West with the Night (15 page)

I bend down and lay my head against the smooth, warm belly of the mare. “The new life is there. I hear and feel it, struggling already — demanding the right to freedom and growth. I hope it is perfect; I hope it is strong. It will not, at first, be beautiful.

I turn from Coquette to Otieno. ‘Watch carefully. It is near.’

The tall, thin Kavirondo looks into the face of the fat one. Toombo’s face is receptive — it cannot be looked at, it can only be looked into. It is a jovial and capacious bowl, often empty, but not now. Now it is filled to the brim with expectation. ‘This is a good night,’ he says, ‘this is a good night.’ Well, perhaps he is optimistic, but it proves a busy night.

I return to my hut — my new, proud hut which my father has built for me out of cedar, with real shingles instead of thatch. In it I have my first glass window, my first wood floor — and my first mirror. I have always known what I looked like — but at fifteen-odd, I become curious to know what can be done about it. Nothing, I suppose — and who would there be to know the difference? Still, at that age, few things can provoke more wonderment than a mirror.

At eight-thirty Otieno knocks.

‘Come quickly. She is lying.’

Knives, twine, disinfectant — even anæsthetic — are all ready in my foaling-kit, but the last is precaution. As an Abyssinian, Coquette should have few of the difficulties that so often attend a Thoroughbred mare. Still, this is Coquette’s first. First things are not always easy. I snatch the kit and hurry through the cluster of huts, some dark and asleep, some wakeful with square, yellow eyes. Otieno at my heels, I reach the stable.

Coquette is down. She is flat on her side, breathing in spasmodic jerks. Horses are not voiceless in pain. A mare in the throes of birth is almost helpless, but she is able to cry out her agony. Coquette’s groans, deep, tired, and a little frightened, are not really violent. They are not hysterical, but they are infinitely expressive of suffering, because they are unanswerable.

I kneel in the grass bedding and feel her soft ears. They are limp and moist in the palm of my hand, but there is no temperature. She labours heavily, looking at nothing out of staring eyes. Or perhaps she is seeing her own pain dance before them.

The time is not yet. We cannot help, but we can watch. We three can sit cross-legged — Toombo near the manger, Otieno against the cedar planking, myself near the heavy head of Coquette — and we can talk, almost tranquilly, about other things while the little brush of flame in the hurricane lamp paints experimental pictures on the wall.

‘Wa-li-hie!’ says Toombo.

It is as solemn as he ever gets. At the dawning of doomsday he will say no more. A single ‘Walihie!’ and he has shot his philosophic bolt. Having shot it, he relaxes and grins, genially, into himself.

The labouring of Coquette ebbs and flows in methodical tides of torment. There are minutes of peace and minutes of anguish, which we all feel together, but smother, for ourselves, with words.

Otieno sighs. ‘The Book talks of many strange lands,’ he says. ‘There is one that is filled with milk and with honey. Do you think this land would be good for a man, Beru?’

Toombo lifts his shoulders. ‘For which man?’ he says. ‘Milk is not bad food for one man, meat is better for another,
ooji
is good for all. Myself, I do not like honey.’

Otieno’s scowl is mildly withering. ‘Whatever you like, you like too much, Toombo. Look at the roundness of your belly. Look at the heaviness of your legs!’

Toombo looks. ‘God makes fat birds and small birds, trees that are wide and trees that are thin, like wattle. He makes big kernels and little kernels. I am a big kernel. One does not argue with God.’

The theosophism defeats Otieno; he ignores the globular Jesuit slouching unperturbed under the manger, and turns again to me.

‘Perhaps you have seen this land, Beru?’

‘No.’ I shake my head.

But then I am not sure. My father has told me that I was four when I left England. Leicestershire. Conceivably it could be the land of milk and honey, but I do not remember it as such. I remember a ship that sailed interminably up the hill of the sea and never, never reached the top. I remember a place I was later taught to think of as Mombasa, but the name has not explained the memory. It is a simple memory made only of colours and shapes, of heat and trudging people and broad-leaved trees that looked cooler than they were. All the country I know is this country — these hills, familiar as an old wish, this veldt, this forest. Otieno knows as much.

