Читать книгу The Present Moment - Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye - Страница 9

CHAPTER THREE

She was so determined to sleep that she even missed the soldier marching by again. Perhaps he had moved house (whatever passed for house) or had chosen the Refuge particularly as his audience.

‘Lef’ ri’ lef’ ri’,’ today he was really drilling in style, causing the traffic to slow down as he followed one side of the road, stopping and starting to his own orders.

‘Might as well have a band,’ commented Nekesa. ‘I remember before I went to Uganda there were often military bands in Nairobi, European ones, I mean, in those days. Livelier than we get now, with always the same DA-DA da-da-da DA-DA. Everyone used to turn out to watch.’

‘Better they had been thinking about their freedom,’ growled Mama Chungu.

‘You can think and still watch.’

‘Nobody wanted to be watched in the forest,’ put in Wairimu. ‘Quiet you had to be, deadly quiet, or else you were a dead man.’

‘Can’t we leave it alone?’ asked Priscilla. ‘The Emergency finished twenty years and more ago. We are free now. Let us not keep chewing over it.’

‘Some of us had losses,’ insisted Mama Chungu. ‘You may not like to be made to remember it, but it’s true. We cannot get away from it.’

Indeed we cannot get away from it, thought Priscilla. But we can try to keep it in the past instead of living haunted with the images of blood and iron.

She looked curiously at Mama Chungu, who had spoken so little of herself since she had been picked up from the pavement and brought to the Refuge that some of them thought she had no memory at all. No one knew where she had come from. But memories, of course, need not speak in loud voices. They may gibber at a tantalising distance like a bat in the rafters, or swoop upon you like a moth, soundless but soiling you with a residue of filmy substance. They are the more terrifying if they wake you up, unaware of where you are, or weave about from real places to the fantasy of story-books or the falsity of postmarked letters. Perhaps, after all, Mama Chungu was resuming shape, particularising herself, and the birth-pain of which she used to babble was not that of the mother but of the newborn child.

‘Rubbish,’ Rahel used to say when Priscilla tried to steer away from Emergency talk. ‘I’ve had to do with fighting all my life. What’s the use of pretending our menfolk can do without it? But I admit it was a tough time for you in the fifties. My Vitalis was a young private then, and it turned him up some of the things he saw. Young men don’t talk all that freely to their mothers, but he told me some things that seemed to haunt him, feeling he was taking it out of his own people. (Not that anyone spoke of freedom fighters then. Not where we lived, anyway. We were taught to feel superior to them and with their jobs and houses falling our way it wasn’t too hard.) But I used to tell him it’s not up to a soldier to choose his side. Other people have to do that, and sometimes they get the chop for it. A military man takes his orders the same as a bus driver. No good saying “I’d fancy a run to Nakuru today instead of Mombasa.” Once you do that, every rut in the road will be your fault. Stick to your orders, I said to him. It lets you out of taking responsibility.’

‘And look where that got us,’ Wairimu would retort. ‘Sharing a house with twenty-eight other old busybodies who praise peace and talk war, without a man in sight except the Reverend coming to tell us to mind our women’s business.’

Wairimu was by far the oldest, so she felt she had a right to slander old age if anyone did. She looked on Rahel, ten years younger, as her lieutenant, but one already failing in health. Sophia actually came between them in age but she was set apart, not by her colour, not by lack of experience (for they all respected her conversion and her tribulations), but by something less definable. It was not only her lack of the countrywomen’s skills, for Priscilla might also have seemed town-born if you did not know better, and Nekesa could hardly tell a potato from a groundnut till it was dug up and put on the market. There was some other timeless quality about Sophia that kept her out of the age-ranking order, friendly enough to all but not near neighbour to any.

‘Isn’t this a bit extreme?’ the donors’ representative had said when the Vicar brought her to see the Matron and go through the record books. She was a sandy sort of person, all pale and dappled, standing for some kind of corporate European personality.

‘I mean you have to be able to observe a lot of heartbreak to get the funds administered properly. It is a bit like the love of God: you take it in full of feeling and then have to learn to live with it inside the bounds of society. But we have been trained to think that it is only white people who can be completely ignored by their relations. These old bodies seem to have survived disaster after disaster.’

‘Of course the cases are extreme,’ said the Vicar gently. ‘Ours is not a very wealthy country. We don’t give out our resources to help the middling poor unless they have had other kinds of distress. Most of us have been middling poor at one time or another in our lives.’

