Dust (11 page)

Nyipir says, voice crackling, “They know when a body is cooling.”

“Who?”

“Vultures.”

Within a dark nook in Nyipir’s heart, a long-ago man whispers, “By the time I’m done with you, you’ll become another. You’ll become mad. To live.” Nyipir shivers.

“Vultures.” Nyipir wipes his face with the blanket. “Baba?” Nyipir hears Ajany. He resurfaces. Stars fill the sky, maize meal white against dark violet.

Ajany asks, “Who’s Hugh Bolton? His books are in the house.”

Nyipir hesitates. Then, “We worked together long ago. Police.”

“The photograph …” she says, remembering the picture of Baba in uniform carrying the Kenyan flag, riding on a black horse.

“No, before.” Baba tilts his head back. “We shared … 
trouble
.”

Fireflies land on memories. Images. Baba coming home from secret journeys, bearing gifts of livestock and assorted weapons like a fourth magus. Ritual display of changes in gun sizes, shapes, and weights. Concealment before sales. Plots and plans. Progression into steelier glints, smoother mechanisms. Smaller, lighter, more compact, faster off the mark, with and without silencers.

“Trouble?”

Baba’s voice is as parched as the Chalbi Desert. “The thing … Mau Mau …”

Ajany shifts, brows puckering.
What?

Creaky-voiced:
“And if I should speak, may the oath kill me.…”

“What?” she asks again.

Silence’s oaths, slow-dripping venom with their seductive promise of memory loss. Erasure of secrets, as long as the oath was fed in intermittent seasons with spilled human blood. “Ahhh! We bury evil with covenants of silence.” Nyipir says, “For the good of the country.” He explains, “We know,
nyara
, that to name the unnameable is a curse.”

Ajany hears his words, the spoken ones, those unspoken.

Nyipir adds, fingers gesturing, “Even if you plant another story into silence, see, the buried thing returns to ask for its blood from the living.” Nyipir’s laugh is short and dry. “Death does not keep its secrets well.”

Ajany rubs her eyes. When she had left Kenya, she had imagined an amputation from its riptide of murky things. But here they were again, expecting her reply. What was she now supposed to be? A memory. Odidi scaring her with stories of misshapen demons jealous of humanity that invade the earth scouring for human spare parts to use to replace their defects. Obarogo shopping for little girls’ eyes. She could paint this darkness and ogres emerging from petrified silence as she and Baba waded across swamps between life and the underworld.

Dung and heat; heady rain-on-earth tang.

Next to them, the red dance-ox grunts.

Nyipir’s silences have summoned the Forgotten. He wrestles, but in spite of his contortions, the Forgotten frog-march him into a lake of histories to retrieve rotting stories. “
They’ll
return.” Nyipir supports his head with shaking hands; fingers shield his eyes.

“Who?” she asks, smelling Nyipir’s anguish.

“Aloys, Tom. Aloys and Tom.” Then he pleads, “Others are voiceless.”

Ajany picks a ghost: “Hugh Bolton?”

Nyipir gurgles.

“Bolton?” she repeats.

Nyipir is brusque. “I was going to Burma. Then I met him.”

Ajany draws circles into the ground with fingers. “What’s in Burma?”

Soft-voiced: “Our people. Went for King George’s war. Didn’t come back.”

Ajany draws lines. Listens.

“Was bringing them home.” Nyipir wipes his eyes.

Ajany scans black spaces between stars. She finds Kormamaddo, the bull camel of the waters, Odidi’s sky marker. “Myanmar,” she mutters.

“Mhh?”

“Burma is Myanmar.”

“
Myanmar
,” Baba says. “Mandalay, 21° 59′ N 96° 6′ E, Rangoon, 16° 47′ N 96° 9′ E.”

From the sky, Kormamaddo looks down on them.

“Yangon,” she adds.

“Who?”

“Rangoon is now Yangon.”

Nyipir sighs.

He asks, “This Isaiah … he’s gone?”

Ajany says, “No.”

“Tomorrow?”

She shakes her head.

“Where is he?”

“The house.”

