A Fool's Knot

by Philip Spires

  The path was narrow and steep, but Musyoka, who had walked this way many times, knew it well and strode briskly and confidently along the ledges, which perched on the very shoulders of the hillside. Anna followed him closely, reassured by her grandfather’s confidence. He helped her over the difficult parts, especially where the path dipped suddenly into a gulley whose sides were strewn with loose stones. In spite of his age, Musyoka was used to jumping straight to the bottom of these trenches, and thereby not making the sometimes treacherous descent, with its danger of sliding and slipping on the rocks. He knew how to choose the place to land, where the dust was deep and soft enough to break the fall. Surely he must convey this skill to Anna, his granddaughter, but today was not the moment and he held her hand tightly as he picked a careful way down the gulley sides, kicking away the piles of stones to make the footing sure.

  The path took them away from Kamandiu and into the massive valley of Ikoo. Then, winding between the hills, it met the Vinda at the end of the valley and turned right towards Museve. There, beneath the hill, stood his son’s new house, where Anna would be reunited with her parents after her short stay at her grandfather’s house. There were nearly seven miles to walk but Musyoka, who had known an age when there was no other way to travel, thought nothing of it. He had scoffed in disbelief at the overt concern his son’s wife had shown at the thought of her daughter having to walk such a distance. In Musyoka’s eye, it was nothing, the kind of journey a normal child might make twice every day on the way to and from school. Had Anna been his own daughter, he told her, his words translated for Lesley’s benefit by John, she would walk that distance every day from the age of seven to carry water from the well.

  In fact he had been worried himself, but not by the length of the walk. As John and Lesley set off in their Land Rover to Nairobi, he and Anna began their walk up the valley towards his home. He was privately afraid that the two days she would stay with him in his household would seem like an age if the child proved to be undisciplined or frightened. All his fears, however, proved groundless. From the start, the moment he called his granddaughter by her Kamba name, Katuunge, the name of his own wife, he realised that the child had warmed to him and would more than enjoy her stay. He had been told many shocking stories of the ways that Europeans treated their children, of how they were not taught to respect their elders or even their own parents, and he feared that these ways may have influenced his son during his time overseas. He found to his satisfaction, however, that the girl was a fine child, who had been taught already many of the ways of her father’s people. She could speak some words of his language, enough for them to converse about simple things. Though he would rarely admit it, he could also understand quite a lot of English and so, in a private mixture of languages, they learned much of one another. Initially it had been Musyoka who was the one held spellbound. She told him things about London and her school in Lambeth, about her other grandparents and the other people she called aunts and uncles when they visited their home. Many of them were in fact no relation whatsoever, being her father’s friends, many of them Kenyan and some of them Kamba, who had met her father through his work. Above all Musyoka could not understand one important point. “Your mother,” he asked, “she is English?”

  “My mother always says she is British,” Anna had replied, “but she was not born there. My grandfather and grandmother came to England when she was a girl, but she was very young and cannot remember the other place.”

  Though Anna’s Kikamba was slow, inaccurate and confusing, it was good enough alongside the occasional English word for Musyoka to understand. “Ah,” he said, as if a light had been switched on in his mind, “so they came to England from Africa, just like your father.”

  “No,” she answered innocently. “They have never been to Africa.”

  The old man scratched his head. He could not understand how these people could not have come from Africa. They were certainly not English because they were black. Their daughter and their granddaughter were black, and black people come from Africa. He could not understand. Over the two days of her stay in Musyoka’s home, Anna tried to explain many times that her mother’s parents were not African and had never been to Africa, but still he knew what must be true, and so preferred to trust his own assumptions.

