The Knife Grinder's Tale

by

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

Feral youth with gold-eyes glowing, emitting an odour of musty sweat-musk-blood had swarmed around Ogwang lifted and stripped him off his shoes and shirt and when they had found and taken his mobile phone, Ogwang had cried out. One of the boys had ridden off on his bicycle, tring-tringing its bell. An over-bulked juvenile high-kicked Ogwang in the chest and he bowed wheezing. In a primeval chorus borrowed from hell’s putrid core, the rest had howled, "Mwiiiiiiziiiiii!" Thief.

It had taken just twelve seconds for Ogwang to begin to die. It started when a big-faced, pock-marked man with girl's dimples materialised like a malignant genie. His eyes were hollow lights in a dark pond and on mobile lips a smile bounced. Like a Goliath heron, waiting for an edible frog to plop out of a swamp, he observed Ogwang. Ogwang gasped when the answer to a question haunting him stared down from within the gleam in the man's stare. An unsacred cacophony of wild-words-tumbling from the mob’s mouth muddled Ogwang and death, invoked, insinuated itself and settled among them.

Ogwang groaned.

He raised his arm to speak. A Thought also crept out of his mind and escaped the growling-jeering-leering-fury-frothing of massed humans, one of whom threw the first stone. Stone on bone through skin-blood-blessed and the rip in Ogwang's heart widened because it was all so unfair.

"Yawa, to unego wuod Olang nang'o?" Why would you kill the son of Olang?

A sadness like a sigh settled in his soul and crumbled him to the ground. The discovery of loneliness curled Ogwang into himself. He was bewildered that in abandonment there was shame. He wondered why.

The second-third-fourth stone cracked his arm, shattered his skull, hurt his heart again but not in the way the man did when he kicked him; groin-ribs-head-groin-chest so that the City Mortuary's nervy pathologist would conclude three days later, writing with the no-brand ball point pen whose ends he chewed on: "Fifth rib cracked, heart perforation. Massive heart trauma (heart broken).”

Ogwang’s lonely-shame was tinged with awe that after everything, this was how life could end. After every thing, it could simply stop one night in Kawangware beneath a half moon Nairobi night sky.

"Mwizi...ua mwizi." Kill the thief.

Ogwang rebelled and he summoned a music-companion of many years.

"Nyabul oyieng mathoche tindo!"

The absurd beer song made him chortle and the blood bubbled out of his lungs, out of his mouth, in a laugh, into the dark, dark night. The earth that had collected others before Ogwang, much in the same way-same-circumstance-same mob shifted beneath him.

Ogwang's chuckle pierced darkness. On the ground, a new crack appeared. The escaped Thought lingered in the air prickling the skin of the mob-now-slinking-away. The Thought pierced the eye of the big faced man with girl's dimples.

The Thought said: "....sight is will of heart…" The Thought would have suggested more if it had not been distracted by life-living.

A black cat rushed by, its tail lashing.

The sewerage riverine mingled with air and birthed an organic-stench thing.

The human-satisfaction-release blood-spilled gave, lurked denied and finally slipped behind eyelids.

The Thought drank in Kawangware’s tainted breeze. On a bass line of muted voices and sobs suppressed, a high soprano note held the pieces of the night together. It was not a wail. It was a song. And the Thought flowed away to seek the custodian of that high voice.

An hour later, a buxom woman with a pink ribbon tied around her ankle wrapped a kanga around her body, wore her pretty-white-shoes-with-buckle.

She run-walk, run-walk, bawling, “Mayo! Mayo! Mayo!”

She whimpered because Hope had walked into her fish shop. Now, a tipsy pastor suggested Hope had been crushed to the earth again.

A few days before, in Nyabondo village, the voices-tears-songs-poems and fire of the wake-at-home had serrated Ogwang’s nerves. In the second night of appeasing-souls-now-gone, Ogwang packed a medium brown bag, slung it over his shoulder and walked from Nyabondo to Kondele, abandoning the mourners. He savoured his son’s name:

“DJ.”

DJ Otieno. D for David, J for Jonathan. Biblical soul-friends. Ogwang’s other names were, ‘John Daudi’- JD. Ogwang crossed the dirt road, his brown bag, its edges frayed, swayed. His heel got caught on a stone and he stumbled. A rectangular lump shifted in the pocket, against his heart. He smiled.

"My Mobile."

Ogwang spoke in a lyrical lilt, stylishly Luo-accented. The vowels extended, indifferently discarding the ‘h’ in ‘sh’. There was always a pause, like a praise-word, before the pronouncement of the savoured name of the treasured object.

"I’m calling you on my… mo-bi-le."

