I was fed with a mixture of camel milk and honey. The Gabra women spooned the mixture into my mouth as if I were a baby. As if they knew about Nyakeeru. They ran their hands, as soft and as pliant as mahamri dough, over my stomach so that when I finally ate solid food, it sat easily in my stomach. Ciira sat with me then, telling me about the frantic search on the night when I was discovered missing. She told me how Mutei refused to give up, only going back to Kalacha Camp when exhaustion had overwhelmed him. The following morning, he woke up early to lead the search party.
“You see, Wanja, you two can find your way back,” Ciira told me.
I was not convinced. I sunk down on the soft goatskins the Gabra women had laid me on and closed my eyes. Throughout the night and the following day, I spoke only of the boy that found me after I had wandered off. The boy that had thought I was a goat.
The boy told me in halting Swahili that his name was Abdi. Full syllables spat out like phlegm. Ab-di. He had been out in the morning looking for one of his goats that failed to come home the night before. Dust covered and partly hidden by a shrub, he thought I was the goat.
I had curled myself into a ball in the gritty sand, crying out for everyone I knew. My words whistled in the desert wind: Ciiiiiiiiiiira! Muuutei! Maaaaaama! Kui! Our Kui! The cold was under my skin and into my bones. My left foot. Fractured or badly sprained. I could not step forward without wincing. Desperate for warmth, I tried to think of the last time I felt heat and I remembered Pete. The crowded dance floor in Kampala on February fourteenth. Mutei and Nairobi were a distant thought that night. Wazungus can’t dance, I told Pete. You jump before the beat. And we laughed together then. I had taken the lead at first, circling Pete’s slim waist. The room smelled like a combination of overripe bananas and perfumed sweat. When Abdi dragged me up and pulled me along, I thought we were still dancing until I tried to put full weight on my left foot. Then the reality of Chalbi came back. I told Abdi that I was brought down by the roots of a shrub as I wandered around lost in the inky blackness of the desert.
Abdi had a bottle of lukewarm water which he allowed me to sip, yanking the bottle from me when I wanted to gulp the contents. In full light, the expanse of the Chalbi Desert seemed once again to have no end. The uniformity stretched all round, broken only by the carcasses of sheep and goat.
The boy, whose skin was marked by pimples like small droplets of water, had told me Njaa huuma kamadudu. Hunger bites like an insect. I felt hollowness where my stomach used to be. Abdi cajoled me to keep moving, sometimes threatening to leave me to the vultures that were circling overhead. The sun above was an angry monster, spewing tongues of fire onto the ground. Twice I saw Mutei in front of me, his skin as black as a starless night, and once I even saw Pete. The smell of Mutei, like freshly cut wood, was in my nostrils and I limped forward with my arms outstretched. But he stayed just out of my reach. I closed my eyes and when I opened them, he was gone.
It was three days before I was strong enough and my left foot could step on the ground with only a twinge of pain. On the fourth day, we headed to Lake Turkana, leaving at dawn to cross the Chalbi Desert before the sun became a bonfire in the sky.
In the car, we saw women in the desert as thin as tree saplings, their long skirts billowing behind them. Ciira’s husband, Maish, was driving, his stocky bulk spilling over the sides of the driver’s seat. Ciira sat next to him. Mutei and I were in the back. Ciira’s throaty laughter made us whip our heads around time and again even though we knew the source. Maish—who I used to think was as dull as an empty sack—still made her double up in helpless laughter seven years into their marriage. I couldn’t understand it. Now they spoke of Njeeri, a college roommate of ours who had recently left her marriage. Her husband went to work one morning only to find a note in the evening and the house swept clean. Maish pointed at the women in the desert, laughing before he even got to the punchline. “If a man were to marry a woman from here and take her to Nairobi,” Maish said, “she would never leave him. Never.”
