Dust (6 page)

Weak-kneed, her hair matted, and unable to let go of tenuous contact, Ajany huddles down right there, studying the dust of home, the progress of safari ants in an evening that stinks of wretchedness.

Nyipir Oganda looks down at his daughter before trundling away to retrieve her travel bags. The pilot follows him, clasps and unclasps his hands before saying, “
Mzee
, condolences. Sorry.”

Nyipir nods. He hauls down orange and red luggage and nods at the pilot over and over. And then Nyipir waits, a solitary form. Soon, the plane taxies, wobbles, and then lurches skyward. The pilot circles Wuoth Ogik, offers a lilt and waggle. Nyipir brings his hand up to his forehead and returns the salute.

Five kilometers away, a slow-moving dust-devil giant lops over the land. Ten minutes later, the formerly green, now rust-colored family Land Rover, long in tooth and loud in rattle, bounds toward the waiting pair. Nyipir faces the car, not breathing. The Land Rover creaks to a stop and emits the smell of a burning clutch. Two people emerge: Galgalu, who had grafted himself onto the family before the children were born, and Nyipir Oganda’s wife, Akai Lokorijom.

She flows like magma, every movement considered, as if it has come from the root of the world. Tall, willowy, wasp-waisted, her breasts still large and firm, she is made of and colored by the earth itself. Something ferocious peers out of dark-brown eyes, so that even her most tender glance scalds. Her voice, a bassoon-sounding, gravel-colored afterthought. At unpredictable moments, for nameless reasons, she might erupt with molten-rock fury, belching fire that damaged everything it encountered. Akai was as dark, difficult, and dangerous as one of those few mountains where God shows up, and just as mystifying.

When he sees Akai, Nyipir’s hands pour sweat. Ajany’s bags slip from his grip and tumble to the ground.

Galgalu, carrying a lit kerosene lamp behind Akai, lifts a hand to Nyipir in greeting, but Nyipir’s eyes are fixed on the bald patches on Akai-ma’s scalp where she has torn out her hair. Scratches and tear marks on her face. Blood cakes her body in thin strips. One of Nyipir’s AK-47s, the four-kilogram 1952 with a wooden butt stock and hand guard, is strapped to her body, cradled in a green kanga with an aphorism written on it:
Udongo uwahi umaji
, “
Work
with wet clay.”

Nyipir shambles toward his wife. He is preparing to steer away from echoes of a conversation that started one day in August 1998, after a distant-living coward detonated a bomb in Nairobi. He should have known it was a forewarning.

“My son!” Akai-ma had wailed at him then, while a BBC Radio news bulletin retold the story of an explosion in Nairobi. “I want my son.”

“He’s safe,” Nyipir had answered.

Akai Lokorijom had said nothing. Disappeared, reappeared—Vaselined and fresh, with a small bag, ready for a journey.

“Now where’re you going?” Nyipir had asked.

“To find my son.”

Nyipir grunted, “I’ll go.”

He had started toward Nairobi, the city that had tried to kill him. He’d made it past shifting dunes into the North Horr airstrip when he bumped into Ali Dida Hada, who was also on his way to Nairobi, summoned to the Kenya National Police headquarters at Vigilance House.

“As if we don’t have enough fools of our own,” Ali Dida Hada griped, not commenting on Nyipir’s sweat-bleeding body, his tremulous voice.

“He’s my only son,” explained Nyipir.

“I’ll look.”

“Akai would die …”

“I’ll find him.”

“Moses Ebewesit Odidi Oganda.”

“I know him.”

“She’ll break if something has hurt him.”

“I know.”

A tacit admission of a situation that neither would acknowledge existed. “I’ll look. I’ll call you,” said Ali Dida Hada.

They had parted.

They had not shaken hands.

Nyipir had changed directions, slunk off toward Maralal to monitor the news. Eight days later, with a crackle of the radio, Ali Dida Hada informed Nyipir that Odidi Oganda was safe, and contributing to the after-attack relief efforts. He also said Odidi was a successful Nairobi engineer servicing large contracts.

A pause. “You saw him?

“I did.”

“What did he say?”

Silence.

Nyipir now inhales the orange sun, the dry grasslands, and the chirping of early-evening crickets, to escape, for even a second, the horror of the story he must repeat to a mother: the roiling country, the murdered son. The fire in Galgalu’s kerosene lamp wavers. Nyipir circles the area, hurries to shield Akai from seeing the coffin.

Her mother. In Ajany, a concentration of absences from seven and a half years twinge in her heart like a torn string clanging lost music. She
exhales and bounds over, an eager dog closing in on its mistress. Akai-ma pivots. Another direction. Ajany stops.

Nyipir stretches out his arms. “Akai.” He starts his explanation.