  By the end of her stay Anna had become the centre of the household. All day-to-day tasks were neglected, or done by Musyoka’s other wives to allow John’s mother, Musyoka’s first wife, to devote all of her time and attention to her granddaughter. Mwikali, Musyoka’s youngest daughter - there had been no more sons - took time off from her work to walk with little Katuunge, to talk to her. At this time of year, Mwikali’s days were usually a repetition of hoeing between the ripening maize to prevent the inter-planted beans from being stifled, so she was very happy that Katuunge had come to stay. Having completed primary school, Mwikali spoke some English and Anna enjoyed satisfying her endless curiosity. She had found the questions just as funny as the family found her answers. Previously, Anna had seen her grandparents for only a day at a time and always accompanied by her parents. When her father spoke Kikamba to others, she could not understand what he said. Her mother, on the other hand, spoke no Kikamba at all, having always maintained that she did not want to learn the language, because it would never be of any use to her. Until this visit, therefore, Anna had exchanged little more than occasional greetings with her grandparents, but this time it had all been different. They had been kind to her and above all had explained many things that were new and some others that she had never fully understood. For their benefit, she had tried to recall as much as she could about London, but somehow it now all seemed a long way away, and it was not easy to remember. But she had played with the other girls. On the second day she had played with a girl of her own age from the next shamba, and she realised that this was the first real friend she had made in Migwani. Together they followed the goats to the dam and then drove them back again. What she would treasure from this short holiday, however, was her new friend’s plain bamboo flute for which she had swapped a charm bracelet that her mother had bought her as a souvenir of a trip to Brighton.

  By lunchtime the journey was over. Hand in hand Musyoka and Anna, who now wanted to be known as Katuunge, ran the last thirty yards to the house, laughing as they scrambled their way up the gentle incline.

  Anna ran smiling to her mother, who had emerged from the house to greet her. The child laughed pure joy while her mother gently wept beneath her smiles, so great was her maternal relief. Within the embrace, Anna, as only a child is able, spoke a torrent of words with ebullient excitement. It seemed that she told the entire story of her stay away from home inside a minute. She listed memories of events, scenes and pictures, the whole rushing out in a jumble. Her grandfather’s house was made of mud. And she had slept in another house also made of mud. It had a grass roof where bugs lived, bugs that fell on her during the night and woke her up. She had eaten such a mountain of maize she thought she might burst. She had driven goats to the dam and back, and had helped her grandmother to bring water from the wells, a job that required her to carry the heaviest load she had ever tried to lift. She had played with other girls and swapped her bracelet for a flute.

  Lesley, in contrast, was almost too overcome with relief to speak. When she did, her quivering lips could mouth only a mother’s questions, all focused on the mechanics of life. Was she all right? Had she eaten well? Did she have water for washing? Had she gone to bed at the proper time? Musyoka, standing some respectful distance from this meeting of mother and daughter, smiled contentedly, propping himself up on his stick, as he watched them hug and kiss.

  After a while, Lesley pulled away and held her daughter at arm’s length, looking her up and down, as if to check that she was all there. With a comforting smile she told Anna to go inside and wash. Anna protested strongly, but her mother simply shook her head and feigned a refusal to listen. “You’ve walked a
long way this morning, my lady”, she said, “and your dress is dirty. There is a pan of hot water in the bathroom ready for you and some cold in the bucket by the sink. So off you go and get washed. Put on the clean dress I’ve left on your bed – and be sure to put those dirty clothes in the washing basket.” Anna, now reluctantly resigned to obeying her mother’s command turned and spoke to her grandfather, much to Lesley’s surprise, in Kikamba, before rushing off towards the open kitchen door at the rear of the house. The old man smiled, waved and said a quick “OK” in reply.

