2.

Miisi had returned from checking on the bees and was settling under the lime tree again when he was gripped by a bout of sneezing. When it stopped, the depths of his right ear itched. He stuck a finger inside but could not reach the itch. He shook the finger inside his ear until the itch ceased. He decided to go back indoors even though night had not fallen yet. When he got to below the stairs, he looked up and sighed. Why had he not thought about old age when he built the main bedroom upstairs? He lifted one sixty-five-year-old foot up and a pain like a current shot through his right hip. He did not even look forward to going to bed.

Miisi was not an insomniac, in fact, he slept deeply. But in his dreams, his mind broke loose and roamed realms strange and familiar. His childhood was a favorite destination, although sometimes he stumbled into places he had never been in real life. Miisi knew that this relentless return to his childhood in dreams signified something disturbing, but he never revisited the dreams when he woke up.

As a child growing up in a Catholic seminary, Miisi was taught that consciousness during the day, sleeping in the night, and waking up in the morning were pictures of life, death, and resurrection. Sleep was death and death was sleep. At the time, when he slept and his mind roamed, he concluded that his dreams were the image of the restless dead, the ghosts and spirits. This imagery, plus his shadow which stood by him in those frightening days when all that was dear and familiar went away, helped him come to terms with his loss as a child.

Now Miisi hoisted himself up the staircase, wondering why his hip had not bothered him when he had run upstairs to see the bees earlier. He arrived at the top landing and walked along the corridor until he came to the door opening to the balcony. He stood and listened: the bees’ hum was low as if they were falling asleep. He opened the door and stepped onto the balcony. In the narrow aperture between the floor and the door, he could see some bees. They seemed lethargic.

Miisi slumped into a basket-chair tucked into a corner. Below him, his two-acre compound rolled down to a sudden drop at the main road. Dusk was gathering under the trees. Just then, a file of children appeared from the patch of flat ground, east of the compound, where boys played football. Each child carried a jerrican of water on his or her head. The older girls, teenagers, led the way carrying a twenty-liter jerrican each while the younger ones took the rear. Now they were so close below that looking down at them he could only see the jerricans lying horizontally, moving. One by one, the children disappeared into the lower house. He could hear them booking who was using the bathroom first, whose turn it was to wash the dishes and who should light the lamps.

He had made the right decision to bring all his grandchildren under one roof, Miisi reassured himself. Now all his grandchildren would grow up as a family. None would ever feel isolated. He might have failed to bring up his own children but if he was careful with his health, this generation would be all right. Every time a son or daughter of his was brought home to be buried, Miisi would ask for the children to be left with him. When he was lucky and found out that a daughter or son was ailing, he visited to talk. It was good for the children to be with their parents but it was not good for children to watch their parents melt away before dying. With this death, even if the spouse were still alive, it was best for them not to worry about the children while they struggled with their affliction.

Just then a stampede came up the stairs. Kidda, his eldest grandson, arrived first. He stopped dead at the door when he saw his grandfather, but the others coming behind him bumped into him, pushing him further onto the balcony. Kidda tried to stem the flow of his cousins and to sound responsible by cautioning, “Stop running in the house,” as if he himself had not run in, but the others clambered past him to see the bees.

“Jjaja Nnamuli says that bees have come to visit,” Kidda stated. Now everyone crowded the balcony, curious.

Miisi laughed. “Bees coming to visit indeed! Well they made themselves comfortable in that room,” he pointed.

Now even the teenage girls had arrived and they stared at the aperture. Little ones knelt on the floor and peered. Suddenly, Kidda made as if to open the door and all the children shrieked and he laughed at their fright. This was Kidda’s way of asserting himself as the fearless oldest boy in the house, and Miisi did not tell him off. Instead he listened and watched as each shared their rationale for the bees.

“I think there was once a beehive in this place and Jjaja, I mean the builders, destroyed it when they built this house but now the bees are back to claim their territory: don’t joke with them!”

“No,” six-year-old Nnattu shook her head. “They came to commit suicide. Wait for tomorrow, they will all be dead.”

“Commit suicide? Tsk! But where does Nnattu get these ideas from? As if bees are human!”

“Wama Jjaja,” Nnattu appealed to her grandfather. “Don’t bees commit suicide?”

Miisi was caught. He was not about to crash Nnattu’s creativity but at the same time he could not back such an outlandish idea.

“They are possibly going to die.”

“See?” Nnattu turned to the others but now even the older girls joined in. They were not allowing her to win.

“Not everything that dies commits suicide; the bees will die because it is their time.”

Miisi watched as the children, now having lost interest in the bees, filed out. He was aware that he had ten grandchildren living with him but he would never consciously count them. Sometimes he mentioned their names one by one, talking about their ages, telling about their school progress—Walime is the quiet one, Nnabaale is very caring toward the little ones, Nnakidda speaks above everyone, Baale can sprint, Nnattu, oh, Nnattu, she must win every argument—but that was not counting. If anyone asked how many grandchildren lived in his house he would say, “Oh, how many shall I say? I am rich in blood.” Now he sighed contentedly. While death took his children, it had brought his grandchildren close to him. They kept him young and he was grateful for that.

After a while, a boy came upstairs to ask whether Miisi would join the family for supper downstairs.

“I don’t have bones to grind up and down the stairs,” he complained. “Ask Jjajja Nnamuli and some of you to come and eat with me.”

Jjajja Nnamuli was Miisi’s sister, who had arrived two months earlier and announced, “Is marriage a prison sentence? Maama, I need to take a break too!”

Miisi suspected that she had no intention of going back to her husband but asking about her return would seem like asking her to leave.

