Nails bite into skin. “Moses Odidi Oganda’s car?”
“Er …” The man drops the cleaning cloth. “Ehhh …”
Thunder in Ajany’s ears, acid on her tongue. “You know you’ll die? You’ll all die,” she explains to the luckless driver.
Shadows of her brother’s footsteps in Ajany’s exit. She finds Peter the taxi man stretched out on his seat, napping. When she drags open the door, he snaps awake. Ajany collapses on her seat, forces breath in; there is blood on her nose. She clutches the picture frame.
Silence as they drive back to the guesthouse.
Peter says, “I’ll fast for you.”
What’s the point?
She pays him for his prayers anyway.
Inside her room, numb. Weary of scrubbing tears away. She needs a destination. Maps made from the matter of memory. And that is when the walls start to close in. And she runs out of the room, out of the guesthouse, out of the gates, into a darkening city.
She breathes in audible gasps. Speaking to Odidi, of Odidi, for Odidi. Passersby see a smallish woman in a yellow dress. Some watch her tilt her head as her hands open in question. Others hurry past in wide arcs with single, cautious sideways glances. She does not see any of them.
19
LONG AGO, IN HIS NEW CLASS, WITHIN A SMELLY ATLAS ON A brown square desk, Nyipir had located Burma. “Burma.” Nyipir learned, “Mandalay, 21° 59′ N 96° 6′ E, Rangoon, 16° 47′ N 96° 9′ E.”
After he got his primary certificate, Nyipir should have gone on to secondary school, except there was little spare money, and nobody was ready to exchange livestock for school fees for him. A priest at the mission in Kisii decided to send Nyipir to Fort Hall. Nyipir could earn money there and complete his education, as he wanted.
Fort Hall, in the Central Province, had asked for a reliable Christian good boy, a non-Kikuyu, to help with the gardening and other chores. “For a short while,” Father Paul had assured him.
Nyipir left on a train, in long trousers and a hat, to start lessons in high culture by planting gardenias and watching them grow. He left in hope.
He settled in at Fort Hall. Entered into the rhythm of work: whitewash stones, cook, wash clothes, clean and polish shoes and boots, set the table, dust, and wait tables. He had sneaked textbooks from the wooden shelves next to the chapel to read by candlelight, preparing for school and wondering what to do so that he could go to Burma and bring his father and brother home.
Next door to the mission was the makeshift army camp. Nyipir would peer through the fence and watch men march in array. He heard the howling of a sergeant major as he screamed men into order. ’Eft, ’ight, ’eft, ’ight, about-turn. When there was no one about, Nyipir tried to practice what he saw.
If he had not met Warui the gravedigger, he would not have met Aloys Kamau, and maybe he would have gone to Burma as he had intended.
Warui made bodies disappear for the Crown, and anyone else who paid for it. Deep-sunken eyes, tattered gunnysack, stained brown coat. One clipped thumb. Warui had stopped outside the mission gate, hat in his hand, glaring at Nyipir, pointing at his mouth, his way of asking for water. Nyipir glanced around — nobody looking — and led Warui to a tap, where he crouched and drank. When he finished, Warui lifted his hat and slunk away.
Five days later, Warui returned. Over the gate, he pursed his lips at Nyipir. In Kikuyu he said, “If you want to make more money, get ready tonight.”
Nyipir sneaked from the mission hut, already counting the money he would earn.
He did not yet understand the state of the nation, or that interrogation units were generating far too many bodies for one man to bury alone under the blanket of night. Bodies in gunia leaked liquids into the ground, over his hands, the stench of invisible human beings, smashed up and nameless, lowered into grounds that he then leveled.
“What’s this work called?” asked Nyipir.
“Vulturing.”
“Who are these?”
Silence.
“Don’t they have people of their own?”
Stillness, and the sound of metal hitting earth.
“How is it possible?”
Warui said, “Too many questions; work.”
They did, in silence. Except for the times Warui would say, “Ssssssssssss” into the ground. Planting secrets. Warui also said, “Ona icembe riugi ni rituhaga.” The sharpened hoe gets blunt. When Warui said it, he implied many things.
Nyipir planted grass atop burial sites. Unlike Nyipir’s gardenias, the grass grew thick, green, and healthy.
After every hour, Warui gave Nyipir ten cents as well as half a tin of maize meal for the evening’s work.
Nyipir said, “Ona icembe riugi ni rituhaga.”
Warui spat, “Speak what you know, better still, don’t speak at all, you hear?”
They worked into the deep of night.
Few witnesses.
The inarticulate dead buried by mute gravediggers.
Warui once peered into the forest canopy and whispered, “It watches.”
Nyipir looked. “What?”
“Too many questions. Dig, dig.”
Nyipir returned to his real post at the mission hours before dawn, bathed his body with a pot of cold water, and went to huddle among the plants. They were stunted and stubborn but had gained a grudging root-hold. He also wondered why his body was trembling. All of a sudden he remembered that he had been handling human remains. He knelt over, head close to the earth, and vomited into the soil. Nothing left in his stomach. He stared at the mess and then covered it. Fifty cents. He told himself that every coin brought him closer to Burma and his father and brother.
Nyipir slept until cock’s crow.
The coins piled up.
But there was still not enough to even buy a train ticket to Nairobi.
The mission had told him that his food and board were payment enough, with a token two shillings a month for savings.
He needed more money.
When he asked Warui to increase his pay to twenty cents an hour, Warui laughed before clouting him in the ear.
“Work!”
One chilled night, Warui helped Nyipir bury a sack. The end of the sack burst open when they tossed it into a hole. Bloody hands and shriveled male genitals poured out. Nyipir gasped and turned to run; Warui barked at him once.
Nyipir stumbled and fell to the ground. Warui spat. “It’s better if your eyes are blind. Hear?”
Nyipir nodded, still dizzy.
They returned to seal the hole in the ground.
That night, needing to clear his head, Nyipir switched paths, walked into and through the safe forest fringes. He walked through cobwebs, the tingle on his face spreading all over his body. He marched on. The ground of Nyipir’s mind opened, and he spoke to the dead and their broken parts. And his father and brother walked with him. His mother joined them, as did his sister.
After he had wiped away tears, Nyipir saw that the forest unveiled a path. He stopped next to a mountain olive tree and waited before doubling back. He did not sleep at all. He knew there was a reward for giving information that led to the capture of rebels. That amount, added to what he already had, might be sufficient so he could take a train to Nairobi, and from there he knew he would find a way to Burma.
Nyipir woke up early to water the plants in the garden, long before morning Mass. He skipped breakfast, slipped out of the gate, and went next door, where the soldiers’ camp was.
After the parade, Nyipir approached a corporal and told him what he had seen in the forest the previous night. The corporal went and told an officer, who beckoned to Nyipir. The officer stood next to a fading whitewashed stone — a fierce son of a struggling empire leaning against the mast upon which the Union Jack quivered. “What do you want?”