1
But the world went on, with or without Paulina’s attention. In January 1969 Argwings-Kodhek, the Foreign Minister, died in a car crash. She was sad. He was a big man in Gem and she had seen him sometimes when she used to live in Pumwani and he would hold Congress meetings there which Martin and his friends went to. Rumours flew back and forth but she didn’t make much sense of them: after all, lots of people die in road accidents. But when the funeral procession came, and of course Martin was one of those following it, it did not make the expected halt for the viewing of the body in Kisumu but drove quickly round the town and out again towards the home place. The townspeople were angry and disappointed. In the homestead in Gem a police burial party fired a salvo of three shots into the air and sounded the Last Post. But though so many Kenya Pohce and Administration Police had turned up, apparently for that purpose, among the VIPs, local people forced themselves repeatedly through the cordon to get as near as they could to the grave. And as though death needed still to feed on death the very next day someone called Eduardo Mondlane was assassinated in Dar es Salaam. Paulina had never heard of him, but the politicians shook their heads and talked of the loss to Africa. Kenya was a hard enough idea to get hold of. Africa, to Paulina, was a name on a map. But perhaps before she went to Nairobi she would not even have recognised the map.
All year there were political quarrels going on, especially at the coast, and newspaper reports of‘unrest’. The radio in the Centre went on and on about these things until you could not keep them out of your mind. In May Parliament annulled the Affiliation Act. This Paulina noticed ruefully as the end of something that might have been meant to help her, while so many high-sounding pieces of legislation
controlled her life without her ever knowing it. Even with the act, it was hard enough to get fathers to take any responsibility for their children outside marriage: those whose wives were working often enough avoided responsibility within marriage. Only a fool would expect voluntary provision. At least Paulina had never had the illusion that anyone was going to help her maintain Okeyo. She could not really see what all this talking in high places had to do with it.
Kano had kept the old hedged homesteads more exactly than the other locations, and also a bigger share of the old plumed headdresses: teams of male dancers bedecked with feathers and bells and intricate chalk patterns were often to be seen going off to the funerals and other pubUc occasions like the Kisumu Festival. Okeyo used to get excited, chattering and pointing till she restrained him, so that the Kikuyu shopkeeper remarked sombrely, ‘He’s a real Luo: more keen on a funeral than anything else.’
There were small outings and events. In July 1969 Paulina had to take a group of women to Kisumu to see the annual show on the Saturday, the last day. They kept the hired bus waiting and at midday were only halfway round the sights: it had been difficult to get them together at all after the mock battle in the arena from which some had fled in terror, but once reassured they continued to march round resolutely. And then, after the radio news, a hush fell upon the ground for a moment, and people began to weep and wail and brandish sticks and branches. Tom Mboya, the voice said, had been shot in Nairobi and rushed to hospital in a critical condition. By the time the news came that he was dead they were already being shooed out of the ground.
At the same time Pauhna was shepherding her party back to the bus, Martin was sitting in his room at Kibera glued to the radio. His eyes were hot and hard. Nancy dared not speak to him when he was like this. He had promised to take her shopping and there was a pair of shoes she was determined to get out of this month’s money. Too bad that a big man was dying, a handsome and powerful man too, but people died on the radio or in the newspapers every day. It was not like anyone you really knew or had a duty to. Nancy was fed up.
She was eighteen, a Pumwani-born girl with a light skin and soft curly hair. Her mother was a Kikuyu. They did not know who her
father was. When she was a baby her mother had been moved from Pumwani down to Bahati with the other ‘free’ Kikuyu. She had a vegetable stall there and grumbled constantly about the closeness of the houses and the harassment, so Nancy started with a determination to get away. She was lucky enough to get a place in high school but had to leave after the first year because she was pregnant. Her mother took the baby and it died soon, but they couldn’t afford to pull strings to get her into another school, so she drifted off to live with a school teacher who had promised to get her admission, but he never paid the fees for her and was afraid his headmaster would object to his having so young a girl in his house, so he was trying to push her out. At this point Martin, who knew the teacher through evening classes, was setting up in a new room at Kibera, since the cousin he was staying with was getting urgently married, so the teacher introduced Nancy as his cousin and a bargain was struck.
She liked Martin, who was a bit soft, and kept in reserve the possibility of really marrying him, since there was some mystery about his first wife and they had no children. On the other hand he was quite old now and might not get much more promotion, and people warned her she would be expected to learn Luo and have dozens of babies. And surely, Nancy thought, a pretty girl these days could at least expect a car before being burdened with a big family. Martin was still doling out the housekeeping money at ten shillings a time and going with her to buy a dress or a handbag in case she should be cheated over the quality or add a margin to the price. But today she was really mad at him, sitting there over that radio as though he were going to cry and taking no notice when she pulled her wrapper tighter and made ready to go out.
Three Luo men trooped in. They shook hands, barely speaking, and huddled over the radio also. At last there was a low moan. She was rattling water in a tin basin outside and barely understood who had made the sound but the import was clear. The man had died and they sat there staring at one another like mad things.
