Green City in the Sun

by Wood, Barbara

  The white men baffled young Wachera. Since that first meeting she had seen them but a few times—they were clearing the forest from the hill above the river—but this morning she had seen the arrival of many more, and it had startled her. Then she had seen the apparition in white, looking down at her, and now, as she listened to the end of Wairimu's remarkable tale, Wachera began to wonder if it had not been a spirit at all but a white woman.

  She said, "Ee-oh!" "hurrah," when the story was over, but the elder Wachera stayed her with sad words: "Unfortunately Wairimu was captured a second time and taken away upon the field of water which stretches to the end of the earth, and she never returned to Kikuyu-land."

  The girl was spellbound. What must it have been like for poor Wairimu? What strange fate had awaited her on the other side of the great water?

  Feeling the baby stir against her back, Wachera laid aside the basket she was weaving and reached up to bring him down to her breast. His name was Kabiru. In Kikuyu tradition, the souls of forebears lived on in children, and so the firstborn son always received his grandfather's name. In this same way grandmother and granddaughter were both called Wachera. The name meant "She Who Visits People," and it had been handed down through the generations from the first Wachera, who had visited people as the clan's medicine woman.

  The grandmother smiled as she watched the young mother nurse. The old woman knew the ancestors were pleased with this young Kikuyu woman who was receiving the clan's secrets and accumulated knowledge, for she was quick and bright and respectful. Elder Wachera's son had raised his daughter well; young Wachera was a model Kikuyu wife: She kept Mathenge's hut clean, tended a bountiful garden, was always cheerful, and never spoke unless spoken to. Everyone enjoyed the sweet Wachera; mothers pointed her out to their daughters as an example to follow. During her circumcision, they would say, when she was sixteen years old and all the women of the clan had looked on, young Wachera had not flinched under the knife. It had come as no surprise, therefore, when the handsome and brave Mathenge Kabiru had approached old Wachera to buy her granddaughter. Sixty goats he had paid for her, a price still talked about among the people.

  The grandmother's heart swelled. Young Wachera had gotten pregnant almost at once. Surely this granddaughter was going to produce many children for the perpetuation of the ancestors. Sad was the Kikuyu family with fewer than four children, for then one grandmother or grandfather would not gain immortality.

  Elder Wachera lapsed into thoughtful silence as the rain pattered on the roof. The air in the hut became thick with the smells of wet earth, cooked bananas, smoke, and goats. Timelessness descended upon the two women. They formed a tableau identical to those of their ancestors because the Kikuyu were governed by tradition, the customs and laws set down by Ngai, their god who lived on Mount Kenya, and change was abhorrent to them. By her bare foot lay elder Wachera's divination gourd. It had been hollowed and dried and filled with magic tokens in an age so remote that not even she knew which ancestress had made it. The gourd was the symbol of Wachera's power; with it she read the future, healed sick bodies, and communicated with the ancestors. Someday the gourd would be passed on to the younger Wachera, and in this way the grandmother would live on, as her own grandmother now lived in her.

  While the rain fell, elder Wachera's thoughts went to the rest of the clan across the river.

  Forty harvests ago a terrible curse had fallen upon the Children of Mumbi. Drought had struck first, followed by starvation, and then a sickness had swept through the Kikuyu and Masai people, killing one in three. In that time elder Wachera had lived with her husband and his other wives across the river in a large settlement. Wachera had been unable to save the clan from the sickness, but the ancestors had spoken to her and told her that she could save her own small family by moving to the other side of the river, where the ground was blessed by Ngai and where there were no evil spirits of sickness.

  The rest of the villagers had scoffed at the folly of such a move. In numbers there was safety, they had argued, but Wachera was by then a widow, the sickness having called her husband to his ancestors, and so she had turned her back on the village, which she knew God had cursed, and had brought her co-wives and children to this new ground. Here she had found mugumo, the sacred fig tree, and she had known that her visions had been right. While the rest of all the tribes in the land today remembered that year as Ngaa Nere, the year of the Great Hunger (and the white man called it the smallpox epidemic of 1898), the survivors in the old village and their descendants referred to it as the year Lady Wachera Moved Across the River.

