Still Sings the Nightbird

Bed

45 B Bed nderneath the granary, was Naana’s ‘bed space.’ She was sometimes called Showshow [CNJcNJ] meaning grandmother. Her bed was just the opposite of Heidi’s as described by Johanna Spyri. Heidi’s loft bed was high Showshow’s was below. A rough wooden ladder, made of wattle poles, led down directly to her lair. In place of warm, strong sacking on yellow hay, poor Showshow only had old rags for beddings. But she was happy to live with the family of Wakabi. It is taboo but taboo responds to need at times. She was sickly. Alone she would die of isolation. Three long and high slab stones made the fire place. In an imaginary circle, each stone was placed in a way that divided the circle into three. They were close in the middle ends and apart on the circumference where wood was pushed in. This was the cooking place that was between the goat shed and the granary. Smoke escaped through the opening between the iron sheets and the walls. Above the cooking place rafters that run across leaning on the granary on one side and the goat shed on the other hold wet firewood. The wood silently dries there with the heat that rises from the fire below. Green wood was broken by hand and brought home on women’s backs. Sometimes it was from old coffee bushes. Scratches from coffee branches became festering wounds. Hewing and sawing of wood came later. When saws came they were for men. Women hewed with axes but sawing was a man’s job. The women still broke wood from branches in the forests with their hands and small cutters. The fire was also lit by the hands of women and fanned by the lungs of women. Kabi asked many questions about this in class. When she sat down to suckle her son, her questions flowed down with the milk of her breast. The teachers often said that there was great progress in U 46 the homes. At home, Naana told her not to be impatient for only with patience could she be a good mother. “Kirƭrƭria!” Naana would say. But in the breath of the sounds of the word that meant ‘Silently bear it all, suffer it’, Kabi hurt. The word also meant to her, not to complain, to be silent. Patience was pressed inside this word. In this part of the country, almost all traditional round huts had disappeared. A church stood stark on a hill above everything else. Most of the houses in the village were the same. Corrugated iron sheet roofs below were scattered everywhere. Sometimes especially after the rain and sometimes even without it, dewdrops would line up on the edge of the iron sheets like soldiers trying to scale jagged cliffs. The dewdrops hang on and stretched like battalions hiding from death in battle. They fell on mud. Kissing the mud, they disappeared. The ground sucked them before they dried. The big house of Wa Ngai as it was called stood three meters directly opposite the kitchen. Inside, its narrow crooked corridor carried on to end up with the lopsided wooden back door. The corridor led straight to the sitting room where Atia used to sleep before. Wakabi and Wa Ngai were lucky to have a bedroom. The other room was used by the girls and Jugus. The front door right opposite the back door was never used. The back door became the main door. The front door stood precariously, threatening to give way if it was opened often. No visitors came in from there. In the light of day the hot sun seemed to be knocking on its fraying wood. During the night rays of the moon seemed to implore it, soothing it as if with a promise. After eating maize and drinking light tea without milk, turungi, a name derived from strong tea, meaning tea without milk all went to sleep. From the days of plentiful milk from many cows, people had learned how to survive on tea without milk. Their lives were the opposite. It was long time ago when they had milk and honey. Long time when they needed no promise of a better land was time gone. In other parts of the country it was the same. There was even more. 47 Traditional cheese and yoghurt took days to cure, but it was...