*Wawuok mondiy said Martin abrupdy, and had to pull himself together to repeat in Swahili the common refrain of the Luo husband, ‘We are going out for a bit. This will be a bad day,’ he added. ‘Do not go out at all. Bolt the doors. If we need beer we will buy it when we
come. Do not go out, mind you.’
They filed out without even formal farewells. Their minds were far away. These Nyanza people, she saw, could never pass up a funeral. She would be in for it now - beer drinks, collections, long faces, crowds to feed. ‘Not go out’ indeed. Who was he to give her orders? What was she in the house - well, after all, what? She had not been asked to be a wife. She had not been asked to be a servant. It was something like ‘she can go and give you a hand while you are moving’. She had cooked and washed, scrubbed the floor and warmed his bed. She did not go out visiting with him or put herself forward when his friends came. Well, what future was there in that? A couple of dresses and some strings of beads, that was all she had made out of it. Well, food and beer, true enough, and a few things for the house. But come here, go there, lock up, take care, that was just like being at school. And for more than a year no one had talked about going back to school.
The noise increased outside. There was weeping and wailing in Luo. She knew enough to recognise that, but others were crying also and in a house across the valley a couple of people were shouting.
Nancy made haste. Her dresses, her ‘jewellery’, her little bit of make-up, her spare sUppers were all bundled into one of the sheets. They had bought the sheets to use together, after all. And the cloths? She would surely be justified in taking one of each kind. And the money for market tomorrow? She would need that, of course, for the bus fare to get to her mother’s. She wanted to be fair. She bolted the back door and slammed the front door Yale lock. He would have a key, surely? If not, he would have to break a window. Let no one say she had left the house unguarded. He had not treated her badly. But a Luo was a Luo and herself she was a new Kenyan.
Nancy walked down the road. Cries and shouts seemed to come from all round her. She pushed her way to the main road. It was still thronged with people. She stood at the bus-stop and someone told her it was no use waiting for the buses would not be able to get through. Not able? Did one death make all that difference? She could not understand it, but there was no going back to tlie locked room so she allowed herself to be carried along with the crowd. By the time they got to the mortuary it was impossible to move. All the hospital roads
were blocked. She glimpsed one of Martin’s friends on the far side but he could not even see her. Her big bundle was ripped open against a fence. The sandals fell out and it was impossible to recover them under the trampling feet. She would be knocked breathless before she could reach her mother’s place, and it was four months since she had visited her mother. Who could say whether she might have moved? Where else was there to go?
In the crowd she spotted one of the boys she had known at school. He must have finished form four by now and looked very smart, as though he were working.
‘Hi, Peter,’ she called.
‘Hi, Nancy, you’re looking super. A bit of a crush here, isn’t there? Where are you heading for?’
‘Just back from safari. I’m trying to get to my mother’s in Bahati, but it’s a struggle and I don’t know that she will expect me in all this.’
‘Sure she won’t. You know my brother’s place is not far from here. Why don’t we put your things there and then decide what to do? It looks as though your bundle is getting torn already.’
‘That’s a good idea. I’m not working at the moment so I’m quite free really . . .’
The house was full of boys and girls and Nancy felt immediately at home.
Martin reached home about eleven o’clock that night. He had had a few drinks with friends here and there and some roast meat but what he had gone out for - to find what had happened, what had been found out, what was to be done - still baffled him. The young men had started out together in need of solidarity in their grievous loss but neither hope nor enlightenment had come to them. He remembered meeting Tom at a students’ fund-raising meeting once and Tom had said, ‘Oh yes. I’ve seen you passing Alvi House. You work near there, don’t you?’
Tom was always like that - never forgot a face, never at a loss for a kind word. Oh, bugger it all.
He had his key all right and opened it on a dark house. She should have put the lamp out with matches even if she’d gone to bed in a sulk. She didn’t wake when he called and when he felt the bed it was empty.
Fool of a girl. Just as likely to get herself assaulted in all this crush. But when he groped in the cooking-recess for the lamp and lit it after wasting half a dozen matches, he could see clearly that she had gone - dresses, shoes, everything. Well, no loss. He ran perfunctorily through the cupboard - his things were safe anyway. She wasn’t going to set up another man with his shirts and shaving tackle. The shelf of cups and pots was not stripped either. The radio was in place and so was the charcoal iron. If anything had gone it was nothing out of reason. The Alego girl who had been so eager to marry him had had everything packed up when his cousin came home and found her getting ready to leave. This time he would cut his losses.
He fell into bed in his underclothes and extinguished the lamp. He felt nothing for Nancy. She was better gone. He was too old and cynical for a kid like that and it didn’t look as though he would ever have luck with women. Right now he didn’t feel like it anyway. Thirteen years since he got married. A wife of thirteen years’ standing should have been well trained and able to comfort him now. Out of those years, half he had hoped and prayed for freedom - no, not for freedom, Uhuru, which everyone knew in Swahili, but for loch, self- government, something he understood. Whether or not there had been what people meant by Uhuru, for six years there had undoubtedly been loch. And was this what it had come to, the striking down of the best and the brightest?
