Ngũgĩ Thiong - Wizard of the Crow

“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 parents. 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.”