1
At the end of 1975 the Okelos went to Mombasa on another transfer and talked about taking Paulina with them, but she was in two minds about whether to go. She knew nobody there and feared that in a strange town she would be even more tied by 24-hour-a-day duties. Martin was visiting her regularly now and she felt that to move with the family would confirm her position as a house-servant for the rest of her days. The cook had long since been dismissed and more and more duties fell to her.
It then appeared that the European family the Okelos were replacing had requested them to take over the house-servant as well as the furniture. Nobody enquired whether the man in question was enthusiastic, and Paulina thought he had better reconsider how urgently he needed his job if he supposed he was going to dragoon this family into keeping the same hours and recipes he was used to. But it was hinted that she might prefer to look elsewhere, and as the older children were being sent to boarding-school - it was feared that another move to a hot climate might interfere with their education - and the youngest no longer required close attention, her ties with the family were weakening in any case.
Paulina hesitated. She had been home to visit her mother only once in the four years since she had escaped to Nairobi and it had not been an easy time. People made up to her because of her good clothes and the expectation of gifts, but they sneered behind their hands, she thought, at her childless state and broken marriage. On the bumpy journey down to Kisumu, two old men on the bus - one a retired policeman she remembered with terror from her schooldays, when his uniform and massively protruding teeth were always held up as a threat to the young, the other a small shopkeeper from the local market - discoursed loudly to one another on the blessing of children
and the miraculous fertility of their sons’ wives. True, not all the progeny were ahve, but the Good Lord knew when enough was enough, and so natural deaths were not to be feared hke the bringing of someone purposely into a danger zone.
Paulina had shrunk in her seat, the weird rock forms she gazed at through the window now uncanny and repellent where once they had been familiar and amusing. She burned with the knowledge that her uncle had been fined for not digging a pit latrine even after the second cholera scare and that she had caught her own niece going through her handbag. The bats had kept her awake and her sisters-in-law had spotted her aversion to the unwashed gourd in which porridge was offered. And she had no home of her own in which to defend herself against their scorn. Although she sent money and letters when anyone she knew was travelling back, she was not eager to go again. Certainly she could not live there, even if by sewing and teaching she could maintain herself in a separate house, and she felt guilty whenever she heard her friends planning happily for a village retirement, even the Okelos, who would shout to high heaven if the electricity were cut off long enough to damp the fridge or cool the bath-water. She might, of course, look for another conmiunity development job, but she had fled from Kano without giving notice, and these days, when all the jobs were localised, you needed to face an appointing officer supported by husband and brother-in-law, dignity and the signs of wealth. Besides, these days there were plenty of girls who had completed secondary school, whereas she herself had not even been right through primary. But, more than anything, she feared going where people would know about Okeyo. Deaths of children are not memorable, but that day of death was stamped on the memory of Kisumu people.
The matter solved itself as the Brethren told her matters offered up in prayer often do. One of the sitting MPs had just moved to a new house in Nairobi. His wife was fully occupied, as big people’s wives are, but also more concerned than some about the running of her household. She was looking for a mature woman to keep an eye on the needs of the school-age children and guests, supervise the cook and put the finishing touches to the housework. She herself could speak Luo although it was not the family language and the children were
taught Swahili and English as well as their mother tongue. An adequate room was available immediately and Paulina moved in the day after the Okelos left for Mombasa. A few weeks later Martin, on a Sunday afternoon visit, asked her to look after his briefcase and a box of books while he was on a selling safari. He dropped in from time to time to take what he wanted and would bring a couple of shirts for her to mend and iron. Once or twice he stayed the night because he did not feel up to the journey back on the late bus, and the first time she left him her bed and made up her own in the children’s room as she would if their parents were away. But soon it was an understood thing that he would stay when he wished. Within six months he had moved all his things to her room. Typically, he was a week away on business and a fortnight in Nairobi. She cooked for him when he was home and asked no questions when he was not. He gave her a hundred shillings towards the food at the end of each month and often brought back cheap bananas and eggs from his safaris. When he first came to stay he bought her a pair of shoes and a dictionary for her little sister in high school.
They were both very deliberately casual about it. He said he did not like to stay alone when he was out of town so often and his goods would not be safe. He had not made out very well sharing with men friends - there were always bottles in the house and disputes over the kitchen items. It would be prudent to move in with her for reasons of security and economy.
She twisted the wedding ring which she still wore. Of course he would be free to come if he wished. She did not assert any right in him but she was still his wife. Neither of them referred to the fact that there was only space for a single bed in the room.
They stored some chairs and the frame of the other bed in the garage. Paulina could not help remembering how they had squeezed into the tiny room in Kariokor so many years ago, and how lavish her present possessions would have seemed to the girl she then was. And, after all, they did not now really have to live in the little room, which would once have seemed ample for their needs. As often as not she had lunch in the kitchen and spent the early evening in the children’s room or serving guests in the lounge. In the daytime there was the whole garden to sit in, and when the family was out she was expected to be
within earshot of the telephone and the doorbell. She had once heard Mr M. explain to an enquiring guest, ‘Oh no, she is not a housemaid, she is more of a general factotum’, and when she asked the meaning she liked the sound of it.
2
In fact she didn’t have much time to ponder over her personal relationships because the election was coming up and she was worked off her feet. She hadn’t thought like that about elections, people don’t after all, if they are not involved. She remembered the tremendous excitement of 1957 but of course she was not qualified to vote then. People stood in a line to make their mark and drop the paper in a box. Then the papers were counted and the results announced. That was all there was to it, just like counting hands at church council elections. Of course the candidates were running around giving talks and getting photographed for the newspapers, but she hadn’t thought that affected anyone else much.