2
Nancy didn’t leave enough of herself behind for Martin particularly to miss or resent her, but she had left a mirror, a little framed one which could be hooked on the wall, and he noticed this and examined his face during one of his thrice-weekly shaves. In fact it was the first time since the assassination he had felt steady enough to do it himself. There was always a fair-weather barber under a tree to do it for you if you didn’t feel up to it.
Although his paunch had grown a little, Martin’s face was thinner than it had been when he was a young man, though not much hned. Still the basic convexity of the Luo features remained. His eyes were a bit bloodshot - he had needed to keep half in a stupor to get through those days at all. His hairline was receding slightly. He was thirty-six.
three years younger than Tom had been, and what had he achieved?
The household was plain but decent. He could provide bedding and dishes for several guests. His library had expanded from the left-over school books to a neat row of professional texts and Kenyan documents. He knew how to use the resources of the town for what he wanted - a reference book, a haircut, a likely pick-up or a chance to observe the top people. He did not see himself as maturing but as deprived of the chance of maturity, a childless man who could not keep a wife, whose house at home was shamed and whose house in town could never be home. He had long since ceased to wear the silver-gilt wedding ring he had assumed that day at St John’s, Pumwani. It could provoke too many questions.
But he was growing all the same. He had adjusted from a vision of freedom in which the figure of a mythical leader, released from prison, hovered distant and glorious like the queen, to an actual country in which shops and houses changed hands, the wage structure remained very much the same, and the man you addressed as ‘sir’ haggled just as before over discounts and overtime. He found himself correcting even foreign customers about the size of envelopes and index cards. Greatly daring, he found that he could enjoy a film better in the comfort of the Kenya Cinema than in Starehe Hall, and that the extra few shillings earned him command of the luxurious foyer and the darkness in which dreams come true. He actually went to a bedroom in the New Stanley Hotel, high up, helping a salesman to hump his bag of samples, and had a drink there, ordered imperiously by phone. On good days he could even remind himself that there were big people in the country who were still bachelors, so he need not be so worried.
In one way working relationships were changing. Asian customers started speaking to you differently, ‘Bwana’ or ‘my friend’ instead of ‘you there’, and some unnecessary handshakes. But working hours did not get any shorter and excuses were not tolerated for lateness or slacking off at work, though a little more leniency than before might be shown for attending funerals or school interviews. Births and weddings hardly came up on the list of special requests ~ one might have thought that birth and marriage would take on more significance now that everyone was born a Kenyan but somehow it was not so. People had once been underdogs on a communal basis but now if you
were an underdog it was somehow your own fault. Martin was glad he had realised it in time.
Tom had realised it too. Tom was a person who fitted fully and easily into that new world and yet could still express his ideas in Luo or Swahili with equal fluency. Tom remembered people’s names and remembered their natural hopes and fears. He didn’t make a virtue out of parading round in leopard skins; he knew there was nothing shameful about cutting sisal or inspecting drains. He knew the risk: since Pio Gama Pinto’s death, if not before, he could not fail to have it always in sight. But now he was dead, and who knew how to get things done any more?
It took a long time to arrange about his funeral, and still no one knew what had really happened. In the meantime Miriam Wandai, that shrewd and saintly old maid whom Paulina had known as a Nairobi neighbour, had died and was to be buried at a brother’s home the same day that was finally fixed for Tom’s fimeral. Paulina heard this from the Brethren, but all eyes were turned to Rusinga Island and the great ceremony to take place there, so few people found time to ask why Miriam was not being laid to rest in Butere churchyard and near the schoolhouse which bore her pioneer name.
From mid-morning Paulina and her neighbours waited by the roadside and no news came. Okeyo was happy with a new shirt and kept them amused playing with a cardboard trolley one of the schoolboys had made him. The expected cortege did not appear from Nairobi. Probably a lot of people wanted to stop and touch it. The sun grew hot and people went back to their homes for umbrellas and scarves and water-bottles. It was rumoured that the widow’s car had had an accident in the Rift Valley and that delayed them, but no one knew where the rumour (which turned out to be true) came from as no loudspeaker van was sent to give news. Eventually, late in the afternoon, the cavalcade came into sight and the people at the roadside made their show of mourning, but the cars hurried past without acknowledging their salutes. In Kisumu there had been trouble, passing drivers later told them, so they shut themselves in their houses without waiting for the procession to make the long sweep back to the Lake shore.
But Okeyo was lively and full of new words and games he had
learned, so that Paulina could not bring herself to feel sad, and though she remembered how much Martin had admired Tom Mboyo she had her own life to live now and could not assume the guise of mourning. Months passed the more quickly as in each the child learned a new skill, until October came.
