Petals of Blood (51 page)

‘And the directors of the Kenya branch were Mzigo, Chui, and Kimeria. I could hardly accept this twist of fate . . . I don’t even know how I came back here . . . But I started thinking . . . Kimeria, who made his fortune as a Home Guard transporting bodies of Mau Mau killed by the British, was still prospering . . . Kimeria, who had ruined my life and later humiliated me by making me sleep with him during our journey to the city . . . this same Kimeria was one of those who would benefit from the new economic progress of Ilmorog. Why? Why? I asked myself? Why? Why? Had he not sinned as much as me? That’s how one night I fully realized this law. Eat or you are eaten. If you have a cunt – excuse my language, but it seems the curse of Adam’s Eve on those who are born with it – if you are born with this hole, instead of it being a source of pride, you are doomed to either marrying
someone or else being a whore. You eat or you are eaten. How true I have found it. I decided to act, and I quickly built this house . . . Nothing would I ever let for free . . . I have many rooms, many entrances and four yards . . . I have hired young girls . . . it was not hard . . . I promised them security . . . and for that . . . they let me trade their bodies . . . what’s the difference whether you are sweating it out on a plantation, in a factory or lying on your back, anyway? I have various types for various types of men. Some prefer short ones, tall ones, motherly ones, religious ones, sympathetic ones, rude ones, tough ones, a different nationality . . . I have them all here . . . And me? Me too! I have not spared myself . . . It has been the only way I can get my own back on Chui, Mzigo, and Kimeria . . . I go with all of them now . . . I play them against one another . . . It is easy because I only receive them by appointment . . . If there is a clash, the girls . . . they know how to handle the situation . . . and, strange . . . they pay for it . . . they pay for their rivalry to possess me . . . each wants to make me his sole woman . . .

‘As for me, it’s a game . . . of money . . . You eat or you are eaten . . . And now I can go anywhere . . . even to their most expensive clubs . . . they are proud to be seen with me . . . even for one night . . . and they pay for it . . . I have had to be hard . . . It is the only way . . . the only way . . . Look at Abdulla . . . reduced to a fruit seller . . . oranges . . . sheepskins . . . No, I will never return to the herd of victims . . . Never . . . Never . . .’

She ended on a kind of savage screaming tone, as if she was answering doubts inside her. Karega sensed the doubt and now looked at her more intently. There was a hardness on her face that he could not now penetrate. He felt the needle-sharp ruthless truth of her statement: you eat or you are eaten. Had he not seen this since he was forced out of school? Had he not himself lived this truth in Mombasa, Nairobi, on the tea and coffee plantations? On the wheat and sugar estates and in the sugar mills? This was the society they were building: this was the society they had been building since Independence, a society in which a black few, allied to other interests from Europe, would continue the colonial game of robbing others of
their sweat, denying them the right to grow to full flowers in air and sunlight.

And suddenly it was not her that he was looking at, seeing, but countless other faces in many other places all over the republic. You eat or you are eaten. You fatten on another, or you are fattened upon. Why? Why? Something in him revolted against this: deep inside, he could not accept the ruthless logic of her position and statement. Either. Or. Either. Or. In a world of beasts of prey and those preyed upon, you either preyed or you remained a victim. But there were some, the many in fact, who could not, who would never acquire the fangs and the claws with which to prey. Yet what was the alternative to the truth she had uttered?

‘No, no,’ he found himself saying. ‘There is another way: there must be other ways.’ And suddenly in that moment, remembering in a flash all the places he had been to, he was clear about the force for which he had been searching, the force that would change things and create the basis of a new order.

‘In this world?’ she asked, half contemptuously.

‘Must we have this world? Is there only one world? Then we must create another world, a new earth,’ he burst out, addressing himself to all the countless faces he had seen and worked with from Kilindini through Central to Western Region.

‘H’m! Another world!’ she murmured.

‘Yes. Another world. A new world,’ he reiterated.

‘We must go!’ Munira suddenly shouted, standing up, He reached for the door and rushed outside, as if driven by a demon.

Karega stood up, walked to the door, and then hesitated and looked back at Wanja.

She had not risen or raised her head. She remained sitting in one place, truly queen of them all under the electric light; her head was bowed slightly and it was as if, under the bluish light of her creation, the wealth she had so accumulated weighed on her heavily, as if the jewelled, rubied cord around her neck was now pulling her and her very shadow to the ground, so that she would not rise to say goodbye, or to shut the door.

