19

He woke up to find himself in bed on a soft mattress and pillow, under clean white sheets and a blanket. Daylight streamed through a window. He could not believe his eyes. He got out of bed, pain shooting through his knees, and hobbled toward the window and tried to open it. His fingers smarted and he could not get a firm grip, but eventually the window swung open inward. Looking through the wire mesh, he saw the walls of other buildings across the yard. He surveyed his new room. At one corner was a sink and next to it a shower and toilet. He felt a need to relieve himself and soon after, he felt his body lighten. No, he cannot have been dead. Next he stripped, piling his clothes on the floor, and showered with avid resolution. He was about to put on what he had been wearing when he saw in another corner a table with two chairs. On one of the chairs there was a suit, to his amazement. He tried it on. It belonged to him but, emaciated as he was from being tortured, it was now a size or so too large. What was going on? His eyes drifted to the door. Maybe it was open. Maybe he would be released secretly. Was the Ruler back? Had fear of what his friend Machokali would do to his torturers sent them packing?

As he reached the door, it opened as if by itself. Tajirika did not know whether to shout for joy or to scream in anger when Njoya entered and carefully closed it behind him.

“So you found your clothes?” Njoya said, as if responding to the perplexity on Tajirika’s face. “Your wife, Vinjinia, sent them. Did you ask her to send them?”

“No,” Tajirika said curtly.

“Ah, well, women and clothes! I am so sorry, Mr. Tajirika. I know I should have come back earlier—a man must keep his word, you know—but every time I asked about you they told me that you were fast asleep.”

“What do you mean?” Tajirika asked in English. “No one told you what they have done to me? Even the donkeys of Santamaria market are treated with less cruelty.” “Is that so, now? Take it easy. Let’s sit down and you tell me all about it. But have you had a bite this morning? Some breakfast?” Two men entered bearing eggs, bread and sausages, and a steaming teapot, placed everything on the table, and left the room. Tajirika was overcome by hunger, and Njoya noticed how Tajirika’s hostility was abated by the food.

“My nails hurt. My knees are aflame from the beatings,” Tajirika complained, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his right hand. “And you claim not to know anything about it?”

“You don’t always know what your subordinates are up to, even in your absence, do you? You yourself told me that you didn’t know that Nyawlra …”

“Is Kahiga your subordinate?” Tajirika asked quickly to deflect the talk from Nyawlra.

“Superintendent Kahiga? Oh, dear, he is the one they sent to you? May I let you in on a secret? That officer? He is crazy. He has killed many in the course of his interrogations. And you know what? The matter ends there. Tajirika, I want to help you and get him off your back. But if I am to help you, you must level with me. I must also level with you. Let’s say, we must level with each other. Let me start. Look at the far corner. What do you see?”

“Nothing unusual,” Tajirika said.

“Look very carefully.”

“Ah, yes.”

“It’s the eye of a camera, a video camera. Everything that takes place between us will be captured on film. I don’t want you to leave here claiming that I too have tortured you. If there is anything you want to say off the record, let me know right away and we can go elsewhere to talk. Mr. Tajirika, should we leave the room?”

“That won’t be necessary. I have nothing to hide,” Tajirika said promptly, for he did not want to imply by word or gesture that he had any secrets left.

“As I said, let’s first ignore Kahiga’s deeds or misdeeds. They shall be investigated; I will make sure of that. I want us to revisit our first interview. Did I torture you?”

“Oh, no, no, you and I shall become friends.”

“You promise?”

“Yes!”

“I just want you to clear something up for me, just one thing. It is a puzzle, and it concerns your illness. I want to paint a scenario with words, and I really want you to weigh the matter carefully, the better to appreciate the problem we have in believing your story. You are now the judge. Here are the facts of the case. Early one morning the radio announces that a Mr. Tajirika has been appointed chairman of Marching to Heaven. This is a rare honor. The same evening, Mr. Tajirika falls ill. The following morning queues start forming outside his office. After a while, call it a week or two, Tajirika is hale and hearty, the picture of perfect health. But instead of Tajirika resuming his business, he is told to resume his illness, and he does so. You will agree with me that a reasonable person would not be wrong were he to conclude that this illness was like a hat that can be put on and off at will. Now comes a time when all the queues that had formed outside Tajirika’s office head toward the site of Marching to Heaven. And lo and behold, the same Tajirika is once again hale and hearty and he readily joins the flow of humanity to the ceremonies. After the ceremonies, he resumes work. An unbiased observer cannot be blamed if he were to wonder: Why did Tajirika become well only after the queues had accomplished their intended goal? And the goal? Not a soul in all Aburlria is unaware of the shameful deeds of those women. And note an even more curious fact. Nyawlra, who had put up a billboard precisely where the queues began, turns out to be one of those performing the acts of shame. And she is Tajirika’s trusted secretary. As for your bizarre illness,” Njoya said, as if addressing not a judge but a culprit, “let’s say I believe that you had a heart attack or what you described as heart trouble. Mr. Tajirika, explain this to me: instead of getting yourself admitted to a private or state hospital, you chose to head straight to the shrine of a witch doctor? Even assuming that you have no faith in modern Aburlrian medicine, you had the option, which by the way you didn’t even consider, of flying to London. If the famed Harley Street surgeons can give your friend

Machokali a completely new set of eyes, enlarged and probably fitted with night vision, why were they not good enough for you? These are the facts of the case. You are the judge. What is your judgment?”

