A Grain of Wheat (25 page)

‘Did you ever dream like that?’

‘Perhaps, sometimes,’ he started vaguely, but she quickly seized his answer.

‘And it came true. You dreamt – yes, I knew it could come true for some people. I used to have so many of those dreams, and all so real,’ she said, her voice and eyes and face digging into the past.

‘It happens … happens with … eh, people … when they are young.’ He risked the general comment.

‘It was there,’ she went on, ‘when my brother talked. My heart travelled with his words. I dreamt of sacrifice to save so many people. And although sometimes I feared, I wanted those days to come. Even when I got married, the dream did not die. I longed to make my husband happy, yes, but I also prepared myself to stand by him when the time came. I could carry his sheath and as fast as he shot into the enemy, I would feed him with arrows. If danger came and he fell, he would fall into my arms and I would bring him home safely to myself.’

He saw the light at the bottom of the pool dancing in her eyes. He felt her dark power over him.

‘Yet when they took him away, I did nothing, and when he finally came home, tired, I could no longer make him happy.’

She was still young, vulnerable; but it was he who was scurrying
with hands and feet at the bottom of the silent pool. It was terrible for him, this struggle: he did not want to drown.

‘I sometimes wonder,’ she went on after a pause, ‘whether Wambuku dreamt. And yet, she – she – you remember her?’

‘Wambuku?’

‘Yes.’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘But you must. Don’t you remember the woman you tried to save, the woman being beaten in the trench?’

‘Yes … yes.’ He could not recall her face except her dress torn by the whip and the impression of agony.

‘She died.’

‘Died?’

‘Yes. Later. People say she was pregnant, you see, about three or four months. She had been Kihika’s woman before he ran away to the forest. She never forgave him. But somehow she hoped he would come back to her and rarely went with anybody. But when Kihika was arrested and hanged on a tree, something strange came over her. For a few days she never left her home, and when she did so, eventually, well, she only destroyed herself with soldiers and homeguards, any man. But she refused, so it is said, the advances of this particular homeguard, who got his chance for revenge during the trench. She never recovered from that beating and died three months later, in pregnancy.’

She took out a handkerchief to rub something from her eyes. Just then her son came running into the room. He briefly looked at the man and then ran to his mother’s knees.

‘Why are you crying?’ he blurted out to his mother, and looked at Mugo with open hostility. Mumbi pressed the boy to herself as if she would protect him from all harm and destructive knowledge. She tried to smile and whispered words to him.

‘Run back to your grandmother, quick. You don’t want to leave her alone, do you? She may be stolen by an Irimu and then what will you say?’

The boy glanced at Mugo and back at Mumbi and ran out of the house.

‘You might say she died for my brother,’ Mumbi resumed, as if there had been no interruption, but her voice was less intense, was more hesitant. ‘A sacrifice…. And then there was Njeri.’

‘Who was she?’

‘She was also a friend, my friend. Wambuku and Njeri and I often went to the train together. But how could we tell that Njeri’s heart really ached for my brother? She often quarrelled and fought with both men and other girls. None of us, however, knew that she had secret dreams. Anyway, not until she ran away to the forest to fight at Kihika’s side. She was shot dead in a battle, soon after Kihika’s death.’

Mugo’s face was a shade darker, his lower lip had slightly dropped. He did not want to look at those things. He was already at the door when Mumbi’s startled voice called him, jerking him back to the present. He stood at the door recollecting himself with difficulty. As he slowly turned round, he felt ashamed that he could still be powerless before his impulses. Mumbi too had stood up and was barely able to cover her own surprise and confusion.

‘I have never talked these things to anybody,’ she said, sitting down again. ‘You make me feel able to talk and look at these things … strange, now that I remember…. Do you know my brother once, no, he said it often when angry with his friends, you make me remember it so well, he said that if he had something really secret and important, he would only confide in somebody like you.’

Mugo stood still, staring at her with vacant eyes. Leave me alone, he wanted to tell her, but he only whispered in a barely audible voice:

‘These things … painful …’

Mugo sat down, succumbing to her seductive power, weak before her eyes and voice. He waited while she struggled with words.

