Wizard of the Crow

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong

  It was Jane Kanyori. He quickly glanced at the video. A woman was now on top of the hero, guiding his hands over her nipples, and Kaniürü realized that much time had passed since he last relieved himself on real flesh and blood. Kanyori never needed too much coaxing. Not that he was overexcited about her. These times were different from those of Marching to Heaven and money laundering, and after their romp in bed tonight he would call off their relationship.

  A glance at the huge suitcase she dragged behind her and he assumed that she was bringing him gifts, but, really, did she have to do this? Denying herself to give him all? Her generosity would make parting difficult, but it would not deter him from letting her know that this was going to be their last night together.

  She dragged the suitcase all the way to the bedroom, but when he heard her say that he was to send a chauffeur in the morning to bring home the remaining luggage, Kaniürü smelled something not right.

  “What is the meaning of this?” he said, standing at the entrance to his bedroom.

  “In the living room,” said Kanyori. “We should talk about it as two good businesspeople. I hate the word businessman for it assumes that women do not do business.”

  “What do you want?” Kaniürü asked her after they sat down on the settee in the living room.

  “I have come to realize that you are not the churchy type, with their ostentatious wedding ceremonies.”

  “Did somebody tell you that I was planning a wedding ceremony?”

  “John, I know you are shy, the type of male who finds it hard to say truly what is in his heart. So I made it easy for you. Oh, John, do you know what I did? Shall I marry him? I asked myself, responding to the question locked up inside of you. I wrote down YES and NO on two separate pieces of paper, put them in a bowl, shook it, shut my eyes, then picked one. YES! What about the day? I did the same with the days of the week, each one on a separate piece of paper. I could not argue against the hand of fate. I thought it best to move in right away so that early tomorrow morning, as decreed by fate, we can go for a civil ceremony at the district commissioner’s.”

  “Are you crazy? Ondoka. GET OUT!” he yelled, threatening to call the police.

  “Hold it! Have you forgotten all the work you and I have done together? A husband-and-wife team?”

  “What are you talking about?” he said, moving away from her.

  “John, dear,” Kanyori said in a softer voice, moving toward him. “You disappoint me. Has the defense portfolio turned you into a male chauvinist black pig} And here I thought that you were a liberated Aburlrian male? Let me tell you the truth. My heart flew to you the day you trusted me with your secrets and all that money. That’s why I never asked you for a penny for all the work I did for you. Being your confidante was its own reward.”

  “How much do you want to settle this?”

  “Money? What an insult to your wife!”

  “My wife? Over my dead body,” he said at once, and he stood up. “Or over yours?” he added, wagging a finger at her. “You, a wife beater?” Kanyori asked with feigned terror in her eyes. “I have vowed that if any male so much as touches me even with his smallest finger, I would scream so loud that all the secrets that I have locked in my heart would reach all the way to the State House.”

  “Are you threatening me? Don’t you know that I can finish you off right here and nobody will ever know or care what happened to you?”

  “Oh, dear, and then those I left waiting by the road not too far from this residence will say that I contracted the same illness that finished off Machokali? Luminous Karamu-Mbu? Rachael? What do you people call it? Oh yes, SID. Tell me the truth: were you also involved in Machokali’s SID? I remember you telling me that he once tried to thwart your rise to the top by refusing to say that you sketched the first images of Marching to Heaven. By the way, I checked that story and discovered that Machokali had asked your students to draw the images.”

  “Shut up, woman!”

  “Oh, so you think that silence is the name of a woman? It is not my name. But I don’t talk much. For instance, it is only my lawyer and a few other people who know that I came home. What will you tell them tomorrow? She appears; she disappears.”

  “You have no proof,” Kaniürü said, a sinking feeling in his belly.

  “God gave me a foolish attachment to paper, documents, anything with handwriting on it-even those pieces of paper on which you used to practice the signatures of… let us not mention their names. I still have them safe in a bank.”

