Green City in the Sun (80 page)

     "If you don't tell me, we'll find him anyway, and it won't go too well for him under questioning, I can guarantee that. He's broken the curfew law."

     "That's not David's fault. I'm responsible for that."

     "What do you mean?"

     Mona tried to think. If David was suspected of having a hand in the dead cat business, then he would be tortured under interrogation. But if she spoke up for him and proved he couldn't have done it because he was with her all night, then she would be confessing to what they had done.

     Before Mona could make a decision, Geoffrey said, "What the devil!" and she turned around to see David in the doorway.

     He was wearing only trousers and was holding a pistol. "I heard voices, Mona," he said. "I thought you were in trouble."

     Geoffrey was too shocked to speak.

     Mona went to David and put her hand on his arm. "We left the kitchen door open, David. Geoffrey came to tell me that a cat was hung on my gate during the night. He thought you had done it."

     She looked at Geoffrey. "But David couldn't have done it," she said, "because he was here with me all night."

     Several looks marched across Geoffrey's face before he was able to speak. "So," he said, walking up to Mona, "I had a suspicion about this. But I couldn't be sure. After all, I told myself that Mona certainly wouldn't sink so low."

     "You had better go, Geoffrey. This is none of your concern."

     "I'll say it isn't! I want nothing to do with this! My God, Mona!" he cried. "Sleeping with a nigger!"

     She slapped him hard across the face.

     "Get out," she said in a deadly tone. "Get out or I'll use this gun on you. And never come to my house again."

     He opened his mouth to say something. Then he gave David a venomous, threatening look, turned on his heel, and marched out.

     When they heard the kitchen door slam, Mona covered her face with her hands and went into David's embrace. "I'm so sorry!" she cried. "He's such a hateful person! It's all my fault, David!"

     "No," he said quietly, stroking her hair. He fixed his eyes on the cracks
of milky light coming through the drapes. It was dawn. "It is no one's fault, Mona. We are simply the victims of forces beyond our understanding." He stepped back and held her by the arms. "Mona, look at me and listen to what I have to say. This is not a world we can live in; our love would not survive. Someday they will have you looking at me and thinking,
nigger
, or I shall look at you and think,
white bitch.
And our beautiful love will be destroyed."

     He spoke passionately. "There must be a future in which we can live together and love each other freely and without fear. We must be able to live as husband and wife, Mona, not creeping about in the cover of night. I love you with all my heart, more than I have ever loved anyone, and yet while that man was insulting you, I was unable to defend you! I cannot be stripped of my manhood, Mona, for then I might as well be dead! I can see now that I have been wrong all this time, that the only way to make the future ours is to fight for it! I can no longer be the white man's 'boy'!"

     She looked up at him, mesmerized, terrified.

     "I am going to do now what I should have done long ago, Mona. And I do it for us. Just remember that I love you. It may be a long time before you see me again, but you will be with me in my heart. And if you are ever afraid or in danger, and you need to contact me, go to my mother. She will know what to do."

     "Where are you going, David?" she whispered.

     "I am going into the forest, Mona. I am going to join Mau Mau."

T
HIS WAS GOING TO BE THE BIGGEST
M
AU
M
AU STRIKE TO
date. And Field Marshal Wanjiru Mathenge was going to lead it. As she counted the last of the dynamite sticks which had been smuggled to her, she felt the heady rush of pulse in her brain, tasted the bite of fear and excitement. It was the same exhilaration she felt whenever she went into the forest, smuggling guns, leaving food and communications in hollow trees for the freedom fighters. She was giddy with anticipation of the big strike she was about to lead: the bombing of the Norfolk Hotel.

     There was to be a meeting there this afternoon. The governor and General Erskine had called a general council of white settlers in an effort to plan a new, major offensive against Mau Mau. One of Wanjiru's lieutenants, a beautiful young Meru woman named Sybill, had slept with one of the governor's aides. He had unsuspectingly told her about the secret meeting.