Martin did not go for the funeral to Rusinga Island. There ’^as a man from South Nyanza in the same company who obviously had the greater right to claim leave - as Martin had claimed his for Argwings’s burial. And, after all, what would the big funeral do? The ceremony was to keep the spirit at peace and bring blessing to the home place. But Tom was at home everywhere, and the spirit was not at peace. Martin heard later how the cortege was held up by an accident and people had waited for hours in the hot sun without getting news. And then they had been beaten back with batons from trying to touch the hearse, and when some local fight had broken out in Kisumu tear-gas had been used, as though people were being punished for their reverence. And yet even the gas had broken down barriers, for people had crowded in anywhere, even to Asian houses, and had been given water to drink and reassurance that the congestion of nose and throat would pass, and it could be seen that the discomfort was the same for white or black, KANU or KPU.
3
With Nancy gone the room in Kibera seemed cheerless and inconvenient for housekeeping after a long journey from town. Everywhere Martin looked seemed cheerless too, Luo faces blank with dismay, the newspaper columns full of the trial of Njenga which seemed to get no nearer to the mystery of the murder, while Njenga himself smiled loftily through it all, like some half-activated idol.
It was Amina who actually brought to a head Martin’s decision to move again. He met her one lunch-hour searching for dress materials in River Road and she greeted him mockingly:
‘Oh, Bwana Mkubwa, do you still remember staying in my httle house? You were a slim boy then and Paulina was just a shp of a girl. Now you have a big tummy and a full purse, I bet.’
‘Too big a one for the purse to fill, in fact. But I don’t know that I’ve been more at home anywhere since I left your house.’
‘Well, everything moves on. I’m down at Eastleigh myself now and Joyce is a big girl in standard five. Why don’t you bring Paulina to see me?’
She knew very well why not, but there was no harm in prodding a little.
‘Paulina’s working near Kisumu. She doesn’t get down here often.’
‘Well, we must go where the money is. And number two?’
‘There isn’t any number two, my elder sister. We are Christians, you know.’
‘Even so, I thought there was a pretty litde coast girl persuaded you otherwise.’
‘Oh no. That was long ago, and she was not pretty enough to break a law for.’
‘Well, well. All the better for Paulina. You don’t feel like taking board and lodging with us while you’re all on your lonesome, I suppose? Nice rooms, furnished, water laid on.’
‘That would be a bit beyond me, I expect, Amina. In any case I must have my own kitchen, in case ... for when . . . well, you know what I mean. But I wouldn’t mind getting back to Eastleigh. The bus service is better, shopping easier. I suppose you wouldn’t know of a room?’
Amina promised to call at the shop next day and by the end of the month it was all settled. She didn’t exactly get anything out of it but she enjoyed pulling strings and getting to know other people’s business.
By this time man had actually landed on the moon. The landing took place ten days after Tom’s funeral and few Kenyans had any thoughts to spare for it, although President Nixon declared, in a record that was soon selling cheap in Nairobi’s supermarkets, that eyes and hearts all over the world were directed to that spectacular feat. Perhaps he was already more nearly tuned into the launching pad than to minds and hearts. A lot of the world still saw the USA as a land of gadgetry where you could watch a president’s assassination on TV without being able to do anything about it, A week later the papers were reporting the death of Mary Jo Kopechne in Edward Kennedy’s car.
At home, preparations for the election continued. People were
asking about conditions under which the new system of ‘primary elections’ would be conducted. Commentator after commentator advised a political stocktaking, pressed the public (like Philip Ochieng’ in the Sunday Nation of 20 July, which Martin certainly read from cover to cover and Paulina absorbed in a different way, for skins were becoming very thin in Kenya just then, very sensitive, reacting to hints and radiations that would have needed blunt statement to penetrate the protective grease and red ochre of custom) to ‘face squarely the real problems of tribalism, corruption and economics - problems whose very existence it needs the brilliance and candour of a Tom Mboya to gloss over successfully’. And over it all hung the grotesque figure of Njenga, grinning in the dock like a cartoon character and spared the one question which would have made sense of the trial.
4
Paulina waited patiently by the roadside. Okeyo did not often have her to himself. He tugged at her hand, laughing and chattering. In spite of the restricted life she had grown up to expect, she found Kano dull after living in Nairobi where there was always news, always something you could walk out and see on a Sunday afternoon. Here it was the same group of classes, day in, day out, the same orders to the child ayah, day in, day out, and although her little son had taken away her reproach, he was a burden on her alone, and she sometimes wondered for how many years he could go on till he realised that he had no father, and although the father-figure of Martin hovered in the background he did not come, would not come.
So on a sunny Saturday afternoon just to stand by the roadside and wait for the procession was a kind of relaxation. The Mzee had long promised to come to Kisumu. This time he had come for the purpose of opening the new hospital, and some of the hope she had had in those young days in Nairobi was coming back again. After all this time the future was for everyone, and her child had been born in a country that stood up for itself.
The noise came down the highway from the far distance, the noise of many cars and lorries and something like drums. How could they be beating drums without singing or instruments in accompaniment?
