Dust (37 page)

Wind-borne silences seeped into sands, hills, and scrub. The sun took its time shortening and then lengthening shadows. Ali Dida Hada’s silhouette shifted and twisted under the light. He inhaled the northern-frontier essence, the breath of camels, its many promises. He asked Nyipir, “Where were you taking these?”

“To friends.” Nyipir leaned over to pick up a strand of dry grass to chew on.

“Where?”

Nyipir paused. “Sele Bedirru.”

Ali Dida Hada lowered his rifle. “You need an escort?” It was why he was there.

An alliance among scorpions
, thought Ali Dida Hada then. Watching for an unguarded moment when one might sting the other to death. But from then on, Ali Dida Hada warned Nyipir about impending military ambushes. He also misdirected government informers, restructured their messages when he dispatched these to headquarters, and provided cover for unregistered consignments.

These activities took precedence over his halfhearted search for Hugh Bolton, which he did continue. There seemed to be no records attached to his name anywhere. Was it possible for a man to erase traces of his existence?

Life had hobbled along. Ali Dida Hada now knew some peace, as if he were kept in the armpits of God.

Petrus drags out his crinkled cigarette pack, studies a single cigarette with its chewed-up end. Ali Dida Hada stares at blue sky, red fire.
How did Petrus find me out?

Petrus insists, “We
are
the same, Ali, trained collaborators for
shit
.
Scavengers who read entrails, and then what? Mboya? Argwings? J. M.? Pio? Ouko? Ward? Goldenberg? Anglo-Leasing? The Artur scum? Parallel forces to traffic, massacre, poach …” He snorts. “And once a season shining tin pins and ornamental shoulder pieces to pin onto uniforms”—his hands cover his squinting eyes—“for our silence.” Weariness in Petrus’s voice. “What does honor mean for the men of this land?” For himself.

Cooing doves, a bristling insect, wind. Ali Dida Hada thinks,
We are the ghosts that consume us
.

Petrus swivels on his heels to glare at Ali Dida Hada. “Can you remember what peaceful sleep was?” He makes a harsh sound. “What it’s like
not
to thirst for blood to spill?” He lifts his unlit cigarette to his mouth, fingers shaking. “When our type retire, we die within a year, three if lucky. You hear?”

Ali Dida Hada coughs.

Petrus stares at his shiny shoes. “Won’t happen to me, understand?” Four steps left, six steps right, a swivel. “What say you?” A sly look. “Amnesia! At last, a solution.” His laugh is a grunt. He rubs his chest. Unreachable ache.

“Oganda’s alive.” Ali Dida Hada denies Petrus’s predictions.

With a downturn of his mouth, Petrus drawls, “You’re bewitched by him.”

Ali frowns.

“You left your wife and children for him.” Petrus gestures.

Ali Dida Hada grunts, “She left me.”

“You did not follow.”

“She’d gone.”

“You did nothing.”

“Nothing to do.”

“You didn’t try.”

“You don’t know that.” Ali Dida Hada sweats.

“But I do. Nyipir Oganda, a cryptologist’s riddle, a seduction no discontented wife could match, mhh? I understand. Oganda made me an apostate. Turned my eyes away from the mesmerizing glower of my deathless president.” A scoffing sound slips past Petrus’s unlit cigarette.

Silence.

Ali Dida Hada stares at Petrus. For all his inquisitiveness, Petrus knows nothing of Akai.

“So?” asks Ali Dida Hada, suddenly unruffled and suddenly sure he would return to Wuoth Ogik.

Within Petrus, a memory deluge from his lifetime of witnessing so many blood-stained transactions, hard cash for souls to slaughter on arcane power altars. He had abhorred the low-grade crudity of the exchange, the furtive compromises. He had noticed how the chief casualties were always those whom the soul-seller had thought he loved.

An imperceptible hesitation.

