A Grain of Wheat (30 page)

That was the time Warui had met Mugo in the street. Warui was coming from a small crowd that had gathered outside the old woman’s hut. To Mugo, Warui was a particularly irksome apparition at the present time. He despised Warui without being able to say why. Warui’s face was troubled with thought, but Mugo did not see this.

‘Long ago such things could happen,’ he started at once, as if Mugo already knew the subject of Warui’s thoughts.

‘What things?’ They walked slowly in the same direction.

‘Have you not heard?’

‘Not anything unusual.’

‘This one is unusual. Of a truth, such things used to happen, not often, once or twice maybe, but they did occur. When a man or a child died, he was thrown into the forest. When I was young, these, my eyes, saw a man who had come from the dead.’

‘What has happened?’ Mugo asked impatiently.

‘You know the old woman. You know she had a son who from birth could not speak or hear.’

At the mention of the old woman, Mugo became agitated. The nausea he had felt at the sight of Warui disappeared. He could hardly wait for Warui to tell the story at his own pace. Mugo remembered only last Sunday he had almost entered her hut. Had she died?

‘And what happens to her son? He was killed. A bullet picks on him, in the heart, during the Emergency. As you can imagine, this
was great pain to her. All these years she has not left her hut, and she has not spoken a word to anybody. And then now she begins to speak. Just like that. What does she say? Her son has come back; she says she has seen him twice.’

‘It’s strange,’ Mugo commented.

‘Once he went into the hut. And then he went out again, without speaking. So she has kept the door open thus many a day so that Gitogo could come back. She says that he came back recently, stood at the door, and then went away again without speaking. She is talking, talking all the time.’

‘It’s strange,’ Mugo said again, fearing.

‘Yes, that’s what I say. It’s strange in our village, and I cannot stop saying it to myself when I see things that happened one, two, three – many years ago, come to disturb a woman’s peace and rest. Those buried in the earth should remain in the earth. Things of yesterday should remain with yesterday.’

When at long last Mugo extricated himself from Warui, he found the incident had disturbed him in a way he could not explain. He wandered through the streets thinking about the old woman and that thrilling bond he felt existed between them. Then he tried to dismiss the incident. But as he went on, he found himself starting at the thought of meeting a dead apparition. Life itself seemed a meaningless wandering. There was surely no connection between sunrise and sunset, between today and tomorrow. Why then was he troubled by what was dead, he thought, remembering the old woman. And immediately he heard Mumbi’s voice in his heart and saw General R.’s face looking at him. He stood at an open space in the village. His lower lip dropped: he felt energy leave him. Weak in body, he leaned against a small tree and gradually slipped down on to the grass. He held his head in both hands. It is not me, he whispered to convince himself. It is not me, it would have happened … the murder of women and men in the trench … even if … even if…. He was moaning. Mumbi’s voice was a knife which had butchered and laid naked his heart to himself. The road from his hut led to the trench. But would it not have happened? Christ would have died on the cross, anyway. Why did they blame Judas, a stone from the hands of a power
more than man? Kihika … crucified … the thought flashed through him, and a curious thing happened. Mugo saw thick blood dripping from the mud walls of his hut. Why had he not seen it earlier, he now wondered, almost calmly, without fear. But he was shaking as he walked to his hut, resolved to find out if the blood was really there.

He saw nothing on the wall. He sat on his bed and again propped his head on both hands. Was he cracking in the head? He started at the thought and again looked at the walls.

It was dark, in the evening, when Gikonyo and Warui called on Mugo.

‘I fear I am not well in the head,’ he told them. ‘I cannot, I cannot face so many eyes.’

‘Take Aspro, it will clear your head,’ Warui said, unable to penetrate the enigmatic gloom in the hut. ‘What does the man sing? Aspro ni dawa ya Kweli.’ He quietly laughed alone and then abruptly kept silent, remembering the earlier conversation with Mugo about the old woman.