  Lesley had never learned how to feel comfortable when left alone with John’s father. Unlike Musyoka, she had always been highly self-conscious and embarrassed about their lack of a common language, since she had no Kikamba, save for pleasantries, kitchen jargon and simple greetings, all of which she had learned out of necessity rather than desire. Whenever she tried to speak the language, she felt only extreme embarrassment and tension, later always transformed into irritation and nervousness. Being tonal, the language held numerous pitfalls for one whose ear had not been trained to hear it from birth. A change of stress, a change of tone, a rise rather than a fall, a flat line instead of a staccato clip were all capable of changing a chair into a vagina, milk into lakes, and a fly to tits. One, like Lesley, whose ear had been trained to hear only English would inevitably make numerous howling errors with every attempt to speak, guaranteeing great entertainment for all. White men seemed to stretch their lips in order to mouth the language’s profusion of vowels and always seemed to speak down their noses. Even priests like Michael, who spoke the language with apparent fluency, would still fall victim to at least one howler per conversation, and the particularly harsh edges of Michael’s voice, an accent produced by the encroachment of broad Limerick, rendered his speech birdlike in most people’s ears. His nickname – ngunguu, a pied crow – reflected not only this similarity, but also mirrored, through the birds black and white markings, people’s appreciation of the near schizophrenia of his character. Some people, Lesley among them, were not equipped to deal with the embarrassment that trying to use the language inevitably brought, and thus the tension strengthened, precluding any further learning.

  Musyoka, himself, always tried hard to communicate with his daughter-in-law. Speaking an amalgam of Kikamba and English, a curious hybrid language in which every adjective was a gesture of the hand, he would try, often in vain, to say what he wished. His English vocabulary, however, was limited to the useless words that are commonplace in the army. If ever the subject of the conversation might shift to cleaning a rifle, doing parade, or the cooking of barracks food, he would be able to make his point with ease. This smattering of English, however, was usually used to the detriment of communication rather than its aid.

  “A cup of tea?” mouthed Lesley, almost chewing the words as she offered generic drinking motions of the hand.

  The old man nodded and mumbled the word “Chai” under his breath. As he followed her into the house, his previous expression of uncertainty hardened into suspicion.

  What annoyed Lesley the most was Musyoka’s manner. She was convinced that he did not trust her and was resolved never to trust her. He would eye her, squinting from beneath the thin lines of his eyebrows, which he would draw up like crests on the protruding sharp bones of his brow. In truth, she was rather afraid of him. It was not a tangible fear provoked by some identifiable aspect of his demeanour, but a deep indefinable mistrust that she seemed powerless either to ignore or overcome. Again today Musyoka had begun to eye her in that way, his forehead all furrowed. If only they could communicate. She began to feel quite nervous. On most occasions when he behaved like this, unknown to Lesley, there were specific reasons that provoked his suspicion. His actions were intentional and expressed the misunderstandings that developed between them. Neither realised that the sources of the tension in their encounters were prosaic misunderstandings which, if either had even a modicum of understanding of the other’s language, could easily have been avoided.

  Today, for instance, though quite willing, even keen to accept the drink Lesley had offered, Musyoka wondered why she had bothered to ask. Lesley believed she had merely asked if he would like to drink tea. Musyoka, interpreting the question surely as anyone would, believed it was said to hide a personal slight. Anyone, after walking several miles to honour an invitation from a son, would expect to find a meal waiting for him on arrival. The person would not be asked to stay to eat because that would be assumed. To be offered something was therefore surely a way of saying that this would be all he would get. Lesley, via her strange, misinterpreted question had placed her father-in-law in some confusion. Did she really mean that there was only tea, or would there be food as well? If he accepted the tea, he ought to leave as soon as it was finished. It was rude to stay beyond what had been offered, for it was a criticism of the quality or quantity of the gift. But if he left he would still be hungry. Had Lesley been a European, he would have accepted her rude behaviour and lack of respect. All white men were the same, after all. But since Lesley was black, as far as he was concerned, she ought to know the correct way of doing things. Her parents, he concluded, must have been poor teachers.

  Musyoka stood by the kitchen door, just accepted inside the house. He held his tattered hat close to his chest until Lesley specifically and exaggeratedly beckoned him towards the central table. Immediately he was rendered quite speechless by what he saw. This was his first visit to his son’s newly completed house. He had seen it before only as a skeleton, unroofed and unplastered. Never had he seen a house like this. Lesley had modelled it on the desirable English home. The old man had never seen so much furniture in one room. In his eyes, the rooms felt like the inside of a shop waiting for customers to come and take items away with them. And the rooms were all too large. How would they ever be kept warm after sunset, especially since none of them had anywhere for the smoke to escape? Why did his son fill this house, in which they would only stay at weekends or holidays, with so many possessions? Surely he did not need them all. Possibly he had brought them to sell to other people in the area. There was far too much for one family, especially one so small, with only one wife and one child.

