Wizard of the Crow (12 page)

Santalucia was a sprawling village of tiny houses of every shape and material. Tiled roofs with walls of well-cut stone shared narrow streets with tin roofs and walls of red clay and cardboard. The sewage pipes were always clogged and there was a permanent stench in the air that was particularly nauseating on a hot day. But when the moon shone, as it did tonight, the village looked peaceful and quite attractive.

The beggar in the lead seemed to know his way around the narrow streets. The other followed closely. As for the police officers, they hoped that sooner or later the beggars would tire, enter a house, or come to a cul-de-sac. But the beggars did not oblige; they ran right
through the village to the outskirts of Santalucia, the vast prairie surrounding all of Eldares.

One of the police officers was so deflated by this turn of events that he started reasoning with his crony to give up the chase. It was stupid to continue; what if they were being led to an armed den of thieves? Why risk their lives for money? But his fellow officer would have none of it, so he, too, decided to go back.

The remaining police officer seemed possessed because by now he had forgotten why he was running even as he increased his pace in a pointless pursuit of shadows of rags in the prairie.

They came to a bush and, though it was darker inside, the leading beggar, followed by the second, dashed in. The police officer did not hesitate and ran after them, only to fall down, trapped by something hard, like a stone. Soon he was up and running again through the bush, now guided only by the sound of the beggar’s footsteps. Emerging from the bush he saw the outskirts of Santalucia. Were they running him in circles? Between the bush and the outskirts was an open space. The police officer could see only one beggar crossing it and reentering Santalucia. Where has the other one gone? he wondered, as the beggar he had in sight disappeared behind some houses.

The police officer ran to the corner of the street. He looked to his right and left and back, but he could not see a shadow or hear any sound. He had no way of telling where the beggar had gone. The streets of Santalucia are narrow and badly lit, and although there was moonlight, to the police officer, a stranger, the streets and the houses all looked alike. Not knowing whether he was looking for one or two beggars, the police officer wondered what to do, and for the first time since the chase began he was indecisive, but only for a moment, because a more insistent inner voice was urging him not to quit. He continued with the hunt. He would force whichever beggar he caught first to lead him to wherever the other was hiding.

By now the two beggars were ensconced in a house, crouched near a window, straining to hear the slightest sound outside. They heard the police officer’s footsteps clearly but could not see him and were uncertain as to where he was.

One beggar peered through another window, and, yes, he could now see the police officer and what he was doing: his gun drawn, the policeman was going from door to door, interrogating residents. The
officer stopped in front of a house where what looked like a bundle was hanging. He hesitated and moved on, and an idea came to this beggar.

“Have you got a piece of paper?” he whispered to his fellow beggar. These were the first words they had exchanged since their flight from Paradise. The beggar addressed said nothing but looked through his bag and took out a piece of paper. “No, not so small, bigger. And see if there are any bones, dry cobs of corn, rags, and a piece of string in there.”

If he was surprised by the request he did not show it; he simply groped in the dark and came back and produced a cardboard, a bone, some rags, and a string, silently handing them over and continuing his watch at the window.

The other beggar tied the bones and the rags together. He then took a felt pen from his bag and wrote on the cardboard in big letters:
WARNING! THIS PROPERTY BELONGS TO A WIZARD WHOSE POWER BRINGS DOWN HAWKS AND CROWS FROM THE SKY. TOUCH THIS HOUSE
AT YOUR
PERIL.
SGD.
WIZARD
OF THE CROW. With great care not to make any noise, he slowly opened the door and saw something even better, a dead lizard and a frog. He added them to the bundle of bone and rags and hung the omen just above the door before quickly retreating to join the other beggar at the window.

Crouched together, the two beggars could just about make out the area around the doorway. Soon they saw the police officer walk near, anxiously wondering what he would do. Would he break the door down? But when the officer saw the bundle of rags and bones, he took a step back. He gathered courage and approached the bundle. He was about to touch it when he saw the leg of a frog and the tail of a lizard, and he was petrified. On reading what was written on the cardboard, he found his voice and let out an anguished cry: Oh, the Wizard of the Crow! He took to his heels, muttering to himself all the while: I knew they were not thieves; they were devils, djinns of the prairie, sent by the Wizard of the Crow to trick me to death. Woe unto me! I am now bewitched. Woe unto me! I am going to die! Actually, I am a dead man walking!

