Incense drifting.
By the time he was touching the coffin, all color had drained from his face. He knew better than to speak.
He is bending over the box, hand on lid, lines written into his face. Time shifts, a chain of moments leading him across thresholds. An intrusive urge moves his hand. He watches himself raise the coffin’s lid to look. Moses. A stiff, graying clay man, stained cotton in his nostrils, an olive safari-suit collar beneath a yellow-and-red blanket that covers him as if he were merely asleep. Last mood recorded in eyebrows that point in different directions; the left one, slightly raised, conveys last-second amusement. A man about his age.
He lowers the lid, not able to look at Ajany.
An impatient long-bodied creature whirrs between them.
A loud thought: “What do I do now?”
Ajany shrugs her Don’t know, don’t care. Her head throbs. Nose aches. Bleeding? Wanting relief from persistent and invading ghouls, she looks above Isaiah’s head, registers the place of red caves and labyrinthine secrets. Drained, she stutters, “You leave b-before it gets dark. Not safe here.” She hugs her body.
“You are Moses’s …?” Isaiah tugs at his brows.
“Sister.” She anticipates his next question. “Arabel Ajany Oganda. I’ll point a way to the next town.” The insect departs.
“Moses wrote to me. Told me to come to Wot Ogyek.” Isaiah moves close to Ajany.
Ajany looks back at her brother’s box.
Isaiah touches her wrist. “Sorry.”
Ajany lowers her hands, her armpits drenched, wanting a dark hiding place where she can bleed unseen. Her nose tickles. If she sneezes, the bleeding will start. She looks to the ground.
Isaiah reaches for his haversack, unzips a pocket. Next to a battered-looking camera, he pulls out Odidi’s Engineer’s Field Guide book, taken from Wuoth Ogik’s library. Ajany already knows the first blank page has a name inked in: Hugh Bolton. Isaiah opens the book to the page and shows it to her. “Moses sent me this.”
Ajany takes the thick, musty book and lifts it to her nose, waiting for the fragrance of Odidi.
A cheerless recognition: the same ghost that haunted her had taunted Odidi. “How did my brother find you?” she asks.
Isaiah wipes sweat from his face. “Three times a year, every year for the past five years, I’ve posted a request for information in East African newspapers. Moses was also looking, as it turns out. Over two years ago, I received a postcard asking for an address to which he could send a parcel that would be of interest to me.”
Ajany inclines her head, listens. “The package came: this book.” Isaiah takes the book from Ajany. He browses the pages. “The sight of my father’s name in his handwriting …” His voice breaks. “Here — my father.” From out of his black wallet he pulls a sepia-stained black-and-white square of an ascetic-looking man with smallish eyes, neat hair, and a fine mustache.
“Also, found this inside the book that Moses sent.”
This. A seven-by-eight-centimeter, oversized bookmark, canvas material with an image.
Ajany takes it.
Reads the neat script—Finn diri—beneath a watercolor of a nude woman whose eyes glower. The woman, not just naked, exposed, raw to the soul. Intricate body scars jump off the small canvas. Languid. Indolent. Poured out woman. Etched into it, sorrow, hunger, beauty, anguish, worship, and defiance. One hand on her knees, the other beneath her head; something arcane suggested in the fecund, swollen belly. Details — a beaded wrist bracelet. This is a soul. Worlds slipping, a giddy wondering. Ajany glares at the artist’s signature: H. Bolton.
The bookmark is clammy in Ajany’s hands.
She averts her face, moves toward her brother to shield him and to conceal herself. She places her head against the coffin lid, striking it. Suffers the throb. Fatigue and dread compete. She scrutinizes the bookmark again.
To scare them, Galgalu had threatened her and Odidi with a ritual of malice, which he said vacuumed the essence of a person’s life through a circle of fire. Its potency slithered out of a seductive song that lured the target’s soul into a confined aperture where it becomes perpetually entranced by the song keeper. Right now, if she knew any such song, she would sing it to own the soul of the artist who blended shades of black with velvety violet strokes, infused with red and spots of gold-yellow, and touched them so that a woman’s life was incarnated on a page. She would sing the song to consume what she had just seen and disintegrate what she now knew. Quivers start inside her stomach. Heart palpitations. Breathing is an effort. Here, now, is the tune of underworld streams feeding murky marshes. Ajany studies the woman. An overwhelming tension eats into her, then leaves in a burst of light. She sees why Odidi had fled Wuoth Ogik’s enchantment with silence. Silence would never explain why and how Akai Lokorijom, their mother, came to be the naked, potent, pregnant subject of Hugh Bolton’s art.
Cicadas and beetles chirp night into being. Ajany crushes the bookmark, fingers cutting into her palm. Ten meters away, Galgalu limps in with two lanterns, dried meat, and two metal jugs of sour milk.
Isaiah watches Ajany’s approach, tries to forestall her demand that he leave. “I was hoping to be able to …”
Ajany touches his right hand, at his wrist. Soft-voiced, she says, “Why don’t you c-come into the house?” A pause. “Wash up, eat, there’s a room upstairs where you can sleep. You’ll find more of your father’s books there.”
Isaiah focuses on the warmth of her hand, her delicate touch on his pulse, embracing words. He almost smiles, is closer to tears of relief. He is unaware that a family’s citadel woven from infinite secrets has just been breached. He clears his throat and nods three times, clutching Ajany’s hand. He lets go.
The throbbing inside Ajany’s head ebbs.
6
AJANY COULD PAINT OVER THE SLICE OF CANVAS, COLOR OUT her mother. She chooses, instead, to bring the image into Nyipir’s dimly lit arena. She lifts the boma’s thorn fence where Nyipir sits against his red dance-ox next to a small fire, propping up his head. The animal chews its cud. Nyipir inclines his head toward a teensy sound emerging from his medium-sized transistor radio. From time to time a phrase is strangled out. Piecemeal news. Ajany has carried a red blanket for him. She drops it around his shoulders.
“Ah!” he says, huddles into it.
Ajany says, “B-baba?”
“Mhh?”
A geyser of questions, a rushed tone. “His name’s Isaiah Bolton.… His father …”
“I know,” says Nyipir; he rubs his head and slouches.
Ajany crouches.
Nyipir indicates the radio. “Down-country, they’re chasing people from their homes. The ones who stay are being cut up and burned.”
No logic. Her mind grasps nothing. Her heart lurches.
Tears crease Nyipir’s face. His left hand hides them. “Wuod Annan is here — listen — to help us.”
The radio spews static. Ajany strains to listen, draws her knees up. She hears minuscule sounds: the radio, her father, jumbled thoughts, the silent night. Perverse desolation. She shudders. More ghosts circling. Static. Kofi Annan’s voice weaving through in words that don’t connect: Parties … eminent persons … bloodshed … peace … violence … Peace … spoken … Honorable gentlemen … war … tribal … politics …