Water got in, roofs collapsed, then rude boys set fire to them. The dead houses were like empty skulls. Dogs fell into toilet pits and drowned. One day when we went down to the shamba there were no names and stones from the Ukerewe house. Within a month its windows were empty, smoke-stained sockets. With no one to tend them, the shambas went to wild and weeds. Goats and crows grazed where they would, the terrace walls crumbled, the rains washed the soil down the valley in great red tears. Fields that had fed families for generations vanished in a night. No one cared for the women"s tree any more, to give the images their cups of beer. Hope stopped working in Gichichi. Always in the minds of the ones who remained was the day when we would look up the road and see the spines and fans and twisted spires of the Chaga standing along the ridge-line like warriors. I remember the morning I was woken by the sound of voices from the Muthiga house. Men"s voices, speaking softly so as not to waken anyone, for it was still dark, but they woke me. I put on my things and went out into the compound. Grace and Reth were carrying cardboard boxes from the house, their father and a couple of the other men from the village were loading them on to a Nissan pickup. They had started early, and the pickup was well laden. The children were gathering up the last few things. "Ah, Tendel6o," Mr. Muthiga said sadly. "We had hoped to get away before anyone was around." "Can I talk to Grace?" I asked. I did not talk to her. I shouted at her. I would be all alone when she went. I would be abandoned. She asked me a question. She said, "You say we must not go. Tell me, Tendeleo, why must you stay?" I did not have an answer to that. I had always presumed that it was because a pastor must stay with his people, but the bishop had made several offers to my father to relocate us to a new parish in Eldoret. Grace and her family left as it was getting light. Their red taillights swung into the slow stream of refugees. I heard the horn hooting to warn stragglers and animals all the way down the valley. I tried to keep the house good and safe but two weeks later a gang of rude boys from another village broke in, took what they could and burned the rest. They were a new thing in what the radio called the "sub-terminum," gangs of raiders and looters stripping the corpses of the dead towns. "Vultures, is what they are," my mother said. Grace"s question was a dark parting gift to me. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that I must see this thing that had forced such decisions on us. The television and newspaper pictures were not enough. I had to see it with my own eyes. I had to look at its face and ask it its reasons. Little Egg became my lieutenant. We slipped money from the collection plate, and we gathered up secret bundles of food. A schoolday was the best to go. We did not go straight up the road, where we would have been noticed. We caught a matatu to Kinangop in the Nyandarua valley where n.o.body knew us. There was still a lively traffic; the matatu was full of country people with goods to sell and chickens tied together by the feet stowed under the bench. We sat in the back and ate nuts from a paper cone folded from a page of the Bible. Everywhere were dirty white United Nations vehicles. One by one the people got out and were not replaced. By Ndunyu there was only me and Little Egg, jolting around in the back of the car. The driver"s mate turned around and said, "So, where for, girls?" I said, "We want to look at the Chaga." "Sure, won"t the Chaga be coming to look at you soon enough?" "Can you take us there?" I showed him Church shillings. "It would take a lot more than that." He talked to the driver a moment. "We can drop you at Njeru. You can walk from there, it"s under seven kilometers."