Mutei and Ciira laughed along with him. Mutei quickly glanced at me to see if I would join them. I gave him nothing, and he stopped laughing almost as quickly as he had started. I stared quietly out of the window, looking at the women. Thinking of the endless cycle of their lives, and the packing and unpacking of the mandasse. The women carried tents made of acacia roots and animal skins on their heads for miles until they found pasture for their goats, sheep and camels. With the changing of seasons, they were running away from the dry March weather. They were heading back the way we had come, back to Kalacha where they would find water. As they walked, small kid goats danced between their feet. I smiled then, remembering Jivi. Out of all the goats in my father’s herd, Jivi was my favorite. Jivi often sneaked between my legs and got into the neighbor’s shamba. I often longed for the Savannah land Laikipia where I grew up. When I first came to live in Nairobi, that concrete maze (and Mutei’s ways) used to drive me crazy. I much preferred the outdoors. I was named Wanja after all. Even though I moved to Nairobi to work as an animal scientist, I never really left the animals. I met them in captivity rather than in the open fields. And after all these years, I still missed my goat Jivi. My only sister, Kui, and I helped in the birth of Jivi’s last eight kids, giving it dry maize after delivery to hasten the coming of the afterbirth.
Mutei told me that the introductory goat and an ewe had already been taken to Mama Tito’s parents. His mother and uncles had taken care of it. He seemed proud of that. Then my husband of ten years leaned in and whispered with all seriousness: “You and I . . . nothing changes,” he said.
I repeated the words slowly. “Nothing changes.”
Mutei reached for my hand. ”Nothing,” he said. “Mama Tito and her child won’t live with us.”
I blinked, but said no more. I moved my hand away. The woman Mutei said he would soon marry had been with us every minute of this trip and so had the boy. The child was about six years old, the same age as Ciira’s first born. I didn’t ask Mutei where they were to live. Mutei and Maish had a real estate firm. They were building a housing estate in Ruiru, not far from where we lived. I suspected Mutei would settle the woman and her child in one of the houses. Our Gikuyu culture allowed women to share a husband, but discouraged them from sharing a house. My mother, who was married as a second wife in my late father’s old age, told me once that two wives are like two pots of witchcraft. Kui and I had vowed we would never become the second pot in someone’s life.
Back at Kalacha, I told Ciira that Mutei saw the possibility with this other woman. “He wants to play father and it is only by counting our ten years that he has agreed to wait for a month before marrying this other one. His mother is pleased, though.” Mama Mutei seemed to enjoy cutting me down with her tongue. After ten years married to my son, you should be suckling your third one. Many a girl kept me awake at night with squealing when Mutei was still at home and sleeping in his simba next to my house.
Mutei touched my knee lightly and I turned to face him. I could still see relief in his eyes. The lost goat had found its way back into the fold. During the long drive, Mutei spoke of things he had not been able to speak of before like poor sperm motility. He refused to even look at the medical literature that I used to bring home over the years about infertility and sperm counts—akin to a child who hides his face with the palm of his hand and says, you can’t see me, I am hiding myself. I had held on to hope with each and every childless year, shutting my ears to Mutei’s aunts who would speak from the side of their mouths saying that a good stomach was not just for food.
After we had been married for five years, my grandmother finally told me that there was a reason children of the same village often look alike. “When a man is away and a neighbor comes to milk his cows,” she said, “he does not leave the milk on the doorstep. He takes it inside the house and gives it to his wife.” At the time, I had pretended I did not understand what she was trying to tell me. But later I would think seriously about Maish and milk. After Ciira had her second baby, she announced that she would not get any more. What harm could it do if Maish were to deliver the milk to me when Mutei was away on business, I thought.
We reached Lake Turkana at 3PM and found the jade-colored lake heaving. A woman ranger escorted us to our lodgings for the night. She told us that there has been a spate of poaching in the park recently. Mutei pulled me to him, holding me close as if I might wander away again.
