Читать книгу The Present Moment - Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye - Страница 7

CHAPTER ONE

It was a beautiful morning. Wairimu could hear the birds singing behind the higher trees and the sun was already promising to warm the path before it got much higher. She would be hot in her goatskin from shoulder to knee, but since being circumcised she wore it always modestly, mindful of her grown-up status. The water-container bounced empty on her back, hardly enough weight to keep the leather thong steady round her forehead. Her bare arms and legs felt smooth and luxuriously conscious of the mild air: on the left arm was a metal bangle her brother had brought back from Nairobi when he went there to see the train and conduct some mysterious business with rupees and skins.

She rubbed possessively at the bangle. Even since she had started fetching water as a little girl the forest had thinned. The path was not so chilly and dank as it used to be. One was hardly afraid – as the mothers always had been in their girlhood – of hyenas or human raiders. On this path she had never heard the wailing of a baby abandoned or put out to perish beside its dying mother. There was too much light among the trees now, and too many of the white men’s agents were on the watch. Beyond the ridges, it was said, the Roman Catholics would even pick up the babies if they were in time, and somehow nurture them without a mother’s milk, not caring to find out whether they were survivors of twins or to examine the tooth order, let alone speculating what evil had brought death upon the mother of a perfectly formed child.

Wairimu quickened her pace. She was not really afraid of the forest, but she would need to catch up with the group of girls ahead to get help in hoisting the heavy skin once it was filled with water. It was strange that Nyambura had not caught up with her by now. This was the first time she had ever seemed reluctant to take her friend with her to deliver a message to her second grandmother, and Wairimu would have waited for her nearer the homestead if she had not been confident she would follow soon. It was strange, but as people grew up you had to expect them to change.

Wairimu turned a bend in the path which brought the morning sun almost to dazzle her eyes, and there the young man was standing. Her head was not bent because her load was so light, and his eyes seemed to catch hers as she paused in the middle of a step, conscious of the weight on her forward foot pressing down the valley path, the yellow haze of morning light, the air caressing her braceleted arm, the bird-song overhead and the rustle of some small animal making for the river.

She turned, and the turning was slow and painful, stretched her left arm and found the bracelet gone, the wrist bony and the fingers hard with old burns and scars. Her eyes were still dazzled a bit and sore from the forward heat.

‘Ee, Wairimu,’ one of the other old ladies chided, ‘you sit too near the charcoal fire. Your head gets heavy and you could hurt yourself when you fall asleep.’

‘I was not going to sleep, Priscilla,’ she replied primly. ‘I was just resting my eyes from the glare and thinking of the next thing I had to do.’

‘And I was just doing the next thing and stirring the thin porridge for both of us. Where is your mug, now, Wairimu?’

It was difficult to think that Priscilla had ever been young. She was all bones and corners. Her voice was sharp and her ears sharp, and though her eyes were a bit blurred she never seemed to forget which day it was, or whose turn it was, or what everyone was called, the baptismal name and the birth-given name and the mother-of name for those who had been lucky and the place names they were attached to. Priscilla, Wairimu thought, had never grown: there was no place where her skin was too big for her, where breasts or features spilt out over the bone structure, no hidden interior self. But Wairimu still enclosed within herself the springy footstep and the ancient ornaments, the gleaming rounded skin and the halo of sunlight encircling the young man with his shirt and shorts, his wide-brimmed hat and sandals, his knowledge of the world and other ways and women. That had been the start of it all, of her going away, because after this revelation of what he shared with her she could not face either the shameful disclosure of the wedding day or the cloying sameness of all the days that would follow. The forest was no longer thick enough to hide divergence. She had to go away.

Rahel had gone from them in all but name. She had not spoken for two weeks now and could not hold a cup to her lips. She lay there, long and black and gaunt, her eyes sometimes following the others about. It was not her first withdrawal, but her longest. They mostly left Matron to feed her, for they were blamed if they made a mess, spilling things or letting her play with the food forgotten in her mouth. But Rahel too was wandering in the woods, gathering firewood with her friends, and as they found themselves far away from the homestead they sang louder and more wildly, practising among themselves the marriage songs and other forbidden chants, which they would not dare to utter within the elders’ hearing and yet were expected to know and perform when the occasion arrived. One of the older girls had even seen the fearful twin dance performed and demonstrated, as far as she could remember, the women’s part, until far from the usual path they came upon the dead tree and were struck suddenly quiet, alarmed by the silvery replica of living branches and the vivid green of moss. They turned away quickly, breaking no branch, but these days the image of the dead tree lay before Rahel’s eyes and she clung to it for its symmetry, its detachment and its total recall.

