Dust (7 page)

Until, that soft dusk of December 12, 1963, when, down in the city, a doleful officer unwrapped the last Union Jack that would ever soar over Kenya, Galgalu stumbled in front of a coral-hued edifice. Wuoth Ogik. A brown-and-black-patched cattle dog that had a lot of hyena in its ancestry had appeared and wagged its tail at him. Galgalu stroked its head. It licked his hand. He would learn that its name was Kulal, after the cherished mountain. By the time he saw the tall, dark, long-limbed spirit flowing toward him, its arms swinging in wide swoops, he was ready to die.
Ekhaara
. A roaming spirit. It carried a headrest and club—things men carried—and a gourd of sour milk, herbs, and grasses. Its feet were dusty in
akala
tire sandals. It had hitched its sarong up on its thighs. Its eyes took in everything. Raro Galgalu had closed his eyes.

Woitogoi!
Akai Lokorijom exclaimed when she saw him.

She reached for him.

The dog whined.

Galgalu quivered.

Akai stroked his head. “
Woitogoi!
You’re a bone, small boy!” She had clucked. “Your name?” She giggled.

He had wanted to laugh with her. Instead, he wailed, because he understood he might live after all.

Galgalu tells Ajany, “Always, she comes back home.”

“We didn’t catch her shadow,” Ajany replies in between hiccups.

“No,” he agrees.

When Ajany and Odidi were children, Galgalu would scoop the soil where their daylight shadows fell and cast the dirt into holes where dusk shadows gathered, so the departing sun would take with it any evil that had threatened them. Galgalu had tried to scrape the earth under Akai-ma’s shadow, to try to exorcise those ghosts that made her wander. Ajany and Odidi had colluded with him by trying to make their mother stand still. They always failed. As long as there was sun, Akai jumped from place to place.

Footsteps.

Nyipir hobbles to join them, blinking at the track.

Speaking to Ajany: “Mama … she … um …” Nyipir’s voice cracks. “She’s happy you’re here. Just …” He waves in the direction of the coffin.

Ajany nods.

He says, “I tried to … but Odidi … um.”

Ajany nods again.

There is something unnamed and shameful about loneliness created out of rejection. Ajany takes refuge in stillness.

Nyipir says, “Once, when I was a boy, a leopard used to escort me home.”

Galgalu and Ajany have heard the story before.

Nyipir continues: “A black leopard used to weave in and out of the shrubs, and his body contained all the nights of the earth. His eyes were made of stars.”

“D-did he make a noise?” Ajany asks, as she did when she was ten years old and scared of night.

“Footsteps like silence. When I reached home, the leopard left.” A brittle note. “Don’t ever call out a leopard’s name. Say
gini
, ‘this thing,’ or
gicha
, ‘that thing.’
Kwach, no!
”

Kwach
.

Ajany squelches the word on her tongue. The temptation to howl it hurtles around her skull. She presses down on the need, suffocates it with memory.

One evening, long ago, Nyipir had found Ajany sitting inside the broken courtyard fountain, waiting for him. She had asked, “Baba, did
gicha
come?”

“No. Not today,” he replied.

Years later, after Ajany had left Wuoth Ogik and Kenya, she suddenly understood that Nyipir’s stories about the black leopard’s visits coincided with the seasons of Akai’s disappearances.

Now.

Ajany says, “We forgot Odidi’s flowers.”

Nyipir answers, “Oh!”

Three people listen to four winds creeping through rattling doum palms. Winds cover the car’s tracks, sprinkling dust over them. They race southward, to the part of the nation where unsettled ghosts have set the land afire and a gang of men are howling and dancing down a city street, dangling a man’s cut-off head. The dead man’s fingers, with their stained voter’s mark, are scattered around his new blue bicycle, next to his national identity card.

3

TODAY IS THE DAY AFTER LAST NIGHT. THE SUN
’
S FIRST RAYS
strike a mosaic on a covered courtyard to the left of a dried-up water fountain. Dry thunder in this pink morning. Ajany hears sporadic bird twitters interfering with a stillness that scowls like the broody spirit of Genesis. In the dust, skid marks. Footprints. Tire trails. Pathways. Watching over her big brother, listening, feeling that any second he will tell her what she needs to know, how she must move, where she is, and what she must do.

She had told yesterday’s mortuary attendant, with his rotten-egg breath and the impatient light in his eyes—a condensation of lessons learned—
This is my brother
.

