Dust (50 page)

She stares. Huge tears floating in her eyes.

“I’ve something for you and Od … er …” Nyipir pulls out an old hard-covered black notebook held together by rubber bands. “Bank safety-deposit details. Odidi’s name. Yours also. Gemstones. Converted from money from … er … trading. Sign in with your ID when you go. It’s all been arranged.” Ajany’s hands hover over the notebooks.
Soft-voiced, Nyipir leans close: “Or leave it. Begin something new. Something that’s yours.” A pause. “You decide.”

Silence stripped bare.

“Baba?”

“Yes.”

Stillness.

She says, “Akai-ma’s leaving.”

“Yes.”

“And Galgalu.”

“Yes.”

Ajany looks at tearstains spreading on their clothes.

What endures?

Silence.

Then Nyipir whispers. “Draw a picture for us,” he adds. “Yes, shade even death in … use the colors of the sun and … and …” He remembers. Grunts it out: “forgiveness.” Quiet. “Create room for trying again. Breathing.” They wait.

“Will you,
nyara
?”

She did not understand, but his brows were puckered, eyes searching hers. In them the past, the here and the faith. She speaks to faith, she says
Yes
.

In Nyipir’s age-etched eyes, new tears. So Ajany burrows her face into his shoulders.

Ajany will hold the memory of light and clouds visible from a window. She will remember her head on Baba’s shoulders, hear echoes of music, smell pilgrimage, mystery, and all the worlds a father contains on musty travel clothes. She will savor this departure, the texture of old salt, and the weightless inability to say the word “Goodbye.” She remembers Nyipir repeating, “Ah,
nyathina
,” a rumbling voice calling her his own, and when she glances at Petrus once more, he has become another sign of faith.

Before Nyipir crossed the threshold that separated Wuoth Ogik from the rest of the world, Ajany gave him her sketchbook. Inside were two watercolors: one an impression of his brother, Theophilus, and the other his father, Agoro, revealed in colors taken from shades of longing within
Baba’s voice. He inserted Odidi’s folded photograph into the pages: all the Oganda men in one place.

What endures?
Echoes of footsteps leading out of a cracking courtyard, and the sound a house makes when it is falling down.

What endures?

Starting again.

Galgalu pivots sharply and moves to his left down a fire-eaten trail, which had those many years ago brought him into Wuoth Ogik. He crosses the space which takes him past the place where the Trader’s
tukul
had been, where he had seen that death was also fire, and it warmed the face of life. He looked and saw that the wind still came to scatter the ash and dust.

Akai Lokorijom dispossesses herself even of stories she had buried in the earth. She tells these to Ali Dida Hada as they walk with slow steps. He receives them. When she stops speaking, he is still there. So they walk some more. As they walk, Ali Dida Hada tells Akai about beginnings. Tells her that if she wants he will tell her his original name, the one he had forgotten. She tilts her head so he can whisper it into her left ear. She hears it and laughs, and he with her. They walk and walk until, one day, near a gorge with secret, sweet water streams, they cross into a land where the fire makers lived, a short distance from a forge. Akai and Ali Dida Hada see pale-yellow moonflowers thriving on the shadow side of a conical green hill.

46

AJANY AND ISAIAH ARE THE LAST TO LEAVE WUOTH OGIK. THEY
leave so the fire burning down the house can finish its work. The house glows. Resin-infused flames. Everything—wood, books, art, chairs, memories—turns to ash. At first the fire had mesmerized them. They watched it from their campsite, and Isaiah dragged out his battered camera to take pictures. But then, seduced by the fire’s frenzied freedom, they had danced before it giddy as children, and in their dancing there was fire and the spirit in the fire found bodies stripped bare to weave into replete landscapes, into which untiring desire roared in visceral rites of exorcism. The next night—just after midnight, when it was coolest—they set out for North Horr. They walked into the morning and past the evening. If they had left even three days after the others had, or if they had waited at Wuoth Ogik one more hour, they might have escaped the weight and waves of the flash flood. The mighty water was from a deluge that had ripped apart an ancient bridge, and caused the Ewaso Nyiro to rise and spread inland over a fifty-kilometer radius for the first time in remembered history.

A rushed, endless plunge.

Later, at the tip of the water, the woman called out to the man. Her voice was smooth, as if newborn. Her eyes contained the shine that marked those who emerge out of chasms. It took an eternity before he
answered. Dripping water, he asked if this was the road that led to the place where journeys ended.

Twelve days later, in the northern reaches of Kenya, rain clouds withdraw. The earth gulps down and stores water for later. A congregation of birds chirp, a raucous choir in need of a sane conductor. Transient storm-rivers disappear as the Ewaso Nyiro starts its reluctant crawl back to old boundaries. Oryx gambol; giraffes browse on the extended banks of streams, among pockets of flowering shrubs of all hues, mostly peach, a desert supernova of frozen flame, fragile blossoms, frantic in bloom, as if they were angels relishing a temporary reprieve from celestial certainty. A golden finger-of-God stirs clouds.

A hundred kilometers away, a helicopter hovers. A Cajun-accented foreigner surveys the area. The Jacobses’ mission station is underwater. The helicopter drifts to where the house should have been and circles the area at least thirteen times before setting course again for Nairobi. It is assumed that the Jacobses, together with an elderly intelligence man, a local named Petrus Keah, were some of the many human, floral, and animal casualties of a sudden desert storm in Africa:
Requiescant in pacem
.

