Dust (4 page)

Arabel Ajany Oganda stands under gray skies where shadows dart. A pair of bateleur eagles—prophet birds, like marabou storks—survey the ground for cooling bodies. Savanna birds encircling a city that is dashing toward an abyss, while here four men advance toward a white hearse with tattered red ribbons fluttering from its front windows.

Ajany breathes into her hands and shivers. Blisters and bruises burst in hidden places within, while her outside eyes glue themselves to Baba’s glowing brown shoes that underline his efficient out-of-place-ness. Bile in throat burns, dissolving her screaming.
I hate …
What? She swallows, focuses on Nyipir’s fixation with the wooden coffin, his guttural breathing out of a lullaby.
Oombe, Oombe / Nyathi maywak ondiek chame
.… She listens for Odidi. Listens for words that return life into a still body she has seen and touched.
Odi, wake up
, she begs with her breathing.

Nyipir Oganda lifts his hand. Six other eyes have been waiting for his sign. Three men: A mortuary attendant, sinewy and lame, one of his incisors elongated and peeping out of his mouth as if from another existence; his eyes ooze a brown substance and madness. Dr. Mda,
police pathologist, a short man of shiny baldness, whose cherubic, pockmarked face carries a too-large mustache set off by big ears and eyes that dart hither and thither; his beige trousers are a size too small. Ali Dida Hada as Ajany had never seen him before—in police uniform, adorned with the insignia of an assistant commissioner of police, carrying a black baton under his arm. An emaciated line, mirroring his strip of mustache, serves as a smile on his mouth. When she was eight years old and the then newly arrived Ali Dida Hada had been pretending to be an itinerant herdsman for her family, she had spied him mesmerizing the family camels with songs sung in a falsetto. She had told Odidi: “He has gold mirrors inside his eyes.”

Nyipir signals. The men hoist up the coffin.

It is a short walk to the white hearse.

They fit the box into the runners.

Bruised faces belie outward harmony.

Earlier, there had been a tussle next to the silver autopsy bay.

Nyipir had said, “I’ll take my son home now.”

Dr. Mda had screeched with moral valor, “A
Mporis
case. The ca
nda
ver
brongs
to the state.”

His tone had caused Nyipir to grab the rotund man’s neck and squeeze as a long python might. Supervising Officer Ali Dida Hada had watched, face placid, head tilted.

“
Heup
me,” Mda choked.

Ali Dida Hada had been nonchalant. “Me, I say there’s no case.”

Dr. Mda bleated, “You
mb
rought me here.”

“
Eh!
To reveal through science how this
cannot
be a police case.”

“Oh!” croaked Mda.

Nyipir had released Mda’s neck.

A practical man, Dr. Mda had looked to the mechanics of death for an answer that would not compromise his only partially tainted soul:
exsanguinations caused by pneumothorax and heart failure
, a footnote on a death certificate so that Moses Odidi Oganda could go home.

Distant sirens.

In the compound, near the grevillea and its cheerful bird, life collapses into the squeak of the opening door of a hearse, the view of a coffin from a rear window, the deep gaze of other strangers, and more shuffling footsteps. No flowers. No cortège—a brother’s leave-taking of a sour morgue where other corpses wait for their living. She remembers that the
hearse driver’s name is Leonard. His thin face bones cast fragile shadows. He has wrapped a white handkerchief around his coat’s upper arm and assumed a funereal look. It suits him. Earlier, Leonard had brought Ajany and Nyipir from the airport in a bright-yellow taxi. It is gone now.

Ajany scrubs her face and stares at two sides of the world.
Before-now
was four hours and forty-three minutes ago. Rained-upon earth mingling with smoke and age and dust and sun and cows on a father’s coat, and her head tucked into its folds in welcome at the airport, the scent of coming home from all her Far Aways.
But-now
is icy eternity, thick with the terror of the voicelessness of her big brother. But-now is made of the murmured anguish of other strangers—a ragged quartet oozing old-clothes smell. Wet eyes, life-hardened faces, as unadorned as the ill-nailed empty coffin on the cement. Panel-beaten features. The woman’s look is a hemorrhage. Wife? Sister? Daughter? Ajany looks away from these other citizens of the sea of absence.