‘Yes, yes, I see. Everywhere there are disasters. But one is dwarfed by disasters without any savings or security to relieve them. Care is one thing. The rebuilding of utterly shattered lives is another. Of course people were doing this with displaced persons in Europe at the end of the war, or after partition in India, but where society has not broken down. . . .’

‘Do our old ladies look shattered to you?’

‘No indeed, that is the wonder. Except the one who keeps nattering about her baby. Of course the one in bed has had a stroke by the look of her – I didn’t see that entered in the record. But still she has a kind of serenity about her, even after all those troubles.’

‘In England, you see,’ the Matron took it upon herself to expound to the Vicar, ‘people will take their old folks to a home, even if they have to pay quite heavily for it. They are more easily defeated by the care than by the expense. We are not like that, though there are a few who abandon their relations. And usually those who are willing to pay can employ someone to do the work at home.’ She had now turned her attention to Mrs Reinhold. ‘Wages are not so high, and in the countryside a helper might not even demand a wage, just expenses paid now and again. So those we get here are really problem cases.’

‘Now, now, Matron,’ the Vicar interrupted. ‘They are people with problems. They are not themselves problems. That is what Mrs Reinhold is saying.’

‘Of course I did not mean to imply. . . .’

‘And we know that the Lord is able to deal with every problem,’ went on the Vicar firmly, ‘and He sends people like you, Mrs Reinhold, to assist.’

‘Yes, I agree,’ said the social worker cautiously. ‘I happen to agree, though I’d be a bit careful about saying so when a number of very good and devoted people think they have sent me themselves. And on their behalf I should like to say how much we appreciate the care you are giving here. But surely not every one of these residents is an out-and-out Christian? And yet they have a resilience, a self-confidence that is hard to find among institutional cases – if you will allow the word for once, Vicar – and not to be taken for granted among people who have been buffeted so much in ordinary life. I mean, even a shared disaster – an earthquake wiping out a town, for instance – gives people an urge to support one another and put a brave face on it. Much of my work is concerned with that kind of situation. It is all these individual tragedies that reduce me to a jelly.’

‘You seem to be holding up very well for a jelly, Mrs Reinhold,’ answered the Vicar gallantly. ‘But I think perhaps you have a different time-scale for disasters than ours. Don’t forget we had the first man – a sort of raw material for Adam – in Kenya. William the Conqueror and Genghis Khan and Hitler, all these people are mere episodes for us. We have lived, traditionally, a very eventful life as regards plagues, famines, migrations, raiding parties. I don’t think any of these ladies grew up in the expectation – I don’t say not in the hope – of a calm course of life in which your husband was always nice to you, your children mostly stayed alive, you were surprised if there was nothing palatable to eat and were sure that your daughters-in-law would look after you in old age. We had the picture of that kind of life, but it wasn’t one to take for granted. If it had been, perhaps people would have resisted the changes the colonialists brought more strongly. I think perhaps it was not that they were too surprised to protest but that they were not surprised enough to believe that the new order was going to last. And the Emergency was not a single catastrophe but a repetition on a large scale of the kind of situation people had already encountered on their own. So it is not unimaginable to these women to be situated as they are. Perhaps it would be unimaginable to people who are young now in this country – we must hope so.’

‘They are tough all the same.’

‘To be eighty years old in Africa is to be tough. Particularly for a woman, because she has learned from childhood to look after others rather than to be looked after.’

‘In Europe and America,’ chipped in the Matron, ‘women live longer than men because they are exposed to less hardship. But in our pastoral areas, men live longer, because the women’s work is so much harder.’

‘Even Rahel,’ the Vicar went on, ‘– Rahel is the one who may have had a stroke – has a story you could hardly bear to hear. The record book only gives the bare bones of it. And yet she is not from the Emergency area and indeed Luo women have a relatively high status in their community. Would you like her to tell you about it?’

Once roused, tidied, introduced, Rahel was more than willing to go over it all again, and a schoolgirl was summoned from a neighbouring house to interpret from Luo into English. Friends gathered round to support even though they might not understand. Mrs Reinhold sat obligingly with a notebook, conscious that an example was being set up for her.

