Dust (10 page)

A voice rumbles, “Afternoon!” With his hand out: “Isaiah William Bolton. I do apologize for showing up like this.” He clasps Nyipir’s hand, frowns. “Are you Moses?” He had imagined Moses Oganda to be much younger.

Nyipir stiffens, pulls his hand away, and takes a step backward, then another. He lifts and clings to his herding stick, plants it between them, and demands, “Your name?”

“Isaiah. Isaiah Bolton.”

Two steps back. “Who?”

Slowly, “Bolton.”

Nyipir’s side wind. “Bolton?”

“Yes.”

Ajany leaps up just as Nyipir zigzags away. “We can’t help you,” he shouts. He bumps into Ajany on his way to anywhere else, camouflaging his flight. “The camels.” He hesitates. “That man … there’s nothing here for him. Tell him to go away.”

Ajany approaches Isaiah, shading her eyes.

The light of the land emphasizes the jagged outline of his face, prominent jaw, symmetry of bones, shape of hazel-tinted eyes, and broad forehead. Gray-and-black hair flecks on powerful arms. He does not look like one who had come hunting for meaning among large East African creatures, nor does he have the messianic glint-in-eyes of “Love Africa” types. Does his haversack contain a problem—the “Mission Statement”? Was he a borehole builder? A poverty eradicator? Yet his look was desolate and distant, with a slight twist of distaste around his mouth. As if he would rather be elsewhere. Enshrouded in the mood of that day, she wants to paint him: movement of space around and about him, presence, hard restlessness, shades of sadness. The man and Odidi share height, broad-chested, muscled, towering maleness framed by a hauteur that is detached from and laughing at the world. Ajany squelches a fleeting urge to tug at the stranger’s face muscles. An old habit: it is how she built her knowledge of the shape and texture of faces, which she used to color in shadows that were the frame of a half-finished sculpture now abandoned in her Brazilian studio.

Annoyance.

Ajany chews on her fingernail.
What face was she cursed to seek and never find?
A breeze. She sniffed at the odour of stale cow emanating from the man and scowled.
What did he want?

The wind tosses dust around.

Isaiah swats an armada of flies with big, impatient hands, flapping them like bat wings. He slaps dead some that had landed on his mouth. His mouth bleeds. Ajany’s lips tremble on an almost laugh.

Isaiah hunches. He wipes his forehead.
This woman’s stillness perturbs
, he thinks. And the afternoon of this land is much too hot, much too orange. And his thirst has reached such depths of concentrated anguish that even his eyelids ache.
Who is she?
Smallish, curved in the right places, barefoot, dust on shins and ankles, good legs. But under her scrutiny, he feels like a new and sentient specimen. He finds her gaze, an effort, and is transfixed by large, slanted, oval-shaped eyes
from which wary questions spark. Hers is one of those faces made to be glimpsed through darkened windows on eerie stormy nights. She’s looking into his soul.

Inner shutters come down. He blinks and gestures. “What d-do you want?” he hears her ask, notes her stutter.

Isaiah lifts the coat from his head, noticing the part of the sleeve torn by a wait-a-bit bush. Isaiah picks at the thorns. A low-pitched rasp: “Did I offend him?” He shifts. “Unintentional. Really sorry.” Heat-tender skin. He needs to sit. Needs to sleep. Needs a pond to drink down. Had walked more than seventy kilometers. Had underestimated what “near Wuoth Ogik” meant.

He asks Ajany, “Am I at Wot Ogyek?”

“Wuoth Ogik,” Ajany corrects. “Who’s asking?”

“Isaiah William Bolton. Moses is expecting me.”

Rattle of secrets.

A name—
Bolton
. One of the many faces of the Gerasene demoniac, icon of the living dead. With tightness in her chest, Ajany will try to hasten Isaiah’s departure. “Moses isn’t here.”

“What? Oh dear!” Isaiah exhales, wipes his forehead again. “Where is he?”

She says, “You must leave. Before dark.”

A crack in his voice. “
Uh
 … no, please. Water? Please.” His eyes are dark with panic. “Please?” Softer-voiced.

Ajany hesitates before aiming for the water pump.

Isaiah walks a few steps behind her, stuffs his jacket into the haversack, and sniffs at the whiff of decay around the decrepit courtyard. Stomach rumble. He had shared three tins of truly awful corned beef and fermenting milk on the lorry, and left behind scissors, a shaving kit, and the remains of his expensive cell phone, which had tumbled out of his pocket and been lost between the hooves of thirty-five humped cattle. He had downed condensed milk on his long walk to Wuoth Ogik, while inside his bag some yellow curry powder and spices moldered. And all the time he traversed the arid district he hallucinated water, pure water, stream water, tap water, rainwater, bottled water, Evian water. Any water.

