Petals of Blood Read online

  He was put in a cell: he heard the chain lock click and he felt a kind of spiritual satisfaction – he remembered Peter and Paul – yes, Paul who used to be Saul – in jail hearing voices from the Lord. Murder is not irio – the same words as were used by the constables who earlier had come for him, Munira thought, yawning. He was tired – suddenly very tired from the night’s vigil – and he sank into deep slumber.

  They woke him up the following day. He felt fresh in the mind. He was ushered into the same office: but this time the officer was a different man altogether: elderly, with a face that was expressionless even when he smiled or laughed or joked, as if the face could never register any emotions.

  The officer had come from Nairobi to take charge of the investigation. He had served in various capacities under various heads from the colonial times to the present. Crime for him was a kind of jigsaw puzzle, and he believed that there was a law to it – a law of crime – a law of criminal behaviour – and he believed that if you looked hard enough you could see this law operating in even the smallest gestures. He was interested in people; in their behaviour; in their words, gestures, fantasies, gait: but only as a part of this jigsaw puzzle. He had read a lot and was interested in the various professions – law, politics, medicine, teaching – but only as part of his one consuming interest. He was looking for that one image which contained the clue, the law of a particular crime. From there he could work out the exact circumstances, to the minutest details, and he hardly ever failed.

  He had no illusions about his work: he had put this knowledge in the service of whatever power happened to be in the land, and he never took an attitude. Thus he had served the colonial regime with the same relentless unsparing energy that he did an independent African government, and he would serve as faithfully whatever would follow. He was neutral, and his awesome power over politicians, professionals, businessmen, petty criminals, all that, arose from this neutrality in the service of a law. His secret ambition was one day to set up a private practice in detective work so that, like a lawyer or a priest, his services could be hired by anybody.

  This case interested him immediately, especially because of the types of personalities it had brought together. Chui – an educationist and businessman; Hawkins Kimeria – a business tycoon; Abdulla – a petty trader; Karega – a trade unionist; Mzigo – an educationist turned businessman; Munira – a teacher and man of God; Wanja – a prostitute. And all this in what was basically a New Town. He wondered how many other people it would bring together. He would apply himself to a study of the place and the people and he would not start with any prejudices; everything fascinated him, and Munira most of all:

  ‘Mr Munira, please sit down. You slept well?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Like some cigarettes?’

  ‘No, I don’t smoke.’

  ‘I should start by introducing myself. My name – you’ll be surprised by the coincidence – my name is Inspector Godfrey, and I must apologise about yesterday. You see, he is young – you know youth these days.’

  ‘I understand. He was only doing his work – servicing man’s law.’

  ‘That is the spirit, Mr Munira. The law. All of us are governed by the law.’

  ‘Of God.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Munira. But God must also work through man; you, me, somebody else. Listen, Mr Munira, you are a very highly respected man in Ilmorog. You have been here longer than anybody else. Twelve years, they tell me. You know the character of most people in this town. Please believe me, we don’t want to deal unfairly with anybody. We only want to serve truth and justice. It may be only man’s concept of justice but it is his present concept of justice. Maybe later, when things are fully revealed to us, when we as it were cease to see things through a mirror darkly . . . but now, Mr Munira, we must try our best. You see a policeman, just like a teacher, or a priest, is only a public servant; I might have said a public victim. We never get thanks for ensuring the safety of people’s lives and property. But that is our lot, our job, and anyway we get paid for it. But we cannot discharge this tremendous responsibility – and it is a fearful trust, Mr Munira – without help from our true master, the public. Now, Mr Munira, we shall provide you with pen and paper and a place to sleep even – for you understand, don’t you, that we cannot very well let you leave the precincts of the police station before you have made a complete statement – it is just procedure, Mr Munira, and nothing is implied – and, of course, food. You can handle it any way you like – I myself am very curious about the history of Ilmorog, of your school even, that is, if you have the patience and the writer’s energy; but remember that all we are asking you to do is to tell us in a clear simple statement anything you may know about the behaviour, the general mental disposition, and especially the movements of Abdulla, Wanja and Karega on the night of . . . and even during the week or so before this triple murder – of course, it may not be murder – of Kimeria, Chui and Mzigo.’

