Petals of Blood (9 page)

‘For days and weeks I planned vengeance. My parents had often beaten me, but it was the first time I was so rebellious in my thoughts. How could I get my own back? Was it a sin to be poor? We ourselves
were not rich: were we sinners? Was it a sin even not to be a Christian? At the same time I hated the young man who had been the cause of my suffering. I nursed the pain in my soul. I am a hard woman and I know I can carry things inside my heart for a long time. I wanted to find something that would really hurt them and humiliate them as they had done to me. But I was young, the pain faded and thoughts of vengeance were buried by the call of daily living. But I also knew that since that night I, my home, school, the world, nothing was any longer the same. I was aware of a growing impatience with the school and learning: it was as if these were keeping me from a world, a more interesting world beyond the school and the village. Out there, there was life. This was also the years preceding independence when there was a lot of talk of how different life would be . . . Aah, you see how I talk as if all this was ages ago. Yet only a few years . . . Yes, a few years.

‘At about this time a certain man came and bought a plot very near our home, and he put up a stone building with a huge iron tank for catching rainwater. He was married, with two girls. His example was soon followed by others, but his remained the best known for setting the trend. It was also seen as a sign of things to come. Maybe, soon, after independence, everyone would have at least a corrugated-iron roofed house and a tank in which they would catch rainwater. He was also the proud owner of a small lorry and a bus. We did not know where he had come from, but he was probably the first such big man in our village in the last years of the emergency, you know, when Africans started acquiring businesses. He was so different from my father: he was tall and strong and wealthy and envied and respected by every one. I was drawn to him from the very first time I saw him in his bus acting as a conductor. He did not charge me any fare the second time, saying you are the daughter of so and so, and of course I felt good that he knew me. He came home once or twice and my father, whose fortune had declined over the years, was so proud I felt ashamed. He became friends with my father and he soon became a frequent visitor at home. During Christmas he brought us all gifts. He gave me a floral dress and called me his daughter and I looked, or thought I looked, like a cousin of mine who had gone to the city a
long time back. Later he gave me a lift in his lorry and took me to an afternoon film show at the Royal Cinema in the city. School could never thereafter be the same. Whenever he came to visit us, I would deliberately go to bed early as if I was shy of company. But his visit was always a sign between us that he wanted to see me the following afternoon. I would put the floral dress into my bag with books on top. In the city I would go to a latrine and change into the floral dress and hide my school uniform in the bag. At four or five I would go back home, of course in my school uniform.

‘It was the maths teacher who found me out. I used to be his best student and he had set his eyes on me. My breasts were a little bit more developed than those of the other girls and I had a full body. He used all sorts of excuses to detain me a little longer in school: Go and light a fire in my house: take these exercise books to my house: why didn’t you clean your nails, see me after four . . . and all sorts of things. Once, I had reported him to my mother and my mother was cross and had threatened to take up the matter with a higher authority. Now he noticed my frequent absences: he spied on me, and he found out. He called me into his house and talked love and said he wanted me and would I? I refused and he confronted me with his knowledge. Either I let him, or I would face my angry parents. I refused. He told my parents. My mother who all along had shown a marked dislike for the man was so shocked she could not even beat me. At first I felt – it has hurt them. But she cried and held me to herself as if she would protect me from a hostile world, and I felt guilty and I wept. This brought their final rupture. She told my father with a tone that cut deep: he was your wealthy friend, after all: and my father was so humiliated and looked so small I felt sorry for him too. My mother threatened that should that man ever set his dirty feet and hypocritical face in the house, she would pour hot water on him. Otherwise they did not say a word to me and for that reason I swore not to see the man again. I became a little more studious and even endured the leering triumphant laughter and snide comments of the maths teacher. I was surprised, and the teacher was probably surprised, when in the mock-CPE results I was number two in the whole area with the best maths results. My awkward boy friend was fifth. Everybody now
thought that the actual exams would be a ‘walkover’ for me, and the teachers started talking of the high schools they would like me to try . . . But the results of my vengeance also followed me. I started vomiting and feeling a little tired. So I was pregnant? I ran back to my lover. I will marry you all right, he assured me, if you don’t mind being a second wife, and my first is so harsh she will make you her slave. I thought him a little light-hearted on a matter that was life and death to me. And I knew that my mother would soon find out. No, I could not bear it. I would not be there when she found out. My mind was set. I would force the issue.