Njeru was what awaited Gichichi, when only the weak and poor and mad remained. I was glad to leave it. The road to the Chaga was easy to find, it was the direction no one else was going in. We set off up the red dirt road toward the mountains. We must have looked very strange, two girls walking through a ruined land with their lunches wrapped in kangas. If anyone had been there to watch. The soldiers caught us within two kilometers of Njeru. I had heard the sound of their engine for some minutes, behind us. It was a big eight-wheeled troop carrier of the South African army. The officer was angry, but I think a little impressed. What did we think we were doing? There were vultures everywhere. Only last week an entire bus had been ma.s.sacred, five kilometers from here. Not one escaped ah"ve. Two girls alone, they would rob us and rape us, hang us up by our heels and cut our throats like pigs. All the time he was preaching, a soldier in the turret swept the countryside with a big heavy machine gun. "So, what the h.e.l.l are you doing here?" I told him. He went to talk on the radio. When he came back, he said, "In the back." The carrier was horribly hot and smelled of men and guns and diesel. When the door clanged shut on us I thought we Were going to suffocate. "Where are you taking us?" I asked, afraid. "You came to see the Chaga," the commander said. We ate our lunch meekly and tried not to stare at the soldiers. They gave us water from their canteens and tried to make us laugh. The ride was short but uncomfortable. The door clanged open. The officer helped me out and I almost fell over with shock. I stood in a hillside clearing. Around me were tree stumps, fresh cut, sticky with sap. From behind came the noise of chain saws. The clearing was full of military vehicles and tents. People hurried every way. Most of them were white. At the center of this activity was what I can only call a city on wheels. I had not yet been to Nairobi, but I knew it from photographs, a forest of beautiful towers rising out of a circle of townships. That was how the base seemed to me when I first saw it. Looking closer, I saw that the buildings were portable cabins stacked up on big tracked flatbeds, like the heavy log-carriers up in Eldoret. The tractors and towers were joined together with walkways and loops of cable. I saw people running along the high walkways. I would not have done that, not for a million shillings. I tell you my first impressions, of a beautiful white city- and you may laugh because you know it was only a UN- ECTA mobile base-that they had put together as fast and cheap as they could. But there is a truth here; seeing is magical. Looking kills. The longer I looked, the more the magic faded. The air in the clearing smelled as badly of diesel smoke as it had in the troop carrier. Everywhere was engine-noise. A path had been slashed through the forest, as if the base had come down it. I looked at the tracks. The big cog wheels were turning. The base was moving, slowly and heavily, like the hands of a clock, creaking backwards on its tracks in pace with the advance of the Chaga. Little Egg took my hand. I think my mouth must have been open in wonder for some time. "Come on then," said the officer. He was smiling now. "You wanted, to see the Chaga." He gave us over to a tall American man with red hair and a red beard and blue eyes. His name was Byron and he spoke such bad Swahili that he did not understand when Little Egg said to me, "He looks like a vampire." "I speak English," I told him and he looked relieved. He took us through the tractors to the tower in the middle, the tallest. It was painted white, with the word UN- ECTA big in blue on the side and beneath it, the name, Nyandarua Station. We got into a small metal cage. Byron closed the door and pressed a b.u.t.ton. The cage went straight up the side of the building. I tell you this, that freight elevator was more frightening than any stories about murdering gangs of vultures. I gripped the handrail and closed my eyes. I could feel the whole base swaying below me. "Open your eyes," Byron said. "You wouldn"t want to come all this way and miss it." As we rose over the tops of the trees the land opened before me. Nyandarua Station was moving down the eastern slopes of the Aberdare range: the Chaga was spread before me like a wedding kanga laid out on a bed. It was as though someone had cut a series of circles of colored paper and let them fall on the side of the mountains. The Chaga followed the ridges and the valleys, but that was all it had to do with our geography. It was completely something else. The colors were so bright and silly I almost laughed: purples, oranges, lots of pink and deep red. Veins of bright yellow. Real things, living things were not these colors. This was a Hollywood trick, done with computers for a film. I guessed we were a kilometer from the edge. It was not a very big Chaga, not like the Kilimanjaro Chaga that had swallowed Moshi and Arusha and all the big Tanzanian towns at the foot of the mountain and was now half-way to Nairobi. Byron said this Chaga was about five kilometers across and beginning to show the cla.s.sic form, a series of circles. I tried to make out the details. I thought details would make it real to me. I saw jumbles of reef-stuff the color of wiring. I saw a wall of dark crimson trees rise straight for a tremendous height. The trunks were as straight and smooth as spears. The leaves were joined together like umbrellas. Beyond them, I saw things like icebergs tilted at an angle, things like open hands, praying to the sky, things like oil refineries made out of fungus, things like brains and fans and domes and footb.a.l.l.s. Things like other things. Nothing that seemed a thing in itself. And all this was reaching toward me. But, I realized, it would never catch me. Not while I remained here, on this building that was retreating from it down the foothills of the Aberdares, fifty meters every day. We were close to the top of the building. The cage swayed in the wind. I felt sick and scared and grabbed the rail and that was when it became real for me. I caught the scent of the Chaga on the wind. False things have no scent. The Chaga smelled of cinnamon and sweat and soil new turned up. It smelled of rotting fruit and diesel and concrete after rain. It smelled like my mother when she had The Visit. It smelled like the milk that babies spit out of their mouths. It smelled like televisions and the stuff the Barber Under the Tree put on my father"s hair and the women"s holy place in Jthe shamba. With each of these came a memory of Gichichi and my life and people. The scent stirred the things I had recently learned as a woman. The Chaga became real for me there, and I understood that it would eat my world. While I was standing, putting all these things that were and would be into circles within circles inside my head, a white man in faded jeans and Timberland boots rushed out of a sliding door on to the elevator. "Byron," he said, then noticed that there were two little Kenyan girls there with him. "Who"ve these?" "I"m Tendeleo and this is my sister," I said. "We call her Little Egg. We"ve come to see the Chaga." This answer seemed to please him. "I"m called Shepard." He shook our hands. He also was American. "I"m a Peripatetic Executive Director. That means I rush around the world finding solutions to the Chaga." "And have you?" For a moment he was taken aback, and I felt bold and rude. Then he said, "Come on, let"s see." "Shepard," Byron the vampire said. "It"ll wait." He took us in to the base. In one room were more white people than I had seen in the whole of my life.
