Woitogoi! Akai Lokorijom exclaimed when she saw him.
She reached for him.
The dog whined.
Galgalu quivered.
Akai stroked his head. “Woitogoi! You’re a bone, small boy!” She had clucked. “Your name?” She giggled.
He had wanted to laugh with her. Instead, he wailed, because he understood he might live after all.
Galgalu tells Ajany, “Always, she comes back home.”
“We didn’t catch her shadow,” Ajany replies in between hiccups.
“No,” he agrees.
When Ajany and Odidi were children, Galgalu would scoop the soil where their daylight shadows fell and cast the dirt into holes where dusk shadows gathered, so the departing sun would take with it any evil that had threatened them. Galgalu had tried to scrape the earth under Akai-ma’s shadow, to try to exorcise those ghosts that made her wander. Ajany and Odidi had colluded with him by trying to make their mother stand still. They always failed. As long as there was sun, Akai jumped from place to place.
Footsteps.
Nyipir hobbles to join them, blinking at the track.
Speaking to Ajany: “Mama … she … um …” Nyipir’s voice cracks. “She’s happy you’re here. Just …” He waves in the direction of the coffin.
Ajany nods.
He says, “I tried to … but Odidi … um.”
Ajany nods again.
There is something unnamed and shameful about loneliness created out of rejection. Ajany takes refuge in stillness.
Nyipir says, “Once, when I was a boy, a leopard used to escort me home.”
Galgalu and Ajany have heard the story before.
Nyipir continues: “A black leopard used to weave in and out of the shrubs, and his body contained all the nights of the earth. His eyes were made of stars.”
“D-did he make a noise?” Ajany asks, as she did when she was ten years old and scared of night.
“Footsteps like silence. When I reached home, the leopard left.” A brittle note. “Don’t ever call out a leopard’s name. Say gini, ‘this thing,’ or gicha, ‘that thing.’ Kwach, no!”
Kwach.
Ajany squelches the word on her tongue. The temptation to howl it hurtles around her skull. She presses down on the need, suffocates it with memory.
One evening, long ago, Nyipir had found Ajany sitting inside the broken courtyard fountain, waiting for him. She had asked, “Baba, did gicha come?”
“No. Not today,” he replied.
Years later, after Ajany had left Wuoth Ogik and Kenya, she suddenly understood that Nyipir’s stories about the black leopard’s visits coincided with the seasons of Akai’s disappearances.
Now.
Ajany says, “We forgot Odidi’s flowers.”
Nyipir answers, “Oh!”
Three people listen to four winds creeping through rattling doum palms. Winds cover the car’s tracks, sprinkling dust over them. They race southward, to the part of the nation where unsettled ghosts have set the land afire and a gang of men are howling and dancing down a city street, dangling a man’s cut-off head. The dead man’s fingers, with their stained voter’s mark, are scattered around his new blue bicycle, next to his national identity card.
3
TODAY IS THE DAY AFTER LAST NIGHT. THE SUN’S FIRST RAYS strike a mosaic on a covered courtyard to the left of a dried-up water fountain. Dry thunder in this pink morning. Ajany hears sporadic bird twitters interfering with a stillness that scowls like the broody spirit of Genesis. In the dust, skid marks. Footprints. Tire trails. Pathways. Watching over her big brother, listening, feeling that any second he will tell her what she needs to know, how she must move, where she is, and what she must do.
She had told yesterday’s mortuary attendant, with his rotten-egg breath and the impatient light in his eyes — a condensation of lessons learned—This is my brother.
The man had answered, “Hii ni kitendawili ya mungu.”
God’s riddle.
Ajany had retched. The attendant had poked her right shoulder. “Wewe uliyempenda maishani yake utapenda pia kifo chake?”—You who love his life, can you also love his death?
Blood flakes beneath her nostrils; Ajany’s fingers twist her hair into thin braids. This is my brother. Today is the day after last night.
Her nose had started to bleed the moment she recognized Odidi’s form. The heavyset pathologist, Dr. Mda, had after a minute pulled her aside and applied small portions of white cotton to her nose. “Lower your head.” He had said, “Do you know what ‘autopsy’ means?” Ontopsy, Dr. Mda pronounced it, shifting vowels and consonants, introducing new sounds so that his cadence gave warmth to words and suggested uncomplicated worlds.
Ajany listened.
“ ‘Ontopsy’ means ‘see for yourself.’ ” He cleaned her nose. “That’s what we’ll do.”
Today, the day after last night. Ajany watches over her brother. She also draws lines on the earth. In order to see, she sketches.
In dust, an outline, a grooved, leaf-shaped scar. “Every crevice contains a story. Every story points north,” Galgalu always says. Odidi repeated this to her when he was telling her how to find a way home.
The scar.
Odidi had fallen on his head. It had been her fault. Ajany was in Standard Six, being molded into a hockey-playing, ethical “future leader.” Her tormentor, Ganda, who for the most part regarded her as unworthy of his bullying talent, had, while imitating Ajany’s stutter, told his posse that people from northern Kenya could not climb trees because they had no trees to climb. As his acolytes cackled dutifully, Ajany’s body moved of its own volition and shimmied to the top of the school’s grandest mvule tree.
Easy to climb: feet into furrows, up, up, up, and the next time she looked down, her nemeses were minuscule punctuation marks below. The distance between high up, where she was, and down, where she ought to be, led to her decision to live the rest of her life in the tree.
Could have been an hour, could have been more. A chubby member of Ganda’s gang who quietly idolized Odidi, then a rising rugby star, latched on to an excuse to speak to his hero, a need greater than loyalty to the gang. Scuffing his heels, he stood outside the Form One classroom, waiting for the bell to ring the end of the day’s lessons.
He accosted Odidi, and garbled the news that Ajany was lost inside a very big tree.
Just as she was praying that it would be painless to turn into a branch, Ajany heard the sweetest voice on earth that day:
“Silly!” Odidi had called.
She wailed, “ ’Didi!”
Odidi reached her tree. “ ’Jany, come down. Are you Zaccheus?” Thinking that was especially funny, he screeched off-key, “There was a man in Jericho called Zaccheus …”
A torrent from Ajany: “G-ganda-said-Turkana-people-d-don’t-climb-trees-and-th-then-I-climbed-and-then-he-left-and-th-then-I-was-afraid-and-th-then-you-came.”
“Come down.”
“Mppph.”
“What, silly?”
“C-can’t.”
“Whaat?”
Louder. “Am stuck.”
Odidi had bayed with laughter, rolling on the ground. A hyrax somewhere yowled, and in the distance another one answered. Ajany wept in gulps that should have dislodged her.
Odidi answered, “Ajany yuak-yuak-yuak.”
Hiccups from within the tree.
“ ’Didi, am stuck.” Ajany lisped.