Opirr leans forward to grab Ajany’s hand.
She stares at the shape, color, and size of his ring. A finger sneaks out to feel its texture. “Tell him, you hear me?” An urgent edge in Engineer Opirr’s tone.
Tears in Ajany’s eyes. She clings to and then drops his hands to pick up her bag and glances at the room one more time. “He was happy here?”
“Delirious. Never saw a child thrive as he did, once given the tools, the time and space. A treasure.”
Ajany gives Engineer Opirr her first real smile since her return to Kenya.
She walks faster than the unmoving traffic all the way to City Park, where someone’s loud, bombastic praise music—pakruok—fills the air. Lively food, touchable juiciness. Two hopeful vervet monkeys peek through doors. Cashew nuts, aubergines, and chili-tomato sauce. Braised meat, braised chicken, and fish. Dried fish. Ohangla music next door to Mzee Ngala’s sedate bango beats. Ajany eats with her fingers, tasting flavors for the first time as portions of Odidi accumulate around her. A treasure. She pauses and smiles.
Isaiah walks the landscape unseen and unknown, as if he might not even exist except to himself. It is toward the end of the fifth day when rectangles of shimmering corrugated iron roofs strike his squinting eyes. A white Land Rover drives past him, and the silence that has been his companion evaporates.
Now.
A bevy of beautiful lorries, contemplative humped cows, a small market made of color and dung. Sheep and goats bleat. A large van with a red cross parks parallel to a decrepit curb laden with gunnysacks next to a green Kenyan army truck whose driver is attempting to reverse in quicksand. Under twin Acacias, three supercilious camels rest. They are flanked by six white boxes bearing a blue-yellow sign with the legend: Reading Is Knowledge. The Kenya National Library Services Camel caravan pitching camp for the night. A youthful camel handler with dark gold skin and a splendid dome of a head is sprawled on a grass mat spluttering away at the contents of Enid Blyton’s Five Run Away Together, the only one in the series Isaiah had not read. With dusk plodding in and scarring the sky with yellow-orange trails, the crescendo of a hundred different home-going birds, blue-note winds, variegated shadows, invisible balsam-scented things, and the multi-toned buzz of assorted insects, within a flat, hard land with neither beginning nor end, in this surreal grandeur, Isaiah’s shabby, bearded, thirsty, shimmering appearance from a place just beyond sight, hands propped on a herding stick balanced on his shoulders, is a small part of “normal.”
The drone of a plane preparing to land. A beatific grin transforms Isaiah’s face. He watches the Piper circle the patch of earth serving as the airfield. His way into Nairobi. He will buy the plane if he has to.
Isaiah returns to Babu Chaudhari.
A toothless grin: “Fou’re back!”
“I am.”
“Fou’re wery brown.”
“Thank you.”
“Not good. Here …” Babu shuffles to the back of the shop and returns with a brown plastic bottle. Suntan lotion. Presents it to Isaiah, who does not recognize the manufacturer.
“Not sunscreen.” Isaiah frowns.
“S’OK.”
Isaiah sighs. He wants a room, a shower. Wants to go home.
The suddenness of night.
Behind a column, with a view of everything and the door, the District Officer drums fingers over a very old newspaper, the football section his source of irritation. The story of the Harambee Stars’ ignoble retreat and their subsequent five-to-one annihilation. The D.O. carries the bug-eyed aura of solitude of the forgotten person consigned to the northern frontiers by indifferent superiors. The tips of his hair are brassy blond — this land’s heat and saline.
“Kwaheri.” The traveling librarians wave at the D.O. on their way out of the bar-restaurant. They are turning in early so they can resume their wanderings before dawn. The D.O. turns to count the regulars, a relief from reflecting on the outrage that is the national football team. Was the long-haired Japanese water engineer turned herdsman who played solitary Ajua already in? They sometimes shared silent drinks together. He was not. Pity. He could have done with uncomplicated silence today. The Harambee Stars had twisted his heart.
Clut-clut-clut. The bald-headed, six-foot-tall, short-skirted woman of indifferent reputation who wears a red ring on her small hawk-beak nose and presides over the billiard table. Wide-eyed craziness. Her skirt is something she made out of a military general’s coat.
The D.O. looks away before she can see him.
Notes that six of the town’s other night women cling to strangers like extra limbs. Apart from an intermittent pawing, the men ignore their transitory mates. The women keep proprietary hands on the men’s thighs. They speak through smoke, pick meat and ugali from trays, quaff beer, and chew qhat. The D.O. understands the facts of children to feed. He recognizes a buxom woman who he had sought out in the early days of his posting when the silences had been unbearable. He knows of other dreams behind kohled eyes and Vaseline-tinted lips. Our poor mothers. He hears the laughter of the no longer deceived.
The shaggy-haired Estonian with the look of an anxious hoopoe walks in. Hunter of tales. He waves to two of his type. A Scottish explorer — that is what he says he is, a stranger who had driven into town four months back, would make mad forays into parts of the lake, return days later, desiring silence, and the German company man who, daily, dashed from landscape to landscape, plucking plants, leaves, gathering berries, scraping barks, and digging out roots. The Estonian sizes everyone up before nodding at the new arrival, a broad-shouldered, sun-darkened stranger who had walked in at dusk.
The watching D.O. rumbles at the male ritual posturing, teeth baring, and muscle-strength testing through hard handshakes.
The owner of the space, a double-chinned sometime bartender and indifferent cook, also owner of the only abattoir in town, waddles to his clients with drinks. Eyes dart; they miss nothing.
Isaiah is dressed in a formerly white T-shirt with a frayed collar and dark-brown khakis that may have once been beige. After greeting the strangers at the table, his hands tremble next to a warm Tusker bottle. His hands have been shaking ever since he settled in his room.
He takes in the bar. Eyes rest on the broken television set on a wooden stand.
Thinks.
Wuoth Ogik.
He must restrategize.
He will.
In Nairobi.
Reflections of patrons bob on the blank screen.
Tuskers and sodas on a round table. Eight lanterns cast a brownish-orange glow into the room. Isaiah turns to the curious gathering of European men at his table, indulges the tribal feeling coiling around them. Yet not one of them will admit to the pleasure of finding the others’ company in the belly of Timeless Nowhere. They share vices; a nameless woman is attached to each. He speaks to a glow-lipped woman whose Bint El Sudan perfume corrodes his nostrils.
“What’ll you have?”
“Martini,” she answers.
“Who’s paying?” His eyes are half-slits.
“Tusker.” She readjusts.
Isaiah watches somebody else’s cigarette smoke rise.
What he needs. To feel skin, heat. Needs a body to lose himself in. Any body. He strokes his stubble, wraps an arm around the perfumed woman with the baby-girl voice. Squeezes flesh, inundated by perfume. His thoughts scatter. They gather at Wuoth Ogik.