The baby did not cry.
Akai had not named the baby.
Later.
When she was able to walk, Akai had wandered away from Wuoth Ogik, seeking news of Nyipir at watering holes and centers of trade. She had strapped the nameless girl on her back, walking in circles.
After six days, the baby all of a sudden refused to suckle.
Soon Akai had nothing left to give her. At midday, in the heat, Akai had fallen to the ground, clawed it open, and screamed and screamed out Nyipir’s name. As she covered the hole with earth, a season’s harbinger — a secretary bird, one with a half-eaten snake — had landed and stared straight at her.
Akai tried to again breastfeed the child.
The child bawled.
The bird stared.
Akai told herself, At least I have a son.
She told the bird, Take it, then.
She put the baby under a Mareer tree, and then she ran away.
Akai crawled into Wuoth Ogik three days later and found a way to the livestock boma, where she curled up next to the fire.
“Where’s baby?” Galgalu had woken her up
“Where baby?” lisped Odidi. “I want baby.”
Akai had stared at them blankly. “Baby?”
Galgalu had swept Odidi up and run into the landscape. Tracking Akai’s footsteps, they searched every bush. Galgalu whistled for honey birds. Four showed up to lead him to honey, but not to the baby.
Four days later, as Galgalu and little Odidi walked slowly back to Wuoth Ogik, Akai saw Odidi clutching a soiled, silent bundle to his chest.
“She’s dead,” Akai said.
Odidi turned on her, eyes afire. He said in an old man’s voice, “This is my baby.”
Galgalu did not stop to talk to her. He went straight to his hut.
Odidi started calling the baby “Ol Arabel,” after a river, for he was four and already understood thirst. He thought every river was Ol Arabel. Galgalu called the baby Arabel, which was the name of a cool, green mountain.
The feelings from that season pound Akai’s mind and heart, making her body clammy. What should she tell Ajany? She glances at her.
Arabel. Ajany. Oganda. The child still listened with her eyes.
“I was also born hot,” Akai says. “As you were. Odidi was born cool. Those born hot die, can even die of nothing. I was not expecting you, but you came, and when you were born, you were fire.”
Ajany winces.
Nyipir eavesdrops.
Akai says, “I became Turkana, but before that, I was Dodoth. I left school to meet one man, my father. But I met two. One is Nyipir. The other, Hugh Bolton. They were together.”
Ajany is suddenly cold. She rubs her arms up and down. She blows into her hands.
43
IN THE LATE YEAR HEAT OF 1956, WHEN AKAI HAD JUMPED INTO the watering hole, laughing, she dived through a portal into another way of being. Nyipir had clenched his hands, wanted to force her to leave. But her effusive life, Hugh’s fascination held him back. He suppressed his fear even as it growled within him.
Akai never did deliver the message of her suspension from school to her stepfather. Instead, greedy for the promise of the bigness of life, she became Hugh’s mistress.
“For me, he was the face of life. His hair was fire. He had answers. He had traveled farther than anyone I knew. Such a person was what I wanted. This is how I wanted to be.”
Tell me about the world. How big is the ocean? Why doesn’t it snow here, where water is needed most? Echoes. Akai now mocks her curiosity.
“But he read me things from his books. He showed me how to feel his music. Eyes shut, memory resurrects strains of what she cannot name as Chopin’s Nocturne in E minor. She sways with the sounds of that past. This is what I wanted. She says to Ajany.
But Hugh started to fondle and toy with Akai in public. Grabbing at her in Nyipir’s presence. Nyipir also started to act out. Breaking china, dropping kettles, polishing his hands. Not eating. He made himself scarce, throwing himself into carting stones for the new house. Akai began to stalk him. She would toss plates and cutlery just to watch him tense up. She undressed in his presence. Needled him to provoke a reaction. He always bowed and walked away.
A year later, during a sudden rare arid land storm, Hugh decided to sketch Akai where she had been reclining behind a boulder near the rude veranda. He commanded her to stay in the rain. She did. He sketched.
He worked all through the afternoon.
His sketch done, Akai had run in, shivering, pouting and snarling like a mad cat.
“Shut up, cow.” Hugh had screamed, “Can’t you see I’m painting?”
Hugh worked through the night.
Nyipir did not sleep at all.
In the morning, when he was preparing a scrambled-egg breakfast for Hugh and Akai, she walked into the kitchen, clutching her body, still trembling. “Go away.” Nyipir had said.
Akai remembers, eyes glittering: “As if I were a flea. So I slapped him.”
Nyipir did nothing.
Months passed.
Akai says, “Then I got pregnant. I was happy.”
The buzz of flies. A striped bird, scarlet and black-beaked, whizzes past. Around Wuoth Ogik, an overbearing cloud squats over seven people. Petrus wanders along the compound’s fence, looking and looking at the person who had really bound Ali Dida Hada to Wuoth Ogik.
Akai says, “Never thought about Selena. She was not of our life. Even when he brought her here and made me hide myself, even when he left with Nyipir, and I was left here alone, I was happy.”
A soft chortle at youthful folly.
Moths had danced around the lanterns installed by Nyipir. Hugh got up, pulled Akai off her seat, and stripped her in front of Nyipir. She stood unclothed and round-bellied.
Nyipir dropped a tray.
Hugh sometimes tore the paper with his paintbrush, throwing the paint and staining Akai’s body and clothes. He would command Akai to leave it on. And she would walk around in garish and grotesque shades.
Insults in Ngaturkana, applied by Hugh:
“Take this fat thing of yours and keep its ugliness from my sight.”
“Ngilac, talononwa.” Lice, bat.
Nyipir fed Akai fish soup. He stole a goat for her. He kept her from Hugh. Once, when Hugh went on a rampage, Nyipir had led her to the red caves near Wuoth Ogik to wait.
Hugh painted Akai from idealized memory.
One Saturday, Akai started to bleed.
Hugh said, “Is that the end of the bastard?”
Nyipir carried Akai to his small safari bed.
Attending to her, praying the bleeding would stop.
Three months before Akai’s delivery date, Hugh arranged a sudden safari to Lokitaung. Nyipir told Akai not to go. She looked back at him, her smile faked. “We finish this,” she said.
Hugh returned a week later by himself. He explained, “She’s gone back to her people. Among her own kind.”
He had settled into a camp chair, staring out. “Kijana, leta Sundowner. Hiyo maneno imekwisha kabisa. Sasa tutakimya.” Bring a sundowner. That matter is done. Now silence.
Akai tells Ajany that Hugh had pushed her onto a boat with an El Molo guardsman who tied a sheep to the prow, and gave Akai fifty shillings. “You come?” she begged Hugh.
“After baby,” he shouted.
Fifty shillings was good money in those days.
“I went home. They were so happy to see me. They were afraid an animal had eaten me on my way from school. They cried when they saw me.” Akai stretches out her legs, holding to Ajany’s hands.