A lethargic white-striped lizard pauses between tiny yellow flowers before lumbering across Ajany’s blue-painted toes, which peep out of absurd dark-blue Brazilian high heels. A howling
Where are you?
Resonance of fear, which pounds its hooves, galloping through her soul. Madness neighs. Her fingers press long, painted nails into palms. These bend and break. Groping darkness behind her eyes. Exhaling slowly so as not to disrupt stillness, Ajany breathes, but it is too late. Now is when forgotten ghosts return to claim beginnings. She could paint these arrivals, but for now she is gnawed by the ghastly bawling of a baby that only she could ever hear. Ajany calls for him, her story maker.
Odidi
. He knew water songs that soothed. He always knew what to do.

Outside sounds:

Étude of squealing tires.

Bird chirp.

Machine-gun opening sequence.

A scream.

Fragments of a song from some unseen citizen’s room.

Franklin Boukaka’s plaintive summons—
Aye Africa
 … 
kokata koni pasi, soki na kati koteka pasi
—and for a whole minute it overwhelms the frenzied crescendo screams of
Haki yetu
, “Our rights.”

It has begun.

Inside Ajany’s heart, a sobbing begins. Farther up the road, a pre-pubescent
girl with a tank top, belly ring, and red sneakers hurries off somewhere, clutching her Nakumatt white-and-blue plastic bags. A big hand lands on Ajany’s shoulder. She jumps.

Her father croaks,
“Wadhi.”
Let’s go.

Nyipir and Ajany Oganda approach the hearse. Then they both stop in front of the car door. The veins on Nyipir’s neck throb, and sweat pebbles crown his head.

In Ajany, a feeling as if her name had become tactile; she reaches for the sensation and glimpses tendrils of brother, strings thrown into this life from another dimension. She pulls at it and wraps the cord around her wrist. “Come, Odi.” A murmur.

Nyipir rubs his eyes before folding himself into the car.

Ajany follows.

They settle in, hugging beige seats, suffused by new-car-in-a-bottle smells. Leonard puts the vehicle into gear. No one acknowledges the pulsating ghost next to them. Like all the others, it is molded out of entombed silences.

Ali Dida Hada, the mortuary attendant, and Dr. Mda watch the white hearse’s departure. They also hear the sudden and explosive rhythms of a country shooting its people and tearing out its own heart. The mortuary attendant wrinkles his nose. “
Aieee!
So much work … and before the new year. Now, when do I see my ma?”

Massive purple clouds rush in from the eastern coast. Ambushed by a warm wind in Nairobi, they scatter, a routed guerrilla force. At Wilson Airport, a
qhat
-carrying eight-seater plane weaves its way off the apron. The last small plane out of Nairobi without top-level permission for the next week. Above the airport din, egrets circle and ibises cry
nganganganga
. Father, daughter, and son are going home.

Dusk is Odidi’s time. In the contours of old pasts, Ajany retrieves an image: She is sitting on a black-gray rock, spying on the sun’s descent with Odidi. Leaning into his shoulder, trying to read the world as he does, she stammers, “Where’s it going?” He says, “Descending into hell,” and cackles. She had only just learned the Apostles’ Creed.

The plane lifts off.

The coffin and its keepers are nestled amid bales of green herbs. Straight-backed, stern, silences reordered, Nyipir is a chiseled stone icon again, an archetypal Nilotic male. But there are deep furrows on his forehead. She can paint these, too. Trail markers into absence. Ajany had once believed Baba was omnipotent, like God, ever since he had invoked a black leopard to hunt down the mean and red-eyed inhabitants of her nightmares.

She trembles.

Nyipir asks, “Cold?”

Baba’s baritone, Odidi’s echo. Dimpled handsomeness. The Oganda men were gifted with soft-edged, rumbling voices.

