Ngũgĩ Thiong - Wizard of the Crow

She resorted to stalking him, casting surreptious glances in his direction, hoping to catch him naked as he emerged from the bathroom or the toilet. Once or twice she opened the door to his bedroom at a time she thought he might be changing into his nightclothes but, finding him fully clothed, she closed the door quickly, as if she had made a mistake through force of habit.

Tajirika had also started feeling restless and perplexed by several questions for which he had no satisfactory answer.

Some of them were prompted by his ego: to be captured, sat upon, put on trial, and beaten by women defied all that he knew about the world. At such moments he wished he had the means to annihilate them, but weren’t they creatures from the netherworld? Anyway, who had told them about him and Vinjinia? Wife beating in Aburlria, after all, was so common as not to be noticed. What made for a peaceful home was not the absence of such blows but the ability of a couple to keep the knowledge of the violence within the confines of the walls of their house.

What fascinated and irritated him at the same time was the knowledge that there was not a single falsehood in the women’s allegations, forcing him to brood on his conduct of this affair. Why had he not checked Sikiokuu’s story with Vinjinia?

He also could not deny the truth of Vinjinia’s claim that he had not done much for her when she herself was arrested, and now he felt ashamed for not having been man enough to stand by his woman.

And what to make of her claims that she had left no stone unturned in search of him? Was this true? He wanted to know more, but how could he break the silence without demeaning himself? He, too, started stalking her, casting surreptitious glances at her to see if he could detect a sign of any softening in her.

The two started circling each other, often finding themselves in the same part of the house, both looking for an opening to satisfy their respective curiosities about one another. One afternoon they encountered each other on the veranda and were struck by the same surprise: starting from just outside the veranda wall were two tunnels. What rains have done this? they loudly asked in unison. Yet they were not aware of any rains recently. With each walking along one of the tunnels, they followed them through the cornfields, all the way down the valley. And then? The second surprise.

On the boggy, marshy valley floor, a pool had formed. They stared at each other. They each dipped a finger into the pool and tasted the liquid. It was salty, like tears. Neither of them could believe the evidence of their tongues. Needing confirmation, they returned their fingers to the pool and now placed a finger on each other’s tongue. The water was still salty. They giggled a little, in unison. They quickly put their fingers back in the pool, each hoping to be the first to place more salty water in the other’s mouth. But it was as if they had read each other’s intentions. Vinjinia dashed into the cornfields, with Tajirika following her in a playful chase.

They at once succumbed to the fatigue of it all and suddenly felt the kind of warmth they used to arouse in each other in the days of their youth: for a moment they stood looking at each other, mesmerized by what was happening to them. They knew rather than talked about it. But there in the open fields, under the corn leaves, it felt good, very good, and for a few minutes the pain of the bruises on their faces and in their hearts seemed soothed away by the sweetness that whistled tunes ending in a rapturous crescendo.

Neither Tajirika nor Vinjinia could have dreamt that out of the tears of sorrow could come such intense screams of joy. But the scream that next issued from Vinjinia’s mouth was not joy or sorrow, and for a few seconds she could not utter a word. Tajirika looked to see what she was pointing at. The sight made him tense up also: a flock of birds was frozen in flight above the lake. Some yards into the pool, a dog, barking at the birds, suddenly froze before their very eyes.

Tajirika and Vinjinia took to their heels and did not once look back until they reached the house. The valley floor used to shake as if hollow below. What had brought the waters to the surface? What of the arrested motion of beings r

They came back the following day, hoping the whole thing had vanished. It had not, and now, in addition to the birds, were bees and butterflies also in frozen flight. On the surface, ducks and chickens, including a cock trying to mount a hen, were all frozen in motion. So also two antelopes, one in the air and the other about to jump.

They gave up trying to unravel the mystery. When Gacirü and Gaclgua came for holidays, Tajirika and Vinjinia forbid them to go anywhere near the valley or talk about it, reinforcing the ban with stories of daemons that lured children into a pool in the valley and swallowed them. But Gacirü and Gaclgua whispered the stories to their friends, and eventually the stories reached the ears of parents, who sternly warned their children to avoid the area.

Parents added their bits to the scary lore: The pool became a lake that turned any living thing that touched its surface or flew over it into stone. Even looking in its direction or looking at it, others added, could turn somebody into stone, which made people walk with their eyes facing away from its supposed location. Silence about the lake ensued.

But Tajirika and Vinjinia were attracted to the lake like a moth to the light. They found a spot from where they could see it, especially in the evenings, because when light fell on the motionless objects the things would change colors dramatically, depending on the intensity and angle of the sun.

Tajirika and Vinjinia named the scene Museum of Arrested Motion.

It was while seated in their usual place facing the Museum of Arrested Motion that Tajirika, out of nowhere, asked Vinjinia how she had come to be the guest of honor at a women’s ceremonial dance, warning her not to lie because he had seen, with his own eyes, photographs of the occasion. She assumed he meant press photos, although she had not seen any. Without mentioning her visit to the Wizard of the Crow, she described her fruitless search for Tajirika and finally her decision to confront Sikiokuu at the official opening of Kaniürü’s office, where some women dancers whom she had never met forced his hand. But it did not really matter that she had never met them, and all he should know was that but for those dancers he would never have been found alive.

It was Tajirika’s turn, and he too omitted any reference to his encounter with the Wizard of the Crow in prison, his commanding a whole camp with only a bucket of shit, and his bargaining his way to freedom by betraying his friend and benefactor Machokali. Instead, Tajirika described how he defied those who had arrested him and threatened to report their criminal mistreatment of him to the Ruler. It was then that the officials told him that the involvement of his wife with subversive female elements was the real reason they had arrested him, and, to prove it, they showed him photographs of Vin-jinia seated in front of the dancers.

The shock on Vinjinia’s face made Tajirika believe that she knew nothing about the pictures. She did not deny that there were people with cameras there, but she had assumed that they were from the newspapers. And why would newspaper people take the pictures of her and the dancers and erase the images of Sikiokuu and Kan-iürü from the scene, since they were the chief dignitaries at the ceremony?

“There is more to these pictures than meets the eye,” said Vin-jinia, shaking her head from side to side.

Her words stung Tajirika into silence. So that was why Sikiokuu did not want him to talk to Vinjinia about the pictures? So that’s why he had forbidden him to beat her? Now he recalled how Sikiokuu had recently put the phone down while Tajirika was about to seek permission to beat Vinjinia. His anger drove the matter of his abduction into the background.