She herself had never voted. For the little General Election of 1966 she did not feel free to go back from Kano to Gem, although by then she had a card. She had no heart to go for the by-election after Argwings-Kodhek’s death; in any case the result was a foregone conclusion. The election of 1969 was meaningless to her; it was a fight among survivors. And now - she would have voted for Mr M. if she could, because he was a kind man and seemed to her sensible, but of course his constituency was far from hers. Mrs M. asked if she wanted to go to Gem, but obviously this would be difficult to arrange, with both employers away and the house besieged by callers, so she said no. Martin had not even suggested her going with him. And it was too late to transfer her vote to Nairobi - it only now occurred to her that with her husband nearby and a job she enjoyed she could actually live in Nairobi instead of treating it as a place of refuge.
It started even before Parhament was dissolved, the rush of extra visitors, the meetings and the private talks that followed meetings, the telephone always ringing and glasses, glasses, glasses to wash and put away. She was worried that many people wanted to talk in a language she didn’t know.
‘Don’t get upset,’ Mrs M. kept saying. ‘If they know how to use the
telephone they know how to speak Swahili or English well enough. We want you to keep the home together when it’s in danger of busting, not to run the constituency for us. Name and phone number is quite enough.’
‘Busting?’ She thought she must have misheard.
‘Now don’t look as though you’re going to cry over me. You can’t afford to get sentimental just because your Martin’s come home to roost. Just wait till this little lot’s over and then tell me whether any sane woman would stay married through more than one election campaign.’
‘But you haven’t any choice, have you?’ asked Paulina, bewildered.
‘You wait and see! But seriously, Paulina, I shall have to be away a lot and the house will be full of people. I’m relying on you to keep the children steady - that’s why I can’t do with an old woman who only knows about tying napkins and bathing babies. They will want you to decide whether they can have friends to tea or not. (On the whole not: you’ll be run off your feet without that. But you have to keep them from resenting the claims of the election as much as I sometimes do.) And you’ll have to see that they get enough rest and finish their homework in spite of the racket going on in the house. It’s no joke, I tell you.’
Paulina sw^allowed hard. ‘It’s beyond my experience. I’ll try to do what you want but perhaps a relation would be better.’
‘Every relation we’re on civil terms with will be campaigning. And though it’s beyond your experience, it’s not beyond your capacity. I trust you to keep it all under control.’
‘And if people want to stay while you’re away? How shall I know?’
‘You know the people who come regularly. That is no problem. And if I send anybody there will be a note or a phone call. With a lot of casual callers you’ll be able truthfully to say the house is full and if they have election business they’d better contact us at home about it. But if there is something that really looks tricky, phone my sister-in- law - you have her number and she will recognise anyone who really has a claim on us.’
So the weeks passed. Mr M. was away most of the time, appearing suddenly to spend a night and then off again, bringing people for tea and drinks but hardly a solid meal at home. Mrs M. took her
accumulated leave and was also away a lot. Paulina kept a list of things they would need to present to her every time she dashed in - the week before the polls Mrs M. wrote a hefty cheque as a deposit at the grocer’s so that she would not run out. Even so, Paulina had to use some of her own money for extra milk from the local shops and hot dogs when the little boy caught a chill and wouldn’t eat anything else. She tried to keep an account of it but there was just too much to do.
Then the day came that the children’s transistor radio disappeared. Paulina was sure at first that they must have taken it into the garden or concealed it in their bedroom to listen when they were supposed to be asleep. But it was gone for good. The children were almost as much upset at the prospect of having to report the loss as at missing the programmes and Paulina also expected a reproof for carelessness, but Mrs M. took it very lightly.
‘You know I feel responsible,’ said Paulina, ‘but the house is never still for a moment, and I think you know that I have always been careful with your things before.’
‘Do you think I’m blaming you?’ laughed Mrs M., who was buying in yet more material for supporters’ uniforms. ‘If you came to the other house with me you would cry. I shan’t have a teaspoon left by the time the campaign is over, not to say a chicken to breed from. Well, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, I suppose. And you mustn’t annoy supporters by asking questions, so let’s make the best of it.’
By the time polling day arrived Paulina was caught up in the enthusiasm, and she sat beside the TV half the night seeing results in. Martin, of course, had gone home to vote, and the children had fallen asleep in spite of their eagerness to stay up late. She was excited when Mr M.’s victory by a safe majority was announced next day but could not get very interested in the other results.
Mr and Mrs M. were both exhausted when they returned to Nairobi. They asked her if she wanted a few days off to compensate for those she had missed but were obviously relieved when she said she had nothing to do at home. It had not occurred to her that you could take a holiday elsewhere. They bought her a dress instead, but
in fact she had enjoyed her time of power rather than resenting the extra work.
‘Huh,’ said Martin. ‘Anyone would think you were going to make the speeches and get the pay, so bucked you are about it. They won’t be getting you extra roads or schools for our place, that’s for sure. All it means for you is more kitchen work as far as I can see, and running up to the school in case their fine friends with cars forget to bring them home.’
What he really meant, of course, was ‘Anyone would think it was your own children you were fussing over.’
3
Martin had opened a shop at home, he told her, a couple of years before, in collaboration with a half-brother and a cousin. He was always grumbling at the outlay - nothing very much seemed to come back from it in relation to the repairs and investment being demanded. It gave him a bit of interest in going home, now that the old folks were no longer there and there was no incentive, she supposed, for improving the little house with no family growing up in it. He never suggested that she should go with him. It was her turn to be the town wife.
