Dust (24 page)

Silence. Then, “Don’t know.” Adds, “Lost touch.” A tinge of malice. “Heard he’d been moving from office to office with a petition form for citizens to sign.”

Musali stops short of revealing to Ajany that Odidi had once been spotted speaking on street corners. Cannot tell her that, seven months after he had walked away from the offices, Odidi had phoned Musali for money and a place to stay. The bank had all of a sudden recalled his mortgage and had then thrown him out with his things. They were auctioning the house. No lawyer would take up the case against the state. Odidi was threatened, followed, summoned, booked for loitering with intent. Some NGOs he visited made the right sympathetic noise but emphasized to him that AIDS, women, malaria, girl children, and boreholes were priorities.

Musali gives Ajany a direct look. She sees the cold glimmer of a green mamba’s stare. “We silted the dams. No choice. We have our money.”

National power shortages worsened.

Companies closed down.

Utility bills exploded.

Citizens paid up.

The managing director held a party to celebrate his first personal billion shillings. Others were more discreet. T. L. Associate Engineers thrived.

“After you make money, you can afford to be an activist.”

Musali stares at the carpet. “We deposited a year’s salary into his account.”

Musali leans back. “Last December, when I was carjacked”—Musali rubs the brace—“I thought … it was late.…” He looks at Ajany’s stricken face. “Ah! Man. When you see that
jama
, tell him we’re in business again. We can do those
ka
sweet, sweet projects he wanted.”

All of a sudden, shoulders heaving, Musali starts to cry. His teacup
topples over. Everything within Ajany is set to melt. She stares at the teacup spilling its rust-colored tea, hears her own breathing, how creaky it sounds. Listens to Musali say, “I heard him.” Pauses. “A year ago? Odidi came to my house.
Kedu
eleven o’clock at night, banging the gate.”

Ajany waits.

“Ah! Man, don’t look at me like that.” Musali is cotton-voiced. “I was afraid … and my family … Then the carjacking … shot in the neck …”

“And?” prompts Ajany.

“It was late.”

“And?”

Musali lowers his head.

He had called the police.

He was not going to tell Ajany that.

Nor that Odidi had shouted, “Musali, bro, help me.”

Ajany’s mouth is wooden, her head heavy. She absorbs the story and everything that has not been said. She needs a body scrub.

Musali rubs his eyes. “Don’t look at me like that.”

She surveys his manicured layers.

“I’m sorry.” He gets up and trundles through a door. Minutes later, he returns with a copy of the picture on the reception wall. “Here.”

Ajany takes the picture with both hands.

“I miss Shifta, man,” he says.

Musali’s hand hovers over Ajany’s shoulder, tentative. No intellectual sparring partner had ever matched Odidi. Without Odidi, even rugby had lost meaning for him. He and Odidi had been among the first to paint their faces with Kenyan colors during the game. They had helped spread the lewd, loud compositions that fans sung even when the Kenyan team was losing. “Who’s your father, who’s your father, who’s your father, referee …”

He says, “We used to be happy.”

She stammers, “Wasn’t that enough?”

Musali pauses. “No.”

Ajany stands up, grabs her handbag.

“I …” Musali starts.

Ajany raises her hand, screws up her face; her whole body says no.

She sucks air in.
Why hadn’t she known her brother’s suffering?

Suffocating, she lurches for the exit, stumbling over a low table. Her
body tingles in places. She focuses on the daylight. She had forgotten that time existed.

The receptionist shouts, “I’ll pray for you.”

Ajany halts, turns. “Why?” Lifeless eyes.

Stiff walk into the parking lot.

A gray-uniformed, cheerful, burly man waves at her. “
Sa’a
, madam!” He sprays water on a parked green Prado.

Ajany asks, “Whose car is that?” Her legs feel so heavy, she is unable to move.

“Engineer Musali.”

Nails bite into skin. “Moses Odidi Oganda’s car?”

“Er …” The man drops the cleaning cloth.
“Ehhh …”

Thunder in Ajany’s ears, acid on her tongue. “You know you’ll die? You’ll all die,” she explains to the luckless driver.

Shadows of her brother’s footsteps in Ajany’s exit. She finds Peter the taxi man stretched out on his seat, napping. When she drags open the door, he snaps awake. Ajany collapses on her seat, forces breath in; there is blood on her nose. She clutches the picture frame.