  2 ~ How does one tell of murder in a New Town? Murder of the spirit? Where does one begin? How recreate the past so that one can show the operation of God’s law? The working out of God’s will, the revelation of His will so that now the blind can see what the wise cannot see?

  Perhaps . . . perhaps this or that . . . what I might have done or might not have done . . . these things we always turn over in our minds at the post mortem of a deed which cannot now be undone. Peace, my soul. But how can I, a mortal, help my heart’s fluttering, I who was a privileged witness of the growth of Ilmorog from its beginnings in rain and drought to the present flowering in petals of blood? I who knew Abdulla, Nyakinyua, Wanja, Karega? Have I not leafed through the heart of each? In all our conversations and schemes and remembrance of the past, even on the night that she made me promise that I would surely return the following day, to celebrate, I was always struck by the razor-blade tension at the edges of our words. Violence of thought, violence of sight, violence of memory. I can see that now. In this prison twilight certain things, groves, hills, valleys, are sharper in outline even though set against a sombre sky. Get thee behind me, Satan. Arrogant confidence of hindsight. There was a time I used to think that I was saving him, might have saved her and Abdulla too. Then I suddenly saw Karega about to tumble headlong down the path I myself had gingerly trodden and I was struck by my lack of power to hold him back, though I wanted to. For that one week I would picture Wanja laughing at our frail efforts to extricate ourselves from her vast dreams and visions; for I now knew, God is my witness, that all she wanted was power, power especially over men’s souls, young, desperate and lost power, I thought, to avenge herself of the evil done to her in the past.

  And Karega even after his travels was still a child. This is not to denigrate him or to deny the strength of his feelings: the fire, the idealism, the glowing faith in the possibilities of heroism and devotion. He stretched his arms for that elusive beauty, for that yet undiscovered truth of an enduring human relationship. Indeed it was as if in everything, even in his coming to Ilmorog, he was searching for a lost innocence, faith and hope. I remember an entry I once read in one of his exercise books in the days before we fell out:

  You’ll laugh and say: oh, these are only the tears of a big baby. You’ll laugh and say: he is manchild come to bring ill-omen to the gates of a peaceful homestead. Laugh and sneer. I alone have carried this fear and wrestled with this knowledge in my heart. For how can I say I had not known, even as our hearts beat each to each, that she would later betray me? She was older than I was; She had seen more thabiri birds fly home with the sunset. And really it is not her alone. Alas, the world I hoped for yesterday has fallen from my hands. The people I knew, the people I had seen creating new worlds, are hazy images in my memory: and the seed we planted together with so much faith, hope, blood and tears: where is it now? I ask myself: where is the new force, what’s the new force that will make the seed sprout and flower?

  I thought then that this was despair and I used to ask myself: could it be this
despair, so painful in one so young, which had made him turn to me for – for – what? Or was it the searching hope behind the selfsame words that had made him a wanderer all over Kenya, from Mombasa to Kisumu and back again to Ilmorog, looking for – for – what? Whatever it was it had driven him to Ilmorog, to me, to Abdulla, to Wanja, to this riddle: truth and beauty – what illusions! We are all searchers for a tiny place in God’s corner to shelter us for a time from treacherous winds and rains and drought. This was all that I had wanted him to see: that the force he sought could only be found in the blood of the Lamb.

  3 ~ I suppose you can say that Karega had chosen to confide in me on the claims of some shadowy connections in our past. Shadowy, I say, because for a long time after our first meeting in Ilmorog I thought that our paths had only previously crossed once in that impersonal territory of a teacher and pupils. But even that I had forgotten, that day he came to my hideout in Ilmorog only recently discovered by one outsider – Wanja. I asked myself, surprised: who is that stranger standing at the gate?

