A Grain of Wheat (7 page)

Abdulrazak Gurnah

2002

Mugo felt nervous. He was lying on his back and looking at the roof. Sooty locks hung from the fern and grass thatch and all pointed at his heart. A clear drop of water was delicately suspended above him. The drop fattened and grew dirtier as it absorbed grains of soot. Then it started drawing towards him. He tried to shut his eyes. They would not close. He tried to move his head: it was firmly chained to the bed-frame. The drop grew larger and larger as it drew closer and closer to his eyes. He wanted to cover his eyes with his palms; but his hands, his feet, everything refused to obey his will. In despair, Mugo gathered himself for a final heave and woke up. Now he lay under the blanket and remained unsettled fearing, as in the dream, that a drop of cold water would suddenly pierce his eyes. The blanket was hard and worn out; its bristles pricked his face, his neck, in fact all the unclothed parts of his body. He did not know whether to jump out or not; the bed was warm and the sun had not yet appeared. Dawn diffused through cracks in the wall into the hut. Mugo tried a game he always played whenever he had lost sleep in the middle of the night or early morning. In total, or hazy darkness most objects lose their edges, one shape merging with another. The game consisted in trying to make out the various objects in the room. This morning, however, Mugo found it difficult to concentrate. He knew that it was only a dream: yet he kept on chilling at the thought of a cold drop falling into his eyes. One, two, three; he pulled the blanket away from his body. He washed his face and lit the fire. In a corner, he discovered a small amount of maize-flour in a bag among the utensils. He put this in a sufuria on the fire, added water and stirred it with a wooden spoon. He liked porridge in the morning. But whenever he took it, he
remembered the half-cooked porridge he ate in detention. How time drags, everything repeats itself, Mugo thought; the day ahead would be just like yesterday and the day before.

He took a jembe and a panga to repeat the daily pattern his life had now fallen into since he left Maguita, his last detention camp. To reach his new strip of shamba which lay the other side of Thabai, Mugo had to walk through the dusty village streets. And as usual Mugo found that some women had risen before him, that some were already returning from the river, their frail backs arched double with water-barrels, in time to prepare tea or porridge for their husbands and children. The sun was now up: shadows of trees and huts and men were thin and long on the ground.

‘How is it with you, this morning?’ Warui called out to him, emerging from one of the huts.

‘It is well.’ And as usual Mugo would have gone on, but Warui seemed anxious to talk.

‘Attacking the ground early?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s what I always say. Go to it when the ground is soft. Let the sun find you already there and it’ll not be a match for you. But if it reaches the shamba before you – hm.’

Warui, a village elder, wore a new blanket which sharply relieved his wrinkled face and the grey tufts of hair on his head and on his pointed chin. It was he who had given Mugo the present strip of land on which to grow a little food. His own piece had been confiscated by the government while he was in detention. Though Warui liked talking, he had come to respect Mugo’s reticence. But today he looked at Mugo with new interest, curiosity even.

‘Like Kenyatta is telling us,’ he went on, ‘these are days of Uhuru na Kazi.’ He paused and ejected a jet of saliva on to the hedge. Mugo stood embarrassed by this encounter. ‘And how is your hut, ready for Uhuru?’ continued Warui.

‘Oh, it’s all right,’ Mugo said and excused himself. As he moved on through the village, he tried to puzzle out Warui’s last question.

Thabai was a big village. When built, it had combined a number of ridges: Thabai, Kamandura, Kihingo, and parts of Weru. And even
in 1963, it had not changed much from the day in 1955 when the grass-thatched roofs and mud walls were hastily collected together, while the whiteman’s sword hung dangerously above people’s necks to protect them from their brethren in the forest. Some huts had crumbled; a few had been pulled down. Yet the village maintained an unbroken orderliness; from a distance it appeared a huge mass of grass from which smoke rose to the sky as from a burnt sacrifice.

Mugo walked, his head slightly bowed, staring at the ground as if ashamed of looking about him. He was re-living the encounter with Warui when suddenly he heard someone shout his name. He started, stopped, and stared at Githua, who was hobbling towards him on crutches. When he reached Mugo he stood to attention, lifted his torn hat, and cried out:

‘In the name of blackman’s freedom, I salute you.’ Then he bowed several times in comic deference.

‘Is it – is it well with you?’ Mugo asked, not knowing how to react. By this time two or three children had collected and were laughing at Githua’s antics. Githua did not answer at once. His shirt was torn, its collar gleamed black with dirt. His left trouser leg was folded and fixed with a pin to cover the stump. Rather unexpectedly he gripped Mugo by the hand:

‘How are you man! How are you man! Glad to see you going to the shamba early. Uhuru na Kazi. Ha! Ha! Ha! Even on Sundays. I tell you before the Emergency, I was like you; before the whiteman did this to me with bullets, I could work with both hands, man. It makes my heart dance with delight to see your spirit. Uhuru na Kazi. Chief, I salute you.’