The two beggars were now beside themselves with laughter. One voice sounded male and the other female, but neither beggar registered the difference. The one who seemed to know his way about the
house now put on the lights. The laughter stopped. The two stared at each other, not daring to trust the evidence of their eyes. When finally they spoke, their simultaneous questions collided in the air.

“Nyawlra?”

“Kamltl?”

At Brilliant Girls High School, Nyawlra went through a period when she really struggled with her names. There was a time when she called herself Engenethi Nyawlra Charles Matthew Mügwanja Wangahü, often writing it as E.N.C.M.M. Wangahü. She was not very keen on Engenethi and became Grace Mügwanja. Grace Mügwanja stuck, mostly in the village community, and she held on to it for a while. Her father liked Grace more than Engenethi, and Roithi, her mother, liked Engenethi more than Grace, and both hated Mügwanja with equal intensity, and so to her parents she would always be either Engenethi or Grace. She herself continued struggling with these markers of identity, and after going to college she eventually settled for Nyawlra wa Wangahü, though there were some who could not bring themselves to call her anything but Grace Mügwanja.

For his part, her father liked initialing his two African names, Mügwanja and Wangahü, to form Matthew M. W. Charles, and sometimes, leaving them out altogether, he was Matthew Charles or simply Mr. Charles. He was angry with those who called him Carüthi, the African-language version of Charles, even if prefixed with a title. He would not of course have raised any objections if they had called him Sir Charles, but in their ignorance the village folk insisted on calling him Bwana Carüthi.

Wangahü’s wealth came from timber, coffee, and tea. He had three children, two boys and the girl Nyawlra. The boys did not do particularly well in Aburlrian schools, and Wangahü sent them off to America, where they enrolled in colleges to study accounting and computer science, or so they claimed. They wandered from college to
college without graduating, but every year Wangahü sent them money for tuition and room and board. Although as a parent he was concerned about their lack of progress, as a man of means he had something that would boost his already considerable standing among his peers: to pay full tuition and room and board for two in America was no easy task, and he was showing that he was indeed a man of some financial clout. He did not send Nyawlra to America, for he did not want his daughter to marry white, though he had no such reservations for the boys. Even so, he wanted her to have a lifestyle commensurate with his class. The rich bought their sons and daughters cars jokingly referred to as toys, Japanese in contrast to all German makes, which were of course for grown men and women. Nyawlra’s was a brand-new Toyota Corolla, and early on she bought into the lifestyle. Parties, keeping up with the latest fashion, speeding on the highways, these were the chief joys of her life, and she had not stopped to look under the surface of things. In those days, the likes of Yunity Mgeuzi-Bila-Shaka and Luminous Karamu-Mbu-ya-Itulka were often in the news, being denounced by the Ruler for preaching revolution. She hated the very mention of these rebels: Why were they so critical of the government? And why were they in exile?

Then there was this accident. She was driving on a highway, fascinated with speed, pushing her car to its limit when it skidded and crashed on the roadside. Though she suffered minor injuries, she knew that she had narrowly escaped. What surprised her then and later when she recalled her near fatality was the number of cars that simply passed her by; no one had stopped to see if anyone was hurt or needed help. The people who hurried to her rescue were the barefooted, mostly. One unloaded his donkey cart to rush her to the nearest medical center many miles away, the donkey announcing their arrival at the emergency room by braying loudly and shitting.

During the period of recovery she learned how to play guitar. At first it was hard pressing the strings and putting the chords together, but when she started strumming and producing music, it was strangely soothing. The music contributed to her healing. It was then that she started thinking seriously about her life. If she had died, what would she have left behind as her legacy to the living? There had to be more to life than fast cars, parties, and beauty parlors. She was in her first year at Eldares University, and from then on she
started taking an interest in social issues. She became active in theater and student politics and acquainted herself with the activities in exile of Yunity Mgeuzi-Bila-Shaka and Luminous Karamu-Mbu-ya-Itulka, who inspired her teenage imagination. She also loved the stage, and nothing made her happier than playing this or that tragic or comic role, eliciting tears or laughter from an audience. She was a brilliant actress. She could change herself into any character, sometimes so realistically that even those who thought they knew her well because of seeing her on the platforms in many student political events were often unable to say whether it was really Nyawlra on the stage. As for history, it excited her curiosity the way a crime scene focuses a detective. History, particularly African history, was the scene of many crimes with many conflicting witnesses. Historians were detectives of time, and she loved the challenge of putting the different pieces of the puzzle together to make out the hidden shapes of things past. So, the pursuit of beau monde had given way to a search for a model society. This change in how she looked at the world is what caused a rupture in her relationship with her father.