  I was returning from a trip to the HQ in Ruwa-ini. I had not stopped anywhere because I was thinking of Wanja’s appeal the night before. I so wanted to take her home – to walk her to her hut – she and I – alone – in the dark. Inside, I was scared of this possession, of the way she had taken my heart prisoner so that she could say so coolly: and you’ll bring me a pound of the long-grained rice: and my whole being so ready to obey. I had gone to every shop in Ruwa-ini. I had bought the rice. Everything was so ready for tonight’s celebration of a harvest. And now who was this stranger?

  ‘Good afternoon,’ I called out in a neutral voice, getting off my creaking bicycle, and leaning it against the white, ochred wall.

  ‘Maybe you don’t remember me . . .’ he started to say after replying to my greeting.

  I waved him to silence with a non-committal smile: we shall talk, we shall talk. Even at that stage in our relationship, there was something about him which irritated me: his apparent self-possession, or was it his ready devotion? He helped me carry two boxes of white chalk and a bundle of exercise books. I carried a packet of the long-grained rice I had bought for Wanja. The sitting-room, like the rest of the house, was rather empty: one wooden bench, a table with huge cracks along the joints; two folding chairs and a shelf fixed to the wall and graced with old copies of Flamingo, Drum, African Film and torn school editions of Things Fall Apart and Song of Lawino. I had always thought of improving my library but in this, as in so many other matters, I dwelt in the twilight of doing and non-doing. He sat at one end of the bench, declining my offer of a folding chair. He was small in build, with sad intense eyes: he was a man, but one who had suddenly but painfully grown mature.

  ‘Some tea?’ I asked, hoping that he would say no: I stretched my legs and thought of Wanja and her story and her concern over Joseph and the magic she had wrought in Adbulla and myself: I thought of her having to leave and I suddenly found myself asking: but what happened to the child?

  ‘Anything watery and warm will be enough,’ he said. I was resigned to the fate of an unwilling host.

  ‘One thing we do not have in this house is milk.’

  ‘Tea without milk is all right. Although we live next to a shopping centre, we cannot always afford milk.’

  As I put pressure in the primus stove, I suddenly remembered, somehow or other his words made me remember Old Mariamu, as we used to call her. She was a muhoi on my father’s land and we always thought of her as inseparable from the land. She was very pious in an undemonstrative way: her piety simply lay in how she carried herself; in how she talked; in her trembling, total absorption in her work. She used to make tea without tea-leaves: she would simply put sugar in a spoon and bake it on the fire. When the sugar had turned into a sticky mess of syrup, she would dip it into the boiling water. How I loved her tea; I would often hide from my mother’s Christian vigilance for a sip of Mariamu’s brew. At least it had plenty of sugar and no pretences about milk. I thought of telling this to my visitor but I only said:

  ‘We should be grateful for small mercies: some people take tea without milk and without tea-leaves.’

  ‘Oh, my mother often does that when she cannot afford tea-leaves. She bakes sugar in a spoon: we call it, we always called it, soot. She would say, laughing: Karega, do you want a little sugared soot?’

  I looked at him rather sharply and said:

  ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘Kamiritho. You know, Kwa-mbira. Limuru.’

  ‘You mean: you came all that way, from Limuru?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not on foot, I hope.’

  ‘Part of the way. I got into a matatu taxi. It was crammed with people. The owner seemed convinced that there was infinite space in the coughing Ford Anglia. He would say: “Mundu wa Uria – Let us love one another and sit up properly, I tell you this car is bigger than even a lorry,” and he would pack in yet more passengers. We were more than twenty in that thing, and it so rough a road.’

  ‘All roads to anywhere in this area are rough.’

  ‘Maybe they will one day gravel them with murram or else tar them.’