And as she - trying to retain him less consciously than Nancy or Fauzia had done - cooked her best, dressed modestly in new fashions, kept up with current events and showed an innocent familiarity with town life, reporting to him where there were men’s shirts selling cheap or when a special speaker was expected at the cathedral or the university, Martin the more withdrew. He refused to speak Swahili outside the work situation, impugned the motives of almost everybody in business or politics, had to be reminded to use the outside lavatory instead of passing water in what was, after all, Mr M.’s private garden. The shop seemed to dominate his thoughts when he was not attending meetings of community or clan associations. His world was shrunk to ‘home’ and everything outside suffered disparaging comparison, whether the price of vegetables, the behaviour of Mrs M.’s children, the weather or the quality of fish.
He did not go regularly to church any more, though he might go if there were a special speaker or if he felt particularly at odds with
Paulina’s having sometimes to work on a Sunday. The climate had changed from the days when you used to say, T am a Christian but I am not yet saved.’ To praise the Lord no longer helped you to get a job, and though the top people attended places of worship in surprising numbers they were often eager for a quick getaway. It was another way in which the light was going out. People talked about religion - on buses, in queues, in cafes you heard them talking, but often as though it was something dull, outside themselves. Paulina sometimes envied the white-robed women in their endless, vernacular-chanting processions, whose proclamation of the faith did not seem to come up against communal grouping or standards of living. Or perhaps it only looked like that in a separate compartment, and on Monday morning homesickness and bickering reasserted itself. And yet to see a bus driver, regardless of insults, wearing the turban of his sect with uniform, day in, day out, or those little groups who, ignoring a hand proffered to shake, clapped instead in greeting, this was a reminder of something worth having. Paulina wished, sometimes, that she had not been so carefully schooled to be inconspicuous.
One day, early in 1975, when Martin was away in Nakuru, she had requested time to see off her brother’s son who was returning from leave to Dar es Salaam, where he worked with the Harbours Corporation. The long-distance buses were marked ‘East African Road Services’ but everybody called them OTC as in the old days. The office had never changed much, either, still on that busy corner that marked the beginning of African Nairobi, stretching away from the bazaars and temples towards the plains where an old European lady who came to visit them had told her that long ago she used to gallop her pony and the wild zebra would gallop beside her.
You still crowded into the ticket office, where the clerks barked out their demands from behind high barred windows crowned with a sacred list of routes and starting times. It was hard to imagine any pre-colonial age when the bus timetable did not fit a grid of order across the whole country. Only ticket holders were allowed through the barrier into the great, dusty yard where the tarmac never seemed to hold down the bits and pieces perpetually chased by a man with a twig brush. But it was not very difficult to get round at the back where a
chain was being constantly raised and lowered to allow the buses to enter, and this she managed to do, chatting with her young nephew about home matters and asking questions about Dar es Salaam, where working life was ruled by the football results and where Asians worked for you like other people, carrying out their crafts in tiny recesses in the city streets or behind the mud walls of ordinary location houses. She could picture the sleepy, hot streets and the sight of a ship’s funnels appearing to pass along in the midst of the town, and after a long period of peace she felt anew the urge to be up and doing and seeing fresh sights, but as she waved her nephew off she remembered that she was now thirty-five and he was young and single with the world before him. The bus left on time, though the coast one was still hanging about to be checked, and the noticeboards were full of names of places she had never seen and could not picture.
She made her way out with the arriving passengers, pushed her way across the road and started up towards the Tusker bus stop. She had not got very far before the bomb went off.
No one understood at first. Her ears hurt and the air was full of smoke and flying dust. It did not even remind her of that day in Kano when a little pop, a tiny piece of metal, were the bearers of death. After a few seconds she began to connect the sound with scenes she had seen on television while waiting up with the children, and as she did so perhaps others did the same, for a voice arose that was somehow a corporate voice, not shouting or weeping exactly but a rumble rising and falling in waves, louder and closer than the rumble which had echoed round Nyanza the day Tom was shot and yet had not made its implication known, and people began to run, some back towards the bus station from which, rumour already began to suggest, the noise had come, some away from it. After standing still for perhaps three minutes, pressed by a surge of bodies in each direction and clutching her bag tightly, Paulina made up her mind. Ignoring the police sirens and screaming ambulances, she set herself to walk steadily in the direction of Parklands, heeding neither the scramble for buses nor the street corner discussions that were bound to be a target for police. Every inch the city dweller, freezing her face to the anonymity which so many in Kisumu had practised five years before, she took methodically the shortest route home on foot.
The children were disturbed and excited. She countered their questions stolidly. There had been a big bang, and if they had not heard the bang itself they might have heard the chain of shouts and questions and whispers that spread so rapidly across the city. Perhaps a bus had blown up, but they did not need to worry about their daddy as he would be using his car, not any buses. But they had better stay at home till next day because some traffic would be diverted from the city centre to oudying roads. She did not know how she knew this, but had no doubt of it. Their mother soon came home and was busy on the telephone. Paulina tried to keep the children out of earshot but could not help hearing some of the rumours herself. Eventually she coaxed them to sleep with stories.
4
‘Tell us the coast one,’ they said. ‘The funny one.’ And she embarked on one of Amina’s Swahili stories, though not sure in her own mind that it was fumiy.
‘Once upon a time, in the northern part of the coast where magic is very strong, there was a whole village haunted by djinns. There were so many of them and they alarmed the people so much that the whole village at last decided to move, and they built a new home on the opposite side of the river.
‘My friend’s mother had a second cousin called Petro, who was a Christian. He worked away in town and so he was not at home when the move took place. When he came back he was very angry at what had happened and said that no one who believed in God need be afraid of spirits. So he determined to sleep by himself in the old village to prove that he would come to no harm. This is a true story. My friend’s mother knew the man and had it from his own lips.