A high-octave pitch. “
My
house?”

Ajany is curt: “Odidi’s guest.”

Nyipir exhales, a whistling sound.

Ajany continues, “Odidi was coming here to meet him.…” A pause. “Odidi was coming home.”

Nyipir breathes into fresh tears.
Rhhhhhhh
.

An aging man dreams what could have been the right end of a broken-off conversation:

Where’s my son, my boy?

Here. Here he is
.

Baba
.

In dreams.

Odidi had wanted to subvert Nyipir’s hopes for his destiny. He had succeeded. Yet Odidi had been coming home. Nyipir no longer hears BBC’s World Service struggling through static to reach him. His son
had
come home.

Then.

Odidi’s absence seizes them both like an unconfessable sin. They peer through a night steeped in other silences. The unraveling.

Ajany opens her mouth to ask,
Why is my brother dead?
Nyipir opens his to beg her to leave the past behind.

They shut their mouths and eyes.

Then.

Nyipir tells Ajany, “Akai-ma must be on her way home. She’ll wonder where we are.”

They rise.

Nyipir says, “He must go.”

“Who?”

“
Musungu cha
. Give him water, make him go.”

“Baba,” she replies, “Isaiah … he’s come with … Odidi gave him
things. Books … and
this
 …” She lifts the small canvas rectangle to Nyipir’s face. “Akai-ma.”

Nyipir becomes a wooden monolith.

He does not touch the piece.

He lurches away, minuet in movement, holding himself intact, leaving Ajany behind. Nyipir hums,
“Par Oganda odong nono.”
Sounds as if cawing crows are trapped inside him: “There’s nothing left of Oganda’s home.”

The canvas is damp in her hand. She stuffs it into her skirt pocket. She hurries to keep up with Nyipir, deluged with the fear of being left alone. Nose tickle. Fire in lungs. She spits. Wants to apologize for Odidi’s absence, for still living, for Akai-ma’s nakedness on a piece of canvas.

They approach the house and discover two things:

Akai-ma has not come home.

Odidi has not returned from the dead.

“Par Oganda odong nono.…”
Nyipir hums to an emptiness that stretches even further out.

“Baba,”
Ajany groans.

Par Oganda odong nono
.…

“Why d-did my brother die?”

Nyipir halts. Then a staccato answer: “Police.”
Let it suffice
.

But he speaks to dark-violet skies. “I begged them, knelt down. Searched for him. Begged them to save my child.”

Ajany would now haul back every question if she could. Bulldoze guilt, shame, and the loneliness made out of a father crying out for his son’s return. Sorrow is admitting to a mother’s loathing for one’s existence. Terror is the knowledge that a persistent phone call could have saved an only brother’s life. Horror is a vision of blood on her hands. Powerlessness is hearing a father’s deep voice become a wail. One question crosses wires with another so that from out of her memory a deliberately suppressed phantom now bounds into Wuoth Ogik.

It is a musician from Salvador de Bahia, and his spectre looms in her mind, and plunders her soul again. What had she done? The echo of a howl, the vision of blood spurting from a jagged wound on the same date as that which was scrawled on a brother’s death certificate. In seeing, inside Ajany, something at last detonates.

There is a minuscule space into which sanity may slip without turning into chaos, an intimate line that should not be crossed by unbearable memory. At last, she is stumbling down cliffs. Mind is black, body melts into massive silent waterfalls that cascade into endless chasms, falling and falling. Her spirit whispers to her soul that Ajany is now dead.

Isaiah had paused outside the house to watch the coral tints that darkened as the light’s mood shifted. Colored tiles, mostly brown. Walls of termite-mound soil, wood mixed with crushed coral. He had wandered into the house and strolled through its two levels. He lay on the floor, the better to appreciate the high roof that nestled on broad, rough wooden beams. He imagined that the style was a paring down of a Kenyan bush aesthetic—made of a palette of colors from the stark landscape. There were glimpses of outside vastness wherever he stood, startling portals designed to sneak the landscape in. He had shut his eyes before one such entryway, and four shrieking winds emerged in a resonant cascade. The house paid homage to water.

