Weep Not Child (19 page)

The headmaster said something to the two officers who immediately withdrew.

‘Sit down, my boy.’

Njoroge, whose knees had already failed him, gladly sank into the chair.

The headmaster looked at him with compassionate eyes. He continued, ‘I’m sorry to hear this about your family.’

Njoroge watched the missionary’s face and lips. His own face did not change, but Njoroge listened keenly with clenched teeth.

‘You’re wanted at home. It’s a sad business…but whatever your family may have made you do or vow in the past, remember Christ is there at the door, knocking, waiting to be admitted. That’s the path we’ve tried to make you follow. We hope you’ll not disappoint us.’ The headmaster sounded as if he would cry.

But when Njoroge went to the car, he realised that the headmaster had not given him a clue as to what his family had done. His words of comfort had served only to increase Njoroge’s torment.

He would never forget his experience in the post. That particular homeguard post was popularly known as the House of Pain. The day following his arrival in the post he was called into a small room. Two European officers were present. One had a red beard.

‘What’s your name?’ the red beard asked, while the grey eyes looked at him ferociously.

‘Njo-ro-ge.’

‘How old are you?’

‘I think nineteen or thereabouts.’

‘Sema affande!’ one of the homeguards outside the small room shouted.

‘Affande.’

‘Have you taken the oath?’

‘No!’

‘Sema affende!’ barked the same homeguard.

‘No. Affendi.’

‘How many have you taken?’

‘I said none affendi!’

The blow was swift. It blinded him so that he saw darkness. He had not seen the grey eyes rise.

‘Have you taken the oath?’

‘I-am-a-schoolboy-affendi,’ he said, automatically lifting his hands to his face.

‘How many oaths have you taken?’

‘None, Sir.’

Another blow. Tears rolled down his cheeks in spite of himself. He remembered the serenity of his school. It was a lost paradise.

‘Do you know Boro?’

‘He’s my – brother–’

‘Where is he?’

‘I – don’t – know–’

Njoroge lay on the dusty floor. The face of the grey eyes had turned red. He never once spoke except to call him Bloody Mau Mau. A few seconds later Njoroge was taken out by the two homeguards at the door. He was senseless. He was covered with blood where the hobnailed shoes of the grey eyes had done their work.

He woke up from the coma late in the night. He heard a woman screaming in a hut not far from the one in which he lay. Could it be Njeri? Or Nyokabi? He shuddered to think about it. He longed to see them all once again before he died. For he thought this was the end. Perhaps death was not bad at all. It sent you into a big sleep from which you never awoke to the living fears, the dying hopes, the lost visions.

They had not finished with him. He was in the room the next day. What would he do if they asked him the same questions again? Tell a lie? Would they leave him alone if he said yes to every question? He doubted it. His body was swollen all over. But the worst thing for him was the fact he was still in the dark about all this affair.

‘You are Njoroge?’

‘y-e-e-e-s.’

‘Have you taken the oath?’ All eyes turned to him. Njoroge hesitated for a moment. He noticed that Mr Howlands was also present. The grey eyes took the momentary hesitation and said, ‘Mark, you tell us the truth. If you tell the truth, we shall let you go.’

The pain in his body came and asked him to say
Yes
. But he instinctively said
No
, withdrawing a few steps to the door. Nobody touched him.

‘Who murdered Jacobo?’ Mr Howlands asked for the first time.

For a time, Njoroge was shaken all over. He thought he was going to be sick.

‘Murdered?’ he hoarsely whispered in utter disbelief. And all of a sudden a strong desire to know if Mwihaki was safe caught him. He for a moment forgot that he was addressing his enemies.

The white men closely watched him.

‘Yes. Murdered.’

‘By whom?’

‘You’ll tell us that.’

‘Me, Sir? But–’

‘Yes. You’ll tell us.’

Mr Howlands rose and came to Njoroge. He was terrible to look at. He said, ‘I’ll show you.’ He held Njoroge’s private parts with a pair of pincers and started to press tentatively.

‘You’ll be castrated like your father.’

Njoroge screamed.

‘Tell us. Who really sent you to collect information in Jacobo’s house about…?’

Njoroge could not hear; the pain was so bad. And yet the man was speaking. And whenever he asked a question, he pressed harder.

‘You know your father says he murdered Jacobo.’

He still screamed. Mr Howlands watched him. Then he saw the boy raise his eyes and arms as if in supplication before he became limp and collapsed on the ground. Mr Howlands looked down on the boy and then at the officers and walked out. The red beard and the grey eyes laughed derisively.

Njoroge was not touched again, and when he became well a few days later, he and his two mothers were released.

The hut in which he had been put was dark. Ngotho could not tell day or night. For him, darkness and light were the same thing and time was a succession of nothingness. He tried to sleep on his sides but only his buttocks were safe. So from day to day he remained in the same sitting posture. But then sleep would not come to relieve him. He wanted to forget his life. For behind him, he was conscious only of failure.

The awareness that he had failed his children had always shadowed him. Even before this calamity befell him, life for him had become meaningless, divorced as he had been from what he valued.