‘So Petro went to the village and said his prayers and went to bed. But about midnight he woke up to hear the sound of a whole crowd of people walking from the direction of the river, pat-pat,-pat-pat, pat- pat, PAT-PAT.’
Paulina told the story as Amina, a master of the craft, had told it, and the whole room seemed to be filled with the tread of damp bare feet coming gradually nearer.
‘As they approached, Petro could hear the clinking of the women’s bracelets, chigili-chigili, chigili-chigih, chigili-chigili, CHIGILI-CHIGILI, growing gradually nearer and the squelching of the men’s sticks on the marshy ground, pff-pff, pff-pff, pff-pffi pff-pff. And then he heard voices coming gradually closer, “Someone’s in there, someone’s in there, someone's in there^ someone’s IN there”.’
The children huddled together, their eyes rounded with expectation.
‘Petro lay quite still on his bed. The door was bolted but he heard ssst-ssst and he knew there was someone in the room. He was sweating in terror and because of this he felt he must get up and pass water. No sooner did he sit up than a shrill voice above his head said, “He wants to pass water” and a gruff voice somewhere near the floor repeated, “He wants to pass water.” By now he was so frightened that he could not contain himself any more. “He has wet his bed,” said the shrill voice. “He has wet his bed,” repeated the gruff voice. “Ha, ha, ha, he has wet his bed.”
‘Petro lay there and he felt his feet beginning to freeze. Little by little he lost the power of feeling up to his knees. He realised that if he did not make an effort he would never move again. He struggled into a sitting position and cried aloud, “Jesus, save me.”
‘ “Ah,” cried the shrill voice above him, “who is he talking to?”
‘ “Who is he talking to?” echoed the gruff voice.
‘ “He is calling on his Jesus,” they mocked.
‘ “He is calling on his Jesus.”
‘ “Who is that Jesus of his?”
‘ “Who is that Jesus of his,” they laughed.’
Peals of shrill and gruff laughter echoed while the quiet voice pursued the story. The children joined in but Paulina felt herself hot with the sweat of sympathy.
‘But although they laughed they were defeated by the name of Jesus. Petro heard again ssst-ssst and knew' that the room was empty. Outside he could hear many voices growing fainter as they moved away.
‘ “ha, ha. hOy ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”
‘ “he is calling on his JESUS, he is calling on his Jesus, he is calling on his Jesus, he is calling on his Jesus.”
‘ “who is that JESUS OF HIS? Who is that Jesus of his? Who is that
Jesus of his? Who is that Jesus of his? Jesus - Jesus - Jesus - Jesus - Jesus.”
‘And he heard the bracelets getting fainter, chigili-chigili, chigili-chigili, chigili-chigili-chigili-chigili - and the sticks, pfff-pfff, pfff-pfff, pfff-pfff, and the footsteps, pat-pat, pat-pat, pat- pat, pat-pat, until they faded away into the river.
‘As soon as it was light Petro ran to the place where he had left his boat and crossed the river to the new village. And though the Christians were glad that the Name had prevailed, no one has been known to sleep in the place ever since.’
5
When the children were asleep Paulina sat in the big house to watch the news on TV and keep Mrs M. company till her husband should return. He came late at night. He had been going over and over the known course of the event with his political colleagues and everyone was baffled by it. The bomb had been traced and yet no one could discover a reason for its having been planted on the bus. No VIP was about who might have been a target for assassination. One could not find any local connection or revenge motive that made sense. Mourners and sympathisers gathered as the casualties were identified. Rumours flew but not one of them seemed credible.
Paulina was thankful that Martin no longer had to travel by bus outside Nairobi but took the firm’s driver with a load of samples. She did not know when to expect him but he arrived back at dusk on Sunday looking tired and shaky. This was no time, he said, to be travelling with other people’s property. He would rather risk losing a few orders than get hijacked on the way and asked what a Nairobi van was doing on the road. He ate early, without appetite, and hurried to bed as though his weariness was worldwide.
They later heard that the Dar es Salaam bus was the last to leave before the explosion and so had been stopped for investigation and every passenger cross-examined about his identity and travel plans. Her nephew did not know the reason and assumed some border incident to be in question, but nothing suspicious was found and they were allowed to proceed to Dar es Salaam where the radio and newspapers soon enlightened them.
Paulina had been directed by a sense of the city in retreating from the scene of the explosion to the anonymity of the house. Similarly she became absorbed in the feeling of the city in the next two weeks while everyone wondered and few sf)oke, while formal statements of investigation were made and not acted upon, when tension became absorbed into the multiple rhythms of everyday life. For in Nairobi you get dressed whether you have clean clothes or not, you eat whether you know where the next meal is coming from or not, you do work, whether the work is a compulsive progression from dustbin to dustbin, from one employment office to the next, or whether it is a ritual with scales or paper clips to dress out someone else’s fantasy. In Nairobi you withdraw when someone threatens your personal space, you manipulate the calculations necessary to crossing the road almost without accident, you recognise by a shrug or a lifted eyebrow the appropriate stations of men and gods. So you cannot be said just to hang upon the next event.
And yet you know that there must be a next event, and when the newspapers begin to report the search for J.M. Kariuki you know that in one sense or another the event has happened.
In the days after the bomb went off the air was full of whispers. Paulina knew the sense of them although they were often enough phrased in difficult English purposely in order to exclude her. But she could not be excluded. Had she not lost a child? They said that Kariuki had gone to Zambia, had registered in a hotel there. But the elder Mrs Kariuki was an acquaintance of the house and she did not know of it. Her co-wife also did not know. There had been no preparations for going: there had been no custom of keeping unnecessary secrets. It was small husbands with small concerns who did that.