  She was thinking of them now. There was her sister, poor childless Thaata, whose name meant "barren" and who subsisted on the living she earned from making pots. And then there was Nahairo, who must certainly be near her time. Although Kikuyu women did not believe in preparing for childbirth, for it was considered bad luck and also a waste of time if the baby did not live, Wachera nonetheless had her birthing knife sharpened and ready.

  Lastly, the medicine woman thought about Kassa, her brother, who was one of the tribal elders. She had received news that he had run north toward Mount Kenya and had obtained employment on the white man's cattle shamba. Kassa was now a counter of cows, and Wachera was greatly troubled. She sensed that some calamitous change was about to overtake the Children of Mumbi. Change had already come, but only in vague, subtle ways. Certainly tribal life went on the same as it was in the days of the ancestors. Perhaps a few women were carrying their babies in americani, and there was old Kamau who had accepted the white man's god and was now called Solomon. But in all, the old ways continued to be strictly observed.

  Wachera's gaze drew inward.

  And yet there was evidence of change right here in her own little family. Mathenge was supposed to be a warrior, but because the white man had forbidden the Kikuyu to carry spears, he no longer conducted raids against the Masai. Wachera remembered with nostalgic yearning the old days when Masai raided Kikuyuland for cattle and women. And some of the women did not protest because the Masai warriors were reputed to be superb lovers....

  Wachera's heart grew hard. She had known the white man was coming with his changes long before he had set foot in Kikuyuland.

  It was many harvests ago, before young Wachera was born. Elder Wachera had been visited in her sleep by Ngai, the God of Brightness, and he had taken her up to his mountaintop kingdom and had shown her future events. When she had revealed these to the clan, they had been shocked and frightened because Wachera spoke of men who were going to come out of the Great Water and their skin would be like that of the light-colored frog, and their clothes would resemble butterfly wings. These muthungu were going to carry spears that produced fire, and they were going to ride a giant iron centipede across the land.

  An emergency council had been called to consider Wachera's prophecy, and it had been decided that the Children of Mumbi would not go to war against the newcomers but would treat them instead with courtesy and study them with suspicion.

  Soon the white men did come, and the Children of Mumbi had seen that they were peaceful and intended no harm and wanted only to pass through the land of the Kikuyu. Many members of the clan believed the wazungu were searching for a permanent homeland and that, before many harvests had passed, they would be gone from Kikuyuland and never be heard from again.

  Wachera calmed her troubled heart with a proverb that said, "The world is like a beehive: We all enter by the same door, but we live in different cells."

  A clap of thunder brought both women out of their thoughts. They did not raise their faces or turn to the open doorway, for it was taboo to look upon the god working, so the elder stirred her soup and the younger returned the baby to its sling on her back.

  When the thunder subsided, young Wachera gazed out through the rain at her husband's hut, which was two spear throws from her grandmother's hut, and the terrible aching came over her again. It was a yearning that was like an insatiable hunger: to lie in Mathenge
's arms; to feel the warmth of his warrior's body; to be solaced by his deep laugh. But it was taboo for a husband to lie with his wife while she was nursing, and so Wachera would have to be patient. She picked up her basket and began to weave again, filling her head with plans for her maize plot, with contemplation of the rain, with fantasies about her own future, when one day she would sit in a hut exactly like this one and pass on her knowledge to her granddaughter.

  Ironically, thoughts of the future suddenly brought her mind back to the present, as if there were some mystical connection between the two, and Wachera found herself thinking once again of the white woman on the hill.

  5

  W

  HEN GRACE HEARD THE WHISPERING SOUND, SHE THOUGHT the rain had started again.

  She was in her tent unpacking and setting things out while the men were in the dining tent for a "sundowner," even though dusk had long since winked out and night was upon them. Grace was in the process of getting ready for dinner, having put on her navy uniform, when she paused to look at the Distinguished Service Cross in its velvet case, the honor she had been awarded for valor in the war—a poor compensation, she thought, for Jeremy's life.