Ajany turns. The light of the sky bounces on her thin face, all bones and angles. Fresh bloodstains on her sleeves. The frills of her orange skirt are soiled. She is tinier than Nyipir remembers. But she had always been such a small, stuttering thing, all big hair and large eyes. More shadow than person, head slanted as if waiting for answers to ancient riddles. He clears his throat. From the gloom of his soul, Nyipir growls, “Mama … er … she wanted to … uh … come to meet you.”

Ajany hears the lie. Sucks it in, as if it were venom, sketches invisible circles on the window. Stares at the green of coffee and pineapple plantations below.

“Yes,” Nyipir says to himself, already lost, already afraid. He shifts. The dying had started long ago. Long before the murder of prophets named Pio, Tom, Argwings, Ronald, Kungu, Josiah, Ouko, Mbae. The others, the “disappeared unknown.” National doors slammed over vaults of secrets. Soon the wise chose cowardice, a way of life: not hearing, not seeing, never asking, because sound, like dreams, could cause death. Sound gave up names, especially those of friends. It co-opted silence as an eavesdropper; casual conversations heard were delivered to the state to murder. In time neighborhood kai-apple fences were urged into thicker and higher growth to shut out the dread-filled nation. But some of the lost, the unseen and unheard, cut tracks into Nyipir’s sleep. They stared at him in silence until the day his disordered dreams stepped into daylight with him to become his life:

They
had pointed a gun to his head.

Click, click, click
.

He had fallen to the ground, slithered on his belly like a snake, hissed, and vomited, because he had forgotten how to talk.

Today.

Sweat on palms, heartbeat quickening, Nyipir swallows. A groan. Ajany hears a father’s leaching anguish. She scratches an ache where it itches her skin, gropes inside-places as a tongue probing cavities does. Expecting to be stung.

Today.

The past’s beckon is persistent.

From the air, Nyipir peers down at an expanding abyss. His country, his home, is ripping itself apart. Stillborn ballot revolution. These 2007 elections were supposed to be simple, the next small jump into a light-filled Kenyan future. Everything had instead disintegrated into a single, unending howl by the nation’s unrequited dead. This country, this haunted ideal, all its poor, broken promises. Nyipir watches, armpits damp. A view of ground-lit smoke. Dry lips. His people had never set their nation on fire before.

On the ground, that night, in a furtive ceremony, beneath a half-moon, a chubby man will mutter an oath that will render him the president of a burning, dying country. The deed will add fuel to an already out-of-control national grieving.

Nyipir turns from the window.

He is flying home with his children.

Yet he is alone.

Memories are solitary ghosts.

He lets them in, traveling with them.

Downcountry.

December 12, 1963
.

Lengees, a soldier, hoisted a red, black, green, and white flag up in a park. The flag collected sparks, and visions drifting like clouds. In that arena of spectacle, Nyipir Oganda had led a cavalcade, lugging a smaller red, black, green, and white flag while riding on a high-stepping black horse. He had shrieked as if expelling a fiend:

“Eyeeeeees left!”

Clop-clop-clop-clop
. Hooves and blurring vision. Men on a podium, some who he thought had died. Two men he knew had pounded other men to death. Another had been detained for his own safety and been supplied with a stream of world literature and unlovely comfort women, one of whom he married. He had focused on one man—Tom Joseph Mboya, who had colored in the red, green, white, and black flag. He had, years before, scoured the landscape and found promising souls that he sent to America to study, experience, and then come back home with transcendent dreams. The Leader of the Nation had tilted his head at the tracker-policeman carrying the Kenya flag, a dark man on a black horse. In his sweaty palms, the flag had almost slipped as Nyipir had bellowed, “Eyeeeees front!” A mosaic people had cheered. Wanderers, cattlemen, camel herders, fishermen and hunters, dreamers, strangers, gatherers and farmers, trading nations, empire builders, and the forgetful. Such were the people for whom Nyipir had carried the new Kenya flag. There was also the anthem created from a Pokomo mother’s lullaby:

Eh Mungu Nguvu Yetu

Ilete Baraka kwetu

Haki iwe ngao na mlinzi
.…