Whisper, whisper, whisper. They said the police officers had been transferred from here to there. That officers had been consulting with the missing man here and there. That there was a lot of money. That Parliament ~ whisper, whisper, whisper.
Paulina went about her duties, ironing, setting tables, supervising the servant in the cleaning of the house and the hard washing. Sometimes her belly throbbed with the child who had been so casually taken from her at another time like this and the others who had been
denied her. And yet a child was a child with a light hold on life. When it came to a man, a wealthy man, golden tongued, greatly loved, though he was not of her own people she knew this much, that the passing of such a man would be remembered, celebrated. Still not a week passed without someone speaking of Tom.
And when the body was found, discreetly mutilated, you knew what the event was that for weeks you had been expecting, although the real event was still not known. The police officers went about their leave or their business outside the station without referring to it, the mortuary keeper who had a well-dressed corpse of appropriate size and weight and characteristics in his charge did not tumble to it. The airline clerks checking flights to Zambia did not tumble to it. The children playing in the streets did not tumble to it - children who were of the age to have been shot in Kano or Patel flats, children who did not shy away from the sight of a gun or hold their noses against white smoke from a bonfire, children who had been conceived after their fathers had come back from the camps, after the squatters had missed their chance to buy up the white farm settlement plots, after the land titles had been written, children who did not know the eerie stillness of the forest or the KEM prohibited signs. Children of the New Method, who knew John Wayne and the Aga Khan and Bruce Lee and Charlie Chaplin by sight, who knew how to figure on a base of five and counted out diligently in their nursery schools:
‘Eeny, meeny, miny mo.
Catch a little baby so,
If he hollers let him go,
Eeny, meeny, miny mo.’
Even those terribly sharp children did not tumble to it.
Nobody really knew how it tied up with the bomb. There was no need to know. Hyenas were there to settle with those who asked too many questions. But while the casualties of the bomb were nameless people absorbed into the daily casualty lists of fire, flood and domestic quarrels, J.M. burst upon the scene as a martyr and a paroxysm of grief ran through the city. The skies were leaden that April and it grew colder and colder. Eyes grew hard in Nairobi and conversations were rounded off with polite, empty phrases, even before the stranger came
close. Photographs of J.M. alternated with the Pope and the Sacred Heart on the roadside framing stands. The book was reprinted and within a few months Parliamentary speeches were printed too. A Kikuyu gramophone record was banned. Mr Mwangale remarked bluntly in Parhament, ‘This time we cannot be told Njenga did it.’ Paulina and Martin did not discuss it. The employers spoke of it in low tones. In May the rains came, chill and steady, a bit late, and in the shanties by the river people squirmed and shivered over the water-logged ground and fires smoked damply at the mouth of airless polythene shelters.
Sometimes Paulina lay awake thinking about it. The district was quiet enough with its big gardens and widely spaced houses, and yet these days it never seemed quiet to a woman who had endured the sounds of eight households mingling over the wooden rafters of Pumwani or the noise of sacks and boxes swaying perilously overhead in Kariokor and latecomers squeezing past folded chairs and unrolled mats in adjacent rooms. Here dogs barked at night suspiciously, on the defence rather than on heat, and, human noise being caged in protective houses or convoyed out in automobiles to vent its passion elsewhere, the distant sounds of traffic hung long in the air, hke the early morning bus at home that was heard so far off, amid the unmechanical buzz of night, that you could get up and dress and be ready to catch it at the market. You could hear the car coming as though straight at you, like the looming danger in a gangster film, and then often you heard the opening of padlocks and the creak of gates to show how well protected your quietness was, and the ear was suddenly tensed, the head lifted from the pillow as though you expected to hear a baby cry or a bomb go off. In that anxiety a barrier had been raised again between rich and poor. But between poor and poor a barrier had been broken down. Whatever else might have happened, the force which had become personalised in this man’s death was not enmity between tribe and tribe.
The months dragged on and the air did not lighten. The dead man’s watch had been found at a police post. A Parliamentary Commission reported but the police declared themselves unable to take any action on the report. The MP and the visitors who came talked in low tones, drank with steady determination, did nothing to bring notice upon
themselves. Passenger trains stopped running. Martin had been taught at school that the country had grown up round the railway as a lifeline. Certainly the notion of country as distinct from locaUty grew where the railway was. It was as though a whole epoch of history had been uprooted, and skilled middle-class workers on indefinite unpaid leave struggled to meet their school fees and to keep their boots in good repair.
In October came another shock. There were high words in Parliament about the state of the ruling party, KANU, and a few days later Mr Seroney, the Deputy Speaker, and Mr Shikuku were taken into detention.
The cloud did not lift. It was as though voices were muffled. Paulina went about her duties as usual, washing linen and glasses - the glasses again seemed to be endless - giving a final polish to the furniture and at the same time answering the telephone, taking messages, helping the cook out when dinner had to be stretched to extra servings. She felt almost like the manager of the house. She was getting the full Nairobi rate of four hundred shillings a month which, with a free room and much of her food provided, made her feel affluent indeed. She did not have to wear a house servant’s uniform or be ordered in and out of the rooms. Somehow the household absorbed her without loss of human dignity, and she was sorry for the cook, always being called to account for the eggs or the milk. She could speak English quite fluently now - could listen to the English radio more readily than she could read a newspaper. She had never exactly learned it, but ever since her days in Homecraft more and more of the language had hung in the air around her.
