Dust (8 page)

Wuoth Ogik was once a sanctuary crammed with the music of rangeland life: a father’s hollow cough, herders’ sibilant whistles, day handing over life to the night, a mother’s sudden, haunted cry, a brother singing water songs to camels.
What endures?
A father sighing
Aiee!
Talkative shadows, crumbling walls, scent of dung and dream, reflections of long-ago clattering of polished Ajua stones falling into a brown wooden board of fourteen holes; the lives of cows, sheep, goats, and camels;
three mangy beige-and-black descendants of a fierce mongrel herding dog with a touch of hyena.

What endures?

Elastic time.

Another junction. Brazil’s Atlantic Ocean, São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos. Five days ago, Ajany had been there, staring at a collage of deep-blue skies, fluffy clouds, and a spread-out view of the beige and frothing ocean. Pre-Christmas exhilaration sprinkled with the beat of a mild pulse of terror attached to dread, of waiting and stillness. She had tried to phone Odidi. She had also been waiting for others, the law keepers, to come for her, had expected up to the end, before the plane strained for high skies, to be stopped and caught. She had expected all these others to reach her first, but instead Nyipir had phoned from Kenya.

“B-baba.” Afraid he knew what she had just done.

But he had whispered, “Odidi’s gone.”

At first she had deleted what she thought she had heard. Did not ask what
gone
meant. Listened when Baba had said, “Come home,
nyara
.” He added, “Come home. Please?” His voice had been low and aged.

She had left Bahia with an orange suitcase and red carry-on half full of mismatched clothes, assorted art supplies, two passports, and three credit cards. A red cell phone and the amethyst necklace she always wore. She had thrown her black MacBook with the tomes of commercial art, her living, into a red shoulder bag and fled.

Also.

In the loneliness of the eastern corner of her all-white, big-windowed room, a space set apart, perched on a black stand sits a half-shaped clay face resting on a plaster skull. White rubber stick tissue-depth markers cut to different lengths, glued in twelve points of the face; the other nine had been removed. The nose and mouth, shaped and reshaped and taken apart over seven years, were half done and gaped in anticipation of a conclusion. The piece’s eye orbits had worn and discarded all colors of mannequin eyes. Thin strips of clay connected the white pegs on the face and across the cranium. The lattice spaces had been filled and refilled with clay, everything reconstructed from the dark-lit memory of a skeleton and its last-breath gesture. The form had journeyed with her
for seven years, traversed the Americas wrapped in brown paper, waiting for dimensions, nuances, completion, and a name. She had considered it. Stroked the plaster on the unfinished face, the undone muscles. Arabel Ajany had not looked at it when she left.

All departures are layered. Hers was accompanied by fingers of silence on the lips of at least ninety ghosts. Arrivals. Touchdown at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport against a dawn cliché of a postcard Nairobi sunrise, acacia-in-the-morning scene, the sky red, mauve. An exact sensation of life wafted around the passengers. Kaleidoscope flavors, earth scents, for her a tumble of memories. A mother’s hand sprinkling mixed herbs into water-keeping sheepskin vessels, spicing hair with ghee, cedar body-washes with desiccated acacia bark and leleshwa leaves. A childhood written in aromas.

At the customs unit, steps toward a queue designated for East African citizens, Ajany was of Kenya again. A dour-looking teak-toned officer with cheap green cuff links on his shirtsleeves stamped the inside page of her blue passport.
Thump
. “You missed the vote.” He was gruff.
“Karibu nyumbani.”

Baggage hall, and a circuitous trolley roll. A glance at the waiting people. And then, in front of her, out of place because he was so detached, so elegant and tall, was Baba, who stood where the outside world separated itself from the inside mêlée. She remembers the warm light, the clouds that caught the edge of her left eye, the smell of rained-upon earth mingling with smoke and age and dust and sun and cows on her father’s coat. She remembers her head on his shoulder and tears that would not stop. She remembers Baba murmuring, “Ah,
nyathina!
Ah,
nyathina!
” She remembers being safe, and the rhythm of his hands patting her back, a rumbling voice calling her his own.