  He weakened at the joints and slumped back onto the sofa. In his brief tenure as Minister Kaniürü had seen the extent of the Ruler’s greed. There was no defense contract, even the tiniest, from which the Ruler did not expect a cut. Not that Kaniürü was judgmental. He had found out in the same period that all the big merchants of death had bribe money built into the costs of securing lucrative contracts for their companies and their governments. So the Ruler was part of a chain of global corruption in the arms trade. And Kaniürü, a quick learner, had no problem with that.

  Still, this did not make the Ruler any more tolerant with being double-crossed. But what scared Kaniürü the most was not her reference to the loot from Marching to Heaven but her mention of the signatures. In addition to Sikiokuu’s, Kaniürü had tried his hand at the Ruler’s signature in an attempt to impress Kanyori with his penmanship. She had him by the balls. He thought he was toying with her, and it now turned out that it was she who had been toying with him!

  “And by the way, dear Jane, does anybody else know about those papers?” he said, trying to change tack.

  “There are two birds who know that if anything were ever to happen to me, SID, for instance, they are to look for the reason in the safe.”

  “Jane, my dear Jane, you are so secretive. And those birds… who are they?”

  “Their names? Please allow your wife to keep those secrets to herself.”

  “How much money do you really want for those papers?” Kaniürü asked, seeing that the tack had failed.

  “This is the eve of our wedding. We should be talking Dirty Diana,’ as Michael Jackson used to sing, and not dirty money. The fact is, there is nothing you have touched with your hands that I have not kept safely away. Sometimes I feel like laughing at my foolishness, because even the irons with which I once chained you to my bed are still with me. How do you put a money value on love mementos?”

  “When do you want us to marry?” Kaniürü said abruptly, resigned.

  “To be honest with you, I married you a long time ago. What remains is for us to exchange rings and sign papers at the district commissioner’s first thing tomorrow. Or shall we invite a priest here?”

  “It’s not necessary to call a priest,” Kaniürü hastened to say. “But let me ask you this. Once we marry, I mean, once we sign those papers at the district commissioner’s, will you tell me everything, the names of all those who know about those documents, the bank in which they are deposited, and how we can retrieve them so that we can keep them safe in our own home?”

  “What is there to hide between husband and wife? I am sure you will also tell me all about your property and we’ll divide it in half, or we’ll go for joint ownership of everything.”

  “You will never get away with this,” Kaniürü burst out in English. “With what?” Kanyori asked, seemingly perplexed. “Marrying you?”

  “Listen carefully and understand my words. You are not my wife. My heart belongs to another.”

  “You see another woman behind my back?” Kanyori said with feigned anger. “We shall marry and file for divorce at the same time. But remember that divorce comes with a property settlement. A minister’s wife must be kept in the lifestyle she has become accustomed to. I will cite Nyawlra as the other woman. You will, of course, explain why you lied about her death. Oh, my war hero. And you were given and actually accepted a medal for killing a defenseless woman? Your first love? Oh, I know. You killed her with words. Just as you did your parent
s. Remember how you used to tell me that you were an orphan brought up by a grandmother? What of the man and woman who were once in a newspaper looking for you after the students had dragged you into a police station? I could not believe it, and later I visited your village just to make sure that my in-laws were alive and well. They know me as simply Jane! They will be very disappointed if they hear that their beloved son was divorcing a woman who has been looking after them-oh yes, I have been looking after them-in favor of a woman who opposed the government.”

  “Leave my parents out of this,” Kaniürü said, breathing fire.

  “Well, I can understand why you killed them with words. But tell me: why did you kill Nyawlra with words? So that you could see each other safely, without suspicions?”

  “I am not saying that I am in contact with those terrorists,” Kaniürü hastened to say, terror-stricken by the implications of her comments.

  How would he explain that a Minister of Defense was having secret meetings with terrorists? Were he to be told to produce Nyawlra, where on earth would he find her? And if dead? Retrieve her body from an unknown grave? And suddenly, unable to know what to do, Kaniürü felt like crying. He, John Kaniürü, a man who had conned everybody, including the Ruler, is to be out-conned by a female con artist? No matter how hard he tried, he could not find an exit formula that would leave him safe and sound.

