Dust (19 page)

Yes
. He
knows
the day, time, and emotion of the making of the painting. By the time he raises his head from the pit, a red-eyed meanness owns him. Rage. He has killed men before. He could kill again. “And if I do?” Nyipir asks, a thin twitching of lips, darkening of pupils.

Isaiah backs away. “Your son, Moses, sent me this.”

Nyipir wags a finger. “You’ll not say his name. You’ll not
speak
his name!” Nyipir throws his shovel at Isaiah.

Isaiah’s arms jut out, ready to fight, but he chooses flight. He hurls himself at the house and kicks the low couch twice. He will stay. He hates this place, but damned if he will leave without getting what he has come to find. He blinks, rubs his eyes; in the silence, he hears the sound of his thumping heart.

That afternoon, in the landscape, a multinational smattering of voices and the BBC World News signal as the Trader crosses the land. Today, for him, the voices are ambient noise. When he left Wuoth Ogik, leaving his camel and goods behind, he gave himself over to a dream in which his wives and children were still with him and his grandchildren played amid fat cows, green grass, and weekly rain.

The Trader walks until he reaches the white picket fence that is the mission where the Jacobses live and preach a version of their Gospel, teaching, healing, and baptizing in the name of God. It is a rectangular white house, a larger version of a Mississippi sharecropper’s house, surrounded by purple and yellow flowers hanging in little pink boxes around the fence. Spikes like sentries around a formerly communal
watering hole. New cement on a foundation that is to become a worship center. The Trader stares at the half-adobe, half-canvas medical center. The fly trap, he calls it.

The Trader stakes out the place, not moving for almost two hours, until the sun-blotched pastor, an angular man, trots out. His watery, pink, pale-blue-eyed wife watches from the door. In a loud, smiley voice, in a new dialect of Kisetla, the man announces,
“Hapa kwetu ni ufalme ya Mungu.”
He flaps his hands in all directions, delineating the territory of the Kingdom of God. The action swats flies, and he swivels his neck like a pretty giraffe.

The Trader wants the freckled man to recognize him. He remembers gray eyes that were suspicious and intense.

“Medicine,” creaks the Trader, slouching so as to meet the missionary’s low expectations about the meaning of his life. The wind tosses sand at them. The Trader clutches his chest, in the place in his heart that is being cut into pieces.

Within three hours, the Trader has surrendered his radio, taken the prerequisite disinfected shower, been photographed for the mission’s fund-raising Web site, and chosen Sila for his baptismal name. These gain him admission and a safari bed with a thin mattress. His heartbeat is measured, blood pressure noted; aspirins are administered; he is encouraged to rest.

“You’ll be fed,” Mrs. Jacobs says in slow, loud nasal sounds. “And, Sila, as a new lamb in the Kingdom of God, you shall pray.”

Sila cries. “The devil is conquered. The perfidious liar! Praise God!” concludes Mrs. Jacobs.

Dawn. Before breakfast, the Jacobses and three acolytes gather to pray around the Trader’s bed. Their prayers include a sequence in which the Trader gets a chance to renounce Satan again, his works, pomps, and empty promises. “You are a free soul now, Sila.” Pastor Jacobs gives him a watery smile. “Rejoice.”

The Trader closes his eyes and heaves a sigh, tempted by the simplicity of being Sila, of being thought for and hoped for.

The prayer warriors leave to have breakfast.

When some time has passed, the Trader tosses off the sheet, throws
on clothes, grabs his radio, and escapes the mission through the window. His body shivering, he heads toward his
tukul
, a six-hour run from the mission.

Not too far from Wuoth Ogik, near a green-stained waterhole where two years ago a pair of hippos had been seen, a crazed
d’abeela
waits for another soul to frighten to death.

Radio crackle.

The Trader turns the corner and glimpses a man’s silhouette. He sees the snow-white hair, the flecks on the man’s face mirroring the creases hacked into his heart. The Trader knows the meaning of the misshapen turban and the dance of the devil in the wide, red, and furious eyes glaring at him.

The Trader sings, feather-light, “
D’abeela, maan feeti?
You’re awake?”

He gets an answer that is arcane, succinct, and crude from a voice that is like a thin flute’s song carving fleeting presences into the soul. But the
d’abeela
’s eyes fill with tears.

Over radio chatter, the Trader reaches over and readjusts the seams of the
d’abeela
’s turban.

“Sit.
We are ravens
,” the Trader explains.
“We pluck fallen color. We barter. With dreams, incense, secrets, animals, and stolen sunsets.”
The Trader plucks out a small sealed bag from inside his robe and counts out eight beans.
“Ka-ha-wa?”

The
d’abeela
offers him a two-tooth partial grin.

They chew beans.

The Trader says, “
We are bees. We touch two million scattered moments, reaping the small nectar of things
.”

The day passes over them.

From the back of the
d’abeela
’s throat a harsh purging sound. He spits out phlegm, mucus, and ugliness. “
We are stones
.” The old man stirs and twists his neck to contemplate the Trader.

No chattering radio now. The Trader sniffs the breeze. A wind lumbers past like an ancient wizard. They chew beans. The Trader says, “
We taste sweet smoke inside bitterness
.”

They chew coffee. The Trader speaks because he must, and because an unshared story can break a heart that carries it alone for too long:

Eleven years ago.

“The drought,” the
d’abeela
says.

