A Fool's Knot (9 page)

The day had begun perfectly. School had been dismissed for the term at lunchtime to enable the boarding students to complete their often long journeys home in daylight. With their usual keenness to depart, they ran from the straggling assembly lines to collect their boxes and set off in the direction of the town as a smiling noisy group with an obvious purpose and pace. Janet walked with them, very much at the centre of things, a haversack slung on her back, packed and ready for the lunchtime bus to Nairobi. After four months of long drop toilets and cold showers from a bucket, she was quite bursting with excitement at the thought of the city with its amenities and the long-awaited chance to spend some time with the other volunteers she had not seen since their training course.

For once, however, today's skies were dark with clouds. Clouds are a sign of rain, says a proverb, and the platitude had again proven true. For an hour a violent storm raged and the town was transformed. Huddled together under the overhangs of the shop's tin roofs the group of would-be travellers sat to witness the changes. With the first spots of rain people ran for shelter, leaving the marketplace, usually jammed with business and noise on a Friday, deserted. Even the goats, left straining at their tether throughout the storm huddled silently together, no longer bleating in vain for the return of their owners. The haste with which the change was made, at first, lent humour to the scene. Old women, whose day was usually spent in a toothless cackle of conversation punctuated by loud laughter, as they sat by their piles of tomatoes and fruit, jumped to their feet on feeling the first spots of rain and worked faster than any machine, tying together the corners of their sacking on which they displayed their wares for sale. With this done and the sacks slung over their shoulders, one by one they ran for the cover of the nearby teashop where the talking would continue over glasses of sweet tea and slices of dry bread. Initially this only added to Janet's and the students' amusement, but as the storm continued and the rain fell ever harder, their spirits waned from elation to boredom and finally to disappointment.

Here, rain was something different from anything Janet had known before. There were no drops of water. As if a sky-borne dam had burst, it fell in wide glassy sheets, obscuring even the tree in the marketplace, only a few yards from where they stood. There was no sound of raindrops hitting the ground or roofs, only the blank roar of a deluge, mingled with a growing trickle of the flow.

The road, hard, sandy and dry only a few minutes before, became a river, now carrying all manner of waste in its flow. From time to time, twigs, tin cans, beer bottles and paper melded with mud to dam the open gullies that served as roadside drains. These trapped the water which poured from the roofs, such as the one where Janet and her friends sheltered, and into this washed the cattle dung and goat droppings from the marketplace. Usually dung would remain where it fell and would quickly dry without smell in the harsh sun and dry air. After a week or so, after being tossed and ruffled by snuffling dogs and goats, or even eaten by a cow blinded by disease, faeces and any other rubbish left over from the market would be powdered, mixed with dust, absorbed and transformed, until it became dust itself. But today the detritus swirled together with a cocktail of red earth and rain water, and today it smelled, smelled so much it prompted Janet and her student fellow travellers to seek shelter elsewhere.

She had never seen rain like this. As they moved along the row of shops, braving the muddy gaps between, she noticed that small holes were starting to open in the softer earth where no puddles formed. It was just as they reached the restaurant front that some of these holes started to issue something else she had never seen before. Clouds of flying black ants started to emerge. Like geysers, the nests seemed to eject their contents from the earth. As if propelled by a great pressure, the dark columns buffeted by rain and wind thrust towards the grey sky. In an apparent silence of frenzied wing beats, the insects searched for a mate surely knowing that only one of their number would find the queen. Within a few short seconds, detached wings began to fall to earth, fluttering like black sycamore seeds. With their life cycle nearly complete in a few moments, the now flightless ants fell back to earth to land in piles, and then to be washed like dirt into the gullies.

As the rain fell ever harder, the entire marketplace was soon awash. Here and there the roadside gullies became torrents whose sides started to erode, with large clods of mud collapsing to form their own new dams. The travellers realised, but did not admit to one another, that within an hour the road would be broken. And so it was. A gaping trench grew wider and deeper by the minute, as a cascading flow of water, debris and grit followed the contour of the land across the road just beyond the last of the shops, and away into the valleys beyond. It became obvious that, even if the bus were to arrive, it would go no further than Migwani today. The travellers were no longer a laughing band. Now glum-faced they waited against all reason, willing the growl of the bus to appear above the hissing of the rain, but knowing that they would go nowhere that day.

When the rain eventually did stop, the only sound to break the air was the continued, but diminishing, trickling of the roadside rivers. In time, the goats began to bleat again and soon, ankle deep in mud, the owners trudged and slithered across the marketplace to reclaim their animals. The walk home would be long and difficult now, so market was finished for the day as its participants drifted away. Only now could the full extent of the damage be seen. Besides the trench across the road in the town, down towards the school at the edge of the town, just fifty yards from the marketplace, where the road was carried by a small embankment between the heads of two deeply rutted low valleys, a drain had dammed and the rain water from the town had flowed across the road, which had simply disappeared. Where it should have been, only a gaping hole remained, easily eight feet deep and ten across and looked, from the town, like a tooth dissolved from the jaw of the land. There would be no traffic through Migwani for some days, not until a Ministry of Works grader, a rare animal at best of times, had visited and left its mark. It would be a week, at least.

Resigned, but still reluctant, several of the students bid Janet goodbye and set off to walk home or to the next town, where they might find a lift to somewhere on their way. Some of the group, providing there was no more rain, might be home in a few hours. As the students departed, some north towards Mwingi, others south towards Kitui and still others taking to the paths away from the main road towards Thitani, Janet was flooded with a new loneliness. Disappointment willed her to cry, but reason reshaped despair into mere undirected anger.