Some of the old ladies said they dreamed a lot. Perhaps this was what they meant. For Luo people, Rahel used patiently to explain to the others, a dream was no such flickering thing as they described, although there might be fancies that turned into dreams. When someone brought a message to you he came, not just seemed to come. He came to claim what was a dead person’s due – a chicken, a change of name, relationship with a child soon to be born – and even if you did not know him yourself, the elders would recognise who he was from your description and act on the message.

Suppose it were a living person, Priscilla had asked. And then does he appear at the age when he died, or younger? Does he speak in known words? Do you see him in your bedroom or somewhere else? Do other people sleeping there see him too? Really, Priscilla should have been a European, asking so many questions. It was all on account of having gone to school so young and worked all those years in big, chilly houses, where the comfort of the cooking fire never penetrated to the upper air and chairs, shiny to the touch, kept you at a distance from other people.

Rahel could no longer answer these questions. She knew what she saw – and this time she saw the girls, young and noisy and mischievous. Her tongue had somehow got out of control since that night she had seen her father’s eldest brother as she remembered him long ago, his thin shoulders bare, the little circles of gold gleaming in his ears (for he was a peaceable man and had bound himself to the self-restraint of the ear-rings as early as she remembered him). His fingers were pulling and working at the sisal rope. He had brought her no message, claimed no child – for her daughters had died long since and their daughters might, for all she knew, be married in distant places – only he had looked at her kindly, plaiting the rope, plaiting the rope, and from that time a chill had fallen upon her limbs and she moved with difficulty. Well, in Nairobi in June and July it could be chilly, but it was only when she saw the dead tree that she remembered the shadowed thickets that were always cold. It was many years since those places had been broken down for firewood and the land put under the hoe: nowadays, at home, you never wished for a heavier blanket unless in the midst of the rain. Of course now you were clothed. Yet in those days the stout calico petticoats the girls got from their own chickens, or as a present with the first instalment of dowry, seemed to their mothers finicky and quite unnecessary. A nice Luo girl was not expected to go in for these new-fangled fashions.

Unable to rouse her, friends pulled the charcoal brazier nearer to her bed and crept away.

The man clanked along the road and the old ladies called one another to come and see. After all, a fine figure of a man, crazy or not, is worth a second look at any age. This one was much more striking than those who appear on Sundays in the uniform of a three-piece suit, collar and tie, as like to one another as the more splendidly dressed waiters and ushers who would move you on outside the big hotels where tourists sometimes offered shillings if you could get close enough, looking pathetic and detached.

He jangled as he walked. It was not in fact the row of medals – they were cut, actually, from the silver foil of cocoa tins and suspended by safety pins and laces from a length of cellulose packing tape – but pieces of metal suspended from the belt that made the noise and occasionally hit against a jerky knee, but most of the old ladies were not able to see that clearly. The man held his head erect and marched with exaggerated movements, his lips muttering directions to himself, ‘one, two, one, two’, when he was not speaking aloud. Coloured cords streamed from the shoulders of his khaki shirt and a piece of tinsel glinted bravely on top of the peaked cap adorned with red and green beads. The tatty trousers were tucked into well-shined ankle boots, and a small cane in his right hand emulated the movements of a newly commissioned officer, anxious lest he leave the baton behind.

A crowd of small children shouted greetings all around but kept their distance after the man had wheeled about with a meaningful tap of the baton on the iron bars. As he got into his stride again, Wairimu minced to the roadside and broke into a dance step, tightening the wrapper girlishly round her hips.

The man stopped and roared out a dozen obscenities in English. The children giggled. Younger women turned their backs and ostentatiously stooped to resume their washing. A young man stood still and saluted, then continued walking in the opposite direction. The words were too familiar to the older parts of eastern Nairobi to retain much of their original force. Some of them were untranslatable and therefore retained an aura of quaintness and sophistication. For some of the old ladies who were new to the town they had no literal meaning; for others they stirred memories which were better suppressed in their present, respected surroundings.