Silence as they drive back to the guesthouse.

Peter says, “I’ll fast for you.”

What’s the point?

She pays him for his prayers anyway.

Inside her room, numb. Weary of scrubbing tears away. She needs a destination. Maps made from the matter of memory. And that is when the walls start to close in. And she runs out of the room, out of the guesthouse, out of the gates, into a darkening city.

She breathes in audible gasps. Speaking to Odidi, of Odidi, for Odidi. Passersby see a smallish woman in a yellow dress. Some watch her tilt her head as her hands open in question. Others hurry past in wide arcs with single, cautious sideways glances. She does not see any of them.

19

LONG AGO, IN HIS NEW CLASS, WITHIN A SMELLY ATLAS ON A
brown square desk, Nyipir had located Burma. “Burma.” Nyipir learned, “Mandalay, 21° 59′ N 96° 6′ E, Rangoon, 16° 47′ N 96° 9′ E.”

After he got his primary certificate, Nyipir should have gone on to secondary school, except there was little spare money, and nobody was ready to exchange livestock for school fees for him. A priest at the mission in Kisii decided to send Nyipir to Fort Hall. Nyipir could earn money there and complete his education, as he wanted.

Fort Hall, in the Central Province, had asked for a reliable Christian good boy, a non-Kikuyu, to help with the gardening and other chores. “For a short while,” Father Paul had assured him.

Nyipir left on a train, in long trousers and a hat, to start lessons in high culture by planting gardenias and watching them grow. He left in hope.

He settled in at Fort Hall. Entered into the rhythm of work: whitewash stones, cook, wash clothes, clean and polish shoes and boots, set the table, dust, and wait tables. He had sneaked textbooks from the wooden shelves next to the chapel to read by candlelight, preparing for school and wondering what to do so that he could go to Burma and bring his father and brother home.

Next door to the mission was the makeshift army camp. Nyipir would peer through the fence and watch men march in array. He heard the howling of a sergeant major as he screamed men into order.
’Eft, ’ight, ’eft, ’ight
, about-turn. When there was no one about, Nyipir tried to practice what he saw.

If he had not met Warui the gravedigger, he would not have met Aloys Kamau, and maybe he would have gone to Burma as he had intended.

Warui made bodies disappear for the Crown, and anyone else who paid for it. Deep-sunken eyes, tattered gunnysack, stained brown coat. One clipped thumb. Warui had stopped outside the mission gate, hat in his hand, glaring at Nyipir, pointing at his mouth, his way of asking for water. Nyipir glanced around—nobody looking—and led Warui to a tap, where he crouched and drank. When he finished, Warui lifted his hat and slunk away.

Five days later, Warui returned. Over the gate, he pursed his lips at Nyipir. In Kikuyu he said, “If you want to make more money, get ready tonight.”

Nyipir sneaked from the mission hut, already counting the money he would earn.

He did not yet understand the state of the nation, or that interrogation units were generating far too many bodies for one man to bury alone under the blanket of night. Bodies in
gunia
leaked liquids into the ground, over his hands, the stench of invisible human beings, smashed up and nameless, lowered into grounds that he then leveled.

“What’s this work called?” asked Nyipir.

“Vulturing.”

“Who are these?”

Silence.

“Don’t they have people of their own?”

Stillness, and the sound of metal hitting earth.

“How is it possible?”

Warui said, “Too many questions; work.”

They did, in silence. Except for the times Warui would say,
“Ssssssssssss”
into the ground. Planting secrets. Warui also said,
“Ona icembe riugi ni rituhaga.”
The sharpened hoe gets blunt. When Warui said it, he implied many things.

Nyipir planted grass atop burial sites. Unlike Nyipir’s gardenias, the grass grew thick, green, and healthy.

After every hour, Warui gave Nyipir ten cents as well as half a tin of maize meal for the evening’s work.

Nyipir said,
“Ona icembe riugi ni rituhaga.”

Warui spat, “Speak what you know, better still, don’t speak at all, you hear?”

They worked into the deep of night.

Few witnesses.

The inarticulate dead buried by mute gravediggers.

