A Grain of Wheat (38 page)

In the evening she went back and found no light in Mugo’s hut. She groped her way in the dark, and then, frightened, called out: ‘Mugo.’ There was no answer. ‘Where has he gone? Where has everybody gone?’ She looked about her, retreating to the door. She wanted a witness, any witness, to contradict the answers that stormed into her – like innumerable echoes shouting back her words and fears, in the dark. She opened the door, more frightened, and ran all the way, through the drizzle, across slithering paths, to her parents’ home.

Though not conscious of the fact, Mumbi had re-enacted the same movement as on the night she went away from Mugo. Only then there had been light in the hut and Mugo was able to see what he translated as scorn and horror on her face. He remained standing, staring long at the seat she had just left. Later he shut the door, put out the light and went to bed. He lay on the bed, aware that he had just lost something. Many times, the scorn on Mumbi’s face flashed through the dark, and a shuddering he could not control thrilled into him. Why was it important to him now, tonight, what Mumbi thought of him? She had been so near. He could see her face and feel her warm breath. She had sat there, and talked to him and given him a glimpse of a new earth. She had trusted him, and confided in him. This simple trust had forced him to tell her the truth. She had recoiled from him.
He had lost her trust, for ever. To her now, so he reasoned, saw and felt, he was vile and dirty.

And then suddenly he heard the village people around his hut singing Uhuru songs. Every word of praise carried for him a piercing irony. What had he done for the village? What had he done for anybody? Yet now he saw this undeserved trust in a new light, as the sweetest thing in the world. Mumbi will tell them, he thought. He saw the scorn and horror, not on Mumbi’s face alone, but on every person in the village. The picture, vivid in his mind, made him coil with dread.

That night, he hardly closed his eyes. The picture of Mumbi merged with that of the village and detention camps. He would look at Mumbi and she would immediately change into his aunt or the old woman.

He woke up early and strangely felt calm. He remained calm. He remained calm all the morning. The torturing images of the night before had gone. This surprised him; why could he feel calm when he knew what he was going to do?

Nevertheless, when the moment came, and he saw the big crowd, doubts destroyed his calm. He found General R. speaking, and this reminded him of Karanja. Why should I not let Karanja bear the blame? He dismissed the temptation and stood up. How else could he ever look Mumbi in the face? His heart pounded against him, he felt sweat in his hands, as he walked through the huge crowd. His hands shook, his legs were not firm on the ground. In his mind, everything was clear and final. He would stand there and publicly own the crime. He held on to this vision. Nothing, not even the shouting and the songs and the praises would deflect him from this purpose. It was the clarity of this vision which gave him courage as he stood before the microphone and the sudden silence. As soon as the first words were out, Mugo felt light. A load of many years was lifted from his shoulders. He was free, sure, confident.

Only for a minute.

No sooner had he finished speaking than the silence around, the lightness within, and the sudden freedom pressed heavy on him. His vision became blurred at the edges. Panic seized him, as he descended the platform, moved through the people, who were now silent. He
was conscious of himself, of every step he made, of the images that rushed and whirled through his mind with only one constant thread: so he was responsible for whatever he had done in the past, for whatever he would do in the future. The consciousness frightened him. Nothing would now, this minute, make him return to that place. Suppose all those people had risen and dug their nails and teeth into his body?

In his mind, this thought turned into fact. He did not enter his hut. He heard Githua’s laughter and felt himself pursued. He did not want to die, he wanted to live. Mumbi had made him aware of a loss which was also a possibility. He lingered outside his hut and peered around him, into the village, at Kabui Trading Centre and the road which went beyond. Would people rise and come for him? He saw the clouds gather in the sky. Maybe he ought to run away from the village before rain fell. He started walking towards the road. He went for a few yards and then thought he might meet with people coming from Rung’ei. He would go the other way, through the village, and join the other road to Nairobi. There, he would start a new life.

Strong in this resolution, he hurried along the main village street, which he had always taken on the way to the shamba. But already people from the meeting had started to stream into the village. The streets and the huts would soon be alive with people and he would not get away. He quickened his step. Now he faced the hut that belonged to the old woman. A thrill burnt him. He felt an uncontrollable desire to enter the hut, to see the old woman, this once, for the last time. But he decided to go on before the rain and the darkness fell.