‘I will always remember that day with shame and guilt. My mother lay in bed, and as I was going to school she told me . . . you see, we had two goats in a pen . . . she told me – go and throw the dry dung in the shamba. Here was my chance. I put all my nice clothes under a basket and covered the top with dry dung manure. And I ran away from home . . . to him. He looked at me once and suddenly he started laughing. He told me not to be funny, he was old enough to be my father, and anyway he was a Christian. Something blocked my throat: I could not cry. I just whimpered once and I went to my cousin in Eastleigh.’

She had lowered her voice a little as she said the last words and Munira could somehow imagine a tortured soul’s journey through valleys of guilt and humiliation and the long sleepless nights of looking back to the origins of the whole journey. She broke into his thoughts with a cynical little laughter.

‘Yes. Many were the times I used to think that I could hear a Lamb’s voice calling me across a deep deep valley: come unto me, all ye that are lonely, and I’ll give you the final rest. It was really tempting and my cousin could see through me as she tried to make me face the reality I had chosen. And yet had I chosen it? I fought hard against both the Lamb’s voice and my cousin’s suggestion. I would live to have my vengeance. I was young: I would not go her way. I have tried my hands at various jobs, but work in bars seems to be the one readily available to us girls – dropouts from school and CPE failures and even some dropouts from high schools.’

The sad, bitter note dominated the silence for a few seconds. It was
clear that no matter what a fight she had put up she had not forgotten the original wound. She had somehow drawn Abdulla and Munira into her world and they seemed also to experience this wound, or maybe it reminded them of their own wounds. Now she suddenly bounced back to life:

‘That is why it always pains me to see children unable to go to school . . . and that is why tomorrow at the shop we must celebrate Joseph’s return to school. Abdulla, I am so happy. Munira, you’ll come tomorrow please, you must. It will be my first night as a barmaid in Ilmorog.’

She again carried them along with her boundless energy and enthusiasm. She had a way of making a man’s heart palpitate with different emotions and expectations at the same time.

‘I am going to see Mzigo at Ruwa-ini tomorrow . . .’

‘No, you must come,’ she interrupted him imperiously. ‘And bring me a pound of the long-grained rice. Abdulla saw me home tonight. Tomorrow it is your turn. Or are you afraid of the dark? Look. The moon will be out. It will announce the first day of harvest. Tomorrow . . . so many hopes to celebrate!’

Afraid? No, not tomorrow night nor any other night with you, his heart sang joyfully.

‘Thank you, Abdulla . . . thank you, Munira . . .’ she cooed as they stood up to go and each felt as if it was said with a special meaning, to him, alone.

Munira said ‘Keep well’ to Abdulla and continued in the dark. But he would be there tomorrow, he said to himself, he would surely see her home tomorrow, and he was now smiling to himself. Beautiful petals: beautiful flowers: tomorrow would indeed be the beginning of a harvest.

