Yvonne Owuor - Dust

Some teachers were charmed. Most became alarmed.

Why is what you know more truthful than what I know?

While the colony tumbled into and out of its halfhearted local war, Akai bloomed. After she menstruated, the clan shunted her off to a secluded place to learn the ways of women: manners, expectations, cooking skills, animal husbandry, pleasure, birth, how to sing, how to weep, how to raise children, how to invoke God, and how to kill a man. Akai ran away before the sessions ended, and she sought her beloved stepfather: “Initiate me into manhood!”

He bellowed with laughter.

Akai laughed with him.

Her mother covered her mouth and thought Akai had been cursed.

“You have shamed me.”

Akai twisted her nose. “How?”

Akai returned to school. She decided she would become a teacher and a traveler. When she came back home, she would organize proper cattle raids. She wanted to own at least ten thousand large-horned cows.

One school term, when the school refused to serve milk or meat but offered plenty of vegetables and plates of fish for a month, Akai organized a boycott of all the mathematics classes until the kitchens offered some meat and more milk. The protest fizzled into nothing.

Akai was suspended.

The headmaster-priest boomed: Mutinous, indecorous, and impious .

Big words , Akai later scoffed to Nyipir.

She was given a letter to take to her parents, who were to return with her to school to administer her public chastisement.

Akai packed her green skirt, took off her shoes, and skipped southward, in the direction of her stepfather’s workplace. It was a five-night journey to the plateau where her stepfather worked for a thin, effete colonial officer as nyapara , supervisor of the works of other ditch-building men. He earned money to restock. He also made himself a de facto enforcer of cattle tax, and occasionally succumbed to temptation by adding a coveted goat or sheep to his own herds. Peaceful livestock raiding, he felt. Other men increasingly loathed him. Their opinions neither moved nor stopped him.

A day before Akai Lokorijom should have found her stepfather, she detoured, aiming for a seasonal watering hole with fragrant waters that were a mix of hot and cold, as she was. She reached the edge and saw that two people were already in the water. She increased her pace, propelled by curiosity. She hoped they had some extra fresh milk to give her.

Stillness in the day.

Heat.

I don’t exist , Nyipir Oganda thinks, pinching the skin of his face.

Dusk.

Nyipir stirs.

Akai?

Sound becomes companion.

Memory reeks: longing and shame.

Things to cut away — that source of pain, his heart.

Midnight.

Nyipir wakes up and gropes the space beside him where he thought his wife lay. She is not there. She has not been there for a while. Yet tonight, when he smells smoke in the wind, he knows something essential has gone from Wuoth Ogik. Unease. A realization: he is not at home yet. A shiver. He clears his throat. His hand rests on the space where his wife used to sleep.

AJANY STUMBLES TO OPEN HER DOOR AFTER A POUNDING FROM the outside becomes a drilling inside her brain that forces her into wakefulness. She is in a wrinkled pink cotton nightshirt and a pair of violet shorts. Lank strands of braid cover her right eye. “It’s you,” Isaiah says, holding up the dreaded painted rectangle. Restless eyes, up and down Ajany’s body. He restrains the urge to push Ajany’s hair strands away. His voice comes from a remote place.

Ajany leans against her door. One hand reaches up and rubs her eyes open. Ache in limbs, thickness of tongue, heavy head. Isaiah. Her nose wrinkling, she examines Isaiah’s tamped-down rage.

Wary step forward.

Halfhearted, “What’re you doing here?” Few things surprise her these days.

Ajany touches the rectangle again.

Hesitates, would frown if it did not hurt so much.

She tries to see.

“It’s you,” Isaiah insists.

Idiot . She thinks.

His left nostril is whistling. The right is blocked. Sweat pools at the belt of his trousers. Knuckles are pale. Black hair bristles on his arms.

Sculptable. Drunk, she thinks.

“Well?” says Isaiah.

Ajany sways, scrabbles after phrases, hunting for clarity.

One, Isaiah is in Nairobi. Two, he is a hawk, hovering and casting It’s you like a scourge. Three, she needs to go back to sleep.

A circling. Isaiah’s eyes are black points.

Cold slithers along Ajany’s spine and settles inside her belly. She shifts her arm. Tilts her head. She stutters, “N-no.”

Soft-voiced: “Stop lying!”

“You’re loud.… Look … when was it painted?”

Thinking is painful . But Ajany likes the sense of being right. She grins when Isaiah’s gaze snaps to her face, confused lines on his forehead; he looks at the work again.

The bird of prey starts to deflate.

“I don’t know. Doesn’t say.” Isaiah wipes his face. “Who, then?” His body blocks Ajany’s way. Isaiah says, “She’s pregnant.”

Outside, a crow caws.

Ajany ducks beneath Isaiah’s arms to re-enter her room. She dives for the bathroom and vomits into the toilet basin. Footsteps. Spine tingle. The cold in Ajany’s stomach stirs. Odidi would know what to do.

A voice from behind her head.

“Are you sick?” Isaiah asks. He stands by the bathroom door; Ajany coughs into the bowl. Isaiah wrinkles his nose as he retreats into the main room and looks around. Sees Odidi’s pictures on the wall. From the bathroom, sounds of water running. Two guests look in. Isaiah nods and shuts the door.

Ajany appears, damp-faced and less groggy.

Isaiah indicates the wall: “Your brother, my guide.”

Ajany pads into the room.

“Who’s the woman?” Isaiah lifts the bookmark up.

“My mother,” Ajany says, and scowls. Don’t ask , she hopes. Don’t ask .

“Oh!”

Silence.

If Isaiah leaves, she can sleep.

Isaiah asks, “So — where’s my father?”

“Don’t know.”

“What do you know?”

His books and art , she thinks.

“Why did you leave?” he asks. “Because of me?”

Ajany rubs her head.

Isaiah hesitates. Frowns. “Someone wants me dead.”

“You’re not worth k-killing.”

“I am worth Wot Ogyek. Belongs to my father, and you know it.”

Ajany splutters, tugs at her nightshirt, wipes her throat. Hears the words — entangled words — and wags a finger. “No.”

“The evidence I have suggests the contrary.”

Ajany moves close to Isaiah. “That’s desperate, Isaiah … and criminal.”

Isaiah asks, “Do you have a title deed?”

Ajany crosses her eyes.

“Does it even exist?” Isaiah insists.

“Ask Baba.”

“Tried to. He wanted to impale me with a shovel.”

Ajany giggles. “He did?”

“He did.”

“He was t-trying to b-bury his son.”

Sudden despair.

Hearing echoes of landscape, feeling its shape inside her, how it formed her, its earth soaking up her tears, its dust on her brother’s body. Wuoth Ogik: home.

Realization interferes with drowsiness. “Bye-bye, Isaiah,” Ajany mumbles.

Isaiah is unmoved. Waves the bookmark. “And this?”

Movement means a destination. The door. Her voice is grim. “ What if , maybe, your father’s dead?”

Blood drains from Isaiah’s face. Eyes narrow. Voice glacial. “You tell me. If he were, given everything I’ve seen, I’d want to know how, who, where, and when, and how your family is involved.”

“Meaning?” Ajany’s chin rises.