Each desk had a computer but the people-most of them were men dressed very badly in shorts, with beards-did not use them. They preferred to sit on each other"s desks and talk very fast with much gesturing.
"Are African people not allowed in here?" I asked.
The man Shepard laughed. Everything I said that tour he treated as if it had come from the lips of a wise old m"zee. He took us down into the Projection Room where computers drew huge plans on circular tables: of the Chaga now, the Chaga in five years time and the Chaga when it met with its brother from the south and both of them swallowed Nairobi like two old men arguing over a stick of sugar cane.
"And after Nairobi is gone?" I asked. The maps showed the names of all the old towns and villages, under the Chaga. Of course. The names do not change.
I reached out to touch the place that Gichichi would become.
"We can"t project that far," he said. But I was thinking of an entire city, vanished beneath the bright colors of the Chaga like dirt trodden into carpet.
All those lives and histories and stories. I realized that some names can be lost, the names of big things, like cities, and nations, and histories.
Next we went down several flights of steep steel stairs to the "tab levels." Here samples taken from the Chaga were stored inside sealed environments. A test tube might hold a bouquet of delicate fungi, a cylindrical jar a fistful of blue spongy fingers, a tank a square meter of Chaga, growing up the walls and across the ceiling. Some of the containers were so big people could walk around inside. They were dressed in bulky white suits that covered every part of them and were connected to the wall with pipes and tubes so that it was hard to tell where they ended and alien Chaga began. The weird striped and patterned leaves looked more natural than the UNECTA people in their white suits. The alien growing things were at least in their right world.
"Everything has to be isolated," Mr. Shepard said.
"Is that because even out here, it will start to attack and grow?" I asked.
"You got it."
"But I heard it doesn"t attack people or animals," I said.
"Where did you hear that?" this man Shepard asked.
"My father told me," I said mildly.
We went on down to Terrestrial Cartography, which was video-pictures the size of a wall of the world seen looking down from satellites. It is a view that is familiar to everyone of our years, though there were people of my parents" generation who laughed when they heard that the world is a ball, with no string to hold it up. I looked for a long time- it is the one thing that does not pale for looking-before I saw that the face of the world was scarred, like a Giriama woman"s. Beneath the clouds, South America and South Asia and mother Africa were spotted with dots of lighter color than the brown-green land.
Some were large, some were specks, all were precise circles. One, on the eastern side of Africa, identified this disease of continents to me. Chagas.
For the first time I understood that this was not a Kenyan thing, not even an African thing, but a whole world thing.
"They are all in the south," I said. "There is not one in the north."
"None of the biological packages have seeded in the northern hemisphere. This is what makes us believe that there are limits to the Chaga. That it won"t cover our whole world, pole to pole. That it might confine itself only to the southern hemisphere."
"Why do you think that?"
"No reason at all."
"You just hope."
"Yeah. We hope."
"Mr. Shepard," I said. "Why should the Chaga take away ur lands here in the south and leave you rich people in the north untouched? It does not seem fair."
"The universe is not fair, kid. Which you probably know better than me."
We went down then to Stellar Cartography, another dark room, with walls full of stars. They formed a belt around the middle of the room, in places so dense that individual stars blurred into ma.s.ses of solid white.
"This is the Silver River," I said. I had seen this on Grace"s family"s television, which they had taken with them.
