Dust (13 page)

He became
duddaani-nyaatte
, a desert peddler who carried goods on his back. His wanderings brought him a deep and wide relationship network. Because he listened, he discovered what people wanted to hear. He also had money to lend at exorbitant interest rates. Shamed borrowers sold him secrets for relief. One of them, a former Coptic priest, had given him nine formulae for blending coffee, nine secrets of intent that delivered the scent to nine places of the distressed soul. He also started to change and retell some of the stories he had heard on the radio. In time, people came to him to confirm or deny what they had heard in the news. He had already obtained four passports by then, two of which were Kenyan. He spoke all the tongues of the desert, mimicked accents and postures, dialogued in the gist of some European languages, including Croatian, adjusting words to suit his hearing, and adopted so many names that, except for him, almost everyone forgot he used to be Zaman Nawfal. Nyipir does not know he was Zaman Nawfal, and Nyipir knows most of everything in those northern lands.

He showed up at Wuoth Ogik that day on a Rendille camel bearing assorted goods, including a Chinese-made Uzi and a five-stringed Spanish guitar. Now his
thee-thee-thee-thee
jounces his shoulders. From time to time he tilts his head and nods as if picking up an old conversation from his radio, before returning to his audience. He tells his audience that a man from Ghana named Choffeur had sent another, named Kofi Annan, to save Kenya. Kofi had in turn invited “Haninant Parsons.”

Galgalu wonders, “So many to save a country—there must be something good here.”

“Thee-thee-thee-thee.”

Nyipir leans forward, “What news of Agwambo? Is he alive?”

The Trader lays out his paraphernalia and stops to tap his chin. “It is possible. Me, I only repeat what the radio says.”

Galgalu asks, “Chibaki—you know him?”

The Trader purses his lips, his eyes narrow. “I sold him two camels—no, no, three.”

“If a man knows camels, he must be agreeable,” Galgalu suggests.

The Trader nods. “But here is a question: are the camels still living?” The Trader sighs. “
Aieee!
Godless news.”

His audience waits.

“A fisherman left his home on the day after the counting. He went to Lake Naivasha. You know the one I mean? He left his wives—there were two, and eight children in their house. But when he was on the water, neighbors wrote out his name and those of his wives and children. Neighbors whom he brought fish. They wrote out his name and gave it to demons that came to seal his house, pour petrol, strike a match, and dance while the family inside died screaming. Those neighbors watched. They ate food.”

Red glow of desert light.

Silence made of revulsion.

Nyipir sits very still.

He has seen this before.

Touched it.

Hidden it.

His mind tumbles back to a different time, when brother, son, mother, father sealed family members in rooms and huts and set these alight in honor of covenants of terror that guaranteed silence:
If I speak, may the oath kill me
. Much later, the horror was painted over and replaced with myths of triumph, repeated, repeated again, then adorned in all
seasons of retelling. Nyipir waited for the inheritors of these silences to call out the names of their undead dead. Not a word. Now, fifty years later, the murdered were shrieking from earth tombs of enforced, timeless stillness, wailing for their forgotten, chopped-up lives. They seemed to accuse every citizen inheritors of their hemorrhaging. Nyipir shivers, chilled. He looks over his shoulder.

The Trader continues. “When those firestarters opened the door to see what they had done, the first one in witnessed the bursting open of the second wife’s womb. And the child leaned out to look at the man. It turned its head. It died.” The Trader says, “Now that one runs up and down looking for priests to cleanse him.”

“Who delivers men like those?” Galgalu covers his mouth.

A hum in his ears, Nyipir mutters a confession: “Long ago, I carried Kenya’s flag. It was not so heavy then.”

The Trader nods.

The Trader is a gatherer and carrier of stories. He collects secrets, a source of income, a pleasurable economy. He cannot endure not knowing. Every memory, even borrowed ones, are his. Sometimes he distributes these when he needs to, and always for a profit. The Trader trades in names, but never with his.

Misery had brought Nyipir to the Trader, in 1970. Over fourteen lucent nights, the Trader had sung soft songs to return the right rhythm to Nyipir’s heartbeat, and then convinced Nyipir’s soul to trust human life again, explaining that what had happened was not Nyipir’s fault. Afterward, the Trader had taken names Nyipir had known and written and made him recite these until they became soft to the taste, which meant that Nyipir was no longer indebted to the disappeared.

