By Anthony Muchoki , originally published 2005.
She was going about her business in the house. Her second born child who was hardly two years old broke a tea glass. The woman’s stomach was heavy in the eighth month of her tenth pregnancy. The child was crying after hurting her fingers, which were bleeding. Then the woman quickly and fearfully darted her eyelids to the direction the father of his children was seated.
She felt all her strength depart from her weakened body. The man as in a drama rose up. He walked to where the woman was seated washing the family clothes.
Holding her head in his jagged palms from behind, the man knocked her back at the middle of the spinal cord with his left knee powerfully. The woman fell down crunching her belly in pain mouth wide open. She did not scream.
“Woman, I don’t know why I married you. See how your children want to destroy me. Why have you told this daughter of yours to break that glass? Why?” He was shuddering in wrath. He whacked her repeatedly. The woman was silent almost as if she was simply an object, which was being hit. Inwardly, she was groaning in pain. She cursed the day she came to know the man who was clobbering her.
“Answer me or I will kill you,” he barked. The woman was bleeding profusely and she felt labour pangs.
“My lord forgive me please…please…,” she pleaded. She felt sickening fear. Eight out of her ten pregnancies had resulted into miscarriage. This was due to beatings that she received from her husband.
She bitterly thought on how one day the man was going to kill her. The wounded child had stopped crying and was now wailing. She had joined her mother in the ground. The man hit the child in mad rage. The child fell down unconscious.
“Woman, you are just like your mother, the only woman in the world who gives birth to women! women! women…” the father spoke to his unconscious child. He battered the mother again and again. The lady lay in a pool of blood almost lifeless. Leaving her in that state, he walked out of the house and left.
With her left hand, the woman held her stomach in anguish. The right hand was trying to caress her unconscious daughter to life when she also slipped to the world of unknown.
Three hours later, Martin, the woman’s brother, saw blood flowing like drainage water as he knocked at the door to her sister’s house. Jitters rent his whole body. The woman was his only sister. She was his blood sister. He loved her with all his heart.
From the first sight, he could tell what had happened without being told. He forcefully opened the door. He thought of the best way to save his sister.
“I should kill the bastard,” he said aloud. The beast had reduced his blood sister to such a wretch.
Martin looked at the baby and the mother. He started crying. His 10-year-old niece was also crying. Her father hated her more than trash. He had chased her out of their family house four years ago. Martin was staying with the young girl. He loved her as his own. He had brought the girl home to greet her mother. The situation at hand was so critical; he decided to call an ambulance. Ten minutes later they were in Randiera National Hospital.
“Well, the baby and the mother have been revived. They are safe. But am sorry the foetus… she had a miscarriage,” the doctor who attended to her informed Martin the following morning.
The doctor in charge of the hospital had reported the matter to the police. A policewoman came to the hospital to ask the woman if she would prefer any charges to the person who had caused them the grievous bodily harm.
“No, he is my husband. I took the vows of marriage with him before God and Father Paul. I cannot accuse my husband,” she said. The police officers tried for two hours to persuade her see sense as the man might one day kill her. She gave her vivid examples of such violent marriages and brutalities, which end tragically with wives being killed.
“Please, I know you are quite reasonable and ready to help me for the purpose of my own good but you cannot change my feelings to that brute. I would never do anything contrary to what Father Paul taught me. I will persevere. Any day the man might change. Go your way. I can never accuse my husband,” the woman told the policewoman who was moving her head sideways in amazement. In tears and dejected the policewoman left the ward. If the law allowed it, she would have gone and shot the brute that so merciless had debilitated a harmless woman and child.
She left the hospital ward cursing legal regularities. “The beast one day will kill her. The beast is scot-free. There is no one to accuse him for the brutality he did against his family,” she thought quietly. It was too hard for anyone to charge him. Randiera criminal laws were very clear that there could never be criminal charges without any first hand complainant.
The lady’s child healed first. The girl was discharged in the third week. The father had never bothered to go and see his family in hospital. So Martin took the young girl to his house. Now he was living with two daughters of his sister.
Reluctantly his wife accepted the new responsibility. When his sister was discharged four months later, she refused to go and stay in his brother’s house. Martin dropped her at her husband’s house.
