A Grain of Wheat (29 page)

‘What is the trouble?’ she asked with submissive concern.

‘Since when did I start discussing my affairs with you?’ he answered. She withdrew, ashamed. What had come over him these last few days? She did not know which was worse: the previous formal, polite talk, or this recent attempt to hurt her with words.

‘Mugo was here today,’ she said coldly, after a while. ‘He said that he would not take part in the ceremony.’

‘What!’ he shouted at her as if she was responsible for Mugo’s actions. She did not answer.

‘Have you no ears? It’s to you that I am speaking. What did he say?’

‘You seem to be seeking a quarrel tonight. Didn’t you hear what I said? Mugo said that he would not lead the Uhuru ceremonies.’

‘You should open your mouth wide and not speak with your teeth closed. Nobody is interested in seeing your teeth,’ he added, resuming his previous posture.

Things might have returned to normal (politeness and all that), but then the boy in dispute came running into the room from Wangari’s place. Previously, Gikonyo also treated the boy politely, showing neither resentment nor affection. For, as he argued in his heart, a child
was a child and was not responsible for his birth. The boy had sensed his coldness and instinctively respected the distance. Today, however, he propped himself in between Gikonyo’s knees, and started chattering, desiring to be friendly.

‘Grandma has told me such a story – a good one – about – about—Do you know the one about the Irimu?’

Gikonyo roughly pushed the boy away from the knees, disgust on his face. The boy staggered and fell on his back and burst into tears, looking to the mother for an explanation. Mumbi stood up, and for a minute anger blocked her throat.

‘What sort of a man do you call yourself? Have you no manly courage to touch me? Why do you turn a coward’s anger on a child, a little child …’ She seethed like a river that has broken a dam. Words tossed out; they came in floods, filling her mouth so that she could hardly articulate them.

‘Shut your mouth, woman!’ he shouted at her, also standing.

‘You think I am an orphan, do you? You think the gates of my parents’ hut would be shut against me if I left this tomb?’

‘I’ll make you shut this mouth of a whore,’ he cried out, slapping her on the left cheek, and then on the right. And the flow of words came to an abrupt end. She stared at him, holding back her tears. The boy ran out of the house crying to his grandmother.

‘You should have told me that before,’ she said quietly, and still she held back the tears. Wangari came hurrying into the hut, her face contorted with pain, the boy following behind at a safe distance. Wangari stood between Gikonyo and Mumbi.

‘What is it, children?’ she asked, facing her son.

‘He calls me a whore, he keeps me in this house as a whore, mother,’ Mumbi said, in a choked voice, and now sobbed freely.

‘Gikonyo, what’s all this about?’ Wangari demanded from the son.

‘This does not concern you, Mother!’ he said.

‘Does not concern me?’ She raised her voice, slapping her sides with both hands. ‘Come all the earth and hear what a son, my son, answers me. Does not concern me who brought you forth from these thighs? That the day should come – hah!— Touch her again if you call yourself a man!’ Wangari had worked herself into an uncontrollable
fury. Gikonyo wanted to say something; then, suddenly he turned round and walked out of the house.

‘And you now, stop crying, and tell me what happened,’ she said gently to Mumbi, who had already sat down and was heaving and sobbing.

A river runs along the line of least resistance. Gikonyo’s resentment was directed elsewhere; it was only that Mumbi happened to be near. And her face and voice found him at a time when the walls that carefully guarded his frustrated life from the outside world were weakest.

Following yesterday’s talk with the MP, Gikonyo called on the five men concerned with the scheme. They reviewed their position and decided to enlarge the land company, raise the price per share, and invite people to buy the shares. In this way, they would raise enough money for Burton’s farm. In the afternoon they went to see Burton, to see if he would accept a large, first instalment. Then they would pay the rest at the end of the month. If the loan promised by the MP came, they would use it to develop the farm. The first thing they saw at the main entrance to Green Hill Farm (as Burton’s farm was called) was a new signpost. Gikonyo could not believe his eyes when he read the name. They walked to the house without a whisper among themselves, but all dwelling on the same thought. Burton had left Kenya for England. The new landowner was their own MP.

