Petals of Blood (47 page)

She had somehow gripped him, possessed him, turned his head and made his heart beat with a thousand pains and sighs. She was exacting her vengeance: she was his ruin. She watched it, supervised it, coldly, detachedly, and yet, somehow, she always seemed vulnerable, dancing just within reach, just outside of reach. His heart would miss a beat, oh the menacing emptiness, he would drink more Theng’eta and dream of heaven.

She had turned her energy and time, after Karega had disappeared, into work. She was seized by the devil spirit of brewing and selling and counting and hatching out more plans for the progress of her trade/business partnership with Abdulla. In time, she employed three barmaids – Kamba, Kikuyu, Kalenjin – who seemed to speak the same language with their eyes and fingers and movement. She also – what a stroke of genius – hired a live band composed entirely of women from many Kenyan nationalities, and this brought more customers flocking to see for themselves. Wanja presided over all this: she had money and she was powerful and men and women feared her. They talked about her, they sang about her, and the many people who drove in to eat roasted goat meat and enjoy music issuing from the delicate fingers of the women, and touch the breasts of the barmaids who would cry out in studied pain of loving protest, also came to see the famed proprietor. But she remained aloof, distant, condescending, willing and commanding things to happen, but herself remaining inaccessible to a thousand hungry eyes, fingers eager to touch, and arteries throbbing with hot blood of desire.

The gang of road-workers had given her and Abdulla a head start. She and Abdulla were really the only local people who had successfully bid for a building plot in the New Ilmorog and started work on it. The rest who either had plots carved out of their consolidated holdings or had successfully bid for one, later sold them to outsiders who could
afford the cost of building. The builders, carpenters, masons, owners, contractors, all fed her thriving business in Theng’eta. One or two people in emulation tried to set up Chang’aa and Kiruru shops but the drinks never caught on. Nothing could beat Theng’eta.

Munira had thought that with the departure of Karega the understanding which had earlier existed between him and Wanja would be rekindled. He tried a reconnection, a reconciliation, but he only met with eyes that bade him no welcome. Defeat spurred him to redoubled efforts and more failure. How close to Abdulla she seemed! Munira felt like a schoolboy bully who, ousted from a group, was now hovering around itching to rejoin it and be accepted. Unwanted, excluded from their communal rite of making money, he felt a tremendous loneliness descend upon him and he was haunted by the past that had always shadowed him. An outsider. A spectator.

He drank more Theng’eta: he felt temporarily lifted out of himself, sailing on surging clouds of vain expectation. Looking at her from cloudy heights, she appeared even more desirable. He waited for a sign, a hand, a tender beaming smile, beckoning. None came. She was pure, indifferent. Her business boomed. Buildings in New Ilmorog went up, up, up.

Theng’eta. Deadly lotus. An only friend. Constant companion. The trouble with drinking was that he felt he needed a little bit more to get back to yesterday’s normality and, in time, to prevent his hands from trembling so that they would remain firm enough to hold another horn. Theng’eta. The spirit. Dreams of love returned.

Something was the matter with him. If only Mwathi’s place had not been razed to the ground! He certainly would have gone there for a love potion or else for medicine to cure the ache of loving.

He started reading star-charts and horoscopes, even in old, torn magazines and newspapers. He followed the doings and predictions of Francis Ng’ombe, Yahya Hussein and Omolo. He even thought of writing to them to ask them to set up an office at Ilmorog. He did not know the day or the month of his birth but every reading seemed to apply to him. He read:

CAPRICORN
, Dec. 22 – Jan. 20: You can be turned on quickly by others who are unique in some outstanding way.

He thought he must have been born or conceived under Capricorn.

SAGITTARIUS
, Nov. 23 – Dec. 21: Since you tend to fall in love with love, it is not surprising that at times you are more or less blinded to the reality of many situations and people: being something of a dreamer when it comes to matters of love, you have a tendency to fantasize most of your love and sexual experience.

He was sure that he had been born under Sagittarius.

