A Grain of Wheat (20 page)

Wambuku was not beautiful, except when she laughed or was animated with passion. Then, with her eyes dilated, her lips parted in expectation, and with her dark face glowing, she could be irresistibly attractive. A woman gifted with tremendous capacity for life, she lived for the moment, exploring and devouring its alluring possibilities. She really wanted life with Kihika, but he always stood on the edge of declaration. When alone together, she would wait expectantly, her heart beating with fear of unrevealed knowledge. Kihika would not take the plunge. He was a man following an idea. Wambuku saw it as a demon pulling him away from her. If only she understood it, if only she came face to face with the demon, then she would know how to fight with her woman’s strength. Had the demon not assumed the rival woman to her? But how could she fight with a demon who never put on the flesh of a woman? How could she fight with things hidden in darkness?

‘It is not politics, Wambuku,’ he said, ‘it is life. Is he a man who lets another take away his land and freedom? Has a slave life?’

He now spoke in a tortured voice, articulating words as if he sought answers to questions inside him. Wambuku impatiently removed her hand from his as if she would not link her fate with his.

‘You have got land, Kihika. Mbugua’s land is also yours. In any case, the land in the Rift Valley did not belong to our tribe?’

‘My father’s ten acres? That is not the important thing. Kenya belongs to black people. Can’t you see that Cain was wrong? I am my brother’s keeper. In any case, whether the land was stolen from Gikuyu, Ukabi or Nandi, it does not belong to the whiteman. And even if it did, shouldn’t everybody have a share in the common shamba, our Kenya? This soil belongs to Kenyan people. Nobody has the right to sell or buy it. It is our mother and we her children are all equal before her. She is our common inheritance. Take your whiteman, anywhere, in the settled area. He owns hundreds and hundreds of acres of land. What about the black men who squat there, who sweat dry on the farms to grow coffee, tea, sisal, wheat and yet only get ten shillings a month?’

Kihika spoke with his hands as to a large audience in front of him. Wambuku suddenly felt she had to grapple with the demon now. She took his hand and gently pressed, so that Kihika looked at her. But words would not form in her mouth to express her heart.

‘Let us not talk about these things now,’ she said, sensing her failure. Kihika returned the pressure of her hand, experiencing the exquisite delight of a man who has found a comforting soul in his set course of action. He wanted to tell her his gratitude: had she not alone among all the people believed wholly in him, in his ideas? If she had not said as much before, she had now said everything, spoken in that gentle pressure of her hand.

‘You’ll not go away from me. You’ll not leave me alone,’ she said in desperation.

‘Never!’ Kihika cried in ecstasy, seeing Wambuku at his side always. When the call for action came, he alone among the other men would have a woman he loved fighting at his side.

His one word like a knife stabbed Wambuku, thrilling her into a
momentary vision of happiness now and ever; would Kihika now leave the demon alone, content with life in the village like the other men?

They walked back to the dancers in the wood, hands linked, their faces lit, both happy, for the moment, in their separate delusions.

Gikonyo never forgot the scene in the wood; while in detention, yearning for things and places beyond the reach of hope, he lived in detail every moment of that experience, a ritual myth of a forgotten land, long ago.

‘It was like being born again,’ he recalled in the presence of Mugo, speaking in a low, even voice, groping for the word which would contain the reality of his experience. The fire in the hearth marked off by three stones, had ebbed into a dull glow; the oil-lamp fluttered, playing with shadows in corners, without clearly lighting the faces of Mugo and Gikonyo.

‘I felt whole, renewed … I had made love to many a woman, but I never had felt like that before.’

He paused, puzzled in wonder, as if words had suddenly eluded him. Slowly he lifted his right hand from his knee, the fingers a little spread, and then let it slump back into its former position.

‘Before, I was nothing. Now, I was a man. During our short period of married life, Mumbi made me feel
it
was all important … suddenly I discovered … no, it was as if I had made a covenant with God to be happy. How shall I say it? I took the woman in my arms – do you know a banana stem? I peeled off layer after layer, and I put out my hand, my trembling hand, to reach the Kiana coiled inside.

