One Day I Will Write About This Place (6 page)

“Why?” I ask.

“When you drown, you drown.”

I am quiet for a while, then I say, “But, but… they were an advanced civilization; they used science.”

Wambui is fifteen, and she is our new nanny. She is round and hard, with round hard breasts. She comes from Dundori, where her parents got land after Independence and they grow potatoes. She likes killing chickens. She cuts their heads off and lets them run around and around and around. She laughs, and we laugh with her. We love her. She can carry all we throw at her, and she is much more than we have known. We are afraid of her.

One of her front teeth is cracked, and is stained brown. Too much fluoride in Dundori water. We have a teacher we call Fluorosis, because all his teeth are brown. Wambui’s face is so angled and certain, her smile so crooked and mischievous, that she is the first nanny we have had whom we cannot control. It is clear she can go further than any of us, in any direction, good or bad, violent or funny. Her smile is a sharp lopsided V against a smooth black face—­no brown or red in her skin at all. She has two shocking interruptions: sharp conical bones on each cheek, pushing her face forward and sliding down to her jaw. These and the patches of darker skin that ring her wide round eyes sometimes give her face a feverish look. She likes to read Longman Pacesetter novelettes.

One day, a few months ago, I was sitting on the veranda and I overheard Wambui on the phone. She was laughing breathily, and saying, “Ohhhh. I am mashure. I am not young. Ohhhh. I am very mashure.” Her voice sounded funny and nasal, and she kept laughing hah hah hah hah… laughing fake, like a woman on
Love Boat
or
Hart to Hart.
“Ohhhh,” her voice high and shrill like a TV and fake, “I am verry prrretty,” she said, in English. Her feet were drawing maps on the ground and she was looking uncommonly shy. I burst out laughing.

She put down the phone and shouted, “Nitakuchinja kama jogoo.”

I will slaughter you like a cockerel.

One day President Moi drives past our school in his motorcade. He stops. He donates a whole small truck of Orbit chewing gum. We giggle at his accent.

The morning after Moi’s visit, the whole school is repainted. We are still chewing his gum. Orbit chewing gum. Gum is banned in school, but Mrs. Gichiri says nothing. Andazi, the gardener, sulks the whole day, saying this sort of thing never happened when white people were in charge. We are told that the president owns the company.

Starting today, our school is no longer Lena Moi Primary School; it is a newly painted Moi Primary School. All the old rubber stamps and exercise books are collected, all stationery, anything with the word
Lena
disappears.

Many new kids start arriving in the school. Kalenjin kids, at every level, every class. Some of the richer families, the Kenyan Asian families, move their kids to the private schools abandoned by many of the white settler families ten years ago. Greensteds. St. Andrews Turi. They want to do British system exams, are worried.

My father does not believe in private schools for Kenyan citizens. He believes it is up to us to make things work. I would not mind going to do GCEs. The local British-curriculum school has a swimming pool and horse riding, and is called Greensteds. Life there sounds very much like an Enid Blyton novel. Ekya Shah, who was briefly my best friend, went there, but hasn’t spoken to me since he left. He hiccups his consonants now, like a proper Brit.

Wambui takes us to visit Railway quarters one day. The good thing about Wambui is that she takes us to places our parents or school would not approve of. She has friends there, who live in a row of one-­room houses with green doors. Clothes flap on the line directly above them, and other clothes are being washed at a tap by young girls and wives.

The buildings are very old, some of the oldest in the country outside the coast, as old as the railway, the origin and spine of what we now call Kenya. Built by the British in 1901, it opened up East Africa for proper conquest. Today, the railway is collapsing. In the 1970s, some tycoons close to Kenyatta wanted to make money from trucking, to break the grip the Luo had over railway jobs. They let the railway collapse. Fungi spread on the open pipes, and green tears stream down peeling walls. A toy safari-­rally car leans against a wall streaked with the charcoal scribbles of children.

It is made from wire shaped into the frame of a car and held together with thin strips cut from the inner tube of a tire. The car is complete with a long steering wheel for a child to grip and run in any direction, making hooting and growling sounds. Railway children make the best wire cars—­crouched and grimacing, with steering that makes the wheels turn; with paper mudguards, number plates, and springy aerials thrust from the back of the car. When the railway was being built, in the first few years of the twentieth century, the British fought a war with the Nandi, who were stealing copper wire.