Later.

Nyipir declared, “I owe allegiance to no nation or people.”

The Trader had guffawed. “Now, brother, we are of the same race.”

Time.

The two men would end up trading in information as Nyipir expanded his gun-trading and cattle-rustling enterprises across the northern territories and into the Horn of Africa. Years later, the Trader
would help Nyipir dissolve his circuits and turn assets into cash and gems, after rogue politicians with private armies leapt into the game.

Nyipir owed the Trader one other valuable thing: his nonexistence. The Trader had arranged to purge references to Nyipir’s life from all official records. An uncommon debt, one of the Trader’s favorites. The Trader now faces Nyipir. “I’m sorry—your son.”

Nyipir nods.

“His life has changed.”

Nyipir nods.

“This road is a circle. We’ll meet again,” the Trader says.

Silences.

Isaiah stares at the man. He imagines a silenus with a face that might have been sketched by El Greco. Watches a set of skeletal fingers move, play with air, communicating story, implying conspiracies. He wonders why a guitar juts out of a gunnysack. Sees the man adjusts a blue-and-white kanga hovering around his waist. Isaiah reads the legend on the cloth:
Light of All Nations
.

The Trader shakes sand off his sandals. Stands, uses the moment to scrutinize those present. He regrets Odidi Oganda’s death. Knows he might have helped, had he known in time. God’s will.
Maybe
. He, too, has lost a son. Does not often think about it. Still, he can explain how the cosmos of grief is another land. It is territory he traverses in silence.

He sizes up the outsider. Watches agitated hands, and searching eyes that reveal the homesickness of eternal wanderers.
Bolton
. He maps Isaiah’s body. Reads strained muscles, a throbbing vein. Sadness etched into skin, hardness in downturn of eye and mouth. This man has seen death and lived, a good beginning. The Trader grins, adjusts his features, and reshapes his body to attract response. He sidles next to Isaiah. “Are you a vulture?”

Isaiah turns.

“I say!” the Trader says, a broadcaster’s voice, mocking Isaiah. “I say … you here to suckle our violence … you like?”

Isaiah’s hands rise. “Think what you want …”
Asshole
.

“Journalist, project manager, philanthropist, messiah, job seeker—which are you?”

Isaiah retreats to the far end of the fire, tenses.

A tap on his right shoulder.

Isaiah sighs.

The Trader says, “I sell secrets. I buy secrets.” He grins. “Which do you need?”

Sweat beads Isaiah’s forehead.

“A secret for a secret.”

Isaiah snaps, “Don’t have any. Don’t
need
any.”

The Trader tips forward. “Everyone has at least four secrets.”

“You don’t say.” Lack of interest bleeds through every word.

“Thee-thee-thee-thee.”

The heat of morning and scents oozing from the Trader overwhelm Isaiah, making him dizzy. He looks skyward.

“Ah … some coffee.” The Trader grins. “Real coffee. Then we talk about your secrets.”

Isaiah’s brows shoot up. “I’ve none.”

“I’ve none,” mimics the Trader, using Isaiah’s voice.

Feeling hunted, Isaiah heads out of the courtyard.

The Trader chants, “One secret can be repeated only to God.”

Isaiah walks forward.

The Trader glides after him. “Your evidence against His goodness.”

“Absurd,” Isaiah mutters.

“
Thee-thee-thee …
The second is buried in between life and death, to be retrieved at the time of a man’s most important life decision.”

The Trader dances in front of Isaiah, walking backward.

“Excuse me.” Isaiah tries to sidestep the pest.

The Trader trills his next words. “The third is the one you sell to buy your oldest longing.”

Humidity suffuses Isaiah’s body as he listens in spite of himself. Waits. Nothing. “There is a fourth, you said.”

“Did I?” the Trader asks.

Isaiah turns and sees the Trader’s broad, yellow-toothed smirk. Blue flies whirl between them.

A chortle. “I knew you’d want to know.”

A stain of red on Isaiah’s skin, a tic above his right eye.

“I’m not irritating you,” says the Trader.

“You are,” replies Isaiah.

