Walking Home (4 page)

“Muchoki?” my sister called.

“Yes?”

“You were staring again.”

“I was
thinking
again. You should try it. Now go to school. I will be back to get you at the end of the day. Do not leave without me, understand?”

“I can find my way back to our tent. I am not a baby.”

“I know, but you are my little sister and you need to listen to me. You need to respect what your older brother tells you. Understand?”

“I understand.”

“Now go.”

She skipped off toward the school tent and was greeted by one of the teachers, then instantly swallowed up into a group of girls. They were all smiling and laughing and talking. I wished
I
were young enough not to worry. I wished
I
could go to school. Not here, of course, but
my
school. Last year I was third out of forty-seven students. This year I would have been studying for my high school admissions. I knew I could get the marks to qualify to get into a good school—at least a provincial school, although my parents hoped for national. That would have been much more money, of course, and I might have had to go farther away, but still, to go to a national school was a dream.

I missed my teachers, my lessons, sitting at my desk, running in the field chasing a football, playing with my friends. My friends—people I had known for years whose fathers and uncles and brothers had come after us in angry mobs, carrying machetes and clubs and torches … I turned and walked toward the gate. I didn’t want to think about any of this. I just needed to get more fuel for the fire.

The entire camp was now up and moving. Almost all the tents had at least one flap up, letting in the sun and allowing the breeze to blow away the stale air. In front of each tent was a small fire pit for cooking. Each one was made of a few rocks to contain the fire and ashes. Many women used small whisk brooms made of leaves to sweep the front of the family tent. The sweeping couldn’t clear away the dirt, but it left smooth patterns in the hard red clay. Fires were being tended, food cooked, and clothes were slung across the tops of the tents—some to dry after being washed, and others just to catch the breeze. Life went on.

Two soldiers, rifles slung across their shoulders, came strolling toward me. I moved to the side to let them pass and looked down at the ground. There were soldiers who patrolled the camp—usually in groups of two or three—and those who stood on guard at the perimeter fence and the gate. The fence itself was nothing more than strands of wire nailed onto rough poles. It was not much higher than a tall man and was topped by razor wire. It would perhaps have been possible in places to pull it up at the bottom and crawl under, but it would have been very difficult, and painful, to try to go over the top. I guess I should have been grateful for the fence and the guards, but strangely it somehow made me feel trapped, almost penned in like livestock. They were there to safeguard us. Still, they made me
feel uneasy and I wondered if the man from the water tank was correct—would they fight to protect us, or flee if there was an attack? Where were the soldiers when we were being attacked? Had they had just turned and run away or hidden in their barracks the way the police hid in their stations? When we needed them the police were nowhere to be seen. Would these soldiers be any different? I wondered how many of the soldiers were Kikuyu, how many of them were
our
people.

I wished I had taken our little cooking knife with me. It wasn’t much, but it was more than I now had.

I slowed down as I came up to the gate. During the night it was closed and nobody was supposed to go in or out, but now it was wide open and the guards didn’t even seem to notice the people flocking through. I was happy not to be noticed.

There was a trickle of people leaving the camp. A few were men but most were women, and some were my age or a little younger or older. I knew I wasn’t the only one going out for wood, although I also knew there were many reasons for people to leave. Some were heading out to the highway to catch a
matatu
—the buses that carried everybody and everything—and take it to the city. Those people might have relatives in Nairobi or were going to find work. I’d never been there, but I’d heard stories of big buildings, road crammed with cars and people on all the streets. The city was supposed to go
on forever—houses, apartments, people, cars, carts and
matatus.
Sometimes my father had had to go there for business. He said he was always grateful to come home because Eldoret was paradise compared to Nairobi.

For me, Eldoret was all I’d ever known. It was where I was born and raised, and where my father said I would eventually marry, have children of my own, take over the homestead and store, and someday die. All that talk about marriage and taking over the homestead just seemed like so much talk, it made me laugh. Little did I know how soon the store and homestead would be gone, and how close to death I almost came to be. Eldoret had changed from paradise to hell.

Those in the camp who had been to Nairobi and were fortunate to find a job or a benefactor would come back with new cooking pots, thick blankets, warm clothing, a new mattress, or even a chicken or goat to be slaughtered. How long had it been since I’d tasted goat meat? We’d always had goats at our homestead, enough to milk and butcher for meat for holidays.

If I were a little bit older or my mother a little bit stronger, one of us would have gone looking for day labor outside the camp. Now, all she could do was rest and all I could do was search for wood and fetch water.

I felt a sense of relief as I stepped through the gate. I took a deep breath, hoping that the air would feel different. It didn’t. I looked back through the wire to all
the tents and all the activity. The crowds, the smell, the dust when it was dry and the mud when it was wet—it all drew me back. Part of me wanted to turn around and go back inside the wire. When I was inside I wanted out, and when I was out I wanted to be back inside.

What I really wanted was to be home.

Just outside the gate, sitting under the shade of a bush, were two girls and a boy. All three of them were about my age—maybe a year older or younger. They seemed to be waiting for something. It wasn’t wise to go out alone, so if they were going out for wood, they might be waiting for more people to join them. Maybe four would be enough. I walked over.

“Hello, I am Muchoki,” I said, speaking directly to the boy, because it would not be proper to address the girls.

The boy got to his feet. He was no bigger than me. “I am Jomo. These are my sisters, Kioni and Makena.” All three were dressed in clean clothing with no holes, although only the boy wore shoes. “We are from Webuye. And you?”

“Eldoret.”

They all took on the same look of concern that people did whenever my town was mentioned.

“It was bad there,” Jomo said.