“My friend,” Tajirika said, assuming, without realizing it, the tone of a jurist. “I quite see the logic of your suspicions, but I can speak only the truth, even if it clashes with logic. For just as you told me, only truth, the whole truth, and nothing else but the truth will remove all doubts from your mind and set me free. Some things are hard to talk about because, as I told you the last time we went over this, these things, even diseases, are embarrassing to the one who is talking about them. When gonorrhea and syphilis were deadly menaces, people suffering from them were often described as having fallen victim to a severe strand of flu. It is the same today with the virus of death. Every victim of the virus is said to have died of a kidney problem. My illness was not quite of the heart … I mean, it was really an illness without a name.”

“Please, Mr. Tajirika, stop joking. In our first interview you freely told me of your heart condition.”

“My illness is without a proper noun.”

“An illness without a proper noun?”

“Diseases do not knock at the door and say, I’m so-and-so, please let me in; they force their way, more like a coup d’etat. Look, soldiers are coming for you, and …”

Njoya did not wait to hear the rest but bolted and started banging the door furiously. Two wardens came in with guns raised. For a moment Njoya thought that these two were part of the coup and tried to tell them that he was on their side, but no words would come out. The wardens clamped handcuffs on Tajirika, dragged him back to the chair, and trained their rifles on him. Njoya realized his mistake and signaled the wardens to leave, muttering a lame excuse: Just testing your readiness and you have passed with flying colors.

“What’s wrong with you?” Njoya asked as he turned toward the handcuffed Tajirika. “This is serious business.”

“But what’s the matter?” a perplexed Tajirika asked.

“I asked you a simple question and you answer me with coup d’etat’ and soldier nonsense …”

“You presented me with a scenario,” Tajirika explained, “so I responded by drawing you a picture to show how such an attack can so overwhelm a person that he loses speech and gets stuck with a tiny word like …”

“So you were not thinking of a real coup d’etat?”

“Me, think of a coup d’etat?” Tajirika said, and felt like laughing at the absurdity.

“Stop drawing pictures and tell me about the illness.”

Tajirika haltingly began to recount his sorry state preceding his visit to the wizard, still mindful of what he chose to reveal. So he explained how seekers of future contracts had come to his office soon after his elevation to lead Marching to Heaven and how each person would leave a little something in an envelope, a few coins, perhaps, to suggest that the project promised future riches. He thought no more of the coins until he went home and he too started thinking about the wealth untold to be generated by Marching to Heaven. “The coins left in the envelope were nothing much, only tokens of appreciation, but they obviously triggered something in my mind that made me start imagining ever-increasing wealth. The worst was yet to come. For I soon imagined people being envious of me, crowds of the envious coming at me from every direction. I ran and locked myself in the bathroom. And still they came, wanting to tear the skin off my face. Imagine a man without a face. Haunted as I was by my wish to be unimaginably rich, I lost my ability to express myself through words. My body truly staged a coup against me. Imagine thought without words, what a curse! In the end, all the thoughts, all my feelings and emotions, were bodied forth by the word if.”

Tajirika stopped abruptly and looked about him as if he did not quite know where he was; then he snapped back to awareness of the cell and Njoya, his inquisitor.

“And what steps did your witch doctor take to stop you from barking the word?”

“He showed me that the ifness had resulted from my longing to be white. Officer, I wished to become a white man. It was a severe case of white-ache.”

Njoya burst out laughing, holding his belly while pointing at Tajirika.

“You? You? A white man? A white European? With those lips, that kinky hair, and that skin? And that pouch? So, how did he bring about a cure?”

“He showed me that I would end up a poor white and somehow this did it. I believe that my white-ache is now in total remission,” Tajirika hastened to add, a little offended by Njoya’s derisive laughter.

“Well, it’s a good thing that you’ve been cured,” Njoya said. He coughed a bit, then cleared his throat. He was now serious, businesslike again. “Mr. Tajirika, you have really helped to clarify some things: I will do my best on your behalf on your assurance that you have told me everything. Now I must take leave of you.”

And saying so, he stood up and started for the door.

“Am I now free to go?” Tajirika shouted the question after him.

“Not just yet,” Njoya said, stopping near the door. “I will show the footage of our conversation to my superiors, and I hope they will see what I myself saw: that you did open a little window into your soul …”

Tajirika was a little down, but impressed by his cleverness in dealing with the issue of the money. He had given an inch for a yard. Were the Wizard of the Crow to mention the money, Njoya and company would think that he was referring only to a few inconsequential coins. And of course he had conceded nothing to the allegations of a Machokali plot and would never do so. But soon he was weighed down by grief and self-pity. Why had the interrogation been recorded? He felt his knees weaken; he held on to the bed to avoid falling. Would he survive this ordeal? he wondered anew.