Authors: Wole Soyinka
Africa39 (20 page)
‘But . . .’ Mukidanyi’s hands were shaking as he groped about for a matchbox and put a flame to the sooty tin lamp on the rack above the bed.
‘Yes, now you will listen to people, Mukidanyi. Now you will listen, I tell you!’ said Ronika, springing out of bed and moving to the far end of the room. There was a wild look in her eyes, her face slick with sweat.
‘That was the money in the briefcase speaking, you mean?’ Mukidanyi was shaking.
‘Go on, take it!’ snapped Ronika, a note of hysteria in her voice. ‘Take your millions, Mukidanyi, go on . . . do not now be afraid of it, big man who is hard of hearing!’ She was adjusting her
lesso
around her waist, her lined face set as if she was going to fly at him and wrest him to the floor. ‘I warned you about the Galos, didn’t I? Eh? Ngoseywe and Agoya warned you too against this, didn’t they, big man? . . . And what did you do . . . eh? Tell me, what did you do?’
‘Come on, Ronika,’ pleaded Mukidanyi, backing into a corner, scared of touching the briefcase. ‘We are not even sure about this.’
But the briefcase confirmed the grim news for him shortly.
‘Now they are talking loudly,’ complained the voice inside, stifling a yawn. ‘I don’t like their shouting! It was better with the silence.’
‘I don’t like it either. I wish they could stop. It makes me hungry,’ answered the other.
‘
Nyasaye goi!
’ exclaimed Mukidanyi, throwing his hands on his head. ‘What madness is this!’
‘He-he-heeeee!’ laughed Ronika hysterically, her eyes glowing angrily. ‘Mukidanyi, son of Kizungu, now you have seen it with your very eyes, haven’t you? Eh? Now you have dipped your finger in the wound and ascertained for yourself, eh? Today you will learn about the people of the world, I tell you, today you will know!’
In the end she had to physically drag Mukidanyi to the briefcase and force him to unlock the padlock and free it from the bed frame.
‘
Out!
’ she snarled, hurling the briefcase out into the night and sending him after it. ‘Go on with your devil money this very minute . . . find somewhere else to keep it but not in this house, you hear?’
The children, who had been woken by the raised voices, huddled together in a corner, puzzled. They had never seen their mother that agitated, or their father that scared.
It was the longest journey Mukidanyi had ever undertaken in his life. That couple of hundred yards from his compound to the Galos’ seemed like a mile with that scary case that got heavier and heavier in his hand with every footstep he took. All around him the night swam with unseen creatures, their formless bodies squirming in and out of his way as if they meant to entangle him in their many scary octopus arms. Occasionally he tripped and as he put his palm to the ground to right himself, struggling to keep the heavy briefcase in his grip he felt a slick tendril snaking out of the darkness and coiling around his ankle, tightening in a bloodsucker’s grip. In the scary moment in which he wrestled with the unseen demon he felt the hold tighten, the razor edge biting into his flesh, but without drawing blood. And yet for some reason he just couldn’t let go of the case and turn tail, for his leaden feet seemed set on doing the entire journey to the Galos’ and nothing short of that.
It was a big relief when he finally saw the electric light the Galos had installed at their high wrought-iron gate looming in front of him. The moment he approached the gate two huge hounds came bounding out of the flower bushes, their teeth flashing.
‘I say, Galo, open up for me!’ shouted Mukidanyi. ‘It is I, Mukidanyi!’
There was a moment of silence before a light went on in one of the windows of the double-storied brick house. All this while the dogs had been snarling at him from a distance but now as he attempted to rap on the gate they both lunged at him, clinging on to the metal grille, a manic glint in their shiny eyes.
It was as he was almost giving in to the hysteria and tossing the heavy briefcase over the gate that he saw a bright light flash from the direction of the partly hidden front porch, the powerful beam seeking him out and playing around his chest and legs.
‘Bayaa, Mukidanyi, what brings you here at this hour of the night?’ said Galo, drawing closer, his bedroom slippers slapping a pata-pata rhythm on the baked brick drive. ‘Anything the matter?’