“It was bad everywhere, but I’ve been told it was among the worst there.” I paused and offered a nervous
smile. Somehow it felt shameful to be from an area that had had so much violence. “I am going to find fuel for the fire and was looking for company,” I said.

“As are we,” Jomo said.

“Do you think the four of us would be enough?” I asked.

“The two of us would be enough,” Jomo said. “We could send the two of them back to the camp to cook, but they both have strong backs.”

“We could work together and split what we find in quarters, each getting our share,” I suggested.

“You are fair. Do you have a knife or an axe?” Jomo asked.

I shook my head.

He pulled up his tattered sweater to reveal a machete hanging in a sheath around his neck. “We will use this, to cut the wood and to have—just in case it is needed to cut something else. Let us set off.”

Jomo started off toward the highway and I fell in beside him. The two girls got up and trailed behind us. There were people—in ones and twos—extending over the hill ahead of us, marking the way. In the beginning we’d have had to only go a few hundred meters, but now, less than a month since we’d moved here, the walk could be close to an hour to find the deadfall.

“How long have you been in the camp?” Jomo asked.

“A little more than a month. We were one of the first, and the camp has grown around us. You?”

“Two weeks. Maybe we will be here only another two or three weeks.”

“You’re going back to Webuye?” I questioned.

He shook his head. “No, to Isiolo.”

“I don’t know where that is.”

“It is past Mount Kenya. My family, we are Meru and we have relatives. It is very far.”

“But how will you get there?” I asked. “Will you walk?”

“I
could
walk,” Jomo said.

Behind him, his sisters started giggling.

“What are you chickens cackling about?” he asked.

“It is hundreds and hundreds of kilometers away! You could never walk that far,” Kioni said.

“I could walk across all of Kenya if I needed to. Walking is simple: Every journey begins with one step. Step after step until you reach your goal. Maybe it would be harder for a couple of chickens.”

“Our father has gone ahead,” Kioni explained. “He is arranging for a place to stay and a vehicle to come and get us.”

“And until he returns I am the man of the family.”

“If we are chickens, then you are nothing more than a rooster,” Makena said, and the two girls burst into laughter.

“And not even a
big
rooster,” Kioni said.

“A rooster that sleeps in each morning and must be woken up,” Makena added. “Not
much
of a rooster.”

“Little sisters,” Jomo said, shaking his head. “Do you have sisters?”

“Just one. She is much younger.”

“You are so lucky to have only one. Would you like a second or third? As the man of the house, I could give them to you.”

“Thank you for your generous offer, but I am happy with just the one,” I said, laughing.

“I understand not two, but one certainly—” He stopped mid-sentence and dropped his voice. “Do you see them?”

He pointed and I looked. There in the scrub, not too far away, were three small gazelles.

“They are so close,” Jomo whispered. “I just wish we had a gun.”

“Or even a spear,” I said.

“We have a spear,” Makena said. “A
flaming
spear.”

What was she talking about?

“She is making a bad joke,” Jomo explained. “My name means ‘flaming spear.’ ”

“If we all picked up our brother, we could throw him at the gazelle,” Kioni suggested.

“Are you
sure
you do not want another sister or two?” he asked me.

“I would rather have a gazelle,” I said. “It would taste good.”

“Have you eaten gazelle before?”

“Never, but I imagine it would be good. Before coming here, I had never even
seen
a gazelle. There are only goats and cows and sheep around Eldoret.”

“The same for Webuye. There are lots of animals around here, though—even elephants and giraffes and lions.”

“You have seen them?” I exclaimed.

He shook his head. “I have heard about them. I have only seen gazelles and some zebras. I wonder what zebra meat would taste like?”

“If we see one, we can throw you at it instead of the gazelle,” Makena said. “It is a bigger target.”

Jomo turned to me. “If I give you a dowry, will you at least marry one of them so she will live somewhere else?”

One of the gazelles—the one with the biggest horns—turned and looked at us then. He ran off, and the others followed close behind. We started walking again.

“When will your family leave the camp?” Jomo asked.

“I do not know.”

“Surely you have family somewhere and can go there.”

“My mother’s people are Kamba. They live in a place called Kikima. Have you heard of it?”

“No.”

I shrugged. “Nobody has. I only know it is in Kambaland, up past Machakos.”

“I have not heard of those places either,” he said. “But all roads in Kenya lead to Nairobi. From there, you can go anywhere else. Have you ever been to Nairobi?”

“Never. You?”

“No. My mother said it is a big, black hole.”

“No, it is a city, a very big city. It is not a hole.”

“I think she meant it was
like
a hole.” He laughed. “She said that once people go there, they never leave. They fall in and the hole is so deep that they cannot climb out again.”

I could easily picture that—a hole so deep that you could never get out, so dark that you could hardly see the sky above. Sometimes it felt like we’d already fallen into one.

We followed the beaten path up a little rise. Up ahead, the people disappeared as they dropped over the dip. I looked back over my shoulder. A curve cut off from view anybody else following behind. We were alone. It seemed so strange after spending all this time at a camp so crammed with people. You were never more than a few steps from other people, and even
when you closed your eyes you could still hear them, coughing or talking, laughing or sobbing, even breathing. There was even a smell of people.

I slowed down slightly, hoping to hold on to the moment before we made the rise and saw the people ahead again. I even thought about stopping and letting Jomo and his sisters go ahead without me so I could be completely alone. Some part of me wanted to be alone, but another part craved the company of others. I was already living a life that was so much closer to being alone than anything I could have imagined. I realized I was relieved when we reached the crest of the hill and could see the other people once more.