Only a few students stayed behind with her. They all lived too far away to walk and all needed at least two buses to complete their journeys, so they were resigned to the reality that they should stay another night in the school's dormitories and set out again early the next day, hoping that a few running repairs might just get a bus past the obstacles. Joseph Mutuli was the brightest of the group in every respect. The son of a Baptist minister, he had learned English by reading the Bible. As his teacher, Janet inevitably found that she punctuated every conversation with instructions to use ‘you' not ‘thou', ‘your' not ‘thy'. Joseph would shake his head and slap his leg, saying, “I am to be forgetting it all the time.” How strange, Janet thought, that now she did not even try to correct the tenses of his verbs. The progressive present had become a norm that even she now used herself. “Even myself,” she said over a cup of tea, “I am not to be using the correct English.”

“Ah,” scoffed Joseph, “but it cannot be true. It cannot be that an English person is not speaking good English.”

Janet smiled and asked the owner of the restaurant to bring some food. She had been bound for Nairobi and had sent her cook home, having also not bothered to buy any groceries in the market that morning. So there was nothing to eat at home. Despite having been warned by many not to eat the local food, she followed the boys' example and attacked the plate of stewed goat and chopped doughy chapatti with great zeal. It was good food.

Michael Kitheka was from Kyuso in the far north of the district. He had been waiting for a different bus, but, of course, it too had not arrived. He was the tallest in the school, built like a pipe cleaner, and he was surely no boy. Janet judged his age might be anything between seventeen and twenty. In fact, she learned some time later, that he was twenty-six, four years older than his teacher. Dressed in khaki shorts and a simple short-sleeved shirt, however, he remained a schoolboy. Had the bus arrived, within eight hours he would have been transformed into the head of a household, the owner of a small farm, a few cows, a wife and four children. At this stage, Janet would never have believed it, had she known. To her he was simply a youth with immature ideas. Above all he was a discipline problem in the school. Several times he had been found drinking in bars and had been suspended from school or punished with bouts of manual labour. Had the school records carried his correct age, Sister Aidan, the frail nun who had administered the school since its foundation, might have better understood his behaviour. As it happened, this full-grown man was regarded as a naughty boy and treated as such. He did as she said and accepted punishments, because she was white and therefore
mutumea
, one worthy of respect. Had the head teacher been black, perhaps the salary he drew might demand Michael Kitheka's respect, admiration and even envy. He would soon learn, since, with the Sister now retired, the new term would see the school's acting headmaster take over the job full time. Michael Kitheka's desire for education and thus his entire journey through life was a quest for riches, a single-minded thrust along the wrong road toward a receding horizon he had never seen. The goat, however, tasted good and maybe he would now stay at school to study rather than try to make his way home. He would make up his mind tomorrow. Michael always made decisions tomorrow, Janet thought.

James Maluki, on the other hand, was one of Janet's favourites. He was perhaps the only real child in the school. His voice was soft and light and his clear eyes were as innocent as his light brown skin was unblemished. Sipping his soup from his spoon with impeccable manners, he made a sharp contrast with Michael Kitheka at his side, who bent low over his own plate, gulping and spluttering, each spoonful raised by his lanky, almost mechanical arm. In Janet's eyes James Maluki was a sweet young child, exactly the kind of pupil she had imagined she would be teaching. In fact he was eighteen years old. His first few years of life had coincided with famine years in his home area and he had been lucky to survive. In Janet's eyes, however, he remained a smiling boy, whose model parents bought him a new uniform each term and always paid his school fees on time. In class, however, he was totally hopeless. He seemed to possess neither the energy to participate nor the intellectual facility to learn. It didn't really matter, she thought, because there were so many like him in the school.

The four sat and ate, sharing a thickly diced chapatti piled on a plate in the centre, from which they occasionally ladled spoonfuls of the bread into their bowls to saturate in the watery broth. Janet smiled a little, remembering a talk on health and hygiene from the orientation course she had attended. Never eat local food had been the message. Guard against infection at all times. Even if you have shaken hands with an African, they were told, be sure to wash thoroughly before touching food. How silly and superfluous all this advice now seemed. Talking to these boys, she began to feel for the first time that she was a part of Migwani, a member of the community. People no longer stood and stared as she passed. They had grown to accept the sight of her in the town, in the bars and the market and in the restaurants. Now she was simply
mwalimu
, the teacher, just as Michael was
muvea
, the priest.

With the meal finished, they knew no reason to leave. Outside, the rain had started again, recreating the same muddy scene of an hour before, so they ordered another tea and talked some more. Janet paid for all of their food with a ten-shilling note and took a sip of her tea. A man on the far side of the room, who had previously sat perfectly still as if asleep, saw this and began to rise to his feet, muttering. Janet had never seen him before, but in the coming months she would regularly notice him asleep under the tree in the marketplace, or in the teashop, or lying under the wheels of a bus. She would also learn to avoid him. He was tall and had a matted grey beard. He looked strange, but perhaps not significantly stranger than anyone else in the room. His wiry beard was matted with what Janet assumed were raindrops, but it was soon obvious that it was his own saliva. He was dressed in a torn and tattered raincoat, car-tyre sandals and a pair of ragged shorts. On his head he wore an incongruous flat-topped army hat with a shiny black peak. Still he muttered as he approached, looking straight at Janet. He said a few words more and then almost everyone in the restaurant started to laugh, including her own companions.

Janet looked inquiringly at little James Maluki. Embarrassed, his eyes fell from her gaze and he tried, with little success, to hide the smile on his lips. Tall Michael Kitheka shook his head and laughed out loud, slapping his thighs and offering a reply to the old man in Kikamba. Only Mutuli tried to explain to Janet what had been said.

“The man is saying that thou art very rich,” said Mutuli.

Janet's face hardened into a teacher's call for attention. “ …is saying that
you are
very rich,” she corrected. She waited for a moment to be sure that he had understood.