The first few drops of rain, however, caught him before he had moved more than a few steps. He’d better take shelter from the rain, he thought. If the old woman was in, couldn’t she, in any case, hide him until the hour of dark when he could get away secretly? He retraced the steps, crossed the street, and suppressing a high voice that urged him to go away immediately, entered the hut. The old woman sat near the empty fireplace, her feet buried in the ashes. At his entrance, she raised her head slowly. Her eyes in the darkish hut had a strange glint.

‘You – you have come back!’ she said, her face contorted by a half-frozen smile into something not of this world.

‘Yes,’ he said, his body aflame with a desire to escape, which he again suppressed.

‘I knew you would come, I knew you would come to fetch me home,’ she seemed grotesque in her happiness. She attempted to rise and staggered back into her seat. Slowly she rose again.

‘All these years I’ve waited for you – I knew they had not really killed you – These people, do you know they didn’t believe me when I told them, when I tell them I have seen you?’

She walked towards him. But Mugo was not listening to her wild muttering. For suddenly her face had changed. Mugo looked straight into the eyes of his aunt. A new rage moved him. Life was only a constant repetition of what happened yesterday and the day before. Only this time she would not escape. He would stop that oblique smile, that contemptuous glint in the eyes. But before he could move, the woman staggered back into her seat. The smile still lingered on her face. She did not move or make the slightest stir. And suddenly he knew: the only person who had ever claimed him was dead. He buried his face in his hands and stood thus for a few seconds.

Later, he shut the door behind him and went into the drizzling rain. He did not continue with his earlier plans. Instead, he walked back to his hut. In the hut, he lit the oil-lamp and sat on the bed. He did not remove his wet clothes. He stared at the wall, opposite. There was nothing on the walls: no visions of blood, no galloping footsteps behind him, no detention camps, and Mumbi seemed a vague thing in a remote past. Occasionally he tapped the bed frame, almost irritably. Water dripped from his hair, down to his face and neck in broken lines; water dripped from his coat, again in broken lines, down his legs and on to the ground. A drop was caught in his right eyelashes and the light from the lamp was split into many tiny lashes. Then the drop entered his eye, melted inside, and ran down his face like a tear.

He did not rub the eye, or do anything.

There was a knock at the door. Mugo did not answer it.

The door opened and General R., followed by Lt Koina, came in.

‘I am ready,’ Mugo said, and stood up, without looking at his visitors.

‘The trial will be held tonight,’ General R. pronounced, gravely. ‘Wambui will be the judge. Koina and I will be the only elders present at the hearing.’

Mugo said nothing.

‘Your deeds alone will condemn you,’ General R. continued without anger or apparent bitterness. ‘You— No one will ever escape from his own actions.’

General R. and Lt Koina led him out of the hut.

Warui gazed out, avoiding the dull vacancy in Wambui’s eyes.

‘It has been going on for two days, this drizzle,’ he commented, prompted to say something by the unease he felt in Wambui’s hut. He sat, huddled near the door, with hands and feet buried under the blanket; his neck, ringed with wrinkles, and his grey head, were the only uncovered parts of his body. Wambui crouched, opposite him, her vacant eyes now and then resting on Warui before straying to the mist, and the rain, outside.

‘Such drizzling can go on for many days,’ she said with a dull voice. They both relapsed into silence, making a picture of bereaved children for whom life has suddenly lost warmth, colour, and excitement. There was no fire in the hearth. Bits of potato peelings, maize-husks and grass lay strewn on the floor as if the hut had not been lived in for a day or two. Under different circumstances, this would have surprised Warui or any visitor, because Wambui’s hut was one of the tidiest in the village. She swept the floor at least twice a day and cleaned utensils immediately after use. In the hut every utensil, every piece of equipment had its own place in various racks built against the walls. As for the mud walls, they were smeared with white ochre she bought from Weru, and she often checked to see that every crack was immediately filled and worn-out areas restored. ‘A man has nowhere else but where he lays his head,’ was the cryptic rejoinder to the many compliments on her tidiness. Warui had not seen her since the day of the big sacrifice. For the last two days people in Thabai had more or less kept to themselves, avoiding, by general consent, public discussions on the events of Uhuru day. There were things that puzzled Warui, questions for which, in vain, he sought answers in the heart. Failing,
he had come to see Wambui. Yet they now conversed, as if they did not know what the other was talking about, as if they were both ashamed of certain subjects in one another’s presence.

