Yvonne Owuor - Dust

Utility bills exploded.

Citizens paid up.

The managing director held a party to celebrate his first personal billion shillings. Others were more discreet. T. L. Associate Engineers thrived.

“After you make money, you can afford to be an activist.”

Musali stares at the carpet. “We deposited a year’s salary into his account.”

Musali leans back. “Last December, when I was carjacked”—Musali rubs the brace—“I thought … it was late.…” He looks at Ajany’s stricken face. “Ah! Man. When you see that jama , tell him we’re in business again. We can do those ka sweet, sweet projects he wanted.”

All of a sudden, shoulders heaving, Musali starts to cry. His teacup topples over. Everything within Ajany is set to melt. She stares at the teacup spilling its rust-colored tea, hears her own breathing, how creaky it sounds. Listens to Musali say, “I heard him.” Pauses. “A year ago? Odidi came to my house. Kedu eleven o’clock at night, banging the gate.”

Ajany waits.

“Ah! Man, don’t look at me like that.” Musali is cotton-voiced. “I was afraid … and my family … Then the carjacking … shot in the neck …”

“And?” prompts Ajany.

“It was late.”

“And?”

Musali lowers his head.

He had called the police.

He was not going to tell Ajany that.

Nor that Odidi had shouted, “Musali, bro, help me.”

Ajany’s mouth is wooden, her head heavy. She absorbs the story and everything that has not been said. She needs a body scrub.

Musali rubs his eyes. “Don’t look at me like that.”

She surveys his manicured layers.

“I’m sorry.” He gets up and trundles through a door. Minutes later, he returns with a copy of the picture on the reception wall. “Here.”

Ajany takes the picture with both hands.

“I miss Shifta, man,” he says.

Musali’s hand hovers over Ajany’s shoulder, tentative. No intellectual sparring partner had ever matched Odidi. Without Odidi, even rugby had lost meaning for him. He and Odidi had been among the first to paint their faces with Kenyan colors during the game. They had helped spread the lewd, loud compositions that fans sung even when the Kenyan team was losing. “Who’s your father, who’s your father, who’s your father, referee …”

He says, “We used to be happy.”

She stammers, “Wasn’t that enough?”

Musali pauses. “No.”

Ajany stands up, grabs her handbag.

“I …” Musali starts.

Ajany raises her hand, screws up her face; her whole body says no.

She sucks air in. Why hadn’t she known her brother’s suffering?

Suffocating, she lurches for the exit, stumbling over a low table. Her body tingles in places. She focuses on the daylight. She had forgotten that time existed.

The receptionist shouts, “I’ll pray for you.”

Ajany halts, turns. “Why?” Lifeless eyes.

Stiff walk into the parking lot.

A gray-uniformed, cheerful, burly man waves at her. “ Sa’a , madam!” He sprays water on a parked green Prado.

Ajany asks, “Whose car is that?” Her legs feel so heavy, she is unable to move.

“Engineer Musali.”

Nails bite into skin. “Moses Odidi Oganda’s car?”

“Er …” The man drops the cleaning cloth. “Ehhh …”

Thunder in Ajany’s ears, acid on her tongue. “You know you’ll die? You’ll all die,” she explains to the luckless driver.

Shadows of her brother’s footsteps in Ajany’s exit. She finds Peter the taxi man stretched out on his seat, napping. When she drags open the door, he snaps awake. Ajany collapses on her seat, forces breath in; there is blood on her nose. She clutches the picture frame.

Silence as they drive back to the guesthouse.

Peter says, “I’ll fast for you.”

What’s the point?

She pays him for his prayers anyway.

Inside her room, numb. Weary of scrubbing tears away. She needs a destination. Maps made from the matter of memory. And that is when the walls start to close in. And she runs out of the room, out of the guesthouse, out of the gates, into a darkening city.

She breathes in audible gasps. Speaking to Odidi, of Odidi, for Odidi. Passersby see a smallish woman in a yellow dress. Some watch her tilt her head as her hands open in question. Others hurry past in wide arcs with single, cautious sideways glances. She does not see any of them.

LONG AGO, IN HIS NEW CLASS, WITHIN A SMELLY ATLAS ON A brown square desk, Nyipir had located Burma. “Burma.” Nyipir learned, “Mandalay, 21° 59′ N 96° 6′ E, Rangoon, 16° 47′ N 96° 9′ E.”

After he got his primary certificate, Nyipir should have gone on to secondary school, except there was little spare money, and nobody was ready to exchange livestock for school fees for him. A priest at the mission in Kisii decided to send Nyipir to Fort Hall. Nyipir could earn money there and complete his education, as he wanted.

Fort Hall, in the Central Province, had asked for a reliable Christian good boy, a non-Kikuyu, to help with the gardening and other chores. “For a short while,” Father Paul had assured him.

Nyipir left on a train, in long trousers and a hat, to start lessons in high culture by planting gardenias and watching them grow. He left in hope.

He settled in at Fort Hall. Entered into the rhythm of work: whitewash stones, cook, wash clothes, clean and polish shoes and boots, set the table, dust, and wait tables. He had sneaked textbooks from the wooden shelves next to the chapel to read by candlelight, preparing for school and wondering what to do so that he could go to Burma and bring his father and brother home.

Next door to the mission was the makeshift army camp. Nyipir would peer through the fence and watch men march in array. He heard the howling of a sergeant major as he screamed men into order. ’Eft, ’ight, ’eft, ’ight , about-turn. When there was no one about, Nyipir tried to practice what he saw.

If he had not met Warui the gravedigger, he would not have met Aloys Kamau, and maybe he would have gone to Burma as he had intended.

Warui made bodies disappear for the Crown, and anyone else who paid for it. Deep-sunken eyes, tattered gunnysack, stained brown coat. One clipped thumb. Warui had stopped outside the mission gate, hat in his hand, glaring at Nyipir, pointing at his mouth, his way of asking for water. Nyipir glanced around — nobody looking — and led Warui to a tap, where he crouched and drank. When he finished, Warui lifted his hat and slunk away.

Five days later, Warui returned. Over the gate, he pursed his lips at Nyipir. In Kikuyu he said, “If you want to make more money, get ready tonight.”

Nyipir sneaked from the mission hut, already counting the money he would earn.

He did not yet understand the state of the nation, or that interrogation units were generating far too many bodies for one man to bury alone under the blanket of night. Bodies in gunia leaked liquids into the ground, over his hands, the stench of invisible human beings, smashed up and nameless, lowered into grounds that he then leveled.

“What’s this work called?” asked Nyipir.

“Vulturing.”

“Who are these?”

Silence.

“Don’t they have people of their own?”

Stillness, and the sound of metal hitting earth.

“How is it possible?”

Warui said, “Too many questions; work.”

They did, in silence. Except for the times Warui would say, “Ssssssssssss” into the ground. Planting secrets. Warui also said, “Ona icembe riugi ni rituhaga.” The sharpened hoe gets blunt. When Warui said it, he implied many things.