"Silver River. It is that. Good name."
"Where are we?" I asked.
Shepard went over to the wall near the door and touched a small star down near his waist. It had a red circle around it. Otherwise I do not think even he could have picked it out of all the other small white stars. I did not like it that our sun was so small and common. I asked, "And where are they from?"
The UNECTA man drew a line with his finger along the wall. He walked down one side of the room, half way along the other, before he stopped. His finger stopped in a swirl of rainbow colors, like a flame.
"Rho Ophiuchi. It"s just a name, it doesn"t matter. What"s important is that it"s a long long way from us ...
so far it takes light-and that"s as fast as anything can go-eight hundred years to get there, and it"s not a planet, or even a star. It"s what we call a nebula, a huge cloud of glowing gas."
"How can people live in a cloud?" I asked. "Are they angels?"
The man laughed at that.
"Not people," he said. "Not angels either. Machines. But not like you or I think of machines. Machines more like living things, and very very much smaller.
Smaller even than the smallest cell in your body. Machines the size of chains of atoms, that can move other atoms around and so build j copies of themselves, or copies of anything else they want. And we think those gas clouds are trillions upon trillions of those tiny, living machines."
"Not plants and animals," I said.
"Not plants and animals, no."
"I have not heard this theory before." It was huge and thrilling, but like the sun, it hurt if you looked at it too closely. I looked again at the swirl of color, colored like the Chaga scars on Earth"s face, and back at the little dot by the door that was my light and heat. Compared to the rest of the room, they both looked very small. "Why should things like this, from so far away, want to come to my Kenya?"
"That"s indeed the question."
That was all of the science that the UNECTA man was allowed to show us, so he took us down through the areas where people lived and ate and slept, where they watched television and films and drank alcohol and coffee, the places where they exercised, which they liked to do a lot, in immodest costumes.
The corridors were full of them, immature and loosely put together, like leggy puppies.
"This place stinks of wazungu," Little Egg said, not thinking that maybe this m"zungu knew more Swahili than the other one. Mr. Shepard smiled.
"Mr. Shepard," I said. "You still haven"t answered my question."
He looked puzzled a moment, then remembered. "Solutions. Oh yes. Well, what do you think?" Several questions came into my head but none as good, r important to me, as the one I did ask. "I suppose the only question that matters, really, is can People live in the Chaga?" Shepard pushed open a door and we were on a metal platform just above one of the big track sets. "That, my friend, is the one question we aren"t even allowed to consider," Shepard said as he escorted us on to a staircase. The tour was over. We had seen the Chaga. We had seen our world and our future and our place amongst the stars; things too big for country church children, but which even they must consider, for unlike most of the wazungu here, they would have to find answers. Down on the red dirt with the diesel stink and roar of chain saws, we thanked Dr. Shepard. He seemed touched. He was clearly a person of power in this place. A word, and there was a UNECTA Landcruiser to take us home. We were so filled up with what we had seen that we did not think to tell the driver to let us off at the next village down so we could walk. Instead we went landcruising right up the main road, past Haran"s shop and the Peugeot Service Station and all the Men Who Read Newspapers under the trees. Then we faced my mother and father. It was bad. My father took me into his study. I stood. He sat. He took his Kalenjin Bible, that the Bishop gave him on his ordination so that he might always have G.o.d"s word in his own tongue, and set it on the desk between himself and me. He told me that I had deceived my mother and him, that I had led Little Egg astray, that I had lied, that I had stolen, not G.o.d"s money, for G.o.d had no need of money, but the money that people I saw every day, people I sang and prayed next to every Sunday, gave in their faith. He said all this in a very straightforward, very calm way, without ever raising his voice. I wanted to tell him all the things I had seen, offer them in trade, yes, I have cheated, I have lied, I have stolen from the Christians of Gichichi, but I have learned. I have seen. I have seen our sun lost among a million other suns. I have seen this world that G.o.d is supposed to have made most special of all worlds, so small it cannot even be seen. I have seen men, that G.o.d is supposed to have loved so much that he died for their evils, try to understand living machines, each