A Fool's Knot (35 page)

After crossing the courtyard behind the bar, Janet knocked repeatedly on the door but received no answer. After calling the barman and knocking again there was still no reply. Possibly John had left early, Janet suggested. Possibly he might have left via the door at the back. But the barman said in his halting English, it was impossible because the door was always padlocked at night and he had not yet opened it that morning. He beckoned towards the door, Janet cast a glance and saw clearly that the padlock was still in place. He bent to peer through the keyhole of number four and then rose again, indicating with a turn of the wrist that the key was still in the lock. He turned the handle and put his shoulder against the door, but it did not give. Janet smiled and suggested that John might have overslept, probably after having had too many beers. “No,” said the barman, John Mwangangi had drunk no more beers last night. He had gone straight to his room and then met his father. They knocked hard on the door, but there was still no response from inside. “Wait,” said the barman, raising a finger towards Janet, as if giving a warning. She tried to explain to him that she had arranged to meet Mwangangi. He was expecting her. He would not have left without first visiting her at the school. She was afraid that the barman had not understood her and, when he set off back towards the bar, she followed him. He gestured that she should wait there, but she still followed.

A few moments later, still following him, she was back at the door to number four. The barman, as ever unhurried to the point of apparent lethargy, fumbled with a large bunch of keys he kept on a nail behind the bar until he had found a particular one and then, with Janet in tow, returned to the courtyard. Standing on a chair, he reached into the still dark room through its wire-mesh covered window and, using a piece of stiff wire, he fumbled as he tried to latch a loop around the key on the inside of the door. Still there was no sound from within, not even when the key jangled onto the floor, as it fell from the lock.

“Finish,” he said with a satisfied smile. He got down from his chair and then inserted his copy of the key for number four in the lock, turned it and then swung open the door. Having poked his head around the door, he was about to conclude that the room was, indeed, empty. He saw that there was no one in the made-up bed and, as he announced this, Janet almost began to turn to make her way out of the bar to seek John in the town.

Then the barman gasped and rushed into the room, flinging the door wide open and causing it to bang hard against the concrete wall. As Janet followed him, he gave a great shout and she saw him confronting an old man, who was crouched on the floor by the far wall opposite the door. The old man's eyes were wide open, staring and not blinking. The barman bent down and prised the old man's fingers from the handle of a
panga
that he held, it seemed, like a vice. Janet could now see the face clearly and recognised Musyoka, John's father. But still he did not move. He simply stared into space, apparently oblivious of the man who confronted him and who forcefully wrested the
panga
from his grasp.

Now daring to step fully inside the room, Janet looked around. John was not there, but there was a smell, a sweet smell… And then she looked down to the floor by the bed. “Oh my God,” she screamed and cried and screamed again, her voice a weight of terror. The barman, startled, turned around, the wrong way, as it happened, to look at her. His eyes followed the line she pointed, but he could not see from where he stood. The bed was in the way. Still she screamed, but no sound came now, only tears, while fear rooted her to the floor. Mwinzi took the two steps needed to stand at her side so he could see along the wall under the window next to the bed. He gave a deep groan, as if breathing out his soul.

John's body was almost under the bed, which Musyoka had clearly pushed against the wall after his son had fallen. Only the remains of his head protruded from under the cover and that was an unrecognisable mass of blood, bone, brain and hair. The first blow the father had struck merely stunned, but knocked the son to the floor at the end of the bed. John Mwangangi, son of Musyoka, had momentarily lost consciousness, but then had tried to stand. As he did, the old man struck again, and this time with the sharpened edge of the blade. Again and again he had struck, cleaving his son's head and ripping the flesh of his face from the bone.

The two could not move for what seemed like an age. Janet felt herself scream and cry, heaving at the air to find breath. But in fact she made little sound, what there was being heard as a laugh. Mwinzi hardly dared to look through the fingers he wished would cover his eyes.

And then he rushed towards the door, pushing Janet with him out of the room. He pushed her so hard he did not even notice she was trying to resist, and then he re-locked the door and ran away. He shouted to her, telling her to follow, but she could not react and she stood where her stumbling retreat had halted by the courtyard wall, opposite the door of number four.

It was only a hundred yards from the Safari corner along the road towards Mwingi to the edge of town where, on top of the hill, the Chief had his office. The barman ran and arrived both speechless and breathless, but so incensed with fear he said everything he needed to say without even speaking. He grabbed the Chief's arm and pulled him from his chair. A moment later he was outside again and rushing to the mud-walled building adjoining the office where the town's resident soldiers brewed their tea during the quiet hours of their duty. He grabbed the arm of the senior soldier and instinctively the other grabbed the rifle it was his duty never to lay down as the barman pulled him to his feet. They all followed without a word. They ran down the hill towards the bar, past shops in whose open doorways people now gathered to see what might have caused the commotion along the street, which usually felt so completely asleep.