     Things were happening so quickly now! Mau Mau had stepped up its fight. The war was expanding to incredible proportions. Wanjiru knew it was because there was a new leader in the forest, a man who had appeared
suddenly one day in July. Wanjiru had never seen him—she took her orders from someone under him—and his true identity was known only to Mau Mau high command. To Wanjiru and the rest of the freedom fighters, and to the Europeans as well, he was known as Leopard. Whoever he was, wherever he had come from, Wanjiru admired him. Since his joining up with the forest armies, Mau Mau had launched a massive push against the whites. Leopard had brought to Mau Mau new tactics, new ways of fighting; he had a soldier's experience and cunning and seemed to know the internal workings of the British military. The successful strikes against the settlers in these past few months all were his doing, as was today's attack, which had been in the planning stages for weeks. Once pulled off, the bombing of Nairobi's most important hotel with Kenya's leaders inside was going to be a crippling blow to the whites.

     This was Wanjiru's first time in Nairobi since the incident at the Queen Victoria Hotel. After she had thrown the rock through the hotel's window, she had run into the forests and taken part in organizing new camps, making homemade guns out of pipes, supervising the women, and forming secret, underground communications networks. Field Marshal Wanjiru had risen in the Mau Mau ranks and was now considered the most powerful of the women freedom fighters. The British had launched a widespread hunt for her; there was a bounty of five thousand pounds on her head.

     She had arrived in Nairobi a week ago, traveling on foot from the Aberdares in disguise. Friends had made for her a Muslim
buibui
, a black veil that covered her entire body, leaving only a slit for the eyes. She had brought Christopher and Hannah with her from the secret forest camp, trudging in the hot sun, begging for food in villages, drinking from streams. As she neared the city and had been stopped at roadblocks, she had pretended to speak not English, Swahili, or Kikuyu but a Somali dialect which none of the soldiers knew. She had looked harmless enough—a refugee from the Northern Frontier District, traveling with two babies—so that the soldiers had passed her through. Once she was in the city, however, things were different. She had to have identity papers. It had been arranged for her to become the "wife" of a Mau Mau sympathizer, a Muslim who worked for the Uganda Railway and who therefore was away from his room most of the time. The
man had taken Wanjiru to the Labor Office on Lord Treverton Avenue, where she had been fingerprinted, photographed, and issued a passbook under the name of Fatma Hammad.

     Now, on this scorching October noon as the hour for the bombing drew near, Wanjiru padded Sybill's stomach with the last of the dynamite.

     She had been at it all morning. At sunrise Wanjiru had gone to the market near to Shauri Moyo, the tenement block where the Muslim sympathizer had a dingy room. At the market Wanjiru had met certain women, as had been arranged, and had passed to them, among ears of corn and in calabash gourds, sticks of dynamite with hurried, whispered instructions to meet at the Norfolk at one o'clock.

     Although the attack on the hotel had been Leopard's idea, the means had been Wanjiru's. Men were not free to move about Nairobi. Tommies and Home Guards stopped everyone, conducted searches, made arbitrary arrests. But women, Wanjiru had observed, were less likely to be harassed. Although many were stopped and questioned and taken away in trucks, most were left to go about their interminable shopping, washing, vegetable selling, and childbearing—the never-ending rut of the African woman.

     Baskets and gourds could be searched, Wanjiru knew, even the slings that held babies on women's backs. But pregnant bellies were seldom given close scrutiny by soldiers. That was why Wanjiru had instructed her women to pad themselves well and to keep the dynamite close to their bodies, and that was why she now made a last-minute adjustment to the wad of sheets over Sybill's abdomen.

     Each woman had been assigned a place. Three days ago Wanjiru had surveyed the hotel grounds, drawn a picture, and penciled in the positions of her saboteurs. While she and Sybill sweated in the ovenlike room of Shauri Moyo, they were gathering there now—eighteen women going unnoticed on the crowded sidewalks, one pausing to pull a splinter from her foot, another to nurse her baby, and so on, until they surrounded the grounds in an inconspicuous and seemingly unrelated circle. Wanjiru was going to be the last one to arrive. At one o'clock she was going to cry, "Mothers of Kenya!" upon which her sisters were to light their sticks and hurl them through the windows of the Norfolk.

