The rain was just beginning when I reached the apartment block. Big, fat raindrops that hit you with a certain kind of impatient ferocity, as if they too had felt delayed up in the skies by the rain gods who resided high up in the mountain of Kirinyaga and who, some farmers whispered among themselves, sometimes slept on the job.
It was almost mid-April and the annual planting season in the villages and government settlement schemes far beyond the city limits was long overdue. A couple of house-helps scurried around like headless fowl, trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to salvage a few dry clothes from the drying lines outside. The rain was now falling in driving sheets, urged on by howling gusts of wind that left electricity lines dancing dangerously in their wake.
I climbed the four sets of stairs to apartment B3 slowly, taking in the aroma of the rapidly soaking soil, clutching my work folder in my right hand and a bunch of lilies in the other. A group of kids rushed past on their way down, probably to retrieve some ball, and knocked my folder to the wet corridor floor. I picked it up and proceeded on my way. I had long learnt to live and let live as far as the kids in the block were concerned. Most of their transgressions were harmless anyway, except maybe for that one time when a ball ripped a visitor’s parked car’s side mirror and all types of games in the yard had been banned for about six months until everybody forgot about the incidence and the sports resumed in earnest.
It was barely quarter past six but darkness was already almost blanketing the rain-swept landscape. A tongue of lightning licked the western sky illuminating drenched rooftops and flooded driveways. A clap of thunder followed almost immediately. The security lights flickered for a long second, hesitated, as if unsure of their next move, then went off. I unlocked the door to B3 and went in. The lights came back on.
Her shoes lay carelessly beside the door mat, one leaning on its side, the other facing the door. They looked like they had literally been kicked off. Her handbag sat on the living room table, abandoned and lonely. A bottle of unopened liqueur, one of those chocolate-y ones, stood smugly beside the bag, an unused whisky glass not far from it. It looked as if someone had planned on having a drink and then abandoned the mission at the last minute.
I removed my shoes and arranged both sets of shoes on the rack, disposed my jacket and folder on a seat, and after assuring myself of the freshness of my breath, paced the few steps to the bedroom.
She lay on the bed, in a cream night dress, halfway covered, staring at the unremarkable ceiling. I could tell she had been crying because her eyes were puffy, and bits of tissue littered the floor. I climbed in beside her, gave her a slight kiss on the lips and handed her the lilies. She mumbled a subdued ‘thank you’, placed them on her bed side stand and buried her face on my chest. I felt the wetness of her tears on my shirt even before her silent sobs escaped from her mouth.
Outside, the rain pounded, the soothing sound of rain drops hitting the window only occasionally interrupted by the far away rumble of thunder, the echo of the dance of the gods.
I remember the day so clearly, it could have been yesterday. But it happened four years ago, today. I remember being called from work on that April morning barely thirty minutes after I had checked in. I had rushed to the hospital without even remembering to call her but when I got there, she was already outside the nursery, crying. They had called her first, and she had already been informed. She was crying violently, her whole body engulfed in spasms. I didn’t want to believe. I barged into the nursery, to the little cot Veronica had called home since she had been born three weeks earlier. It was empty and cold. I stared at a young nurse, hoping for a different, better, explanation. She just shook her head slowly and turned away. Perhaps the sight of a grown man sobbing overwhelmed her. Perhaps this scene was repeated all too often, it was just another day at work for her.
We had been trying to conceive for almost five years. We had undergone thousands of tests. She had been on hundreds of supplements. They called it biochemical incompatibility. We prayed. Sex became a carefully planned and executed ritual. When she conceived, it was as if we had been re-born. At fourteen weeks, she left work to take care of the pregnancy, uneventful though it was. We were therefore shocked when she went into labour barely at twenty six weeks, but they assured us the baby would live. She was so tiny, it was impossible to tell her feet from her hands. But as the days went on, she grew beautifully and we began to make arrangements for her homecoming.
Then, suddenly, on that April day, the sun went out of our lives. Pneumonia, they said. We listened, but none of us heard a thing.
We have long stopped questioning the gods. ‘Why us?’ We would lament in those early days. But we soon realised that if it were not us, then it had to be somebody else, and we couldn’t wish that horrible experience on our worst enemies.
We have largely made our peace with fate and only the annual anniversary rouses the ghosts of the past. We have stopped trying. Not that we aren’t making love. Only that we don’t have to follow a schedule nowadays. We are looking at a few adoption agencies. She wants a girl. I think she will make a fine mother.
The rain is petering out. An owl mourns somewhere in the darkness. The dance of the gods escalate.
(Louis Kibathi, www.kibathi.co.ke)
