Green City in the Sun (74 page)

     She picked up the letter from Bella Hill. "My dear Lady Mona," the agent had written, "I do hate to bother you with these matters, but the unavoidable fact is that something
must
be done or else we shall lose the last of our renters."

     Mona put the letter aside. She was in no mood to read about Bella Hill's seemingly interminable problems. When her aunt Edith had moved out to live in Brighton with her cousin, Mona had had the Suffolk mansion converted into apartments, with cheap postwar rents. Returning soldiers had snapped them up and moved their new brides into them. But as prosperity returned to England, as life-styles improved, as the wives began to produce children, and as wear and tear began to take their toll on old Bella Hill, the ancestral estate that had once been a source of revenue when Bellatu was in need had become a financial drain. Renters, complaining of bad plumbing and insufficient heating and wanting modern improvements, were moving out faster than the agent could replace them. Mona knew she was going to have to do something about the poor old white elephant, and soon.

     Bella Hill...

     She glanced at David. He was running up figures on the adding machine, his head bent, his handsome face molded in concentration.

     She was remembering three incidents. The first, twenty-four years ago, had taken place in a gloomy hallway of Bella Hill, when an unhappy little Mona had tried to force David's sister, Njeri, to run away with her. The second incident had come close on the heels of the first: Mona and David trapped in the burning surgery hut. But the third episode she recalled now, as she watched him work, had happened seven years ago, shortly after he had taken the job of estate manager.

     "I want to apologize to you, David," Mona had said to him. "I was cruel to you when we were children, and I am sorry about that. I nearly got us both killed."

     A look, one which Mona had not been able to read, had crossed his face, and then he had said, "It happened a long time ago. It is forgotten."

     As if sensing her eyes upon him now, David looked up from the adding machine and smiled. "I almost forgot," he said, pushing away from the desk. "I have brought you something from Uganda."

     She watched him reach into his pants pocket and bring out something large wrapped in a handkerchief. He held it out to her.

     Puzzled, Mona took it. David had never given her a present before. And when she took away the handkerchief and saw what it was, her puzzlement turned to shock.

     "Good heavens," she whispered. "It's beautiful!"

     "This is the necklace the people of Toro make. Do you see these green beads? They are malachite from the Belgian Congo. And this is carved ebony."

     Mona stared at the necklace that lay in the sunlight. It was a stunning creation of polished copper, chunks of amber, ivory rosettes, and iron links— African and primitive, yet strangely modern, almost timeless. A work of art, it seemed to Mona, that had no business hanging about someone's neck.

     "Here," David said, "let me put it on you."

     He went to stand behind her. She felt his hands sweep aside her hair. She saw the necklace come down before her eyes, felt it settle heavily and comfortably on her breast. David's fingers brushed her neck as he fastened the clasp.

     "Go to the mirror, Mona. Look at yourself."

     She couldn't believe her eyes. Mona thought she looked different, no longer ordinary but transformed in some way. The necklace lay against her cotton blouse in a kind of glory that made everything else—the room, the furniture, the sunshine outside—seem prosaic.

     "It's magnificent, David," she said.

     "The women of Toro wear these."

     "The women of Toro are beautiful. It looks wrong on me."

     "As soon as I saw it, I thought of you, Mona."

     She pictured the Ugandan women of Toro, with their dark, slender necks and proud heads. "I don't do it justice," she said. "I have the wrong skin for it."

     David said, very quietly, "There is nothing wrong with your skin, Mona."

     She looked at his reflection in the mirror. He was standing close behind her. Their eyes met in the glass.

     When Mona turned around to thank him, the stillness was shattered by the sudden blare of a radio voice.

     It was the Kikuyu-language noon broadcast. Solomon, in the kitchen, had turned it on. The newscaster was reporting the Mau Mau slaying of Abel Kamau and his European wife. Their four-year-old son, he went on to say, having sustained severe eye wounds, had just died in King George Hospital.

W
ANJIRU AND HER MOTHER-IN-LAW SANG TOGETHER AS THEY
worked. It was a simple song, with the same words repeated over and over, and they sang it in pleasing harmony, changing it, making it up as they went. It was a hymn to Ngai, the god who lived on Mount Kenya; it was a prayer for
uhuru
, freedom.

     Mama Wachera's heart was heavy with sadness on this cool, crisp day before the beginning of the rains. As she dug sweet potatoes and trimmed off the leaves to feed to her goats, the elderly medicine woman thought about her daughter-in-law's imminent departure. She did not want her son's wife to go, but Mama Wachera would not try to stop her. There was a call in the younger woman's heart, David's mother knew, a summons that only Wanjiru could hear and that she was compelled to answer. Mama Wachera had borne loneliness before; she would bear it again.

     What a strange pass the world had come to! Not even her Bag of Questions could have foretold for Mama Wachera the internecine war that was tearing Kikuyuland asunder today. Nor even the most prophetic of her
dreams could have shown her Kikuyu brother fighting Kikuyu brother, while the other tribes of Kenya looked on. How the ancestors must be lamenting, Mama Wachera thought, to see the forest fighters come down from the mountain and slay their African brothers and to see the comrades of those murdered men retaliate by hunting down and torturing any whom they suspected of being in league with the forest men. How had such madness come about?

     Mama Wachera straightened and gazed up at the grassy ridge overlooking the river.

     It had begun with the coming of the white man, she decided.
They
were the cause of this terrible war that was destroying her tribe. They had come many harvests ago, with their covered wagons and milk-skinned wives, and had started to spread their poison. When would it end? the old medicine woman wondered. When would Kikuyu stop killing Kikuyu and unite to drive the white man out of Kenya? When would they see the foolishness and shame of this fruitless war and combine their fighting strength against their one true enemy?