Matthew Charles Wangahü wanted his daughter to marry into a wealthy family so that wealth would produce more wealth, power, and social standing. Before the accident, she had seen this as natural and inevitable. But now Nyawlra wanted to marry somebody with whom she could build a new tomorrow. At college, she met a young man of her new dreams of self-reliance.

Kaniürü was an artist very much involved in his art. Even if he was indifferent to student politics, he did not seem to mind her involvement. He was not one of those who forbid their girlfriends or wives to get involved in public issues or those who believed that politics and civic matters were a man’s domain. What convinced her that she had found her life’s mate was that Kaniürü did not come from a wealthy family. He told her that he was an orphan; his parents had died when he was a child, and he was brought up by a grandmother who died when he was at college. She felt for him and fell in love with her image of a self-made man.

What Grace Nyawlra did not know was that Kaniürü did not share her notion of a pure and blissful union. When his eyes rested on her, they saw beyond her looks to the even more alluring looks of Wan-gahü’s wealth and property. Through Nyawlra, he would rise from the
depths of poverty and misery to the heaven of leisure and well-being. He kept on dreaming and looking forward to the day when he and Nyawlra would walk down the aisle; Nyawlra in white satin and he dressed to kill in a dark suit with a boutonniere. There would be ten bridesmaids and ten best men, a huge wedding ceremony with a hundred Mercedes-Benzes, bumper to bumper, shuttling dignitaries to the reception. Holding hands, he and Nyawlra would be the center of everybody’s attention, gladly having to endure speech after speech from all those dignitaries, this endless prelude to that moment when he and Nyawlra would slice through a ten-layer wedding cake. Whenever Nyawlra saw the glint in his eyes, she assumed it reflected the light of desire and love, and she felt humbled by the intensity of his devotion. Nyawlra’s dreams were for a simple wedding ceremony, not a display of affluence. She wanted a celebration of life, not a performance of its denial.

As for Wangahü, her father, he would have been surprised to know how close his own vision was to Kaniürü’s. But Wangahü s contempt for anybody who had not made it was so deep that even this shared vision would have struck him as presumptuousness of the poor. The thought that his own daughter would marry a man who did not even have a family was too painful to contemplate. What kind of a man is an artist? To Wangahü, drawing pictures was the work of cripples, children, and feeble women or men afraid to use their muscles; he would never see his own blood connected to such misery.

So Nyawlra and Kaniürü put wedding rings on each other’s fingers without the blessings of a grateful father, and not before a multitude but at the district commissioner’s, their witnesses being a man and a woman whom they had met only a few minutes before the civil ceremony. The split between father and daughter was now complete. Wangahü kept on insisting, She has disrobed me in public, why? She has left me naked before my entire church community, why? She has turned me into a laughing stock, why? Why elope with a man so poor that he does not even have a family? How will he support her, by hawking wood carvings of giraffes and rhinos to tourists?

The estrangement between father and daughter caused tension between the newlyweds. Kaniürü felt that the lifeline that was supposed to pull him out of his sea of troubles had been severed and Nyawlra was now the only person who had the power and the means
to put things to right. No sooner had the two returned from their honeymoon than Kaniürü started urging Nyawlra to fall on her knees and beg her father’s forgiveness. Nyawlra, for her part, needed to break with her past; she yearned to make it on their own and earn respect through hard work, the simple dignity of their home, and a happy family life. Every day the newlyweds clashed. Kaniürü continued nagging her, even after he got a job at the Ruler’s Polytechnic at Eldares. He would often accuse her of ruining their lives by refusing to reconcile with her father, until one day Nyawlra exploded: Was it me you wanted to marry, or my father’s money r