He used opening phrases like a chess-master’s gambit. Purpose: to incite envy. Goal: glee satisfied. Ogwang’s peers like Adhiang and Okello were perfect dupes in his game. Now walking to Kondele, he dialled DJ’s number. Phone-to-ear, he waited;

“The number you have dialled is not available.”

A refrain he was struggling to live with.

Because of DJ Otieno, "My son with an occupason in Nairobi city", Ogwang owned the first cell phone in Nyabondo. After DJ gave it him, the village, including those who would have preferred not to know, endured daily public demonstrations of the cell phone’s marvels performed by Ogwang, in-between his knife-grinding work. The finale, when he had credit, was calling DJ. Ogwang’s cell phone operated at maximum volume. He altered its ring tones daily. Eventually, disdainful clansmen mouthed any one of Ogwang’s stock phrases when a phone rang.

"DJ my son in Nairobi...my mobile is expensif but I'm affording."

“Am I phoning you or are you phoning me?”

“Gi ngur.” They growl. He confided to his son, cackling, his saliva sprinkling passer-by.

"But do I say?”

Ogwang adjusted his tie and twisted his moustache. Ogwang’s chubby face sat incongruously on his lanky frame. His slightly protuberant eyes glittered with eternal inquisitiveness. He moved quickly, gesticulated wildly and chortled at everything. Ogwang lowered his voice and settled into a conversation that was his and DJ’s alone.

"Nyabul oyeng mathoche tindo..."

An odd contentment song had poured out of his heart when he held DJ, then a small, slimy-from-the-ordeal-of-birth creature. The song had become their talisman, shattering silences distance wrought; always an invitation to laugh.

“My-outside-eyes, my-medicine-man”. Ogwang intoned. Sometimes, DJ cried because the city had broken him again. Ogwang his voice carrying laughter-disguising-fear, said;

"Babu...your baba is as constant as a sap star. Come home. We sall carry out our enterprise together."

Another night DJ called his father to tell him about Mama Lucy, a woman he had met in Kawangware. She had a fish shop– pronounced fis sop where obabmbla, fulu, fuani, nyar mami, mbuta… fish bounty of Lake Victoria could be eaten. “Baba… I’m thinking … she’s like…Arosi?”

Apart from knife-grinding, the search for wife-mother preoccupied Ogwang and DJ’s lives. Ogwang had won and lost four wives. The first was a good woman who could not provide him with offspring. The second was a wild woman who could not provide him with offspring. The third, DJ's mother, produced DJ whom mean-spirited villagers noted bore a similarity to a wiry Somali transporter of illegally cultivated khat. Apart from Dana Kathorina, the clan crone, who said the baby was Dana Selenia reincarnated- only she had ever seen Dana Selenia- few knew of another family baby whose eyes were of the palest brown and fringed by lashes that skirted cheekbones. To Ogwang these were trifles. On a rare windy day on the Nyando plains, three years later, the Somali transporter drove out of town with the third wife. Immediately, Arosi, the widow of a distant cousin was brought to Ogwang. Arosi grabbed Ogwang and DJ to her forlorn heart and drenched them with love surging in disorganised and entangling waves. She was a substantially proportioned woman whose laughter was as loud and threatening as a war drum. Her sarcastic tongue could flay skin and she reserved a malevolent wrath for those she suspected harboured ill views of her family.

The seasons shifted, leaving trails of red-orange-purple-blues in dawn skies. DJ turned fifteen. One rainy spell, Arosi was returning from Kondele market, carrying fifteen chicken. The matatu van turned and missed the flooded pot-holed bridge. It slid into the rolling Nyando river. Neither Arosi nor her chicken were ever seen again but Ogwang and DJ besought her to find them again.

Dawn crept in pinkly as Ogwang reached Kondele Market. He looked around for the Nairobi bus.

"Trrriiiiiiingggggg"

A man wearing a blue uniform with red epaulettes wove his green bicycle around Ogwang.

Ogwang twisted his nose. He invoked Nyamburko his twenty year old Black Mamba bicycle made-in-China, the Knife-grinding business’ key asset. Ogwang’s named everything he could.

He dredged up the memory of DJ, then a small boy, kicking at a stone.

Ogwang had asked: “That stone… what’s its name?”

DJ had frowned. Ogwang had seized him, tickling him. When their laughter subsided, he had told DJ; “Boy, name things...that’s how you bring life to things.”

Above the sounds of business starting at Kondele, the crackling of metal on metal made Ogwang turn. To his left, next to the maize stall, a new butcher mincingly honed a knife. Ogwang flinched. His hands itched to save the knife but just then, the dust settling behind it, the blue-green bus to Nairobi arrived.

“Look…look at the knife…which one is it?” He had asked DJ.

To Ogwang there were two types of knives. Those that hungered to taste what they cut and were open to being wounded, making their edges true and the ones closed in their knife-being and were quickly whittled down to mere handles.

