He asked me to shave him. It took me time to find the razor blades. He sat in his easy chair, with his legs stretched out, his thin, deeply etched Beckett face upturned. The razor crackled and filled with stubble as I dragged it across valleys and ridges. Birds chirped fussily in the tallest gray-skinned mtuba trees. They jumped up and down on one branch.
“Snakes,” Grandpa said irately. I nicked his throat. “It is a black mamba up there. This place is full of black mambas.”
“Green mambas too,” I said, cleaning the stubble and the blood.
“All this bush,” he said, sweeping with his hands. “It is full of snakes.”
“Are you still afraid of snakes, Grandpa?”
“Who isn’t? Of course I am still afraid of them. My worst fear is finding one in bed, sitting on it and getting bitten.” I suddenly remembered Padlock’s mother and the puff adder that had killed her. I did not laugh.
“Snakes replaced all the people who left the village,” he continued.
“How about the newcomers?” I asked eagerly. “I can hardly recognize a familiar face in this village!”
“I told you the village is full of snakes. It is the coffee-smuggling madness that is the cause of all this.”
“When was this area taken over by smugglers?”
“A few years after you left. It was good that this happened in your absence.”
“How did it happen? I mean …”
“In the sixties, your parents migrated to the city to look for work and a better life. Now young people leave to join coffee-smuggling gangs and to get killed by anti-smuggling patrols.”
“Tell me about it, Grandpa,” I said, almost salivating.
“Young people discovered a way of making quick money, without having to go to school. They smuggle coffee across the lake to Kenya and exchange it for American dollars. They come back laden with consumer goods: bell-bottom trousers, radios, Oris watches, wigs, all that junk, and behave like maniacs. They discovered that this little village was a good place to hide and to cause mayhem without attracting undue attention from the authorities. The nearest military barracks is fifteen kilometers away, so they have nothing to fear from the army. Now and then, a few soldiers escape from the barracks and spend a weekend here, drinking and fighting over women. The smugglers can live with that. The chiefs lost control and let the youths have their part of the village and destroy themselves in peace. But sometimes they hold motor races through the old village, scaring children and women out of the way as they tear past at great speed. All those boys are gamblers. Anti-smuggling patrols are killing them in ever-increasing numbers. Others kill their colleagues when they see so much money and greed sets in. It all seems to make the survivors more reckless. They come home, spend the money like lunatics, go broke and go back. Most survive only a few trips before getting killed. Most of the boys who used to take my coffee to the mill are dead. You just hear that so-and-so’s son or grandson ‘drowned.’ ”
“What a waste!”
“Keep your nose in the books, my boy.”
“It is all I seem to do, Grandpa.”
“I used to tell you about the coming explosions and you sometimes looked incredulous. You were too young, I guess. But I think now you see that I was right. Things cannot remain as they are.”
“What will happen afterward?”
“That is for you to work out; you are the lawyer, aren’t you?”
I smiled sheepishly and said, “Yes, Grandpa.”
“I don’t need all this coffee, all this land anymore. It is for you and your brothers. I have a feeling that you will not come back to the land. Go out into the world and make a place for yourself. A big lawyer does not need to be tied to the village, especially if it is full of the wrong people.”
“Thank you, Grandpa.”
I thought about asking him to challenge Cane’s view that it was our chiefs who let the British into the country and destroyed what remained of it, but he seemed lost in thought, as if communicating with people I could not see. I already had my send-off; what more did I need?
There was a relative of some sort, a careless young girl who laid things all over the place — kettles in the doorway, pans in the yard, the kitchen knife on the table — who was responsible for Grandpa’s householding. She cooked, cleaned, washed and did some work in the shamba. On the weekend, Uncle Kawayida’s mother came over and helped her. I found that a very interesting turnaround, but again I did not ask Grandpa what he thought of it. I pitied the woman a bit. She must have worked like a horse, cleaning up this girl’s mess. The girl was semi-illiterate, polite and very hospitable. When she brought tea, my cup had traces of hurriedly wiped dirt, and Grandpa’s was in no better condition. I was caught between insulting her hospitality by asking her to immerse the cups in a mountain of suds, thrice, and closing my eyes to take the torture. The cup smelled of fish. I engineered a little accident, pretending that an insect had crept up my leg. I spilled the contents of my cup and refused a refill. I started suspecting that Grandpa’s nose was in trouble too: in the past, he would not have touched dirty utensils with a barge pole.
Grandpa reminded me of King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. Although he lacked the look of absolute power and total harmony with death of the king, Grandpa too had reached that stage where the old looked frozen in their dessication. His cane looked like a thinner extension of his hand. He had prodded me a few times with it when I annoyed him and tried to get away. He volunteered to show me round the village. It was very good weather: mild sunshine was drying the rain that had fallen the day before. The sky was very blue, as it mostly was here, with a few scanty clouds. Vegetation was glossy with constant rain. The air was laden with earthy smells mingled with whiffs coming off different plants. It was quiet here.
Grandpa got into a gray trench coat, a white tunic and soft slippers and grabbed his cane. He was going to show me off, his prize bullock. I felt proud. I would be the first lawyer from this village. We followed the main path that went round the old village in a semi-circle.
We went over to the Stefano homestead. It was a large compound that used to be full of people, sons and daughters and their families living in smaller houses built round the main house. I was always afraid to go there: the courtyard used to look enormous, and with all those eyes looking, it felt intimidating. Now it was like a deserted football field long after the match, with just a handful of people looking for souvenirs in the stands. Mr. Stefano, once a big, tall, fat man, lay paralyzed by a stroke. His infirmity haunted the place. It felt dead. “My only competition,” Grandpa said. “What a sad way to go!” I was thinking about Tiida and her efforts to take Grandpa to Rome. How idiotic the whole enterprise looked on the ground!
I wanted to see some of the children Grandma had helped to birth. I wanted to see the tanner, whose courtyard used to be haunted by the stench of drying cowhides stretched and fastened onto wooden frames with pieces of string. He was a tall, gaunt man I used to associate with the Biblical Abraham. He had a lot of jackfruit, mango and avocado trees, but no child wanted to eat his fruit because of the stench in the yard. He used to live with his old wife, whom we called Sarah. I asked Grandpa about him. He said that he was alive, still tanning his hides.
I also wanted to see Aunt Tiida’s first lover, the one who gobbled her virginity but would not marry her. I did not ask about the man, because Grandpa did not like him.
The path was wide but uneven, with potholes here and stones there. Grandpa stepped into a pothole he had not seen and made one prolonged wince. He had hurt his bullet leg. I did not know what to do. I suggested he sit down, but he refused. He bent forward, clutching the leg, his face a twisted mass of lines. I could hear loud music from the other end of the village. It was a Boney-M song, and the crowd was singing along. After some minutes, when the song had ended and another had started, Grandpa stood erect, held my hand, and we headed home. End of tour.