Something Small at Counter Six

By eight in the morning the matatus are already blaring music down the avenue, and the queue outside the records office stretches past the security desk and down the steps. Inside, the ceiling fans turn slowly over rows of steel cabinets. Paper files, tied with string, are stacked on every desk. Wanjiru sits at counter six with a mug of chai and a stamp.

She has worked here nine years. She processes certificates and searches. Most people in the queue have been waiting weeks. Some have travelled from far away. An elderly man from Murang'a has come three times about his late brother's papers.

Just before lunch, a well-dressed man in a grey suit leans on her counter. He is friendly. He calls her “Madam” and asks after her family. He needs a file processed today, not in six weeks. He slides a brown envelope halfway under the glass. “Kitu kidogo,” he says, smiling. Something small. For your tea.

Wanjiru does not touch it. But she does not push it back at once, either. Her rent went up in January. Her son's secondary school fees are due. The envelope is thick. Her colleague at counter five has a new car, and everybody knows how. The man sees her hesitate and smiles a little wider. “Nobody loses,” he says.

But somebody does lose. She knows exactly who. If his file goes to the top, the old man from Murang'a goes further down. So does the widow from Kitengela who came on Monday. That is how the queue works. Every envelope moves someone else back.

She thinks of a verse from Exodus that her father, a schoolteacher, made her copy out when she got this job. He wrote it on a card and put it in her first salary envelope, of all places. “Thou shalt take no gift: for the gift blindeth the wise, and perverteth the words of the righteous.” It blinds the wise. It does not only buy a favour. It changes how you see. After the first envelope, the queue stops looking like people.

Wanjiru pushes the envelope back under the glass. She keeps her voice polite. “Your file is in the queue, sir. It will be done in its turn.” The man's smile disappears. He says something unpleasant under his breath and leaves. Counter five watches her and shakes his head.

That afternoon she finds the old man's file from Murang'a. It is complete. It has simply been waiting. She processes it, stamps it, and calls his name. He takes the certificate in both hands and thanks her three times.

There is no reward for this. The rent is still higher. She has had to find the school fees through a chama, her savings group. The man in the grey suit has, she hears, found another counter. Some weeks her honesty feels like the only one in the building, and that is lonely.

But Micah's words also hang on her office wall now, beside her father's card: do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with your God. Every day at counter six she does a small, unseen kind of justice. The queue moves in its turn. And she can still see the faces in it.