smaller than the smallest living thing, but together, so huge it takes light years to cross their community. I know how different things are from what we believe, I wanted to say, but I said nothing, for my father did an unbelievable thing. He stood up. Without sign or word or any display of strength, he hit me across the face. I fell to the ground, more from the unexpectedness than the hurt. Then he did another unbelievable thing. He sat down. He put his head in his hand. He began to cry. Now I was very scared, and I ran to my mother. "He is a frightened man," she said. "Frightened men often strike out at the thing they fear." "He has his church, he has his collar, he has his Bible, what can frighten him?" "You," she said. This answer was as stunning as my father hitting me. My mother asked me if I remembered the time, after the argument outside the church, when my father had disappeared on the red Yamaha for a week. I said I did, yes. "He went down south, to Nairobi, and beyond. He went to look at the thing he feared, and he saw that, with all his faith, he could not beat the Chaga." My father stayed in his study a long time. Then he came to me and went down on his knees and asked me to forgive him. It was a Biblical principle, he said. Do not let the sun go down on your anger. But though Bible principles lived, i! my father died a little to me that day. This is life: a series of dyings and being born into new things and understandings. Life by life, Gichichi died too. There were only twenty families left on the morning when the spines of the alien coral finally reached over the tree tops up on the pa.s.s. Soon after dawn the UNECTA trucks arrived. They were dirty old Sudanese Army things, third hand Russian, badly painted and billowing black smoke. When we saw the black soldiers get out we were alarmed because we had heard bad things about Africans at the hands of other Africans. I did not trust their officer; he was too thin and had an odd hollow on the side of his shaved head, like a crater on the moon. We gathered in the open s.p.a.ce in front of the church with our things piled around us. Ours came to twelve bundles wrapped up in kangas. I took the radio and a clatter of pots. My father"s books were tied with string and balanced on the petrol tank of his red scrambler. The moon-headed officer waved and the first truck backed up and let down its tail. A soldier jumped out, set up a folding beach chair by the tailgate and sat with a clipboard and a pencil. First went the Kurias, who had been strong in the church. They threw their children up into the truck, then pa.s.sed up their bundles of belongings. The soldier in the beach chair watched for a time, then shook his head. "Too much, too much," he said in bad Swahili. "You must leave something." Mr. Kuria frowned, measuring all the s.p.a.ce in the back of the truck with his eyes. He lifted off a bundle of clothes. "No no no," the soldier said, and stood up and tapped their television with his pencil. Another soldier came and took it out of Mr. Kuria"s arms to a truck at the side of the road, the t.i.the truck. "Now you get on," the soldier said, and made a check on his clipboard. It was as bold as that. Wide-open crime under the blue sky. No one to see. No one to care. No one to say a word. Our family"s tax was the motorbike. My father"s face had gone tight with anger and offense to G.o.d"s laws, but he gave it up without a whisper. The officer wheeled it away to a group of soldiers squatting on their heels by a smudge-fire. They were very pleased with it, poking and teasing its engine with their long fingers. Every time since that I have heard a Yamaha engine I have looked to see if it is a red scrambler, and what thief is riding it. "Oh, on," said the t.i.the-collector. "My church," my father said and jumped off the truck. Immediately there were a dozen Kalashnikovs pointing at him. He raised his hands, then looked back at us. "Tendeleo, you should see this." The officer nodded. The guns were put down and I jumped to the ground. I walked with my father to the church. We proceeded up the aisle. The prayer books were on the bench seats, the woven kneelers set square in front of the pews. We went into the little vestry, where I had stolen the money from the collection. There were other dark secrets here. My father took a battered red petrol can from his robing cupboard and carried it to the communion table. He took the chalice, offered it to G.o.d, then filled it with petrol from the can. He turned to face the holy table. "The blood of Christ keep you in eternal life," he said, raising the cup high. Then he poured it otrt on to the white altar cloth. A gesture too fast for me to see; he struck fire. There was an explosion of yellow flame. I cried out. I thought my father had gone up in the gush of fire. He turned to me. Flames billowed behind him. "Now do you understand?" he said.