Ajany now draws water with a calabash. Isaiah licks his dry lips. She offers him the bowl and he quaffs down its contents.

“Ahh!”
He groans. He can now hear cadences of winds, endlessness of space, changelessness. Infinitesimal beingness. He had never heard anything like this wind before.

The woman says, “Now you can leave.”

He asks, “Where’s Moses?”

“You must go.”

“Where’s Moses?”

“Gone.”

“Where?”

Her intense gaze, craters inside her eyes. She could be half wraith.

She says, “Leave before dark.” A tinge of threat.

Despair in spite of himself: “I’ve come such a long way.” He touches her forearm. “Please.”

When she lifts her eyes to meet his, he finds the details he had missed before: redness of eyes, puffy, damp face, the thick aura of sadness, an edge as if she did not give a damn.

“You friends?” she asks.

A whisper, “Friends?”

“Moses?”

“We’ve been in touch for a while.” He hands over the calabash. “Shared interest in my father, Hugh Bolton … and”—an expansive hand gesture—“Wot Ogyek.”

“Wuoth Ogik.” Her hands flutter.

“Moses said I would find what I needed here.” Isaiah rests his hands over his chest. “Here I am. To see Moses.” A pause. He leans forward. “I’ve been looking for my father for a long, long time.”

A migrating bird’s glissando—they angle their heads at the same time to listen. Ajany hesitates. And then she moves her body the better to point out a coffin resting under a green tarpaulin. Isaiah follows her look.

He will forever remember the texture of the wind at that moment, how it was a witness. He will remember how he stopped breathing. He will remember the flavor of sorrow blended with fear against the backdrop of pale bonsai thornbushes, sand, a doum-palm tree, Bayonet aloes, cacti, fleshy giant milkweed, myriad acacia sentinels rooted in loam, sand, and lava. He will remember that the singing bird stopped mid-reprise.

Incense drifting.

By the time he was touching the coffin, all color had drained from his face. He knew better than to speak.

He is bending over the box, hand on lid, lines written into his face. Time shifts, a chain of moments leading him across thresholds. An intrusive urge moves his hand. He watches himself raise the coffin’s lid to look.
Moses
. A stiff, graying clay man, stained cotton in his nostrils, an olive safari-suit collar beneath a yellow-and-red blanket that covers him as if he were merely asleep. Last mood recorded in eyebrows that point in different directions; the left one, slightly raised, conveys last-second amusement. A man about his age.

He lowers the lid, not able to look at Ajany.

An impatient long-bodied creature whirrs between them.

A loud thought: “What do I do now?”

Ajany shrugs her
Don’t know, don’t care
. Her head throbs. Nose aches.
Bleeding?
Wanting relief from persistent and invading ghouls, she looks above Isaiah’s head, registers the place of red caves and labyrinthine secrets. Drained, she stutters, “You leave b-before it gets dark. Not safe here.” She hugs her body.

“You are Moses’s …?” Isaiah tugs at his brows.

“Sister.” She anticipates his next question. “Arabel Ajany Oganda. I’ll point a way to the next town.” The insect departs.

“Moses wrote to me. Told me to come to Wot Ogyek.” Isaiah moves close to Ajany.

Ajany looks back at her brother’s box.

Isaiah touches her wrist. “Sorry.”

Ajany lowers her hands, her armpits drenched, wanting a dark hiding place where she can bleed unseen. Her nose tickles. If she sneezes, the bleeding will start. She looks to the ground.

Isaiah reaches for his haversack, unzips a pocket. Next to a battered-looking camera, he pulls out Odidi’s
Engineer’s Field Guide
book, taken from Wuoth Ogik’s library. Ajany already knows the first blank page has a name inked in:
Hugh Bolton
. Isaiah opens the book to the page and shows it to her. “Moses sent me this.”

Ajany takes the thick, musty book and lifts it to her nose, waiting for the fragrance of Odidi.

A cheerless recognition:
the same ghost that haunted her had taunted Odidi
. “How did my brother find you?” she asks.

Isaiah wipes sweat from his face. “Three times a year, every year for the past five years, I’ve posted a request for information in East African newspapers. Moses was also looking, as it turns out. Over two years ago, I received a postcard asking for an address to which he could send a parcel that would be of interest to me.”