1 ~ Twelve years later, on a Sunday, Godfrey Munira tried to reconstruct that scene in a statement to the police, a statement in which he was meant to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing else but the truth. But he found that although it was still alive in the memory, the night of Wanja’s first narrative, with all its suggestion of inexplicable doom and violence, eluded exact formulation in words. He sat on a hard bench, his elbows planted on the table, his eyes occasionally darting to the Aspro-calendar, the only decoration on otherwise bare walls. But mostly he rested his eyes on the face of the officer: he must be new in the Force, Munira thought. Ilmorog was probably his first big station and he was probably nervous or impatient or both. He tapped the floor with his right foot and drummed the table a little with his fingers. He was losing patience and Munira tried to understand: who could not feel the subterranean currents of unrest in the country? Schoolboys and girls on strike and locking up their recalcitrant, authoritarian headmasters and headmistresses in office cupboards: workers downing their tools and refusing the temporary consolation of tripartite agreements; housewives holding processions and shouting obscene slogans in protest against the high food prices; armed robbers holding up banks in daylight with crowds cheering; women refusing to be relegated to the kitchen and the bedroom, demanding equal places in men’s former citadel of power and privilege – all these could try the nerves of those entrusted by the ruling classes of this world with maintaining man’s ordained order and law. They trusted too much in the wisdom of this world: they would not open the book of God to see that these things had been prophesied a long time ago. Karega and his following of Theng’eta factory workers were
not any different: they had rejected it is true mere brotherhood of the skin, region and community of origins and said no to both black and white and Indian employers of labour. But they too would fail: because they had also rejected the most important brotherhood – the only brotherhood – of religion, of being born anew in the Lord of the universe and of the eternal kingdom. What other truth did the officer want? Munira wanted to show him that Wanja was the ‘She’ mentioned by the Prophets, extracting obedience from men, making them deviate from the path, and all the time with a voice that had the suggestive qualities of suffering and protest, hope and terror and above all of promises of escape through the power of the flesh. But the officer – the wise man of this world – he only stood and walked about the room, turning cold eyes on Munira. What had a silly barmaid’s cry eleven years back – before a single stone building, let alone an international highway, had been built in Ilmorog – to do with the present? He might as well open that book and start with Adam and Eve. But would it not be better – it would surely save time and energy – if he skipped the years and did not indulge a rather – well – a rather vivid memory? That was exactly the point, Munira thought, slightly amused by the officer’s outburst. It – the cry – the scene had everything to do with it: for if Munira had not been blinded by that voice he could have seen the signs, the evil web being spun around him, around Abdulla, around Ilmorog. He tried another approach: he begged for pen and paper and appealed for time: he would write a statement in his own hand and in his own way and later the policeman could ask questions – and with the help of the Lord . . . The officer suddenly banged the table, all patience gone: he wanted facts, not history; facts, not sermons or poetry. Murder was not irio or njohi, he said and called out to the warders: Lock him in.

He was put in a cell: he heard the chain lock click and he felt a kind of spiritual satisfaction – he remembered Peter and Paul – yes, Paul who used to be Saul – in jail hearing voices from the Lord. Murder is not irio – the same words as were used by the constables who earlier had come for him, Munira thought, yawning. He was tired – suddenly very tired from the night’s vigil – and he sank into deep slumber.

They woke him up the following day. He felt fresh in the mind. He
was ushered into the same office: but this time the officer was a different man altogether: elderly, with a face that was expressionless even when he smiled or laughed or joked, as if the face could never register any emotions.

The officer had come from Nairobi to take charge of the investigation. He had served in various capacities under various heads from the colonial times to the present. Crime for him was a kind of jigsaw puzzle, and he believed that there was a law to it – a law of crime – a law of criminal behaviour – and he believed that if you looked hard enough you could see this law operating in even the smallest gestures. He was interested in people; in their behaviour; in their words, gestures, fantasies, gait: but only as a part of this jigsaw puzzle. He had read a lot and was interested in the various professions – law, politics, medicine, teaching – but only as part of his one consuming interest. He was looking for that one image which contained the clue, the law of a particular crime. From there he could work out the exact circumstances, to the minutest details, and he hardly ever failed.

He had no illusions about his work: he had put this knowledge in the service of whatever power happened to be in the land, and he never took an attitude. Thus he had served the colonial regime with the same relentless unsparing energy that he did an independent African government, and he would serve as faithfully whatever would follow. He was neutral, and his awesome power over politicians, professionals, businessmen, petty criminals, all that, arose from this neutrality in the service of a law. His secret ambition was one day to set up a private practice in detective work so that, like a lawyer or a priest, his services could be hired by anybody.