In between some of the ceilings, under the old corrugated iron roof, young men keep carrier pigeons, and their feathers are clustered in the roof drains. Jimmy comes here a lot. He likes carrier pigeons, and dogs, and has friends here.

One woman is sprawled on the grass, elbow crossed over her eyes, sleeping, her whole body receiving the sun. The smell of fish, dry fish, cooking fish, and boiling, bitter green vegetables is everywhere. It smells like a foreign country—­a hot and languid place. Dried fish from Lake Victoria. Many railway employees come from all over East Africa. The railway was once the East African Railways, but Idi Amin became the Ugandan president, and Mwalimu Julius Nyerere is a communist, so the East African community collapsed. To re-create Kampala and Kisumu heat in these highlands, these women keep food boiling on stoves, and sit inside steaming courtyards and small rooms.

Two women’s heads are held at the knee by their hairdressers, legs wide open. There is a pile of discarded pea pods,
sukuma-­wiki
stems, and potato peels next to the tap, covered with a large web of slime. Brackish, soapy water glides into an open drain where ducklings swim. Ducks with mossy, muddy bellies wander about. One of the women, in a blue and white
kikomi
outfit, starts to talk to Wambui in Dholuo.

“Who is Engine?” asks Wambui.

“Ai? You speak Luo?” Ciru asks Wambui.

“I used to speak it well, but I forgot much of it.”

Ciru and I look at each other. When Wambui speaks Luo, her body language changes. Her face becomes more animated, does more moving than her arms; her mouth pouts, her arms rest akimbo. Wambui is awkward in English, crude and ungrammatical in Kiswahili.

“He! Engine ni mwingine,” says the woman in Kiswahili. Engine is something else.

“Kwani?” Wambui asks.

“I have never seen someone like that one. Chu chu chuuu all the time. He—­huyo, he has no brakes when he is with a woman.”

A child runs past roaring like a rally car as he steers his wire Datsun 160J. We laugh.

“He is an engineer—­his mother was a Goan, from India. His father was a rich Maasai. He has women all over the railway line.”

All the women start laughing. The sleeping woman wakes up suddenly and stands slowly, her
lesso
falling off. She reties it, and I see twin strings of beads running around her waist. Wambui told me beads are for making men happy in bed. I am not sure how. Wambui is winking at Ciru. Those two have secrets, and I don’t like it. I miss Cleophas.

The woman stands. She is not young. In her sixties maybe. Straight and lean with sharp buttocks outlined against her
lesso,
and very short gray hair, cut like a boy’s.

Time stops for a moment as she walks toward the communal kitchen. Her head is a pot gently placed on a long, straight neck, where it rocks gently from side to side; giant metal loop earrings dance with the sway; hips and buttocks are a pendulum of tight flesh. Her back is perfectly straight.

Wambui turns to Ciru and whispers sharply, “You see, I told you. The best way is to practice by carrying pots on your head.”

To practice what? I have no idea, but I nod hard at them both to pretend I understand. Wambui catches my eye, mid-­nod, and winks. I blush. I cannot wink well. I have practiced a cool wink many times in front of the mirror but can’t get one eye to shut confidently on its own.

I have learned to lift one eyebrow really high, and keep my lips straight, which I like to do in school if somebody says something I think is too stupid for words. I call it my supercilious manner. I have tried to cultivate a sneer, but it is not very good. Wambui has an epic sneer.

There is a guy in my school, called Moses, who can keep one eye low and cool, like Steve Austin in
The Six Million Dollar Man.
Moses’s father owns a nightclub. Girls like him. My nose sweats a lot these days, and my armpits smell, and I wake up at a lot at night all wriggly and hot, like Congo rumba music. I send Wambui my most supercilious eyebrow. She does not even see it—­she is huddled with Ciru, and they are giggling at something.

…

It is dark. Mum and Baba are out. They have gone to State House for a Madaraka Day dance. Baba hates going. Mum likes it, because she can dress up. People from school went for choir at the stadium this morning. They will show the Massed Choir on TV tonight on
Yaliotokea.

Sometimes Wambui talks about going to Amigos Disco. Amigos is famous in Nakuru, and I have a picture of it in my head, gray and silver, full of orange and green polyester shirts and orange bell-­bottoms, bouncing Afros and sweat. Boogie down. Wambui rubs soap on her legs every day after washing us. She tells us stories about about the village, cows, digging with a hoe, maize and beans, hard hands, hunting for pigeons with the barefoot boys, and Mau Mau days. Her grandmother was in the Mau Mau. She knows how to play soccer; she can make and shoot a catapult.

