|
Minutes of Glory 2
lodgers, clean up the bar and wash dishes and glasses. Then
they would hang around the bar and in shifts until two o'clock
when they would go for a small break. At five o'clock, they had
to be in again, ready for customers whom they would now
serve with frothy beers and smiles until twelve o'clock or for as
long as there were customers thirsty for more Tuskers and
Pilsners. What often galled Beatrice, although in her case it did
not matter one way or another, was the owner's .insistence that
the girls should sleep in Starlight. They would otherwise be
late for work, he said. But what he really wanted was for the
girls to use their bodies to attract more lodgers in Starlight.
Most of the girls, led by Nyaguthii defied the rule and bribed
the watchman to let them out and in. They wanted to meet
their regular or one-night boy-friends in places where they
would be free and where they would be treated as not just
barmaids. Beatrice always slept in. Her occasional one-night
patrons wanted to spend the minimum. Came a night when
the owner, refused by Nyaguthii, approached her. He started
by finding fault with her work; he called her names, then as
suddenly he started praising her, although in a grudging
almost contemptuous manner. He grabbed her, struggled
with her, pot-belly, grey hairs, and everything. Beatrice felt an
unusual revulsion for the man. She could not, she would not
bring herself to accept that which had so recently been cast
aside by Nyaguthii. My God, she wept inside, what does
Nyaguthii have that I don't have? The man now humiliated
himself before her. He implored. He promised her gifts. But
she would not yield. That night she too defied the rule. She
jumped through a window; she sought a bed in another bar
and only came back at six. The proprietor called her in front of
all the others and dismissed her. But Beatrice was rather
surprised at herself.
She stayed a month without a job. She lived from room to
room at the capricious mercy of the other girls. She did not
have the heart to leave Ilmorog and start all over again in a new
town. The wound hurt. She was tired of wandering. She
stopped using Ambi. No money. She looked at herself in the
mirror. She had so aged, hardly a year after she had fallen from
grace. Why then was she scrupulous, she would ask herself.
But somehow she had a horror of soliciting lovers or directly bartering her body for hard cash. What she wanted was decent
work and a man or several men who cared for her. Perhaps she
took that need for a man, for a home and for a child with her to
bed. Perhaps it was this genuine need that scared off men who
wanted other things from barmaids. She wept late at nights
and remembered home. At such moments, her mother's village in Nyeri seemed the sweetest place on God's earth. She
would invest the life of her peasant mother and father with
romantic illusions of immeasurable peace and harmony. She
longed to go back home to see them. But how could she go
back with empty hands? In any case the place was now a
distant landscape in the memory. Her life was here in the bar
among this crowd of lost strangers. Fallen from grace, fallen
from grace. She was part of a generation which would never
again be one with the soil, the crops, the wind and the moon.
Not for them that whispering in dark hedges, not for her that
dance and love-making under the glare of the moon, with the
hills of Tumu Tumu rising to touch the sky. She remembered
that girl from her home village who, despite a life of apparent
glamour being the kept mistress of one rich man after another
in Limuru, had gassed herself to death. This generation was
now awed by the mystery of death, just as it was callous to the
mystery of life; for how many unmarried mothers had thrown
their babies into latrines rather than lose that glamour?
The girl's death became the subject of jokes. She had gone
metric-without pains, they said. Thereafter, for a week,
Beatrice thought of going metric. But she could not bring
herself to do it.
She wanted love; she wanted life.
A new bar was opened in Ilmorog. Treetop Bar, Lodging
and Restaurant. Why Treetop, Beatrice could not understand
unless because it was a storied building: tea-shop on the
ground floor and beer-shop in a room at the top. The rest were
rooms for five-minute or one-night lodgers. The owner was a
retired civil servant but one who still played at politics. He was
enormously wealthy with business sites and enterprises in
every major town in Kenya. Big shots from all over the country
came to his bar. Big men in Mercedes. Big men in their
Bentleys. Big men in their Jaguars and Daimlers. Big men with
uniformed chauffeurs drowsing with boredom in cars waiting outside. There were others not so big who came to pay
respects to the great. They talked politics mostly. And about
their work. Gossip was rife. Didn't you know? Indeed so and
so has been promoted. Really? And so and so has been sacked.
Embezzlement of public funds. So foolish you know. Not
clever about it at all. They argued, they quarrelled, sometimes
they fought it out with fists, especially during the elections
campaign. The only point on which they were all agreed was
that the Luo community was the root cause of all the trouble in
Kenya; that intellectuals and University students were living
in an ivory tower of privilege and arrogance; that Kiambu had
more than a lion's share of developments; that men from Nyeri
and Muranga had acquired all the big business in Nairobi and
were even encroaching on Chiri District; that African workers,
especially those on the farms, were lazy and jealous of 'us'
who had sweated ourselves to sudden prosperity. Otherwise
each would hymn his own praises or return compliments.
Occasionally in moments of drunken ebullience and self-
praise, one would order two rounds of beer for each man
present in the bar. Even the poor from Ilmorog would come to
Treetop to dine at the gates of the nouveaux riches.
Here Beatrice got a job as a sweeper and bedmaker. Here for
a few weeks she felt closer to greatness. Now she made beds
for men she had previously known as names. She watched
how even the poor tried to drink and act big in front of the big.
But soon fate caught up with her. Girls flocked to Treetop from
other bars. Girls she had known at Limuru, girls she had
known at Ilmorog. And most had attached themselves to one
or several big men, often playing a hide-and-not-to-be found
game with their numerous lovers. And Nyaguthii was there
behind the counter, with the eyes of the rich and the poor fixed
on her. And she, with her big eyes, bangled hands and
earrings maintained the same air of bored indifference. Beat-
rice as a sweeper and bedmaker became even more invisible.
Girls who had fallen into good fortune looked down upon her.
She fought life with dreams. In between putting clean sheets
on beds that had just witnessed a five-minute struggle that
ended in a half-strangled cry and a pool, she would stand by
the window and watch the cars and the chauffeurs, so that
soon she knew all the owners by the number plates of their
To be continued |
