Two a.m. The bed light is on; Isaiah watches the ceiling fan rotate.
He is certain it is a late-in-the-day version of jet lag.
No sleep.
Hakuna matata. “Only tourists say that,” Kalela had scoffed earlier. “Say hamna mtatizo.”
No worries.
In the morning, at breakfast, he browses through The Rough Guide to Kenya, before trying to sleep again.
Much later, Isaiah will prowl the city’s streets, witnessing its surreal radiance. Nairobi’s night music will draw him in. Pulsing lights, shrieking conversations, and boom-boom beats in a club he has found filled with a multicultural class lamenting the nation’s halfhearted attempt at civil war, seedy diplomats, and do-gooders — an alarming rash of these. Isaiah squints. What was it with the men and their long wavy hair, unshaven look, indoor sunglasses, even tan, sneakers, and Jesus sandals?
The stale-breathed club Anzigane is easy to get into, harder to leave. Dance. Music. Cocktails. Hookahs and hookers. Double brandy in hand, Isaiah barely flinches when a thin woman, just out of school, squeezes his testicles. “Go away,” he grumbles. Blond-wigged, long-legged females — thin, fat, mostly in between — wiggling flesh, grabbing his thighs, drooping over him, with fucked-up suggestiveness. Wanting a different kind of world. Hybrid lusciousness; in more receptive lands, they would be starlets and über-models. They give shape to his expanding Nairobi vocabulary: malaya.
Restless, insomniac, and pissed off, Isaiah wants to start a fight. He is irritated by the existence of a pebble-spectacled, weedy Swiss man who plows through the night’s women like a predatory combine harvester. In a more just place, this watery specimen of manhood would have had to slit his wrists to save himself the ignominy of perpetual rejection. Isaiah’s nose flares as the European export scurries about like a popular rodent. He wills the man to reach his corner of the bar. Three hopeful females flutter their lashes at him. He downs another caipirinha, gets up, and flees the bar, weighed down by this nocturnal character of exile, the incessant darkness of no-place-ness.
17
NYIPIR LIMPS ACROSS THE COMPOUND, SPRINTS, DARING IMAGINARY foes—goyo sira—but his tear ducts are blocked:
Ochamo ka Oganda ma ji oluoro.
Dede ochamo ka Oganda ma ji oluoro
Ere? Ochamo ka Oganda ma yande riek.
Par Oganda odong’ nono ma wuon dhok.
Locusts have consumed Oganda’s realm,
A once-splendid realm is emptied
Where? Oganda, who was once wise.
Nothing remains for this guardian of cattle.
The dread becomes sweat that heats up his body, broils his thoughts so that, as a young boy would, he reaches for his father, Agoro Patrobus Oganda, and his big brother, Theophilus Paulus Oganda.
“Burma.” Nyipir mutters to himself, “Mandalay, 21° 59′ N 96° 6′ E, Rangoon, 16° 47′ N 96° 9′ E.” He recited this as an invocation for them.
By the time able-bodied men in Nyanza were summoned for King George’s war by persuasion of the paramount chief, and a trumpet-voiced member of the regiment-recruiting safaris offered King George’s shillings, thumbprint-on-paper, and reduced taxes for the prestige, honor, power, and glory of membership in the King’s African Rifles, Agoro and Theophilus had both left for training in Maseno.
The steam train taking men to foreign battlefields stopped in Kisumu. Petronilla, his mother, who was pregnant, had held on to Nyipir’s arms as Nyipir’s body twisted toward his father. “Adwaro dhi kodi!” I want to go with you.
Petronilla’s counterpoint: “Leave me this one — leave me this one — leave me this one at least.”
“Theo!” Nyipir’s brother had turned, faced him, and raised his hand in salute.
“Owadwa adwogo.” I’ll return, bro.
The train had gained speed. Petronilla let Nyipir run after it as far as he could. It left him far behind. He stared at the rails until the station-master chased him away. Nyipir memorized journeys his brother and father took: Madagascar, to fight against Vichy France. Back to Kenya. Mombasa to Burma and the 1944 Monsoon Campaign.
And then a period came that was woven from sorrow alone. Petronilla Ajany, his mother, died — snakebite when she was washing in the river. Nyipir’s uncle took over the family’s goods and lives. He commanded Nyipir to tend to his baby sister, Akoth.
One night, six months after his mother had died, Akoth, who had been restless and hot, coughed, looked at him, and, even as he clung to her, became very, very still.
Uncle took Nyipir away from school, told him to herd the family livestock. Nyipir reread old schoolbooks, prayed, and waited for his father and brother to come home. They did not, not with the men marching back home from war fronts. Changed men like Baba Jimmy, who brought a Spanish guitar that he plucked like the nyatiti. Baba Jimmy was a giant with a hoarse, tearing voice, a descendant of musicians who make the lyre weep. Gangrene had eaten Baba Jimmy’s toes during the war, and now he hobbled. He never explained why his body lurched in twisted angles as he moved.
Nyipir had run to him: “Ere baba, ere Theo?” Where are they?
Baba Jimmy shuffled ahead, his guitar swinging on his back, told Nyipir to direct his questions to God. He relented. “Gi biro.” They are on their way.
Nyipir heard the condensed sadness in Baba Jimmy’s voice, the source of music.
“Come, boy, sing,” Baba Jimmy suggested. He wanted to stop Nyipir’s no-answer questions. From within the army coat he still wore, he dug out a brown-and-silver mouth organ. Baba Jimmy dangled it on the tips of his fingers and let it fall into Nyipir’s open hands.
“Inhale, exhale.” Hollow laugh, cheerless eyes.
Nyipir counted sixteen holes before lifting the instrument to his lips, eyes on Baba Jimmy.
“Breathe in, breathe out.”
Nyipir did.
“Open your mouth, whistle. With your lips, cover these holes; don’t move until you know the name of the sound.”
They had turned old stories into songs without words.
It was the evening of a cold day in Kisumu; Nyipir milked the animals and settled them in for the night. He went to his hut. And then his uncle came to count the Oganda animals. Two goats that had eaten poisonous weeds died that evening. Uncle returned with boka rao. He raised the length of whip. It connected with the side of Nyipir’s face the first time. By the second blow, Nyipir had picked up the hoe next to his mat and swung it at his uncle. The hoe hit its mark with a crunch. Maybe it split Uncle’s head, because there was a small, spurting fountain of blood, which in the dimness looked very black, and Uncle whimpered.
Nyipir did not wait.
He ran. And when he stopped, he found he had crawled into Baba Jimmy’s granary. The next afternoon, when Baba Jimmy found Nyipir hiding there, he said nothing, closed the door, returned with a calabash of water, and closed the granary door again.
Three days later, Baba Jimmy told Nyipir a story, which they would turn to melody:
“Listen.… Chon gi lala, a greedy hyena, had a brother. The brother was a warrior and went on a journey. This hyena opened its big mouth to swallow his brother’s home. He also tried to swallow the brother’s son, except this son was bigger than the hyena’s open mouth.…”