‘Perhaps it is this cold that killed her,’ he tried again.

‘Who?’

‘The old woman.’

‘Ye-es!’ she said, irrelevantly, and sighed. ‘We all forgot her on that day. We should not have left her alone. She was old. Loneliness killed her.’

‘Why on that day, I keep on asking myself. She used to live alone, or is that not so?’

‘Then, life was around her. The smoke and the noise of children. On that day, all of us went to the meeting. All of us. There was no smoke anywhere, and there were no cries or laughter of children in the streets. The village was empty.’ She spoke as if building up a case in an argument.

‘But why on that day?’ Warui persisted in his doubt. He, too, seemed engaged in an argument, in the heart.

‘She was lonely, can’t you hear? Her son came for her. Gitogo fetched her home on that day,’ she finished with impatient irritation.

‘Yes. Things started changing in our village the day she started seeing visions of the dead.’

Wambui looked at him. This time she did not say anthing.

‘And that day,’ Warui went on, ‘that day! First Gikonyo breaks his arm.’ He stopped unexpectedly and turned to Wambui. She was looking at the showers outside, indifferent to his words, to the questions in his heart. Looking in the same direction, he saw Mumbi suddenly emerge from the mist, a few yards from the door. Mumbi came into the hut, her feet wet, bespattered with mud. Water dripped down the sack with which she covered her head and back. She removed the sack, and shook it a little, before hanging it on a rack. Wambui gave her a seat near the door.

‘It’s cold,’ Mumbi said, holding herself together, making a hissing sound as she sucked in air through her closed teeth. ‘I am not in luck today. My mother is just making a fire at home, so I run away to this place because you always have a ready fire. See what I find.’

‘Did you go to the hospital today?’ Wambui inquired.

‘Yes, I was there with my mother-in-law. I go there every day.’

‘How is the arm?’

‘It is not badly broken, only cracked. He will be out soon.’

‘Something went wrong …’ Warui started again, slowly following his own thoughts. ‘Everybody gone. And a minute before, the field was covered with so many people, like in the days of Harry, you know, at the procession. Then in the twitching of an eyelid, all gone. The field was so empty. Only four (or were we five?) left. We slaughtered the rams – and prayed for our village. But it was like warm water in the mouth of a thirsty man. It was not what I had waited for, these many years.’

‘You say that, and it was the same with me, with everybody. I’d never once suspected that he … that Mugo had done it.’ With effort Wambui had mentioned the one name she and Warui had been avoiding. Mumbi did not say anything for a while.

‘He has not been found,’ Mumbi at last said in a changed voice.

‘Nobody has seen him since that day,’ Warui answered, as if Mumbi had asked a question.

‘Maybe he has bolted himself inside the hut,’ Wambui said.

‘I went there last night. The door was not locked, or bolted from the inside. I found nobody in.’

‘Perhaps he has left the village,’ Warui observed.

‘Or maybe he was in the latrine when you went in.’

‘But I went back to the hut this morning before I went to the hospital.’

A small breeze blew rain-showers into their faces. Wambui rubbed the water from her face with the back of her hand. Warui bent his head and rubbed his face against the blanket. Mumbi tilted backwards as if to move back her seat, and did nothing. They all retained their places near the door.

‘Perhaps I could have saved him. Perhaps I could if I had gone into the hut that night,’ Mumbi lamented.

‘Who are you talking about?’ Wambui asked quickly, and turned her eyes away from Mumbi.

‘Mugo.’

‘There was nothing to save,’ Wambui said slowly. ‘Hear me? Nobody could have saved him … because … there was nothing to save.’