I did. Sometimes it is better to destroy a thing you love than have it taken from you and made alien. Smoke was pouring from under the roof by the time we climbed back on to the truck. The Sudanese soldiers were only interested in that it was fire, and destruction excites soldiers. Ours was the church of an alien G.o.d. Old Gikombe, too old and stupid to run away, did his "sitting in front of the trucks" trick. Every time the soldiers moved him, he scuttled back to his place. He did it once too often. The truck behind us had started to roll, and the driver did not see the dirty, rag-wrapped thing dart under his wing. With a cry, Gikombe fell under the wheels and was crushed. A wind from off the Chaga carried the smoke from the burning church over us as we went down the valley road. The communion at Gichichi was broken. I think time changes everything into its opposite. Youth into age, innocence into experience, certainty into uncertainty. Life into death. Long before the end, time was changing Nairobi into the Chaga. Ten million people were crowded into the shanties that ringed the towers of downtown. Every hour of every day, more came. They came from north and south, from Rift Valley and Central Province, from Ilbisii and Naivasha, from Makindu and Gichichi. Once Nairobi was a fine city. Now it was a refugee camp. Once it had great green parks. Now they were trampled dust between packing-case homes. The trees had all been hacked down for firewood. Villages grew up on road roundabouts, like castaways on coral islands, and in the football stadiums and sports grounds. Armed patrols daily cleared squatters from the two airport runways. The railway had been abandoned, cut south and north. Ten thousand people now lived in abandoned carriages and train sheds and between the tracks. The National Park was a dust bowl, ravaged for fuel and building material, its wildlife fled or slaughtered for food. Nairobi air was a smog of wood smoke, diesel and sewage. The slums spread for twenty kilometers on every side. It was an hour"s walk to fetch water, and that was stinking and filthy. Like the Chaga, the shanties grew, hour by hour, family by family. String up a few plastic sheets here, shove together some cardboard boxes there, set up home where a matatu dies, pile some stolen bricks and sacking and tin. City and Chaga reached out to each other, and came to resemble each other. I remember very little of those first days hi Nairobi. It was too much, too fast-it numbed my sense of reality. The men who took our names, the squatting people watching us as we walked up the rows of white tents looking for our number, were things done to us that we went along with without thinking. Most of the time I had that high-pitched sound in my ear when you want to cry but cannot. Here is an irony: we came from St. John"s, we went to St. John"s. It was a new camp, in the south close by the main airport. One eight three two. One number, one tent, one oil lamp, one plastic water bucket, one rice scoop. Every hundred tents there was a water pipe. Every hundred tents there was a s.h.i.t pit. A river of sewage ran past our door. The stench would have stopped us sleeping, had the cold not done that first. The tent was thin and cheap and gave no pro , tection from the night. We huddled together under blankets. No one wanted to be the first to cry, so no one did. Between the big aircraft and people crying and fighting, there was no quiet, ever. The first night, I heard shots. I had never heard them before but I knew exactly what they were. In this St. John"s we were no longer people of consequence. We were no longer anything. We were one eight three two. My father"s collar earned no respect. The first day he went to the pipe for water he was beaten by young men, who stole his plastic water pail. The collar was a symbol of G.o.d"s treachery. My father stopped wearing his collar; soon after, he stopped going out at all. He sat in the back room listening to the radio and looking at his books, which were still in their tied-up bundles. St. John"s destroyed the rest of the things that had bound his life together. I think that if we had not been rescued, he would have gone under. In a place like St. John"s, that means you die. When you went to the food truck you saw the ones on the way to death, sitting in front of their tents, holding their toes, rocking, looking at the soil. We had been fifteen days in the camp-I kept a tally on the tent wall with a burned-out match-when we heard the vehicle pull up and the voice call out, "Jonathan Bi. Does anyone know Pastor Jonathan Bi?" I do not think my father could have looked any more surprised if Jesus had called his name. Our savior was the Pastor Stephen Elezeke, who ran the Church Army Center on Jogoo Road. He and my father had been in theological college together; they had been great footballing friends. My father was G.o.dfather to Pastor Elezeke"s children; Pastor Elezeke, it seemed, was my G.o.dfather. He piled us all in the back of a white Nissan minibus with Praise Him on the Trumpet written on one side and Praise Him with the Psaltery and Harp, rather squashed up, on the other. He drove off hooting at the crowds of young men, who looked angrily at church men in a church van. He explained that he had found us through the net. The big churches were flagging certain clergy names. Bi was one of them. So we came to Jogoo Road. Church