Warui once peered into the forest canopy and whispered, “It watches.”

Nyipir looked. “What?”

“Too many questions. Dig, dig.”

Nyipir returned to his real post at the mission hours before dawn, bathed his body with a pot of cold water, and went to huddle among the plants. They were stunted and stubborn but had gained a grudging root-hold. He also wondered why his body was trembling. All of a sudden he remembered that he had been handling human remains. He knelt over, head close to the earth, and vomited into the soil. Nothing left in his stomach. He stared at the mess and then covered it.
Fifty cents
. He told himself that every coin brought him closer to Burma and his father and brother.

Nyipir slept until cock’s crow.

The coins piled up.

But there was still not enough to even buy a train ticket to Nairobi.

The mission had told him that his food and board were payment enough, with a token two shillings a month for savings.

He needed more money.

When he asked Warui to increase his pay to twenty cents an hour, Warui laughed before clouting him in the ear.

“Work!”

One chilled night, Warui helped Nyipir bury a sack. The end of the sack burst open when they tossed it into a hole. Bloody hands and shriveled
male genitals poured out. Nyipir gasped and turned to run; Warui barked at him once.

Nyipir stumbled and fell to the ground. Warui spat. “It’s better if your eyes are blind. Hear?”

Nyipir nodded, still dizzy.

They returned to seal the hole in the ground.

That night, needing to clear his head, Nyipir switched paths, walked into and through the safe forest fringes. He walked through cobwebs, the tingle on his face spreading all over his body. He marched on. The ground of Nyipir’s mind opened, and he spoke to the dead and their broken parts. And his father and brother walked with him. His mother joined them, as did his sister.

After he had wiped away tears, Nyipir saw that the forest unveiled a path. He stopped next to a mountain olive tree and waited before doubling back. He did not sleep at all. He knew there was a reward for giving information that led to the capture of rebels. That amount, added to what he already had, might be sufficient so he could take a train to Nairobi, and from there he knew he would find a way to Burma.

Nyipir woke up early to water the plants in the garden, long before morning Mass. He skipped breakfast, slipped out of the gate, and went next door, where the soldiers’ camp was.

After the parade, Nyipir approached a corporal and told him what he had seen in the forest the previous night. The corporal went and told an officer, who beckoned to Nyipir. The officer stood next to a fading whitewashed stone—a fierce son of a struggling empire leaning against the mast upon which the Union Jack quivered. “What do you want?”

Nyipir stuttered the story of a covered diversion waiting in the forest. The field officer was a wiry, medium-height man with a ragged strawberry-blond beard. He listened to Nyipir, dolorous eyes becoming smaller and smaller.

The man said, “Right, boy! I’ll arrange things with the padres.”

That night, Nyipir rode in a Land Rover for the first time in his life and decided that this was all he would ever drive. Four others, one informant, a young soldier who had blackened his face, whose lips gleamed
pale, and three armed home guards, in the car. The road was bumpy. The Land Rover slid down slippery grooves, then halted. The men leapt out. Nyipir led the way to the path he had seen. The men crawled through the thick undergrowth.

An advance tracking squad had brought in a man on suspicion of being an oath giver. Nyipir was standing next to a guard when the man looked straight at him and said, “I surrender. And you?”

Nyipir puzzled over that.

The men eased their way into the concealed path, rifles at the ready, as silent as hunting cats. Nyipir, who had been ordered up a massive Wild Olive tree to wait and whistle an alarm if he saw anything untoward, ached to be part of the fierce band of men. Within the branches of the tree, Nyipir made a pistol shape with his right hand: two fingers pointing out, thumb up, two fingers in his palm. He waited up there until the hunters reappeared at dawn.

The following afternoon, Nyipir was redeployed from the mission to the camp—more of the same work but with guard duties thrown in and better pay. He became the camp’s odd-jobs boy, until two months later, on a frost-cold day, he was ordered by the commandant to join a group of men sent to retrieve bodies from a hut: a beheaded old man, a hanged youth about his age, a toddler, and two split-apart young women. The attempts to torch the hut had failed. Only the doors and windows were scorched.

So
this
was war? Nyipir had pressed his face into the soil and screamed until he blacked out. Cold water and invective revived him, supplemented by a kick on his rear.