Akai shoves him aside.

He stumbles.

She reaches the coffin. Wind hurls dust around, a pair of creamy butterflies. Silence. Soft voice. “Who is it?”

Nyipir enters the breach. “Our son. Odidi.” He bows his head.

Akai asks, “Who is it?”

“Odidi.”

“Who?”

“Akai …” pleads Nyipir.

“No!” she explodes.

She glares at them all, paces up and down a portion of the field, her arms thrown up and then down; then she returns and pinches Nyipir’s arm, her eyes sly. “Where’s my son?” She won’t wait for his reply. She returns to the coffin, clutching her waist, scratching her left arm.

“Mama,” Ajany calls.

Akai waves a hand at the noise. “Nyipir, where’s my son?”

Nyipir’s head swings left, right, left, right. “I tried everything, I tried,” he croaks, hands gesturing upward. “Akai …”

“Nyipir! I told you, ‘Bring my son home.’ Didn’t you hear me?”

Nyipir’s hands move upward again. His mouth opens and closes. Saliva clings to his jaw.

“Nyipir—
where’s my child?
” Akai’s eyes bulge.

“M-mama?” stutters Ajany.

Akai points at the coffin. “Who?”

Galgalu moves closer. He props the lantern against the tree. Uses his whole arm to wipe tears off his face. He had known it would come to this. He had known.

Akai hobbles past. “Show. Me.”

Galgalu unscrews the large bolts and opens the coffin lid.

No time. No space.

Akai-ma falls, arms stretched forward. She crawls, leans over Odidi’s body, reaches in, takes it by the shoulders, holding him to her breast, keening in intermittent groans, lips on Odidi’s forehead. She rocks her son, strokes his face, rocks her son.
Odidi
, she croons.
Odidi, wake up. Son. Listen. Ebewesit. I’m calling you
.

To name something is to bring it to life.

A churning heat, like heartburn with a rusty aftertaste, grows in Ajany’s gullet.
Cry
, Ajany tells herself. An ugly jealousy, of wanting to be the dead one held by her mother, being invoked to life by such sounds. Shame. Akai’s whimper.
Cry
, Ajany tells herself. Watches her brother limp in her mother’s arms.
Live
, she commands Odidi. But her eyes are dry.

Akai-ma moans furiously. She batters the earth with one hand, while the other grips Odidi.
“Take me. Here, you thing, take me.”
Akai holds Odidi with dust-stained hands as if he were just born. She adjusts his shirt, moves his headrest, and swabs invisible drops from his face. She holds him to her breast, her head resting on his. She hums, her voice large, deep, husky, and ancient. She stares at the sky, rubs her face with her son’s hands. All of a sudden she looks over her shoulder and stares with intent at Nyipir.

Ajany flinches at what hurtles between them. Nyipir shakes his head, palms out. “Akai.” A gray shadow descends around him. From his mouth, a whistling of deflation, and then his face is sunken and old.

Akai-ma turns again to rock Odidi, humming.

Nyipir lumbers toward her.

Ajany kneels, watching them.

Nyipir approaches; Akai lifts up her hands. She screeches, “Don’t. Touch. Me. You. Don’t. Touch …” She points at Nyipir. “Don’t.”

Nyipir stands still in the middle of an eternal landscape that seems to foreshadow the end of life.

Akai: coded prayers, unrepeatable curses.

Galgalu pleads with her. “Mama, mamama …” Akai looks through him.

Galgalu says, “Ma, give me the boy. I’ll put him to sleep.”

Akai places her head against Odidi’s.

Connecting.

Galgalu kneels next to her, his face close to hers, her rifle floating in and out between them. Sticky wet of sorrow tears merging.

“Odidi?” Akai-ma purrs, easing her son, she imagines, into wakefulness.

It is more than an hour before Akai-ma lets Galgalu return Odidi’s body to the coffin. She adjusts Odidi’s shirt, strokes his sewn-shut eyes. “I can’t see,” she whispers to Galgalu when he seals the coffin’s lid.

Galgalu places the lantern on top, a miniature beacon, then wipes its surface with his shawl and helps Akai up.

Ajany and Nyipir creep closer to her.

“M-mama,” Ajany calls.

Akai-ma straightens up and blinks. “You?”

A cold stone inside Ajany’s stomach flutters.

“Arabel Ajany,” Akai-ma says. “Arabel Ajany.” Her voice falters.

Ajany takes four steps toward Akai-ma, a history of longing in the movement. Akai’s arms reach out. Ajany steps in, inhales Akai-ma’s rancid, sad warmth. Incense, hope, and softness. Almost touching, almost disappearing into her mother. But then Akai shoves Ajany away. She drops her arms; her eyes dart left, up, and right. She groans, “Where’s your brother?”