Army had once been an old, pre-Independence teaching center with a modern, two-level accommodation block. These had overflowed long ago; now every open s.p.a.ce was crowded with tents and wooden shanties. We had two rooms beside the metal working shop. They were comfortable but cramped, and when the metal workers started, noisy. There was no privacy. The heart of Church Army was a little white chapel, shaped like a drum, with a thatched roof. The tents and lean- tos crowded close to the chapel but left a respectful distance. It was sacred. Many went there to pray. Many went to cry away from others, where it would not infect them like dirty water. I often saw my father go into the chapel. I thought about listening at the door to hear if he was praying or crying, but I did not. Whatever he looked for there, it did not seem to make him a whole man again. My mother tried to make Jogoo Road Gichichi. Behind the accommodation block was a field of dry gra.s.s with an open drain running down the far side. Beyond the drain was a fence and a road, then the Jogoo Road market with its name painted on its rusting tin roof, then the shanties began again. But this field was untouched and open. My mother joined a group of women who wanted to turn the field into shambas. Pastor Elezeke agreed and they made mattocks in the workshops from bits of old car, broke up the soil and planted maize and cane. That summer we watched the crops grow as the shanties crowded in around the Jogoo Road market, and stifled it, and took it apart for roofs and walls. But they never touched the shambas. It was as if they were protected. The women hoed and sang to the radio and laughed and talked women-talk, and Little Egg and the Chole girls chased enormous sewer rats with sticks. One day I saw little cups of beer and dishes of maize and salt in a corner of the field and understood how it was protected. My mother pretended it was Gichichi but I could see it was not. In Gichichi, the men did not stand by the fence wire and stare so nakedly. In Gichichi the helicopter gunships did not wheel overhead like vultures. In Gichichi the brightly painted matatus that roared up and down did not have heavy machine-guns bolted to the roof and boys in sports fashion in the back looking at everything as if they owned it. They were a new thing in Nairobi, these gun-gangs; the Tacticals. Men, usually young, organized into gangs, with vehicles and guns, dressed in anything they could make a uniform. Some were as young as twelve. They gave themselves names like the Black Simbas and the Black Rhinos and the Ebonettes and the United Christian Front and the Black Taliban. They liked the word black. They thought it sounded threatening. These Tacticals had as many philosophies and beliefs as names, but they all owned territory, patrolled their streets and told their people they were the law. They enforced their law with kneecappings and burning car tires, they defended their streets with AK47s. We all knew that when the Chaga came, they would fight like hyenas over the corpse of Nairobi. The Soca Boys was our local army. They wore sports fashion and knee-length Manager"s coats and had football team logos painted in the sides of their picknis, as the armed matatus were called. On their banners they had a black-and-white patterned ball on a green field. Despite Of their name, it was not a football. It was a buckyball, a carbon fullerene molecule, the half-living, half-machine building-brick of the Chaga. Their leader, a rat-faced boy in a Manchester United Coat and shades that kept sliding down his nose, did not like Christians, so on Sundays he would send his picknis up and down Jogoo Road, roaring their engines and shooting into the air, because they could.
The Church Army had its own plans for the coming time of changes. A few nights later, as I went to the choo, I overheard Pastor Elezeke and my father talking in the Pastor"s study. I put my torch out and listened at the louvers.
"We need people like you, Jonathan," Elezeke was saying. "It is a work of G.o.d, I think. We have a chance to build a true Christian society."
"You cannot be certain."
"There are Tacticals ..."
"They are filth. They are vultures."
"Hear me out, Jonathan. Some of them go into the Chaga. They bring things out-for all their quarantine, there are things the Americans want very much from the Chaga. It is different from what we are told is in there. Very very different. Plants that are like machines, that generate electricity, clean water, fabric, shelter, medicines. Knowledge. There are devices, the size of this thumb, that transmit information directly into the brain. And more; there are people living in there, not like primitives, not, forgive me, like refugees. It shapes itself to them, they have learned to make it work for them. There are whole towns-towns, I tell you-down there under Kilimanjaro. A great society is rising."
"It shapes itself to them," my father said. "And it shapes them to itself."
There was a pause.
"Yes. That is true. Different ways of being human."
"I cannot help you with this, my brother."
"Will you tell me why?"
"I will," my father said, so softly I had to press close to the window to hear. "Because I am afraid, Stephen. The Chaga has taken everything from me, but that is still not enough for it. It will only be satisfied when it has taken me, and changed me, and made me alien to myself."