The first lorries came into sight, full of figures in strange masks. Perhaps it was meant to amuse, but it looked frightening. Some of the children cried, but Okeyo was jumping up and down with excitement. The road was long and straight. Many people had gone into Kisumu for the celebrations. Only a few of the bitter ones had remained indoors. So there was a straggle of spectators, not continuous but bunched near any roadside building. As the lorries came into sight, Paulina and her companions saw the knot of people on the horizon break and nm. Perhaps someone had used rude words there or tried to get too close for safety as they had done when Tom’s body passed for burial. It seemed natural enough that something like this should happen. As the lorries with uniformed men passed, car after car followed, full of people in ordinary clothes, and guns pointed from the windows and from time to time a stanuner of shot came from the motorcade as it dragged on, and the people backed, but few ran away, assuming this to be some harmless demonstration. Okeyo was still bouncing in delight, crying 'Bang, bang - bang, bang’, and then suddenly he had slipped out of her hand and was running forward. Clumsy, not used to being in charge of the child herself, she dived forward, but before she could get hold of him he fell at her feet, blood oozing from a hole in his forehead. She snatched him up and began to run, heedless of the noise behind. A door of the schoolhouse was open and she dashed in after the others, who stood round her in a respectful group, silent.
‘Get a doctor,’ she shouted. ‘Don’t just stand there. Help me to get him to hospital.’
‘Mother,’ the oldest man in the group plucked up courage to say to her, ‘mother, don’t you see the child has no need of a doctor? He is dead.’
‘But it is a very little wound. Hardly any blood.’ Yet as she looked she knew that it was true and began to wail loudly, rocking the baby in her arms as others took up the lamentation.
‘Mother,’ said the old man again, ‘No one will be going to the hospital today. From the hospital this thing started. In Kano we shall treat our wounded and bury our dead. Do not think you are alone.’
For an hour they continued to mourn, almost unconscious of the hubbub left at the roadside, the shouts and groans, the frenzied search
for someone out of sight, the rustle of dispersion, the final silence. Cattle were hastily stalled that day, some left unmilked. Sermons that should have been prepared that evening burst out next day as frenzied intercessions. Homework that should have been marked that weekend was caught up in a frantic expurging of comment or question. By Monday morning the quietness of routine beggared belief. According to the Luo expression, the country had eaten its people. At last.
‘We must go to our homes,’ the old man said. ‘If they find us here after dark there will be trouble. I have been in the military in the old days and I know. The neighbours will not leave you alone, mother, but we who live at a distance must go.’
With two old women he accompanied Pauhna to her house and the women made tea while the others dispersed silendy. The old man’s face was deeply lined. It was as though the skin had not so much sagged over the retreating flesh as been taken in, sewn and cross- sdched like the seat of a boy’s shorts which the tailor has mended, thrusting his machine back and forth to reinforce the patch bulging underneath. Every wrinkle was impressed on Paulina’s eyes as she recognised in the lines of experience and pain and kindness the truth of her son’s death. As they helped her into the house she glimpsed her own face in the mirror, staring now with grief but basically as smooth and unlined as Okeyo’s own, and wondering how much more one has to take, how many more years, how many deseruons and deaths, before it could show and command respect. And as she fingered Okeyo’s face and clutched at his body, she saw that this too was calm and unused. The puckered skin of healed cuts, the bulge of a remembered burn, were not in him. Except for the little wound he was perfect, and that one would never go through the straining together of a healed wound. He would go to the earth, like herself, unperpetuated and unfulfilled.
5
They heard no more that night but next morning, sure enough, loudspeaker vans came to tell them that a dusk to dawn curfew was in force. One neighbour had had two fingers shot off and a quarter of a mile up the road there was another house of mourning. They had no idea how many others there were in Nyalenda and Kisumu town, for
people who came and went on duty did not speak of these things or show any emotion. Inside the house they began to discuss the funeral.
Most of the neighbours knew, wordlessly, that the child was not Martin’s and there would be no burial plot in Gem for him. She could go to her own home, but her father was dead and her elder brother, though often in Kisumu, was even more often away with one of the transport lorries. Who would pay the expense of the funeral? To hire a lorry, even if the money could be found, was to draw attention to oneself. To stay away for the night was to break curfew. They talked and talked to her. It is only a child. It does not matter where a child is buried.
Tt is like a war,’ said the old man. ‘We left our dead in Ethiopia and in Burma. We had to. So no harm will come of it.’
A corner of a public plot was found and prayers hastily said. No one sat up for the wake. Curfew was in force. On Tuesday Paulina returned, stony-faced, to work. No one spoke of these things. The women did not come to class in large numbers and even the market was visited only for essential supplies, not for sociable gatherings. Only an irrepressible youngster, living with his uncle in Kisumu town on schooldays, brought home the story of how one of his schoolmates had burst a milk-packet blown up with air at Kibuye market on the Sunday morning and the market had emptied to the sound.