‘Please think again,’ Gikonyo told him. Warui and Gikonyo left the hut. Gikonyo was puzzled by the look of terror on Mugo’s face. Warui remembered that he had not yet told Gikonyo about the old woman.

‘It’s only pictures in the head.’ Gikonyo dismissed the story, now thinking of Mumbi. Suddenly he felt the urge to beat her, really beat her, and keep her in her place. This time he would not let his mother interfere.

Warui turned to Wambui’s place and told her of Mugo’s refusal. Wambui and Warui went to a few other huts and told the same story. And so the word passed from one hut to the next. The man who had suffered so much had further revealed his greatness in modesty. By refusing to lead, Mugo had become a legendary hero.

To whom does one turn, Gikonyo mused, as he hurried to vent his anger on Mumbi. He was angry with everybody: the MP (why should these men be elected only to enrich themselves), and Mugo (what does he think he is?), and Mumbi (I had thought marriage would bring
happiness). He trembled with excitement outside the house. Nobody would hold him back. He would thrash Mumbi until she cried for mercy.

He pushed the door open, with force, and only stared into Wangari’s eyes.

‘She has gone back to her parents. See how you have broken your home. You have driven a good woman to misery for nothing. Let us now see what profit it will bring you, to go on poisoning your mind with these things when you should have accepted and sought how best to build your life. But you, like a foolish child, have never wanted to know what happened. Or what woman Mumbi really is.’

In normal circumstances, Gikonyo knew that when Wangari adopted that cool controlled voice, she was angry, or deeply wounded. Now he too was angry and unable to turn into words the many thoughts that passed through his mind.

‘Let her never come back,’ he shouted, glaring at his mother, including her in the whole conspiracy against his life. Wangari stood up and shook her front right finger at him.

‘You. You. If today you were a baby crawling on your knees and eating mud and dust, I would pinch your thighs so hard you would learn. But you are a man, now. Read your own heart, and know yourself.’

She went out and left Gikonyo standing alone inside his new house.

Most of us from Thabai first saw him at the New Rung’ei Market the day the heavy rain fell. You remember the Wednesday, just before Independence? Wind blew and the rain hit the ground at an angle. Women abandoned their wares in the open and scampered to the shops for shelter, soon crowding together in narrow verandahs. Water dripped down the sack and the pieces of clothing with which they covered their heads; little pools formed on the cement floor. People said the falling water was a blessing for our hard-won freedom. Murungu on high never slept: he always let his tears fall to this, our land, from Agu and Agu. As we, the children, used to sing:

It had rained the day Kenyatta returned home from England: it had also rained the day Kenyatta returned to Gatundu from Maralal.

We saw the man walk in the rain. An old dirty basket filled with vegetables and potatoes was slung on his back. He was tall, with broad shoulders, and he walked with a slight stoop that created an impression of power. The fact that he was the only man in the rain soon attracted the attention of people along the pavements and shop verandahs. Some even forced their way to the front to see him.

‘What is he doing, fooling in the rain?’

‘It is a dumb and deaf man he is.’

‘Showing off, if you ask me.’

‘Maybe he has a long way to walk, and he fears the night will catch him.’

‘Even so be it, he should let the rain break a little, for tell me, what’s the profit to him when he arrives home carrying pneumonia in his bones?’

‘Or maybe he has something heavy in his heart.’

‘That’s not anything to make him drench himself ill. Which of us does not carry a weight in the heart?’

The man neared the corner at the far end of Rung’ei shops. Women discussed all the risks people ran by exposing themselves to water. Soon the man disappeared, lost behind the shops.

‘What prevents him from taking cover?’

‘Mugo is a strange man,’ Wambui said reflectively.

Mugo had gone to the market to buy some food. As he pushed his way among the people, between the columns of sitting women, he felt himself watched and regretted coming to the place at all. Then suddenly the sun seemed to die prematurely; the country and the sky turned dull and grey. A cold wind started to blow carrying with it bits of white paper, pieces of cloth and grass and feathers whirling in the air. Clouds were fast collecting in the sky. A few flashes of lightning were followed by a faint rumbling thunder. And abruptly the rain fell. Mugo had another frightening sensation of re-enacting dead scenes come to life. He remembered the women’s devils at the Indian shop long ago, and took flight.