‘Still your dogs, Galo. I am not a thief or a witch that they may tear to pieces,’ shrieked Mukidanyi breathlessly. ‘And yes, something is the matter. I changed my mind about selling the land. Here is your money.’
Before Galo could take in what it was all about Mukidanyi had dumped the briefcase at the gate and taken off into the night like an arrow. And he wouldn’t stop to catch his breath, not even when he banged his head on low hanging branches or knocked his toes on outcropping roots on the path, opening up flesh painfully. All that preoccupied his mind was getting as far away from the storied brick house as he could.
Mehul Gohil
The kitchen was dark and I didn’t see Daddy pick an orange from the bowl. I dropped big red Eveready batteries into the torch. Daddy said, ‘On it’. My thumb slid forward. Yellow light streamed out. I manoeuvred the light beam around the blender and the fridge and the microwave then focused it on the orange. Daddy’s strong fingers were holding it from the very bottom. They turned and the orange turned. I had once seen those fingers squeeze all the orange juice out of the fruit with just one squeeze. A dirty grey patch gradually came into view. Daddy continued turning and the dirty grey patch disappeared.
This is how, at the age of six, I learnt of the existence of Earth’s rotation.
The Night. The Sleep. The dreams and Rapid Eye Movement. The leg jerks in-between.
At half past five, the first bird sings. After all these years, the song still sounds the same. A slight variation in the melody perhaps; a slightly different tone maybe. Because this is another bird, another life.
The Day.
I am sitting up on my bed. My hands are on my bow-legs. My fingers are playing with the hair on my thighs. My head is empty and light this morning. I am looking at my fingers and seeing how I have grown – the hard and strong bones in them now. And seeing how small and soft they are in my memory.
I am putting on my black trousers and fashionable striped shirt. I think they have a name for this kind of shirt but I don’t know what it is. I just know it looks good and everyone’s wearing a variation of it. Including my boss, who’s an early-twenties retail prodigy. He’s short and has baby fat glowing from under his fair skin.
I’ll call him Striped Shirt. He owns Organic Body Building.
I am at the Sarit Centre branch of Organic Body Building. Striped Shirt’s complaining about the lack of reports. He calls me a fizzy drink. That I start off great and then begin exhibiting properties of diminishing returns. That I switch off my phone. I tell him I got robbed but he tells me I’m always getting robbed. He says I am a ‘Head of Department’. I say I should be given a car because if you expect me to take Cabanas to Mlolongo matatus, expect me to get robbed.
‘That’s not the point,’ he says. ‘Reports have to be mailed. I, Striped Shirt, have to keep an octopus eye on things from my laptop. I, Striped Shirt, should not be bumming around branches, doing low life, shelf attendant jobs. That’s your job. To coordinate operations at the bottom two levels of this organisation’s hierarchy. I need reports to know if this is happening.’
I tell him nothing’s going wrong, there are no stock variances straying out of bounds, the negative stock levels are under control, no pending transfers in the transit warehouse.
A ‘pop-up window’ appears and I maximise it. There are lines of transactions listed in chronological order. Most are simple POS entries. Others are ‘IMs’ or ‘Inward Movements’. There are ‘CNs’, ‘STs’, credit notes and stock adjustments. The list of transactions is the complete history of a particular item. I am good at translating this history into layman’s language and telling everyone what’s going on. In fact, I am the best at this in Organic Body Building. I can mystically conjoin the information in ‘Stock Queries’ and ‘Sales Reports’. I am the SAP guru.
But the truth is stock auditing at Organic Body Building is a boring job. It’s a prison of files arranged alphabetically – Assorted toiletries, Baby foods, Body building, Body care, Bulk items, Confectionary and so on until Teas.
I am going at a line of 250gm Xanthan Gum packets with moon walking fingers: two, four, six, eight. Then Tetra Paks of Rice Dream milk, two outers, four outers.
Seventeen tubs of Whey. I scour my inventory reports and compare and contrast shorts in Yaya to excesses in Galleria. Calculate inventory movements and set limits to the frequency of containers coming in for Organic Body Building. Cut out slow movers. And all this is only the tip of the Organic Body Building iceberg.