‘I wanted to talk to you about my husband,’ she said bluntly, looking straight at him. Gradually the defiant challenge in her eyes melted into silent, almost submissive pleading. Her parted lips trembled slightly.

‘I want him because, because I want him above everything else,’ she said. After a pause she seemed to ease. She asked: ‘You know about the child?’

Suddenly Mugo wanted to hurt her intensely. He revelled in this mad desire to humiliate her, to make her grovel in the dust: why did she try to drag him into her life, into everybody’s life?

‘Your husband told me.’

‘He told you?’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘Last night.’

‘Everything?’

‘Everything … the child … Karanja.’ He spoke bluntly, inwardly laughing with pain as he saw her wince, once or twice. The house was silent. Mugo’s eyes were hostile. Even if she wept openly, he would not leave, he would not move, and he would not say a word of comfort. But the next minute Mumbi broke into the charged atmosphere, excitedly, as if she had just remembered something big and important.

‘Did he tell you about the house, I mean our two huts? Did he?’

‘House – which house?’ he asked, genuinely puzzled.

‘Where we lived before they took him away – aah, I see he did not tell you,’ she went on with a sad triumph. ‘Who could have told him but me? But he does not want to know….’

Mugo remembered that those who did not move into the new village in time were ejected from their old homes; their huts were burnt down.

‘Even now, at night, in bed,’ she started. ‘I remember the red flames. There were two huts. One belonged to my mother, the other was mine.
They
told us to remove our bedding and clothes and utensils. They splashed some petrol on the grass-thatch of my mother’s hut. I then idly thought this was unnecessary as the grass was dry. Anyway, they poured petrol on the dry thatch. The sun burnt hot. My mother sat on a stool by the pile of things from our huts and I stood beside her. I had a Gikoi on my head. The leader of the homeguards struck a match and threw it at the roof. It did not light, and the others laughed at him. They shouted and encouraged him. One of them tried to take the matches from him to demonstrate how it could be done. It became a game between them. At the fourth or fifth attempt the
roof caught fire. Dark and blue smoke tossed from the roof, and the flames leapt to the sky.
They
went to my hut. I could not bear to see the game repeated, so I shut my eyes. I wanted to scream, but I must have lost my voice because no sound left my throat. I suddenly remembered my mother beside me, and I wanted to take her from the scene, to prevent her from seeing it all to the end. For those huts meant much to her because she had built them after Waruhiu, her husband in the Rift Valley, had divorced her from his side. Anyway, she pushed my hands away and she shook her head slightly and she went on staring at the flames. The roofs were cracking. I remember the pain as the cracking noise repeated in my heart. Soon the roofs of the huts fell in, one after the other, with a roar. I heard my mother gasp at the first roar. But she never let her eyes from the sight…. Something gave way in my heart, something in me cracked when I saw our home fall.’

The breakup at the old Thabai Village followed the fall of Mahee Police Post to Kihika and his band of Forest Fighters. The blow at Mahee had incensed the government. It is said that the black man in Nyeri, Mwangi Matemo, who, in a forgetful moment of enthusiasm, heard the news of the capture over the radio was instantly taken to Manyani, the most famous and the largest concentration camp in the country. The item had been censored; but the radio only confirmed what people all over Gikuyuland knew. The government retaliated. All African trading centres like Rung’ei were to be closed ‘in the interests of peace and security’. People were to move into fewer and less-scattered villages. At first this was a distant rumour; people shrugged their shoulders in disbelief and went on mourning the fate of those who had gone to detention or to the forest: would they ever return? Thomas Robson, then a District Officer, held barazas in every ridge, giving people two months within which to demolish the old and build new homes.

Mumbi was depressed because there was no man of the house. In the end, she tied a belt around her waist and took on a man’s work. Together with Wangari, they cleared the site. Karanja came and helped them draw the plan of the hut on the ground. He was quiet and distant, but Mumbi was too busy to notice the reserve of a man
undergoing a crisis. Within a few days the site was ready. Next she went to her father’s small forest and cut down black wattle trees for posts and poles. These were days when no smoke rose from any of the huts in Thabai because men and women only returned to their homes with the dark. And the following day they would be back to the site: overnight children grew into men, women put on trousers; but the babies strapped on the backs of their mothers kept on howling for food and attention. Kariuki left school every day at four and ran home to help his sister with the building.