The man had answered, “Hii
ni kitendawili ya mungu
.”

God’s riddle.

Ajany had retched. The attendant had poked her right shoulder.
“Wewe uliyempenda maishani yake utapenda pia kifo chake?”
—You who love his life, can you also love his death?

Blood flakes beneath her nostrils; Ajany’s fingers twist her hair into thin braids.
This is my brother
. Today is the day after last night.

Her nose had started to bleed the moment she recognized Odidi’s form. The heavyset pathologist, Dr. Mda, had after a minute pulled her aside and applied small portions of white cotton to her nose. “Lower your head.” He had said, “Do you know what ‘autopsy’ means?”
Ontopsy
, Dr. Mda pronounced it, shifting vowels and consonants, introducing new sounds so that his cadence gave warmth to words and suggested uncomplicated worlds.

Ajany listened.

“ ‘Ontopsy’ means ‘see for yourself.’ ” He cleaned her nose. “That’s what we’ll do.”

Today, the day after last night. Ajany watches over her brother. She also draws lines on the earth. In order to see, she sketches.

In dust, an outline, a grooved, leaf-shaped scar. “Every crevice contains a story. Every story points north,” Galgalu always says. Odidi repeated this to her when he was telling her how to find a way home.

The scar.

Odidi had fallen on his head. It had been her fault. Ajany was in Standard Six, being molded into a hockey-playing, ethical “future leader.” Her tormentor, Ganda, who for the most part regarded her as unworthy of his bullying talent, had, while imitating Ajany’s stutter, told his posse that people from northern Kenya could not climb trees because they had no trees to climb. As his acolytes cackled dutifully, Ajany’s body moved of its own volition and shimmied to the top of the school’s grandest mvule tree.

Easy to climb: feet into furrows, up, up, up, and the next time she looked down, her nemeses were minuscule punctuation marks below. The distance between high up, where she was, and down, where she ought to be, led to her decision to live the rest of her life in the tree.

Could have been an hour, could have been more. A chubby member of Ganda’s gang who quietly idolized Odidi, then a rising rugby star, latched on to an excuse to speak to his hero, a need greater than loyalty to the gang. Scuffing his heels, he stood outside the Form One classroom, waiting for the bell to ring the end of the day’s lessons.

He accosted Odidi, and garbled the news that Ajany was lost inside a very big tree.

Just as she was praying that it would be painless to turn into a branch, Ajany heard the sweetest voice on earth that day:

“Silly!” Odidi had called.

She wailed, “ ’Didi!”

Odidi reached her tree. “ ’Jany, come down. Are you Zaccheus?” Thinking that was especially funny, he screeched off-key, “
There was a man in Jericho called Zaccheus
 …”

A torrent from Ajany: “G-ganda-said-Turkana-people-d-don’t-climb-trees-and-th-then-I-climbed-and-then-he-left-and-th-then-I-was-afraid-and-th-then-you-came.”

“Come down.”

“Mppph.”

“What, silly?”

“C-can’t.”

“Whaat?”

Louder. “Am stuck.”

Odidi had bayed with laughter, rolling on the ground. A hyrax somewhere yowled, and in the distance another one answered. Ajany wept in gulps that should have dislodged her.

Odidi answered, “Ajany
yuak-yuak-yuak
.”

Hiccups from within the tree.

“ ’Didi, am stuck.” Ajany lisped.

“Try?” Odidi threw pebbles upward. An incentive.

Sobs.

Odidi hastened up the tree, no plan in mind. He got to Ajany, in the Y part of the tree, and sat next to her before hugging her. “Silly goat, I’m here.”

And he was.

After a minute, Odidi said, “OK, sit on my back—I’ll climb us down.”

A slow, sweaty descent. Eight meters from the base of the tree, Odidi miscalculated distances and fell to the ground with Ajany on his back. Rolling to protect her, he had split his forehead in the process. Ajany had used her maroon school sweater to stem the blood flow before racing like a spooked gazelle to get the school nurse, praying
Hail-Mary-full-of-grace-The-Lord-is-with-you
so that
OurHolyMotherMary
would let her die in Odidi’s place.

