Dust (17 page)

She dropped it.

A moan.

She retrieved it from the floor, body shaking. She stretched out the charcoal portrait of a fiery-eyed, long-limbed, crop-haired, full-lipped,
dark-brown-skinned woman. Harsh lines, clear, old eyes. Hands sweating, she picked up another canvas. The same woman was stretched in a pose that might have been lewd if it were not for fine details—a beaded bracelet, intricately patterned stomach scars—which made the work an intimate ode to visceral femininity. Three small pieces, a triptych, making a medium-sized rectangular piece, made blood rush from Selene’s head, forced her to catch her breath, sit on the floor, and breathe hard. The woman, her belly rounded, pregnant, legs stretched out, watching the artist, the universal lover’s gaze, hand beneath her head, a half-smile.

Hugh used to mock portraiture—
icon making for ghastly paper gods
. Questions arrived and left. Inside no-thought, Selene restored Hugh’s art to its place. Left it at that.

The next day, she left with Hugh for a stark otherworldliness where the sky dominated everything.
This is how the land crushes its refugees
. Selene stared at broody mountains, the rockscape.
Drought is profligate
. She fanned her face. Sweated streams, struggled to breathe, visualized winter. They reached Kalacha. Everywhere she looked, there were camels and goats, cows and donkeys and sheep. Oryx, gerenuks, giraffes, elephants, gazelles, impalas, and snakes. Horses. Mules. Everywhere she looked, she craved verdant greenness. Organic green.

Hugh hugged her. “For you.” The house. Almost ready. A pink mouth made out of the land’s eclectic matter.

Selene thought,
Not mine. Yours
. She compressed her lips.

Hugh dangled a bunch of keys above her head.

She dragged out a smile, took them, and, with a quick step to the front door, inserted the wrong key into the lock. Unsteady fingers searched for the right one. The keys fell. Hugh picked them up. He unclenched her fist and placed the keys on her palm, closed her hand over them, and kissed each of her fingers.

Another kind of heat:
Touch me
, followed by an impulse to flee as only the preyed-upon can. Lifting her hand, Hugh inserted the right key into the lock. The door opened into a large, cool room where a gap in the wall brought air in and revealed a splendid view of the desert.

Selene sighed. Glazed stone tiles, plastered walls and floor, Ethiopian Orthodox icons. A green-robed Saint George accompanied by a glowering angel carrying a flaming sword—Hugh’s work. Etching in the wall. It read:
Crux sancta sit mihi lux / Non draco sit mihi dux / Vade retro satana
/
Numquam suade mihi vana
/
Sunt mala quae libas
/
Ipse venena bibas
. She remembered, “Let not the dragon be my guide / Get thee behind me, Satan.…” And gasped, “Hugh?”

Hugh’s lavish laughter. “No
shetani
s here.”

Aggrey Nyipir Oganda stood a few paces behind them.

Selene turned.

He looked at the floor.

She would wonder that his face had been distorted by pity.

If all houses had resident spirits, Selene knew the ones here regarded her as an invading entity. Her nails cut into her palms as she looked through the screen window into the landscape, its sleight-of-hand mounds over vast horizons. The winds slithered in through the doum palms. She slapped her arms, imagining insects.

A sensation.

She was being watched.

She turned to look.

The light’s sublime
, Hugh was saying.

Inside, Selene wept.

But Kenya had given her the ability to wear the right face for the right time. To proceed as if nothing had happened, as if she had not been changed, was not being changed all the time.

That first night at Wuoth Ogik, the face of the painted woman haunted Selene’s sleep.
Who is she?
Mouthed in silence to a darkness that scared her. She clung to Hugh.
Who is she?
she thought as she got out of bed. Stepped into the library, strode around the room, counting footsteps. Eighty-two. She struggled to light a kerosene lamp, scorched the tips of her fingers as the lantern wick burned. She wandered downstairs and outside and found herself in a courtyard. She sat on the edge of the fountain, leaning back until the water’s coolness soaked her body.
Very, very civilized fountain
, she told the water. She listened to the murmur of spring water.

