Dust (38 page)

He is there, head bowed, as though in prayer.

She will color absence green.

Like grass and life.

His shirt.

Black skies outside.

Rain scatters on the red brick ledge.

Ajany studies raindrops. That way she can postpone meeting Isaiah. There, the salve: washing blood from jagged wounds. Here, the waterfall: tumbling into fire, becoming steam, and returning as rain again. Suddenly, next to her, a pointy-nosed waiter says, “Madam, Calisto the chef recommends chicken tikka masala with a choice of potatoes, ugali, chapati, or rice.” The waiter escorts her to a chair opposite Isaiah.

Not a green shirt, more like a shade of teal.

Eyes lowered, Isaiah suggests, “Chicken?”

A nod.

She counts the bamboo-wood strips of her place mat. Outside, quiet rain. He lifts his head. Between them, magnetic tension, and Isaiah’s contemplation of Ajany becomes an incendiary thing. Drawn to look, she finds his voracious, restive longing. Its confusion. Blinded, she allows his hunger, revealing her own, breathing through half-open lips. Suspended seconds, soft fall of rain. On the table with its plain white cloth, fingertips touch. Stillness. Clanking plates on a tray. Footsteps. Curried steam. The food is served.

31

TWO NIGHTS AGO, HE MADE THE DECISION. NYIPIR HOVERED
outside Galgalu’s
boma
, carrying a huge empty gunnysack. He needed Galgalu’s company. Bandaged and balmed, Galgalu had returned from the medical center the night before.

Nyipir told Galgalu, “There’s something in the red cave.”

“It’s forbidden,” Galgalu replied.

Nyipir said, “For that reason, we go.…”

Galgalu said, “It’s time?”

All the while, Galgalu had known.

They ventured into the twisted darkness, crawled on the ground until they reached a sliver of light. They paused before entering into the chamber of images, stories, and bones, on their knees like penitents. When they re-emerged, they were burdened and changed. Nyipir insisted on carrying Hugh’s bones alone.

Three white-tailed honeyguides listen to human songs of unraveling oaths. Galgalu still prays over an Englishman’s ghost, pleading for a truce, since they are all so far from home.

Nyipir completes a new cairn within forty-eight hours. In that time, he has talked, mostly to human bones in a gunnysack, until his tongue is swollen. Galgalu hears some of those words, their plea for mercy.

Nyipir spoke of an almost-teenage boy running from a psychotic uncle whose head he had split with a flying hoe, a teenage gravedigger with plans to head out to Burma to retrieve family ghosts.

He spoke to the bones and Galgalu, of Hugh. “I used to be a child.” Nyipir says, “Before I met a man who walked with power.”

“He took me for police training. ‘Can’t work with “bleddy” civilians,’ he said—remember? I fed and washed a grown man who could kill if he wanted to—and he did. But he showed me how not to be afraid. And work, always work with Bolton. Driving. Washing dishes, clothes. Polishing brass and boots. Fetch, carry, hunt, cook, guard, light fires, set plates, boil bathwater, and set up a safari camp, walk, hunt, talk, fight, listen. And tea. At ten and at four.

“We hunted men,” Nyipir adds.

The addiction.

“This kind of thing does not end right.”

Silence. Yet in Nyipir’s mind, turbulence. Scarred memories of a patriot with a wire around his scrotum that would be pulled at another man’s whim, for the sake of the nation. Rotting in state dungeons. Losing faith, in God, in men, in country.

He finally told Hugh, “I’ve lost her.” Defeat.

No, he had never imagined intimate casualties, had never thought his only son would die before him in these nameless wars.

The cairn is completed before midnight. It is straight on all angles at the base, and the stones chosen to create the ramparts are perfect. When it is done, Galgalu brings Nyipir a calabash of liquid. Honey wine had medicinal and purgative values.

Nyipir had lost his Kenya on July 5, 1969, in Nairobi, when Tom Mboya was assassinated. The murder was the culmination of fears, swirling rumors, the meaning of clandestine oaths that made the rest of the country enemy territory to be owned. It was the purpose of the silences that had started before.

Nyipir and a colleague, Mzomba, had been looking across the Jeevanjee Gardens and had paused when the report of something
punched the air. Then silence. They started to walk in the direction of the noise. Twenty minutes later, a woman in a green dress, barefoot, carrying white shoes, raced past them. She was crying, a horrible sound that seemed to come from all around her, and from within her.

Ka-Sehmi. Mayieee! Gi-neeeee-go Mboya
.

Mboya!

Nyipir’s body temperature had dropped.

Tom. Mboya
.

His heart had slowed down, and he collapsed with his disintegrating national dreams.

Then.

It is a lie. Nobody would kill Tom. Nobody would dare kill Tom, because it means they would be willing to kill Kenya
.

He started to stutter something.

Later, Mzomba lit a cigarette and offered it to Nyipir, who was on his knees and clinging to a telephone pillar.

This death created a fissure in the nation, as if it had split apart its own soul. The funeral cortège was more than two kilometers long. A wailing nation lined up on three hundred kilometers of road to touch the passing hearse. In the silence of everything else, in the farce of a trial, a man named Njenga, who had fired the gun, cried,
Why pick on me? Why don’t you ask the big man?
Before he could suggest much more, Njenga was hanged.

After Mboya, everything that could die in Kenya did, even schoolchildren standing in front of a hospital that the Leader of the Nation had come to open. A central province was emptied of a people who were renamed cockroaches and “beasts from the west.” But nobody would acknowledge the exiles or citizens who did not make it out of the province before they were destroyed. Oaths of profound silences—secret shots in a slithering civil war.