Men, finding women like Mumbi on the roof hammering in the nails, stopped to tease them: it was all because a woman – a new Wangu – in England – had been crowned: what good ever came from a woman’s rule?

‘Aah, but that is not true,’ the women would reply at times, glad for the interruption. ‘Doesn’t Governor Baring, who rules Kenya, have a penis?’

‘Aah, it’s still the woman’s shauri. See how you women have sent all the men to detention for their penises to rot there, unwilling husbands to Queen Elizabeth?’

‘And to the forests, too,’ the women would burst out, the raillery turning into bitterness. And without another word the men would hurry back to their own sites to continue the metallic cries of the hammer and the nail.

Karanja’s intermittent help, though added to Kariuki’s, was not enough, and Mumbi’s hut had yet to be mudded when the two months’ grace ended. Mumbi and Wangari stayed on in their old huts, preparing to mud the walls of their new hut in a day or two. But on the second day, the homeguards arrived. Mumbi opened the door, saw their eager faces, and rushed back inside, to prepare Wangari for the truth.

‘I knew they would come, child,’ Wangari wearily said, and started removing utensils and other things from the doomed place.

The homeguards went away solemnly as if they had just performed a ritual act; their eyes searched for approval on Robson’s face. Robson drove off. There were more huts to burn down and the day was short.

Before night fell, the last walls of the old Thabai Village had tumbled
down: mud, soot, and ashes marked the spots where the various huts once stood.

‘On that night my mother and I slept in our new unfinished hut. My father broke the curfew order and came in the dark to take us to his own place. But my mother-in-law refused to go and I could not leave her alone. The roof was thatched with grass, but the walls were without mud. All night long cold wind rushed through the empty walls and lashed us on every side. I had wrapped myself with an old blanket and a sisal-sack and still I shivered. I don’t think I closed my eyes even once. I knew my mother was not asleep, either, but we did not talk. Really, it was a long night.

‘From that day, Karanja came to our place often and asked after our health, and sometimes he brought us food. He was quiet, though, and he seemed troubled by something. At first I did not notice this; I did not even particularly notice that his visits were becoming more and more frequent. I was too busy nursing my mother, for after our old home was burnt down, she kept on complaining of aches in the stomach, in the head, in the joints. One day he found me splitting wood outside. He stood there without speaking and only looked at me. I hate being watched when I am working, because I feel uneasy and I cannot control my hands properly. So I told him: “Come and help a woman split the wood.” He took the axe from me and did the work. And still he did not speak. “Come inside for a workman’s cup of tea,” I told him. As I bent down to collect the pieces of wood, he put out his hand and touched me on the head and whispered: Mumbi. Anyway, I looked up quickly and saw he wanted to tell me something. I was frightened. You see, Karanja had once proposed to me, a week or so after I had already accepted to marry Gikonyo. I then had laughed him out of that passion and reminded him that Gikonyo was his close friend. He never proposed to me again and he had kept on coming to visit my husband. He must now have seen the fright in my eyes, for he went away immediately without saying anything. He did not even look back. I suppose if he had, I would have called him back, for I was struck with remorseful thoughts: something perhaps weighed heavy in his heart. Besides, he had been kind to me and my mother as befits a friend.

‘He did not come again. Soon after this, Kihika was caught at the edge of Kinenie Forest and later hanged on a tree. Do you know that my father, once a warrior whose name spread from Nyeri to Kabete, urinated on his legs? He wept the night long, like a child, while Wanjiku, my real mother, comforted him. From that day, the two were broken parents. I believe that but for their faith and hope in Kariuki, they would have died. I also became sick and for two nights I would vomit out whatever I ate or drank. And then, as you know, the punishment came. Thabai was going to pay for my brother’s actions. You know about the trench. At least the beginning. It was soon after you were arrested trying to save Wambuku, that I first heard Karanja had joined the homeguards. I could not believe it. He had been a friend of Kihika and Gikonyo; they had taken the oath together; how could he betray them?