Presently, Nnamuli arrived carrying the basket of food. She came with five of Miisi’s youngest grandchildren. She was dark and petite where Miisi was light-skinned and tall. Miisi’s wife had once remarked how the two were so unalike. Miisi, who had heard that comment all his life and was fed up with it, had answered that it was not uncommon for siblings not to look alike. Perhaps his sister looked like their father while he looked like their mother.

As they ate supper, Nnamuli, agitated over sitting too close to the bees, whispered, “Do you not fear . . . the visitors?”

“Visitors?”

“The bees?”

“They are harmless,” Miisi smiled.

“Still, we should keep a respectful distance. We don’t know what they want.”

“I doubt they’ll be joining us for supper. Is any food left in the wraps?”

Nnamuli looked inquiringly at the untouched food on Miisi’s plate.

“The children need more food,” he explained.

His sister grunted as she made a show of searching the banana leaves. She found morsels of matooke and gave them to the nearest child. Then she scratched the pan with the ladle for crusts of groundnut sauce that clogged around the rim and tossed it on the same child’s plate. The child attacked the food with the gusto of someone starved. Miisi despaired. He took the food from his plate and distributed it among the children.

“Stop it, I say stop it now!” His sister looked at the children fiercely. “This is why we don’t eat with you. These children are drains: they don’t realize when they’ve been fed.”

“I’ve had enough, my stomach has shrunk. Here, Magga, have this.”

“Why wouldn’t it shrink if it’s starved?”

Despite Jjaja Nnamuli’s severe look, the boy called Magga stretched his arm toward his grandfather’s generosity. Miisi licked his fingers and sat back satisfied. “At this age food is wasted on me, but these . . .” he waved his hand toward the children, “they need to eat until food packs down their legs.” Seeing his sister’s irritation, Miisi tried to humor her.

“I bet you’ve already done something about the bees. I mean, the visitors. They’re already passive.”

“Hmm.” His sister would not be drawn in.

“Did you pray or give thanks?”

Unfortunately, a slick of sarcasm floated on Miisi’s voice.

“That’s the way with the world,” Nnamuli’s own sarcasm was barely veiled. “Some of us are simple and insecure where others are intelligent and sure. Luckily, the world needs all of us equally.”

After the meal, Nnamuli stood up gathering the food-wraps and went downstairs. Miisi went to bed. As he waited for sleep to take him, his mind cast back to the bees. It was peculiar. The year 2004 was only five days old but so far it had thrown up drama after drama. He wondered what it had in store for the future.

When midnight launched the New Year five days earlier, Kande had risen up to resounding applause—drums thundering, people screaming, and others ululating. For more than ten minutes, the village was covered in noise. Village youths had converged at the crossroads near Miisi’s house dragging dead Christmas trees decorated with cotton wool and toilet tissue. At midnight, they set the trees ablaze to make a bonfire. At first, Miisi sucked his teeth at their parents’ negligence but then he remembered that to some children having parents was a myth, some homes were run by twelve-year-olds and children grew up like weeds.

As the uproar died down, Miisi heard youths hurl insults first at the departing year then at the new arrival. Even to him, the New Year was a troll sitting on the horizon surveying the residents. In time, it would sweep into the village to weed out the luckless and the careless. At the end, another year would sit in the same place and survey its crop. The old year, 2003, had whisked off a daughter and a son from him. Out of the twelve children Miisi had had, only Kamu Kintu and Kusi Nnakintu remained.

The youths stopped shouting at the years and started walking toward Katikamu. Along the way, when they came to a house, they called the names of the residents and told them what the village whispered about them. When they came to Miisi’s house the youths called him a Russian idiot and a communist waste of education. At first, Miisi marveled at the success of Western anti-Russian and anti-communist propaganda. But then it dawned on him that the village resented his professed principles. Perhaps to them, his rejection of a lucrative job and a life of comfort in the city seemed a mark of conceit. Miisi choked in mortification as he remembered pontificating to men who had no alternative but to struggle all their lives, that he would rather be poor than hand degrees to students who did not earn them, that he had come to this decision after he had wasted money on a pretentious house. He cringed as he realized that the ability to take such a stand was exceedingly privileged. He had even inflicted on villagers notions of the uselessness of religion, warned them against the lures of the middle class and the lie of immigration to the West. Miisi had tried to recall exactly how he put these ideas. In retrospect, he should have pointed out that religion was crucial to society in terms of discipline and management of resources, especially at the family level. Immigration redistributed resources and middle-class values built nations. Miisi had closed his eyes in shame. For the first time, he considered abandoning his crusade to build interest in global issues among residents, a crusade that attempted to make his grand education relevant to the community.

After his house, the youths had accused Widow Bakka, the oldest person in the village—no one knew how old Bakka was, ninety-something, perhaps a hundred years old—of defying death. Apparently, instead of dying the widow wiggled, like a snake, out of her old skin into a younger one. Every time she shed her skin, someone in the village died in her stead.

“What are you waiting for, Bakka?” the youth demanded. “Do you think you’re a tree, that the longer you live the better timber you’ll make?”

Even to Miisi’s atheist mind, the young of a community going around the village in the night wishing the old dead at the beginning of the year did not augur well.

Now the bees?

Miisi turned away from the irrational thought. To forge a link between the coincidental events of New Year’s Day and the arrival of the bees was tenuous.

Presently, he heard his wife and his sister coming up the stairs. A light flashed through the door, then he heard the balcony door open and close. After ten minutes, he decided that the women were perhaps doing spiritual rituals for the bees. He attempted to turn and lie on his right side but an arrow of pain shot through his hip and he gave it up.