A Grain of Wheat (16 page)

‘It was not cowardice. I would have done the same.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘You want to know, do you?’ Mugo said, forgetting himself. Then the temptation fleeted away.

‘I had no home to come to,’ he said quietly, without emotion. ‘I suppose I did not want to come back.’

‘No, it is not that,’ Gikonyo said in a gale of genuine admiration. ‘You have a great heart. It is people like you who ought to have been the first to taste the fruits of Independence. But now, whom do we see riding in long cars and changing them daily as if motor cars were clothes? It is those who did not take part in the Movement, the same who ran to the shelter of schools and universities and administration. And even some who were outright traitors and collaborators. There are some who only the other day were singing songs composed for them by the Blundells: Uhuru bado! or Let us carve Kenya into small pieces! At political meetings you hear them shout: Uhuru, Uhuru, we fought for. Fought where? They are mere uncircumcised boys. They knew suffering as a word. They should have listened to your speech that day. All of them. As you spoke, I felt you were reading my heart …’

‘Was it hard waiting, for you?’ Mugo spoke abstractedly as if he wanted to change the subject of conversation. Gikonyo needed only small encouragement.

‘Yes. Because I thought I would never come back. You see with the experience of hardship in detention, I knew that if I could get out I could make something great out of my life with Mumbi.’

Gikonyo talked of a world where love and joy were possible. Why was he now troubled, then, Mugo wondered. He had all that a man needed to be happy: wealth, position, and relations who cared for him.

‘You love your wife,’ Mugo observed.

‘I did!’ Gikonyo said slowly and emphatically. The hut was silent. The fire still glowed between them. The oil-lamp went on fluttering.

‘She was my life, all my life,’ Gikonyo declared, staring fixedly at the hearth. ‘Do you know,’ he went on in the same quiet tone, ‘do you know that when I finally came back, well for me everything had changed; the shambas, and the villages, and the people …’

‘Mumbi?’

‘She too had changed,’ Gikonyo said, almost in a whisper. ‘God, I sold my soul, for what? Where is the Mumbi I left behind?’

Then, as now, Thabai Ridge sloped gently from the high ground on the west into a small plain on which Rung’ei Trading Centre stood. The centre was a collection of tin-roofed buildings that faced on another in two straight rows. The space enclosed served as a market where women from various ridges congregated to sell and buy food and exchange gossip. Indian traders from Nairobi had also discovered this market, where they often came, haggled over prices with the women, let slip one or two dirty words which sent the women into fits of dirty laughter, and then took the vegetables and other wares to Nairobi where they disposed of them to the city people at a much higher price. Other Indians had settled in the area; a few minutes’ walk from the African shops brought you to the Indian place, where buildings, also in two straight rows, were made of corrugated-iron sheets. These Indians also brought potatoes, peas, beans, and maize grain from Rung’ei Market during the harvest. But they stored them at the back of their shops, and later sold them during the hard times.

The African shops, though often roofed with rotting tin, had the unsurpassed virtue of having stone or brick walls. People claimed that Rung’ei was the first centre with such buildings in all Gikuyu country. Rung’ei had other virtues, too. The iron snake had first crawled along this plain before climbing up the escarpment on its way to Kisumu and Kampala; for a long time Thabai was the envy of many ridges not so graced with a railway line. Even people from ridges bordering the Masai land paid visits once in a while just to see the train coughing and vomiting smoke as it rattled along. Thabai was proud of Rung’ei. They felt the centre belonged to the ridge, that even the railway line and the train had a mystical union with Thabai; were they not the
first to welcome the rail and the train into the heart of the country? Of the story, current to this day in other ridges, which told how men, women and children deserted Thabai for a whole week when the iron snake, foreseen by the Gikuyu seer, first appeared on the land, they kept discreet silence. They ran for refuge to the neighbouring ridges, so the story goes, and only trickled back, and that cautiously, after the warrior spies, armed with spears and simis, brought news that the snake was harmless, that the red strangers themselves were touching it.

Later, the railway platform became the meeting place for the young. They talked in groups at home, they went for walks in the country, some even went to church; but in their minds was always the train on Sunday. On Sunday afternoon, the passenger train to Kampala and the one to Mombasa met at Rung’ei station. People did not go there, as it might be thought, to meet friends arriving from Mombasa, Kisumu or Kampala – they just went there to meet one another, to talk, to gossip, to laugh.

Love-affairs were often hatched there; many marriages with their attendant cry of woe or joy had their origin at the station platform.

‘Will you go to the train today?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Leave me not behind, friend.’

‘Then you must be ready on time. It takes you a whole day just to put on your clothes.’

‘That’s a lie in clear daylight.’