Gikonyo tried not to think of the day’s experience or his quarrel with Mumbi as he went to Warui’s hut. His first duty was to the Party. Besides he wanted the Uhuru celebrations to succeed, for this would add to his power and prestige. Warui was in the hut alone, taking snuff at the fireside. What made such a man as Warui contented with life in spite of age and loss of a wife, Gikonyo mused, taking a seat and listening to Warui’s delighted words of welcome. Was it because he had lived his own personal life fully as a man, a husband and a father, or was it because he had lived his life for the people? ‘I have got my heart’s earliest wish: my mother has a good house in
which to live. I have a bit of land and money enough to buy me food and drink. But now the money gives me no pleasure, the wealth tastes as bitter water in my mouth. And yet I must go on seeking for more.’

Warui was not as contented with life as his outer frame suggested to Gikonyo. It was only that he took delight in active living, and refused to bow to disappointments. His wife had died the year before. Mukami had been a wife who admired her husband and enjoyed singing his praises among other women. Warui on his part always brought delicacies to her every evening. She was a good listener and every night he would relive his doings of the day with her. If nothing exciting had happened he would relate old stories about the birth of the Movement, the Gikuyu break with the missions, and about the Harry procession. Mukami would often rebuke him for his vanity, but enjoyed every episode that told of her man’s strength and courage.

Warui’s main disappointment in life lay in his three sons. They had been conscripted to fight for Britain in the Second World War. The eldest died in active service; the other two came back, overwhelmed less by the actual hardships and violence in the war, than by the strange lands and women they had seen. Both had gone through the Emergency unscathed, escaping forests and concentration camps, by prostrating themselves and cowering before whichever side seemed stronger at a particular time and place. After the Emergency they returned to the Rift Valley to live as squatters on the land owned by the white people. Kamau, the elder of the two, believed implicitly in the power of the British.

‘I tell you, if you see an Englishman, fear him,’ he would say in a voice suggesting greater knowledge of the whiteman’s secrets than Kamau cared to reveal. ‘I saw with my own eyes what he did to Hitler. And I tell you the Germans were not boys, either. What do you think Kihika and his men can do with their unpredictable home-made guns, rotting pangas and blunt spears?’

Warui, however, placed his faith in the God of the nation and what he cryptically called the spirit of the black people. He believed, in turns, that people like Harry and Jomo had mystical power; their
speeches always moved him to tears; at such times he would tell the story of the 1923 procession and end with the same refrain: ‘Perhaps if we had the guns …’ He had a similar faith in Mugo, he wished his sons had grown to be a man like him, and used the same formula which over the years had made him predict, with a prophetic accuracy that surprised him, the national heroes: you can see it in his eyes, he often told his wife. But now Mukami had died, and his sons had failed him.

After a few inconsequential words, Gikonyo plunged into the subject of his visit.

‘Mugo says that he will not lead in the ceremony.’

‘What do you say? But I was with him today, this afternoon, and he did not say a thing.’

‘Still, he says he’ll not lead; he is a strange man, hard to understand.’

‘Now that I think about it, he did seem troubled when I talked to him.’

‘I’ve come so that you and I can go there to see him again. Else we shall have to choose another man, and time is short.’

On the way to Mugo’s hut, Gikonyo told Warui his disappointment over Green Hill Farm.

‘And he did not tell you he had bought it when you saw him yesterday?’ Warui asked.

‘No, he did not tell me. I could see, though, that he did not want to look at me in the eyes.’

‘The gods who rule us,’ Warui said with sympathy. He wanted to tell Gikonyo the story of how people once rose against women-rulers who enriched themselves and forgot the responsibility of their office, but only muttered: ‘They’ll only raise wrath against the hearts of their worshippers.’

Gikonyo did not answer, and nothing further was said on the subject until they were near Mugo’s hut.

‘It is the old saying come true: Kamwene Kabagio ira,’ Warui said.

When a young boy, Mugo once went to the railway station at Rung’ei to look at the trains. He walked along the platform, awed by the goods-train with its many coaches. In some of the coaches were
horses, big powerful animals. One of the horses fixed him with its eyes and then yawned, opening wide its strong jaws. Mugo shook with terror and for a time was unable to move. He feared being trampled to the ground by horses’ hooves.

