Yvonne Owuor - Dust

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.

Until, that soft dusk of December 12, 1963, when, down in the city, a doleful officer unwrapped the last Union Jack that would ever soar over Kenya, Galgalu stumbled in front of a coral-hued edifice. Wuoth Ogik. A brown-and-black-patched cattle dog that had a lot of hyena in its ancestry had appeared and wagged its tail at him. Galgalu stroked its head. It licked his hand. He would learn that its name was Kulal, after the cherished mountain. By the time he saw the tall, dark, long-limbed spirit flowing toward him, its arms swinging in wide swoops, he was ready to die. Ekhaara . A roaming spirit. It carried a headrest and club — things men carried — and a gourd of sour milk, herbs, and grasses. Its feet were dusty in akala tire sandals. It had hitched its sarong up on its thighs. Its eyes took in everything. Raro Galgalu had closed his eyes.

Woitogoi! Akai Lokorijom exclaimed when she saw him.

She reached for him.

The dog whined.

Galgalu quivered.

Akai stroked his head. “ Woitogoi! You’re a bone, small boy!” She had clucked. “Your name?” She giggled.

He had wanted to laugh with her. Instead, he wailed, because he understood he might live after all.

Galgalu tells Ajany, “Always, she comes back home.”

“We didn’t catch her shadow,” Ajany replies in between hiccups.

“No,” he agrees.

When Ajany and Odidi were children, Galgalu would scoop the soil where their daylight shadows fell and cast the dirt into holes where dusk shadows gathered, so the departing sun would take with it any evil that had threatened them. Galgalu had tried to scrape the earth under Akai-ma’s shadow, to try to exorcise those ghosts that made her wander. Ajany and Odidi had colluded with him by trying to make their mother stand still. They always failed. As long as there was sun, Akai jumped from place to place.

Footsteps.

Nyipir hobbles to join them, blinking at the track.

Speaking to Ajany: “Mama … she … um …” Nyipir’s voice cracks. “She’s happy you’re here. Just …” He waves in the direction of the coffin.

Ajany nods.

He says, “I tried to … but Odidi … um.”

Ajany nods again.

There is something unnamed and shameful about loneliness created out of rejection. Ajany takes refuge in stillness.

Nyipir says, “Once, when I was a boy, a leopard used to escort me home.”

Galgalu and Ajany have heard the story before.

Nyipir continues: “A black leopard used to weave in and out of the shrubs, and his body contained all the nights of the earth. His eyes were made of stars.”

“D-did he make a noise?” Ajany asks, as she did when she was ten years old and scared of night.

“Footsteps like silence. When I reached home, the leopard left.” A brittle note. “Don’t ever call out a leopard’s name. Say gini , ‘this thing,’ or gicha , ‘that thing.’ Kwach, no! ”

Kwach .

Ajany squelches the word on her tongue. The temptation to howl it hurtles around her skull. She presses down on the need, suffocates it with memory.

One evening, long ago, Nyipir had found Ajany sitting inside the broken courtyard fountain, waiting for him. She had asked, “Baba, did gicha come?”

“No. Not today,” he replied.

Years later, after Ajany had left Wuoth Ogik and Kenya, she suddenly understood that Nyipir’s stories about the black leopard’s visits coincided with the seasons of Akai’s disappearances.

Now.

Ajany says, “We forgot Odidi’s flowers.”

Nyipir answers, “Oh!”

Three people listen to four winds creeping through rattling doum palms. Winds cover the car’s tracks, sprinkling dust over them. They race southward, to the part of the nation where unsettled ghosts have set the land afire and a gang of men are howling and dancing down a city street, dangling a man’s cut-off head. The dead man’s fingers, with their stained voter’s mark, are scattered around his new blue bicycle, next to his national identity card.

TODAY IS THE DAY AFTER LAST NIGHT. THE SUN’S FIRST RAYS strike a mosaic on a covered courtyard to the left of a dried-up water fountain. Dry thunder in this pink morning. Ajany hears sporadic bird twitters interfering with a stillness that scowls like the broody spirit of Genesis. In the dust, skid marks. Footprints. Tire trails. Pathways. Watching over her big brother, listening, feeling that any second he will tell her what she needs to know, how she must move, where she is, and what she must do.