I can mention the story of the twenty-five kilo Deluxe Muesli bag that came out of the Maersk. A Goods Receipt was done without a prior check and it was received at the Westgate branch. A Ku Klux Klaned, Karen suburb-born, Mzungu White British Bitch bought it. On reaching home, she screamed out her fucking ovaries. The bag had four dead rats in it. She came back with reporters and a seven foot Cholmondeley guy. Their faces looked so fucking concerned. But fuck it; I have been doing this for four years.
After four years I can float into daydreams whilst playing with the SAP. Like taking myself to the last day of the 1989 Safari Rally. April 4. This was the one Miki Biasion won. I pronounced him Miki Bison, after the animal. Spectator cars were lined up on the footpaths along Uhuru Highway. We were parked on the hilly stretch that overlooks the scrap metal sprawl of the railway yards. The sky was blue and stainless. It should have been a great day but it wasn’t. Daddy was not happy. He was an angrier Daddy, the one looking straight out of the window. Not even knowing what he was looking at. Moving his lips and talking to himself in whispers. I was sorting out these – what can I call them – playing cards – each one had a picture of a species of fighter jet on it with details below about size, speed, wing span and other random aeronautical jargon – they were all mixed up – when the shadow of a man slid past us and Daddy gave a start. Miki Bison’s car zoomed past with a roar. I quickly looked through the back window and saw a nude brute walking down the Uhuru Highway hill. It was a total surprise for sure.
Then I come to the end of another dull working day. Orange skies fireball across car windscreens. Downtown becomes an underwater metropolis – all the cars in traffic become submarines caught in the rip of the highway currents. And from left and from right thousands of people come and gather at the edges of the rip, waiting for their turn to cross the highway, and when they do they move like majestic shoals of multicoloured fish. Some are attired formally in their grey-scale suits and well-heeled toe-fins. Others have dyed the plaited scales of their hair a scareberry blue colour; their frocks breathe and flap like gills in the wind. Sometimes matatus manoeuvre rudely around them and this upsets the natural flow of the rip. Giant bubbles rise up from the highway and, when I look through them, Nyayo House is bent. Deep bass pop songs thump out of cars, matatus, buses, so it seems a pissed off whale hides underneath the sprawling grass of nearby Central Park; great coughs booming out from the undergrounds of its lungs. Dim violet skies cool across windscreens.
Dinner in the night and Daddy is sneezing. I thought he had recovered from a cold just a month ago but he’s sneezing again. I eat my
dal bhat
alone. Who cooked this? The other two are not in the house. It might be a bad night if they don’t come in peacefully.
Something of the day remains. A tiredness devised by that entire stretch of workday boredom. And now it depends on the talents I was born with – is it the talent of hard work or the talent of sloth? My fight with myself begins. I want to write. All I have ever wanted to do in life is write, whether I write good or bad. I like to believe I was born to do this but the greatest talent God gave me is the sloth one.
I fight with myself. I make plans. I am going to read a chapter of Michael Herr – helicopters and napalm and naked Vietnamese girls walking the Phan Thiet beach.
Then I am going to have a shower. Then I am going to put my laptop on the desk.
Then I am going to pull the chair to the desk. Then I am going to boot the laptop and write.
This is the plan – Herr, napalm, shower, desk, laptop, write – I convince myself. In the shower I feel it’s really going to happen. The water is hot. Steam all around. And when I come out I feel I need to relax by lying down in bed and reading another Herr chapter:
There were times at night when all the jungle sounds would stop at once . . .
I hear Daddy sneeze again, his soft muffle coming from the other room, through my door and into my wet ears. A depression buzzes through me and for a nanosecond I feel a resolve arising inside me. Maybe I’m going to get up and go to the laptop.
Then the brief depression passes but something else pains in compensation. I want to mould the litfest finale into the shape of a black hole. The idea has been growing inside my head for many days. Increasing in weight, increasing in pain. I need to give birth but my goddamned talent of sloth traps me in bed like a rock underneath mighty Elgon.