Okeyo was dead. She sent Margaret back to her people, giving her the bus-fare, careless of what might happen to her on the way. She gave away Okeyo’s clothes: she would not need them again. Perhaps his death was a punishment for being born out of wedlock. She brooded over it alone. There was no good discussing it. All around her babies were being born out of wedlock and legitimate babies were dying. She continued to wear Martin’s ring, remembering again and again that quiet ceremony at St John’s Church where he had confirmed their marriage and put it on her finger. And yet even that time she had lost the baby. Everything was topsy-turvy. At her father’s funeral, she remembered, the oldest uncle had been concerned about the breaking of the roof-pole, to show that the house was now without a head. They had decided to leave it because they could not find any young boys who knew the role they should play in the ceremony. But now in the empty house there was, so often, no lack of
children, and the house of promise remained empty. Would it, after all, have been different if Martin had come for that funeral, to fulfil her rights? And yet, if Okeyo had been his son, would he not still have died?
Martin did not go to Kisumu for the opening of the hospital, for he was at work, and public events were often cancelled or delegated, so that you did not risk losing work-time on them, and when he heard about the curfew and the shootings and the detentions he felt that he had always known about it, though he had never heard a gim fired in anger, only those painful, empty shots over Argwings’s grave. It was four days before he heard about the death of Paulina’s son, and then he thought that if he had brought her back to Nairobi with the child it would not have happened. But he said nothing. And he did not go for the elections or for Christmas, for what comfort could he bring to his parents when after all these years he no longer had even the pretence of a child to care for their old age?
A break came in December when the Kisumu curfew was shortened by two hours and the new elections were patching over the gaps in the ranks. One of Paulina’s friends introduced her to a top bank official who was going to Nairobi on promotion and needed someone with experience to look after the house and children. Paulina was glad to go. Although domestic work might be a step down in status it would be a break from the deadly monotony of Kano. She would get a glimpse of the ‘Upper Hill’ end of Nairobi life and perhaps a chance to visit old friends too. She travelled by OTC the same day the Okelos were going by car and the mother picked her up from the bus station. Already, driving through unknown streets for unimaginable distances, she was sinking into the blessed anonymity of the big city.
She sorted linen into drawers as though born to it, mastered the working of the stove, conjured up supper for the children out of tins, while their parents, exhausted by the shift in status as well as place, went to eat in a hotel. There was a room for her built in the garden, left a bit greasy by the previous occupant but still sound, cleanable and private compared with the old Pumwani room. She felt at home at once. Okeyo belonged to the past. He had never had a home. He had no nickname to identify him with family and clan. Perhaps she had never had a right to him, after all - it seemed so natural to be alone.
That talent for order which Martin had hoped to cultivate in her as a wife would serve as well for the job of housekeeper.
In the daytime, when the Okelos were out at work, servants from the neighbouring houses would come to pass the time of day. The Luo people asked only general questions, names and places. None of them referred to recent events or the curfew. Other people, asking, unspecifically, ‘How is Kisumu?' would relate the necessary answer, ‘Well, but not very well’, to the detention of Jaramogi or to Tom’s death, all those months ago. They didn’t seem concerned at the little news they had received about the curfew and the shootings and she locked these things away in her heart.
6
Paulina never knew who in Nairobi could have heard of her move, but on the second Sunday Martin appeared at the little house, neat, polite and distant, like someone sent with a message. She could not spend long with him as the children were to be taken to tea in a neighbour’s house, but he expressed formal regret for the death of the child and asked for news of family and friends. For the first time she was able to express to somebody in words the numbness of Nyanza after the shock that had burst upon it that Saturday, the indignity of the curfew, the hardly believable acceptance of death, the terrible silences. Martin had lost weight, his cheeks were hollow, his eyes deep and staring. He told her he had not been home. There seemed no point in it.
‘We can’t do anything,’ he kept saying, ‘we can’t do anything.’ He shook hands and promised to come again. He had left Kibera and got a room in Eastleigh, but he still worked for the same company, as outside salesman now, which got him a few extras and more chance to see the world than the man at the counter.
‘I did not think,’ he said, ‘when I first brought you to Nairobi, that there would ever be a time you would feel safer here than at home.’
‘I can make a home here now that I am alone,’ she said practically. ‘I like the people. There is plenty to do.’
But he shook his head, murmuring that only Gem was home, which seemed odd, since she could have no welcome if she went back there. She had to bring the children back from the tea party and get them
ready for bed, so there was no time to brood on it.
She often slept in a comer of the children’s room if their parents were going to be out late, and sometimes she made extra reasons to sleep there when men banged on her door in the night and troubled her. She always told them to go away because she was not allowed to receive visitors, and for the time being did not find it hard to do so. The child’s death left her hyperconscious of sin and Martin’s nearness reminded her that she had not been the first to break faith. She did not ask him about the coast girl.
The months passed. The elections and the curfew were forgotten. Jaramogi, in detention, was not spoken of. But Tom’s death, the previous year, was always remembered, and his photograph still appeared in shop windows and picture-framing booths. The papers said that Njenga had been hanged for the murder, though somehow, amid ail the other alarms, the fact had not reached the news at the time. But no one took any account of Njenga, for the circumstances of the murder remained as hidden as they had been that final Saturday, when Kisumu Show closed down and Okeyo had been a dancing httle boy, not understanding why grown-ups glued their ears to the radio, and there had been another day when they lined up by the roadside to watch the hearse pass and yet he came back unharmed and demanded meat for his supper and astonished everyone by his cleverness. It was better not to remember.
