Dust (16 page)

Beguiled by her rush, the gathered gawk. By the time Nyipir kicks aside the gate to try to stop her, the darkness has already swallowed Ajany.

Isaiah shakes his head to dislodge the lost-in-dreaming sensation that suffuses him.

The Trader stares into nothing with a finger across his face. “It’s out,” he explains. “Now it roams.”

Silence.

When Ajany was fifteen and lost—a drought had run for two years, and the old nanny goat simply lay down and died. Galgalu found her and shouted, “You’ll save those tears. Crying is for when camels fall.”

Ajany-jany yuak, yuak, yuak
, Odidi used to taunt.

Now she leans into cave walls, clinging to stone.
Odidi Oganda
, she etches, and then she touches his name. When she scrapes the cave walls with her palms, she feels.

Eeeeoiiiiahaaa!

After that, as should be expected, there is stillness. It is the time of false dawn and red, purple, and blue smudges in the sky. Small moths flit in between fireflies and shadows of conical mountains. Among the sojourners there, it is understood that
ekhera
, the restless dead, might show up and shout around encampments at night. The most tormented sounds are the
ekhera
avoided by other ghosts—those exiled and lonely dead.

That night.

Eeeeoiiiiahaaa!

A hideous lament.

It contains the kernel of all their deepest yearnings.

“Eeeeoiiiiahaaa!”

The notes find and burrow into secret wounds of the hearers. Peel away scars. Goose bumps at Wuoth Ogik; even the livestock moan. Gut ache, heart murmur. Nyipir paces back and forth, a leopard caged. Paralysis starts with a popping stab in his right eye. More losing. He cannot move.

Weary.

Of waiting.

For Akai.

Where was she?

This woman.

His no-center-of-gravity war.

Weary.

Of battle losses.

Of fighting alone.

Memories are ghosts.

Akai, even wandering herdsmen come home at sunset
.

Even the house was dying.

Galgalu tries to light an incense stick, fumbles. The stick drops. He picks it up again. Glances at the scented clouds to see if they show whether his mother is still alive. He cannot look at the answer.

The Trader’s hands are claws; there are tension lines on his face. He has clamped his teeth over images of faces once caressed, which as the years have passed have become more and more beloved, more and more blurred.

Isaiah strides—left, right—haunted and hunted, clutching his head as the wail bounces inside him. He
will not
die like this. Not here. Stops.
I’ll leave
, Isaiah reassures himself.
Go home
. Stoops. Knuckles to the ground, wanting to vomit. He grinds his teeth.

Hands on Isaiah’s shoulders. Isaiah does not see his comforter, but he bounds away, too many questions after him. “I want
my
daddy.
My
daddy.” A child’s tantrum. Selene had spanked him. Fury in her arms, face distorted in horror, as if he had become evil. He had cowered. “Sorry, Mummy. Sorry.” Selene had gathered him to her, covering his body with kisses and tears, whispering, “Oh, my poor, poor baby.”

His questions had dissolved, only to re-emerge as asthma. The asthma evaporated when he found something beautiful of his own to save—a woman who would one day walk definitively away from him. With her disappearance, the compulsion to find his lost souls returned to possess him.

Soon after, he and Moses Oganda found each other, and Moses had called him to Kenya. He had shown up a few days too late to find Moses out of his reach. Another of his lost.

Something flutters past Isaiah’s ear. He swings at it. The Trader’s droll voice: “Giant moth.”

A lantern shakes in Galgalu’s hand. Nyipir looks in the direction of the red caves. The Trader watches Nyipir standing guard over shadows. “What did you do to her?” Isaiah asks the Trader.

“Ka-ha-wa?”
the Trader suggests, pointing at the coffee beans drying on the fire.

Isaiah says, “Good night.” Amid his father’s books, he can salvage sanity.

“Isaiah!”
the Trader calls. “They’ll come.”

Isaiah stops. “Who?”

“Your dead.”

Isaiah walks away.

The Trader wheezes “Good night” and stomps his feet for warmth. The night was cold—wrong temperatures for this season. A random arc of light from Galgalu’s lantern shines on the wet on the Trader’s face. The Trader blows into his hands. The hyena that normally crossed Wuoth Ogik to get to the watering hole avoids it. It waits by the acacia tree as echoes of a lone spirit’s wail are swept away by Wuoth Ogik’s four winds.

Drenched in so many feelings, losing himself, Isaiah puts his head in his arms; bile rising, he swallows. What was he still doing here? His mother had been right. Ghosts were best left undisturbed. What did his father want here?

Late 1961, at about midday, a native aide to Hugh, a recruit of the Tribal Police, drove Hugh’s black car up to the Naivasha farmhouse. The man was square-faced, tall, and thin. His Hitler mustache set off high cheekbones. His skin was ebony velvet, and when he spoke, his voice rumbled. When he looked at people as he did Selene, they wondered what he saw that they themselves could not recognize.
What’re you looking at?
Selene almost snarled.

Hugh jumped out of the car. His head was bandaged, left arm in a sling, and no explanation. No questions. “Darling!” he droned.

Selene sauntered over and laid her cheek against his.

“Your head?”

“Little cut. Healing well.”

“Who’s that?” Her eyes on the aide.

“My new man. Aggrey Oganda. Good boy. A very clever Kavirondo.”

