Yvonne Owuor - Dust

Ajany cannot stop moving. When she dances, the dread dies. When she moves, she is not lost. When she moves, there is no absence. When the music moves her, there is such life she laughs. The antics of a firefly caught in the memory of a once-perfect flame. Ajany dances. She dances with a hard-bodied Namibian doctor who is in town and looking for a good time. His arms wrap around her; her head is pinned on his shoulder. She dances away until she is three steps from the DJ. There she sways until it is daylight, the last one on the dance floor. Then she just stops. Justina, who abandoned her once they walked through the door of the club, is long gone.

Ajany, shoes in hand, handbag strapped across her body, saunters out the door, squinting at the light. A passing early-morning watchman’s wrapped-up radio plays: Maua mazuri yapendeza / Ukiyatazama utachekelea / Hakuna mmoja asiye yapenda / … Zum zum nyuki lia wee .… Nairobi’s flamboyant trees are in bloom. Ajany stoops to pick a floppy crimson flower, her feet soft on the cold, hard tarmac, feeling her way to the guesthouse, where she will eat the chef’s strawberry crêpes and, afterward, sleep the day away.

Ajany slumbers through the morning, still savoring yesterday, which was the opposite of limbo. Yesterday was Far Away. Yesterday she discovered that the shadow tendrils wrapped around her body had loosened and she had lost the will to tie herself up in them.

AJANY RETREATS INTO A RESTAURANT TO COMPOSE A NEWSPAPER item. She drinks milk-filled coffee and, pen in mouth, stares through a table of huddling black-suited men, two women looking silently into cups, and another woman gesticulating. Undated recycled post-election violence scenes on CNN, panga-wielding Kenyans setting their country alight explained in the voice of an “Africa specialist” from Louisiana, whose accent clangs all over his disapproval. Cut to news from tidy Anglo-Saxon worlds — a sequence of pretty, orderly spaces explained with tender adjectives.

Sniggering from another table.

Ajany overhears the tail end of a joke: “We were terrified the country was going to the dogs. But it was worse; it was given to the Africans.” She turns. The joker is a scruffy foreign-correspondent type wearing scuffed leather sandals. His eyes carry the ravenous gawk of Must-Become-Authoritative-Protagonist-of-Bad-African-Happening types. His bespectacled companions are a droopy man, something of the I-speak-for-Africa worthiness of Bono about him, and a woman with thigh-length brown hair, whose painted nails adhere to his tanned arm. Catching Ajany’s look, she turns a brutal shade of violet. “Shhh, Shhh.” She makes it sound foreign.

The waiter says to them, “Anything else, sir?” He is unperturbed in a Nairobi way. Surprise me , the look says. Surprise me and witness my indifference .

Ajany signals to the waiter as she finishes her message for the newspaper, takes out her payment. She departs. On the streets, a traffic-busting, police-avoiding matatu brakes. Emblazoned on its side, its name, Monica Lewinsky . It is cruising down the wrong end of the street. At the top of the street stands the rotund structure of the newspaper office.

At the crossroads leading to the Nation House, a group of turbaned Bohra men sweep past in robes. A lanky, dark-toned man with shattered glasses, his hair uncombed, stands in a washed-out brown coat that covers a frayed blue shirt. His shoes are so worn they tilt to the edge. He trots after the men, yelling, Osama, Osama . He stops and laughs out loud and long; his laughter punctures Ajany’s senses. The Bohra men increase their pace, robes flapping, and turn down a corner. Ajany’s spine prickles. The raw laugh, its concentrated mischief, is pure Odidi. She glimpses the man among milling passersby. Unthinking, Ajany runs across and into Kenyatta Avenue, where a hawker furtively peddles new and old lace underwear, nail cutters, and chewing gum. She runs. A car screeches. Three p.m. cathedral bells, book vendors’ glossies. Opposite the Parliament buildings, a street preacher in a yellow-brown shirt and belly-high trousers is selling insurance against sulfur and hellfire. There, Ajany sidles as close to the charcoal-stained street man as she can. Laughter suffuses his voice as he screeches at a passerby, Go to hell! As Odidi would have.

Two nights later, a dust squall warped Wuoth Ogik’s destiny. It came on the tail of a cattle raid when livestock, it is said, tiptoed out of Wuoth Ogik. Not even a moo of distress. Not even Nyipir’s pampered dance-ox tried to find its way home after it wandered away from the main herd of camels, cows, sheep, and goats heading northward. The news flew across watering holes. The rustler has been rustled.

The night before, Wuoth Ogik had been wrapped in a rare white mist made of dust. When, at 2 a.m., the house’s large water tank cracked completely with a metal yawn, Galgalu had staggered awake, picked up a short rungu , and left, barefooted. Inside the house, he waded through small streams. In the dark, they look red, like blood trails He clucked, “Tch.”

A woolly quiet broken by the muffled grunting of animals in the boma . Galgalu made his way there, thinking of adding logs to the hearth, wondering about Akai and when she would come back home.

Electric awareness, his hair stood on end, shadowed rapid movement behind him. Burning vegetation.

He knew … he knew the size of the fire eating the Wuoth Ogik drought grass before he turned. A soft hiss became a sting, and the world bright and burning. Galgalu tasted redness, and blackness. Too late to call out for help, he fell. A long shadow bent over him — he knew its scent. It touched his forehead and murmured something. It rested its face against his. He smelled nettles, sweat-dust softness.

For the first time since he had brought his son home, Nyipir slept straight into the morning. He woke up to abnormal silence. He rolled off his mat, wrapped a kikoi around his body, and dashed outside. A ghost scorpion scrambled away. Above him, the sky had turned up as strings of violet clouds. It was then that Nyipir knew that a portion of his everyday horizon was gone.

A single white butterfly.

Scattered rocks, red dust, and heat. Burning grass. The fire had left a trail. A mishmash of tracks, churned-up soil, leading out of the homestead.

Absence.

Hitching up his wrap, he ran through a thorn fence, which cut shallow strips into his body. Feet scraped dung through fire-infused earthiness. Nyipir scoured corners, hunting for the crevice into which his camels, cattle, donkeys, sheep, goats, and herding dogs had fallen. The dung was still warm. Nyipir circled the place where the boma hearth’s fire still smoldered. Arms sagged. Knees genuflected. Hand touched soil. Nothing. This absence, like that of his son, was absurd, and anything that was left of his heart had become dust.

He saw that Galgalu had crawled as far as he could.

“Gaalgalu!” Nyipir had howled. “Ahhhhh.”

Nyipir held Galgalu’s body, touched his sticky face. Leaned toward his nostrils. Soft air in and out. Head wound. The blood around it was coagulated. Blue flies, a buzzing cloud over him, on him.

That morning, Nyipir carried Galgalu, his first journey toward the mission. Blood spots on a hard road. A disjointed wind kicked dust around them. It took a day and a bit of night to reach the Jacobses’ medical center. He talked to Galgalu about the past, to keep Galgalu conscious.