‘Solomon, man.’ Chiri laughed shaking his head. ‘Always sly.’
‘We didn’t hear from Solo for one year.’
‘Wah. I take back sly. Crazy, like a fox.’
‘So Baba went all the way to the UK to tafuta him. When Baba came back he said zero. Sufuri. That’s when he sent for me in Namenengiu. Being away from City he said had been good for me … then he said I had his permission to start real life …’
Chiri was trying to remember when exactly Solo had come back.
‘Baba said I could make a life with farming wheat … he gave me the John Deere tractor, and the old Massey Ferguson harvester. Alafu he leased fifty acres for me in Melilli to anza my life.’
‘But just like that Baba left us. One day there was a knock on the door and there he was. Solo. We had not seen him for seven years. You should have seen Mum. But there was no time for questions. We were busy with funeral things. Mazishi. Then we started taking stock, you know how it is – what we had and of course we turned to Solo.’
A white Zebu cow suddenly appeared out of the darkness, its long horns reaching out at them. It peered through the windscreen, chewing slowly, then eased back into nothingness.
‘Seven years. But we found out that he was bila degree. Nothing. Even now we don’t know what conversations he had with Baba in the UK. He came back with only a serious drinking qualification and too much English. For every year Solo was in the UK, we could have bought a Massey Ferguson. I know because Baba used to send me to the bank to buy bank drafts for Solo. Seven Massey Fergusons. Or three John Deere tractors.’
Juli continued. ‘I left Naimenengiu and when I tried to give the shop to the old man he laughed and asked what he was supposed to do with it. Then he said, do not go back. “Usirudi stay here with us.” But then he saw my eyes and he said: “sisi, ni watu wa mlango nyekundu, we are of the Red Door. If you ever need anything, please come back.” I know the people of the Red Door will always be there for me.’
Chiri could no longer hold his bladder; he opened the door quietly and started peeing on the side of the Datsun. Even before he finished, he heard Juli weeping quietly. Chiri let his friend grieve for his father, for his years in the wilderness. But the tears were more than that and Chiri sensed they were also for their lost Buru Buru childhood and all those who had wished failure on Juli – his St George’s teachers, the Buru Buru mothers who feared for their daughters.
Then Juli stopped and said, ‘You know, that old man did not know me from the animals in the magic forest. But he took me in, wanted me to marry into his family, he would have given me land. If anyone wanting to harm me came looking for me, the village would have protected me, say they didn’t know me. That is the way of mlango nyekundu, the Red Door…’
‘It cannot continue. Solo’s behaviour.’ Chiri heard a new hardness in Juli’s voice.
‘Baba would not allow it. Solo. He has let down the clan. He has let down the Sayiankas. He has let down our late father.’ Juli paused, his face thinking through the mist that was coming at them. They had run out of miraa and without the busy chewing movements his face seemed like the Juli of old. ‘…And now Solo has a mzungu wife. And maybe all I really had of any value was that small shop in Naimenengiu.’ Lightning streaked the sky above them.
Juli said, ‘Fuck Buru and Nairobi. I can’t go back there. If anything, I’d go back to Naimenengiu.’
Chiri tried to picture the small shop out there in the middle of nowhere.
‘I need some miraa,’ Juli said, and impossibly the first of daylight now emerged. And then it started pelting with hailstones.
Driving the whole day, they found the Harvester on the side of a hill deep in Mau Narok that evening. Like a strange windmill the machine tilted to the side, a small tower in the middle of all the nothingness. Moseti was nowhere to be found. He had fled after the machine got held in this rocky field in the dark. It was clear that Moseti had taken up an extra job in the night for his own benefit.
Almost half the wheat fields in the area had been destroyed by hailstones. They went to look for help and they found an old man of about seventy several fields down the road sitting at the edge of his farm holding wheat stems and bawling like a baby. Juli stopped the Datsun and they let the old man grieve and then asked him where they could hire a tractor to help pull away the Harvester. He sat up immediately and said he had a tractor.
‘These kalenjins,’ Juli said. ‘He’s liaing here and he can get a loan tomorrow. And get back on his feet.’
They also hired two drivers with the tractor and dislodged the Harvester. They started to tow it back to Nairage Ya Ngare. The rain lightened as they headed back north. At every trading centre, they saw people who seemed chastened by the hailstorm, re-emerging into their lives, walking like they were in a funeral procession. Chiri and the drivers took turns steering the Harvester. Up in the Harvester like a newly crowned king Chiri surveyed all the broken magnificence, steering through trading centres whose wheat crop had been destroyed in the storm. They passed field upon field, flattened, as if by giant hands. The Harvester had two small round mirrors mounted on long metallic rods and Chiri saw how dark he had turned, how lean his face had become and how rough and pitted his forehead had grown.
Theirs was not the only Harvester the storm had rendered idle. They met other blue, green and red iron giants headed north, made redundant by the Hand of God and the prolonged rains. The faces underneath Trading Centre stoops looked up wordlessly and went back to small, meaningless tasks. They finally left this funeral land and arrived in Narok on the end of the fourth day after they had set out. Juli stopped by the police post and paid some cops to track down Moseti.
The next day they visited Kinuthia, a mechanic who told them that the Harvester repairs would cost Ksh 200,000 and the spare parts could only be found in Nakuru. They left the machine with him. Before they set out to look for the money Chiri and Juli slept for two days from exhaustion. When they woke up, Gogo told them she did not know where Solo had gone. It was late September and they had ten weeks before the first harvest in mid-December. They needed to fix the Harvester quickly.
Juli went to Obergon to ask for a loan but it turned out that he was planning to get married and had no liquid cash. Juli who was only learning of these plans discovered from Gogo that his father had given Obergon half the bride price months ago. Since Petro Sayianka had died Juli had slowly found out the absurd amounts of money that his father had handed over to their innumerable relatives.
However, Obergon had a suggestion. Narok businessman Nkaiseri Ntimama was known to give loans. Obergon went to see Nkaiseri and came back with a report. The conditions for any kind of loan were vicious. The money Juli needed would be lent at 30 per cent interest and, in case of default, Nkaiseri would auction the Harvester and they would only be left with the tractor. After handing over the logbook, Juli and Chiri received a cheque for Ksh 1 million, paid Kinuthia for long overdue repairs, and then half the wages for the Suswa and Ngareta farms. When they went to Melilli, however, the foreman and the drivers and their boys demanded all their money to stop them burning the wheat. When they went to see Kinuthia to get a list of the parts they needed he suggested that they could get the parts even cheaper in Eastleigh. Kinuthia also now told them that he could not fix the harvester in Narok because the garage was too small. He told them he had a place in Kutus sixty kilometres away and they got the machine towed there. It was near the end of October. Before the trip Juli and Chiri headed to Narok and partied like it was already Christmas. When they went back to Gogo’s they found Solo had returned.
IV
They sat in the cabin of the Datsun 1200 parked in Kinuthia’s small town open-air garage in Kutus. They sipped warm Cokes laced with cheap gin, squirming and groaning in the oven-like cabin waiting for Kinuthia to diagnose all that the Harvester needed. The sun reflected off the metallic innards of the other ailing Massey Ferguson