Wuoth Ogik: Journey’s End.

Sensation of being watched.

Then.

A movement, a strangled-off voice, scuffling.

A minute later, Aggrey the aide appeared carrying a calabash of water, which he offered her at once.

“Ni nini?”
Selene gasped. What is it?

“
Paka tu
, madam.” A cat.

The gourd smelled of use and sour milk. Selene took the vessel with both hands and sipped water.
Who is she?
she needed to ask. “Thank you. You may go now,” she said instead, handing over the gourd.

The aide bowed and left.

Who is she?
The wind screeched among doum palms; Selene covered her ears.
Enough
. She dashed into the house—leaving the lantern behind, gulping down a scream.

Upstairs, she peeled off her wet gown, crawled naked into bed, and snuggled into Hugh. His large hands adjusted her body to his. He muttered in his sleep. Selene ignored the shadows that had entered the room with her.

A pink haze over the land lit up their room. Selene woke up in tears. Hugh was sleeping faceup. He had raised his left knee. Selene studied his naked body. Seamlessly brown, as if the sun had delicately turned him on a spit over its fires.

Till death do us part
.

Which death? Many kinds on offer here.

She moved so that she was on top of Hugh. He opened his eyes and smiled a lopsided smile, tightened his arms around her. She lowered her head, her hair covering his face. Memories of another couple named Selene and Hugh nestling in each other’s arms, people from a Pleistocene epoch, far away from the Selene and Hugh they had since become. She tasted his sweat. The scars on his chest, on his head. The chest hair. Rubbed her face against his stubble, inhaling silent lines of too many hidden stories. Scratches, bites, bullet wound, the faint mark of a garrote beneath his chin.

She should have asked the questions.
Who is she?
Painter hands, hard, elongated, denuded of excess fat.
Who are you?
Open-mouthed breathing.
Who is she?
Her tongue hunted the Hugh she remembered. He was
there. He was there.
Who is she?
A long kiss made of grief. Hugh moved his body so she was under him. He bit her nose, half in jest, stroked her leg. Selene moaned instead. Hated the memory of buzzing blue flies. How could she live with these flies? Hated Hugh. Loved Hugh. Craved Hugh. Arched into Hugh, who used to gasp but now grunted. She placed his hands around her neck and squeezed. Soft. Gentle. Loving. Loathing. Tears.

She did not know how long Hugh had been watching her. He touched her sweating body. She turned to him, her face unmasked. He kissed her mouth. He whispered, “You don’t like it here.”

Hugh’s disappointment scalded Selene’s soul. She knelt, reaching down him, fingers fluttering, touching his face. Willing to forgive and forget everything. “Let’s go home, let’s go back home.”

Hugh played with her hair. “We
are
home, darling.”

She left the Northern Frontier District.

She left alone.

Almost a year later, volcanic shifts within Selene were interspersed with the outside rising babble of new-Kenya tunes:
“Kenya, Kenya, Kenya nchi yetu … wapi wale wabeberu waone haya …”
Gloating hymns overpowered her, their deafness to intimate losses, as if she had no right to desire, as if the years of work and ash-strewn dreams meant nothing, as if she had not struggled to love this land even though it had tried to take everything from her. A secret. In the darkness she had seized something from it, and now, like a jewel thief, she was fleeing the scene of her heist. Destination England. To save a life, to have a life.

Unease
.

The baby moved. She shielded her stomach, exhaled, and then smiled a mother’s smile.

11

IN THE MORNING, AFTER AJANY STAGGERED BACK INTO WUOTH
Ogik from the caves, she saw gold-and-red daylight on stone. She lurched to the edge of her brother’s half-finished grave, sniffed the putrid smell of dying, and jumped in.

Light swathes. It warms her skin. She clambers out to stand near her brother. Contemplates the gray, placid face inside the coffin. Its stillness and absence are a new palette. She knows how to paint with darkness. She knows shadows, too. Absence is new. She must chase after it until it takes her to Odidi’s Somewhere Else.