Paulina seldom got the whole day off to brood over things, but she sometimes found her way to church at St Stephen’s or St John’s and discovered that some of her Brethren friends were hving in smart new flats and driving cars. In the old Pumwani streets there were not many people she knew now - a few of the shopkeepers, the younger of the landladies. Amina had moved. She had a house in Eastleigh, people said, and took in boarders, which was more profitable than just letting the rooms. She had got big ideas since taking in the coloured child but the rest of the women were not too hard on her for that. They agreed that Pumwani was not a good place to bring a girl up in and that Amina had done well for herself. The girl had been sent away to boarding school, where she told people that her mother had had a white husband who was killed in the Emergency.
The months came and went, cleaning, washing, minding children.
That other rocket had nearly burned out on a trip to the moon, but people were blase about it, counting another world already colonised, the spectacular risk of those few men in space hardly commanding a prayer meeting or a special edition. From Gem there came constant news of death - not suspicious, exactly, but as though ill-omened. The Okelos discussed the news with relish and attended services where appropriate but did not let it distract them from the steady social climb. These days death announcements took up longer and longer radio time, so that people from all over the country were expected to forgather, and time was left for them to do so, except when the successive cholera scares, from 1971 on, put a temporary halt to the practice. The expense of Paulina’s father’s funeral looked negligible beside the new demands. The Asian habit of inserting photographs with the death and in memoriam notices was beginning to spread to other communities, so that it became from year to year a bigger burden on the bereaved and a secure comfort to the press through the years of rising paper and printing costs.
Early in 1971 Jaramogi was released from detention. It did not make a very big headline, but every Luo heart was the lighter for it, though he looked old and ill. There was talk of offering him a Parliamentary seat at the coast if Nyanza politicians did not vacate one for him, but it all came to nothing, as it had for an earlier detainee from Sakwa. Martin never let anyone forget it.
The Zanzibar plot was very much in the news and Uganda in a state of flux. Suddenly on Madaraka Day it was announced that nine men of different tribes and professions had pleaded guilty to plotting to overthrow the government. For a week the hearings and confessions in the Sedition Trial continued to dominate the news. By the time of the nationwide loyalty rally at the end of June, for which people travelled from all over the country, weapons were forbidden and refreshment rooms requested to provide a 24-hour service, the ‘sedition’ shock was over.
Paulina knew about the trial because radios up and down the road carried the news and everyone was talking about it, but it would not have occurred to her to go to the rally and the Okelos did not go either. Martin went and reported that he had never been so squeezed, deafened and generally shoved about in his life. He was not happy or
sad or excited or disappointed but only reassured: everything was going to stay the same. On 4 July the Chief Justice made his loyalty pledge. The reporting was in so low a key that Paulina would not even have noticed his leaving office three days later if Martin had not pointed it out to her.
Martin always knew about the whispers. Whispers of a ruby mine, whispers of oil in Northern Province, whispers of Obote, with a big price on his head, being openly seen in Dar es Salaam - that same Obote whom one used to run into in Pumwani Memorial Hall. Whispers of hidden violence in Uganda - whispers, whispers, whispers.
It gave him something to talk about when he came to see Paulina, since they were not very free with family news. His mother died at the end of 1971 but he never suggested that Paulina should go to the funeral. Much as she liked the old lady, Paulina accepted exclusion, knowing that she had not fulfilled a daughter-in-law’s duty. Martin was decorous, not particularly shaken by his mourning. There was nothing monstrous or untimely about the death. Paulina dared not ask him whether the little square house was in good repair, who slept there now and kept her gardens. One of the Httle sisters was a nurse and still single. The other had left school early and married in Uyoma. She supposed that nephews must have been brought in, all these years, to fetch firewood and water and do the herding. She had kept her mind away from it. Here no one brought her maize to grind and she cooked daily with the insipid white flour out of packets. Some days she finished work too late to feel like cooking, and so she kept a loaf of bread in the cupboard, like a European. But the regular, dull work kept in control the feelings surging inside, just as Nairobi kept going with its surface chatter and safari rally cars charging about at the very time that, if the confessions in the Sedition Trial were to be believed, a violent plot was simmering just below the surface.
Paulina sometimes got a ride into town if the children wanted to go shopping with their mother on a Saturday and marvelled at the new^ buildings and the sophistication of the city centre. There was something of the same excitement now that she had felt fifteen years before on seeing the city for the first time - the pleasant sunshine, the continuous change of spectacle, the bustle and the hard-learned
possibility of belonging. Only what was gone was the hopefulness of a first start. There might be a new start, but the gush of feeling afid the certainty of birth would never come again.