Today, the day after last night, begins with thunder but no rain. Last night three people raised a green tarpaulin over a casket in silence,
surrounded it with incense and water, and, five meters away, lit a fire that would witness this death. Last night Ajany had stripped the bed of Odidi’s blankets, carried down his pillow, lifted the coffin’s lid to tuck her brother in. She had wrapped her body against the desert cold and known she would not fall asleep. She had waited for Odidi to tug on the fragment of string around her body and tell her what to do, when to haul him in.

And today he had appeared when her eyes were closed.

Leaden footsteps.

She turns.

Baba. Nyipir. Hollow-eyed, a new tilt to his body, as if he is fighting gravity. A stone sculpture melting. In its searching eyes, white terror.

Re-entering a ceaseless day.

Meaninglessness is ash in Nyipir’s mouth. Swallowing saliva. Failing, falling, clutching at nothings. The compartments into which he parcels his life are broken and leaking. Swallowing, Nyipir stares at sunspots, the contained spaces occupied by pieces of light.

“Baba …” his daughter stammers.

He turns.

Father and daughter sit close to each other. Then Nyipir says, “I named him.” She leans forward. “Your brother,
Ebewesit
. Akai’s father—she expected that.
Oganda
so our name would outlive us.”

They wait.

They watch the day walk across their feet. And then it is three hours later and Galgalu is adding tinder to a wake’s fire made pale by daylight.

“We’ll build a cairn,” Nyipir suddenly says, rising and measuring the ground with his eyes. “Seven and a half meters across the base.” He picks up black, white, and brown stones, squeezes them in his hands. “A stone garden.” Dust strains through Nyipir’s fist.

Behind them, a white-fungus-infested chunk of their coral house collapses. The house’s water tank has tilted on its roost and yawned open; it is draining its contents through ceilings and down walls.

4

A CONVOLUTED SILENCE WARPS THE LANDSCAPE. NOTHING
seems stable, not even the aged acacias. Nyipir Oganda lifts the hoe way above his head, and when it falls it bounces off the ground with a
thwack
! A pause. The sunspots look the same as always. What Nyipir had not considered was the hardness of the ground. Or the fragmenting of hearts during a father-son wrestling match, or the pain of pleading, “Stay. I’m sorry.”

To protect new post-independence citizen children, parents like him repainted illusions of a “future Kenya,” while shouting out words of the national anthem as if volume alone would re-create reality.
Nyakua
. Mouths, ears, and eyes shut, parents partitioned sorrow, purchased more silences and waited for the “better Kenya” to turn up.

Nyipir’s daily covenants with silence had all of a sudden lost their weight. Today the voices of the dead-providing-their-own-witness take over his thoughts with a soundtrack—Babu Kabaselleh’s “Lek Wuonda,” to remind Nyipir that the dying started long ago. Before Pio, Tom, J.M., Argwings, before the red, black, green, and white flag fluttered one midnight in December.

Eeee … lek wuonda
. Deceived by dreams.

Nyipir pounds metal to dust, listening helplessly.

Thwack!
This is how to beat back seething phantoms.

Thwack!
Bury engulfing blackness and its music.

Thwack!
How to demand silence.

Aieee!

The usual breeze east of Badda Huri hums over the lava-sprinkled drylands of the Dida Galgalu Desert. Green and beige doum palms at the water point a kilometer away lean west, toward derelict Dida Gola.

Dust in his eyes, inward gaze. Inside Nyipir, secrets stir, and his mouth opens.
“Ona icembe riugi ni rituhaga,”
he croaks. Witness from fifty-year-old burial grounds.
“Ona icembe riugi ni rituhaga.”
Nyipir scrambles for silence.
Ona icembe riugi ni rituhaga
—repetitive, loud-speaking thoughts.

Ajany hears Nyipir. Listens for more. Galgalu hears Nyipir. Knows he is crying. He wanders away, making lines on the earth with his herding stick.

Stillness. Then Nyipir speaks. “A man I knew used to say
Ona icembe riugi ni rituhaga
before we dug the graves.”

Ajany hears “
dug the graves
.”

Nyipir spits.

He hacks at the ground. Nothing more to add. Glut of shadows. Shadows of phantoms.

What endures?

A disappearing mother, heaving silences, and the desire to vomit out anguish. Head throbs, fists clench and unclench. Ajany teeters on the edges of inside fog. Liquid slides down her lips. Nosebleed, small tears.

She flees.

Dashes into the dimly lit interior of their splintering pink house that at night becomes a sparkle-crackle of parts being chomped down by unseen termites.