  “Willow weep for me,” Kaniürü said, without really knowing what he was saying.

  “Louis Armstrong,” Kanyori said. “So you love jazz? You even love that voice that croaks like a frog? I love the blues, but you don’t want to sing with Ruth Brown, That train don’t stop here anymore.’ I want your heart and mine to be stations forever where our trains will always stop.”

  Jesus! And this was the woman I used to think dumb? He, Kaniürü, could not even remember where, how, or when he got the lines from Armstrong.

  “Listen to me. Why don’t you go home and we’ll talk about all this tomorrow, after a good night’s rest?”

  “But I am home. Or do you want us to go to bed and resume this talk early in the morning, after a night of relaxation?” she asked mischievously as she leaned toward Kaniürü and pinched his nose playfully. “Singing Dirty Diana’ in my ear all night, oh, my dashing soldier!”

  Kaniürü and Kanyori were married the following day at the district commissioner’s, almost a repeat of his wedding with Nyawlra.

  11

  When Tajirika learned that Kaniürü had married without fanfare, he suspected that there was more to this than met the eye. Modesty was not Kaniürü’s style. Tajirika’s suspicions deepened when later he learned that Jane Kanyori worked in a bank. Weren’t all banks now under his ministry?

  He decided to investigate.

  The investigation turned out to be quite easy, especially after Tajirika got copies of the bank records and saw that the signatures that approved all the transactions involving Sikiokuu and Kaniürü were all Jane Kanyori’s. Thereafter it was a matter of common sense and simple calculation, and now, armed with his new knowledge and the bank records, Tajirika went straight to the Ruler, confident that once the Ruler realized that Kaniürü was the only person who had made money out of Marching to Heaven he would strip him of his defense portfolio. Now nothing would save Kaniürü from the Ruler’s wrath.

  The Ruler took the documents, examined them very carefully, then shook his head from side to side in apparent disbelief that such a fellow could so successfully trick them all. Then, to Tajirika’s surprise, he suddenly started laughing.

  “What a crook!”

  “Yes, a first-rate crook,” quickly agreed Tajirika.

  “And what is such a crook doing as my Minister of Defense?”

  “Very dangerous, Your Excellency,” Tajirika agreed.

  The Ruler sent for Kaniürü.

  A glance at Tajirika, the Ruler, and then at the papers on the table and Kaniürü knew he had been cornered, but instead of panicking Kaniürü saw this as his opportunity to avenge himself against Kany-ori, or at least paint her character with so much dirt that were she ever to reveal his forgery of the Ruler’s signature, the Ruler would not believe her. So when confronted with the accusations of making money out of Marching to Heaven and laying the blame on others, he seemed to relish gushing out all the details. He did not know what had come over him to make him take the word of a woman seriously. “Having been bitten once by the woman who later turned out to be an enemy of the State, I should have learned my lesson, but I was caught again in Kanyori’s web of lies.” But he was not going to blame himself too much, because even Samson, a war hero, was once lulled to sleep by Delilah.

  “Your Ever Mighty Excellency, my Delilah is actually my second wife, Jane Kanyori,” said Kaniürü, claiming that the conception of the grand deception and its execution was all Kanyori’s.

  “And why did you marry her knowing all this about her?” asked Tajirika, fearing that the Ruler was being taken in.

  “Do you want to know the truth?” asked Kaniürü rhetorically. “She threatened to expose the whole thing and blame it on me. Pure whitetnail.”

  “You mean, she is a bigger crook than you?” asked the Ruler, smiling a little.

  The art of his tongue and the strategy of blaming everything on Kanyori was working, Kaniürü thought, so he invented a few more details.

  “Even though she is my wife, I cannot tell lies before Your Mighty Excellency: My wife Kanyori is dangerous. She can lie with numbers like nobody’s business. She can deceive the Devil himself.”