     Mama Wachera thought about her son and wondered where David's loyalties lay.

     Like many Kikuyu men, he chose to work for the white man and to live in a stone house near his job, leaving his wife to work the shamba. Wanjiru was luckier than most women, for David did not live far from her hut. The wives to be pitied were those whose husbands left them for jobs in Nairobi, where they lived in flats and drank European beer and slept with prostitutes. Those poor wives seldom saw their men, sometimes not for years, while Wanjiru was visited by David once a week, when he would stay the night in his
thingira
hut and eat food prepared by his wife and mother. On those visits David Mathenge honored his women with gifts of americani, sugar, and oil. In many ways, David's mother admitted, her son acted in true Kikuyu fashion.

     But how, she wondered when she saw a truck pass along one of the dirt tracks among the Treverton coffee trees, could he work for the very woman whose father had stolen his land? It was a mystery Mama Wachera could not fathom. But being a respectful mother and mindful of her son's privacy, she would never think to ask him.

     Mama Wachera went to the other side of the shamba, where Wanjiru was harvesting pumpkin leaves, and checked her banana plants.

     She knew that her daughter-in-law had taken a Mau Mau oath. Many years ago, on the night of a terrifying storm, as her grandmother lay dying and waiting for the hyenas to devour her flesh, a young Wachera had eaten a similar oath. Oathing was part of the Kikuyu way of life; it was as old as the mists on Mount Kenya. Without oaths the Children of Mumbi would cease to be. But the oath Wanjiru had eaten had been disturbingly altered. For reasons unfathomable to Mama Wachera, her daughter-in-law had sworn her oath while holding the
mzungu
Bible; she had eaten the soil and pledged her word upon Jehovah.

     What did that mean? Why such a subversion of sacred tribal ritual?

     Mama Wachera feared that this evil Mau Mau was going to destroy the old ways forever. Those men in the forest, she decided, were not true, honorable Sons of Mumbi, but exactly what the white men called them, "thugs." Tribal discipline was breaking down, Kikuyu society was disintegrating, and misguided young men were jeering at their elders.

     
They do not fight for the soil
, Mama Wachera thought as she filled her basket.
They fight to be wicked and to defy the ancestors.

     The hymn came to an end as the two women walked back to their huts, where twin spirals of smoke rose up from cook fires. Wanjiru knew that her mother-in-law did not approve of her decision to go. She knew that they would never agree on this issue, because Mama Wachera was an old woman, over a hundred and twenty harvests old by her own reckoning, which was sixty years in Wanjiru's estimation, and living in the past. When they talked about the Children of Mumbi's taking back the land that was rightfully theirs, all Mama Wachera could speak of was
thahu.
"They have been cursed," she repeatedly told Wanjiru. "I told them that they shall know only misfortune and misery until the land is returned to the African. And see? They have known misery. All dead, save for two, and no sons to inherit the land."

     Such antiquated thinking and such stubbornness annoyed Wanjiru, but having been brought up to be modest and respectful in the presence of her elders, she had not argued.
Fighting
—that was what Wanjiru believed in. Only war was going to restore the stolen land to the African. "The tree
of liberty is watered by blood," she had told her mother-in-law.

     But Wanjiru was fighting for reasons other than simply to take back the land. Like many women who were joining Mau Mau, Wanjiru was fighting for her daughter's rights. She envisioned a future in which Hannah would have the freedom to go to school without being taunted by cruel boys, as had been Wanjiru's unfortunate girlhood experience; the freedom to work outside the home alongside men; the freedom to choose and pursue an honorable career; the freedom to walk at her husband's side as his equal, not behind as his beast of burden. Kikuyu mothers, Wanjiru believed, owed this fight to their daughters.

     "Take the bark of the thorn tree," Mama Wachera instructed her son's wife now as Wanjiru prepared to depart. "From the youngest branches. Roll it in salt, and suck on it. This will cure stomach ailments and diarrhea."

     Wanjiru listened while her mother-in-law spoke. They were packing a basket with medicines and healing charms. On top of these went boiled arrowroots and cold sweet potatoes, a few bananas, and some maize meal. When the basket was full, Wanjiru wrapped it in the blanket she was going to use for a sling, wedged a large calabash of water next to it, and down the sides she tucked the bullets and three pistols which had been smuggled to her that morning. Lastly she included hastily written notes and messages from wives to their freedom fighter husbands in the forest.

     When all was ready, Wanjiru put two dresses on over the one she already wore, wrapped a bright red
kanga
around her shaved head, and swung, with her mother-in-law's help, the heavy blanket sling onto her back. A strap across her forehead held the sling in place so that her hands were free to carry Christopher, who was tied across her breast in a kanga, and Hannah, whom she held on her hip.

     Outside the hut Mama Wachera paused to place a blessing upon this daughter, whom she suspected she might never see again. "I will take care of David for you," she said.

     "David is my husband no longer," Wanjiru said, and then added the words which, by Kikuyu tradition, a woman could dissolve her marriage,
"I divorce him.
Do not fear for me, for I was born only once and I shall die only once."

     Mama Wachera watched sadly as, bent beneath the weight of her burden, with a baby at her breast and a child on her hip, young and strong Wanjiru set out across the river and ultimately out of view.

     S
HE WALKED IN
the afternoon sunshine, following a path that bisected newly planted fields waiting for the rains. Wanjiru walked in the warmth and laziness of the day, with flies droning in the hot sun, dust rising up from beneath her bare feet. Christopher, nearly a year old and very heavy, slept against his mother's comforting bosom, while three-year-old Hannah's head nodded upon her mother's shoulder.