‘Every day I found a new Mumbi. Together we plunged into the forest. And I was not afraid of the darkness …’

Wangari, his mother, was also happy. She had found a daughter in Mumbi with whom, even without the medium of speech, she could share a woman’s joys and troubles. The two went to the shamba together, they fetched water from the river in turns, and cooked in the same pot. The soul of the mother warmed towards the young woman crossing the abyss of silence no words could reach, revelling in the tension of new recognition. Together they looked beyond the
hut to the workshop, where the man held a saw or a plane. They listened to the carpenter’s voice singing with the tools and their hearts were full to bursting.

Soon, however, Wangari and Mumbi, like the other women in Thabai, noticed a change in the man. He now sang with defiance, carelessly flinging an open challenge to those beyond Thabai, to the whiteman in Nairobi and any other places where Gikuyu ancestors used to dwell. Karanja, Kihika and others joined Gikonyo and they sang sad songs of hope. They laughed and told stories, but their laughter was no longer the same; it carried mocking and expectation at the corners of their mouths. They went less to the train, the dance sessions in the forest turned into meetings where plans for the day of reckoning were drawn. They also met in huts in dark places late at night, and whispered together, later breaking into belligerent laughter and fighting songs. The hearts of the women fluttered; they caught the sadness at the edge of the songs and feared for their children.

The air was pregnant with expectation.

One night it happened. Jomo Kenyatta and other leaders of the land were rounded up; Governor Baring had declared a State of Emergency over Kenya.

A few months after the declaration, Mumbi stood outside her hut looking dreamily at the land. Gikonyo was not at the workshop and Wangari had gone to the river. The untrimmed hedges surrounding the scattered homesteads made the ridge appear one endless, untamed bush, but for the curling wisps of smoke from the many huts which made the land homely and peaceful. The sun was about to set. The small hedge outside Mumbi’s new home rippled with the breeze. She silently revelled in the scene before her.

She saw Kariuki, her younger brother, walking in the fields. Mumbi was suffused with warmth; she felt happy the boy was coming to visit her. She loved Kariuki and before her marriage always washed and pressed his clothes with care. In the morning she always woke up early and made tea for him before he went to school. Though she liked Kihika, admired him and leaned on him, the stronger, without understanding him, it was on Kariuki that she poured a sisterly care.
She and Kariuki often went for walks in the country together. She listened to the boy’s prattles about anything, from school to women. She would rebuke him, without conviction, whenever he made comments on grown men and women. Then Kariuki would make comic faces and Mumbi’s secret smile would break into open laughter.

Kariuki had his school clothes on, and as he came near, Mumbi was alarmed by the solemnity on his face. The light in her eyes faded, the revelry inside melted into anxiety and she was all set for activity.

‘What is it, Kariuki? Has anything bad happened at home?’

‘Is Gikonyo in?’ Kariuki asked, avoiding her eyes, and her question.

‘No, he is not in. But what’s wrong? How your face alarmed me!’

‘Nothing. Only my father sent me to tell Gikonyo to come home with me. You too.’

The boy was looking down. His voice had faded into a whisper though it could be seen he was trying to keep it strong. Now Kariuki looked up at Mumbi and something like tears glittered in his eyes.

‘It is our brother, Kihika … Oh, Mumbi, Kihika has run to the forest to fight,’ he added, and fell into Mumbi’s arms. For a moment sister clasped brother; Thabai went round and round beneath Mumbi’s feet. Then the earth became still again, and almost peaceful.

‘What is to be done?’ she asked.

It was dark outside. Wambuku and Njeri left Mbugua’s hut and set out for home. They walked in silence each preoccupied with her own thoughts. Wambuku remembered the scene in the hut which for a time had driven out her own heartache. Mbugua sat with a bowed head, listening to Wambuku’s story without interrupting. Only when she had finished did he look at her.

‘He said his place was in the forest?’

‘Yes.’

‘What has come into his head? Don’t I have enough land to last him all his life, he and his children’s children?’ It was left to Mumbi to put the particular grief into perspective.

‘With the arrest of Jomo, things are different. All the leaders of the land have been arrested and we do not know where they have been taken. Do you think Kihika, who was the leader of the Movement in
his region, was going to escape the heavy arm of the whiteman? He had to choose between prison and forest. He chose the forest.’

‘Let God do with him as he sees fit,’ Mbugua said. Wanjiku nodded her head in sympathy with her husband.