‘Women have done me no good,’ shouted the military man in Swahili. Mama Chungu remembered him from the days she used to hold a begging-bowl outside the mosque. But they were not allowed to beg once they had entered the Refuge, and each one made herself into a different person to fit the situation just as she had done on marriage, motherhood, widowhood and time and time again, conscious at each stage of identity behind the expectant, narrow hips, the swelling breasts, the symbols of mourning and the simulation of distress. The man used to parade in town those days – he still did, for all she knew – wanting to flaunt his condition to the world and so using these foreign tongues and manners instead of the intimate birth language that would allow one to divine and assuage his grief. She did the same. They were all masked here for the sake of sharing, since they had been brought up to see sharing as the ultimate goal and there remained this sisterhood of constraint to share with. If he had been a real soldier in a real war, there would exist a kind of brotherhood, not needing to be sought out with dirty words and toy medals. It was like hearing on the radio a search for missing persons – fifteen years old, one metre 55, wearing a white school blouse and a grey skirt, black shoes, white socks – as though one could be found by sharp Swahili voices rather than by following the trail of home and blood.

The man made a derisory gesture and continued his march. Wairimu giggled. Some of her friends mocked her stiff movements. Priscilla pursed her lips at loose behaviour. Sophia was reminded of beni processions long ago, Kingi competing with Scotchi or Kilungu. But they did it so much better – those military uniforms, that imitation of bugle notes on traditional instruments, the marching rhythms tapped from the surface of the usually more subtle drums. Or was it only that at the coast things seemed sharper, better defined, more rational? Eeeee – these old ladies thought it was only your early days you cared about, saw them through golden sunlight, the days when feet never seemed heavy or belly slack and empty. But it was not that, not that at all. Even the day she left Mombasa with her daughter – the years not counted, but well past the time of childbearing – looking forward to living with the grandchildren, not dragging back or clouded with the knowledge of the tragedy to come, even then, she remembered, the minarets were set deliberately against the radiant colour of the sky, the palm fronds distinct, your fingers almost itching to plait them; every dress, every meal, planned, leisurely but just as you wanted them, till the purchaser, the husband, the client for hairdressing or medicine, would fall pat like a ripe mango just where you intended. The day was regulated by the call to prayer, the years by women’s wiles and fashions, the lilting precision of the language, the delectable swing of argument and counter-argument, sharpening the wits and smoothing the gracious tongue. These women of shrill claim and counter-claim, of late-learned cleanliness, leaving old implements to rot beside their homesteads, patching their roofs with odd sheets of board and their dresses with clashing colours, they might stare at this battered old fellow. Even now with a clean kanzu and a decent haircut he might be made respectable.

But Matron, scandalised, sent the kitchen helper to call them in to tidy up before supper, because the nurses were coming next day.

Every term a group of Community Nurses in training came once or twice to visit the Refuge. The old ladies were pleased: they liked visitors and every event gave them something to talk about. Many of the girls were cheerful and laughed and joked to buck them up. A few even returned on private visits when they were in the neighbourhood or if, after finishing their first training, they went on to do midwifery at Pumwani just round the corner. These, though, were the strong-stomached. Many of the old ones seized on the opportunity to relate in clinical detail their own and their daughters’ confinements, and most of the nurses felt that enough was enough. But the old ladies also benefited by having the place spruced up for visitors and more fervently inspected to see if their clothes and bedding needed renewal. One time the girls had brought them packets of dried milk.

‘She is very weak,’ frowned one of the nurses examining Rahel. ‘Don’t you think she would be better in hospital?’

‘No,’ said Wairimu firmly. ‘She likes the company of people she knows. She is better here with us. What more can you do for her in hospital than we do here? She’s not going to start riding a bicycle, now, is she?’

‘But isn’t it depressing for the rest of you?’

‘She got worse last time they took her to hospital,’ put in Sophia. ‘And it’s not depressing to have her here. What would be depressing is to think that we would be kicked out if we got like her.’

The others nodded assent. Just then Matron appeared in the doorway.