We were served the day’s catch for dinner that evening. Nile tilapia with brown millet ugali and bitter traditional vegetables that stung the tongue. We spent the night in huts made of tightly woven grass. Next to me in bed, Mutei’s body felt awkward, like something that had been taken away then returned all the worse for wear. We fumbled with each other’s bodies and it was almost like it was with Pete that night when we were both lonely and had reached for the other, my inhibitions finally falling away like the dress. Pete talked of his ex-wife with the casualness of the wave of a hand, as if their union had been a brief encounter that had perhaps lasted a little too long. As soon as he had finished, I dressed and Pete went to the bathroom. I let myself out, shutting the door against the sound of running water in the shower.
“I’m so sorry,” Mutei said. The words were jagged, as if snagged on woven grass.
I turned my back, but he pulled me to him, forming a curve around my body, and pressing his face between my shoulder blades. I felt a wetness spreading down my back.
There was soon only the sound of his snoring. An animal could have easily dragged Mutei outside while he was asleep and he would not have awakened until it had eaten half his arm. When his snores softened, I slipped outside. Resiato, the female ranger, was standing guard at the edge of the camp. I sat with her and we talked about how poaching had decimated the black rhinos in Kenya. “There were twenty thousand in 1960,” she said. “Now only a palty six hundred remained.” When Resiato learned that I grew up in Laikipia, she told me that she had worked at Olpejeta National Park protecting the remaining white rhinos in the world. With the death of the only surviving male, their future now depended on artificial reproduction.
“Too bad the white rhino cannot mate with the black rhino eh?” I said.
Resiato and I laughed that way until morning.
After a late breakfast the following day, we started our journey back. I could sense that the pull of Nairobi was strong among us. I was anxious to get back to work as well. We spent the night in a guest house on the outskirts of Maralal. When I woke up the following morning, I felt the urgent need to retch and when I rushed to the washroom, nothing came up but an acrid sun-yellow liquid.
I touched my stomach the way the Gabra women had done, circling it from top to bottom. Hope had become like an addiction which I craved and now that I had found a fix, I started worrying for the time I would come back from the high I was feeling. I flushed the loo quickly, then I poured a toilet cleaner that I found on a shelf above the cistern. I rinsed out my mouth and then breathed into my palm and smelt my breath. Mutei gave me a long look when I got out of the loo. His question was suspended in midair between us. He had hung in there for years on the tendrils of hope, but I gave him nothing. “I’m fine, just an upset stomach,” I said. Then I went to the closet and began to pack.
Maish and Mutei pushed forward, taking turns to drive and we arrived home in Nairobi late in the evening. Maish and Ciira dropped us at our house in Thome estate. Ciira hugged me closely when she and Maish were leaving.
“Mission accomplished,” she said. “You guys found your way back.”
I could almost see her writing a final report, as if I were one of her projects. Ciira worked at a nongovernmental organization and often talked of capacity building and sustainability. The trip to Chalbi Desert was her idea. She called it an intervention, a way to save our marriage. Behind her, I met Mama Mutei’s eyes. She had been house sitting while we were away.
“Hello, Mami,” I said. Maybe it was the expectant look on her face that made me greet her in this way. Mami was an intimate term for one's mother in-law. In all the ten years of our marriage, I had never used it.
She pulled me to her, running her hands over my hips as if tracing their outline. The following morning I would find that she had prepared breakfast for me. In the corner of the tray covered by a serviette I would find odowa, the soft stone crumbling.
As an animal scientist, I was well grounded in biology, but I dared not trust what my body was telling me. During a field visit to a farm in Kabete a week later, the stink of manure would turn my stomach as if it had reached its hand inside my stomach. I went behind the cowshed, Pete a few feet behind me.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “I am fine.” I said. “Everything is finally ok.”
I passed through a pharmacy. At home, I sat on the toilet seat staring at two strips of pink. I counted the days since that night in Kampala when I allowed Pete to pull me past my hotel room. More than six weeks had passed. Both laughter and tears burst forth, weaving together. I stuffed the pink strips inside my bra, then rushed outside the house, leaving Mama Mutei calling after me, her shouts of Wanja! Waaanja!!!! swallowed by the roar of my car engine as I floored the pedals and drove out of the compound.