     A plan of which Leopard had highly approved.

     When Sybill was done, she wrapped a bright yellow kanga around her shaved head, hoisted her heavy load of onions onto her back—she was going to spread them out on a cloth in front of the hotel, pretending to sell them— said to Wanjiru, "The soil is ours," and left.

     When she was alone, Wanjiru commenced with her own final preparations. As she created a pregnant belly from the remaining pillow, she paused to look at her two babies asleep on the iron bed. Hannah was getting to be a big girl, and Christopher, at eighteen months, was strong and handsome. He looked exactly like his father, David.

     With that thought Wanjiru's look darkened. She scorned the man she had divorced and chastised herself for ever having loved him. David Mathenge was a coward, she decided, a man who brought shame to the Children of Mumbi. She hoped he was miserable, working on the white bitch's estate.

     As she recalled Mona Treverton, Wanjiru's spirits lifted. Sybill's report on today's secret settler meeting had included a grain of wonderful information: that Dr. Grace Treverton and her niece, Mona, were going to be there.

     
What will you do then, David? Without your memsaab?

     She roused the children. "Come along, my babies. We are going for a walk."

     They were languid and moved slowly in the heat. Hannah put on her one dress, which was dirty and torn and too small for her growing body. Christopher wore only a pair of shorts. Both were hungry and barefoot. As she prepared to leave the tenement building, taking up her basket of arrowroots, which she was going to pretend to sell on the sidewalk in front of the Norfolk, Field Marshal Wanjiru Mathenge reaffirmed her resolve.
I do this for my babies, for their future, that they may never have to suffer the degradation their parents did.

     After the July rains the city had turned green. As Wanjiru walked in the sun, with Christopher on her hip, Hannah walking alongside, holding her hand, the arrowroots weighing down upon her back and the explosives tucked against her belly, she recalled how Nairobi had looked when she had come here sixteen years ago as a girl, to be the first nursing student at the Native Hospital. The city had seemed so much smaller and quieter then.
Lines had been clearly drawn; rules of race and society had been simple. The Africans stayed on their squalid estates; the whites had all the rest. In those days, it seemed now to Wanjiru, a kind of innocent peace had enveloped Nairobi; people hadn't paid much attention to the speeches of teenagers like herself and David. In those days the African "knew his place."

     When she passed the spot where the great, failed protest had occurred, on the day of the parade when the Treverton son had been killed and David had fled to Uganda, she saw how things had changed. There were bigger buildings, paved roads, more cars and people, and it made her feel almost nostalgic for the passing of the old days.

     
But they were bad days
, she reminded herself as she turned down the road toward the Norfolk.
They were wrong days; we fight now for better ones.

     She paused on a street corner and looked around. Nairobi had turned into a military camp. Not since the war had so many uniforms been seen on its treelined streets. British Tommies patrolled up and down, ignoring the sullen looks of Africans. And the Home Guards, Kikuyu like herself and just as villainous, in Wanjiru's mind, as the whites, swaggered with their police badges and baton sticks. She didn't know which she feared more.

     As she neared the Norfolk, Wanjiru spotted her sisters among the pedestrians. There was Ruth, idly filling her gourd from the street water tap; Damaris had taken off her sling and was readjusting it on her back; Sybill had spread out her cloth of onions; Muthoni sat on the curb, nursing her daughter; and there was old Mama Josephine, who had written a letter to Queen Elizabeth for Kenyatta's release, appealing to the queen's maternal instinct. They blended in with the crowd on the sidewalks, just a few random African women going about their mundane tasks. The soldiers, having examined their passbooks, had dismissed them as insignificant and unworthy of further concern. Wanjiru knew that also at their stations were the rest, women who appeared to have nothing on their minds but who were, in fact, sharply alert and waiting for a deadly signal.