said the woman with the machete as she did a little war jig while brandishing her weapon. Even as the women pummeled him, his eyes were focused on the machete. His pain was dull; his stare was blank.
4
When Tajirika finally found himself outside the gates of his residence, he simply could not believe it. Had they let him go? Was he really safe at Golden Heights? His initial impulse was to enter the house and immediately set upon Vinjinia and break her legs and arms. But the last words he remembered hearing were unambiguous: “Bemember: resume your wife beating and you will surely feel the full force of female daemons.” So he had been right, after all, about who the women really were. As he imagined them suddenly emerging from the surrounding cornfields for retribution, he started trembling, overcome by a mixture of relief, shame, anger, and helplessness.
Instead of opening the door, Tajirika leaned against it and started to sob. Tears raced down his cheeks and fell onto the veranda. They increasingly became bigger and faster, soon turning into torrents that gushed down as from a broken dam, making two tunnels on the earth just outside the veranda. But he was not aware of the tunnels as he eventually opened the door and quickly locked it from the inside.
5
The drama of the female daemons was not something Tajirika was overly eager to shout from the rooftops. He could imagine the nasty derisive comments of passersby: There goes the man beaten by women. So he confined himself within the walls of his house and ran his business over the phone.
Vinjinia was also keen to avoid questions about her bruised face, and, like him, she stayed indoors.
Thus they found themselves spending their nights and days inside the house, avoiding each other. They even tried to hide their bruised faces from each other, Tajirika by donning a wide-brimmed hat and Vinjinia with a cloth over her head.
Vinjinia had been so sure that Tajirika would exact vengeance that she became more worried when after a few days no violence had surfaced. But, under the cover of silence and calculated indifference, was he planning something more sinister? After a few days of this, Vinjinia started wondering: What did those women do to him? Did they cut his manhood off?
She resorted to stalking him, casting surreptious glances in his direction, hoping to catch him naked as he emerged from the bathroom or the toilet. Once or twice she opened the door to his bedroom at a time she thought he might be changing into his nightclothes but, finding him fully clothed, she closed the door quickly, as if she had made a mistake through force of habit.
Tajirika had also started feeling restless and perplexed by several questions for which he had no satisfactory answer.
Some of them were prompted by his ego: to be captured, sat upon, put on trial, and beaten by women defied all that he knew about the world. At such moments he wished he had the means to annihilate them, but weren’t they creatures from the netherworld? Anyway, who had told them about him and Vinjinia? Wife beating in Aburlria, after all, was so common as not to be noticed. What made for a peaceful home was not the absence of such blows but the ability of a couple to keep the knowledge of the violence within the confines of the walls of their house.
What fascinated and irritated him at the same time was the knowledge that there was not a single falsehood in the women’s allegations, forcing him to brood on his conduct of this affair. Why had he not checked Sikiokuu’s story with Vinjinia?
He also could not deny the truth of Vinjinia’s claim that he had not done much for her when she herself was arrested, and now he felt ashamed for not having been man enough to stand by his woman.
And what to make of her claims that she had left no stone unturned in search of him? Was this true? He wanted to know more, but how could he break the silence without demeaning himself? He, too, started stalking her, casting surreptitious glances at her to see if he could detect a sign of any softening in her.
The two started circling each other, often finding themselves in the same part of the house, both looking for an opening to satisfy their respective curiosities about one another. One afternoon they encountered each other on the veranda and were struck by the same surprise: starting from just outside the veranda wall were two tunnels. What rains have done this? they loudly asked in unison. Yet they were not aware of any rains recently. With each walking along one of the tunnels, they followed them through the cornfields, all the way down the valley. And then? The second surprise.
On the boggy, marshy valley floor, a pool had formed. They stared at each other. They each dipped a finger into the pool and tasted the liquid. It was salty, like tears. Neither of them could believe the evidence of their tongues. Needing confirmation, they returned their fingers to the pool and now placed a finger on each other’s tongue. The water was still salty. They giggled a little, in unison. They quickly put their fingers back in the pool, each hoping to be the first to place more salty water in the other’s mouth. But it was as if they had read each other’s intentions. Vinjinia dashed into the cornfields, with Tajirika following her in a playful chase.
They at once succumbed to the fatigue of it all and suddenly felt the kind of warmth they used to arouse in each other in the days of their youth: for a moment they stood looking at each other, mesmerized by what was happening to them. They knew rather than talked about it. But there in the open fields, under the corn leaves, it felt good, very good, and for a few minutes the pain of the bruises on their faces and in their hearts seemed soothed away by the sweetness that whistled tunes ending in a rapturous crescendo.
6
Neither Tajirika nor Vinjinia could have dreamt that out of the tears of sorrow could come such intense screams of joy. But the scream that next issued from Vinjinia’s mouth was not joy or sorrow, and for a few seconds she could not utter a word. Tajirika looked to see what she was pointing at. The sight made him tense up also: a flock of birds was frozen in flight above the lake. Some yards into the pool, a dog, barking at the birds, suddenly froze before their very eyes.
Tajirika and Vinjinia took to their heels and did not once look back until they reached the house. The valley floor used to shake as if hollow below. What had brought the waters to the surface? What of the arrested motion of beings r
They came back the following day, hoping the whole thing had vanished. It had not, and now, in addition to the birds, were bees and butterflies also in frozen flight. On the surface, ducks and chickens, including a cock trying to mount a hen, were all frozen in motion. So also two antelopes, one in the air and the other about to jump.
They gave up trying to unravel the mystery. When Gaciru and Gaclgua came for holidays, Tajirika and Vinjinia forbid them to go anywhere near the valley or talk about it, reinforcing the ban with stories of daemons that lured children into a pool in the valley and swallowed them. But Gaciru and Gaclgua whispered the stories to their friends, and eventually the stories reached the ears of parents, who sternly warned their children to avoid the area.
Parents added their bits to the scary lore: The pool became a lake that turned any living thing that touched its surface or flew over it into stone. Even looking in its direction or looking at it, others added, could turn somebody into stone, which made people walk with their eyes facing away from its supposed location. Silence about the lake ensued.
But Tajirika and Vinjinia were attracted to the lake like a moth to the light. They found a spot from where they could see it, especially in the evenings, because when light fell on the motionless objects the things would change colors dramatically, depending on the intensity and angle of the sun.
Tajirika and Vinjinia named the scene Museum of Arrested Motion.