Then, “Our business,” says Petrus, a waver in his voice that he corrects as he pulls out a medium-sized black notebook. Inside, in neat green-ink letters, are banking details. He carefully tears out the page and, with a direct look at Ali Dida Hada, says, “Our oath of silence.” Then, in broken Tigrinya, Petrus asks,
“Ezu yibehai ezi b’Tigrinya?”—
I’ll forget everything I know after the money has been transferred? A slow smile. Ali Dida Hada pales. “I know. I know. But people do listen better in the language of their umbilical cord.” A chortle. Petrus tucks his paper into Ali Dida Hada’s pocket. “Amnesia and amnesty, you and me. We are Kenyan originals. We can use money to Sellotape our war wounds.” A tiny wink. Petrus laughs.

Ali Dida Hada’s face, now drained of emotion, is a void.
Dem Hira!
He curses within his mind.

Forefinger to lips, Petrus says, “Shhh.” He then adjusts his glasses. “Me amnesia, you amnesty, or vice versa.” Petrus salutes Ali Dida Hada. He turns around and flings open the metal door. Whistling “Sina Makosa.”

Receding footsteps.

Ali Dida Hada tries to shove air into his lungs.

30

INSIDE A NAIROBI GUEST ROOM, A SKULL ACQUIRES ITS OWN
eyes. Fingers mold contours and crevices, drawn from worlds of feeling that she has known and that she imagines. The light changes as she seeks its moods to offer gradations to her work. Ajany has done this before, always returning to the memory of the cave for meaning. She wipes down the plaster of Paris; her fingers shape eye orbits. More certain now of how to build the nose and mouth, she shapes the nasal opening and spine. Tingle in her arms, glow in her heart, Ajany becomes the shaping, the finding, the becoming. Later, she will adjust the skull on a black metal stand with a broad base.

First, Isaiah wipes the sandman’s crusts from his eyes. Next, he waits for the bite of despair that is the companion to his waking. Third, he remembers the early morning, how it started and ended, and when he raises his body to find the woman again, a movement stops his eyes and he sees that the colors of the late afternoon have muted her being and submerged her in her story making and if he moves too soon she might disappear.

She is looking at a broken skeleton from the cave of memory. Ajany stretches clay across a plaster-of-Paris cranium.

In the midst of molding, she stops.

Glancing over her shoulder, seeing Isaiah watching her. A small smile. Soft-voiced, she says, “I need your father’s photograph.”

He reaches for his wallet in the discarded trousers, pulls out the photograph, steps over their clothes to reach her and give it to her, fingers touching, hands clinging.

He says, “It’s late?”

“About two.”

“Slept well.”

She smiles.

“Here’s Dad.”

Ajany stares at the sepia image.

Her mind returns to the cave, and its skeleton.

She closes her eyes.

Hugh Bolton’s gaze.

Obarogo.

She drops the photograph. Picks it up, hands it over to Isaiah. Not looking. Composing herself, she touches his face instead, tugging at skin.

He watches her.

She applies clay to the object’s upper and lower eyelids. She touches Isaiah’s mouth to learn it and transfer it to clay.

Strips of clay. A mouth of clay. She thinks of Hugh’s mouth in the photograph.

When she moves again, Isaiah grabs her right wrist, catches her fingers between his teeth. Scrapes his teeth down her palms to the soft part of her wrists. She reaches up for him. Isaiah bends, kisses her, sucking, suckling, curious. Waiting for someone to move away.

The wind slams the window shut.

They pull away slowly.

She turns to her work.

Stillness.

She breathes out abruptly.

Fighting temptation—this need to cling to another, to touch and be touched, burrowing out simple spaces and escaping despair for a season.

Three days later, almost four—an imperfect face returns to the world after a full night’s crafting. It is made of distance, silence, frozen time, and old light. Its essence transfixes two people, the woman who has textured him to life, and the man who would be his son who cannot speak.

“This is what I know,” Ajany says, hugging herself.

Isaiah swoops her up. Squeezes her hard.

Nothing lasts.

Not hope, or pleasure. Isaiah wanted more to be in control over. He wanted a place to go to, to look and find. He had questions:

How do you know?

Where do I look?