Girls normally went to the river on Saturday to wash their clothes. Sunday morning was the time for pressing the clothes and also making their hair. By lunchtime, they were ready to walk or run to the station. Men had no such rituals. They were ready all the time, and in any case, most of them spent their time at the Rung’ei shops, only a short distance from the station.

The train became an obsession: if you missed it, sorrow seized your heart for the rest of the week; you longed for the next train. Then Sunday came, you went there on time, and immediately you were healed.

From the station they normally went to dance in Kinenie Forest
overlooking the Rift Valley. Guitar players occupied a place of honour in this community; beautiful girls surrounded them and paid tribute with their eyes. Men bought dances. When a person bought a dance, the guitarist played for him alone, praising his name, always the son of a woman. The man danced to the rhythm alone or invited his friends to join him while others only watched. Nobody else could come in. The conventions governing the dances in the wood were well understood.

Often the dances ended in fights. Again this was well understood and men came prepared, at times courting danger with provocative words and insulting songs. The men organized themselves in groups according to the ridges of origin. Thabai was famous because men from there successfully fought other groups and took away their women. Girls loved men from Thabai, anyway, so that taking them captive was not exactly a difficult feat.

At the platform things were different. Nobody thought of starting a fight. There, the man who beat you the previous Sunday and took away your woman, was a friend. You talked and laughed together. But he knew later in the wood you would look for a chance to stab him and take away his woman.

‘I rarely missed the train,’ Gikonyo now remembered, years later, when this was only a myth. ‘I loved to rub shoulders with the men and the women.

‘Yet the day I missed the train was the happiest in my life,’ he told Mugo.

Then Gikonyo worked as a carpenter in Thabai. Though an immigrant to the ridge, he and his mother had been absorbed into the community and its daily rituals. He came to Thabai, a child strapped on the mother’s back, from Elburgon area in the Rift Valley province where his father, Waruhiu, worked as a squatter on European farms. Being a hard-working man, it was not long before Waruhiu found himself the centre of attraction to many women. He got new brides and complained that the thighs of the first wife did not yield warmth any more. He beat her, hoping that this would drive her away. Wangari stuck on.

Eventually, Waruhiu ordered her to leave his home and cursed mother and son to a life of ever-wandering on God’s earth. But Wangari did not wander for long; surely she could find welcome in Gikuyu land? ‘Waruhiu thinks I will die because I am poor and have nothing to eat,’ she one day said to herself sitting on a stone near Elburgon station. ‘But there is no home with a boy-child where the head of a he-goat shall not be cooked,’ she said, and holding the child to her breast she hurled an unspoken challenge to Waruhiu by boarding a train which took her to Thabai.

Wangari sent her son to school. But Gikonyo did not stay there for long because the woman had not enough money for fees. Fortunately at school he had learnt a little carpentry, and this he determined to use and make a living.

He loved carpentry.

Holding a plane, smoothing a piece of wood, all this sent a thrill of fear and wonder through the young man. The smell of wood fascinated him. Soon his senses developed sharp discrimination, so that he could tell any type of wood by a mere sniff. Not that the young carpenter made it appear so easy. In fact, Gikonyo used to act out a little ritual the performance of which varied depending on who was present. The drama went like this:

A woman has brought a piece of wood – she wants to know what type of wood it is. The carpenter takes it, gives it a casual glance, and then carelessly flings it onto a pile of other pieces. He continues with the job in progress. The woman stands there admiring the movement of his muscles. After a while, he lifts the piece of wood, its far end resting on the table. He shuts the left eye and peers at the wood with his half-open right eye. Then he closes his right eye and repeats the performance with the other eye. This finished, he knocks at it swiftly, rhythmically, with the knuckle of the right front finger as if he is exorcizing spirits from the wood. Next he takes the hammer; strike, listen, strike, listen. Then he sniffs the wood carefully (that is, professionally), and gives it back to the woman. He resumes the other job.

‘What is the wood? It is podo—?’ the woman ventures to ask, overwhelmed by the professional sniffs and pauses.

‘Podo? Hmm. Bring it.’ He sniffs at it again, slowly turns the wood round and round, nodding his head knowingly. Then he spends a few minutes explaining why the piece of wood is not podo.

‘It’s camphor. Have you ever heard of it? Grows mostly in the high ground in the Aberdares and around Mount Kenya. Very good timber. Why else do you think that the white people appropriated that land to themselves?’ the carpenter pronounces with quiet wisdom.

The workshop was a small table set against the wall of Gikonyo’s hut. Towards sunset, Wangari always came to the workshop, rummaged through the wood shavings, hoping to collect one or two unwanted pieces for the fire.

‘Do you need this?’ she asked, smiling.

‘Oh, leave that, mother. You can never see a piece of wood without wanting to burn it. It costs money you know. But that is what a woman will never understand.’

‘What about this?’ Wangari was not easily daunted. She loved to hear the voice of the son admonishing her.

‘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.