7
The days passed. Mrs Okelo, who complained bitterly that her boss would sometimes keep her twenty minutes late finishing the letters, and always on a day when they had to go to a party and it would take her three-quarters of an hour to get ready (not that she enjoyed parties, she insisted, but for the sake of her husband’s career they must go), never seemed to be aware that time existed for other people. Even when Paulina had gone to her room after giving the children their supper and tidying up after them, she would call her back with instructions for the next day, a shopping list or a search for something that had been too safely put away. In the mornings - especially the crotchety mornings following the parties - Paulina might have to call the parents when the cook had breakfast ready, ferret out the green shoes to go with the green dress and remind about the milk money, as well as getting the children ready for school and nursery. She noted all this as inefficiency but did not resent it - what else, after all, would she do with her time? Even when she had been promised a free afternoon because the family were going on a visit, she often enough found herself left with the little one because he was too sleepy or cross to go. But the time left was enough for her scanty personal life, and she enjoyed taking the children out to tea and having a chance to compare notes with the other ayahs from Indian and European houses. She never told them she had had a child herself. It helped her not to remember too much.
One day she had requested a Sunday afternoon off to visit the wife of the next-door house servant in the Maternity Hospital. The visit was not cheering. The young mother had lost a lot of blood and had to share a bed with a very fat woman. She looked drained and miserable. Within a week she would probably have to go back to her mother-in-law, since the employer had already made it clear that she would not tolerate the noise of babies crying, and Nyambura had reason not to like leaving Mwangi on his own.
Paulina walked out of the hospital into the blazing sun. The wards
had been greatly extended since her Pumwani days and the young midwives had all the self-possession of the modem girl, clicking through the corridors in shiny shoes and with buoyant hair burying their vestigial nursing caps. She turned to catch the bus back to town and came face to face with Amina, her old landlady, now aged with dignity, still voluminously clad in gay cotton, her cheeks a little pinched, her eyes duller than of old, but still quick to recognise, seize, commandeer. Paulina felt herself firmly held by the arm while lengthy farewells to the other Moslem women were completed, then steered towards Section Three.
She protested mildly - she must be back for the children’s suppertime - but was glad to meet a friend in such hearty flesh and substance, adding reality to her own tentative hold on life, and so obediently she went along. She followed Amina upstairs above a grocery shop in one of the old Eastleigh streets. The stairs were grimy but the sitting-room, which they entered through a Yale door, was bright and clean, with yellow and red lino on the floor, a sofa set with elaborate embroidered cloths, a fringed tablecloth, a chiming clock and a radio playing at full blast. The young girl lounging in the armchair beside the radio could only be Joyce, though she looked more than her twelve years or so - a hefty young person with gingery hair tied back on her shoulders with a scarf, a long nose, a small mouth and a smile that did not go very deep. She entered politely into the greetings and exchange of news, speaking perfect Swahili but with a mannerism quite different from her mother’s.
Paulina did not mean to talk about the baby or about Nyanza at all but Amina’s way was at once so compelling and so sympathetic that it all came out, except Okeyo’s parentage, of course, which was none of Amina’s business but which it was, all the same, likely she would know about already - as indeed she did. Amina was direct in her sympathy - ‘See how long I had to wait before I got this one, but you at least have the assurance that you can have another.’ - but it was Joyce who surprised her. Tears welled out of her and ran unheeded down on to the expensive stuff of the new armchairs. When she escorted Paulina back to the bus-stop she pressed upon her a tray-cloth she had embroidered at school.
‘I want you to remember that there is a child who cares for you,’ she said simply.
‘I am grateful,’ answered Paulina, just as simply, ‘and I should like you to remember that I loved carrying you when you were a baby and I did not seem able to have one of my own.’
On the way home Paulina realised - or would have realised, if the thought had not come to her as an intrusion to be speedily repressed - that she had lost the habit of speaking to people. She passed the time of day with servants along the road, enquiring into their household routines and how they were treated. A few of Mrs Okelo’s visitors greeted her civilly - she always dreaded that they would know too much of the past. There was a young widow working at the grocery store with whom she would occasionally go to church or shopping if their free times corresponded. But there was no one to whom she would pour out her sorrows and questions as she once had to Rachel or Susanna. There was so much she wished to hide and so Uttle she wished to know, though some kinds of knowledge obtruded upon her.
Her little sister came one school holiday, and by manipulating times and sometimes getting permission to take the Okelo children too she managed to show her Parliament Building, the Post Office, the park, very much as she had shown the club women long ago. And out of her private memories she showed her the museum too, and the open shop doors where young men work at mending carpets in rich colours without leaving a trace of needle or thread, the milliary stone where you could measure your distance from Bahoya in Australia, or the Pyramids of Egypt or the Pope in Rome. But she did not really talk to the sister, only exhort her to study more and help her mother at home. And she did not really talk to the Brethren either: she could not repent of having Okeyo, and she could not repine at staying alone if that was the price of having had him. She chatted in the re-echoing phrases she had grown up with or the more discursive Swahili of the town - ‘So you are planting cabbages, are you?’, ‘Vegetables have got dearer again’, ‘A la, who would have thought it?’ - but no strength went out of her in real converse. She had none to spare.
CHAPTER