A hesitation.
But then his hand closes over Petrus’s.
The day’s hard light toasts their skin. Petrus chews hard on his cigarette end. Fresh wrinkles wreathe his face. His unlit cigarette falls and, like soft November rain beginning to fall, his tears create an inkblot on the earth’s surface.
Later.
“I’m wondering,” Nyipir says as he watches the regress of a column of safari ants. “Mandalay, 21° 59′ N 96° 6′ E, Rangoon, 16° 47′ N 96° 9′ E.”
“Yes?” Petrus rubs his spectacles.
“Burma.”
“Myanmar, osiepna. And Rangoon is Yangon.”
“So my daughter says. She’s very clever.”
Petrus squints at the light on faraway mountains.
Nyipir says, “A place to see. Burma.”
Three pairs of ibis squawk their way home. Petrus studies their flight route. Dropping rules. Escaping dutifulness, he grabs at the offer of a trail of friendship. Atonement? His eyes pop, lift, and meet thick brows. “Msee,” Petrus asks, surrendering to his craving, “do you have fire to lend me?”
Unknown and unseen wanderers have added stones to Wuoth Ogik’s new graves. Nyipir counts these, seven. He also counts the cigarettes he and Petrus have shared in life. This last one was their second.
39
WATERING HOLES ARE LITTERED WITH MEMORY CIPHERS. CATTLE bones — casualties of past droughts, a prevailing north wind. Ali Dida Hada asks after a red dance-ox. Wanderers tell him where they have seen it, marveled at its trained, polished horns, lofty temperament, and majestic amble. Following the trail, he and Isaiah reach a cross-shaped boulder in a wadi.
A pale tree stump, dry and carved by water, leached by sun, warped into a humanlike face with its nose pointing north in the direction of the water’s flow. Its shorn branches point skyward. Ali Dida Hada strokes the bark. He rocks it until the loam loosens. Above, sulky clouds approach in phalanx. Ali Dida Hada murmurs, “Rain.” The tree stump rolls forward. “It’ll flow.” He watches the wind bend the low-lying, yellowed grass.
Isaiah and Ali Dida Hada hike northward. Silent men, in the moment, in their thoughts. A whooooo sound stops them five hours later. A shared grin. The scent of water. The angle leaves a view of wavelets on a recently formed temporary lake, child of a flash flood. The land has split into two. The animal tracks they were following end there. Assorted birds balance on reedlike shrubs. Not yet dusk.
“So?” Isaiah asks, considering the water.
Ali Dida Hada strips off his clothes and slides into the water.
Isaiah tugs at his shoes, preparing to follow.
Ali Dida Hada says, “Crocodiles here. Small ones.”
“You’re joking?” Isaiah shouts.
Ali Dida Hada snorts.
“I’ll build a grave of stones for your remains,” Isaiah proposes, wading on the muddy shore, examining the water for reptile-looking shapes.
Ali Dida Hada submerges himself.
Later.
They resume their journey, turning northeastward, and descend into a rain-season river valley that is now dry. Ocher-tinted earth. Below, near a pale-brown monolith where a weak sliver of a tributary of the Omo River touches Anam Ka’alakol, they halt and collapse to the ground.
Isaiah, lying on his back, looking at dusk’s clouds, remembers exactly how the mood changed, the electric sense of not being alone, of being watched.
Ali Dida Hada had adjusted his sarong and located his gun; he signaled stillness to Isaiah, who stiffened. They waited.
When Akai Lokorijom walks into sight, Ali Dida Hada drops his gun and gasps.
She has aged. So many lines crisscross her face. Her gaze still burns, and her mouth, though softened, still has its sarcastic twist. She smells of the land, its age, heat, and hardness. Wizened hands. And she says, “You are here.”
He is silent.
“You’re angry,” she says.
He does not speak.
Isaiah understands that he will never again mistake Akai Lokorijom for Ajany. Here is the elemental thing that had obsessed Hugh and — he glances over — possesses Ali Dida Hada.
Her eyes skim over him. He immediately closes his.
Angular features, dark-skinned, a life form that seems to pour itself into the object of its focus. He wants to touch her skin, to know its texture. He imagines all kinds of warmth. He watches Akai Lokorijom glide over and cup Ali Dida Hada’s face.
Ali Dida Hada is unmoving. “I’ve been looking for you,” he says in Gabbra.
Behind, a volley of barks.
They turn.
One of Wuoth Ogik’s herding dogs.
“The animals?” Ali Dida Hada asks.
Akai hunches, looks away to the left. “Gone.”
“The red dance-ox?”
Silence.
Ali Dida Hada asks, “What do you want to do now?”
He is tired of arguing with phantoms.
Tired of losing.
He steps back and lowers his head.
Akai understands the exhaustion of bleeding life one love at a time, of trying to keep a step ahead of threat, dread, fear. Struggling not to need, not to crave more, trying to ignore the hunger to contain an other, always battling not to swallow her own.
He is here.
The only man whose stillness gives her peace.
And he grasps her world, and when he recites his poems, it is as if he can see as she does and she is not alone inside her imagining.
Akai says, “Bakir, I’m tired.”
Ali Dida Hada rubs his eyes, and then his head.
“You’re old,” she tells him.
Silence.
A movement.
Akai pivots again.
Watches Isaiah watching her.
She asks, “Is that Abdulkadir’s son? The chicken thief?”
Ali Dida Hada glances at Isaiah.
Malice. “No. That’s Isaiah William … Bolton. Son of Hugh Bolton.”
Isaiah understands the word “Bolton.” He sees Akai cover her mouth. Her eyes narrow. Are those tears?
Ali Dida Hada feels Akai’s body’s heat, a thrumming force.
The smell of fear.
Isaiah shuffles under Akai’s stare, scratches his arm, imagines even his pores are being probed.
She moves closer to examine Isaiah.
She walks around him.
She strokes the skin of his arm.
She says, “Your mother’s in you. I see her.” She reaches up and turns his head this way and that. A sly smile, a snort. “Selena’s son.” Without looking over, she asks Ali Dida Hada, “Why did you bring this one here?”
“He’s come for his father.”
Akai studies Isaiah.
Ali Dida Hada says, “Akai?”
She drops Isaiah’s face and strides to Ali Dida Hada and looks him up and down.
Ali Dida Hada tugs at her arm, her forearms in a clinch. His jaw firms up. They are almost nose to nose. “Where is he?” Akai pulls away and spits. “Shall I tell you?”
She pivots, watching Ali Dida Hada.
“He is now buried at Wuoth Ogik. Nyipir’s brought in his bones from inside a cave. He’s buried next to your son.”
Akai tumbles backward, shrinks, hugs her body, bends, and breathes in rhythm to inaudible sobs.
Ali Dida Hada reaches for Akai.
She slaps his hand away.
She turns to Isaiah and grabs his shirt. In her version of English, “I’m woman in Hugh pictures.” Hoo, she pronounces it. She looks into him. “I see your mother, Selena.” He waits. “She come for Hugh. But Hugh want me, not her.” Isaiah is mesmerized. “Your father? He is not Hugh. OK?” She taps his face. “Your father, he someone else. Not Hugh. Look your color, see?” Akai gargles. Shakes her head. “Not Hugh. Selena—ai! — she’s mad.” Akai claps her hand. “Good revenge. Hugh …” She glares at Isaiah. “A bad, bad man.” She sneers. “Be happy Selena mad.” Another gurgle. “Or your hair be red like stupid.”