Mugo had felt the same irrational terror on leaving Mumbi and General R. He felt pursued from behind, and he could not escape. He wanted to return to his hut, and even quickened his steps to do so. But he was irrevocably drawn to the lives of the villagers. He tried to think of something else – himself, his aunt – but he could not escape from his knowledge of Gikonyo’s and Mumbi’s lives.

The sun was fiercely hot. Children – there were always children – played in the streets. And yesterday, on Sunday, he had seen these huts as objects that had nothing to do with him. Yesterday, this morning, before Mumbi told her story, the huts had run by him, and never sang a thing of the past. Now they were different: the huts, the dust, the trench, Wambuku, Kihika, Karanja, detention-camps, the white face, barbed-wire, death. He was conscious of the graves beside the trench. He shuddered cold, and the fear of galloping hooves changed into the terror of an undesired discovery. Two years before, in the camps, he would not have cared how Wambuku lay and felt in the grave. How was it that Mumbi’s story had cracked open his dulled inside and released imprisoned thoughts and feelings? The weight of her words and the face of General R. dissolved into acts of the past. Previously he liked to see events in his life as isolated. Things had been fated to happen at different moments. One had no choice in anything as surely as one had no choice on one’s birth. He did not, then, tire his mind by trying to connect what went before with what followed after. Numbed, he ran without thinking of the road, its origin or its end.

Mugo abruptly stopped in the middle of the main village street, surprised that he had been walking deeper and deeper into the village. Incidents tumbled on him. He stirred himself with difficulty, to cut a path through the heap. He was again drawn to the trench and seemed impotent to resist this return to yesterday. The walls of the trench were now battered: soil had fallen and filled the bottom. Potato peelings, rotting maize husks, bits of white paper, bones and remains
of rotting meat were strewn on top and on the banks of what was now a shallow ditch.

Three women, bent double with loads of wood, crossed over the ditch into the village.

Mugo walked along hoping, with a guilty curiosity, to come to the section he himself had helped to dig. Fear and restless expectation raged inside. He would fix his eyes on the scene, and he would not flinch.

The whole scene again became alive and vivid. He worked a few yards from the woman. He had worked in the same place for three days. Now a homeguard jumped into the trench and lashed the woman with a whip. Mugo felt the whip eat into his flesh, and her pained whimper was like a cry from his own heart. Yet he did not know her, had for the three days refused to recognize those around him as fellow sufferers. Now he only saw the woman, the whip, and the homeguard. Most people continued digging, pretending not to hear the woman’s screams, and fearing to meet a similar fate. Others furtively glanced at the woman as they raised their shovels and jembes. In terror, Mugo pushed forward and held the whip before the homeguard could hit the woman a fifth time. More homeguards and two or three soldiers ran to the scene. Other people temporarily stopped digging and watched the struggle and the whips that now descended on Mugo’s body. ‘He’s mad,’ some people later said, after Mugo had been taken away in a police van. To Mugo the scene remained a nightmare whose broken and blurred edges he could not pick or reconstruct during the secret screening that later followed. He only saw behind the table the inscrutable face of the whiteman, whose cold eyes examined Mugo from head to foot. The voice when at last it came as from a dead body, carried venom.

‘You have taken the oath.’

‘No, no, Effendi.’

‘Take him back to the cell.’

Two policemen pulled him out; they poured cold water on him and locked him in. Strange how often Mugo forgot the hob-nailed shoes dug into his flesh, but always remembered the water on the cement floor.

Mugo looked across to the men and women who worked on the narrow shambas, enclosed by the thick and unkempt hedges that spread from the ditch, once the trench. He seemed to be seeing things as if they were new. Were people always doing this, day in, day out, coaxing the hard soil for food?

Suddenly the curiosity which had driven Mugo back to the trench, died, and he wanted to escape from the trench and the memories drumming inside. He crossed into the village. His hut appeared now the only safe place. He wanted to resume that state, a limbo, in which he was before he heard Mumbi’s story and looked into her eyes. The dust he raised as he went back to the hut whirled low behind him.