Yvonne Owuor - Dust

“Cause of death, for example?”

She stares at Isaiah’s clenched fists over Akai-ma’s image.

She now wants the bookmark.

Isaiah says, “The house. Keeping it up is not really your family’s forte.” A thin smile. “Will you build apartments there? Lay foundations for another African slum?”

She moves toward the door, gestures out with her head.

“I’ll finish this, you know. My mother’s dying breath was for Hugh Bolton.” He shakes his head. “Lugging his ghost into eternity.”

No expression on Ajany’s face.

Isaiah leans into her. “Would be worth knowing how and when your mother got to be my father’s whore.”

Her first effort slices open his nose. His fist deflects her arm, but the skin below his left ear is bleeding. He grabs at her hair. Her hands are around his neck. A tug, and her hair escapes from his grasp.

Isaiah wipes the thin trail of blood and gives her a sideways look.

She keeps the door open, body shivering, eyes steady.

He says, “It stinks in here.” As he walks out, he lifts the painted rectangle. “Vulgar, my dear. Such pornographic attention is sordid. Wouldn’t you say?”

Ajany wants to speak. She struggles for the right adjective in which to couch insults. All she needs is sound. Her mouth opens.

She spits.

It is a direct hit.

The saliva globule spatters Isaiah’s face and hands.

She spits the way Akai-ma used to, then cackles as Odidi would have.

“Urgh, shiiit !” Isaiah howls, scrubbing his face.

“No, spit,” Ajany corrects.

He shakes the gobs away.

His look.

Ajany slams the door shut. Locks it. The door shudders when Isaiah hurls himself against it. Outside, she hears him tell someone, “Er … no … no, everything is fine. No problem.”

Inside the room, Ajany, crouching, breathing. She sits with a crowd in her heart. Her head aches. On the other side, Isaiah stretches out his palms on the wood of the door. Left palm, right palm, left palm. Sticks fingers into the doorjamb. Scratches his chest. Bloody hell . Nobody has ever spat on him before. Isaiah leans into the wall, shuts his eyes. Lies to himself: the wet on his face is not sudden tears.

A RECURRING DREAM PESTERS ALI DIDA HADA. HE BLAMES Petrus. The older man has been needling him about Wuoth Ogik, digging and digging about Hugh Bolton.

“What precisely did you find?”

“What did Oganda say when you asked about Bolton?”

“How is Oganda connected to Bolton?”

“What did you ask?”

“What precisely did you see?”

“All I know is in those reports,” Ali Dida Hada has answered, sick in the heart.

Last night’s sleep dissolved into a nightmare for Ali Dida Hada. In the dream, he was in the center of an inferno. That woman merged with the flames and was wailing at him, begging for a poem. In the nightmare, he tried to but could not speak. And the more he could not speak, the closer the fire came, and the more pitiful that woman’s sobs. He had fought his way out of sleep, screaming out her name, drenched in sweat, and aroused, and furious at his need.

“Herdsman … a poem?”

What did he emerge with?

A half-witted tree wails in a dry wind / Crying for last season’s camel’s tongue / On salty, scented barks / Moon-sight stirs fragrant spells .

It had been his first true answer to Akai Lokorijom after they met.

She had laughed at his words as a delighted child might, clutching her hands and looking up at him as if he were magical. So he had danced, whirling on his heels. And when he looked at Akai again from the center of his turning, he had seen fire, and the spirit in the fire, and the fire in his heart and in the land out there. Time, space — there had been everything, and fullness. There had been Akai and he. He forgot that he used to have a wife whose name was Nafisa and that she had left him and also taken his children away.

Sometimes the anguish was a phantom limb, raw, weeping, and invisible.

Trained as a cryptanalyst in Ghana and then England, he had returned to Kenya on the day after the assassination of Minister for Economic Planning Tom Mboya in 1969. In the terrible turmoil that followed, and the deployment of security men to quell riots and rumors everywhere, one of the higher-ups tossed him the Hugh Bolton case to deal with. He fought against it, presenting his qualifications, needing a more relevant assignment.

“Just a short time,” he was told.

He went to the Kenyan northern territories, grinding his teeth.

Nafisa, his wife, would write him one letter a week. He should have paid attention to her nostalgia for the English weather: “Good for my skin, which is now drying up.” These letters started to spread out. Twice a month, then one every three months. Busy , she would tell him when he managed to get through to her on the telephone — a once-every-half-year occurrence. She said her jewelry business took up her days.

When he came home from the north, she told him in a teasing tone, “You are the smell of dust.”

Ali Dida Hada had showered and perfumed his body with sandalwood. He said: “There is an ocean of lava. Mount Kulal, on the peak, there are storms even if there is drought on the ground, and the lake is always a mixture of cream and sky.”

Nafisa twitched her nose, staring hard at the television showing Liverpool FC playing an indifferent game. “That’s good. You still smell of dung.” She gave him a vague look.

When he crawled into bed, her face was pancaked with a rosemary-and-lemongrass face mask, her long hair tied back. She had patted his head, then daintily pulled a duvet over his head.

Ali Dida Hada woke up thirteen times that night.

She made him mahamri and Masala chai for breakfast. She smiled at him, eyes coy. “Dubai gold, Ali, is selling well. Even Abdi is driving two Jaguars.” And then, “Ali, let us to go back to England, for the children’s sake. There’s nothing here for us. These people are only good for shouting, killing, and dying. That’s all they know.”

The core of post — Tom Mboya Kenya had been cracked. Nothing was certain, not even hope. Citizens spoke to one another in whispers, if and when they spoke at all. When those associated with Tom Mboya and his name were hunted down like vermin, there was silence.

“We’re safe,” Ali Dida Hada said, reaching across the table for Nafisa’s arm. “We’ll leave before anything explodes.”

She shrugged his hand away.

Then his children came home for half-term: “Daddy! Daddy! How lovely to find you here.” His daughter said, “Do you want to hear me play the oboe?” It got worse. His son called him Father , in a dialect of English he had not heard before. The boy was bespectacled and fragile-looking, and he told his father it was evil to eat meat.

Ali Dida Hada tried to control the drifting. His authoritative commands generated unbearable sulks, and his meals were served burned. He applied for a transfer to Nairobi. “Personal reasons,” he pleaded.

His supervising officer nodded, scribbled notes, and sent his application into a large room stacked with other dusty, pending-for-action documents.

Ali Dida Hada returned to the northern terrain to figure out both his life and the whereabouts of Hugh Bolton. The name “Bolton” was a vapor at the watering holes. Where did he live? Somewhere . Where did he go? Anywhere . When was he last seen? Hard to say . There were tiny, tiny story fragments linked to his presence, but these, too, merged with the lives of other British colonial officers — tax collection, road works, dead elephants, oryx, and zebra, confiscated livestock, extended pilgrimages, solitude, insanity, copper-colored hair, a fascination with cairns. False leads, one that led him up a mountain of rocks and down into a narrow valley to a crevice where a Persian hermit dwelt. If this was Hugh Bolton, he did not intend to be found or spoken to. Ali Dida Hada asked Nairobi for more details. Nothing forthcoming. He then told headquarters that the puzzle of Bolton could not be solved quickly, given that an excess of time had passed. Ali Dida Hada searched, but mostly waited to be recalled.