Arms linked, they had traveled the road from airport to morgue in Leonard’s yellow taxi, in silence. Baba watched the road, the vein on the side of his head pulsing. Traffic nervy, bumper-to-bumper. Red brake lights spilled onto the wet road, like escaping blood. Whispery breeze. Above, low-hanging telephone wires swung to, fro, to, fro, tar-paint pole to tar-paint pole. Along the road, leftovers of last month’s jacaranda season, the green grass brown-tipped from too-short rains. Next to a lamppost, a purple-pink bougainvillea had wrapped itself around a twisted croton tree. Billboarded faces of presidential candidates and corporate
marketers stained the land; messianic promises on smiley faces, salvation products in shiny packages.

Leonard had turned knobs to increase the radio volume.

They heard a menu of vote counts, rumors, accusations, tallying-hall disruptions, and even more fantastic numbers. The rest of the world did not exist. The car swung left, swooped right across an uneven road, and stopped at a gate of peeling yellow-green paint with a coat of arms. It read
Nairobi City Mortuary
.

What endures?

Surprise.

It is also a question mark.

Now, in the wide-spaced rooms of home, Ajany lunges from spot to spot, tugging at filaments she can feel, urging Odidi in.
See
.

The room she wanders through has wood shutters that do not close and is infused with the smell of dung, salt, milk, smoke, herbs, and ghee. Ajany stumbles over a fourteen-holed Ajua board on the floor, moves it aside with her feet. On the mantelpiece, two black-and-white photographs, one showing a man on horseback carrying a crooked Kenyan flag—her father, Nyipir Oganda—the other, in a Sellotaped frame, featuring a broad-faced man, the late minister for economic planning, planner of a pre-independence mass airlift, designer of the national flag, the murdered Mr. Tom Mboya. Near these, a fading color studio-portrait of a well-dressed Oganda family, including Galgalu, arranged as if facing a firing squad.

Beside the photographs, a large seashell with orange lips. Ajany lifts it up, remembering its weight, the magic of listening to beckoning oceans. Raises it to her ear. Hears Odidi:
’Jany, you can hear the sound of Far Away
. She returns the shell to its grimy place. A creak. Ajany looks over her shoulder. Memory echoes of family feet on stained acacia wood, white-stoned floors of flaking varnish and gnarled planks. Another framed picture. Ajany touches the toothless grinning face of Odidi-Eight-Years-Old. She leans forward and rests her face against the glass. Tightening of chest as she chokes in all the undone yesterdays. This shade of longing has a venomous sting: it poisons breath, stretches out time.

Work hard. Study
.

Ajany turns to look into the hearth.
Work hard. Study
. Nyipir always tried to be home so that when his children returned from school for the holidays they would find him there. Sometimes he would meet their erratic bus and they would all ride back to Wuoth Ogik in the then-green family Land Rover.

His questions were immediate:
What did you learn?
Odidi told him about rock art, Mozart, Aztecs, and the industrial revolution.

Did you learn about Burma?
Nyipir asked every time

Odidi would say, “Not yet.”

Odidi. Always one of the top five in his class.

Work hard. Study
.

Ajany languished at the bottom, changing places between number twenty-one and number twenty-three in a class of twenty-four.

Until one Christmas holiday when Ajany was eleven and a bit, and had found a new way of speaking what clamored inside her. She drew shapes, forms, and creatures from the space around which the image would be born. Canvas, paper, earth. A yield of unsought rewards: applause from a school she hated, the first prize in the national art show, number seventeen in the class of twenty-four, and the sense that what she felt was what it was like to be born at last.

Her large eyes shone all the way to Wuoth Ogik that December.

She talked and talked all the way to Kalacha.

At the house, she unwrapped her three winning canvases for her parents to see and praise.

