Dust (28 page)

Ajany focuses on the crowd at the terminal. She could curse as her mother would. Kick down the ramshackle red shop. Her eyes are fire when she glowers at the man, who is gesturing with chin and eyes. “Go to Justina.” He points at her. “Go.”

“Me?” she stammers.

“
Kwani
, you see anyone else? Go!” he says. “Go!” A furtive look.

A customer approaches the shop.

He wants a sachet of milk and oil.

“Mluyia!”

The kiosk man snaps, “
Ati
, Mluyia!” Like most citizens, he is now careful about small, unconsidered talk. New sensitivities. His cultural roots had not mattered before the chaos—not in the city. Now most citizens understated ethnic roots, overemphasizing Kenyan-ness in brash Kiswahili and even louder English. Renegotiating belonging, desperate faith in One Kenya.

Ajany returns to her quest for a ride home.

The kiosk man shouts, “
Weh!
Oganda,
umenisikia
?”

Ajany pivots; her new braids swirl. “How do you know my name?”

“Go to Justina.” He glares at her.

Ajany heart pounds. “Who’s J-justina?”

The man shuffles objects on his narrow shelf.

She says, “So where’s this Justina?”

“Ask that woman.” Chin points toward the Gloria’s God Gives salon, where the stocky hairdresser beckons her back.

22

JUSTINA
’
S DARK-BLUE CORRUGATED IRON DOOR IS OPEN. AJANY
pushes it inward and finds a pregnant woman painting lines on a canvas that is perched on a sturdy wooden stand. The air in the room is stuffy, smoky, and tense, as if an argument has been interrupted. Ajany frowns when she sees the Windsor canvases that fill the room.

A stove reeks of paraffin. Cabbage in a small
sufuria
on the boil, as a hen cackles under a large wooden bed with a cheap purple velvet headboard.

Ajany’s eyes adjust to the dimness. “Justina?”

The woman gives her a side glance, offers nothing.

Justina is a long woman, no other way to describe her. Long fingers, long nose, long thin earlobes, and long limbs. Her muumuu is yellow, her lipstick too dark. She waves her squirrel-fur brush at Ajany. Nibbling her nails, she tilts her head at the canvas with its slash of red, its airbrushed-looking violet horizons.

The hovel’s door eases shut behind Ajany and locks into place. Ajany then notices a pair of a man’s dark-brown leather shoes placed behind the door. She reaches for them.

“Don’t …” starts Justina.

Ajany picks up the shoes anyway, eyes closed. Lifts them to her face, inhales the residue of sweat and dust. The smells become life, acquire a
voice. A dog yaps. New grief creeps in.
The day I meet God, I’ll throw my spear at him
.…

Justina paints.

Time evaporates.

Justina dips her brush into a metal mug. She tells Ajany, with a sudden side look, “I saw you.”

Ajany lowers the shoes, arranges them where they had been.

Justina says, “Saw you looking for Odi.” She scatters the excess liquid from the brush across the concrete floor. Red color splatters on concrete. A drop lands on an Ajua board set on a table.

An unfinished game.

Ajany stares at the board.

“Un tem fé, si un tem fê … mh, mh, mh … medo e confians …”
Justina hums, “
lalalala
 …”

Cesária Évora.

Ajany’s eyes fixate on the board.

Two rows, six cups. Forty-eight seed “cattle.”

Two extra holes.

Cattle storage areas.

She walks toward it, squats.

Sows seeds counterclockwise on the board, one at a time.

The aim of the game—practicing brigandage.

Take cattle, retain your own.

Justina approaches. “Only you may touch that, nobody else.”

Ajany almost slumps to the ground.

“Before he went that day, we played.”

Ajany rocks on her heels, hands covering her face.

“Don’t …” says Justina.

The hen clucks.

Justina bends and tugs at Ajany’s left hand, lifts it, and places it on her stomach. Fluttering movements within. Her baby stirs.

Ajany’s eyes meet Justina’s. Justina gives her a half smile, a tiny nod. A small sound as Ajany rises at once and presses her head to Justina’s stomach.

Justina cradles Ajany’s face, paintbrush in hand. She touches her brush to Ajany’s tears. “He wanted to tell you himself.”

“Odidi?” She needed to speak his name here.

Justina’s voice is low, with a touch of mischief. “I hooked him. He came to Twilight 333. I was there. I saw him. I wanted him. I got him.”

