Nothing To Call Our Own

At thirty seven we didn't have much.

Not even a baby was under our name.

Nyayo!

Njeri holds him. He sobs and cries out in pain like his limbs are being torn off his body, one by one. She holds him as he weeps in regret, as he shouts.  If there was sackcloth and ash nearby, she thinks, he would have worn it. He always was dramatic.

Nyayo! he had always said with a sort of manic passion; his fist hitting the table with force. Then he'd laugh uncontrollably. She had never understood why he had such a passion for that word. Maybe it reminded him of his father. Maybe he had gotten tired of hearing the children at school say it so many times, like it was their second name. But there had always been a strange fire in his eyes when he said nyayo. And Njeri had thought, hoped, that he'd join the Mwakenya group that she had heard Karanja had joined. They were her salvation, her only way to freedom.

She strokes his head, comforts him, and soothes him. She tries to tell him that it wasn't his fault, that all will be well. She tries to bring herself to say that they could escape to Tanzania, like all other exiles. But she can't. She holds him with her head turned away, holding back the bitterness and disgust that is ripping up a storm within her, that rocks them back and forth. All she wants is to turn off the broken record that is his voice, repeating the one word she couldn't stand him say: sorry.

Njeri looks at the man crying on her lap, streams of tears and mucus fall from his face to her once clean white dress. She wants to spit on his face. She wants to move him away and tell him to quit dirtying her dress, just as he has dirtied the nation. She wants to call him what he truly is: a monster. The grinch of independent Kenya! He was no longer her husband or the father of her children. He stopped being human the moment he confessed to being a torturer. He stopped being human when he became a murderer.

She never understood why he came home so late. Surely a headteacher at a primary school did not have so much work On many nights he would arrive and dash to the bathroom. Njeri would hear him retching his bowels out. He used to say that he was making room for Njeri's good cooking. At times she'd laugh, delighted that he loved her cooking. Other times she'd consider spiking his food with deworming medicine. Right now, as he sobbed uncontrollably, she thought that maybe it wasn't the cries of mourners that were the sound of death; maybe it was retching.

She had promised never to leave him. He had promised to follow in the footsteps of God and his father. Those had been their vows. Like Moses breaking the stone tablet, Njeri realised that they were breaking their vows, him holding one side of the stone and she the other. All because he has chosen to follow a different kind of nyayo.