“No. Statement. I’m not irritating you. The irritation is already inside of you.
Thee-thee-thee
.”

Nyipir, listening, turns a sudden laugh into a cough as Isaiah jumps. The Trader has spoken straight into Isaiah’s ear, the voice seeming to spring from within his own body. Isaiah watches the Trader’s mouth.
The man’s mouth has not moved.
Bloody hell
. Isaiah turns away.
Ventriloquism in the armpit of Africa?

The Trader persists, “What’s your name?”

Isaiah is desperate to escape. “Isaiah Bolton.”

“Ah! You want the fourth secret?”

Isaiah oozes aversion. He cannot give the hobgoblin the satisfaction of an admission.

The Trader exudes warmth.

Isaiah, confused, frowns.

“The fourth one …” the Trader starts.

Isaiah listens.

“The fourth is the name you baptize your death with.” The Trader laughs out loud, offers an expansive hand gesture. “This name, when spoken out loud, can even
kill
you … 
thee-thee-thee!
”

Isaiah lurches back, aware that his hands are shaking and the world is receding. Just then Galgalu steps out with a camphor-and-clove-scented burning censer. Isaiah sucks in the perfumed air. The sinister sensation that assailed him fades.

“Isaiah!”
the Trader whispers. Isaiah’s head swivels. “Never trade in a name. Trade in everything else, but not a name. Nothing like a name. For example … 
Bol-ton
. I heard that a man came very close to this place of fire.”

The Trader about-turns, salutes Nyipir, and slow-marches toward him.

Isaiah rubs his arms, feeling as if grimy hands have manhandled his soul. He needs to scrub out the man’s voice from his body.

Nyipir looks over at Isaiah.

Isaiah holds his gaze.

Nyipir turns away.

Isaiah knows a clue to his question has been dropped.
Everything spits out fucking riddles
. He spins and strides toward the livestock enclosure, his thoughts everywhere, fists clenching and unclenching. What would happen if he held the scrawny peasant in a choke hold?
Secrets? I’ll squeeze out secrets!

Engulfing loneliness.

Will I ever return home?
He stops mid-stride, leans over the
boma
fence. His agitation subsides as he watches the placid livestock.

When Isaiah returns to the others, he finds that the Trader is covering Ajany with orange-blossom-scented smoke and broken tunes. Isaiah
watches the Trader blow smoke down Ajany’s nostrils. He closes his eyes. Was this the doctor they had all been waiting for? A tic pulses near his left eye. He reminds himself that he does have
normal
to go back to. A gust of pleasure—it would soon be spring in England. He might even be home before the emergence of new leaves on winter-denuded oak trees. He would also try harder to make peace with Raulfe, his stepfather—a surge of fondness for the fragile man who had tried so very hard to raise him right,
dear Raulfe
.

9

TWO AND A HALF YEARS EARLIER
.

Soft lights. Night obscured life’s details. The emaciated woman limped around the bathroom of her hospice room in Sussex, easing a cramp in her right thigh. She used to be a marcher when she was not dying, when she was not seventy-eight years old. Touched her hair. Meager where it existed, once ink-black, worn pageboy-style. She winced. Breathing was a chore. The cancer had spread. Curved spine. How tall was she now?

Her nose twisted. “I’m old.”

Dying has a ghastly smell.

She had been fragile until the visit.

Her son.

She had dreaded this, had hoped to avoid it.

Now it had happened, adrenaline urgency.

All these invasions
, she thought.
One eats the body; the other deranges the soul
.

Agitation.

Now engrossed with praying to the night through a wide bathroom window. Night obscured reality’s details.
I love this dark
. Not primeval, concealing, and heavy, like other darknesses.
Leave my child alone
, she tells those other nights.
Let him alone
.

A word:
Uncontained
.

Isaiah William, her son.

Uncontained
, like … She snapped off her thoughts.

“I want my truest daddy!” the toddler had once screamed, and afterward his longing had become a suffocating mania, which she had ignored, waiting for the day he would outgrow it. The yearning wounded him, infected others, ate at him. But because she had erased the name, neither he nor she dared voice it. It had no room in their renewed existence. “Raulfe is your daddy.”

Bloody
Kenya. Bloody.