“Try?” Odidi threw pebbles upward. An incentive.
Sobs.
Odidi hastened up the tree, no plan in mind. He got to Ajany, in the Y part of the tree, and sat next to her before hugging her. “Silly goat, I’m here.”
And he was.
After a minute, Odidi said, “OK, sit on my back — I’ll climb us down.”
A slow, sweaty descent. Eight meters from the base of the tree, Odidi miscalculated distances and fell to the ground with Ajany on his back. Rolling to protect her, he had split his forehead in the process. Ajany had used her maroon school sweater to stem the blood flow before racing like a spooked gazelle to get the school nurse, praying Hail-Mary-full-of-grace-The-Lord-is-with-you so that OurHolyMotherMary would let her die in Odidi’s place.
Today, the day after last night, begins with thunder but no rain. Last night three people raised a green tarpaulin over a casket in silence, surrounded it with incense and water, and, five meters away, lit a fire that would witness this death. Last night Ajany had stripped the bed of Odidi’s blankets, carried down his pillow, lifted the coffin’s lid to tuck her brother in. She had wrapped her body against the desert cold and known she would not fall asleep. She had waited for Odidi to tug on the fragment of string around her body and tell her what to do, when to haul him in.
And today he had appeared when her eyes were closed.
Leaden footsteps.
She turns.
Baba. Nyipir. Hollow-eyed, a new tilt to his body, as if he is fighting gravity. A stone sculpture melting. In its searching eyes, white terror.
Re-entering a ceaseless day.
Meaninglessness is ash in Nyipir’s mouth. Swallowing saliva. Failing, falling, clutching at nothings. The compartments into which he parcels his life are broken and leaking. Swallowing, Nyipir stares at sunspots, the contained spaces occupied by pieces of light.
“Baba …” his daughter stammers.
He turns.
Father and daughter sit close to each other. Then Nyipir says, “I named him.” She leans forward. “Your brother, Ebewesit. Akai’s father — she expected that. Oganda so our name would outlive us.”
They wait.
They watch the day walk across their feet. And then it is three hours later and Galgalu is adding tinder to a wake’s fire made pale by daylight.
“We’ll build a cairn,” Nyipir suddenly says, rising and measuring the ground with his eyes. “Seven and a half meters across the base.” He picks up black, white, and brown stones, squeezes them in his hands. “A stone garden.” Dust strains through Nyipir’s fist.
Behind them, a white-fungus-infested chunk of their coral house collapses. The house’s water tank has tilted on its roost and yawned open; it is draining its contents through ceilings and down walls.
4
A CONVOLUTED SILENCE WARPS THE LANDSCAPE. NOTHING seems stable, not even the aged acacias. Nyipir Oganda lifts the hoe way above his head, and when it falls it bounces off the ground with a thwack! A pause. The sunspots look the same as always. What Nyipir had not considered was the hardness of the ground. Or the fragmenting of hearts during a father-son wrestling match, or the pain of pleading, “Stay. I’m sorry.”
To protect new post-independence citizen children, parents like him repainted illusions of a “future Kenya,” while shouting out words of the national anthem as if volume alone would re-create reality. Nyakua. Mouths, ears, and eyes shut, parents partitioned sorrow, purchased more silences and waited for the “better Kenya” to turn up.
Nyipir’s daily covenants with silence had all of a sudden lost their weight. Today the voices of the dead-providing-their-own-witness take over his thoughts with a soundtrack — Babu Kabaselleh’s “Lek Wuonda,” to remind Nyipir that the dying started long ago. Before Pio, Tom, J.M., Argwings, before the red, black, green, and white flag fluttered one midnight in December.
Eeee … lek wuonda. Deceived by dreams.
Nyipir pounds metal to dust, listening helplessly.
Thwack! This is how to beat back seething phantoms.
Thwack! Bury engulfing blackness and its music.
Thwack! How to demand silence.
Aieee!
The usual breeze east of Badda Huri hums over the lava-sprinkled drylands of the Dida Galgalu Desert. Green and beige doum palms at the water point a kilometer away lean west, toward derelict Dida Gola.
Dust in his eyes, inward gaze. Inside Nyipir, secrets stir, and his mouth opens. “Ona icembe riugi ni rituhaga,” he croaks. Witness from fifty-year-old burial grounds. “Ona icembe riugi ni rituhaga.” Nyipir scrambles for silence. Ona icembe riugi ni rituhaga—repetitive, loud-speaking thoughts.
Ajany hears Nyipir. Listens for more. Galgalu hears Nyipir. Knows he is crying. He wanders away, making lines on the earth with his herding stick.
Stillness. Then Nyipir speaks. “A man I knew used to say Ona icembe riugi ni rituhaga before we dug the graves.”
Ajany hears “dug the graves.”
Nyipir spits.
He hacks at the ground. Nothing more to add. Glut of shadows. Shadows of phantoms.
What endures?
A disappearing mother, heaving silences, and the desire to vomit out anguish. Head throbs, fists clench and unclench. Ajany teeters on the edges of inside fog. Liquid slides down her lips. Nosebleed, small tears.
She flees.
Dashes into the dimly lit interior of their splintering pink house that at night becomes a sparkle-crackle of parts being chomped down by unseen termites.
Wuoth Ogik was once a sanctuary crammed with the music of rangeland life: a father’s hollow cough, herders’ sibilant whistles, day handing over life to the night, a mother’s sudden, haunted cry, a brother singing water songs to camels. What endures? A father sighing Aiee! Talkative shadows, crumbling walls, scent of dung and dream, reflections of long-ago clattering of polished Ajua stones falling into a brown wooden board of fourteen holes; the lives of cows, sheep, goats, and camels; three mangy beige-and-black descendants of a fierce mongrel herding dog with a touch of hyena.
What endures?
Elastic time.
Another junction. Brazil’s Atlantic Ocean, São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos. Five days ago, Ajany had been there, staring at a collage of deep-blue skies, fluffy clouds, and a spread-out view of the beige and frothing ocean. Pre-Christmas exhilaration sprinkled with the beat of a mild pulse of terror attached to dread, of waiting and stillness. She had tried to phone Odidi. She had also been waiting for others, the law keepers, to come for her, had expected up to the end, before the plane strained for high skies, to be stopped and caught. She had expected all these others to reach her first, but instead Nyipir had phoned from Kenya.
“B-baba.” Afraid he knew what she had just done.
But he had whispered, “Odidi’s gone.”
At first she had deleted what she thought she had heard. Did not ask what gone meant. Listened when Baba had said, “Come home, nyara.” He added, “Come home. Please?” His voice had been low and aged.
She had left Bahia with an orange suitcase and red carry-on half full of mismatched clothes, assorted art supplies, two passports, and three credit cards. A red cell phone and the amethyst necklace she always wore. She had thrown her black MacBook with the tomes of commercial art, her living, into a red shoulder bag and fled.