Yvonne Owuor - Dust

“Not sunscreen.” Isaiah frowns.

“S’OK.”

Isaiah sighs. He wants a room, a shower. Wants to go home.

The suddenness of night.

Behind a column, with a view of everything and the door, the District Officer drums fingers over a very old newspaper, the football section his source of irritation. The story of the Harambee Stars’ ignoble retreat and their subsequent five-to-one annihilation. The D.O. carries the bug-eyed aura of solitude of the forgotten person consigned to the northern frontiers by indifferent superiors. The tips of his hair are brassy blond — this land’s heat and saline.

“Kwaheri.” The traveling librarians wave at the D.O. on their way out of the bar-restaurant. They are turning in early so they can resume their wanderings before dawn. The D.O. turns to count the regulars, a relief from reflecting on the outrage that is the national football team. Was the long-haired Japanese water engineer turned herdsman who played solitary Ajua already in? They sometimes shared silent drinks together. He was not. Pity. He could have done with uncomplicated silence today. The Harambee Stars had twisted his heart.

Clut-clut-clut . The bald-headed, six-foot-tall, short-skirted woman of indifferent reputation who wears a red ring on her small hawk-beak nose and presides over the billiard table. Wide-eyed craziness. Her skirt is something she made out of a military general’s coat.

The D.O. looks away before she can see him.

Notes that six of the town’s other night women cling to strangers like extra limbs. Apart from an intermittent pawing, the men ignore their transitory mates. The women keep proprietary hands on the men’s thighs. They speak through smoke, pick meat and ugali from trays, quaff beer, and chew qhat . The D.O. understands the facts of children to feed. He recognizes a buxom woman who he had sought out in the early days of his posting when the silences had been unbearable. He knows of other dreams behind kohled eyes and Vaseline-tinted lips. Our poor mothers . He hears the laughter of the no longer deceived.

The shaggy-haired Estonian with the look of an anxious hoopoe walks in. Hunter of tales. He waves to two of his type. A Scottish explorer — that is what he says he is, a stranger who had driven into town four months back, would make mad forays into parts of the lake, return days later, desiring silence, and the German company man who, daily, dashed from landscape to landscape, plucking plants, leaves, gathering berries, scraping barks, and digging out roots. The Estonian sizes everyone up before nodding at the new arrival, a broad-shouldered, sun-darkened stranger who had walked in at dusk.

The watching D.O. rumbles at the male ritual posturing, teeth baring, and muscle-strength testing through hard handshakes.

The owner of the space, a double-chinned sometime bartender and indifferent cook, also owner of the only abattoir in town, waddles to his clients with drinks. Eyes dart; they miss nothing.

Isaiah is dressed in a formerly white T-shirt with a frayed collar and dark-brown khakis that may have once been beige. After greeting the strangers at the table, his hands tremble next to a warm Tusker bottle. His hands have been shaking ever since he settled in his room.

He takes in the bar. Eyes rest on the broken television set on a wooden stand.

Thinks.

Wuoth Ogik.

He must restrategize.

He will.

In Nairobi.

Reflections of patrons bob on the blank screen.

Tuskers and sodas on a round table. Eight lanterns cast a brownish-orange glow into the room. Isaiah turns to the curious gathering of European men at his table, indulges the tribal feeling coiling around them. Yet not one of them will admit to the pleasure of finding the others’ company in the belly of Timeless Nowhere. They share vices; a nameless woman is attached to each. He speaks to a glow-lipped woman whose Bint El Sudan perfume corrodes his nostrils.

“What’ll you have?”

“Martini,” she answers.

“Who’s paying?” His eyes are half-slits.

“Tusker.” She readjusts.

Isaiah watches somebody else’s cigarette smoke rise.

What he needs. To feel skin, heat. Needs a body to lose himself in. Any body. He strokes his stubble, wraps an arm around the perfumed woman with the baby-girl voice. Squeezes flesh, inundated by perfume. His thoughts scatter. They gather at Wuoth Ogik.

And skid away.

Inside, chairs scraping the cement floor. The sound of wood on wood. A shout outside. A donkey brays. A fourth round of beers.

The shaggy-haired Estonian filmmaker is trying to use special lights to capture relics of a past he hopes he can make an exclusive future with. He is an apprentice, a student at the foot of a one-legged Turkana rainmaker-healer-spiritualist. To Isaiah: “Where from?”

Isaiah answers: “Here. There.”

The Estonian shifts.

The German oil-prospecting-company ecologist, cultivating a stringy gray ponytail which roosts like a bushy tail above his neck, scrutinizes Isaiah. He leans forward and demands, “Vot do you do?”

“This”—Isaiah looks to the ceiling—“and that.”

The Scot trying to solve the mystery of Sir Vivian Fuchs’s lost Lake Rudolph expedition-team members watches Isaiah. “Bloody Internet wasteland here.” Isaiah raises his brows. “Must upload my blog. Where you from?”

“South,” drawls Isaiah. His temples pound, and from inside the bar comes the sound, solid against solid: clut-clut-clut-clut .

The Estonian insists. “What’re you doing here?”

“Safari.”

The Estonian growls, “No one comes this far just for safari.”

“No?”

The explorer watches.

“Another beer?” offers Isaiah. No need to start a fight.

They speak of landscapes crossed.

“Going to Nairobi,” Isaiah concedes.

“Is zeir trival vor finished?” asks the German. “I hear, and I vas at vance understanding a pis festival, ja? Viz ze lake, by ze lake, near ze lake. I vill speak to my embassy and ve shall gazer ze desert tribes.” His voice crescendos: “Zey vill sing, zey vill dance. Togezer, ja. Zey vill illuminate metaphorical pis and from ze lake pis vill be a mirror, like ze memory.” His smile is determined.

The explorer’s tone is droll. “And yet the desert nations’ work schedules might not coincide with your ‘peace’ plans — animals to pasture, journeys to make, people to meet, that sort of thing.”

“But ve must insist. Zey must conform.” A frown. Sarcasm missed.

Isaiah stares hard at the tableau. Headache. He shrugs. Clut-clut-clut-clut . Isaiah turns toward the sound and sees her. A vision of presence, of curves within which a hundred thousand sorrows can be deeply forgotten. He pushes away from the table, Tusker in hand.

The Scottish explorer’s low voice: “Don’t look, lad. Don’t touch.”

The splendid vision leans backward against the table and cues the ball.

The Estonian. “With her, you lose.”

The German continues, “A trival pis festival vizin ze allegorical oasis …”

Isaiah saunters over and leans against the table just as the woman strikes a billiard ball across the table into its pocket.

The explorer, voice overloud: “I say, can we get some Tusker baridis hapa sasa hivi ?”

The large, double-chinned bar owner toddles over.

The bald-headed woman rearranges the balls, ignores Isaiah.

The D.O. rereads the football score on the paper under lantern light. Sips ginger ale. Glances out when a night bird calls out in staccato warbles.

Clud-click .

Isaiah strikes a billiard ball on the warped table. Tattered cloth, tilting leftward. Isaiah plays until only two striped balls are left. The woman plays the plain balls to the last, a dance of strikes. Isaiah pulls out and drops a thousand shillings on the table before she can play the last black ball.