Mugo tried to pull out his hand. His heart beat and he could not find the words. The laughter from the children increased his agitation. Githua’s voice suddenly changed:

‘The Emergency destroyed us,’ he said in a tearful voice and abruptly went away. Mugo hurried on, conscious of the man’s eyes behind him. Three women coming from the river stopped when they saw him. One of them shouted something, but Mugo did not answer or look at them. He raised dust like a man on the run. Yet he only walked asking himself questions: What’s wrong with me today? Why
are people suddenly looking at me with curiosity? Is there shit on my legs?

Soon he was near the end of the main street where the old woman lived. Nobody knew her age: she had always been there, a familiar part of the old and the new village. In the old village she lived with an only son who was deaf and dumb. Gitogo, for that was the son’s name, spoke with his hands often accompanied with animal guttural noises. He was handsome, strongly built, a favourite at the Old Rung’ei centre where young men spent their time talking the day away. Occasionally the men went on errands for the shop-owners and earned a few coins ‘for the pockets only, just to keep the trousers warm’, as some carelessly remarked. They laughed and said the coins would call others (man! their relatives) in due time.

Gitogo worked in eating houses, meat shops, often lifting and carrying heavy loads avoided by others. He loved displaying his well-built muscles. Whispers current in Rung’ei and Thabai said that many a young woman had felt the weight of those limbs. In the evenings Gitogo bought food – a pound of sugar, or a pound of meat – and took them home to his mother, who brightened up, her face becoming youthful amidst the many wrinkles. What a son, what a man, people would say, touched by the tenderness of the deaf and dumb one to his mother.

One day people in Thabai and Rung’ei woke up to find themselves ringed round with black and white soldiers carrying guns, and tanks last seen on the road during Churchill’s war with Hitler. Gunfire smoked in the sky, people held their stomachs. Some men locked themselves in latrines; others hid among the sacks of sugar and beans in the shops. Yet others tried to sneak out of the town towards the forest, only to find that all roads to freedom were blocked. People were being collected into the town-square, the market place, for screening. Gitogo ran to a shop, jumped over the counter, and almost fell on to the shopkeeper whom he found cowering amongst the empty bags. He gesticulated, made puzzled noises, furtively looked and pointed at the soldiers. The shopkeeper in stupid terror stared back blankly at Gitogo. Gitogo suddenly remembered his aged mother sitting alone in the hut. His mind’s eye vividly saw scenes of wicked
deeds and blood. He rushed out through the back door, and jumped over a fence into the fields, now agitated by the insecurity to which his mother lay exposed. Urgency, home, mother: the images flashed through his mind. His muscles alone would protect her. He did not see that a whiteman, in a bush jacket, lay camouflaged in a small wood. ‘Halt!’ the whiteman shouted. Gitogo continued running. Something hit him at the back. He raised his arms in the air. He fell on his stomach. Apparently the bullet had touched his heart. The soldier left his place. Another Mau Mau terrorist had been shot dead.

When the old woman heard the news she merely said: My God. Those who were present said that she did not weep. Or even ask how her son had met his death.

After leaving the detention camp Mugo had several times seen the old woman outside her hut. And every time he felt agitated as if the woman recognized him. She had a small face grooved with wrinkles. Her eyes were small but occasionally flashed with life. Otherwise they looked dead. She wore beads around her elbows, several copper chains around her neck, and cowrie-like tins around the ankles. When she moved she made jingling noises like a belled goat. It was her eyes that most disturbed Mugo. He always felt naked, seen. One day he spoke to her. But she only looked at him and then turned her face away. Mugo felt rejected, yet her loneliness struck a chord of pity in him. He wanted to help her. This feeling warmed him inside. He bought some sugar, maize-flour and a bundle of firewood at one of the Kabui shops. In the evening he went to the woman’s place. The hut was dark inside. The room was bare, and a cold wind whistled in through the gaping holes in the wall. She slept on the floor, near the fireplace. Mugo remembered how he too used to sleep on the floor in his aunt’s hut, sharing the fireplace with goats and sheep. He often crept and crouched near the goats for warmth. In the morning he found his face and clothes covered with ashes, his hands and feet smeared with the goats’ droppings. In the end he had become hardened to the goats’ smell. Amidst these thoughts, Mugo felt the woman fix him with her eyes, which glinted with recognition. Suddenly he shivered at the thought that the woman might touch him. He ran out, revolted.
Perhaps there was something fateful in his contact with this old woman.

Today this thought was uppermost in his mind, as he again felt another desire to enter the hut and talk to her. There was a bond between her and him, perhaps because she, like him, lived alone. At the door he faltered, his resolution wavered, broke, and he found himself hurrying away, fearing that she would call him back with mad laughter.

In the shamba, he felt hollow. There were no crops on the land and what with the dried-up weeds, gakaraku, micege, mikengeria, bangi – and the sun, the country appeared sick and dull. The jembe seemed heavier than usual; the unfinished part of the shamba looked too big for his unwilling muscles. He dug a little, and feeling the desire to pass water, walked to a hedge near the path; why had Warui, Githua and the women behaved that way towards him? He found his bladder had pressed him into false urgency. A few drops trickled down and he watched them as if each drop fascinated him. Two young women dressed for church, passed near, saw a big man playing with his thing and giggled. Mugo felt foolish and dragged himself back to his work.