In this landscape, a dog and camel saunter ahead of two tall gray-haired, ebony-skinned elders, one of whom, bare-chested, traverses the land in shiny black shoes set off by red socks. The camel, separated by the storm from its herd, is a good-natured juvenile now renamed Kormamaddo II by his itinerant, self-styled new owners. The travelers approach Lake Ka’alakol, which glowers, unmoved by nature’s theatrics. One of the men, with his fedora and cane, is debonair in a tattered kind of way. He has to remind the other to “Move, move.” The shirtless one gawks at day and night skies. Two evenings ago, he swore he saw the amused face of Existence looking down on itself. The night before that, he heard the clamoring of wounded souls who had taken residence in his being. They had offered him a truce: the idea of peace if he would speak out their names. It was a deal. Afterward, and for the first time in a terrible and long while, he heard silence. “See those clouds,” he demands of his companion.

An exasperated snort. “So now I’m blind?”

“Look again,
msee
.”

“I’ve seen. For many years, I’ve seen. Move, move.”

“You never told me.”

A sigh.

Fourteen days later, under a pure blue sky, the travelers stumble upon a neighborhood made of neglected corrugated iron triangle-huts fringed by several giant-milkweed bushes with white-and-purple flowers in bloom. In the center of a field, a tattered red, black, green, and white flag quivers on a rusting pole. They stroll past it. Their camel scans the world in small increments, its mouth in the shape of an “O.”

The desert’s transitory rivers and lakes evaporate.

Within sight of what had been Wuoth Ogik, a spread-out acacia sprouts green life. In there, a colony of gossipy weavers admonish the world from nests hanging like grass fruits. Roaming winds there ambush a timeless, dense, solitary airstream heading toward the Indian Ocean and pass above a trader and his grizzled, turbaned friend slumbering on the remains of a guitar in one of the day shadows of Mount Kulal. The bluster of air currents flanking the country disturbs the quiet care of a graying midwife crouched in front of a long-limbed, panting woman who has just given birth to twins—a boy and a girl, who emerged with little arms entwined around each other. The winds blunder toward Nairobi and become the tail end of an evening storm, the suddenness of which startles a pilot whose packed plane carries a lofty man from Brazil with a jagged scar that traverses his right hand and disappears up his sleeve. The thundershower pivots, and inside of three minutes swamps a squalid, downtown bar behind River Road, where accordions belting a gritty
mugithi
compete with Fadhili Williams on tape who croons,
Hakuna mwingine zaidi yako, ni wewe, ni wewe wa maisha, moyo wangu na mapenzi yangu nimekuwachia
.…

Acknowledgments

This book has been breathed to life through the thoughts, words, and deeds of composite souls, creatures, and landscapes:

Thank you to the Wylie Agency and Sarah Chalfant, who sought, saw, and believed, and then turned the story’s delivery into a cause. Dear Jacqueline Ko, for putting up with random ramblings with such tenderness and strength. To my brilliant, patient editor Diana Coglianese at Knopf, who peered through convoluted word thickets and shone light upon scenes while humanely killing assorted “darlings,” thus infusing order into a long, long tale.

David Godwin, your wily pursuit of this story covered four continents. That this book is in existence is evidence of faith moving mountains. Thank you. Binyavanga Wainaina, for whip-wielding tough love, daring, friendship, relentless faith, and a space-to-breathe residency; Jackie Lebo, for ruthless, brilliant reviewing; Kate Haines, for scalpel-edged insight and story sense—thank you, dear ones. Thank you, RL Hooker, for the sense of colored-in spaces and gifted story-sight; James ole Kinyaga, for interpreting the book of landscape for me; and Olivier Lechien, for a thorough, hands-off review.

Soul gratitude to you, my Amazonian
comadres
—Maryanne Wachira, Ann Gakere, Sheila Ochugboju, Claudia Fontes (especially for the
“Reconstruction of the portrait of Pablo Míguez”
), Saba Douglas-Hamilton, Caroline Ngayo, Deirdre Prins-Solani, Michelle Coffey, Shalini Gidoomal, Andrea Mogaka, Garnette Oluoch-Olunya, Marie Kruger, Nancy
Karanja, Lucy Mulli, Beverly Singer, Doreen Strauhs, Ashminder Dhiawalla, Hildegaard Kiel.

Thank you, Marcel Martins Lacerda Diogo and Claudia (again!), for “Braziliana”; Langi Owuor, for “camel water poetry”; Jimmy Gitonga, for forensic imaginings; Amolo Ng’weno, David Coulsen, and TARA, for Northern Kenya experiences; the amazing staff at the National Museums of Kenya (Nairobi, Loiyangalani) and all those exceptional souls at the Kenya National Archives. To Chimamanda Adichie, Billy Kahora, Angela Wachuka, the Kwani Trust team. Annette Majanja, Parselelo Kantai, Keguro Macharia, Michael Cunningham-Reid, Dickson Wambari, and Michael “Kobole” Maina, my debt of gratitude.

To the many who fed my hopes and then unexpectedly crossed into unreachable realms—Mary Komen, Agnes Katama, Uncle Ben “Odidi” Winyo, Gichora Mwangi, Morris Odotte, Anthony Dzuya—supernal thank-yous.