  I remembered the aeroplane, the Land Rover and the surveying team that only the day before had planted red pegs in Ilmorog. An International Highway through Ilmorog. I suddenly wanted to laugh at the preposterous idea. Why, I asked myself, had they not built smaller serviceable roads before thinking of international highways? At least my ‘journey to and from Ruwa-ini would have been much quicker and I would have arrived home much less tired and might even have avoided this meeting with a stranger. But as suddenly I became bitter and took the side of the Ilmorog peasant; they would never build a road – not unless money was a flowing river. I burst out:

  ‘Yes. Yes . . . when hyenas grow horns.’

  I was surprised at my words. After all, the peasants and herdsmen in Ilmorog had for years fought the earth and the sun without help from tarred roads and reliable transport. Young men and women had anyway trekked to the cities and left the old to till the land, and the old themselves had not much incentive to farm for the big markets. As for the herdsmen, they usually multiplied their cattle only to see them claimed by the drought or disease. The curse of God, they would probably say as they moved further into the plains. In my mind I now put this wretched corner beside our cities: skyscrapers versus mud walls and grass thatch; tarmac highways, international airports and gambling casinos versus cattle-paths and gossip before sunset. Our erstwhile masters had left us a very unevenly cultivated land: the centre was swollen with fruit and water sucked from the rest, while the outer parts were progressively weaker and scraggier as one moved away from the centre. There is a story of dwarf-like Gumbas who lived long, long before the Manjiri generation, before the iron age in Kenya, and whose heads were over-huge and so sat precariously on the rest of the body. Whenever a Gumba fell, so goes the legend, he could not lift himself without aid from outside.

  As suddenly as these thoughts, so alien to my life in Ilmorog, stole into my consciousness, I felt the presence of the young man as a weight on my spirits: what did it matter to me that the peasants here were without decent water? That the herdsmen had swollen eyes and the cattle died of drought? What did it matter to me that the able-bodied had fled Ilmorog in search of the golden fleece in cities of metallic promises and no hope? What had it all to do with me? I was not and I had never wanted to be my brother’s keeper.

  I was never one for the public limelight or really interested in the affairs of others. My life was a series of unconnected events: I was happy in my escape-hole in Ilmorog, at least before Wanja came. Her face once again rose before me, etched beautiful and sad against the horizon of my being. What was she doing to me? What had happened to her child?

  ‘What work do you do?’ I asked the young man rather abruptly, coldly in fact.

  ‘Work? I don’t do any . . . no job yet . . . I’ve been all over the city . . . well, that is why I have come . . . you s
ee, until a year or so ago, I used to go to school—’

  ‘Which school?’

  ‘Siriana!’

  ‘Please help yourself to another cup,’ I found myself saying, looking at him with renewed interest. He was fingering his empty cup, looking to the ground as if about to continue talking but not knowing how to proceed. I handed him the mbirika and he poured tea into his cup. The face, his face, now formed a faint silhouette in the memory.

  ‘I am afraid I can’t quite – eeh—?’

  ‘It’s a long time. My name is Karega. But I don’t expect that you would immediately remember me. I think I have grown a bit. I used to pick pyrethrum flowers in your father’s shambas.’

  He paused but he sensed that I was still unable to place him. He continued:

  ‘My mother was Mariamu and before we moved to the new Emergency village in 1955, we used to live on your father’s farm. Ahoi . . .’

  ‘Mariamu,’ I said. ‘Are you Mariamu’s son?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I cannot recall . . . but . . . I knew your brother Nding’uri. He used to be a playmate. We even went hunting antelopes together, running through thorny bush in my father’s forest. We never caught any . . . But that was long before 1952.’

  ‘I didn’t know him . . . I have only a vague, misty impression . . . but I recently heard about him and I built a few more details of him . . . but only in imagination.’

  ‘I am sorry about what happened . . .’

  ‘You mean his being hanged at Githunguri? It was a collective sacrifice. A few had to die for our freedom . . . But it is strange . . . now that you say you knew him . . . I did not even know that I had a brother . . . that he had died – until Mukami told me.’