, looking to the ground, absorbed in thoughts he did not know he had, speaking from a past he should have forgotten, crossing valleys and hills and ridges and plains of time to the beginning of his death, you must be able to lick the boots of those above you, you must be able to scrub a dish to a shine brighter than the original, or as we would say in Siriana, outpray Jesus in prayers of devotion. Siriana: you should have been there in our time, before and during the period of the big, costly European dance of death and even after: you might say that our petty lives and their fears and crises took place against a background of tremendous changes and troubles, as can be seen by the names given to the age-sets between Nyabani and Hitira: Mwomboko . . . Karanji, Boti, Ngunga, Muthuu, Ng’aragu Ya Mianga, Bamiti, Gicina Bangi, Cugini-Mburaki. But you understand we were protected from all that at Siriana, then both a primary and secondary boarding school. But I am straying. I could never quite lick anybody’s boots. I could never shine dishes to brightness brighter than bright, or out-Jesus . . . eeh . . . Mr Christ. To be sure I was never prominent in anything. In class I was average. In sports I had not the limbs — I had not the will. My ambition and vision, unlike that of Chui, never would carry me beyond what the Lord had
vouchsafed to me. Ambition, the same Chui used to say, quoting from an English writer called William Shakespeare, ambition should be made of sterner stuff. He himself was made of a different stuff from most of us. He was a tall youth with prominent cheekbones, a slightly hardened face, and black hair matted but always carefully parted in the middle. He was neat with a style all his own in doing things: from quoting bits from Shakespeare to wearing clothes. Even the drab school uniform of grey trousers, a white starched shirt, a blue jacket and a tie carrying the school motto, For God and Empire, looked as if it was specially tailored to fit him.
It was Chui who first introduced the tie-pin to school: it became the fashion.
He was the first to wear sports-shorts with the bottoms turned up: it became the fashion.
He was the star in sports, in everything: Chui this, Chui that, Chui, Chui, Chui everywhere. The breezy mountain air in which English settlers had found a home-climate had formed his sinewy muscles: to watch him play football, to watch that athletic swing of his body as he dribbled the ball with sudden swerves to the left or to the right to deceive an opponent, that was a pleasure indeed. Shake, shake, shake the ball, the looking-on crowd would shout themselves hoarse. He was a performer, playing to a delirious gallery. Shake, Shaake, Shaaake . . . spear the ball somebody added. And Shakespeare he remained until, again through him, we heard of Joe Louis and his feats in the ring. He then became Joe, especially when our school was playing against some European teams. Joe, Joe, shake them, shake them: if you miss the ball, don’t miss the leg. That was his best moment. His footwork would then be perfect. I believe that in such moments he was us, playing there against the white colonists.
Now when I come to think of it, it was strange that with all the hate we had for white people, we hardly ever thought of the Rev. Hallowes Ironmonger as a white man. Or maybe we thought of him as a different sort of white man. He was, despite his name, a gentle old man who looked more a farmer than a missionary headmaster. He was rather absent-minded and he would often forget his gold-laced black gown in the classroom or in the chapel. Walking across the grass lawns hand in hand with his bow-legged wife – we used to say that if she were to be made a goalkeeper, all the balls would go through her legs – they looked as if they were pilgrims resting on earth for a time, before resuming their journey to heaven, where they would eternally plough cotton-white fields, drink milky tea and eat vanilla cream chocolates. Rev. Ironmonger liked Chui and used to call him Shakespeare (but never Joe Louis) affectionately to the amusement of us all. They used to take him for long rides in the country in their choking Bedford. They also took him to musical concerts and puppet shows in the city. He was probably the son they had never had. We were not surprised when Chui, in his third year, was made the school captain, previously a prerogative of those in the fourth forms.