"Your faith, Jonathan. What about your faith?"
"It took that first of all."
"Ah," Pastor Elezeke sighed. Then, after a time, "You understand you are always welcome here?"
"Yes, I do. Thank you, but I cannot help you."
That same night I went to the white chapel-my first and last time-to force issues with G.o.d. It was a very beautiful building, with a curving inner wall that made you walk half way around the inside before you could enter. I suppose you could say it was spiritual, but the cross above the table angered me.
It was straight and true and did not care for anyone or anything. I sat glaring at it some time before I
found the courage to say, "You say you are the answer."
I am the answer, said the cross.
"My father is destroyed by fear. Fear of the Chaga, fear of the future, fear of death, fear of living. What is your answer?"
I am the answer.
"We are refugees, we live on wazungu"s charity, my mother hoes corn, my sister roasts it at the roadside; tell me your answer."
I am the answer.
"An alien life has taken everything we ever owned. Even now, it wants more, and nothing can stop it.
Tell me, what is your answer?"
I am the answer.
"You tell me you are the answer to every human need and question, but what does that mean? What is the answer to your answer?"
I am the answer, the silent, hanging cross said.
"That is no answer!" I screamed at the cross. "You do not even understand the questions, how can you be the answer? What power do you have? None. You can do nothing! They need me, not you. I am going to do what you can"t."
I did not run from the chapel. You do not run from G.o.ds you no longer believe in. I walked, and took no notice of the people who stared at me.
The next morning, I went into Nairobi to get a job. To save money I went on foot. There were men everywhere, walking with friends, sitting by the roadside selling sheet metal charcoal burners or battery lamps, or making things from sc.r.a.p metal and old tires, squatting together outside their huts with their hands draped over their knees. There must have been women, but they kept themselves hidden. I did not like the way the men worked me over with their eyes.
They had shanty-town eyes, that see only what they can use hi a thing. I must have appeared too poor to rob and too hungry to s.e.xually hara.s.s, but I did not feel safe until the downtown towers rose around me and the vehicles on the streets were diesel-stained green and yellow buses and quick white UN cars.
I went first to the back door of one of the big tourist hotels.
"I can peel and clean and serve people," I said to an un dercook in dirty wellies. "I work hard and I am honest. My father is a pastor."
"You and ten million others," the cook said. "Get out of here."
Then I went to the CNN building. It was a big, bold idea. I slipped in behind a motorbike courier and went up to a good-looking Luo on the desk.
"I"m looking for work," I said. "Any work. I can do anything. I can make chai, I can photocopy, I can do basic accounts. I speak good English and a little French. I"m a fast learner."
"No work here today," the Luo on the desk said. "Or any other day. Learn that, fast."
I went to the Asian shops along Moi Avenue.
"Work?" the shopkeepers said. "We can"t even sell enough to keep ourselves, let alone some upcountry refugee."
I went to the wholesalers on Kimathi Street and the City Market and the stall traders and I got the same answer from each of them: no economy, no market, no work. I tried the street hawkers, selling liquidated stock from tarpaulins on the pavement, but their bad mouths and lewdness sickened me. I walked the five kilometers along Uhuru Highway to the UN East Africa Headquarters on Chiromo Road. The
soldier on the gate would not even look at me. Cars and hummers he could see. His own people, he could not. After an hour I went away.
I took a wrong turn on the way back and ended up in a district I did not know, of dirty-looking two-story buildings that once held shops, now burned out or shuttered with heavy steel. Cables dipped across the street, loop upon loop upon loop sagging and heavy. I could hear voices but see no t one around. The voices came from an alley behind a row of shops. An entire district was crammed into this alley. Not even in St. John"s camp have I seen so many people in one place. The alley was solid with bodies, jammed together, moving like one thing, like a rain cloud. The noise was incredible. At the end of the alley I glimpsed a big black foreign car, very shiny, and a man standing on the roof. He was surrounded by reaching hands, as if they were worshipping him.
"What"s going on?" I shouted to whoever would hear. The crowd surged. I stood firm.
"Hiring," a shaved-headed boy as thin as famine shouted back. He saw I was puzzled. "Watekni. Day jobs in data processing. The UN treats us like s.h.i.t in our own country, but we"re good enough to do their tax returns."
"Good money?"