‘I have never seen such a land, Otieno. Like you, I have read about it. I do not know where it is or what it means.’

‘That is a sad thing,’ says Otieno; ‘it sounds like a good land.’

Toombo rouses himself from the stable floor and shrugs. ‘Who would walk far for a kibuyu of milk and a hive of honey? Bees live in every tenth tree, and every cow has four teats. Let us talk of better things!’

But Coquette talks first of better things. She groans suddenly from the depth of her womb, and trembles. Otieno reaches at once for the hurricane lamp and swells the flame with a twist of his black fingers. Toombo opens the foaling-kit.

‘Now.’ Coquette says it with her eyes and with her wordless voice. ‘Now — perhaps now —

This is the moment, and the Promised Land is the forgotten one.

I kneel over the mare waiting for her foal to make its exit from oblivion. I wait for the first glimpse of the tiny hooves, the first sight of the sheath — the cloak it will wear for its great début.

It appears, and Coquette and I work together. Otieno at one of my shoulders, Toombo at the other. No one speaks because there is nothing to say.

But there are things to wonder.

Will this be a colt or a filly? Will it be sound and well-formed? Will its new heart be strong and stubborn enough to snap the tethers of nothingness that break so grudgingly? Will it breathe when it is meant to breathe? Will it have the anger to feed and to grow and to demand its needs?

I have my hands at last on the tiny legs, on the bag encasing them. It is a strong bag, transparent and sleek. Through it I see the diminutive hooves, pointed, soft as the flesh of sprouted seeds — impotent hooves, insolent in their urgency to tread the tough earth.

Gently, gently, but strong and steady, I coax the new life into the glow of the stable lamp, and the mare strains with all she has. I renew my grip, hand over hand, waiting for her muscles to surge with my pull. The nose — the head, the whole head — at last the foal itself, slips into my arms, and the silence that follows is sharp as the crack of a Dutchman’s whip — and as short.

‘Walihie!’ says Toombo.

Otieno smears sweat from under his eyes; Coquette sighs the last pain out of her.

I let the shining bag rest on the pad of trampled grass less than an instant, then break it, giving full freedom to the wobbly little head.

I watch the soft, mouse-coloured nostrils suck at their first taste of air. With care, I slip the whole bag away, tie the cord and cut it with the knife Otieno hands me. The old life of the mare and the new life of the foal for the last time run together in a quick christening of blood, and as I bathe the wound with disinfectant, I see that he is a colt.

He is a strong colt, hot in my hands and full of the tremor of living.

Coquette stirs. She knows now what birth is; she can cope with what she knows. She lurches to her feet without gracefulness or balance, and whinnies once — so this is mine! So this is what I have borne! Together we dry the babe.

When it is done, I stand up and turn to smile at Otieno. But it is not Otieno; it is not Toombo. My father stands beside me with the air of a man who has observed more than anyone suspected. This is a scene he has witnessed more times than he can remember; yet there is bright interest in his eyes — as if, after all these years, he has at last seen the birth of a foal!

He is not a short man nor a tall one; he is lean and tough as a riem. His eyes are dark and kind in a rugged face that can be gentle.

‘So there you are,’ he says — ‘a fine job of work and a fine colt. Shall I reward you or Coquette — or both?’

Toombo grins and Otieno respectfully scuffs the floor with his toes. I slip my arm through my father’s and together we look down on the awkward, angry little bundle, fighting already to gain his feet.

‘Render unto Cæsar,’ says my father; ‘you brought him to life. He shall be yours.’

A bank clerk handles pounds of gold — none of it his own — but if, one day, that fabulous faery everyone expects, but nobody ever meets, were to give him all this gold for himself — or even a part of it — he would be no less overjoyed because he had looked at it daily for years. He would know at once (if he hadn’t known it before) that this was what he had always wanted.

For years I had handled my father’s horses, fed them, ridden them, groomed them, and loved them. But I had never owned one.

