Yvonne Owuor - Dust

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.

Musty-earthy: The Flowers of Kenya .

Fingers run across book spines.

Tactile familiarity.

A gap, an uneven bump; the rhythm is off.

Some books are missing. She looks. Crusty clove and fecund green smells: the engineering and agriculture books — Odidi’s preferences. Ajany pulls out a large gray History of Art and turns to the first blank page. There “Hugh Bolton” has scrawled his name in semi-cursive script. Most of the books had once belonged to Hugh Bolton. Odidi had nicknamed Hugh Bolton “Someone Else.” “Whose books are these?” Odidi asked his parents one day. Akai-ma had snarled, “Someone else’s.”

Someone Else . As Ajany’s hand hovers over the book, her mind replays a humid evening when the family sat in this room. In the armchair, Baba gripped the edges of the Dhouay-Rheims Bible as his lips moved, spelling out words letter by letter, unease furrowing his face, as if he were memorizing a damning verdict in an alien language.

It had been a good time for Ajany to show off her improved reading skills. Drawing in breath, she spelled out: “H-U-G-H, Hugg, Huff … Baba, what’s a Hug-g B-Bolton?”