In spite of his pain, however, he never regretted the death of Jacobo. In fact, immediately after Jacobo’s death, Ngotho felt grateful. This was an act of divine justice. For a day or two he had walked upright only later to hear that his son Kamau was arrested in connection with the murder. For a day and a half he had remained irresolute. But at night he knew what to do. The Gikuyus say, ‘We shall not give the hyena twice.’ Now since the white man had reversed the tribal law and cried, ‘A tooth for a tooth’, it was better for Ngotho to offer his old tooth that had failed to bite deep into anything. But Ngotho could never tell where he had found courage to walk into the DO’s office and admit that he had killed Jacobo. It was a confession that had shocked the whole village.

And Ngotho had now for days been tortured in all manner of ways, yet would tell nothing beyond the fact that he had killed Jacobo.

Mr Howlands had, as was the usual practice with government agents and white men, taken the law into his own hands. He was determined to elicit all the information from the man. So he had Ngotho beaten from day to day. For Mr Howlands was determined to conquer and reduce Ngotho to submission.

Ngotho, who had worked for him and had thwarted his
will, would not now escape from him. For Ngotho had become for him a symbol of evil that now stood in his path.

And indeed he became mad where Ngotho was concerned. Even the homeguards who worked with him feared to be present when the DO was eliciting information from this man.

But Ngotho had stuck to his story.

Njoroge had always been a dreamer, a visionary who consoled himself faced by the difficulties of the moment by a look at a better day to come. Before he started school, he had once been lent to his distant uncle to help him in looking after cattle. The cattle had troubled him much. But instead of crying like other children, he had sat on a tree and wished he had been at school. For that would end such troubles. And for an hour he had seen himself grown up and at school. Meanwhile the cattle had eaten a good portion of a
shamba
and his uncle had to send him home immediately.

But all these experiences now came to Njoroge as shocks that showed him a different world from that he had believed himself living in. For these troubles seemed to have no end, to have no cure. At first these had a numbing effect so that he did not seem to feel. All he knew was that his father and his now only brother were in trouble and he himself was not at school.

But even when his mind became clear, the old fear came back and haunted him. His family was about to break and he was powerless to arrest the fall. So he did not want to contemplate the fact that his father could have committed the murder. He did not even talk with Nyokabi or Njeri about it. And they perhaps understood him because they never tried to force it on him. Only one evening when every fire had gone out and voices in the village had died did his mother try to speak to him.

‘Njoroge.’ The voice did not sound like hers.

‘Yes, Mother.’ He feared her next word as he slightly held his breath. But she could not proceed. Njoroge could hear constant sniffs as if Nyokabi was unsuccessfully trying to suppress sobbing. He let his breath go. He felt a painful relief.

However, he could not all the time hold himself from thinking. The image of the murdered chief as he had seen him in his home came to his mind. Everybody and everything for him had a stamped image of the chief. And this image came to represent that which had robbed him of victory when the door to success had been opened.

Only once did he think of Mwihaki. That was the night his mother had tried to tell him something. But he thought of her with guilt. He felt as if it was his connection with her that had somehow brought all this ill luck. He wanted to shout to his mother across the night,
It’s I who have brought all this on to you
. He hated himself without knowing why and then hated the chief all the more.

Later this feeling became so oppressive that one night he left home. It was a quiet night and everyone had gone to sleep. Njoroge was long after to wonder how this courage had come to him. He walked towards the old house of the chief, clenching his fists as if ready to fight. The ghost of the chief was there to lead the way. And he followed it because he wanted to put an end to this oppression. He would revenge himself on the chief and strike a blow for his family. But when he reached the deserted household, the ghost had transformed itself into Mwihaki. He tried to hit her but soon realised that what he wanted was to hold her and together escape from the calamity around. She was his last hope. And then Njoroge woke up from what he thought was a frightening dream. He heard the sound of feet beyond the hedge that surrounded the house. He had forgotten that the deserted place was still guarded.

He quietly retraced his steps. In the morning he did not want to look his mother in the face because even to him the truth of his position was frightening.

That day, for the first time, he wept with fear and guilt. And he did not pray.

Nyokabi and Njeri sat in a corner. Njoroge could see tears flowing down their cheeks. It depressed him because as a child he had been told that if women wept when a man was ill it showed that the patient had no hope. But even as Njoroge looked at the distorted face of his father, he had no strength to stop or soothe the weeping women. For the first time Njoroge was face to face with a problem to which ‘tomorrow’ was no answer. It was this realisation that made him feel weak and see the emergency in a new light.

Ngotho struggled to one side and for the first time opened his eyes. Nyokabi and Njeri quickly moved nearer the bed. Ngotho’s eyes roamed around the hut. They rested on each of the women in turn, Njeri first. He opened his mouth as if to speak. Instead a round tear rolled down his face. He wanted to rub it away. But as he could not lift his hand, he let the tear run down unchecked. Two others followed and Ngotho turned his eyes and rested them on Njoroge. He seemed to struggle with his memory. He then made an effort to speak.

‘You are here…’

‘Yes, Father.’

This rekindled hope in Njoroge. He felt a cold security when he saw that his father was still in command.

This was Ngotho’s first speech since they moved him from the homeguard post, four days before. Njoroge was long to remember the day. Ngotho had to be supported by a man at either side. His face had been deformed by small wounds and
scars. His nose was cleft into two and his legs could only be dragged. For four days now his mouth and eyes had remained shut.