Within two hours, I had a new doctor in downtown Nairobi, one that I have found on the internet. In the waiting room, I looked at our finances. I checked my joint investments with Mutei and the secret investments in stocks that I had made over the years. I studied my CDCS accounts, the central depository numbers saved like phone numbers in my phone. After I had seen the doctor, and we had counted the days, and argued about the expected date, I called my sister, Kui. I asked her whether we could be partners again.
“Don’t ask foolish questions,” Kui told me.
Over the years I had sent her money to increase the herd of goats. Before we left for Chalbi, I had sent her money to buy five more acres of land.
“We will get lost in the Savanna grass again!” I said.
Her yelps mingled with the bleating of goats at her goat farm. It may be hard to believe, but the earthy, woody smell of tall golden brown grass came to my nostrils.
I rushed home before the evening traffic got thick. I found Mama Mutei with Ciira in the sitting room. Ciira opened up her arms for me, but I brushed past her and went upstairs to my bedroom.
Ciira came upstairs and found me packing. “Wanja you can’t leave,” she said. “Not now.”
I forced the lid of the suitcase down hard and went to my bedroom window. A small bird was perched on the window ledge. Kanyoni kanja flew away with a whirr of its wings even though it was no more than the size of a grown man’s fist. I watched it flying away until it became a tiny dot in the horizon.
“I found my way back, Ciira,” I said as I faced her.
With that I smiled and I picked up my small suitcase. Ciira stood between me and the bedroom door with a puzzlement on her face. I pushed past her. She looked wildly about her, a person looking at yarn that has unravelled and is rolling out faster than they can stop it. I dragged the suitcase down the stairs. Mama Mutei, was standing at the landing. In the third year of our marriage, Mama Mutei had wanted to take me to a Mundumue to be given ngata, charms which would protect me from evil spirits. I had refused. She told me the spirits had been known to tie up a woman’s womb for years so that even if she became pregnant, the baby would stay in the womb for so long that it would be born with teeth and hair that was turning grey. I met Mama Mutei’s eyes now and she simply stepped aside.
Mutei’s car and mine passed so close at the gate of our compound they almost touched. I slowed down. “The milk was delivered inside the house,” I said. And with that, I drove off, merging on to the traffic on Marurui Road and heading out of Nairobi.
What I could not tell Mutei was that I had to leave. In less than eight months, the news of the birth of my baby would have been so big it would have filled mouths so that people would put their palms there to prevent it from gushing forth. I could not have told Ciira that it would be difficult for the women to say with conviction the way Gikuyu women are wont to say, “The baby is a throwback to its ancestors. There were light-skinned people along Mutei’s lineage, but look at those ears. They look exactly like his.”
Nyakeeru, the light skinned one, was born in the field, coming so fast we could not have risked going to the hospital twenty kilometers away. Kui had played midwife, just as she and I had acted on a goat the previous night. And when she laid the baby on a lesso next to me, and I wiped him, his skin resembled the tall savanna grass, turned tawny by the early December sun.
NOTE: Revised from the original, December 2019.
Contributor Notes
Alice Muthoni Gichuru is a Kenyan author who writes under the pen name Muthoni Wa Gichuru. She is the Cordinator, AMKA space for women writers. Muthoni’s first published novel, Breaking the Silence, (East African Educational Publishers, 2010), was first runner-up for the Jomo Kenyatta Foundation Literature Prize, 2011. Her novella, The Hidden Package, (EAEP, 2016), won second prize Burt Award for African Writing. Her debut play, The Land along the River, was on the list of Commended plays in the English as a Second Language category at The 25th International Radio Playwriting Competition. Muthoni has also been published by Story Moja Publishers. In 2018 she was the overall winner of Burt Award for Africa Writing, Kenya for her manuscript, The Carving. Muthoni is also a short story writer and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2015. She has been published in Fresh Paint volume 2, (2015) an anthology by AMKA, Kenya, Moonscapes 2016, an anthology by African Writers Trust, Uganda and The Wrong Patient and Other Stories from Africa (2018), an anthology by Africa Book Club.