The husband was a high school teacher. As his wife was away in the hospital, he had been promoted to be a deputy headmaster. He was waiting for his wife to get healed. If she dared to try and live with her brother, he would never allow it. Natiehi was the wife’s name. He felt she was all what he owned on earth. He could do anything to her and be answerable to nobody. No one would ever take Natiehi away from him, he thought. He felt all empty inside his body and soul.
The only thing that gave him joy was tormenting her. Nothing else. At school he would beat boys up but still felt no possession of anything in his whole being. Empty. Only beating Natiehi made him feel like a human being. Everything else was nothing including his whole existence.
When they got married more than ten years ago their marriage was a little paradise. Both of them were teachers. The woman injected so much bliss in his life. She would give him a son. Since he was a very young boy he had longed to have a son of his own. A son!
His own father was melancholic in the whole of his life because he could not bear a son. He had 15 daughters and no son. No son. But finally, at an advanced age he had to adopt one and that is how he joined the family. He remembered how bitter he was after he learnt the sour truth. He would never know who were his real parents. This pained him a lot.
Only a son would take away that pain. In the beginning of their marriage, he had longingly waited for the day Natiehi would give birth to a son. She gave birth to a daughter and decided to stop teaching so as to be a full-time mother. The second born will be a boy, he had hoped.
When she fell pregnant, he decided to go to a male fertility clinic. After several tests he was told his right testicle was comatose. Worse, he was told he could never impregnate a woman to give birth to a male child. After going home he was totally depressed. He felt like a man trapped in a horribly dark hole of life without a beginning but only a definite end – an extremely awful death. He turned wild and never told his wife why. The very day he raped Natiehi repeatedly. After raping her for more than one hour in the most beastly way, he repeatedly hit her stomach with his clenched fists. A few minutes later Natiehi had a miscarriage.
He never shared the secret about his faulty manhood with anyone.
“Woman, you are back,” he told her. He had not seen her for more than four months. He told her how beautiful she had become and ordered her to get to the bedroom. He removed her clothes, raped her as usual and then beat her up.
“Nothing has changed,” he told her.
“My husband, I love you. I beg you don’t beat me again. I will do all what you want me to do, I will make you happy…”
“Make me happy, are you God? If you don’t enjoy my beating you wouldn’t have come back. You belong to me. Your life is in my hands. I will always do what I want to do with you.” The woman sat down on the bed pensively.
Her head had been hit very hard. It was aching madly. Looking in the horizons she fell off the bed. The man told her to wake up some hours later and fix his supper. She just stared at him blankly. He hit her on the head with a hard fist blow. She did not respond in any way.
Quivering in fear, he thought she was dead. He felt her pulse. The woman was alive. That night he did not touch her. In the morning he saw the woman had not changed position. She had soiled her clothes. Her eyes were wide open but not blinking. He stared at her for sometimes then, left for school.
Martin came to check on her. He was shocked to see her passed out. He quickly took her back to the hospital. He waited for two hours as doctors did the necessary tests on her. Finally, the lead doctor told him, his sister had suffered a massive stroke. The rest of her life she was going to be a cabbage. Martin walked out of the hospital room without a word.
He drove to the nearest police station. Luckily enough, he got the policewoman who had tried to convince his sister to leave the brutal husband.
“Please. Take me to that brute. I want to have a talk with him. If he ever beats up my sister again I will kill him with my own hands. You must arrest him also…” Martin told the policewoman. Together they reached the school the man was teaching. Martin could not hold his rage when he saw him in front of a classroom teaching. He got inside and started beating him.
“You have killed my sister,” he told him as he tore through his body with hard punches.
Students hated the man so much; they joined Martin in the fracas. They took him out in the field and stoned him. The policewoman was powerless and could not stop the mad crowd. The man died out in a hail of stones. After investigation, the state under the urge of the policewoman who had witnessed the whole saga preferred no charges against Martin and the students.
He had dispossessed his adopted father daughters’ of all their inherited properties. A primary court rule ensured they got everything back. As for his body the state was forced to bury it as nobody laid any claim to it. Natiehi, sadly never recovered from the stroke and she had to be cared for like a toddler the rest of her life.
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