How can you know?

Where is he?

“I don’t know,” she repeats.

I don’t know
.

“What do you know?” His fingers grab at her arm.

There’s a cave made of red
, she could say. But if she did, she would have to imagine how its agitated occupant got there, and if she did, she would have to start with Wuoth Ogik, and if she tried, she would hear both Odidi and her old
I swear
. The silence.

She says, “I must go home.”

He suddenly asks, “Bernardo?”

She swivels her body, eyes wide. Startled.

He says, “You called out to him in your sleep—he makes you cry.”

“Cry?” she asks.

Isaiah leans forward to wipe tears from Ajany’s face. He shows them to her, the glistening on his fingers.

She sinks to the floor, legs crossed. Her stammer is so bad she has to pause to breathe in.

“Who is he?” Isaiah asks.

Choose
.

“A man,” she says.

“He makes you afraid.”

Silence.

She looks to the floor.

“A hungry man I made God.”
And now there’s a blank
. She thinks.

Isaiah stares down at her. “Is he ‘home’ for you?”

“No.” She shivers. “Oh no.”

“Where is he?”

“Bahia. Where I live … lived … We were together. Four years. More.”

“Not long.”

“Long enough.”

“For what?”

“To get lost.” Her face is pinched.

“You’re here.”

“I cut myself out.”

“Cut?”

An empty-eyed look, speaking with reluctance. “From him. His ghost.” A wry twist of mouth. “Blood. Butterfly shaped. Like an oryx mask.” She gestures.

“Oryx mask?” Isaiah rubs his face.

She nods. “Had to cut myself away. Had to.”

Isaiah leans toward Ajany. “Meaning?”

She looks up at him, mute.

“What?”

“Was tied up inside him. Had to cut free.”

“From Bernardo?”

“Yes.”

“So? How?”

“I … uh … the knife … uhm …” No other way to put it. And there was an odd relief in speaking the truth aloud. “… stabbed him.”

Isaiah jars his spine when he sits on the floor.

Long exhale.

Churning deep-inside turbulence. Aware of fragility, its sometimes-madness. The woman hugging her knees beside him.

He asks, “Why?”

The question he asked his warlord-photography subjects.

She repeats the same answer they gave him: “I don’t know.”

Quiet.

Somewhere outside; an early-evening cicada vibrates a song.

“When?” Isaiah asks.

Christmas Eve.

A woman in a turquoise dress with a flower in her hair, hips swaying
in the night. No doors open for stragglers desiring explanations for why stars twinkle when the world had fallen apart. Kormamaddo the sky camel should have fled. The song of stars became still. She would call Odidi. He always knew what to do.

“Onde Bernardo, Arabel?”
Good-natured laughter, the tangle of a web made of other people’s expectations.

Find Bernardo
.

She would beseech him to keep her. She had taken off her shoes to return to the party that much faster, had stepped out of the lift.

Isaiah says, “You were afraid.”

“No.”

“Why stab?”

She says, “The knife was there. Next to the big-boobed woman’s golden thong. My replacement.”

“Anger,” Isaiah says.

“No.”

“Why stab?”

She squirms. “To loosen myself.”

“You could have gone.”

“He always finds … found me.”

“What was so awful that you couldn’t speak it?” He addresses other ghosts. He remembers how he fell from lofty power’s altitudes.

Ajany’s lips tremble.

Silence.

Isaiah smells words, hears smells, and tastes sounds. Inhales blood and sea and salt and the sound of waves that once swept away huge portions of his life.

Now.

Chin dropping to chest, refuge in the mundane. “Meet for dinner in thirty?” He gets up. No reply sought.

The room is stifling.

He slams her door in error.

Retreating footsteps. A wondering.
What if every human is born with a volume of madness to resolve?
Isaiah hunts for and retrieves his keys.
Some seize and drive those forces into an inner corral
. He enters his room.
Others are overwhelmed; they submerge and quietly drown
. He locks the door behind him.

Good evening, Jos
.

Evening, ma’am
.