A Fool's Knot (30 page)

 

 

 

July 1976

 

What absolute absurdity! Janet felt like she ought to laugh as Barnabas Maluki wheeled his bicycle out of the school compound and into the road, but it was sadder than that. She watched him set off up the hill away from the town and then turn right at the top and follow the footpath, which bore north-west towards Thitani. She knew the path to be narrow and rough, passing first through the area known as Kaliluni alongside the farm belonging to the Musee family. Here his head was still visible from where Janet stood at the front of the school, just next to the flagpole by the headmaster's office. The pole's affixed rope flapped in the strong wind, rattling against the hollow metal shaft. Then, as Barnabas rode down the first of the many deep gullies the path crossed, he disappeared from her view. Only then did she look down at the sealed envelope in her hand and smile, shaking her head at the irony.

Barnabas was a primary school teacher, and a good one. He had lived in Thitani all his life. His father, a man locally renowned for his brewing skill, kept a bar there and recently had invested the profit it generated over the years in a general shop. Thitani market possessed only eight shops and now two of them belonged to his father. Whatever he chose to do, he knew he could always return to the family business and receive a good income. Barnabas, however, had become a devout Christian during his stay at the government boarding school in Kitui and had embraced the wisdom of Jesus Christ, as he himself described it. Amid constant self-retribution, he was forever conscious of his position in the community and realised that, if a teacher were to be respected by his pupils, he must be above reproach, a model of discipline and morality. Thus in school he was a hard-working and conscientious teacher. Education, for him, was not merely the accumulation of knowledge, it was the key that would unlock people's lives and free them from the misguided beliefs of traditional society. Since he first entered secondary school as a bright fourteen-year-old, small for his age, with thirty points in the primary school exam – a performance of which he would be eternally proud – his life had been guided by the Bible. Interpreted literally by the preachers of the Africa Inland Church, its advice had provided him with a strict code, a definitive list of rules which, when obeyed, would surely lead to the only true reward.

The way he had chosen, however, had not been easy. The preachers had never said it would be, of course, but always they advised that no one should doubt the word of God as written. Over the years, Barnabas had grown to his maturity, had obtained good results in his exams and had been overjoyed to fulfil his ambition to train to be a teacher. Privately he hoped that on graduation he would be posted to a school in a large town, Nairobi, or Nakuru, for instance, and had been utterly dejected at first to find that his employment would be in his home area. However, he must accept what God provides. It is right.

In the five years since his graduation, he had worked as conscientiously as he could imagine. Besides teaching throughout the day, he had devoted much of his spare time to the local church and hoped that one day he would become a preacher himself. Thitani, however, was still too ‘bush' for his taste and people there were not enlightened. Indeed, many were still primitives, because they did not even go to church. His own father, for instance, spent much of his time brewing beer or serving in his shop, which also sold cigarettes. He had told his father many times, and in no uncertain terms, that he would do nothing to help the family business while it practised such sins. So, to keep his options open and to upgrade his teacher's salary, he had studied furiously every evening for three years to obtain his O-levels. His recent success in his latest exam, sat as a private candidate in Kitui, had convinced him that he ought to pursue a better position than Thitani School could offer. It was obvious to him that there was no work in this area for someone with such qualifications. In some years' time, he granted, when people here would be more educated, then there might be jobs to attract people like him, but at the moment there surely was nothing. From the American missionaries at Kyome he had heard that there was good employment in Nairobi in the Bible schools, which their church had founded. People like himself went there from all over the country to study God's word and, for someone such as him, there might be a chance of obtaining a position as a teacher.

Two months ago, with eagerness overflowing, he had taken the bus to Nairobi and had visited the man whose address he had been given in Kyome. He talked to the man and explained his desire to teach in the Bible school. The job would be well paid, nearly a thousand shillings a month, almost as much as a qualified secondary school teacher could earn. Though Barnabas had been told clearly that only people with advanced level qualifications would be considered, he returned to Migwani proud and expectant. The man told him to wait until they had considered his application, a statement that Maluki interpreted as acceptance. According to Barnabas the letter would soon arrive telling him that he should come to Nairobi and begin work. He was still waiting.

It was in a magazine that he saw the advertisement. To pass the time on the return journey from Nairobi, he bought one of the expensive glossies that purchasers would read several times cover to cover before trying to sell it on. Rejecting the Kenyan magazines because he knew them to contain many bad things, he chose an English – and therefore in his eyes respectable – magazine called
New Scientist
. He was attracted by its title and a picture of a white-coated teacher addressing students on its cover. He enjoyed reading it, though it did take him some time. He read all the words and even convinced himself that he understood them. Some of the things he read reminded him of things he learned in his secondary school science lessons. Others he recognised from the words he learned recently to support his studies for his General Science exam and, during the journey home, he took great pleasure in pointing out each key phrase with enthusiasm to the unfortunate sitting next to him and explaining its meaning. He was silenced by a box of words in a narrow column inside the back cover. The words told of courses in computer programming being offered by a college in London. They invited all people to write for details.

With imagination duly fired, Barnabas wrote to the address for details and then waited expectantly for the reply, already trying to imagine what life in London would be like. He knew that another Migwani man, Mwangangi Musyoka from Kamandiu, had gone to study in England, and he had returned to become a District Officer and then a rich man in the city. He resolved to go to see him and ask his advice when the time was right.