Somewhere, a woman started the song of the trench, at one time the village anthem. Others took up the thread.

Mugo’s name was whispered from ear to ear. Mysterious stories about him spread among the market women. This would not have happened on an ordinary market day. But this was not just another day. Tonight Kenya would get Uhuru. And Mugo, our village hero, was no ordinary man.

Wambui put it in his way: Independence Day without him would be stale; he is Kihika born again. She went around the market place determined to put her secret resolve into practice. Women had to act. Women had to force the issue. ‘And, after all, he is our son,’ she told women at the market place at an impromptu gathering after the rain. Wambui’s fighting spirit had never died.

She believed in the power of women to influence events, especially where men had failed to act, or seemed indecisive. Many people in old Thabai remembered her now-famous drama at the workers’ strike in 1950. The strike was meant to paralyse the country and make it more difficult for the whiteman to govern. A few men who worked at a big shoe factory near Thabai and in the settled area, grumbled and even said, so the rumours went, that they would not come out on strike. The Party convened a general meeting at Rung’ei. At the height of the proceedings, Wambui suddenly broke through the crowd and led a group of women to the platform. She grabbed the microphone from the speakers. People were interested. Was there any circumcised man who felt water in the stomach at the sight of a whiteman? Women, she said, had brought their Mithuru and Miengu to the platform. Let therefore such men, she jeered, come forward, wear the women’s skirts and aprons and give up their trousers to the women. Men sat rigidly in their seats and tried to laugh with the crowd to hide the inner discomfort. The next day all men stayed away from work.

Now the women decided to send Mumbi to Mugo. Mumbi the sister of Kihika. They would confront Mugo with sweet insistent youth – youth not to be ignored or denied.

So Wambui went home to pass on the message to Mumbi. And there she found Mumbi had left her husband. But Wambui sought her out.

‘This matter concerns all Thabai,’ she impressed upon the young woman. ‘Forget your troubles in the home and in the heart. Go to Mugo. Tell him this: the women and the children need him.’

Mumbi had found it difficult to tell her parents why she had left her husband. She had never told her own mother or father about the tension in which she lived: how did you go telling people that your husband had refused to sleep with you? Might they not think he was impotent and spread damaging rumours? Anyway, because they did not know the full story, her parents did not welcome her back with open arms. A parent did not encourage a daughter to disobey her man. Wanjiku had even ridiculed Mumbi’s feeble explanation.

‘The women of today surprise me. They cannot take a slap, soft as a feather, or the slightest breath, from a man. In our time, a woman could take blow and blow from her husband without a thought of running back to her parents.’

‘Don’t you care about me any more? I cannot stay in his house again. Not after what he said – I cannot, I cannot.’

‘Ssh! Don’t you talk like a foolish woman.’

‘No, mother, if you don’t want me in this hut, tell me at once, and I with my child will go to Nairobi or anywhere else. Yes, I’ll not go back to that house. I may be a woman, but even a cowardly bitch fights back when cornered against a wall.’

Wanjiku felt with Mumbi. But hers was a delicate task of mending that which was torn.

‘We shall talk about it, my child,’ she said in a softened voice.

Another thing plagued Mumbi. Even in her grief, she could not forget what General R. had said. Karanja would be killed for his part in Kihika’s death. Should this be done in the name of her brother? Surely enough blood had already been shed: why add more guilt to the land? She woke up in the morning with the problem still unsolved. But luckily for her, Wednesday was a market day in Rung’ei, attended by people from the eight ridges around Thabai. She accidentally met a man going to Githima and quickly made up her mind. She got a piece of paper (she had been taught by her brothers to read and write)
and scribbled: Don’t come to the meeting tomorrow. She addressed it to Karanja and gave it to the man. She felt relieved.