Read Dreams in a Time of War for Free Online

much of a road to our homestead. The truck simply made two tracks pastLord Kahahu’s orchard to our compound. Unfortunately, it had been raining. The truck got stuck in the mud, and as the driver tried to rev it out, the truck hit my mother’s hut and dug deeper in the mud. The army men in green khaki fatigues and army hats spent most of their night visit trying to dig it out using flashlights to see. We crowded around them, and I could not even make out who Kabae was except when he, a shadowy figure among shadowy figures, left his men digging and said hurried greetings to the family. He was back from the East African Campaign, resting and recharging in Nairobi, before redeployment to other fronts in Madagascar or even Burma. Apparently he and his friends had taken the truck without permission, hoping to be away for only a few hours, long enough for Kabae to quench, a little, the thirst for home that he must have felt in his years away. It was also an opportunity for him and his non-Gĩkũyũ comrades-in-arms, who must have felt even farther from home, to eat a home-cooked meal as opposed to their rations of cookies and canned meat. He mentioned some of the countries of their origin—Uganda, Tanganyika, and Nyasaland. The King’s African Rifles had people from all over Africa, he said. By the time they dug out the truck, they could only eat hurriedly and were anxious to leave and return to camp in Nairobi. So we did not spend much time with him, but I hardly slept thinking of the drama that had just ended. It was as if Kabae had jumped out of a story, said a hello, a good-bye, and then jumped back into the story. Hitting my mother’s hut and digging out the truck at night was not exactly the most heroic homecoming for one whohad been all over the world fighting ogres, but then his was the first motor vehicle ever to come to our homestead. We realized how big our brother was when the landlord did not raise any complaints about the tracks the truck had made through his land or about the bent orchard trees. The visit was forever engraved in my mind and talks of the big war now brought back memories of a military truck stuck in the mud by my mother’s hut.
    I don’t know how long it was after Kabae’s visit, but more magical happenings followed. A white man came to our homestead. Although white people owned the tea plantations on the other side of the railway, and I had even heard that there were white owners of the Limuru Bata Shoe factory, the nearest thing to a white man I had seen at close quarters were the Indian shopkeepers. But here was a real white man, on foot, in our homestead, and we ran by his side calling out,
Mũthũngũ, mũthũngũ
. He said something like
bono
or
buena
and then asked for eggs. My mother gave him some, even refusing his money in exchange, and he uttered something like
grazie
and went away saying
ciao
, which we took for yet another word for “thank you.” We followed behind him, a crowd of children, still calling out
Mũthũngũ
. And then came the shock.
    We saw white men making a road, white men who were not supervising blacks but were actually breaking the stones themselves. Later more of these workmen came to our place asking for eggs,
mayai
, throwing words out like
buonasera, buongiorno, pronto, grazie
, but the word that was most frequent and common to all of them, the one that lingered inthe mind, was
bono
. We nicknamed them Bono: I would learn that they were Italian prisoners of war taken between May and November 1941 when the Italians surrendered at Amba Alage and Gondar, ending the East African Campaign. The prisoners were imported labor, charged with building the road from Nairobi to the interior, parallel to the railway line that was first built by imported Indian labor. The prisoners became a regular sight in our village, and every house had an Italian tale to tell.
    Ours concerned Wabia, Kabae’s sister, who could not take a step let alone walk without the aid of two