Faithfully the agency replied and Barnabas collected the letter just two weeks later. His friend had told him that the letter was there. He had seen it in the cardboard box, which served as the mailbox for all letters addressed to residents of Migwani. Users would sift through the contents of the small box on the shop's hardboard-topped counter to see if there was anything for themselves and invariably decided to take any letters for friends or family with them, but often then forgetting about them in the following weeks. With excited pride Barnabas studied the outside of the envelope before opening it. It had to be genuine because it bore an English stamp with a picture of the Queen and the address had been written with a typewriter. Inside he found a second envelope with the words ‘Do Not Open' stamped all over it. A letter pinned to this explained that inside there was a short test which the applicant must complete in the presence of a responsible person, who must then sign to say that everything had been properly conducted. The test was then to be returned to the address at the top of the letter. After some days of indecision, during which he re-read all of his secondary school notes as revision, and after many hours of contemplating the problem of who might be responsible enough to satisfy the people in London, he finally made up his mind to ask the English teacher in Migwani, part of her qualifications being her known proximity to Bwana Mwangangi, his role model.

His encounter with Janet was unfortunate. He rode to Migwani on a Sunday, after attending church in Thitani and went straight to her house in the secondary school compound. Having knocked on the door several times, he concluded that she must have gone to church, but he decided to walk around the house anyway just to make sure there was no one there. Janet, in fact, was spending the day lazily stretched out on a collapsible bed in her bikini within the privacy provided by the euphorbia hedge that edged the whole school compound. Having been told that she would depart for England within a month, she had thought it wise to seek out at least a show of a tan, otherwise her mother would nag at her for looking pale and her friends would never believe she had lived in Africa.

Barnabas was deeply shocked. As he came round the corner of the house and saw her, he could only stand and gape. Having been educated in a tradition that did not allow even a man to bare his shoulders in public, such an array of nakedness left him quite speechless. Had the flesh not been white, he might simply have scoffed damnation aloud and turned away. But this was Janet who lay before him, and he was rendered dumb and weak-kneed by the sight.

Seeing him, Janet greeted him and, calmly donning a wrapper, which still left her shoulders bare, she approached to shake hands.

“I thought you were at church,” he said, barely in control of his mouth.

“No. I don't go to church,” she replied calmly. The remark served only to anaesthetize further his already numbed senses.

What kind of person was this, he thought, who would go outside wearing almost no clothes and who did not go to church? After a moment's thought, concluding that since she was white Janet must be a Christian, he produced the brown envelope with the covering letter still attached and handed it to her. She read the letter and wanted to laugh. It was only then that she realised that he seriously wanted her to invigilate the exam.

“Can you spare the time, Miss Rowlandson?” he asked. “I have already done my revision and, as you can see from the letter, the test will take only ten minutes. Can I do it now?”

After re-reading the instructions Janet pointed to a series of example questions and answers on the back of the letter. “Have you studied these?” she asked.

“Yes, Miss Rowlandson,” he said, “but I have done a lot of other work as well. There,” he continued, pointing at the worked solution, “they have given the answers to these questions, so they will not be in the exam.”

Janet smiled knowingly. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Yes, Miss Rowlandson.” Barnabas was adamant.

For the stipulated ten minutes Barnabas sat across the table from Janet with pen in hand, poised ready yet reluctant and eventually redundant. The exam turned out to be a set of extremely complex questions of the kind that were used in IQ tests. At first Barnabas was eager, setting about the task with great technique, reading the question through before attempting his answer. Clearly, however, he had not understood a word of what he read, and when Janet announced that his time was up he was quite speechless in his disappointment. He had not made even a single mark on the paper and flatly refused to comply with Janet's suggestion that he should at least tick the boxes at random. He seemed to be more interested in obtaining her signature on the paper than in attempting to answer any of the questions and, when she had signed it, he offered her great thanks and carefully folded the paper into the previously stamped and addressed envelope.

“Will you post it for me in Kitui?” he asked. “I don't want to give it to the post office here in Migwani because many letters are lost from there.”

With that he thanked Janet for her kindness and left. Janet felt a little dazed for a while. She read and re-read the address on the envelope. Then, deciding she had to speak to him, she dashed out of the house towards the school. Having called him, she caught up with him right outside the school's main office in the centre of the circle of bare earth, where the students gathered at each Friday morning assembly to hoist the national flag.

“Are you really sure you want me to send this?” she asked. “The stamps are worth two shillings. If you don't want to send it, I will buy the stamps from you. I can use them to send my own letters. All I have to do is stick a label over the address and I can use the envelope as well.”

He seemed more than a little offended, patronised even. Then he answered, his voice almost pleading. “But, Miss Rowlandson, you have signed it… I am sure that when they see your name there they will take me. Please, you must send it for me.”

Still standing where he had left her, she watched until he disappeared from sight before she began to laugh, shaking her head in disbelief.

Back in her house, Janet toyed for a while with the idea of throwing the letter into the bin and forgetting the whole incident. But she had given her word and thus she should fulfil her unspoken promise to post it. She placed it, still smiling ruefully, in her jacket pocket. On her next trip to Kitui she might forget the letter, but she would not forget her jacket. Alone again in the house, she set about re-establishing the routine through which she had learned to live most days. First, though, she rocked the blue gas bottle which stood by the cooker to check if it was empty and then lit the stove to make a coffee. Having lost interest in her suntan, she went into her own room to change.