In time.

A train would stop at a lakeside town and offload men, women, and children. Displaced ghosts, now-in-between people. No words. Then one night a government man drove into town from Nairobi. He carried petri dishes of
vibrio cholerae
. He washed these in a water-supplying
dam. Days later cholera danced violently across the landscape, dragging souls from that earth, pressing dessicated bodies deep under the earth.

No words.

Under the trance of fear, a nation hid from the world. Inside its doors ten thousand able-bodied citizens died in secret. Some were buried in prison sites, and others’ bones were dissolved in acid.

Nyipir knew.

He saw.

He did not speak.

He hoped it would end soon.

Just like the others who had also seen, he told no one.

A hundred, and then a hundred more, herded into holding houses.

Picked up—taken from homes, offloaded from saloon cars, hustled from offices, stopped on their way to somewhere else—prosecuted, and judged at night. Guilty, they were loaded onto the backs of lorries. And afterward, lime-sprinkled corpses were heaped in large holes dug into the grounds of appropriated farms. Washed in acid, covered with soil that became even more crimson, upon which new forests were planted.

After Mboya, Kenya’s official languages: English, Kiswahili, and Silence. There was also memory.

Nyipir’s mind had collected phrases shouted out to those who were within hearing range:

Tell my wife
.

My brother
.

Daughter
.

Son
.

My friend
.

Someone
.

Tell my people
.

That I am here
.

Tell them you saw me
.

Because there was silence, he tried to memorize names, never speaking them aloud.

Some he wrote out in a child’s notebook.

In case one day a stranger might ask if so-and-so had existed.

Patrick Celestine Abungu
. University professor of history, returned from Russia, bearded and bespectacled. Broad-chested and terrified. He shouted,
Tell my wife and children
.…

Onesmus Wekesa
. Musician, composer of songs with double-meaning
lyrics. A song that mocked an oafish, greedy hyena that ate up its own body had brought him to the police cells. He wept when they dragged him away. He clung to everything. He shouted,
Tell my brother
.…

Cedric Odaga Ochola
. Engineer. Former major. Dragged out the door, he had screamed, “How can you do this?” He glimpsed a figure and shouted,
Tell my daughter
.…

Odd.

No one would emerge to ask after men who had been erased.

It was as if they had never been born.

Kenya’s official languages: English, Kiswahili, and Silence.

But there was also memory.

Nyipir knew.

He saw.

He did not speak.

He hoped it would end soon.

Till one afternoon.

A jeering colleague.

Nyipir was braiding his horse’s tail when the man sneaked up to him, spitting displaced rage:
“Nyinyi! Heee! Mambo bado. Mtaona! Mnacheza na Mzee?”

Nyinyi
. You
the other
. Not us.

Two weeks later, three men in camouflage gear, berets, and shoulder lapels watched an Ajua game in progress. In the camp near Kapedo Falls, to the south of Turkana District, the sound of the Suguta River.
Clack-clack-clack
of seed on wood. Fixed gaze of two squatting men. Two rows of rough, curved hollows on the board where stones collected. A two-hour Ajua game. Slam on board.

Nyipir collected all but four of Corporal Gakui’s seed “cows.” He had gloated,
“Mia dhako!”
Give me a woman!

The corporal spat,
“Kihee!”

Silence that precedes an ambush.

Three jumpy men watched.

Kihee
. Uncircumcised.

Nyipir dropped a seed into the grooved slot before turning to the man. He asked, “How does a mutilated penis make a man more of a man?
Msenje
,” he said, “I’ve buried your testicles before, I can bury them again.”

It was only when a locust whirred over a pale-brown anthill that Nyipir realized that in in this epoch of silence, he had spoken, and by speaking he had made himself a sacrifice.

He got a confirmation within five days:

Citing Acting Inspector Nyipir Oganda for indiscipline, insubordination, and criminal activity; failing to protect civilians, stealing police equipment and stock, absconding from duty; protracting military conflict …
Verdict: dishonorable discharge
.

That was 1969, the year Tom Mboya was murdered, and Nyipir lost Kenya. Often, for him, it was still 1969.

Later, despite a decree that had declared that it was not possible, somehow, the Leader of the Nation managed to die. In 1978, a lean cattleman, an inarticulate teacher, took charge, and Kenya changed again. Still, nobody dared talk about 1969 and why Tom Mboya died, not even Nyipir.

Until the day Nyipir washed his son’s naked and unmoving body, and heard how a grieving Kenya, to receive a new year, 2008, had set itself on fire.

Ajany returns from her final pilgrimage to her brother’s death scene. She had waited by the road, staring at the remains of a white flower on the spot. Later, she had gone to seek Justina, to breathe all that was in and of her that was also Odidi’s. She had found herself wandering from door to door, had discovered that not one of the doors was familiar. “Justina?” she had asked passersby.

No
.

Not even stout Gloria could remember that Justina had existed.

“But I saw her … you showed me …”

“Are you sure, Mami? Can I fix your hair?”

Out of Ajany, a tiny whimper.

The kiosk man had frowned. “
Ai!
Madam, Justina?” Ajany had examined the bland look on the man’s face. A shield. She had turned away,
taken steps toward the dusty road. Walked through the late-morning light and paused to pluck out fragments of a lily stuck on a hard black road. Odidi’s flower; she would take it with her to Wuoth Ogik.