HE WATCHED THEM FLY

Wesonga Robert, August 31, 2011.

wesongarobert@yahoo.com

He let them pass. Or rather, he watched them pass. He watched them fly by because they had wings and he had not them. He stood down and watched as they drifted, afloat in the mid-morning sky. The sunshine reflected playfully on the white underbellies. They flapped their wings gracefully; effortlessly. On the gentle hillside he stood watching just because he could not have wings. How he wished he could fly like them. Maybe he would have flown only had he believed he could.

The ten year old Erasto was eagerly waiting for the day of the picnic. His neighbour, Beni, had promised him an outing on one free Saturday. So he waited. He had a slight idea of the mysterious character that Beni was. He knew Beni was a man who made a lot of promises. But at least he was better than his uncle. Although most times Beni would explain to him why what he had promised him had not happened, he fulfilled a good number of his promises. He was not going to ask him; or remind him; or pester. He would sit and wait whatever the degree of temptation to remind.

Erasto looked at the birds disappear several flaps later. He did not feel bad about it. He saw the three white dots disappear on the horizon as they made their drift towards Baragoi or Barsaloi. Or maybe to some other place beyond the solid greenness of the Kirisia Hills. It was a sight to behold in the rainy mid-August. He wasn’t jealous or even envious of them because they could fly and he could not. Instead, he elected to wonder and marvel at the varying fortunes and degrees of performance that nature bestows upon different creatures.

Others can fly but cannot swim; some can manage a double-existence in both water and on land, but can do nothing to stop the interference by human hand. Premised on these divergent fortunes of creatures, he decided to count himself luckier than the birds. At least he could not be slaughtered for a meal. While considering this power he had over birds, he reminisced on Beni’s tales of chicken chasing and slaughtering.

He was a boy with a steady assured forehead. His limbs had the appearance of a delicate pair of organs. When he walked, he did it with a blend of grace and briskness. Somebody had even remarked that he should have been born a girl. That way, it would have been easier to reduce the briskness and give the walk a more graceful catwalk. He had a unique way of looking at people without wasting too much time – he would cast a glance at somebody and with one sweep take in the image of the object of his look. He would then look away as if nothing had happened. Even when he was not happy, Erasto could still manage a serene and easy smile. These aspects of his person had made Beni to take a keen interest in the boy.

He was now ascending the sloping land that gently dipped into a pool of water. The size of the mass of water was no less than the size of ten football stadiums of world-cup proportions. For an area that was so far away from the nearest lake, Beni had once thought that this pool of water on the south-eastern end of Kisima town qualified to be called a lake.

The birds had long passed but yet again something came. It came from the North. A neat white trail of smoke was left in a long line in the wake of it. Erasto remembered that Beni had told him about a plane that left behind that kind of line. Such a plane carried the queen only. He had once asked Beni who the queen was and how she looked like. On that day Beni took from his wallet an old coin with a hole in the centre and showed him. Then he saw. The queen had a fair face and long hair that emerged from her head to her shoulders and beyond. Then he heard Beni read his name on the coin: Queen Elizabeth the Second.

“The queen must be very lucky,” the boy had said almost to himself.
“You think so?” Beni asked.
“At least she gets to travel many times in a week inside a big beautiful plane. She must be very rich too.”
“The pilot too must be lucky. He gets to fly the queen frequently,” Beni said, patting the boy on the head.

He remembered this day with a serene innocent smile writ all over his face. He soon thereafter increased his pace towards Kisima town.

The boy wanted to watch the plane for longer but dismissed the idea. He assured himself that later that evening the same plane would be traveling back the same way to the North; back to the queen’s home somewhere past the horizon. Somewhere after Poro Radar Station and beyond the Suguta Valley. In the evening, the plane would fly in the red sunset. Then, it would look as though it was blazing having caught fire. The thought of the plane blazing in a flame always made Erasto shudder with terror. He feared that the queen would get consumed in a fireball of the exploding jumbo jet above Maralal town. That would be bad enough.

Birds. Planes. White doves and the white queen’s plane. During his free time – which was not a short time, he would watch out for them. That is why he loved holiday. He felt almost sad that the August holiday was coming to an end in two weeks. Then, he would have to begin bearing the morning cold and the fear of going to school without finishing homework. On the other hand, there would be the thrill of meeting with friends and the football games. There would also be the fun of meeting Ntaini once more. This was the fine-looking girl who kept on smiling at him and hiding her face behind her exercise book in class. Ntaini reminded Erasto of Queen Elizabeth’s face. At least the way he saw it on Beni’s coin.

Before school opening, he hoped Beni would be back from his home in the western part of the republic. From what Beni told him, life in the village had to be interesting. His mind flashed upon the chicken chasing and slaughtering. It lingered there for a moment.

*** *** *** ***
That night, the air was dense with humidity. This heaviness appeared to be an extension of the slow day that had been. The wind that had been dominant in the preceding weeks had finally given way to a stagnation of air. And with such limited movement of the air, time hardly moved. If it did move, it did so in a latent fashion, oblivious of the gloom it imposed upon the minds of the half-sleepers. Beni turned in his bed. He had been turning for eternity. He did not want to look at his bedside alarm to find out what time it was. He suspected it was still about eleven though he felt he had been half-sleeping for a whole night. For the second night running, sleep was playing hide-and-seek with him.

This night it was not just the heat that betrayed him, neither was it just the lack of sleep. It was combination of the two, conspiring with the attitude of his neighbour’s four year old daughter. The girl seemed to be very keen on involving everyone in her nightmares – and she did have a pretty many of them. This night she was performing what sounded to Beni like the war songs he had heard the Samburu Moran sing.

He remembered his classes of old; the era of innocence in school. A time during which he began believing in the supremacy of academic pursuits over all forms of civilization. In his schooling years, he also learnt that what could be held in the heart could also find its realization in the practical world of difficult choices and hard realities…