Ajany goes rigid.

Nyipir intervenes. “See, Akai, see, Ajany’s home.”

Akai-ma sucks air. “Why?” Childlike sound: “Where’s Odidi?”

Ajany
not
thinking. Then thinking,
And me?
Thinking,
Where am I?
But before the ground dissolves under her, she throws herself at her mother, grabbing her back.
And me?
The feeling pushes at her mouth. She clings to Akai’s neck, an unyielding hold. Mucus and saliva, blood and bitterness from a palate cut.

Akai recoils, tears herself away. Her eyes are thin slits, her nostrils flare, and when Ajany looks again, her mother is a still, steady point with a finger on a trigger and a smile on her face.
Click-clack
. Selector set to burst. Clear gaze. Gun pointed to heart, a glint from the barrel like light on a pathologist’s scalpel.
Certainty
. Akai will pull the trigger if Ajany moves in her direction again.

Ajany drops to the ground.

She lies down flat.

Hands scrabble at the earth.

Mind focused and roaming around the barrel of a gun. She senses its position. Tenderness because her mother is at the other end. She hears Nyipir’s soft chant.
Akai, Akai, Akai, Akai
. Feels the soft departing of day.

She could paint this. Could even paint the nothing, its sliver of warmth on her skin. Ajany sniffs the earth, dust flecks on her face. She twists her neck to glance at the purpling sky. Not trusting thought. Finding nothing to trust. In that moment, she stops waiting to be born. She is willing to re-enter her half-death, aches for fire that may return her to silence. She rests her head upon her arms and waits.

Shift of pressure, rush of air. Running feet, a question, and the distant slam of doors. Car engine revs, wheel squeal. Nyipir shouting—
Akaaai! Akaaai!

Akai Lokorijom is leaving.

Ajany waits for her body to come together again, all those parts she had stopped feeling—hands, feet, face. She raises her head to see the lurching, stopping, starting, and stalling green car. She tells herself that she can also leave. She can also go away. And then she is in pursuit of a ramshackle family Land Rover. Behind her, Galgalu also runs. The car jolts ahead of them. Low-lying thornbush scrapes Ajany’s feet, stinging. Galgalu overtakes Ajany. Ajany reaches for and drags him back, hanging to his right arm, fighting not to be left behind again, not thinking, she bites into his arm. Galgalu snatches his hand away; he snarls and tumbles. She falls over him. Ajany reaches for Galgalu’s hand. She rubs off her saliva and tooth marks. On the coffin, the lantern’s flame flickers.

Galgalu pats Ajany’s back.
“Ch’uquliisa,”
he croons.
“Ch’uquliisa
.” Grasping for clarity.
“Ch’uquliisa,”
Galgalu says, reading Ajany’s soundless hiccups. He knows her voices. He had urged Ajany into life from Akai’s womb, had sucked mucus out of tiny nostrils, and had understood her stupefied silence when she saw the world she had come to. Later, he had scooped her from beneath a tree where patient vultures watched over her. On that day he had told four-year-old Odidi, while he arranged Ajany in his arms, “
This
is your baby.”

Raro Galgalu is an intermediary between fate and desire, a cartographer of unutterable realms. He has lost faith in tangible things. Now he scrutinizes the skies. The portents are cruel. A pale-orange veil shrouds the world. He recites
“La illaha illa ’lla Hu. La illaha illa ’lla Hu.”

Galgalu seeks the mind of his dead father. His father had been
ayyaantuu
—an astrologer, in Hargagbo. After a gruesome drought that he predicted would be the worst—it was—had passed, and a locust invasion he foretold would destroy all pasture had done so, rumors of sorcery slithered across the landscape and followed the family. Mad, the older Galgalu predicted his own death. His son Raro tried to pray him back to life in a season of almost white skies, while his mother sought refuge in herbs and hope. But one moonless night on the day after a total solar eclipse, Galgalu heard his father cough—a rattling sound.
Then Raro saw his father’s shadow lift itself from the body on the mat, felt it brush against him as it glided out into the darkness.

“
Ch’uquliisa
,” Galgalu sings to Ajany. “
Ch’uquliisa
.”

His arms around her.

One wild afternoon, by decree of elders, Raro Galgalu was chosen as scapegoat for all clan guilt. He had been bringing home a kid that had sprained its leg. Its mother bleated behind him while men surged around him and inflicted the ritual curse. He tore at his heart, to pull out the malediction. The scars were curved lines across Galgalu’s chest. The kid tumbled from his arms, and his goats cried as he was driven away with sticks, stones, dust, and dung. Driven by billows of unwantedness, he marked his progress by cairns in the daytime and falling stars at night. He wandered, a solitary, bowlegged creature intending to walk itself to death.