  Hearing the gently sibilant sound beyond her tent walls and thinking the rain had begun again, Grace went to the canvas doorway and looked out. There was no rain, only a heavy mist. She searched the compound, seeing the ghostly shapes of tents, the halos of lantern light, and she listened. With the setting of the sun the forest had come alive with bird sounds, crickets, the warble of tree frogs. Then she realized that what she had thought was rain was, in fact, someone weeping. The sound was coming from the next tent.

  After putting on her heavy navy coat, she hurried along the planks that had been laid in readiness for the mud and stopped at her sister-in-law's tent. "Rose? Are you all right?"

  She found Rose sitting at a dressing table, bent over with her head in her arms.

  "What is it, Rose? Why are you crying?"

  Rose sat up and dabbed at her eyes with a lace handkerchief. "It's all so terrible, Grace. Those camps—after we left the train at Thika, I had thought we had seen the last of all that. I had so looked forward to a proper house."

  Grace looked around Rose's tent. It was more elegantly furnished than her own, with a gilt-edged mirror over the dressing table and satin pillows on the bed. Even the sheets were not merely white but shades of antique rose and teal blue, the Treverton colors. Grace saw that her brother had gone to a lot of trouble to please his wife.

  Then she realized that Rose's personal maid was not present. "Where's Fanny?"

  "In her tent. She says she wants to go back to England! Grace." Rose's voice dropped to a whisper. "Please tell him to leave."

  Grace looked over at the African who was standing by the tent door holding a water bottle and a linen towel. He wore a long white kanzu that came to his bare feet and a Turkish fez on his head. "What's the matter with him, Rose?"

  "He frightens me!"

  The man spoke. "My name is Joseph, memsaab. I am a Christian." "Please leave us," Grace said.

  "Bwana Lordy told me to take care of the memsaab."

  "I'll explain to Lord Treverton. You may go, Joseph."

  When they were alone, Rose turned to her sister-in-law with a pleading look and whispered, "Grace, you must do something for me!"

  Grace studied Rose's face. The ivory cheeks were flushed; the lips, trembling. A few strands of moonlight-colored hair had escaped from combs and framed Rose's face. "What do you want me to do?" Grace asked.

  "It's . . . Valentine. You see, I can't—I'm not ready to—" Rose turned away and fumbled for her silver hairbrush. "You're a doctor, Grace. He'll listen to you. Tell him it's too soon after the baby...."

  Grace was silent. She didn't know what to say.

  "Help me, Grace. I can't face it. Not yet. First I must get used to"—she waved her hands— "all this."

  "Very well. I'll talk to him. Don't worry about it, Rose. Come along now. The men are waiting for us."

  Both women received a shock when they stepped from the cold night into the dining tent.

  "Valentine!" Grace said. "How on earth did you manage it?"

  "It was a bit dicey, old girl, what with the war and all. Sometimes it comes in handy to be filthy rich!" he said as he strode across the tent in a black tuxedo and starched white shirt. Lord Treverton kissed his sister on the cheek, then received his wife with a beaming smile. "Well, my darling, what do you think?"

  Rose's eyes moved over the Chippendale chairs, the Belgian lace tablecloth, the silver candlesticks and china place settings. A gramophone played a waltz; lamplight made the crystal and champagne glasses sparkle; the air was scented with wild jasmine. "Oh, Valentine," she breathed. "It's lovely..."

  "Let me introduce you to our guest," he said, indicating the newcomer among them. He was District Officer Briggs, a portly man in his sixties who wore a pressed khaki uniform and polished Sam Browne belt. Valentine poured aperitifs, and they all drank a toast to British East Africa.

  "I had hoped to meet your wife, Sir James," Grace said as she took a seat next to him at the table. She thought him quite attractive in his smartly cut white dinner jacket.

