Yvonne Owuor - Dust

Nyipir hears the courtyard gate creak as it swings to and fro. He is sure he had closed it earlier. Ah!

Ali Dida Hada turns.

“Her trail is fading,” Nyipir informs him. “You know how she gets lost.”

Ali Dida Hada is spellbound.

Nyipir notices. “Isn’t that what you’ve wanted?”

Ali Dida Hada hears the offer. He moves closer. “What are you saying?”

Nyipir looks at him. “She’s gone.…”

Ali Dida Hada’s heart palpitates. “So?”

Nyipir points to the ground. “Those footsteps lead her far from me.” His shoulders droop. “But you can find her.”

Ali Dida Hada frowns. He looks intently at the trails, hands flexing and unflexing.

There is a quiver in Nyipir’s voice: “Ali … bring me back my animals.”

Ali Dida Hada waits before he nods once.

Later, Wuoth Ogik will hear a wind-borne song that is a paean to a lion rendered in a falsetto:

Yaaya Gamo

Goofare gamme dubra

Gama dubbate

Daafana lubbuuni dufte

I sing the Solitary One

glorious mane like a girl’s halo,

heard roaring from afar,

makes the fearful tremble

Ali Dida Hada the predator.

Galgalu closes his eyes. The better to imbibe this melody, and to hear the textures in the voice of its singer.

Ajany sits with Nyipir next to Odidi’s grave.

Nyipir says, “Bolton’s head is in Isaiah’s room.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I made it.”

“How?”

“It’s what I do.”

A pause.

“People pay for this?”

“Sometimes.”

“How do you know what to draw?”

Ajany peers at him. “I just know.”

“Even Bolton?”

“Mhh.”

Nyipir nods.

Two winds clash behind Ajany.

Wrestling again with a vow of silence.

Giving it up.

“B-baba, when we were children, Odidi and I … we went into the red cave and saw bones and a face.”

Nyipir’s head sinks into his chest. His breathing is a whistle.

“Didn’t know.” Stillness. “Were you frightened?”

“I was. Odidi wasn’t.”

“Takes a long time to die, nyara .”

She shivers.

Nyipir wonders as he glances at his daughter.

“You had an uncle. His name is Theophilus, and my father, your grandfather, his name is Agoro.” He smiles. “Can you see them?”

A dark cloud dissolves with Nyipir’s soft smile.

Ajany smiles back. She says, “Tell me more.”

“Nyamrecha!” he says. My seer.

An unknown grandfather, an uncle visible only to her father’s heart. She could draw a bridge from the bottom of a precipice to higher ground. Cairns would mark the way, stones to create bridges to connect absent to now .

Waft of decay.

Nyipir shifts to look at the half-filled cairn. “We’ll talk here, and work.”

The grave.

“Akai-ma’s not coming back.”

Ajany draws lines on the soil.

“We must allow your brother his sleep.”

Sound of earth shifting: digging, shovel on stone. Alternate rhythms. Ajany’s and Nyipir’s.

Nyipir talks about Agoro and Theophilus.

He hunts for the right words.

“My father. Strong. Large. Perhaps it was because I was a child then. Everything looks bigger when you are a child.

“My brother, so funny. Roasted birds. Would read me stories. I wanted to be him.” Nyipir paused to press his hand to his chest, where there was a niggling ache. “They are still in Burma.”

Digging, shoveling.

Nyipir and his daughter extend the base of a cairn that will contain Odidi’s coffin.

“You didn’t go to Burma?”

Nightmares.

Should he speak of nights soaked in water-urine-blood, darkness, and nothing? Could he give voice to the terror of nonexistence, darkness’s invasion, how it penetrated the soul and never left?

Nyipir chooses what he will not say. “Long, long ago, I saw a young man. A catechist. He was dead.” Meandering thoughts. Nyipir sees the coagulating wound that is Aloys Kamau. How it seeps, spreads, and becomes a subterranean stream of blood in Kenya, and how its tentacles reach even the newborn, and how the wound won’t close until its existence is spoken aloud, but not one person dares to.

Nyipir looks closely at Ajany.

He is looking for her brother’s scars.

He continues: “My turn came. Nineteen sixty-nine. When Tom died. They wanted me to drink their oath. Couldn’t.”

“Why?”

“Because of Aloys the Catechist.”

His crushed face.

Nyipir murmurs, “Things changed. Later, couldn’t remember to go to Burma.”

Three days after his discharge from service, Nyipir was summoned to headquarters. There was a fractured mahogany desk in a dim rectangular room, wood soon darkened by spattered blood. Same color as if it were soaked in tears. Nyipir wept first when four men — his colleagues — held him down and his hat — he loved the hat, a fifties film star’s beige hat with a black band — fell askew. One examined his teeth as if he were a cow. Another shaved off his mustache with a razor blade, cutting into his upper lip. He waited for the snap that would confirm the splitting of bones, the death of faith. He had imagined he would stand tall. Had thought he could speak tersely and clearly about the codes of decent men, of officers and citizens. Had thought he would invoke the Name of God Almighty. Had believed he was protector of country, woman, and home. But by the end of that day, he was crawling, hatless, shoeless, and his body was twisting at the end of a sharp stick. They had brought a basket of snakes into his cell; the snakes writhed but were benign. Then they had offered to find his wife, explained to him what they would do to her. Only then had he screamed.

“Akai?” said his peer, an officer who had trained with him in Kiganjo, who beat his body and toyed with his testicles.

Creeping, crawling shame. He cannot tell Ajany that he had wailed, “Unisamehe!” Mercy! Can’t describe the ways of losing faith. Can’t speak of dread when he knew he had lost control of his death. Violence had pierced his skin, broken teeth and bones, until he could tell who a person was simply by the intensity of rage in a touch.

They had pointed a gun to his head. Click, click, click, click, click, click . He fell, slithered on his belly like a snake. A trail of bowel-loosened muck stained his trousers, the floor. Shit, urine, sweat, blood, tears, and shame. “Af-f-fande, n-n-naomba un-ni-nisamehe.” I beg you, forgive me. “Nihurumie.” Have mercy.

A boyish intelligence man, there, Petrus Keah, would joke, “I mentor delinquent citizens.”

Ajany sees old seasons’ shadows crisscross her father’s face, she watches him shiver in front of an invisible, dreadful secret.

In 1969 Petrus had bent over Nyipir. What followed was an inventory of color, sound, and pain: the on-off small red light of a lit cigarette; the on-off red light of a switch that made electricity flow. It had gone on and on, timed at two-hour intervals. Odor of terror and blood; Nyipir’s urine had pooled at his feet and seeped into the concrete.

What Nyipir tells Ajany is, “Nineteen sixty-nine was a very hard year.”

Violated intimacies that men freed from conscience permit themselves, knowing that shame seals secrets in. There had been no one to tell that he existed. There had been cold, reasonable voices also devoid of truth:

“You’re a good man.”

“Take the oath.”