“See,” she lisped, opening her mouth, “Ahh ohhkeh.” I’m OK.
Below them, the world eased by.
Later that night, after being force-fed by Galgalu, Ajany sat on her bed and waited for the house to become still. She then skulked down the stairs and found the embers of her work in the hearth. The heat evaporated Ajany’s tears.
Nothing was ever said about her artwork again. But when Odidi and Ajany returned to school in the middle of January, once they were inside the school gates, Odidi said, “ ’Jany, you’ll paint.”
She had stared at the soil.
Odidi shook her. “You must paint.”
She had shaken her head.
Odidi pinched her jaw, lifting her face, his eyes deep and clear. He said, “I say you paint, silly, or I take you back to your tree now.”
“Can’t.”
“Can.”
“Don’t know how to start.”
“Try.”
“Everything burned.”
“Silly, paint a river out of Wuoth Ogik. Then paint an ocean and a ship, and inside the ship, me and you going Far Away.”
Ajany had turned and run into the art studio, retrieved last term’s unfinished canvases and hardened paint. She could already hear the sound of ocean waves, and inside the waves, she saw the color yellow-white screaming at the color indigo blue.
Now.
Ajany pushes away from the hearth. Racing away from old words, and from the waning memory of the actual pitch of a brother’s voice.
A small corridor leads into the narrow kitchen, which opened into a womblike alcove.
Memory maps within an old house.
Details.
Details help with forgetting.
Here was a long-drop toilet with its shower that was open to the elements and also used by bird-sized moths. There, to the left, a gate swung out to uneven stone trails that stopped where food used to be cooked on open fires fueled by livestock dung, paraffin, and desert kindling. Vestiges of numerous herbs and spices and a row of smoked, drying, putrefying flesh. Fodder for so many journeys.
The shelves are empty now.
There, Akai had slaughtered goats, sheep, lambs, cows with the precision of a dispassionate executioner. Cool. Contemptuous of Ajany’s penchant for sliding into a mourner’s crouch at the sound of a victim’s pathetic bleating, the memories of which Ajany would regret as she chomped on and chewed up soft, spiced meat chunks.
No blue fires today.
To the right, a nine-step stone stairway splits into two at the top, separating bedrooms from two windowless bathroom toilets.
Next door, the library-study, a family room with functional furniture, a huge, frayed brown couch, a long oval table of dark wood and hard metal extensions with grooved chinks that held homemade beeswax candles that extended and sometimes replaced the night kerosene lamps’ orange light. Memories of long, flickering shadows pouring out of nooks, seduced by naked firelights. A rough shelf laden with the weight of Someone Else’s Baudelaire, George Sand, Charles Dickens, the Brontës, Carle Vernet, Flaubert, encyclopedia, and books on engineering, empire, and agriculture. Books on flowers, trees, birds, animals, and hunting. Jack London’s Call of the Wild. One black-leather-covered Holy Bible. Ajany can select a book and name it by smell alone.
Musty-earthy: The Flowers of Kenya.
Fingers run across book spines.
Tactile familiarity.
A gap, an uneven bump; the rhythm is off.
Some books are missing. She looks. Crusty clove and fecund green smells: the engineering and agriculture books — Odidi’s preferences. Ajany pulls out a large gray History of Art and turns to the first blank page. There “Hugh Bolton” has scrawled his name in semi-cursive script. Most of the books had once belonged to Hugh Bolton. Odidi had nicknamed Hugh Bolton “Someone Else.” “Whose books are these?” Odidi asked his parents one day. Akai-ma had snarled, “Someone else’s.”
Someone Else. As Ajany’s hand hovers over the book, her mind replays a humid evening when the family sat in this room. In the armchair, Baba gripped the edges of the Dhouay-Rheims Bible as his lips moved, spelling out words letter by letter, unease furrowing his face, as if he were memorizing a damning verdict in an alien language.
It had been a good time for Ajany to show off her improved reading skills. Drawing in breath, she spelled out: “H-U-G-H, Hugg, Huff … Baba, what’s a Hug-g B-Bolton?”
Nyipir’s head had almost jumped out of his neck. In one move, he dropped the Bible, surged up, strode over, and snatched the book from Ajany’s hands, snapping it shut. In a shredding tone he said, “Brush your teeth. Go to sleep. It’s late. You, too, Odidi.”
Ajany had run out of the room, down the steps, and into the living room and thrown herself behind a settee. Odidi found her there. He crawled in next to her, let her weep into his shoulder. “I c-can’t never get the spellings right,” she mourned.
Odidi had said, “ ’Jany, ’Jany, don’t cry.”
She had wept until she fell asleep in her brother’s arms.
Now.
Ajany rustles book pages, sitting cross-legged between a gramophone and a Lamu chest, next to which lie three elephant tusks and moth-eaten sheepskin rugs. In the room, four lesos in a heap, a curved horn on which fat white cows with slanted eyes are painted in brown, gold, and white, Ethiopian Orthodox art, wood etchings, and landscape watercolors. A twenty-by-forty-centimeter painting titled The Last of the Quaggas. On the eastern wall, a still-flaking depiction of a green robed Saint George conversing with a resigned gold-sashed, golden-fire-sworded Archangel Uriel with only a quarter of his grandeur intact, victim of the brown dirt trails of termite nests.
A creak and grumble from one of two massive water tanks sitting on platforms and posts inside the roof. They had leaked for years, creating a grooved, reliable wide tear line that sustained the life of small things. Ajany disturbs a small cloud of insects as she wanders out. She falters outside Odidi’s room.
Odidi.
Crossing time, she trudges in, looks around, glimpsing shadows of brother that slice into her heart, her stomach. No tears. Ajany sits on Odidi’s low acacia-wood bed, rearranging its grimy, thin floral cover. Dust of spaces. In the wall recesses that served as his cupboard, emptiness. Ajany folds herself into his old bed and curls into a ball, hands clinging to feet, as she remembers the things that make a brother: Voice. Deep-seeing eyes. His music — old fashioned Afro-rumba. Franklin Boukaka, Fundi Konde, Mzee Ngala. Addiction to water songs — a liturgy of flowing, bubbliness. Even the camels listened to him. Rockdrill laughter, excavating terror; salt in soup; no sugar in tea made from rangeland herbs. Sign of the cross before converting a try — Shifta the Winger’s trademark. Soaring out of bed to meet the sun, shaking his sister awake and making her join him in watching sunspots grow and grow. Whistling. Odidi lying on warmed-up stones to witness the evening’s departure. Large arms — wings, really — that engulfed fear. Words suggesting Obarogo and then vanquishing the bogeyman in the same breath. Heartbeats. This is my brother. And then, in dreams, she has returned to Wuoth Ogik and Odidi is shouting from akwap a emoit—the land of antagonists — that she hurry to watch the advent of a moonlit indigo night.