Now I owned one. Without even the benefit of the good faery, but only because my father said so, I owned one for myself. The colt was to be mine, and no one could ever touch him, or ride him, or feed him, or nurse him — no one except myself.

I do not remember thanking my father; I suppose I did, for whatever words are worth. I remember that when the foaling-box was cleaned, the light turned down again, and Otieno left to watch over the newly born, I went out and walked with Buller beyond the stables and a little way down the path that used to lead to Arab Maina’s.

I thought about the new colt, Otieno’s Promised Land, how big the world must be, and then about the colt again. What shall I name him?

Who doesn’t look upward when searching for a name? Looking upward, what is there but the sky to see? And seeing it, how can the name or the hope be earthbound? Was there a horse named Pegasus that flew? Was there a horse with wings?

Yes, once there was — once, long ago, there was. And now there is again.

S
OMEBODY WITH A FLAIR
for small cynicism once said, ‘We live and do not learn.’ But I have learned some things.

I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesterdays are buried deep — leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late.

I left the farm at Njoro almost the slowest way, and I never saw it again.

I would have turned back — Pegasus who carried me would have turned back, because even he had woven three years of memory to hold him there. But our world was gone like a scrap in the wind, and there wasn’t any turning.

It all happened because those amiable gods who most times walked together, or at least agreed on larger things, fell out and neglected to send any rain.

What does a fall of rain, a single fall of rain, mean in anybody’s life? What does it matter if this month there is none, if the sky is as clear as the song of a boy, and the sun shines and people walk in it and the world is yellow with it? What does a week matter, and who is so dour as to welcome a storm?

Look at a seed in the palm of a farmer’s hand. It can be blown away with a puff of breath and that is the end of it. But it holds three lives — its own, that of the man who may feed on its increase, and that of the man who lives by its culture. If the seed die, these men will not, but they may not live as they always had. They may be affected because the seed is dead; they may change, they may put their faith in other things.

All the seeds died one year at Njoro and on all the farms around Njoro, on the low fields, on the slopes of the hills, on the square plots carved out of the forests, on the great farms and on the farms built with no more than a plough and a hope. The seeds died because they were not nourished, they were starved for rain.

The sky was as clear as a window one morning. It was so the next morning, and the next, and on every morning that followed until it was hard to remember how rain felt, or how a field looked, green, and moist with life so that a naked foot sank into it. All the things that grew paused in their growing, leaves curled, and each creature turned his back on the sun.

Perhaps somewhere — in London, in Bombay, in Boston — a newspaper carried a single line (on a lesser page); ‘Drought Threatens British East Africa.’ Perhaps someone read it and looked upward, hoping his own skies, that day, were as clear as ours, or considered that drought on the farthest rim of Africa was hardly news.

It may not have been. It is hardly news when a man you have never seen and never will loses a year’s labour, or ten years’ labour, or even a life’s labour in a patch of ground too far away to imagine.

But when I left Njoro, it was all too close to be easily forgotten. The rain feeds the seed, and the seed the mill. When the rain stops, the mill wheels stop — or, if they continue to turn, they grind despair for the man who owns them.

My father owned them. In the time that preceded the drought he had signed contracts with the Government and with individuals, committing himself to the delivery of hundreds of tons of flour and meal — at a fixed price and at a fixed date. If the essence of successful business is not to receive three times what you give, then it is at least not to receive less than you give. I learned the tyranny of figures before I knew the value of a pound. I learned why my father sat so long and so late and so fruitlessly over the scribbled pages, the open inkpot, and the sniggering lampwicks; you could not buy maize at twenty rupees a bag, grind it to meal, then sell the meal at ten rupees. Or at least you could (if you honoured your own word), but you saw your substance run out of the hoppers with every cupful of the stuff you milled.

For many months the same long chain of loaded wagons dragged over the road from Kampi ya Moto to the farm at Njoro. They were filled with the same grain they had brought for years, but it was not new grain. It was not fresh grain prodigally harvested, gleaned from the fields with shouts and sweat. It was hoarded grain or grain combed from niggard patches; it brought the highest price the oldest settlers with the oldest stories could remember.