‘Vitalis was getting on for eighteen when his father died, and mad keen to follow in his footsteps. So he joined up. It was probably the best thing he could do. I took it for granted, really. It was the only kind of work I knew much about, and he was not all that good at school to look for an office job. Margaret – they had all been baptised by then – was nearly sixteen, and soon afterwards she married a man from Seme and they moved to Tanganyika. Florence studied up to standard four and she stayed with me. After the town kind of life we lived in quarters I didn’t much like the idea of being inherited by some old man in Uyoma. My co-wife had a grown-up son by then, so she was able to stay with him in our own dala. So we arranged that she would prepare the fish that end and I would collect them off the bus in Kisumu and sell them in the market. When Florence was a little older she got a job as a ward-maid in the hospital and was able to help me pay the rent of the little room we had. I wasn’t really a very keen churchgoer then – in any case you lose a lot if you’re not in the market on Sundays – but my church friends were pleased that I had refused to be passed on to another man, and so they tried to teach me more and I got some comfort out of it.

‘But then our troubles started. I don’t mean to say that our husband’s death was not a trouble, but that was in the course of nature. He had put a lot of his Post Office money into a boat for his eldest son, Omondi, and that’s where a lot of our fish came from. But Omondi, the first child of my co-wife, was perhaps not meant to be a fisherman. He was a bit clumsy. He was not properly a saved man but he did not go in for the full boat-rituals either.’

There was a pause here, because the schoolgirl came from an inland area and had no idea of the mysteries of the lakeshore and the fishing cults. With a long explanation and a few Swahili words thrown in, she managed to convey the idea.

‘He said they were expensive and a waste of time. But a man who does not believe in anything will surely come to grief, and unfortunately the end came on a day when he had taken his younger brother out with him. None of the men came back and there was no trace of the boat. For a long time my co-wife was completely broken down – sons gone, boat gone, and the families of the other men blaming her for what had happened. It was a terrible time. Her elder daughter had been sent to boarding school up to standard eight and was training as a teacher, a great thing in those days, but she got pregnant and ran away from the college and we never heard what became of her or received any dowry. The little one was now about thirteen and doing well at school, but of course she had to leave because there was no money for fees, and she was needed to help her mother with the fish business.

‘We managed to keep on, but not very easily. We worked – jowa, that time, in the 1950s, we worked. We were happy in a way because of the Uhuru we were hearing about. But these young people think that to have a job is just enjoyment – money at the end of the month and the rest of the time sitting around drinking tea – that is far from it, mama.’

The schoolgirl giggled. Her fees depended on the commission her mother made getting orders for shoes and knitwear from bored girls in office after office she dropped into for a chat during a carefully planned working day. Mrs Reinhold frowned: one of her daily problems was the clamour for jobs from people who had never learned what it meant to have a job.

‘Florence had her little bit of money but of course she wanted shoes out of it, a handbag, skin cream – you ask Wairimu, she has worked for wages ever since she was young, she knows what girls are: but work, running here, running there, carrying the dirty pans, going to rooms where people were half-dead, cut open and stinking, or even completely dead, that is not easy, and without the praise a nurse gets for it either. Whether you had a bad head or what, always running, and mother always asking for rent out of your money: myself I was providing the food, the market payments, the charcoal, the fares to Uyoma. I think if we had been working alone we might have made a fair profit, but having always to allow a share to Min Omondi, who was in a very low state anyway because of the expense of that big funeral, it was a hard grind. Often we had only the leftover fish to eat, the ones that would not last till morning, and the smell seemed to be around us day and night.

‘So I was not surprised that Florence wanted to get away from it. She started to spend nights at her girlfriend’s place in railway quarters. I could not object so long as she was helping me. Girlfriends, of course, have brothers, cousins, uncles: don’t suppose I hadn’t thought of it. Soon she was wanting to be married by a Kisumu man.

‘Well, of course I asked, “What about the dowry? Where are your uncles to speak for you? Where is your mother from? Do you have regular work?”

‘He was a gardener and groundsman at one of the schools.

‘“It’s a bit late, mother-in-law, isn’t it, to be asking these questions?”

‘That’s what he said to my face. No respect at all.

‘“I reckon you’ve got less than four months to get them answered, Min Florence. I’m ready to give her a roof and a name for the baby,” he said to me. “And if my brother can help me to scrape together five hundred shillings, that might pay your rent for a year, I suppose. As to talk about registering the marriage, leave that till we see how we get on. If you think with all that education she’s fit for a doctor or a lawyer, then you’d better look after the bastard yourself, hadn’t you?”

