Nyipir stuttered the story of a covered diversion waiting in the forest. The field officer was a wiry, medium-height man with a ragged strawberry-blond beard. He listened to Nyipir, dolorous eyes becoming smaller and smaller.
The man said, “Right, boy! I’ll arrange things with the padres.”
That night, Nyipir rode in a Land Rover for the first time in his life and decided that this was all he would ever drive. Four others, one informant, a young soldier who had blackened his face, whose lips gleamed pale, and three armed home guards, in the car. The road was bumpy. The Land Rover slid down slippery grooves, then halted. The men leapt out. Nyipir led the way to the path he had seen. The men crawled through the thick undergrowth.
An advance tracking squad had brought in a man on suspicion of being an oath giver. Nyipir was standing next to a guard when the man looked straight at him and said, “I surrender. And you?”
Nyipir puzzled over that.
The men eased their way into the concealed path, rifles at the ready, as silent as hunting cats. Nyipir, who had been ordered up a massive Wild Olive tree to wait and whistle an alarm if he saw anything untoward, ached to be part of the fierce band of men. Within the branches of the tree, Nyipir made a pistol shape with his right hand: two fingers pointing out, thumb up, two fingers in his palm. He waited up there until the hunters reappeared at dawn.
The following afternoon, Nyipir was redeployed from the mission to the camp — more of the same work but with guard duties thrown in and better pay. He became the camp’s odd-jobs boy, until two months later, on a frost-cold day, he was ordered by the commandant to join a group of men sent to retrieve bodies from a hut: a beheaded old man, a hanged youth about his age, a toddler, and two split-apart young women. The attempts to torch the hut had failed. Only the doors and windows were scorched.
So this was war? Nyipir had pressed his face into the soil and screamed until he blacked out. Cold water and invective revived him, supplemented by a kick on his rear.
He imagined he could leave. “Afande,” he pleaded with a tow-headed junior officer, “this is sickness. If I stay, I’ll surely die.”
The man had guffawed and pounded Nyipir’s back twice. “Gets easier, boy, don’t worry.”
It didn’t.
And then Aloys Kamau.
More collecting of hacked-to-death human casualties of a small war.
A convulsing Italian priest drenching the site of death with holy water and incense, chanting, “Aloys Kamau,” instead of prayers.
The priest was long-faced, dark-haired, as bony as an Ankole cow in the drought. His cassock was disheveled; he had a swollen face from a cracked, pus-filled molar.
He had grabbed onto the police officer who had turned gray at the human mess scattered around. In a bass voice the priest howled, “This is a teacher of children — oh God — of children.”
Much later, the priest, chewing sour tobacco, attempted to seize sense through staccato phrases. “That oath,” he growled, “that … black sacrament … that cursed, roaming architect of sin … this vile landlord …” He swallowed the tobacco instead of spitting it out. Choking, crying.
“Aloys abjured the oath.”
A week later, the children he taught gathered to spit on him as one. “Oh! Miei bambini.” The priest groaned. “Their poor souls.” He sputtered his knowledge, and his hearers, Nyipir included, understood that Aloys Kamau had tried to save another teacher’s life, a man who was being chopped up by seven men in front of his students. Aloys had intervened. He could have escaped. He did not.
Silence.
Then a palpable existential dread invaded the landscape, and the men moved closer together while the priest bayed, “Why are we here?” over and over. No birds sang. The priest howled at silent clouds, “We are simpletons. What can we do? Send exorcists, for God’s sake. Send them exorcists!”
No birds sang.
Later, Nyipir would scrape the ground, looking around. This is a body, he thought as he waited for the brooding dread to materialize and crush them all. He gathered everything he could that was once Aloys — pieces of body in the sack. A wide dark spot marked the ground where Aloys had fallen. The priest stared at the site, paralyzed, and Nyipir thought, This is blood, and waited for the rumble that would surely end a world confronted by this horror.
It didn’t come.
The world rolled on, but not before consecrating Nyipir to its whims, Nyipir, who clutched a bloodied sack, as if it contained all the densities of night. Much, much later, Nyipir’s mind watched life shutting down on itself inside the pitch of human screams: Ngai, Ngai, Ngai. God, God, God. Of passes issued to souls with blank eyes who volunteered names in exchange for peace, peace alone (the pass read, “Mwigito wa kwihonokia ukineana … uyu ukuuite ‘bathi’ ino arinda”—The bearer of this pass wishes to surrender). Of wondering how a people could harbor a malignant presence that would devour children, and not scream out, not even once. Of trying not to scratch himself out of his skin, because this could not be the meaning of life.
Yet.
He knew he might endure all this so that he could go to Burma and bring his father and brother home. He could endure this world, he realized, so that, in defiance of intent, a murdered dreamer named Aloys Kamau might borrow eyes to still look upon a life that had been severed from him.
Months later, a special “processing” station was built to manage the national crisis. The base at Athi River sought trustworthy hands. An officer slapped a band on Nyipir’s upper arm and sent him over to the plains. On his way to Athi River by train, Nyipir glimpsed Nairobi at sunset and thought of Burma.
At the secretly located Athi River station, Nyipir’s tasks were simple: join seven other men and stare at inmates in cells, no words.
“What kind of job is this?” he asked a short man.
“Are you being paid?” the man asked.
“Yes, sir,” said Nyipir.
“Then why question?”
Concentrated silence drowned the hardest of men.
Faces he contemplated every day burned themselves into Nyipir’s nights, and would start conversations as he slept that had not been possible during the day. He began to dread both day and night. Some nights, to postpone sleep, Nyipir wrote long letters to Baba Jimmy. He told of stages of light in human eyes. Akia kata nying’ gi, he wrote. The body of a human cannot live without kindness. When it meets hatred, it stops trusting its life. This is what weakens men. Nyipir did not write that because of the ugliness in the stillness of the plains, he was unable to play the mouth organ and had kept it away in a crevice of his suitcase. He wrote, I will find Baba and Theo. To be so far from home cannot be good. I’ll go to Burma. He did not write that Burma meant he could forget the things he had seen and done. Nyipir signed off his letter. An wuodi, Nyipir. If Baba Jimmy sent a reply, Nyipir never got it.
“Mwigito wa kwihonokia ukineana … uyu ukuuite ‘bathi’ ino arinda”—The bearer of this pass wishes to surrender. A new man, an officer named Hugh Bolton, came to join the study of lives belonging to the documentation Nyipir issued: “Ne ûndû wa kûhonokia ûtûro wake”—For the salvation of his soul.