  "Lucille would love to have been here. It's been months since she's seen a white woman. But I'm afraid her condition made the journey down from the ranch impossible. She's expecting our third child in a few weeks."

  "I say," said DO Briggs as he took a seat across the table. "What a blessed sight you two ladies are! Every white man in the district will be thundering up here just to get a look at you!"

  Lady Rose laughed and tossed her head. The rhinestone band around her hair glittered; the single osprey feather brushed the air. Valentine's wife was wearing the latest postwar fashion: a slim-line Poiret gown with long ropes of pearls and a square neckline cut daringly low.

  The dinner was served in eight correct courses by silent Africans in long white kanzus who appeared from the back of the tent with silver platters. "Not as good as I'd wanted," Valentine said as he poured the champagne. "We've got terrible shortages here in the protectorate because of the war."

  Officer Briggs took a spoon to his soup as if it were the last he was ever to have. "Bloody Germans! Ran us like hounds after a fox. Farms being left to rot, crops unharvested, railway getting blown up, and no medical supplies. We lost fifty thousand men, Dr. Treverton. It wasn't just you lot in Europe who had it bad, you know."

  "I wasn't in Europe for the war, Mr. Briggs," Grace said quietly. "I served on hospital ships in the Mediterranean."

  Suddenly all was silence, except for the forest sounds out in the cold mist. Then Sir James said, "We can only hope the rains do come. We're in the middle of a depression; can't afford to add famine to that."

  "But I thought it was raining," said Rose.

  "You mean that bit this afternoon?" said Officer Briggs. "That was a drop in the bucket! If that's all it does, we can say good-bye to all the farms hereabouts. In East Africa, when we say rain, Lady Rose, we mean rain."

  "You see," Sir James said, "we have no seasons here, just wet spells and dry spells. In Europe you plant and then you harvest. In British East Africa you plant, but you don't necessarily harvest."

  "You know a lot about this country, Sir James. Have you been here long?"

  "I was born here. In Mombasa on the coast. My mother was a missionary; my father was something of an adventurer. They were as different as night and day, and I've been told that their courtship was something of a legend."

  Grace looked at him. Sir James had a striking profile with a large, straight nose and square, hollow cheeks. "It sounds romantic," she said.

  "My father was an explorer. He met Stanley when he was in the Sudan and had been in London during David Livingstone's funeral. Something about those two men infected my father. He came to Africa with a dream to open up the Dark Continent."

  "And did he?"

  Sir James reached for his champagne glass. "In som
e ways, yes. He was one of the first white men to set foot in this country. That was just over thirty years ago. When the natives saw him, they ran away, frightened. They had never seen anyone with other than dark skin."

  "How did your father overcome that?"

  "He was clever. In 1902 he made a safari up into this area, and the local Kikuyu barred the way, saying he could go no further unless he brought rain with him. He replied through an interpreter that he thought that reasonable payment and retired to his camp to wait. Presently the rain did come, and my father got all the credit for it."

  Grace laughed. "Did you go on such journeys with him?"

  "Not as a boy. He was too busy searching for immortality to be bothered with a child. My father claimed to have been the first to discover the Great Rift Valley, but that honor went to someone else. He dreamed of having something great named for him, but fame always eluded him. And so he turned hunter, and that was when I joined him on safari."

  Lady Rose said, "Sir James, I've been wondering. Why is it called 'safari'? What does that mean?"

  "It's the Swahili word for journey."

  While the gazelle cutlets were being served, Grace found herself thinking of the man at her side. Sir James intrigued her; he represented something mysterious and exciting. "Have you ever been out of East Africa, Sir James?"

  He gave her another of his shy smiles, as if he were self-conscious about something. "Please call me James," he said, and Grace recalled one of Valentine's letters in which he said that James Donald, who owned a cattle ranch up toward Nanyuki, had received a knighthood for his war actions.

  "I went to England only once," he said. "That was back in 1904, when I was sixteen. My father died, and I went to live with an uncle in London. I stayed for six years but had to come back. I found England too tame, too safe, and too predictable."