DJ looked, listened, learned. Ogwang thrilled at the movement of feet working pedals of the knife grinding machine, sparks flying and the edgy buzz-hum of metal-on-metal filling the room and refining thoughts. When the edge of light could dance on a well-ground knife Ogwang whistled. "Sapa than a star. Sapa than a sak."

The bus raced to Nairobi and the landscape changed from brown plains to green hills. An itinerant spider sought a way out of the bus and Ogwang slouched in the back of the bus. Outside a young man run holding sugar cane stalks. Ogwang thought of DJ at seventeen. His young face had been lined with future fears, hands shaking and eyes tinged yellow with anguish, sometimes veiled by his eye-lashes. He had happened upon DJ curled like a foetus behind the granary Ogwang had returned to his room, fished out a spear head attached it to a short metal handle and had taken his son by his trembling hand. They had walked across stream, hills and valley until they reached the deep salt Lake called Simbi Nyaima four hours later.

There, Ogwang hurled the spear into the ground. It jammed into an ant-hill quivering.

“Take it out.” He said.

DJ went over. He tugged at the handle. The spear slid out of the mound.

“Bring it here.” Ogwang held to DJ’s hands, stroking them. DJ’s hand tremors ceased. Ogwang looked into DJ’s eyes.

“…now...into the lake.”

DJ hesitated. He pulled away, steadied his grip, flung the spear into the lake, bellowing like a buffalo. The spear curved and pierced the lake’s waters soundlessly. Ogwang chanted; “Carrier-of-my-medicine-pouch, war-companion, my-dirge-singer.”

Somehow, then, DJ had understood that an examination C- was not a death sentence; that there would be other ways of learning how to build bridges that could withstand floods. Father and son had walked back listening to the sounds of night returning. One of them started singing:

“Nyabul oyieng mathoche tindo…”

They laughed and laughed until they wept.

In the bus to Nairobi, the spider had found a safe haven in Ogwang’s brown bag.

It was early sunset in Nairobi when Ogwang stepped out of the bus. He crossed the road and onto a side path over a sewerage pipe that was also a bridge. An hour later Ogwang was in Kawangware. The slum perched awkwardly in the orange-mauve-in-tint-sunset, its peculiarly formed lodgings an unequal tribute to some anti-aesthetic ghoul. The landscape was cluttered with voices satisfying dream-deprived eyes. It was Sunday and a bevy of evangelical cults belted nuanced versions of The Truth spouting scripture and heresy with equal fervour. Ogwang crossed the road and a speeding No 46 matatu van whizzed past him.

“Mama Lucy.” Ogwang invoked her name to a woman passing by.

Turn left. Turn right. Straight ahead. Start from here. Go to Mburu's Goats Supermarket after Power of the King church, turn left. Mama's Fish shop was right there.

Mama Lucy recognised Ogwang at first sight. He looked nothing like the son but something of their spirits was the same. She smiled even though her heart was heavy. She glanced at her white heels and the pink ribbon around her left ankle. Then she covered her eyes and sobbed. Her clients glanced at her, at him and understood. A man, red-eyed and reeking of spirits got up and left, eyes cast down.

Ogwang dropped his bag and glanced about him.

Flies buzzed on the counter.

Outside, cockerel crowed.

Ogwang identified catfish in the raffia tray by their whiskers.

Mama Lucy’s eyes streamed as she waddled up to Ogwang. She squeezed him in a warm, soft hug.

Ogwang said: “I’ve come …to find out...”

"Baba Otieno…don't say that."

"... follow his shadow until…”

“Baba Otieno…”

He stretched out his hand, a plea

“…I… understand…why.”

Mama Lucy looked away. Ogwang picked up his bag. He paused, staring at the zip, seeing something else. Something he had cradled, in its desecrated, torn form for twenty four hours. Its swollen mouth showing broken teeth, revealing a ‘beauty gap’. He had stroked its eyelashes. Inviting resolution. The abyss-filling, meaning-remedy had not come.

Ogwang turned to Mama Lucy.

“What’s this…what’s this… to be…human?”

Mama Lucy grabbed Ogwang’s bag, shouted to an unknown entity lurking somewhere in the backrooms. "Murungaru...!

A vague “OK” echoed back.

Mama Lucy launched out, disrupting the contemplative gobbling of a neighbour's turkey, Ogwang a step behind her. Word spread and a line of people followed them. Some women sniffled, coughing tears. Some men, the strong ones, slunk away.

The late evening wind pounded a sign that read;

"JD (father) and DJ (son) enterprises."

For your knife-grinding needs.

Machetes, swords and spears.

"Sharper than a star. Sharper than a shark"

Mobile: 0788-63359000

Day or night at your service.