6
Only one person asked a lot of questions about the new detention and that was a single woman MP, a rare bird indeed. Her questions were not fully answered, though rumours buzzed about, and fresh news overtook them as the months passed. Then all of a sudden the girl - Chelagat Mutai was her name - was accused of inciting a crowd to violence in the previous year and sentenced to thirty months’ imprisonment.
Thirty months - an unbearably long time, people said. It was about
as long as the whole time Paulina had had Okeyo. But time passes. Twice as long as that, more than twice, had somehow been got through since she lost him. Chelagat was tough. She would get through it too. Mrs M. asked Paulina’s opinion about getting a cross- section of Kenya women to petition for release. Paulina shook her head. She did not know many women and most were concerned only with their own domestic affairs. It was not her business and yet it troubled her.
All the time she was getting closer to Mrs M., who was herself a high school girl from a generation when high school girls were rigorously selected, and a trained secretary. Mrs M. appreciated the qualities in her ‘general factotum’ which had been developed without the aid of formal education. She often took Paulina with her to meetings where women’s place in society was discussed, pointed her out as a person who had achieved a balanced and contented life without the blessing of children, stressed her great usefulness to society though she was not competing directly in any man’s field of achievement. And yet Paulina could not help remembering that her usefulness was secondary to Mrs M.’s usefulness, her contentment, if that was what you could call it, partly derived from Mrs M.’s own motherhood and precariously dependent on Martin’s failure to get a child from any other woman. She did not claim to understand it all, but worked, prayed when she could, observed, remembered and held her peace. It was no use getting upset on your own behalf.
Paulina focused all her indignation on the Mutai case, all the complaints of woman in a man’s world which she dared not relate to her own conunonplace experiences. She even overcame her usual reticence to the point of shouting at Martin when he sat down to eat, without showing any particular emotion, on the day the sentence was announced. Perhaps his public emotions had been used up while hers were conserved. At the time of Tom Mboya’s murder she had been too happy with Okeyo to feel much grief: the later ‘incident’ was swamped by her private sorrow at the loss of her child. She could hardly have told you when the election was held or the curfew lifted. The Sedition Trial had hardly touched her: it was like a stage play in a church hall: one could not really believe that such things were going on. And J.M.’s death had crystallised a feeling of belonging, so that
though she herself had dared to go up and take the hand of the widow when she visited the house, and pour out what phrases of consolation she could manage in SwahiU (for mourning was something you ordinarily did only in the mother tongue and had to be rethought if your sympathies lay outside), people had thought more of themselves than of the dark terror of those moments, the betrayal by friends, the gradual chopping off of fingers. But Chelagat, a strapping young woman and single, was within her comprehension, cut off from friends and constituents, humiliated in the cell, sent out to dig, kept from the news of other sufferers which she had been demanding before anyone remembered the incitements said to have occurred so many months back, when she had not yet addressed the press conference or posed the awkward statements and the defiant questions.
‘We must do something,’ Paulina howled at Martin.
‘Don’t shout at me. I’m not the High Court of Appeal. What do you think we can do?’
‘Write to our MPs, make processions, sign petitions, strike . . .’
‘You going to strike against Mrs M.? To persuade her to do something she wouldn’t have wanted to do?’
‘Well, of course I don’t have to, but you know what I mean.’
‘I know you can’t do anything. Anything at all. Only government can do it.’
‘But we are the government. Mrs M. says . . .’
‘If you are the government, you get Mr M. to queue up to put his cross on a bit of paper with your symbol on it: fig-leaf or something, or a militant crochet-hook. I don’t see . . .’
‘We put them there and we help them to act.’
‘Paulina, will you be silent, for I see myself that there is nothing for us but “can’t”. I used to go to meetings, as you know, and classes, as you know, and read books such as we still have here, but what is there for me to do? When I married you I was selling envelopes and now I am still selling envelopes, maybe a few more and a bit dearer but that’s all there is to it. Yes, I have a better suit and eat meat more often, but what of it? If I had six sons to keep I should have less for myself than I had then. And no more to say.’
Ill
‘You have the shop.’ What could she answer to questions about sons?
‘So I do have the shop at home, or a half or a third of the shop with my brothers. What do I get out of it?’
‘You get the feeling that a bit of Nyanza is yours.’
‘If I have no shares in anything I don’t fit into the new society. And if I do have shares in it, how can I change it?’
‘Then you could . . .’
There would have been no end to it except that they both had their work to do, their separate circle of acquaintances. Their time together was limited, their conversation desultory, but always she was the one demanding to grow, to get out, to do things, and he was tired and disillusioned.
Mrs M. and Paulina thought that a women’s petition might secure not a pardon for Chelagat, that was a matter of law, but some mitigation of her sentence. Even if it failed, women might become politically conscious by making the attempt. And whereas six women, or twenty, making a fuss in Nairobi about a court case, might be arrested or harassed, no one in these non-Emergency days could arrest thousands on thousands of women. Tirelessly Mrs M. sought out the leading women in different professions, tribes, conununities to assist her.
‘Well, of course I would sign if I thought there was any possible chance of succeeding, but since there isn’t, why stick your neck out?’
‘But of course she prefers being a martyr. She would just hate it if anyone else had a hand in getting her freed. I simply couldn’t face her, you know.’
‘I think it’s an absolutely marvellous idea and of course you should do it, but me. I’ve taken far too many risks already: my husband would never allow me to put my name to it.’
‘But if you could really get some old Nandi grannies marching about, wouldn’t they be in just the position that Chelagat is supposed to have put them into at the beginning?’
‘And with so few women in leading positions, wouldn’t it be wrong to put a career at risk just for a gesture . . .?’
Mrs M. sighed, reporting one refusal after another.