  Lesley gave the old man his tea, which he drank from the saucer, much to her hidden disgust. He spluttered and complained that there was no sugar in it. Who in their right mind left tea half made like this? Lesley gave him a spoon and pointed at the sugar bowl on the table, but to her surprise he merely stirred the tea, as if he assumed that she already knew how he liked it. She tried to explain that he would have to put some sugar in the cup and then stir it, but not until he had winced at the bitterness of another sip did he realise what she meant. After all, the sugar, along with the water, tea and milk, should have gone into the pot to make the brew. What an utterly foolish thing to do. Cooking tea without sugar was like boiling meat without salt. Could it be that his son had made an unfortunate choice? Could it be that this woman simply could not cook?

  As the old man finished his drink, he decided, if reluctantly, perhaps merely out of politeness and respect for his son’s house, that he must leave. His stomach felt very empty indeed and he did not relish the thought of the long walk home. But his daughter-in-law had made it clear that there would be no food for him. So with great speed he stood up, bid Lesley and Anna goodbye and left the room. Lesley did not realise what was happening at first, thinking that he had seen something or someone outside as he walked towards the door. What about the food she had prepared? In a fluster, she rushed after him in pursuit and was relieved to see that Musyoka had met John, who had just arrived home for lunch. His car was parked some distance away at the edge of the compound, so she had not heard him arrive.

  “John”, she called, “could you ask your father if he is staying to eat?”

  John put the question to his father, who scratched his head and looked utterly confused. In his frustrated disbelief, he struck his stick against the ground. Re
calling Lesley’s invitation to take only tea he said, “Your wife said there was no food, that there was only tea.” John translated his father’s answer as a question to his wife.

  “I did not say that,” she replied with obvious offence.

  John could not see how the misunderstanding had arisen and reverted to his usual tactic when things seemed a little tense. To clear the air, he took his father by the hand and led him laughing back towards the house where, on reaching the door, he put his other arm around his wife’s waist and kissed her. Then, holding his father’s and his wife’s hands between his own, he greeted them both with a simultaneous shared handshake. It was a gesture inviting reconciliation, but since neither party knew the source of the difference, it failed.

  For Lesley, the meal turned out to be utterly traumatic. The stew she had cooked was perfect and much impressed old Musyoka’s palate. So she can cook, he thought. The old man ate in the only way he knew – with his fingers, ignoring the cutlery the others used so exaggeratedly. What he did not like was the fact that his potatoes, his cabbage and his meat were all neatly placed in separate piles on his plate, so he began by mixing everything together before plucking mouthfuls from the resulting pile with his fingertips. At the end of the meal he mercilessly pursued every last drop of gravy by lifting the plate to his lips and drinking the juices. When Lesley got up and turned away, he thought she was going to the sink to do the washing. His son had learned dirty ways in England, thought the old man. Neither he nor his wife had brought a bowl of water and soap for his hands before the meal. He had therefore had to eat with dirty hands. It was a very bad thing to do indeed. Lesley, of course, had thought the old man terribly dirty. He had eaten food with his fingers without first washing his hands. What disease, she thought, might Anna have caught over the previous few days? And what a mountain of food the old man had eaten! She found it all quite unbearable. He who says he is satisfied, thought the old man, abuses the cook. He leaned back in his chair, and patted his stomach after finishing the last of the stew from a pot, which Lesley had thought might do them two meals. At last Musyoka offered his cook a genuine relaxed smile. Lesley responded with her own, somewhat forced attempt, as she ruefully surveyed the splashes and debris that surrounded her father-in-law’s plate.