Shadows shift.

Ajany pushes open the doors of the falling coral house. Hearing the sound, Galgalu hobbles in, fingers knuckled against his chest where it throbs. He starts when he finds Ajany staring at family pictures.
“Ch’uquliisa?”
he whispers, fingering the amethyst she had given him.

She is wiping the picture frames.

Galgalu takes Ajany’s blood-streaked palms and turns them over, touches entangled hair, smells sweat, rot, and coldness. There is brightness in her eyes, and her body thrums. She had turned herself over to something.
Madness?
Galgalu trembles.

“ ’Galu,” Ajany says as if in a dream, “tell … Baba I’ve gone to find Odidi.”

Galgalu mutters, “Remember the moon.” Ajany stares. Galgalu says, “It falls to pieces. It becomes whole again.”

She hears his words in patches.

Galgalu tiptoes out of the room pulled apart by two desires, to seize Ajany and shake her back to lucidity, and to protect Nyipir from this, the image and likeness of lunacy.
If a man has nothing to live for …

Akai Lokorijom had not come home yet.

Galgalu pinches his chin, then twists the amethyst this way and that. He must return to the Trader. There was a formula for exorcising everything. The Trader always said so.

Ajany pulls out clothes from her still-packed bag until she can carry it with one hand. She places Hugh’s painting in the library for Isaiah to find. Nothing to do with her now.

Wind-marked solitude. A goatskin water bag. Ajany’s orange carry-on swings in counterpoint to her steps. She scans the earth for signs of water, wells, damp soil, mud, dew-storing stones, and scraggly grass. Mount Kulal—the storykeeper of this land. She listens for songs of the terrain that Odidi would have been singing by now.

He had started it, Odidi had. Their homelessness. He had conjured up stories of Elsewhere—imagined siblings, aunties, uncles, cousins, and grandparents, a web of doting dream relations into which he and Ajany inserted their longing to leave. Those relatives never did come.

Ajany walks over scallops molded into a black, pimply earth. Her stride lengthens. A view of mountains shaped like music notations, and six cairns. She crosses two
lagas
, gawks where foreigners have planted a forest of white windmills, implants in a land made for silence. There are other strangers elsewhere building giant rigs, prospecting for oil in margins without a sound.

Blue sky. Memory of cattle drives across this land to markets and to
jilali
safe pasture. Toward Turbi, distances and destiny. Heat, dust, and hope; murmurs and songs; whistling, laughter, and spare words. The last time they had walked she had been ten, still sucked her two fingers, and
lurked in Odidi’s shadows. Not wanting to be left behind with Akai-ma, she had sneaked after Galgalu, Nyipir, and Odidi after they had left with the cattle for sale. Galgalu knew she was in the shadow of their trail, but he had not given her away. She showed herself after two and a half days.

Baba had frowned down at her. Then he sighed and asked, “Akai-ma?”

Ajany had looked back at Nyipir, as unworried as a favorite cat, while Odidi made throat-cutting gestures at her behind his father’s back.

“What do I do?” Nyipir’s brow had gone up.

Nothing
, she hoped.

Nyipir contemplated her.

He nodded.

They resumed their trek. Odidi moved close to pull her hair.
“Olwenda,”
he hissed.

So what if she was a cockroach? She stuck her tongue out at him. “Baba,” Odidi announced, “everyone does their share of work.”

Nyipir looked over his shoulder at Ajany.

She smiled at him. He laughed, stooped so she could ride on his shoulders in their northward journey.

“Olwenda!”
mouthed Odidi.

She stuck fingers into her mouth, stretched it, and crossed her eyes at him.

Ajany learned from Galgalu how to bind the camels’ feet; she milked the camels and mimicked him as he murmured to the animals’ secret anxieties. At night, under the stars, Odidi, whose stomach served as her pillow, showed her Kormamaddo, the camel of the skies, and as he did, she knew she was as safe as a seed enclosed in a warm, thick pod.