She watched as the aide parked the car. Smooth, swift turns. No movement wasted. He got out of the car, wiped the door handle with a white cloth, flicked invisible particles from the windscreen, checked the tires, tucked the cloth into his pocket, turned, and saluted Hugh: “Sir.” He stood at attention, waiting for instructions.

Hugh waved him off without a glance.

Aggrey Nyipir Oganda lowered his cap at Selene. “Madam,” he said, and then about-turned in the direction of the servants’ quarters.

Not
memsahib
, Selene observed. “You ought to feed your boy, Hugh. Rather scraggy, isn’t he?”

“He’ll fill up. What’ve you been up to, old girl?”

“I
have
missed you,” she told Hugh.

He patted her bottom.

That night, in bed, Selene curled next to Hugh as he told her he had decided to build her the perfect house near a perfect oasis in Kalacha. He told her about pink and coral stones being carted across the arid lands. “From Dar es Salaam.”

Tanganyika?
She asked, “Frightfully far, isn’t it?”

“No, darling,” hooted Hugh. “Dar es Salaam—below Somaliland. On our side of the map.”

Our
side. “I see,” said Selene, for a moment certain that she would die from her longing to return home to England.

Hugh spoke of the northern lands, of birds and desert plants, of transient peoples and wild horses. He spoke, and in his words there were gaps and new silences.

Before dawn, Hugh got out of their bed. Selene counted his pacing steps. One … three … nine … eighteen … thirty-two … a hundred and thirteen.
Who are you when you’re there?
Selene wondered.

Hugh struggled to recompose an interest in their Naivasha life, but at any time of the day Selene found that he had stepped onto the porch to stare at horizons beyond the lake.

When he was not painting, he was going for long walks with Nyipir, journeys that started at dawn and ended after dusk.

Who are you when you’re there?

Selene served tea and an experimental tangerine sponge cake. She studied Hugh and his clear-eyed insouciance. A wild laugh, organic. She startled a rare raw hunger in his eyes as he watched her. He muted the gleam. Selene avoided her husband’s gaze, but now, if she brushed against his body or touched him, it was with the mild titillation of taking liberties with a stranger. Committing adultery with one’s own husband.
Committing idolatry
—a wry grin.

When he was on one of his walks, she returned to the scene of his drying artwork. Her fingers hovered over the thick, dark brushstrokes, as her eyes studied the jagged lines. His finished work: impressions
of heat on black rock, and something else, a shimmering form. Selene stared at it for a long time.

At night, one hand cradling her jaw, the other lifting a cigarette to and from her mouth, Selene watched Hugh read, and picked out his edited phrases.
What is true?
she wondered.

Every day, Hugh spoke of the place he had just come from. He said there were different notes to the “whistling thorn.” That each of the four winds up north carried its own song. That the clatter of the doum palms evoked the rush of a freight train. He said water evaporated before it reached the ground. That he had gone to the South, North, and Central Islands in Lake Rudolf. Quiver of awareness.

He guffawed at her reaction to his assurance that the islands were indeed inhabited by demons and evil winds. He told her he saw the giant python in the crater on the east end of the North Island. Said his boat had stumbled into a lake storm. Said he screamed at the wind, that it stopped only after he dared it to kill him: “Like a faucet turned off.” Hugh’s nostrils had flared, his eyes narrowed, he was back on the lake.
Crocodilian
, Selene felt.

Death’s grim grin
.

The next day, without her expecting it, Hugh left with Nyipir for his Northern Frontier District.

Selene listened to the clock tick. Brooded before the canvas with the impression of heat. The remaining dog sat close to her, shivering. The other older Labrador had died after a tangle with a poisonous snake. Today, everything Selene touched or thought seemed ready to crumble. She breathed. She walked. She gardened, planting herbs and hydrangeas, and turning the soil with her hands. Selene waited.

A month later, Hugh returned to Naivasha without Nyipir.

Deep in Selene’s womb, twisting anxiety.

He came with a new stillness that menaced her.

After dinner, Hugh sat brooding, oozing solitude.

Selene went to brush her teeth.

Turned when she sensed Hugh.

Found him staring at her.

Memorizing me
.

Her lips trembled. Her skin tingled. He opened his mouth to say something. She pre-empted him. Rushed to lock her arms around him, pressed her body into his, cupping his face, seeking a return to familiar silences.

Bed.

A frenetic and furious slippery mating, in which his teeth bruised her nipples, they tore at each other again and again—clinging, clawing, marking—and, in the midst of the craving, sudden stillness. Hugh stroked her back, drawing lines with the back of his hand.

Later.

“Darling, my darling.”

Selene tensed.

Then.

“The home Hugh’s built is perfect for his dear darling thing,” he spoke into her neck. “What does she say?”

God, dear God, no
. But Selene faked an animated laugh. “For me?” she said. “However will I thank you,
sweetheart
?” Dread in her voice. She hunted for the pretense of joy.

“We’ll have to find a home for the dog,” Hugh said. “Or maybe let’s braise and eat him? Or stuff him so he’ll always be with us?”

Selene stopped breathing until Hugh poked her back and sniggered. “So solemn, my love?”

She yawned, murmured, and pretended to become drowsy.

Selene stayed awake all night, head pressed into the pillow to absorb streaming tears.
Let us go back home
, she wept to the country.

Two months later, on the eve of the day they were to set off, Hugh went to the nearby club for a drink. Selene wandered into his workspace. On the easel, a half-done art piece; on the table, rolled-up canvases. She reached for one of these and unwrapped it.