‘Ladies, I hope you aren’t hindering the girls in their work.’

‘Discussing things with them is our work,’ the nurse insisted bravely. She found the very name of Matron alarming. ‘I thought this one could be moved to hospital, but they are reluctant to let her go.’

‘I believe they are right.’

You never knew with Matron. To your face she would never admit that you understood anything, but eventually she would allow some respect for your experience.

‘The community has a strength of its own. Some of them have not much else left to live for. Rahel’s leg was healed, as far as it can be, in hospital, but you do not have a cure for her years and her losses.’

The nurse swallowed.

‘All right, I won’t report this to Sister Tutor, then. But if she complains, I hope you’ll stand up for me.’

‘Don’t worry. The hospital is so overcrowded I’m sure they will be grateful to any of us who can look after our own patients. When shall we see you again?’

‘You won’t, officially speaking. We’re going back to classes next week and the new lot of girls will be starting as soon as they’ve had their short leave.’

Mary was one of those looking forward to joining the public health section: she was still on ward duties, with tests and leave to come before they changed over. She hummed as she walked briskly down the long corridor to collect the day’s issue of medicines from the dispensary. This was the first time she was doing it alone. She still delighted in her crisp uniform, though the belt was uncomfortably tight and it took long minutes of wrestling to pin the cap straight on her long, springy hair. The watch on her left wrist was also a pleasure to her. It was one of the most expensive items on the list of pre-training requirements and her eldest brother had bought it for her to reduce the strain on her parents. She remembered him every time she studied the second hand to register the rate of pulse or the gradual suffusion of temperature.

The corridor was by now familiar, the doubts of the first training days long overcome. She could not, of course, remember being wheeled along it as a newborn or again after she had broken an arm in standard five. In fact the place had grown grubby over the years. Some of the light shades were broken and the repeated pressure of bodies at visiting time had left lines of grease along the wall, but she was hardly aware of this. Though some people criticised, your hospital, like your school, was not exchangeable. Its very ordinariness made a claim on your loyalty.

It was just where the passage branched off to the dispensary that she met the student doctor. He did not appear to be gliding round with his hands full of important papers like the seniors. He was just standing by the intersection looking about him, empty-handed, his white coat gleaming as though very new over his expensive-looking shirt and slacks, a striking light brown face, loose, curly hair, an exploratory look in her direction. She almost stopped, then lowered her eyes and tried to even her pace. After all, she had seen medical students before. Everybody warned you about them. It would be foolish to let them get you flustered. But something about this one was different. When she walked back with her loaded tray he was still there, in conversation with one of the specialists who attended her ward. She was not at all surprised when he appeared there later in the day.

Suddenly one morning Rahel woke up and asked what time it was.

‘Half past seven,’ Priscilla told her, careful to express no surprise. Bessie and Mama Chungu helped to prop Rahel up against the pillows. She insisted that she would get up, but soon found that she could not stand and submitted to their ministrations.

‘Well, where have you been?’ Wairimu demanded, after they had fussed over her, fed her, prepared clean clothes and found some pretext on which Matron could call in before breakfast to observe the change.

‘I’ve been trying to sleep: haven’t we all?’ retorted Rahel. ‘What with bugles blowing and crates crashing about. I almost thought my leg was gone again.’

‘Well, you take care of what you’ve got left after all the time it took them to patch you up. See, here’s your leg, a bit stiff but you can walk on it when you’re stronger. Not that you’d better go climbing trees, now.’

‘I never did, you know. And I never even touched the special tree. But it was a noisy night, wasn’t it? I seemed to be ages getting to sleep.’

‘You’ve been ages waking up,’ said Matron gently. ‘You’ve been quite ill, you know, so you’d better take things quietly. Let’s put you in the wheelchair while we make the bed up again. It’s only in your head you were hearing bugles.’

‘And people have been asking for you,’ added Sophia. ‘The Community Nurses – perhaps even the soldier.’