She likes to talk about the corrugated iron township, Boney M., Sister Sledge, Tabu Ley, and Maroon Commandos. When she speaks English, her
r
’s and
l
’s get tangled up, like my hair if I comb it dry. All her
d
’s become merged with
n
’s. All her
b
’s merge with
m
’s. Maloon Commados. M’boney M. She makes us laugh. Idepedence Nday.

It is dark. Chiqy, my baby sister, is asleep. Wambui is plaiting Ciru’s hair in Mum’s chair in the sitting room. I am not happy. I am used to moving from Ciru’s bold girlness to a boyishness that stands behind Jimmy. I don’t have anybody to follow.

I move to the back of the sofas by the windows, which are cool from the night outside. The curtains of the television room are green on white: thick, stately, teeming with life, an ecosystem of snarling flower heads, ecstatic stems and leaves bent forward, like italics.

Now they are putting on Mum’s lipstick and makeup.
Mmmm-­pah.
They keep smacking in front of a small mirror.
Mmmm-­pah.
Sometimes they try on Mum’s shoes and clothes.

The news is over, and now there is a full hour of Independence Day cere­monies on television. Wambui likes
Yaliotokea.

Mp-­ah. M*h.
They still kiss the mirror, and now they are putting on face powder.

Trumpets are blaring on television and groups start to march.
Mp
and
mpr
words. You have to inhale and push enough air down your mouth to make sure that you make a promising
mpr.
Permanent bonds. On headstrong things. Boys. Paper. Stubborn girls. Citizens. Two solid things meet, and one is, or both are, left changed forever.

Imprint. Impress.

Trains and trains of people swarm the screen. Schoolchildren; Salvation Army bands, the navy, the army, teachers’ choirs, traditional singers from all over Kenya, religious groups all marching to the stadium in Nakuru, to sing for the president. It is Madaraka Day, when we got
uhuru,
so every year we sing for the president.

The camera swings, and we see a massive group of people sitting on the soccer pitch in the stadium, waiting for the president. All around are piles of celebrating accessories. Some gleam in the hot sun, like iron roofs: trumpets and drums and shiny uniforms and belt buckles. Different tribes in different nationalizing uniforms that we call traditional. The military people are crisp and beautiful—­there are no straighter lines in Kenya, no whiter whites.

There are also feathered ankle rattles, women in dyed-grass skirts, groups of men wandering around aimlessly drinking sodas, ankle bells rattling and clanking, enormous drums.

There are many whistles. Troops of Scouts called to order by whistles. I am in Kingfisher Patrol. Every year we go and march past Baden-­Powell’s grave in Nyeri. He founded the Boy Scouts and could skin a rabbit with his fingernails. He was buried in Kenya.
Mprr.
Traditional bandleaders with feather and skin hats, and fly whisks sing
mprrrrr
every few minutes to push the song forward. Army and police bands are called to order. Impound. Stamp. Impede. Sta-mpede.

All around, choirs are practicing. The groups are spread on the grass, arranged in three or four lines, according to height—­the tallest at the back, their eyes open in complete earnestness, their eyebrows jostling up and down, men’s chins forced down into their throats to sound bass. “Fuata Nyayo, fuata Nyayo. Tawala, Moi, tawala.”

Rule, Moi, rule.

The women are dressed in
kitenge
print dresses that reach their ankles, with freshly plaited or hot-­combed hair. All the choirs sing with a cartoonish expression, and Wambui mimics them, her newly lipsticked mouth adding some exaggeration to the effect: eyebrows up, cheeks sucked in, mouth open as round as the letter O. Mr. Dondo, our choirmaster, tells us that the eyebrows create a feeling of happiness, when the mouth is making an O. When the mouth is released, the choirs bare their teeth, polite hotel slices of breakfast pawpaw, to look extremely happy. Proud. Pretty. Prim. Promising. Eyebrows subside.

My lips close down firmly on each other. Imp. Imprison. Implode. Implant. Impede. After each
mp,
there is a little explosion of air outward because your lips purse as if prepared to rein in the words after each
p.
Improve. Impress.