Karega went out. He could not find Munira outside but he walked determinedly toward the town centre, the heart of New Ilmorog, where light and smoke and the roar of a distant machine announced that a night shift of workers continued the relay to keep the factory roaring its pride and power over Ilmorog.

In his own place, Munira fell down on the bed and repeated: Another world, a new world. Could it really be true? Was it possible?

1 ~ ‘And what does this rather . . . eeh . . . poetic business mean, Mr Munira?’

Munira leaned over the table to see what the officer was pointing at, what it was that he had picked out of all the things Munira had scribbled. Munira was relieved that after almost nine days of isolation they were now face to face.

‘Oh, a new earth, another world?’ Munira queried in his turn, sitting back on the hard bench, eyeing the officer with immense pity at the earthly film of ignorance that covered his face, making it seem hard and totally removed from what Munira saw as the overriding need for the acceptance of sins and salvation through grace.

‘Yes,’ the officer said, the aloof, tolerant boredom in his eyes. ‘What did it mean to you that night?’

Munira thought a while. He momentarily relived that scene two years back in Wanja’s blue-lit sitting-room on the night of Karega’s sudden return: he felt as if the jewelled, miniskirted body seeming so far away, so lonesome, and yet to him now carrying the power of satanic evil, would raise the head and pierce into his weakness, his fragile defence. It’s me, it’s me, oh Lord, he heard an inner voice calling, and he felt more secure and able to face the police officer. It was now his tenth day in the remand prison. He had been expecting this second visit with some dread, true, but at times feverishly looking forward to it, to his release from bondage, and yet when the time came for a second encounter he was surprised, wanted to put off the final confrontation to another day. After the usual breakfast of porridge in enamelled tin cups, he saw that instead of locking him back inside the cell or else letting him loose in the exercise yard as had been the
established pattern, the policeman was taking him straight to the bare desk and walls that they called the office. Munira protested that he had not completed the document but this protest was faintly voiced because he was rather tired of the whole business. Inspector Godfrey had ignored his demurs, and had gone ahead with questions, perfunctorily turning over the pages of his prison notes.

‘This . . . eeh . . . this new world . . . what was it? You keep on referring to it . . .’

Munira tried. It had always seemed clear to himself except when he tried to communicate the vision to somebody else. And now, with mounting despair, he realized how difficult the task before him was: how was it possible to impress on a man administering the corrupt laws of a corrupt world, the overwhelming need and necessity for higher laws, pure, eternal, absolute, unchanging? How was it that even the wisest in the kingdom of this world could not see what was open even to a child? The tune that had altered his life and outlook vibrated at the nerve centre of his spiritual being:

He wanted to sing it loud, but instead he found himself talking calmly about his new-found land.