There is a space between hearing and believing. There comes a moment when the space in the heart gets occupied by the night of nothing, and there is absence. Before, in this place, answers nonchalantly leaned against each other. Now a shadow-question-mark loomed. With every thud of the sign against the wall, Ogwang felt the absence-presence sear his soul's heart. He read and re-read the words carved from pale brown wood. The logo was a brandished spear. Ogwang looked for meaning, found love but not the conquest of death.

DJ’s door was padlocked. Mama Lucy twisted her mouth one way and then another and somebody produced a key. Ogwang entered the small room. At the centre was a pale green knife-grinding wheel. There were eight blunt knives of various sizes on the table. Against the left wall near a wash bowl, an adapted bicycle leaned with its name "Nyamburko II" set above its lights. Ogwang carried the wheel and fitted it on a frame on the bicycle. Faces peered through the door against which Mama Lucy stood. She watched Ogwang step behind a brown-white Kanga cloth curtain into DJ’s sleeping space.

Ogwang sat on the bed. He gazed for a long time at the portrait of DJ and his gap-toothed smile. A likeness of ‘Christ Pantocrator’ presided over the bed and beneath this was a circular portrait of the Madonna and child. Above this, a book shelf warped with the weight of books mostly about Structural engineering; on the wall at the end of the bed, a picture of Ogwang leaning against a fence, shielding his eyes from the sun.

The bed was unmade.

Ogwang pulled off his shoes, took off his coat and placed it on the wall. He slid into the bed and burrowed his head into the pillow, audibly inhaling. Mama Lucy pushed gapers out and shut the door behind her.

It is like an edgy-buzz; The sound of the knife-grinding machine. At midnight, it was an unusual sound even in a slum. No one said anything. At dawn, the sound stopped.

At cock crow, Mama Lucy found Ogwang and the bicycle had gone. She chewed her painted nail and started for her shop when she bumped into Evangelist Patrobus praising the Lord, his zeal aided by discreetly imbibed unholy spirits.

He declared, "Ahhh shishter Lushy…the boysh father ish at that shatanic place." He pointed upwards, meaning left.

Mama Lucy waddled-run in her pretty white shoes.

"Oh! Oh! Oh!"

Fifteen minutes later, her face dripping in sweat, gasping and wheezing, she found Ogwang seated on a bloodied rock, one amongst a massed collection which formed a cairn. The ground was marked by the memory of a man-sized dark pool.

Beneath this cairn a body had rested. It lay buried in Nyabondo.

Adhiang and Okello had held the father to the ground when the body was taken from his arms and restored to its coffin. The two men had clutched the father to their hearts when the coffin was covered by the dry, black earth.

Wringing her hand now, Mama Lucy intoned. "Please…Baba Otieno...please...let’s go.”

Two small boys squatted, their hands on their chins staring at Ogwang.

Ogwang hugged his smart black coat and remembered waiting for DJ’s weekend phone call. Slowly a hole had developed in his heart; there, inside him, he had heard DJ’s voice exclaim "Babaaaaa!".

Ogwang had called DJ’s number; 0788-63359000

“The number you have dialled is not available.”

Waiting.

Two days. Five more. On the seventh day, a watchman called Lawi called.

He said the body was on its way to Nyabondo. “An accident”. Lawi said.

When he saw what remained of his son, Ogwang wished there had been an accident.

The Kawangware morning chill pierced Ogwang. From his rock he asked Mama Lucy: “Why?”

Later, when Nairobi city denizens raced to have knives ground by a singing knife-grinder who said - sapa than a star, sapa than a sak- and gawked at the portrait of a long-lashed, gap-toothed man dangling from the knife-grinder’s handle-bars, Ogwang asked “Why?”

Now Mama Lucy’s breath faltered.

"... It was night...they screamed…it was night.”

She covered her face. She sobbed.

"It wasn't me, Baba Otieno.”

Ogwang picked up a discarded green plastic bag among thousands dappling the ground. He stretched it. It crinkled. He stooped and scooped the damp, dark dirt, using his hands like a spade. He filled the bag. Mama Lucy touched the bicycle with its mounted knife-grinding apparatus. She caressed DJ Otieno’s portrait dangling at the front. Ogwang wrapped the plastic bag to the handlebars. Mama Lucy turned away, her hand on her head. Ogwang wheeled the bicycle and leapt on. The movement shifted the mobile phone in his pocket.

When he reached the road Ogwang sang;

"Nyabul oyieng mathoche tindo..."

It is a song of satisfaction. It is a song that bridges silences shaped by distance.

Later that day, someone phoned Ogwang from DJ’s number.

Ogwang, his hands trembling, answered; “DJ…son?”

There was silence.

Then a voice, not the usual one, retorted:

“The mobile subscriber cannot be reached.”