“The drought,” the Trader confirms.

Ceaseless dryness, as if there were no God. Nine half-moons of waterlessness. Even the camels died. It was a bad time. The Trader, who was still answering to the name Zaman, had left his wife, mistress, children, and suffering livestock at Hurran Hura to go for water, identify pastures, and obtain help from other supportive clans. Three weeks later, outside Kargi, he received two messages, which had been passed down from trading post to watering hole to trading post. First his fickle mistress, Rehana, had seduced a visiting Malaysian prospector and, in the thrall of new love, had disappeared from the district with him. She had combined her greetings and goodbye and conveyed them through a stranger. Second, his wife and his children were now on their way to Kargi. Irritation. His wife was an insecure nag. They spent their time together raging about one or another of his many misdeeds. Yet her fragile beauty still made him sing, and he could try to summon down the best stars for her. And when he tried, she would laugh like a chime caught in a soft wind.

The children must be exhausted after a long walk.

He raged.

Women. Insensible camels.

He shook himself and readied to meet them.

Zaman approached the town center, now milling with escapees from the drought, afflicted by empty eyes and potbellied fragility. He searched for his family. He found them gathered around a stripped-down tree.

All his life and its hopes collapsed there. He crawled over and touched the gaunt, desiccated frames that were already disintegrating. They lay wrapped and small in the garish colors of the Somali cloth he traded with. A tide of fury at the yellow-red-orange and blues. He smelled death. Saw vultures and
bambaloona
waiting in trees.

“Biche naisi,”
moaned his wife. Water, please.

“Yes. Yes. Yes.”

And he had run.

Run thirty kilometers.

Run as if a hungry lion were at his heels.

The watering holes were stink ponds, filled with green poison.

He ran another twelve kilometers to the beat of
Biche naisi
. He flagged down a lorry carrying fluorspar. The driver shared a drop of water with him. He promised the man a milk cow so he could borrow a
mid-sized round yellow plastic container. At Kalama he jumped down, fought off livestock and other herders at a green-water oasis, groaning,
“Biche naisi,”
and because he looked crazed and unkempt they let him scoop the sludge.

He was trudging back when he heard the sound of a car charging along the track.

The Jacobses’ four by four,
Light of the Nations
emblazoned in pale blue. It would have scuttled past him if he had not thrown himself across its path. Scrunch-on-the-ground brakes. All six Jacobses stared at Zaman, who waved at them from the front. The cacophony of an amplified car horn and Pastor Jacobs’s big red face leaned out of the window as he screamed at Zaman in a twang that infused words with curves and elongated vowels. “Heathen, in God’s name, what do you intend?”

Zaman pleaded. His wife and children needed the water he carried. He had lifted the container for Pastor Jacobs to see. In the name of God, he needed a ride to Kargi. In the name of God. It was less than a day away. In the name of God, Whom they both served.

The pastor’s nasal prodding: “Son, are you Bible-believin’ and saved? Do you serve the living God, the true God, the only God?”

“Yes, yes, yes.”

“Do you know our Lord as your personal Savior?”

“Yes.”

“John 3:16?”

“What, sir?”

“John 3:16? Confirm your faith, son.”

“The Lord is my … uh … shepherd in … uh … heaven?”

Pastor Jacobs’s pale wife leaned over to the driver’s side. “Tch-tch-tch,” she said, wagging a finger.

Pastor Jacobs withdrew his face from the window, his mouth firmed up. He put the car into gear and sped off, gunning the engine as Zaman raced after them. Zaman threw the jerrican at them with all his strength. The lid burst open, and the foul water spilled out to the ground. He heard the earth quaffing down his family’s life, and then he wailed.

Eeeeeeeeoiiiiaaaa!

Zaman stretched out his arms, fell forward, lay on the ground, his face and arms bruised. After half an hour, with ants clinging to his arms, he wiped his face, cleaned the dust off his clothes, and walked back to the foul oasis with the yellow can. The people saw him; they said nothing. They watched him fill the container again. He restarted his
journey to Kargi on foot. Got there in the late evening of the day after that. Remarkable speed.

A wheezing part-time imam approached Zaman as he shuffled to the tree where he had last seen his family. He stopped.

“God be praised,” exhorted the imam.

“Yes.”

And he told Zaman the truth. In keeping with burial customs, all bodies were buried just before sunset. The prayer man said, “It is God’s will.” He told Zaman that they would all meet in paradise, thanks be to God. He said they were in a better place.

Zaman heard the words.

He said nothing in reply.

Nothing.

Had not spoken about the events to another human being until now.

Eleven years later, the Jacobses were still plowing seeds of light across unheeding desert people of Kenya. In keeping with the times, they had also become spotters of terrorists and pirates. Their medical center was a web, a rich pond for mass baptisms and extraordinary renditions.

Close to dusk. The Trader gets up. He is trundling away when the
d’abeela
calls after him, “
We are ravens
 …” the Trader gurgles. The voices on the radio tell him about the chaos that followed the murder of a Pakistani woman leader.

13

OLD COFFEE AND A CONVERSATION IN THE WUOTH OGIK
BOMA
—two men and a cramped eavesdropper. Galgalu had taken to lying under the sky so his nightmares had greater distances to cover before they reached him. Galgalu had seen that the Trader’s eyes were cold and his voice like breaking glass. His spirit shivered as the man spoke.