Akai-ma and Nyipir saw panels of techno-caricatures of ghosts, the black leopard, and fire makers. They saw the stories as they would see secret nightmares. In the faces and patterns their daughter had conjured, her parents recognized their enemies and some of the devils that haunted them.

At first, there was silence. Then Nyipir had reared back, hands fisted, and he roared, “What’s this?” Bulging eyes filled with terror that in Akai-ma’s eyes showed itself as sad emptiness. They had glowered at Ajany, as if accusing her of something.

Akai-ma had turned to Odidi. “Go find Galgalu. Take This One with you.”

Odidi had rushed Ajany out of the room, leaving her work behind them.

They had run and run. They had made for the rocks where they could look down at the world passing by, where they could sit silent and unseen. Ajany squeezed Odidi’s right hand, cutting off its blood supply. She bit hard into her tongue until its blood filled her mouth. Some of the blood seeped out of her mouth; some of the blood she swallowed. And when Odidi saw what she had done to herself, he started to cry. It was the first time she had seen him cry, and the feeling was the worst pain she had ever known in her life.

“See,” she lisped, opening her mouth, “Ahh ohhkeh.”
I’m OK
.

Below them, the world eased by.

Later that night, after being force-fed by Galgalu, Ajany sat on her bed and waited for the house to become still. She then skulked down the stairs and found the embers of her work in the hearth. The heat evaporated Ajany’s tears.

Nothing was ever said about her artwork again. But when Odidi and Ajany returned to school in the middle of January, once they were inside the school gates, Odidi said, “ ’Jany, you’ll paint.”

She had stared at the soil.

Odidi shook her. “You must paint.”

She had shaken her head.

Odidi pinched her jaw, lifting her face, his eyes deep and clear. He said, “I say you paint, silly, or I take you back to your tree now.”

“Can’t.”

“Can.”

“Don’t know how to start.”

“Try.”

“Everything burned.”

“Silly, paint a river out of Wuoth Ogik. Then paint an ocean and a ship, and inside the ship, me and you going Far Away.”

Ajany had turned and run into the art studio, retrieved last term’s unfinished canvases and hardened paint. She could already hear the sound of ocean waves, and inside the waves, she saw the color yellow-white screaming at the color indigo blue.

Now.

Ajany pushes away from the hearth. Racing away from old words, and from the waning memory of the actual pitch of a brother’s voice.

A small corridor leads into the narrow kitchen, which opened into a womblike alcove.

Memory maps within an old house.

Details.

Details help with forgetting.

Here was a long-drop toilet with its shower that was open to the elements and also used by bird-sized moths. There, to the left, a gate swung out to uneven stone trails that stopped where food used to be cooked on open fires fueled by livestock dung, paraffin, and desert kindling. Vestiges of numerous herbs and spices and a row of smoked, drying, putrefying flesh. Fodder for so many journeys.

The shelves are empty now.

There, Akai had slaughtered goats, sheep, lambs, cows with the precision of a dispassionate executioner. Cool. Contemptuous of Ajany’s penchant for sliding into a mourner’s crouch at the sound of a victim’s pathetic bleating, the memories of which Ajany would regret as she chomped on and chewed up soft, spiced meat chunks.

No blue fires today.

To the right, a nine-step stone stairway splits into two at the top, separating bedrooms from two windowless bathroom toilets.

Next door, the library-study, a family room with functional furniture, a huge, frayed brown couch, a long oval table of dark wood and hard metal extensions with grooved chinks that held homemade beeswax candles that extended and sometimes replaced the night kerosene lamps’ orange light. Memories of long, flickering shadows pouring out of nooks, seduced by naked firelights. A rough shelf laden with the weight of Someone Else’s Baudelaire, George Sand, Charles Dickens, the Brontës, Carle Vernet, Flaubert, encyclopedia, and books on engineering, empire, and agriculture. Books on flowers, trees, birds, animals, and hunting. Jack London’s
Call of the Wild
. One black-leather-covered Holy Bible. Ajany can select a book and name it by smell alone.