Justina is watching Ajany’s reactions. Ajany stares at the ground.

Twilight 333. The dome-shaped go-go lap-dance magnet. Floor shows, and rooms on the side for assignations and deals.

Justina’s lashes flutter.

“He came with me. He never left.” She looks into the distance, and a smile appears on her mouth, revealing a dimple in her left cheek. “He paid a daily no-service fee.”

Ajany asks, “And you p-paint?”

“Sex for oils and canvas.” Justina’s eyes harden; the ends of her mouth turn down. “Odi-Ebe—he wasn’t supposed to die.”

They take in the canvases, oils, paint powder, turpentine. Justina rubs her face, in fear of tears.

Silence.

Justina says, “He told me you painted.” A laugh. “We were coming to see you, Arabel.”

Ajany lowers her head.

“He got tablets—see—to help him sleep in the plane.…”

The room was closing in. Ajany’s body collapses in uncontrollable weakness, she is on her knees, her head drops to the floor. She lifts her arms to support her head, face turned toward a wall.
Paint a river out of Wuoth Ogik
.

“Do you like this?” Justina points to a canvas on the wall. Next to one of the photocopies of Odidi that Ajany had distributed, Odidi’s eyes, a triptych in four shades of rust. Next to the eyes, a square canvas on which a dancer in blue shadow leans against a copper-colored pole; she has exaggerated eyes. The gaze.

Ajany looks.

She asks, “What’s the tint?”

“Henna.” Justina turns to Ajany, stroking her face. “I’ll paint you.”

Ajany whimpers.

Justina whispers, “He wasn’t supposed to die, Arabel.” She drops her brush. “I wanted to see you.”

“Why?”

“To know what it would do to me.”

“And?”

Justina examines Ajany, eyes half lidded. “You’re nothing to me.”

Ajany steps back, gasps, recovers, tugs at a sudden sharp ache within her heart.

Justina grunts and says, looking at nothing, “Where is he?”

“Who?”

A whisper now: “Odidi, where is he?”

Silence.

Two years ago, Odidi had stepped into the frenzied friendliness of Twilight 333, away from cold city streets and the growing list of friends who could no longer abide his presence. He walked in for the music; it was something Angolan, and at once he wondered if he should call his sister. He walked in because he was exhausted by his helplessness, and the uselessness of his crying out to citizens, trying to alert them to the reasons they were paying six times the price for bread, fuel, milk, and sugar. Why their shilling had plunged, and why there were now multi-billionaires shopping for helicopters in their midst. He understood that as long as there was enough to move the day, beyond a grumble, people really didn’t care to know why their lives had become harder. They prayed. They organized themselves into cooperatives. They prayed. They wanted good things for their children. Worn out. He had tried.

Then he had seen the gangly girl with the big Afro wig, limbs dangling, as skinny as a reed, wearing a sparkly red top and black tights. She was haranguing bouncers in a dark-timbred voice while threatening men twice her size with a squirrel-hair paintbrush that she had drawn out of her oversized black handbag as if it were a knife.

He strolled over. “Is there a problem?” he asked; his voice was growly.

One of the bouncers whirled on him and lifted a hand, which he stopped easily. The bouncer looked closely at him, “Shifta? You?”

Odidi raised a brow.

“Oh, man! No problem, man, you don’t remember me, man, you left and, man, after that, rugger
mbovu!
Oh, man! Oh, man, can I buy you a beer? Where did you go? Shifta!”

And Justina—that was her name—had swirled, and tilted her head.

“I like your voice,” she said.

Odidi smiled.

She reached for his shoulders and measured them with her hands. “Strong. Are you rich?” she asked.

“No.”

“Can you make money?”

“Yes.”

“Come dance with me.”

They had danced together until the pain of his illusions of Kenya numbed, and when the music ended, at dawn, Justina knew she would never leave Odidi behind.

A sobbing cough from Ajany.

“I fed him,” Justina says. “He was so hungry.”

Ajany looks back at her brother’s eyes on the wall. Eyes lift toward a wooden cupboard. She sees it. Odidi’s brown leather rugby ball. She knows it is the one with a squiggle in blue, some Springbok player’s signature. From the day at the university when he had received it, just before Ajany left, Odidi had carried it with him. It had rested on his pillow.

“Leave that,” shouts Justina.

Ajany has to jump to reach the ball. It bounces off her hand and onto the ground. She grabs it, clutches it to her body. Gnashing teeth. Suffocated keening. Now she tries to gather her shattered selves by putting together pieces of Odidi.

Nothing happens.

Clutching the ball, Ajany cries.

Nightfall.

“I’m going to work,” says Justina.

“Now?” Ajany sniffs.

“When?”

Ajany walks in the direction of the door and sits on the ground in front of it. She watches Justina.

“A prostitute’s child needs the same things other babies have,” Justina says. “Stay or go. I’ve got work to do. If you stay, inside that box are his clothes.”

“He lived here?”

“Those dogs could never find him.” Pride. “I protected him.”

Studying Justina, Ajany wonders,
Why her? Why this place?
Bitter taste. Ajany looks around. Flickering lights, stench of yesterday’s cabbage, brooding chicken, children playing football outside. Ceaseless noise.
Why this?

Justina strips off her yellow muumuu, digs around for a loose-fitting
black-lace spaghetti top. A quiet laugh. “Sometimes, Odi-Ebe used to dress up as an old woman to pass through police roadblocks. They never caught him.” She squeezes into skintight shiny red trousers. “This is our world. Odi’s world. Tomorrow, when you come back to look for Justina, you may find there was no Justina. Maybe there will even be no house.”

Justina retrieves platform wedges and weighs them in her hand. Her head bends. “He almost made it home.”

“What happened?”

Justina leans against the bed.

“Uhaini.”

Betrayal.

“Who?”

“A diseased dog we were paying. He’s gone now.”

“Gone?”

“Someone got him.”

“So this is normal?”

Justina’s head goes up. “What’s wrong? Your brother was a thief? So what? Ebe organized us, he organized everyone. We do—did—do everything for our men. Even die.” She wipes her eyes. Throws her hand up. “Go away. Odi-Ebe didn’t want you here. Go away.”

Ajany looks at the ball. Tosses it up, catches it. “How much?”

“What?”

Ajany stares, eyes clear. “For your time?”

Justina whistles. “What do you want me to do?”

“Talk.”

Justina ponders Ajany, lips curling. “Anything else?”

Ajany glares.

Justina says, “Money first.”

“How much?”

“Five thousand shillings, for the night.” Justina sticks out her lower lip.

Ajany pulls out the notes from inside her coat. “Here’s what I have, three thousand and fifty. I’ll bring the rest tomorrow.”

“Keep your stupid money.” Tears slither down Justina’s top.

“Take it.”

Justina hits Ajany’s hand; the money scatters.

“May I feel the baby again?”

“For the money?”

“For Odidi.”

Justina lowers her head.

Ajany places her hands over Justina’s belly.

Closes her eyes.

The baby kicks.

Odidi
, Ajany calls with all her heart,
Odidi
.

She exhales.

This she can paint.

Today, filling in the name of loss.

The color is red.

It has a name.

Odi-Ebe
, pronounced in the breathy voice of a pregnant woman named Justina. She could sketch hope living in a womb, the best portions of a brother’s life—shoes, football, a woman, and an unborn child.

Small things.

Justina touches Ajany’s hair, leaves her hand on her back. They cry. Outside, thunder rumbles; there is a scattering of rain on the tin shack. Two women crying while the beloved unborn and the now dead listen.

They sleep on opposite ends of the bed.

They are only able to speak of Odidi at dawn.

The small universe inside is apart from the outside world. It is a place with Odidi at its heart and his sister guzzles down what she learns from the woman who had known this part of his life. She hears something of this woman’s life too. Family from Mombasa, Nairobi railway workers, father a polygamous train driver in the last days of the steam engines, Justina growing up contented in the city with assorted brothers and sisters, then a series of misfortunes that devastated, decimated, and dispersed the family. Disease. Job loss. Death. Dropping out of school, where Justina had excelled in art and mathematics, to take care of her sick mother, who had been the youngest and later abandoned wife. Justina’s little joys: timing the Mombasa–Nairobi train as it chugged along the railroad close to her shack, running after it and listening for the sound of its loud horn.

Crows caw outside. Footsteps—life in a hurry. Somewhere a dog barks and then whines. Inside, endless cups of ginger tea, and
mandazi
,
and then it is six-thirty in the evening and Justina is adjusting a blond wig, while disentangling yellow neck-length earrings from the hair.