‘Well of course,’ Rahel began, making up for time lost to speech and heedless whether they had heard it all before, ‘soldiering is in the blood, as my man used to say, and I can’t just ignore it.’ Sounds of the past kept on reverberating, that was what she meant to say. But her tongue still felt clumsy, prodding in an exploratory way at the Swahili words, whistling over the sibilants, whispering the final vowels, jes’i, tarumbet’, ssstand-at-teasss. ‘I could picture myself joining up if I were young now and had my two good legs, like those young women we saw in the TV news, remember? My father was a regular soldier and he was away in Tanganyika when I was born during the Great War. My next brother was not born till three years later when the KAR came home, so he was one of those called Keya. We did not live in quarters and all that as people did later on. The soldiers had a really rough life in barracks, sometimes, or out in camp: my mother would weep over it but of course we children just thought the stories were exciting. But the men were very loyal to one another so it’s not surprising that I married a soldier too. Many of my father’s comrades used to come and visit us at home, and I dare say some were specially picked to look at me and my younger sister. I was second wife to my man down in Uyoma – we were not baptised then, and my father thought that was good enough for me. It was a little while before they built Jubilee Market in Kisumu, so that would have been about 1935: some African soldiers went to London for the procession and I remember my father had a photograph of them. So I was all right in Uyoma. My co-wife was ten years or so older than me, but not jealous. . . .’

‘Careful, sister, careful,’ interjected Wairimu. ‘So she was my age. Are you saying that by 1935. . . ?’

‘I am not saying anything bad, Wairimu my sister. I am only saying that Luo women have a certain dignity as they get older, if you take my meaning – and it’s no use swinging your skinny old hips in here. There’s no one to admire you, even if some people have forgotten the meaning of taboos. Not to say what would happen if Matron found you skipping about like you were not a day over forty. Well . . . so I was all right in Uyoma. I got used to preparing fish for the market and getting water straight from the lake, but the harvests seemed poor to me. I got Vitalis first and then two girls before my husband went away to the war, to Somaliland first and then to Burma. We managed, somehow, through the famine of Otonglo and all that, with no money coming in. We had fish and water at least, so the children stayed alive.

‘After the war our husband came home. Everyone was happy. Vitalis was ten years old and wanting to go to school. My daughters were at the toothy stage. My co-wife had a little girl she said was five – I think she juggled with the dates a bit myself. She encouraged me to go on a long visit to my mother about the time she said the baby was due. But I didn’t feel it was my place to say anything, and when our husband came home from the war he didn’t ask any questions either. He was changed, very quiet. He was glad to see the children, especially the boys, asked them questions about fish and plants and different kinds of wood, got them into competition, throwing stones and sticks, making traps. But with us he was reserved. If we asked,

‘ “How do those I-talians talk?”

he would make us laugh,

‘ “Al-la-la-ali-lu-la-it-to-ta,” up and down the scale like Sophia when she gets some of her real Swahili friends together. Or

‘ “How do you know when you meet a general?”

‘ “At – ten – shun. God – say – king – mai God – hel – lo – ol – boi – at the double – cheers!”

(But sergeants’ voices we already knew. We thought he might be a sergeant by now but he didn’t even show us his sleeves.)

‘But if we asked,

‘ “What is the ship like? Did you go in an aeroplane? What do they grow in Somaliland? Were the people in India friendly?” he would just sit silent and tell us,

‘ “You wouldn’t understand. It is better for you not to know. These are not women’s matters.”

‘And on that leave he would sit hour after hour, just looking out from the front of the house or walking down to see the fishing boats and back without answering people’s questions. The little girls asked him once,

‘ “Didn’t you bring us a present back from the war?” (For he had money. He put some in the Post Office at Kisumu and with some he bought meat and bottled beer and sweets for the children, but nothing from those distant places.) And he said to them,

‘ “I have come back to you. No one can ask for more than that.” Later that day he called Vitalis and showed him the big scar on his left thigh, and said to him,

‘ “This is the best present you can get in a war. Do you know that? It is worth two weeks in bed and four weeks of not being directly shot at. It is therefore a very valuable experience.” Vitalis did not understand, but he never forgot. The rest of us never dared ask what caused the wound or whether it hurt: he shut me up angrily when I tried.

‘Then when one of the women from the neighbourhood, a grubby old thing, always making trouble, came to greet us, she started saying to him,

‘ “Don’t you think that Auma is very small for her age? I have been surprised ever since I have been seeing that child. My grandchild whom my son left in the womb when he went to the war and did not come back seems to be much healthier.”