‘And what could I do? It wasn’t like now, when a girl goes back to work a month after she’s had her baby whether she’s married or not. I couldn’t have kept the two of them, and in any case she was set on having this husband. But I felt my heart sinking, for he was not clean in the way that a man who has come home from honest work and respects his neighbours makes himself clean, and not careful, even in the way that a man living under begging eyes on low wages can be careful. It was a weary year for me. If it hadn’t been that Vitalis sent me a few shillings out of his pay now and then, I don’t know how I’d have got through it.

‘By this time it was the late fifties: conferences going on, elections, parties forming and reforming, Women’s Progress movement, more and more children going to school – it was exciting if you think back over it. And me getting near the end of my womanhood, almost crying at the waste of it, but getting some strength from those church women I worked with. I knew in any case that none of those layabouts who tried to get on visiting terms with me were fit to stand in the same drill yard as the husband I’d lost. Besides, I was a grandmother already, though Margaret did not write to me, and not wanting to give Florence any excuse for misbehaving either (as though she needed one). Perhaps I was a fool, as some of you think, to refuse to be married again in Uyoma, but I swear to God I never gave my husband cause to be ashamed of me when he was alive or after he was dead, and now I’m glad of it.

‘So it went on, fish, fish, fish till Uhuru, and the rest of you remember that too, how we all expected that the sky would light up and everyone would pay twice as much as before for whatever he bought from you. Did they now? Somehow in these twenty years we’ve got more dresses than we ever expected then, and shoes. Children of people we know are going to the university. You go on a country bus without picking up any bugs – that’s something, I suppose – there are better jobs for women and all those good houses filled with our own black people. Yes, things have got better, but slowly. Then we were looking for miracles.

‘All right, Uhuru! Flags, fountains, shouts and songs. And then you remember what – mutiny! Perhaps it did not sound so terrible to you compared with all the other new words we’ve got used to – hostage, hijack, mugging. But to those of us who had grown up in the military it was like a thunderbolt, the extreme evil, the breaking up of all the rules you live within. Change of flag, picture, tune had not before meant for me the splitting of the framework.

‘People in the market had radios. They came to tell me. Yesterday it was a far-off event in Uganda and Tanganyika. Today it was among us. Vitalis was at Lanet. The road was closed. Vehicles were not going through to Nairobi. Trains were overloaded. One of the saved sisters came and handled the money for me. She could see that I was half-blind with tears. It was like a sort of death.

‘In fact to other people it was not what I meant by a mutiny. There were no symbols of disgrace and death, and in a couple of days it was all over. Perhaps a new country, I thought, can teach people new rules. For the first time I began to doubt whether I could cope with changes to come. For the army, I was thankful it was no worse. But Vitalis – Vitalis was gone. A deserter.

‘I haven’t seen him for nineteen years. He is my only son and I don’t know whether he is alive or dead. But it isn’t just that, you know. Some people’s children go to America and stay there. Or even to Nairobi and stay there. They get a letter now and again or perhaps a photograph. Even if your son doesn’t have money and presents to send you, you still have a son. Even if he doesn’t keep in touch, you have some idea how he is making out. Even if he was buried in Burma, you have the measure of his life. Take my daughter Margaret. She was in another country and we got very little news, but the family carried on. Then in 1975 the border was closed. A little while after that we heard that she had died of cholera. There was no way to go to the funeral. I have grandchildren there that I have never seen. There is nothing they could do for me even now that there is talk of opening the border. I am settled after four years here in the Refuge and there is nowhere I would be better looked after. But Margaret has had her life. One is not ashamed.

‘Vitalis has broken his father’s greatest taboo. He must have had reason, I suppose. As you grow older, you find loyalty is more complicated than you used to think. Why should a woman be ashamed before all other men except those picked for her from Uyoma, if there is even that much choice? Why should you hear talk from your daughter’s man that even your own brother would be ashamed to use before you? Why should you not ask the DC, now that he is your fellow African, the same price you asked of the DC when he was a white man? I may perhaps still have an only son. But because of these taboos we taught him he dare not come near us and we do not know where he stays or even what name he is using. As though the taboo means more than being a son. Is it not strange?’

‘And Florence?’ asked Mrs Reinhold gently, aloud, but silently asking herself whether it was not better, after all, to be childless and not disappointed. ‘Is not Florence able to help you?’