‘But if you went straight to the people,’ asked Paulina, ‘you, say, to
your location and I to mine? Would not the educated women come forward to help? It would be a start at least.’
‘Picture it. You go to Gem. You have not hved there for more than ten years, right? Have you any status there? Face it. To the old grannies you are a childless woman whom they admired for a httle while when to read and sew - and still stay at home - was a distinction. So you tell them that a Kalenjin girl stood up for the rights of poor people. But faraway people whose needs and rights they do not know. She was convicted in a court of law, and headmen and elders always tell people to respect the law. And to these old ladies, what is so terrible? They have seen women going to prison for illegal brewing and men for tax offences and failing to build latrines, and the people come out much the same, not very much damaged. If the girl has no children to leave behind, no husband to misbehave while she is away, what is the loss? She will dig as other people dig and eat as other people eat. For a girl who has been to all those schools it is not a bad experience, they will say. I do not see how we can do anything without the help of leading women who will stand up to the chiefs and convince the ordinary folk. And even if we did it only in your district and mine, we should be accused of tribalism if we did not get signatures on all sides . . .’
For a little while they let it rest, until one day Mrs M. approached her husband on the subject. He was furious. The Constitution, he pronounced sententiously, was not made for individuals. One person could sink or swim without making it right to put the rest in danger. He intended to keep his head and his seat and his chance of helping people in his constituency, and his wife would be well advised to be a bit more active in collecting funds for a self-help secondary school.
Mrs M. repressed an impulse to answer that there were more secondary schools already than they could find fit pupils or teachers for, but she managed to retreat with dignity to a Red Cross committee meeting. Soon they saw in the paper that an appeal date had been fixed for Chelagat’s case, so there seemed no point in doing anything else until the appeal came up, and by the time it was rejected the opportunity for a petition had passed, even if they had had the heart for it. All the same, neither of them was prepared to accept ‘can’t’ as a standing answer. And in insisting so, Paulina for the first time set up
her will against Martin’s. She had given in to Simon by default, not of set purpose. This was different, and for the first time she felt the same pressure to defend her opinion that Mrs M. and other educated women felt. It was no longer obvious that decisions had been made for her.
The mood was depressing - there was a tension in the house that Paulina could not explain just from public affairs. The one thing everyone got excited about was the Entebbe Raid. Even though most people in Africa took without question the Palestinian side against Israel, still it somehow lightened the heart to hear of an exploit in a neighbouring country that came straight out of storybook fiction. The newspapers rang with it, the books sold in hundreds. ‘Scarlet Pimpernel in East Africa,’ declared Martin, remembering his schoolboy favourites.
Compared with the humdrum of every day, where most people who got killed died arbitrarily and passed into obscurity, here was romance and gallant sacrifice, and that in the country that had always left a feeling of unease among them compared with the straightforward conflicts of interest elsewhere. Uganda left you with a feeling of dread - its kings, its crocodiles, its martyred history, its excesses of dress, devotion and, in recent years, of devious violence. Martin had once been there to visit a relation at Tororo, where, before the Kenyan Exodus of 1970 more Luo was spoken than Luganda. But even such a little way into the country the roads, the vegetation, the traffic were spectacularly different from Kenya. So there you could imagine rescue swooping from the sky and feel somehow linked with a worldwide network of - what - intrigue, morality, technique, honour, imagination, courage? There was a human existence outside, different from the trickle of experts and equipment that remained impersonal, remote, and acts of force could, at a cost, be reversed. It was something to be going on with.
The months dragged on. Paulina took the children to the Nairobi Show, but she could not get excited about it. They came home with an assortment of cardboard headgear, free tracts and samples of soup which she calculated could have been bought with less strain on her employers’ pocket and her own feet, not to say sparing the washing off of candy floss and discussions on the superiority of colour TV. She
made the wearisome journey to Kisumu to see her mother who was sick in hospital, but was getting better and Paulina’s brother was going to look after her till she was well enough to go home, so she did not attempt the trip to her birthplace or feel any need to do so. Kisumu looked as it used to do, trim, miniature, self-contained, and full of women she had once known with long-legged children in school uniform to shop for them and take the maize for grinding. Their energy in the hot afternoon amazed her. She went down after the hospital visit to catch the breeze from the lake and there were people still manhandling crates and sacks on to lorries. She booked her return ticket from the market-place where turnboys vied for custom and hawkers jostled to be first in with their wares. She saw the medicines - Kamba and even Swahili as well as Luo medicines - spread for sale, to give fertility, vigour, good memory, to protect against coughs, malaria, swelling of the joints, and felt no longer even the faintest temptation to buy. She clambered into her seat on the third day and did not turn away her gaze as they rode past her old house and the schoolroom and the little unmarked grave. She had no impulse to go back, to instruct exhort, tidy, straighten. She sat back, open-eyed, and learned things as she had become accustomed to learn - new names in Kericho streets, abundance of tea plants which, oddly, sometimes left a shortage of tea in the shops, new metal on the road, woolly sheep promising good blankets to come. She turned her head as they pulled up the shoulder out of the Rift Valley. It was so magnificent one could not do other than look. But she did not catch her breath at the sight or covet any of those vast rolling fields, only took note that the road was risky and that Martin crossed it more often than she remembered. That much remained of love in her.