Wambuku had with difficulty prevented tears from showing, but now, in the dark, she wept silently. Her grief overflowed into words.

‘It is the demon.’

‘Will you go to him?’ Njeri asked.

‘No!’ she cried with passion into the night. ‘He went away from me, he broke away from my arms. Njeri, I begged him to stay, with tears. Yes. We were alone, outside my home. He came to tell me he was going. Would I wait for him? I reminded him of a promise he once made to me at Kinenie, that he would never leave me. But he went away—’

‘Don’t you love him?’ Njeri asked in a tone that carried contempt and superiority.

‘I do – I did – I kept myself from other men for his sake. At night I only thought of him. I wanted him. I could have saved him. He was a man, Njeri, strong, sure, but also weak, weak like a little child.’

‘You did not love him. You only wanted him when he slept with you.’ Njeri said with unexpected venom, which took Wambuku by surprise.

‘You cannot teach me what’s in my heart.’

‘Some people don’t know what’s in their hearts.’

‘I know. You are jealous.’

‘Of you? Never!’

They separated without another word. Though Njeri was a short girl, her slim figure made her appear tall. But there was something tough about that slimness. She despised women’s weaknesses, like tears, and whenever fights occurred at Kinenie, she always fought, even with men. A cat, men called her, because few could impose their physical will on her. Now she felt superior and stronger and she could not help her contempt for Wambuku. She stood alone in the dark outside her home, peering in the direction of Kinenie Forest.

‘He is there,’ she whispered to herself. Then she addressed him directly with a passionate devotion. ‘You are my warrior.’ She raised
her voice, letting loose her long-suppressed anger. ‘She does not love you, Kihika. She does not care.’ She walked a few more steps and then wheeled round, willing the waves of the dark to carry her declaration of eternal devotion to Kihika.

‘I will come to you, my handsome warrior, I will come to you,’ she cried, and she ran into her mother’s hut trembling with the knowledge that she had made an irrevocable promise to Kihika.

Gikonyo always returned in the evening to a secret he could only share with Mumbi. This he guarded jealously. He went on with the workshop, Karanja and others collected there in the evenings, hurled curses and defiance in the air, and reviewed with pride, the personal histories of the latest men to join Kihika. Wangari and Mumbi saw the carpenter’s hand was not steady as he flung his plane along the surface of the wood. This, Wangari thought she understood and feared. But how could she explain the glow in his eyes, the animation in the voice, as if the fire of guns in the air, the bugle that told people to lock their doors at six, could not touch his manhood? Only Mumbi felt she could understand, because she knew the man’s hands and fingers on her body; she knew the man’s power as his limbs fixed her helpless to the ground. And her body would wait, wings beating in readiness. Those were the moments one experienced terror and tenderness; and she wanted him too, now exulting in her woman’s strength for as the man swooned into her, it was her tenderness and knowledge that saved him and gave life back to him.

She did not want him to go and hated herself for this cowardice.

More men were rounded up and taken to concentration camps – named detention camps for the world outside Kenya. The platform at the railway station was now always empty; girls pined for their lovers behind cold huts and prayed that their young men would come quickly from the forest or from the camps.

One day the arm of the whiteman touched Mumbi’s door. She had fearfully waited for the day, indeed had armed herself against its deadliness. But when the time came, she found herself powerless to save her man. She collected all her will and strength into a cry that went to the hearts of many present: Come back to me, Gikonyo. For the cry was like a shriek of terror. And this feverish terror seized the
whole of Thabai as later in the night they learned that Gitogo, the deaf-and-dumb son of the old woman, had been shot dead by those messengers of whiteman’s peace.

Perhaps they did not know that it was fitting that such an important campaign should open with blood on Thabai’s own soil.

Gikonyo walked towards detention with a brisk step and an assurance born in his knowledge of love and life. This thing would end soon, anyway. Jomo would win the case, his lawyers having come all the way from the land of the whiteman and from Gandhi’s India. The day of deliverance was near at hand. Gikonyo would come back and take the thread of life, but this time in a land of glory and plenty. This is what he wanted to tell his mother and Mumbi as the soldiers led him to the waiting truck. Let the whiteman then do anything; the day would come, indeed was near at hand when he would rejoin Thabai and, together with those who had taken to the forest, would rock the earth with a new song at the birth of freedom.