A Fool's Knot (20 page)

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. Recalling 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.

The greatest contradiction for Musyoka had been the presence of Lesley and Anna at the same table. In his own house that would never have done but, here in his son's house, this foreign place, he was prepared to make this concession. He knew that European families always ate together at the same table. Though it was not good manners to do so, he was willing to grant the inevitability that his son, after living in England for so long, would have learned to accept some foreign ways out of necessity. An animal smells of the forest in which it slept, thought Musyoka, but now his son had returned home, surely it was time for common sense and good manners to reassert themselves.

John asked his father to come and look at the farm, especially the work he had been supervising that morning, and the two of them left the house to walk in silence towards the river bed which bordered the large plot of land. John had been occupied there since dawn supervising the construction of foundations for what was to become the pump house. By the side of the Vinda, which at this time of year was a river of sand, he had laid into the earth two courses of red earth bricks. Piled around the edges was the fine dusty soil which had been moved the previous day and on top of this lay strewn a hundred or more new bricks, some already crumbling or broken, waiting to be added to the structure.

John and his father stood on top of the pile of earth to survey the project. The old man was clearly very surprised that his son had already accomplished so much. He had said many times to John's mother that he was afraid his son would forget how to work in the fields, if all he did every day was sit in a chair and write.

“This,” said John, pointing proudly to the small square of brickwork, “is going to be the engine house. It will be finished, roof and all, before the end of the week.”

Musyoka gave out a hearty laugh and grabbed at his hat as it shook off his head. “I thought it was going to be the toilet,” he said. “It seems to be about the right size. I was going to say that you ought to have dug the pit before you started the walls!”

John smiled knowingly and decided to give his father something of a shock. It is the young man who must teach new words to the old. “The toilet is inside the house.”

“Inside?” retorted his father, as if suddenly burnt. “Are you telling me that you have paid money for a man to build a new house and he was stupid enough to have put the toilet inside?” He tut-tutted for a second or two and shook his head as his son continued to smile. “You finish a job, and then you see the mistakes. That house cannot be a home for you, Mwangangi. It will be very dirty, smelly and unhealthy for your children. And the smell will attract flies. The house will be full of them.”

“Father, it will not be a long drop toilet,” John explained. “It will be a European style with pipes that bend and stay filled with water. There will be no smell.”

“What a waste of water!” scoffed Musyoka. “What will this place do?” he asked, jabbing the air with his stick in the general direction of the brick foundations.

“This will house a diesel engine,” replied John with some pride.

“So what? A man is always satisfied with a skin from his own cow,” thought Musyoka. Though somewhat impressed with the idea, he was still baffled as to why his son should wish to build a house for an engine. After studying the foundations with reverent ignorance, he turned to face his son and waved his stick towards the expanse of sloping fields before him. “And how do you propose to make this desert fertile? There is no rain here. That's why no one has farmed this land as far as I or your grandfather can remember.” He continued to face his son, his wide-eyed expression suggesting that he had asked an unanswerable question. Any reply would be sheer enlightenment.

John pointed at the dry sand of the river bed. The old man looked and noticed for the first time what seemed to be an oil drum sticking into the earth. “Beneath the surface,” said John with some gravity, “there is always water. The engine is going to pump that water. Some of it will go straight onto the fields and the rest will go into those tanks.” He swivelled to point his father's gaze towards a cleared area nearby, where concrete foundations had been laid to support the corrugated iron water tanks that were already on order. “More than that,” he continued, now with almost childlike excitement, “at night the engine will drive a generator to make electricity and, better still, the excess power will charge batteries that will power some electrical appliances, such as our fridge and the washing machine, during the day.”

For some time the old man appeared to be studying the ground near his feet. “It will be very expensive to run,” he said, his observation clearly the least of the problems he could envisage.

“Ah, no,” scoffed John, his tone momentarily offending the old man. “I will run the engine, the pumps and the generator for about five hours a day. It will cost only forty shillings a week for the fuel. I will also have a small windmill up there on the ridge, which will trickle-charge the batteries from a car's generator throughout the day.”

To Musyoka forty shillings a week sounded like a small fortune. The contradiction this aroused infected his words with what sounded like sarcasm. “I suppose we harvest what we plant. It seems strange to me that for generations we knew nothing of these things and yet rain came to water our crops.”

“That's true,” replied John, “as long as you also remember the times of famine when people died unnecessarily and, above even that, the fact that a generation ago this land supported less than half the people it does now.”

“What you say is true,” said the father. “I am an old man now. You must excuse me if I cannot learn new words. All I can say is this. When I was young, if our land had grown as bad as this,” he said, turning to point vaguely towards the hillsides, whose surrounding parched brown faces bore no signs of life, “we would have moved to a new area and there would have been no famine.”

John decided not to pursue the point and opted to change the subject. But before he had a chance to speak, his father continued. “There is famine, my son, because people are no longer allowed to live their natural lives. We are unable to move because our government forbids it. They told us years ago that we should support them, that they would rid us of the British so that we could return to the way of life which we all knew and which had been denied us. They said they would repeal the laws that limited the number of cows a man could own. Well, they did that and we were grateful. What they did not tell us was what they themselves really wanted. They just wanted to take the white man's place, to banish him and then replace him with their own. But, alas, they are only Kikuyus and cannot see that they are fools. The white men still control them with bribes. If you go to Nairobi and look around, what do you see? You see white men – rich white men riding alongside these Kikuyus in cars. The only reason, my son, why there is famine here is because the government wants one. If we could move, as we used to, or if the government would give us dams and not schools, then there would be plenty. These Kikuyus, though, will only allow us the husks of the maize whilst they promise the grain. These people,” he scoffed, waving his arms high to imply and include everyone who lived in the area, “have been blinded by the white man's religion, his schools and his water pumps. They don't seem to realise that they will get nothing of any use from their Kikuyu masters or, for that matter, from the white man. They have been educated into stupidity.” He paused for a moment, as if to allow time for his words to sink in. His lips seemed to be bursting with examples he could use to illustrate and strengthen his case, but he calculatedly chose only one, and one which had direct relevance for his son. His words were intended to provoke, and provoke they did, but John listened in silence, if grudgingly, like he had done as a child, when scolded for criticising his father's advice. “Look at the people in the town,” Musyoka continued, now almost shouting, pointing up the valley vaguely in the direction of Migwani. “The council said they would bring water, so they put one of your engines by the dam. And what has come of it? It has worked for about three weeks in the last two years. When the water comes it is undrinkable because it is so dirty and it is expensive. It costs more than buying a woman as a new wife to draw water from the well. The whole idea is stupid.”