Back in the courtyard behind the Safari, a panting Mwinzi fumbled for his keys as the Chief, tall and uniformed, and the soldier with his rifle at the ready by his hip watched in still ignorant anticipation. They remained stoically oblivious of Janet, who stood nearby, still crying, her hands still clutching at her face. Father Michael, who had heard the shouting, now entered the courtyard and immediately took hold of Janet and embraced her. He was trying to console her, trying to ask her what had happened, but she could not speak. When the key was turned and the door opened, the three men went inside and were silent for a moment, and then the groans came again, full of regret. Through the open door Janet saw only Musyoka, the old man she once knew. Still crouched by the wall, still staring blank-eyed into space, only his arms moved, as he chipped away at a stick with his penknife. She did not know, and indeed would never know that it once was part of a carving meant for her.

For five hours, Janet and Michael waited together in the mission under the Chief's instruction not to leave the town. He tried to console her, to lessen the shock, but she was inconsolable. She couldn't speak or eat or drink or believe that it was reality that attacked her. When the District Officer's Land Rover drew up outside and John's successor in the office accompanied by a policeman came into the room, she still could say nothing, nor feel anything, nor show any emotion.

 

In the town there had been great activity. The Chief had commandeered the town's lorry and ordered its owner to drive him to Mwingi from where he immediately returned with the District Officer and the policeman. The old man, locked away in the soldier's room and guarded by his captor, had sat, immersed in a world of his own, chipping away at his stick. No one had yet thought of taking the knife from him, for he was surely helpless now. John's body, covered by the sheet from his bed, lay on a table in the town's health centre. No one entered the room to look until the policemen from Mwingi lifted the sheet to confirm his death. By then the news had travelled far and wide, conveyed on foot to everywhere within walking distance. It had gone by bus to the west, destined for Nairobi. It had gone south towards Mombasa and north towards Mwingi and beyond to Garissa. Within the day everyone who should have known about Migwani's tragedy would have been told the story as the barman had found it. And all who told or heard the story were to be stunned by it. Old men, young men, women, grandmothers, children, girls, none had ever known a father kill a son.

 

When the District Officer bid goodbye to Father Michael, still shaking his head in profound disbelief, he said, “I cannot think what is happening these days. We used to say that it is the old man who is taught new things. But make no mistake, what Musyoka has done is unknown amongst our people. From now, Musyoka and his family will only be known for their sin.” With that he shook hands with both Michael and Janet without saying another word, took his seat in his Land Rover and drove off into the town. He stayed around Migwani for some hours, gathering what information he could and talking to anyone willing to talk. By the time he set off for Mwingi, Michael and Janet had themselves already left the town, but in the other direction, bound for Nairobi and a meeting with Lesley Mwangangi. In the District Officer's assessment the case was clear-cut. Later, when he wrote up the report, he concluded that the case would go to the High Court, which would find that John Mwangangi, son of Musyoka, had been murdered by his father, Musyoka, son of Mwangangi, an old man who now was incarcerated in the town's only cell at the rear of Mwingi's police station. As he signed the report, he passed it through the hatch in the wall to the waiting clerk, who typed it with multiple carbon sheets, one for his own files, one for the Kitui Police, one for the Nairobi Police and one for the Public Prosecutor. As for Musyoka, neither his name nor a word of sympathy on his behalf would ever again be spoken. He would first be transferred to Kitui and from there to Nairobi to await trial. The case would be judged, his guilt declared and he would hang. Throughout his time in custody, wherever that was, Musyoka would never again see a member of his family, neither his wives, daughter, Lesley nor Anna Katuunge Mwangangi. In death he would be granted an unnamed pauper's grave near the prison outhouse where he was hanged.

It was almost dark by the time Janet and Michael reached John's house in Nairobi. Only a few short hours now separated Janet from her midnight flight to London, but first there was this duty to perform. As she wept in Lesley's arms with Michael looking on, apparently unable to react, she still wondered how she might find words to convey any meaning. And then a young boy emerged from the house. She knew him. He was the son of one of the shopkeepers from Migwani market, a day student in her school's Form Three. It was only then she fully realised that Lesley was not crying. She seemed strangely calm and controlled. As Janet drew back to look at her, she said, “Julius came on the morning bus and brought the news. He arrived about an hour ago.” Lesley's voice sounded empty, merely empty.

“Will you be wanting to go to Migwani?” asked Michael after a nervous pause during which he walked towards the still embracing women and then away again.

“No,” said Lesley with conviction.

“What are you going to do?” asked Janet, disengaging herself from Lesley's now limp arms.

“I don't know,” was the soft, hollow reply.

For some minutes they stood there in the driveway, statically arranged, as if about to deliver a quartet in a tragic opera, but they were all silent. Then, after a simple goodbye, Janet and Michael got back in the car and drove away. Only then did Lesley weep, but it was only a single tear and even that had dried by the time she approached Julius with repeated thanks for bringing the news.

The accommodating waiter in the restaurant that Janet chose was worried throughout by their lack of appetite. He approached the table many times and asked with a broad nervous smile whether the food was all right. Both Janet and Michael said it was fine, but still, it seemed, they did not want to eat. At the airport, necessity ruled as they worked through the formalities of flying. Janet weighed the luggage that Michael had carried and the clerk checked the ticket she presented. Janet paid the tax of twenty shillings and took the stamp without which she could not depart. Then, after kissing Michael once on the cheek, she said what became a hurried goodbye and walked beneath the sign that said ‘Departures' without once looking back. She had to begin again.