‘It was not a sudden thing, you understand. It was that the words coming out of his mouth, amidst that perfumed squalor, and this after five years of exile and wandering, were strangely disquieting. Out of the mouth of babes, saith the Lord. And uttered after that story, after the tortured self-revelation of a sinful woman. I believe now that the word of God is revealed to us not in a context of our choosing. I had heard those selfsame words from Ironmonger, from my mother, from my wife, but they had never really rung a bell. A new earth. Another world. I kept on turning them over in my heart and mind. I couldn’t thereafter drink Theng’eta in peace. My body thirsted for it out of a five-year habit, but my heart was not there. At the bottom of Wanja’s story and experience was an injustice that did not make sense.
I knew her story now and yet . . . yet . . . Teaching became even more tedious. How could I continue teaching them how to fit into a world I was beginning to reject, a world that was fundamentally illogical and evil? How could I explain this: that Ironmonger was replaced by Cambridge Fraudsham, that Fraudsham was replaced by Chui, that Chui owned a factory in Ilmorog, that he was one of Wanja’s lovers, that he sold beer, with a slogan that I had first invented? How . . . how . . . how could it be that Wanja had run away from Kimeria only to fall more fatally into his arms? He too was now her lover. And Mzigo . . . and Karega . . . and the breaking up of the Ilmorog that I knew? Nothing made sense. Abdulla had fought for independence . . . he was now selling oranges and sheepskins to tourists and drinking Theng’eta to forget the forced demolition of his shop. Yes. Nothing made sense. Education. Work. My life. Accidents. I was an accident. I was a mistake, doomed to a spectator’s role outside a window from a high building. I started going to church. The New Ilmorog Anglican Church was built with donations from Christians in Kenya, and from churches abroad, and it was an impressive affair, only a few yards away from the ashes of the once proud homestead of Mwathi wa Mugo, now, as you can see, an archaeological museum. Rev. Jerrod Brown was the head and the spiritual shepherd of this New Anglican parish community in Ilmorog. There were many cars outside: all the makes from all over the world. I would listen to him preach from prepared texts, admonishing people about drinking, too many divorces, too fast driving, the need to give to the church, and other sins of omission and commission. Nothing had changed from the content of the prayers except that for the ‘King’ they now put ‘President’. Once I wanted to go and announce to him: I am so and so, son of so and so, whom you once turned away from your house hungry. Now I am not hungry for earthly food, I am burning in a hell of molten fire – help me. But remembering my experience in his house in Blue Hills, I thought he might be equally mean with his spiritual diet. I continued going to church. I was weighed down by a sense of guilt, as if I had contributed to Wanja’s degradation and the evil of the world, and I felt a tremendous need for forgiveness. Once I even wrote to my wife. I said that I was beginning to see that her way was indeed the right
way. Walk your way all the way, I had ended it, and then suddenly tore it up. I would occasionally join Abdulla where he was selling oranges and sheepskins and mushrooms to passers-by on the Trans-Africa Road and tourists. Maimed. Wanja had once said that we were all like Abdulla but instead of our limbs it was our souls that were maimed.

‘It was at this time we heard the terrible news: the lawyer had been murdered. He had been taken from a big hotel and taken a mile or so from the Blue Hills and he was shot and left for the hyenas to eat. For the first time in a long while Karega, Wanja, Abdulla and Njuguna met. We had not planned it: it just happened that we all strolled to Njuguna’s iron-roofed house. His wife gave us milk and nobody touched it. We talked about everything else but the murder of the lawyer. Except Njuguna. The words seemed to just escape his lips: ‘And it was on the same pass where we once trod on our way to the city.’

‘Nobody answered him. How, I kept asking myself, how could they murder a man who was only a help to the poor? He had contributed to every Harambee effort in the land: he had wealth, but he did try to share it out without regard to class, religion and tribe. How? Why? We all dispersed to our different hovels and I asked myself: How could I let this mistake continue, standing outside the gate of things, and I a teacher? I was on the verge of a decision. And that Sunday I did not go to church. I suddenly hated the very sound of Jerrod’s voice, his sermons and his prayers. I walked from my house toward Ilmorog ridge, ready to end the accident by another accident. The game could not continue. And then suddenly I saw the group. They were dressed in white kanzus and they were drumming. They were surrounded by curious children, a few women and men. I stopped to listen. She was now preaching and her voice cut into me: We have all sinned and come short of the glory of the Lord. I could not believe my eyes: it was Lillian, transformed Lillian leading a group of men and women in prayers and sermons and speaking in tongues. She talked of a new earth, another world, that knew not classes and clans, that levelled the poor and the wealthy, once they accepted the eternal law of God. Not churches; not learning; not positions; not good works:
just acceptance, in faith, and behold: a new earth and a new heaven. I trembled. It was too simple. Yet, yet what else could be true, could make sense? We have all sinned and come short of the glory of God. She spoke with all the power of many voices gone, of many voices to come, of a world to be. Only accept: only accept: my heart beat with her voice and the authority of joy behind it. Not learning, not wealth, not good works, only accept. The law. The eternal law. Will you now accept this new life with Christ? It was as if the question was directed at me: It was as if she could read my heart. How strange that Lillian should have crossed my path at that very day, that particular hour. I looked at her, at her eyes, her transformation and I asked myself: whence from this power in her who only the other day was using the same religion as part of the amorous game? In that second, everything was revealed to me. And I truly beheld a new earth, now that Christ was my personal saviour. He would level mountains and valleys and would wrestle Satan to the ground and conquer the evil that is this world. New life with Christ in Christ. I accepted the law. My knees trembled. I humbled myself to the ground and cried: “I accept, I accept.” I felt tears of gratitude and joy. My years of agony and doubt and pursuit of earthly pleasures were over . . .’