Yvonne Owuor - Dust

She had told yesterday’s mortuary attendant, with his rotten-egg breath and the impatient light in his eyes — a condensation of lessons learned— This is my brother .

The man had answered, “Hii ni kitendawili ya mungu .”

God’s riddle.

Ajany had retched. The attendant had poked her right shoulder. “Wewe uliyempenda maishani yake utapenda pia kifo chake?” —You who love his life, can you also love his death?

Blood flakes beneath her nostrils; Ajany’s fingers twist her hair into thin braids. This is my brother . Today is the day after last night.

Her nose had started to bleed the moment she recognized Odidi’s form. The heavyset pathologist, Dr. Mda, had after a minute pulled her aside and applied small portions of white cotton to her nose. “Lower your head.” He had said, “Do you know what ‘autopsy’ means?” Ontopsy , Dr. Mda pronounced it, shifting vowels and consonants, introducing new sounds so that his cadence gave warmth to words and suggested uncomplicated worlds.

Ajany listened.

“ ‘Ontopsy’ means ‘see for yourself.’ ” He cleaned her nose. “That’s what we’ll do.”

Today, the day after last night. Ajany watches over her brother. She also draws lines on the earth. In order to see, she sketches.

In dust, an outline, a grooved, leaf-shaped scar. “Every crevice contains a story. Every story points north,” Galgalu always says. Odidi repeated this to her when he was telling her how to find a way home.

The scar.

Odidi had fallen on his head. It had been her fault. Ajany was in Standard Six, being molded into a hockey-playing, ethical “future leader.” Her tormentor, Ganda, who for the most part regarded her as unworthy of his bullying talent, had, while imitating Ajany’s stutter, told his posse that people from northern Kenya could not climb trees because they had no trees to climb. As his acolytes cackled dutifully, Ajany’s body moved of its own volition and shimmied to the top of the school’s grandest mvule tree.

Easy to climb: feet into furrows, up, up, up, and the next time she looked down, her nemeses were minuscule punctuation marks below. The distance between high up, where she was, and down, where she ought to be, led to her decision to live the rest of her life in the tree.

Could have been an hour, could have been more. A chubby member of Ganda’s gang who quietly idolized Odidi, then a rising rugby star, latched on to an excuse to speak to his hero, a need greater than loyalty to the gang. Scuffing his heels, he stood outside the Form One classroom, waiting for the bell to ring the end of the day’s lessons.

He accosted Odidi, and garbled the news that Ajany was lost inside a very big tree.

Just as she was praying that it would be painless to turn into a branch, Ajany heard the sweetest voice on earth that day:

“Silly!” Odidi had called.

She wailed, “ ’Didi!”

Odidi reached her tree. “ ’Jany, come down. Are you Zaccheus?” Thinking that was especially funny, he screeched off-key, “ There was a man in Jericho called Zaccheus …”

A torrent from Ajany: “G-ganda-said-Turkana-people-d-don’t-climb-trees-and-th-then-I-climbed-and-then-he-left-and-th-then-I-was-afraid-and-th-then-you-came.”

“Come down.”

“Mppph.”

“What, silly?”

“C-can’t.”

“Whaat?”

Louder. “Am stuck.”

Odidi had bayed with laughter, rolling on the ground. A hyrax somewhere yowled, and in the distance another one answered. Ajany wept in gulps that should have dislodged her.

Odidi answered, “Ajany yuak-yuak-yuak .”

Hiccups from within the tree.

“ ’Didi, am stuck.” Ajany lisped.

“Try?” Odidi threw pebbles upward. An incentive.

Sobs.

Odidi hastened up the tree, no plan in mind. He got to Ajany, in the Y part of the tree, and sat next to her before hugging her. “Silly goat, I’m here.”

And he was.

After a minute, Odidi said, “OK, sit on my back — I’ll climb us down.”

A slow, sweaty descent. Eight meters from the base of the tree, Odidi miscalculated distances and fell to the ground with Ajany on his back. Rolling to protect her, he had split his forehead in the process. Ajany had used her maroon school sweater to stem the blood flow before racing like a spooked gazelle to get the school nurse, praying Hail-Mary-full-of-grace-The-Lord-is-with-you so that OurHolyMotherMary would let her die in Odidi’s place.

Today, the day after last night, begins with thunder but no rain. Last night three people raised a green tarpaulin over a casket in silence, surrounded it with incense and water, and, five meters away, lit a fire that would witness this death. Last night Ajany had stripped the bed of Odidi’s blankets, carried down his pillow, lifted the coffin’s lid to tuck her brother in. She had wrapped her body against the desert cold and known she would not fall asleep. She had waited for Odidi to tug on the fragment of string around her body and tell her what to do, when to haul him in.

And today he had appeared when her eyes were closed.

Leaden footsteps.

She turns.

Baba. Nyipir. Hollow-eyed, a new tilt to his body, as if he is fighting gravity. A stone sculpture melting. In its searching eyes, white terror.

Re-entering a ceaseless day.

Meaninglessness is ash in Nyipir’s mouth. Swallowing saliva. Failing, falling, clutching at nothings. The compartments into which he parcels his life are broken and leaking. Swallowing, Nyipir stares at sunspots, the contained spaces occupied by pieces of light.

“Baba …” his daughter stammers.

He turns.

Father and daughter sit close to each other. Then Nyipir says, “I named him.” She leans forward. “Your brother, Ebewesit . Akai’s father — she expected that. Oganda so our name would outlive us.”

They wait.

They watch the day walk across their feet. And then it is three hours later and Galgalu is adding tinder to a wake’s fire made pale by daylight.

“We’ll build a cairn,” Nyipir suddenly says, rising and measuring the ground with his eyes. “Seven and a half meters across the base.” He picks up black, white, and brown stones, squeezes them in his hands. “A stone garden.” Dust strains through Nyipir’s fist.

Behind them, a white-fungus-infested chunk of their coral house collapses. The house’s water tank has tilted on its roost and yawned open; it is draining its contents through ceilings and down walls.

A CONVOLUTED SILENCE WARPS THE LANDSCAPE. NOTHING seems stable, not even the aged acacias. Nyipir Oganda lifts the hoe way above his head, and when it falls it bounces off the ground with a thwack ! A pause. The sunspots look the same as always. What Nyipir had not considered was the hardness of the ground. Or the fragmenting of hearts during a father-son wrestling match, or the pain of pleading, “Stay. I’m sorry.”

To protect new post-independence citizen children, parents like him repainted illusions of a “future Kenya,” while shouting out words of the national anthem as if volume alone would re-create reality. Nyakua . Mouths, ears, and eyes shut, parents partitioned sorrow, purchased more silences and waited for the “better Kenya” to turn up.

Nyipir’s daily covenants with silence had all of a sudden lost their weight. Today the voices of the dead-providing-their-own-witness take over his thoughts with a soundtrack — Babu Kabaselleh’s “Lek Wuonda,” to remind Nyipir that the dying started long ago. Before Pio, Tom, J.M., Argwings, before the red, black, green, and white flag fluttered one midnight in December.