GEMINI
, May 22 – June 21: Once you develop an emotional interest in someone, you are inclined to persist in your pursuit until you are either totally accepted or totally rejected.

Gemini was really his star.

So that, depending on his moods, he variously imagined himself born or conceived under every star: practically every prediction and every advice seemed to apply to him. Sometimes he would try to act on different starry guides, hoping that one at least might prove true and prophetic. But nothing seemed to happen. Wanja was still chilly and distant, oscillating between her business establishment in old Ilmorog to her stone building going up in the New Ilmorog.

He decided to stick to one star. He chose Leo. He read:

This week is marked by the movement of Saturn into your solar ninth house of intellectuality and emotionality. Under both influences, you’ll be inclined to lay a course which will both be challenging and promising of heaven. Keep on smiling. Romance may come your way.

He kept on smiling. He waited. Romance and love came his way.

Leo, Lillian, my star!

He saw her coming toward him and his heart gave thunderous beats. Could this be true? He listened to her unlikely story. Somebody had given her a lift from Eldoret, she claimed, and he had abandoned her in Ilmorog. Munira smiled at her. He knew her: he had seen her. He hummed the tune she once played at Ruwa-ini. She smiled back. They talked. He reminded her of the day, years back, he had found her playing a religious hymn sung by Ofafa Jericho Choir at Furaha Bar in Ruwa-ini. Wanja gave her a job. She was very fond of singing or humming religious tunes, especially after a drink or two. She would sing in a husky voice, her eyes dilated, her eyes and neck raised in heavenly expectation:

She had a way of making up words and phrases so that they fitted in without much seeming strain on her part. And yet with her obvious gift in words and voice, she would not hear of joining the band or singing what she called irreligious songs. She would only change from one hymn to another of her own making but they were beautifully seductive:

For a time Munira was intrigued by her and almost forgot the pain of being possessed with Wanja. Lillian: she was a strange case of a girl who maintained that she was still a virgin even after he had entered her and she had screamed and scratched his back, bitten his hand and cried in ecstasy and delight: Come, come, Lord, into me.

Munira had hoped that his involvement with Lillian would provoke. Wanja’s jealousy. But she did not seem to be moved. He gave up starry charts. Lillian, the ‘virgin’, was not a substitute for Wanja.

He resumed his lone walks across Ilmorog ridge, now cleaved into two by the Trans-Africa Road. He watched cars go beyond the hills: he would even count them to while away the time. Often, after school, he would walk to the building sites, and for a time become lost amidst trenches with pools of dirty water, piles of quarry rock, the cry of hammers on stone, nail and wood, the ribald chatter among the masons. What was happening to sleepy Ilmorog? What happened to the land of trios of children singing, paving the way to sleep with lullabies? He stopped and rubbed his eyes clean: Wambui, Muriuki’s mother, was staggering behind the handles of a wheelbarrow piled high with stones. The demarcation and the fencing off of land had deprived a lot of tillers and herdsmen of their hitherto unquestioned
rights of use and cultivation. Now they were hiring themselves out to any who needed their labour for a wage. Wambui, a labourer! Now she had joined others who had been drawn into Ilmorog’s market for sweat and labour. He quickly passed on and only stopped when he came to Wanja-Abdulla’s building. This would soon be the New Theng’eta centre. He was racking his brains for ways and means of endearing himself to her when the idea struck him. Soon the place would be opened. There might even be other licensed bar facilities. He would help her increase her sales of Theng’eta. He would pull in more customers for her!

Munira had always liked advertisements. But now he started reading them even more avidly. He now had a mission. He studied them, the words, the phrasing, and the difference between the intended and the possible effect on the readers and hearers. He collected a few:

Put a tiger in your tank. Healthy hair means beautiful hair. Every time is tea time. Be a platinum blonde: be a redhead: be a whole new you in 100% imported hand-made human hair. Join the new Africans: join Ambi people. Beautiful ones not yet born? You are joking. They are, everyday, with beautiful silky wigs: Man can get lost in it.