‘She kept on about it and I was trembling for what he might say to Min Auma, but he only fixed his eyes on the old woman.

‘ “Have you ever seen a woman with a big belly and her head shot off?” he asked.

‘She shook her head.

‘ “Can you imagine a hot, marshy place – you may think it is hot here, but really it is hardly warm – and a man who has been dead three days with his feet in the marsh?”

‘ “No, my brother-in-law, these are evil things.”

‘ “You, who love to slither and slide, have you ever marked a trail by counting the dead men near the path, and picked up their weapons to use against their brothers as you go forward?”

‘ “In our custom you let the enemy’s spear lie where it falls, since it can operate only for your enemy’s benefit.”

‘ “So I was taught, but Luo custom is for little Luo wars, fought by the rules for a bit of land or a few cattle. But in a real war, that aims to destroy rather than to get, every weapon is a weapon pleasing to war, and every death is a death pleasing to war, and every fighter is a sacrifice to war. Do you understand me?”

‘ “These words are beyond my understanding, my brother-in-law.”

‘ “Then keep your small concerns for small minds and do not bring your tittle-tattle here to me,” cried my husband, and she scuttled away and never made trouble for us again to my knowledge. But trouble comes and these days we do not think to ask who makes it.

‘We did not have any more children, my co-wife and I. He did not neglect us, but perhaps some strength had gone out of him in the wartime. And even when my father sent word to him of my youngest sister, thinking that such a marriage would strengthen my position in the house and also bring the girl some protection, for she was rather lazy and wayward, not likely to organise a home well, he was not interested at all, but said he would prefer to invest his wealth in the children he already had. Since some of these were mine, of course, my father could not object. Although he was still strong, my father did not go overseas during the second war, but helped to train the young recruits until his time came to retire. There was one time, in 1947, he was sent specially to Gilgil. He said afterwards it was a matter of discipline, something that could not be avoided. That was all he would say, but we could see he was deeply hurt and he did not live long after retiring. He had been in different camps, but my mother never travelled further than Kisumu till the day she died.

‘But it was different in our days. Although my husband professed not to listen to stories about my co-wife, it was only I who went with him to Gilgil so that Vitalis could go to school. I also learned to read there and to look after a military house. It was an easy life if you had a good man. Don’t you see I even speak Swahili as well as you people?’

Wairimu did not really think so, but as she had learned it at an earlier age and had a more sensible mother-tongue to start with she did not press the point. Luo people generally did not tell the difference between one and many till they got to the end of a word, and could therefore be very careless about the vital first syllables in Swahili. Rahel, admittedly, was better than most. Whatever you learned in the army you were likely to learn well.

‘But it didn’t work out like that, did it?’ asked Wairimu. There was no need for tactful silences between them. The boundary of talk was where the lack of words or experience drew the line. ‘I mean about investing in the family. Or else you wouldn’t be here, would you?’

Rahel sighed.

‘Whether that old lady really left us alone or tried to work witchcraft on us I couldn’t say. Or whether the evil that my husband had seen during the war preyed upon him and upon us after he died. He just collapsed and died, you know, in 1952. Same time as the old king. He would have liked that. Great ones for kings and generals the army people used to be. Of course, we hadn’t started thinking about Uhuru then.’

‘I had,’ insisted Wairimu.

‘Well, I suppose you had, and our top people had; but I hadn’t. That’s all.’

Rahel held her peace. Since 1947 she had dealt with these Kikuyu people, their history of loss and assimilation, their long, hidden malice, their quick calculations and the terrible bent backs of their burdened women. She wanted to shout at them to hold their heads up. Was that only because she was a soldier’s wife or because she had grown up to a graceful carriage and a steadily balanced water-pot? Was it because her ancestral land had been protected by the mosquito and the tsetse fly or because plain speaking, back in her father’s time, had matched the British in their own stiff-necked way?

She subsided back into sleep, dreaming of grainy millet porridge with bitter greens (for in recent years she had quite gone off fish heads), of the cool earthy corner of the house where the filled water-pots were stored according to their use, of drums in different rhythms and starched uniforms with gleaming buttons. When the Community Nurses came they were astonished at the improvement, but let her rest.