Now a fly weaves in between fault-lined pillars. Isaiah’s eyes follow the insect as it navigates wall fissures that start at the base of the house and disappear into eaves. The house creaks. Musk of neglect, and something else—as if the inhabitants whose memories drenched the walls had lived their lives within the house, but not
in
the house, and the house had never participated in the ebb and flow of their existence.

Isaiah finds a place for himself in the library, to which he has been directed. He stops before the shelf filled with his father’s books. He turns, sits on a dust-dotted sisal mat, and draws up his knees. He invokes his mother, Selene.
I’m here
.

Nobody sees his tears.

Later, he would browse through book pages, count the number of times
Hugh Bolton
was written into the first leaf: sixty-one. Trace
squiggles in margins, mountains, water, trees, and stick figures, feeling for messages, imagining warmth. He has brought books to his nose and thought he detected a whiff of old cigar smoke. Brushing fingers on black fountain-pen strokes, lingering on a twisted old-fashioned “g,” imagining that he was touching his father’s hand.

7

OUTSIDE, DAY BECOMES NIGHT. INSIDE HER DREAMING, ODIDI
and Ajany run from the red cave and its skeleton that oozes resentment. They scamper over large black, red, and brown rocks and spill over spidery, sandy trails, a camel track. Tear through small thornbushes that grab at and leave blood stripes on their bodies, cross a damp
laga
, past a Morengo and Mareer tree, through an abandoned cattle
boma
, and crash into flowering acacia thickets, from where they can hear Kalacha springs murmur, the prattle of buffalo weavers and golden pipits.

The shadow of Wuoth Ogik.

Line of blood on Odidi’s face.

Ajany spits on her hands and wipes Odidi’s forehead where blood has clotted. Odidi winces. “Sorry, Odi.”

He pulls at her hair. “Is it showing?”

Ajany nods. “Sorry, Odi.”

“We say a wait-a-bit branch got me, OK?”

Ajany asks, “We pray?”

Odidi pinches her arm. “Silly!”

She sobs, “Where’s Obarogo’s face?”

Odidi’s fingers nip her upper arm. “Shhh.”

A falsetto trill seduces cows and camels to water. Water songs.

“Sprinkled life

Unshackle journeys
,

Respite. Rest
.

Drink-Drink, flat-footed, sand-dreamer.…”

The two children wait for after dusk, when lanterns are lit. They tremble with the wind. The night is as jumpy as they are.

Odidi’s voice is slow and solemn: “Never, never, never shall we talk about this, never to remember the cave. We forget, and if we tell, the earth must gobble us up. Swear?”

Fear inserted itself between them.

It breathed.

It was in Odidi’s hiss, “You must
swear
.” Grabbing earth: “Hold this soil.”

The oath inflamed Ajany’s little throat, and she choked.

“Why m-me?”

“ ’Cause you’re a cry-dudu-water-mouth silly.”

“Not.”

“You scare easy.”

“Don’t.”

“So?”

With watery eyes, Ajany ground out the words “I swear,” clinging to the dirt, and something elemental inside her flowed away, just like the soil she held in her hands.

The woman glided toward the gate. Her AK-47 pointing downward. Not threat—vigilance. A sunset silhouette. Akai-ma. Baba was not home.

Two pairs of eyes followed Akai-ma as she inspected the patterns of the land, looking for something.

Ajany clutched her brother.

Her stammer worsened in Akai’s presence: Akai-ma’s all-seeing eyes, a temper distilled into condensed, burning, tearing words with the impact of a curse.

“Odi, I’m afraid.”

Ajany felt herself to be a shadow that flickered at the edge of her mother’s gaze. It was rare for her mother to call her by her name.
“That One!”
Akai-ma might yell until Ajany emerged, already protecting herself from physical blows that were implied but never came.

Odidi said, “We go. I talk, you shut up.” Which was the normal way of things between them. “And stop shivering,
idjut
!”

Sniffle
.

Odidi’s harsh whisper, “Silly
dudu
. Can’t take you Far Away if you cry. Such a baby.”