He tried his head at making up a few. Maybe he could sell them to whoever was going to set up businesses in the New Ilmorog. Munira: seller of beautiful ads and slogans. Want to go into Parliament? Buy a slogan! Be successful! Buy a slogan. For Wanja he would try to create a special one. For free. One that would so popularize Theng’eta that she would be known as Queen Theng’eta. She would then
have
to notice him. Author of her new fame.

Do you have what it takes? Drink Theng’eta. Increase your potency: Drink Theng’eta. Beautiful people, beautiful thoughts, beautiful love: Drink Theng’eta. Join the Space Age: Drink Theng’eta. On your way to the moon with Armstrong: Drink Theng’eta. Three T’s: Theng’a Theng’a with Theng’eta.

He was now ready. He tried the last one on a few customers, suddenly standing up in their midst, during a lull in the music from the band, and shouted: Drink the drink of three letters and increase your potency: Theng’a Theng’a with Theng’eta. He shouted it again
and raised a glass to his lips. They all looked up at him and thought him drunk. They laughed and continued their drinking. Wanja looked at him and shrugged her shoulders. But the slogan remained in use – as a joke!

That night he took Lillian home, and when she pretended that she was a virgin being taken against her will he beat her. They fell out. Lillian left Ilmorog. He was alone. Theng’eta.

He would always remember that year as the beginning of three years of shameless enslavement to naked passion. It was as if the completion and the opening of the New Ilmorog shopping centre also saw the complete unmaking of Munira, the hitherto respected teacher of their children. He could see it; he watched the decline, a spectator, an outsider, and he could not help himself. Or was he punishing himself for another kind of failure?

It was this that he could not quite tell him, he, who, in part, was the cause of it.

But Karega’s eyes were insistent, his whole being seemed waiting for an answer to a big question he had not yet asked. It was all very much like their first encounter. Then Munira had sworn that tarred roads would only be built when hyenas grew horns. He would like to have swallowed back the words. For the changed circumstance under which they now met was in part a product of the tarred road. Trans-Africa Road. Even the school had changed: it was now built of stones; it had full classes and full teachers, with a new modern headmaster, and Mzigo came regularly, in part to inspect the school but largely to look after his shop in the New Ilmorog. Mzigo, Nderi wa Riera, Rev. Jerrod, they all had shop buildings in Ilmorog.

‘What happened to Joseph?’ Karega asked.

‘He passed all right. 3 As. He went to Siriana!’

‘Siriana?’

‘Yes. Siriana.’

A silent moment followed Munira’s disclosures, both he and Karega maybe remembering what Siriana had meant to them in earlier times. Munira, still weighed down by anxiety, eyed Karega who looked at the same spot, a concentration of light in his eyes, his hands still moving, but his face refusing to smile. Munira could not tell if Karega
was pleased or not with Joseph’s success. But it seemed there were some problems pressing him and it was five years since he left Ilmorog.

‘And what happened to the old woman?’ Karega asked, as if he was completing a thought dialogue with himself.

Munira was visibly relieved that the big question did not come. But even this was hard to answer, because everything had happened so fast, a chaos in a drunken dream. Nyakinyua. The old woman. Even Munira did not wish to remember, to think of her fate. What could he now say about Nyakinyua and himself and not weep again?

He recalled, without telling him, that he had somehow continued looking for a slogan, for a catchy ad which would bring him Wanja’s favours – even for a night. He would go through the newspaper and read, not the news, but the advertisements. He read of course about the lawyer and his thunderous speeches in Parliament and how he was calling for a ceiling on land ownership and other reforms. But that was only because there were memories attached to the name. His main interest was in ads – he had to get the slogans . . . to beat all the slogans, the slogans that would finally buy him Wanja.

He would always remember the evening he read about Nyakinyua – with pain . . . He was drunk but the Theng’eta in his head seemed to evaporate when suddenly he saw it. His hands and the newspaper trembled. He sobered up and looked at the announcement. It was not possible. It could not be possible: