Dust (32 page)

Isaiah’s voice: “Does it help?”

Ali Dida Hada hands over the painting. “No.”

His voice is strained. “Excuse me, I’ve work to do.… Afande Petrus will help you.”

He heads for the steel door.

Petrus calls to him in Kiswahili: “Ali! We all have a case that confuses our skills—even me.” A gruff laugh. “The sudden disappearance of the Nairobi lord mayor’s great golden chain. Started a private investigation. A diversion. Was curious. Then it got intricate, and, yes, personal. Was all set to go to France to hunt for evidence, when, fortunately—I see that now—I run out of money.” A snort of laughter. “Anyway, Ndugu Ali, your problem is this, you hunt in darkness and alone. Always a risk.” Ali Dida Hada stops. “You also think truth is the same as order. Your downfall.” Ali Dida Hada touches the door. “What happened?” Petrus’s eyes are half closed. “Collusion? With Oganda?”

Ali Dida Hada drags open the metal door. He descends the steep steps. He hears Petrus tell Isaiah, “The search for your father cost Ali his family.”

“How?”

“They abandoned him.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Why?”

“Unfortunate loss.”

“No doubt.”

“About the obituary.”

“Yes?”

“Should we talk to its author?”

“Start the conversation.”

“Where? How?”

“I draw good maps.”

25

AJANY
’
S CONVERSATION WITH JUSTINA DOES NOT GO WELL
.

Justina was shouting, “Leave me alone.”

“Your money.”

“Ah! Just go.”

Ajany counts out six thousand shillings—Justina hesitates, then takes it and stuffs it into her brassiere.

“Let’s talk,” said Ajany.

“About what?”

“Odidi.”

“He’s dead. It’s life.”

“The baby …”

“Is mine.”

“My parents …”

“Never tried to reach him.”

“They searched for him. He was coming home.”

“Home!” Justina pushes Ajany.

“
This
was a better life for him?”

“Yes.”

“My brother is … was an engineer, a sports star.…”

“Did it help him?” Justina shouts.

“You certainly didn’t,
slut
.”

Justina slaps Ajany twice. But when Ajany lifts her hand to push Justina, a lake of red dancing before her eyes, she remembers the swelling womb beneath Justina’s blue chiffon blouse. Her hand hovers in the air.

Justina offers,
“Hebu jaribu.”
Just try.

Ajany touches her face, pats it. “I would, but Odidi’s baby is here.”

“The baby’s mine.”

Ajany’s voice chills: “Blood calls to blood. I’ll find the child.”

“I’ll kill it first.”

“Then I’ll find you.”

Justina turns away, face wet, swaying in high heels. “Come near me again,” she says, “I’ll cut up your face.”

Ajany shrugs.

By the time Jos at the guesthouse checks Isaiah William Bolton into a room with a view of the lawn, just two doors away from Ajany’s, Ajany has sought out Twilight 333 again. She disappears into the music while downing Black Ice.

After midnight, after the floor show, Ajany takes to the glinting pole, remembering a woman who used to throw herself into yearning. Black curl stretch. Lights throb. Body ripple. Music swirling inside her, lengthening her. Box splits.

Remembering seasons before Odidi’s death:

Phone conversations.

“You’re sad,” Odidi once said. “Come back home.”

“You come visit,” she countered.

He had confessed his fear of flying. So they spoke of rain, of drought and rock art. A hinted-at longing. “Do you miss us?” Odidi had asked.

Every day
, she had thought.

“ ’Jany, come home.” He had listened for her answer—its absence.

He should have actually told her what he needed to say.

A long-suffering brother’s sigh: “
Okaay
. I’ll come and see you, silly.”

Ajany had started to cry.

He teased,
“Ajany yuak-yuak.”

“Odi …” she murmured.

He had exploded, “He’s murdering you.”

“N-no,” she stammered.

“You’re not painting?”

How had he known?
“Odi …” Her apartment door had rattled then, a key being inserted. Bernardo was home. “He’s here. Talk soon?”

Odidi, raspy-voiced: “ ’Jany—”

She cut him off. “B-Bernardo.”

“That fungus. Leave him.” His voice was soft.

Ajany had switched off the phone and pocketed it. Rearranged her face into a neutral look for the lover who had broken his guitar’s stem on her arms the day before.

On the Nairobi dance floor, Ajany falters mid-crouch. She stops, seeking sensation; her hands reach for the strobe effects, swaying, moving, and winding. She stares through the smoke.

Emerging out of subtexts. What is the world like? Anguish. The dance floor is hard. Burnslide to standing. She is conscious of silver-blue lights shining in her eyes. She stumbles away from the raised floor.

Catcalls. Whistles and grunts from murky audience circles. Stench of sweat, musk, and lust-encrusted heat. A hand slams into her crotch. She claws it away, scratching back.

“Malaya!”
—a curse.

“Skunk”—her grunted reply.

Needing air, needing sleep. She peers at her cell phone and, when the lights appear, presses out Peter the taxi man’s number. Through red-lit passageways, the artificial sunset changes color from orange to yellow to pink to red and back to orange. “Peter?” she slurs on third try. “Take me home. I’m in Twilight 333. Am feeling s-s-thick.”
Sick
. She vomits next to three bouncers borrowed from a rugby scrum. One in a pink shirt spits on the pavement. He sneers at her. “Useless.”

His insult is a splodge between them—a blobby object from the mouth of a hulk wearing a glittery pink shirt. Ajany gives up.
Pink spangles
. She sputters in laughter. Sounds like sobbing, though.

He. Must. Force out. Akai
.

Cut her out
. He must bleed out his soul to save Akai’s life, because if she appears now he will slaughter her. He knows which knife he will use, and no one will hold him accountable.

Her footsteps
.

She
had come to Wuoth Ogik.

She had made her decision.

Her choice had cut him off; it did not include him.

Had it ever?
Nyipir wonders.

It had once
, he comforts himself.

From the time when he first saw Akai Lokorijom standing on the other side of a heated watering hole, shimmering in the heat, Nyipir’s life had been about that moment, that season, that second. Everything he had sought seemed to have been to anticipate this encounter.

Even at that time, he had desired to squeeze all of her into himself, hide her from the world, and contemplate her for and by himself. And later, when he could cup her face, trace its inner bones, it was in secret, and broken with long spates of dark tears. Akai Lokorijom could make him talk as if he had never spoken before. Nyipir told her where he came from, describing even the almost white shade of brown that was the colour of the loam soil of home. He described his mother and his sister to her, and how they had died. On the ground, he sketched a crooked shape of Nam Lolwe, the freshwater lake whose presence was inside his life. He told her of deep promises made, how he would one day find his father and brother and bring them home from Burma. He even whispered to her the story of Aloys Kamau, and how through the memory of his blood he could sometimes see the heart of the world. Akai had drained Nyipir of his stories before she would allow him a small glimpse into her universe.

Chon gi lala
, once upon a time.

There was a dry season of such parched vehemence that even the low, pale thornbushes died. A Ndesit family crossed the lake, moved southward, and stopped at Ileret when the rains came. From there they would restock diminished herds with borrowed livestock. The vigorous incursions of hopeful administrators into that part of the country coincided with the arrival of Akai’s family.

Scrambling over life’s fences, traveling long distances alone to
look for and dwell briefly with members of her pastoralist family, Akai erupted without patience into her teenage years. She was a consummate shirker of herding duties and a cook who always burned food, more likely to be found hunting, swimming, and challenging young men to wrestling matches.

Freshly arrived Irish missionaries had been plaguing the clan to send their children to school, a game of hide and seek, which the missionaries lost. But they were persistent. A sacrifice for peace, Akai and the other children whose families had lost their livestock were dragged into mission camps for religion and an education.

Her restless imagination thrived when it found fresh universes. A nomadic, pastoralist, sacrificial incarnate God-priest slotted perfectly into the landscape like a much-expected missing puzzle piece. With her new knowledge insights, Akai intended to seize the world. She was a mimic, and her expanding English vocabulary was tinged with the brogue of her Irish teachers. She was at the top of her class, excelling in all subjects. She expected this. Akai plagued her teachers with questions: What desire is at the heart of God? Who fills it? Where do stars go, if, as you say, they die? Where is the farthest far away?

Some teachers were charmed. Most became alarmed.

Why is what you know more truthful than what I know?

While the colony tumbled into and out of its halfhearted local war, Akai bloomed. After she menstruated, the clan shunted her off to a secluded place to learn the ways of women: manners, expectations, cooking skills, animal husbandry, pleasure, birth, how to sing, how to weep, how to raise children, how to invoke God, and how to kill a man. Akai ran away before the sessions ended, and she sought her beloved stepfather: “Initiate me into manhood!”

He bellowed with laughter.

Akai laughed with him.

Her mother covered her mouth and thought Akai had been cursed.

“You have shamed me.”

Akai twisted her nose. “How?”

Akai returned to school. She decided she would become a teacher and a traveler. When she came back home, she would organize proper cattle raids. She wanted to own at least ten thousand large-horned cows.

One school term, when the school refused to serve milk or meat but offered plenty of vegetables and plates of fish for a month, Akai organized a boycott of all the mathematics classes until the kitchens offered some meat and more milk. The protest fizzled into nothing.

Akai was suspended.

The headmaster-priest boomed:
Mutinous, indecorous, and impious
.

Big words
, Akai later scoffed to Nyipir.

She was given a letter to take to her parents, who were to return with her to school to administer her public chastisement.

Akai packed her green skirt, took off her shoes, and skipped southward, in the direction of her stepfather’s workplace. It was a five-night journey to the plateau where her stepfather worked for a thin, effete colonial officer as
nyapara
, supervisor of the works of other ditch-building men. He earned money to restock. He also made himself a
de facto
enforcer of cattle tax, and occasionally succumbed to temptation by adding a coveted goat or sheep to his own herds. Peaceful livestock raiding, he felt. Other men increasingly loathed him. Their opinions neither moved nor stopped him.

A day before Akai Lokorijom should have found her stepfather, she detoured, aiming for a seasonal watering hole with fragrant waters that were a mix of hot and cold, as she was. She reached the edge and saw that two people were already in the water. She increased her pace, propelled by curiosity. She hoped they had some extra fresh milk to give her.

Stillness in the day.

Heat.

I don’t exist
, Nyipir Oganda thinks, pinching the skin of his face.

Dusk.

Nyipir stirs.

Akai?

Sound becomes companion.

Memory reeks: longing and shame.

Things to cut away—that source of pain, his heart.

Midnight.

Nyipir wakes up and gropes the space beside him where he thought
his wife lay. She is not there. She has not been there for a while. Yet tonight, when he smells smoke in the wind, he knows something essential has gone from Wuoth Ogik. Unease. A realization: he is not at home yet. A shiver. He clears his throat. His hand rests on the space where his wife used to sleep.

26

AJANY STUMBLES TO OPEN HER DOOR AFTER A POUNDING FROM
the outside becomes a drilling inside her brain that forces her into wakefulness. She is in a wrinkled pink cotton nightshirt and a pair of violet shorts. Lank strands of braid cover her right eye. “It’s you,” Isaiah says, holding up the dreaded painted rectangle. Restless eyes, up and down Ajany’s body. He restrains the urge to push Ajany’s hair strands away. His voice comes from a remote place.