At home she was better, with routine work to do and plenty of sewing. The last thing she would have anticipated was a visit to the National Theatre. She had seen films, in church sometimes and now and again in a commercial cinema when there was no one else to take Mrs M.’s children. She liked the news best and the cartoons. And of course she sometimes saw the television, but the National Theatre looked foreign and difficult. She had seen people there lugging about enormous
musical instruments when they had stopped the car once or twice to pick up a neighbour’s child from ballet class, and the children made ludicrous imitations of that kind of music. But it so happened that one of the young executives from Martin’s firm was taking part in a play, and had given out complimentary tickets which Martin said it would be rude not to use, so she found herself, one early evening, in a sober navy-blue jersey dress with three-quarter sleeves, standing outside the theatre waiting to meet Martin. As she waited, the crowd around her laughing and chattering and a line of uniformed schoolgirls led by a harassed young teacher, heavily pregnant, she spotted a figure she half-recognised. Could it be Amina’s daughter - what was her name - Joyce, now very grown up, sixteen or seventeen she supposed. She was more surprised to find the girl also looking at her.
‘Excuse me, I think you are a friend of my mother’s,’ she said. ‘My mother is Amina and I am Joyce.’
‘How clever of you to remember! My name is Mrs Paulina Were, and I was wondering if it was you - so much grown up. How is Amina?’
‘All right. Still down in Eastleigh, you know.’
‘She didn’t come with you to watch the play?’
‘Me, I’m not watching. I’m dancing in the play. In the daytime I’m taking a secretarial course.’
‘Is that so? You perform every evening? How do you get home?’
‘One of my friends will take me home. I’m staying with my friend: she’s in the play too. Nancy, this is Mrs Were.’
A tall coloured girl came forward, older and more sure of herself. Martin came hurrying over and there was sudden silence.
‘Oh, Mrs Were? You are Martin’s wife, then. He was always talking about you. I am so glad to meet you.’
‘Really? I thought he never talked much.’
‘Why, Nancy, how are you after all this time? Nancy and I used to be neighbours in Kibera,’ said Martin stiffly.
‘Yes, yes, good neighbours,’ chimed in Nancy. ‘I think it was my cousin who introduced us.’
‘You look as though you have gone up in the world since then.’
‘Well, there was no way to go except up, don’t you think?’
‘And you are also in the play, Mrs . . .?’
‘Just call me Nancy. I don’t fancy sharing anyone else’s name. But that’s the second bell, kid. We ought to be dressed and the producer will be fuming.’
They ran off, and Martin, suddenly solicitous, showed Paulina to her seat explaining the layout of the theatre (he had been there twice before, once for a music festival and once for a Swahili play) and insisted on bringing a son of his old teacher from the opposite side of the hall to introduce him. Paulina was immediately suspicious, but there is no point in chewing over the past. Everything was so strange and new to her that she was fully occupied with the play. The story was not very clear to her but there were some funny slapstick scenes and she enjoyed the dancing.
In the first interval she remarked, ‘Amina’s girl has grown up quickly.’
‘Time passes.’ True enough. She might have had a son in university by now.
‘She’s a pretty girl too. Do you think she’s related to the other one?’
‘She’s not supposed to know about any relations is she? That was what Amina laid down.’
‘I suppose not. Where does the other girl come from?’
‘Nairobi, why?’
‘I thought you knew her.’
‘Yes, I knew her in Kibera and she speaks Kikuyu, but I never heard she had a home outside Nairobi.’
‘And how does such a person get married?’
‘How? Well, I can’t say I’ve thought about it. It’s not difficult to pick up a man in Nairobi, surely?’
‘I wouldn’t know. But that isn’t quite what I meant.’
And she shook herself and knew that what she meant meant nothing any more, for even here in the audience there were people of all shapes and colours, and at home she had received, on Mrs M.’s behalf, brown teenagers who spoke Luo and brown toddlers who spoke little else than German and black children with foreign mothers (or not so foreign) who seemed to speak only English. And you did not ask of these people where they belonged or where they would marry.
you only asked it in Eastleigh and Pumwani. At home you never asked, but perhaps it was time to start asking. The music was beginning and they gave their attention to the play. And the young man who had given them the tickets was pointed out on the stage as an old, bent man with white hair and a blanket throwm over his shoulder. Really it was very confusing!
The dancing was well done, again the terrifying, wasteful energy of the young. Paulina was sure they were young although they were made to look otherwise. But then in something very similar to a Luo dance a young man suddenly started jumping up and down on one spot like a Kamba, whom you might see performing in the stadium before a rally started, or again it made you think of the Israeli sect in their white robes and turbans: some were always running but she had seen them jump like this also to the dull drumbeat on a Sunday, head and shoulders appearing higher and higher over the hedge round the flats, while onlookers stopped to stare and shout encouragement: it beat the Salvation Army for a show and offered another hazardous distraction to Sunday drivers. But these acrobatics did not fit with the Luo dance, and then the words suddenly switched to Enghsh and the costumes seemed to be coastal wrappers, all bright and strapless, with not a modest Moslem buibui in sight. There was nothing to point out what you were supposed to believe.
All the time, she pondered, giving up the effort of finding a story in the play, there seemed to be new things. Not things that had been there before, like Swahili conversation or Parliament Building, that you started to learn about after leaving school, but things that had never effectively existed in one’s life. Cracks were even appearing in the customary reticence between husband and wife, so that she could even question her husband, for the sake of guests, on what they kept in the shop, and he could bring her an order for crocheted cloths. She did not mind dealing with the new things, but there was an emptiness where some of the old things ought to have been.
After the play they walked decorously down to the bus stop, with nothing to say about the show which had entertained them without moving them, and had to wait a long time. They were surprised to see Mr M.’s Peugeot passing them - if he had spotted them he would
surely have offered a lift - and there was Joyce sitting, smiling and relaxed, in the front seat, with no other passengers. The journey home was slow and they were late to eat and late to bed, but were roused again at two in the morning by the sound of the Peugeot coming in.
CHAPTER