  The Ruler put on a serious face as the others anxiously looked on. “Kaniürü, you are in the wrong ministry. The Defense Ministry needs somebody trustworthy, not a crook, at least not a crook that would lead his commander in chief astray. It needs somebody I can trust completely, somebody who can make enemy forces surrender with scare tactics but who is scared enough not to try anything against his Lord and Master, somebody who can lie for me but not to me, somebody who has shown that he would rather dig his own grave in the prairie than cross me, somebody like Tajirika, and in the era of the Baby D, I need such a man at the head of my armed forces. Tajirika, you are my new Defense Minister.”

  Today I will open a bottle of champagne, Tajirika said to himself, and even Vinjinia, who does not drink, will have to have a glass.

  “And now I come back to you,” he said, looking at Kaniürü and barely holding back his laughter at the thought of a male being outdone in crookedness by a female. “I want fifty percent of all the money you stole from Marching to Heaven, and the interest, to go to the Ruler’s Smog Disaster Fund. But I will give you another chance. Your kind of cunning is best for youth and money matters. You are my new Minister of Finance and Youth. As for your wife, Jane Kanyori, I want her transferred immediately from the National Bank of Commerce and Industry and placed in a strategic position in the Central Bank. I want her as the new comptroller of the Central Bank. But let me warn you. I am giving you and Mrs. Kaniürü a long rope with which to hang yourselves. No more lies! Otherwise let me have crooks about me,” said the Ruler, as if expressing satisfaction at his reshuffle and the appointment of a new female technocrat to a position of monetary authority. “Real crooks are guided by realism.”

  The lines were straight out of the Ruler’s Political Theory, wherein Machokali had written that crooks are often more realistic in their assessment of a situation than moral idealists.

  The two ministers looked at each other as if neither knew exactly who had gained more than the other from this first cabinet reshuffle in the era of Baby D. But they knew that the struggle between them, like the one between Machokali and Sikiokuu in the previous era, had only just begun.

  12

  The reshuffle was overshadowed by the news that Julius Caesar Big Ben Mambo, Minister of Information and Honorary Officer of the Armed Forces, had been arrayed before a court-martial to answer charges of plotting against the State.

  Bumors claimed that the minister had been asked
to plant some elderly men and women in key positions in the public gallery for the Buler’s address to Parliament so that when the Buler asked the public to offer their opinions on the speech the groomed few would stand up to bless Baby D, but the first on his feet was actually the old man who talked about cheap presidential arseholes. This angered Dr. Yunique Immaculate McKenzie so much that she spontaneously whispered to the Buler regrets over an affair she once had with Mambo when she worked in the Ministry of Information soon after her return to political grace from exile. This stung the Buler, and Mambo’s unusual induction into the military as an honorary officer was the Buler’s ploy for vengeance.

  But what was cited in the trial was the history of Mambo’s relationship with the late Machokali: Machokali once rescued Mambo from a permanent physical disability by sending him to Germany for surgical correction of his protruding tongue. Big Ben Mambo always sided with Machokali. So what a coincidence that the old man whom the late Machokali once prearranged to ridicule the Buler during the original unfurling of plans for Marching to Heaven had somehow reappeared in the public gallery during the Buler’s speech rejecting the madness of Marching to Heavenr

  Even the name of Julius Caesar became an issue. Who does not know that Julius Caesar was a renowned military general in the days of the Roman Empire who undermined the republic with his ambitions to become emperor? But even long before the Roman chapter of his life, Minister Mambo was calling himself Big Ben, the famous clock that in the days when the sun never set on the British Empire regulated time in the entire empire. The issue of the newspaper that had described Mambo as combining the glory of imperial London and ancient Rome was introduced in court as a crucial exhibit of the man’s inordinate thirst for power. It had been found framed and hanging on the wall of his office. When addressing the people during the so-called People’s Assembly, Big Ben Mambo boasted that his voice was that of the commander in chief of the armed forces, and, most telling, he preferred talking from the top of armored vehicles.