Ajany inclines her head, listens. “The package came: this book.” Isaiah takes the book from Ajany. He browses the pages. “The sight of my father’s name in his handwriting …” His voice breaks. “Here—my father.” From out of his black wallet he pulls a sepia-stained black-and-white square of an ascetic-looking man with smallish eyes, neat hair, and a fine mustache.

“Also, found this inside the book that Moses sent.”

This
. A seven-by-eight-centimeter, oversized bookmark, canvas material with an image.

Ajany takes it.

Reads the neat script—
Finn diri
—beneath a watercolor of a nude woman whose eyes glower. The woman, not just naked, exposed, raw to the soul. Intricate body scars jump off the small canvas. Languid. Indolent. Poured out woman. Etched into it, sorrow, hunger, beauty, anguish, worship, and defiance. One hand on her knees, the other beneath her head; something arcane suggested in the fecund, swollen belly. Details—a beaded wrist bracelet.
This is a soul
. Worlds slipping, a giddy wondering. Ajany glares at the artist’s signature:
H. Bolton
.

The bookmark is clammy in Ajany’s hands.

She averts her face, moves toward her brother to shield him and to conceal herself. She places her head against the coffin lid, striking it. Suffers the throb. Fatigue and dread compete. She scrutinizes the bookmark again.

To scare them, Galgalu had threatened her and Odidi with a ritual of malice, which he said vacuumed the essence of a person’s life through a circle of fire. Its potency slithered out of a seductive song that lured the target’s soul into a confined aperture where it becomes perpetually entranced by the song keeper. Right now, if she knew any such song, she would sing it to own the soul of the artist who blended shades of black with velvety violet strokes, infused with red and spots of gold-yellow, and touched them so that a woman’s life was incarnated on a page. She would sing the song to consume what she had just seen and disintegrate what she now knew. Quivers start inside her stomach. Heart palpitations. Breathing is an effort. Here, now, is the tune of underworld
streams feeding murky marshes. Ajany studies the woman. An overwhelming tension eats into her, then leaves in a burst of light. She sees why Odidi had fled Wuoth Ogik’s enchantment with silence. Silence would never explain why and how Akai Lokorijom, their mother, came to be the naked, potent, pregnant subject of Hugh Bolton’s art.

Cicadas and beetles chirp night into being. Ajany crushes the bookmark, fingers cutting into her palm. Ten meters away, Galgalu limps in with two lanterns, dried meat, and two metal jugs of sour milk.

Isaiah watches Ajany’s approach, tries to forestall her demand that he leave. “I was hoping to be able to …”

Ajany touches his right hand, at his wrist. Soft-voiced, she says, “Why don’t you c-come into the house?” A pause. “Wash up, eat, there’s a room upstairs where you can sleep. You’ll find more of your father’s books there.”

Isaiah focuses on the warmth of her hand, her delicate touch on his pulse, embracing words. He almost smiles, is closer to tears of relief. He is unaware that a family’s citadel woven from infinite secrets has just been breached. He clears his throat and nods three times, clutching Ajany’s hand. He lets go.

The throbbing inside Ajany’s head ebbs.

6

AJANY COULD PAINT OVER THE SLICE OF CANVAS, COLOR OUT
her mother. She chooses, instead, to bring the image into Nyipir’s dimly lit arena. She lifts the
boma
’s thorn fence where Nyipir sits against his red dance-ox next to a small fire, propping up his head. The animal chews its cud. Nyipir inclines his head toward a teensy sound emerging from his medium-sized transistor radio. From time to time a phrase is strangled out. Piecemeal news. Ajany has carried a red blanket for him. She drops it around his shoulders.

“Ah!” he says, huddles into it.

Ajany says, “B-baba?”

“Mhh?”

A geyser of questions, a rushed tone. “His name’s Isaiah Bolton.… His father …”

“I know,” says Nyipir; he rubs his head and slouches.

Ajany crouches.

Nyipir indicates the radio. “Down-country, they’re chasing people from their homes. The ones who stay are being cut up and burned.”

No logic. Her mind grasps nothing. Her heart lurches.

Tears crease Nyipir’s face. His left hand hides them. “
Wuod
Annan is here—listen—to help us.”

The radio spews static. Ajany strains to listen, draws her knees up. She hears minuscule sounds: the radio, her father, jumbled thoughts, the silent night. Perverse desolation. She shudders. More ghosts circling. Static. Kofi Annan’s voice weaving through in words that don’t connect:
Parties … eminent persons … bloodshed … peace … violence … Peace … spoken … Honorable gentlemen … war … tribal … politics …