Akai-ma says, “Little to take from that house.”
Wuoth Ogik in deformed shadow.
Ajany’s sudden desperate tone: “Akai-ma, how does madness come? Can it arrive with the sound of wailing? It’s inside.” She stops. “It cries. Like a baby.”
With a rapid movement Akai-ma gathers Ajany to her and presses her head to her daughter’s. Lips to skin. Husky-voiced. “Tell the crying one that she has a mother. She belongs to life. She has a mother and the mother holds her. The mother forever holds her.”
A burning sensation harrows Ajany’s inner being.
It listens to Akai-ma say, “This is my heart, this is my breathing, and it’s you. You hear?” Heartbeats. Arms tighten around each other. Time darts through them. Small contentment.
Later.
Too soon.
Ajany watches her mother’s silhouette merge with the vast darkness in a slow-flow dance. On a distant hill, a pinprick of firelight. It wavers. She watches until time — or something like time — becomes seeing. After that, there is more waiting.
Under the waning moon, a shadow emerges. It approaches. It becomes Isaiah. He drops down next to Ajany. Above them, night-blackened clouds with starlit fringes. Isaiah shifts until their bodies touch. Ajany tilts her head, in the silver light. Mussed-up hair, frayed shirt collar, wiry arm muscles, deepened angular features, a deep gaze fixed on her. The silence. With hardening nipples and aching body, she watches light slivers dance on his skin. Her silence, their stillness.
Then.
“Hello, Arabel?” Quiet in his voice.
“Hello, Isaiah.”
Isaiah reaches over. His hand on the back of her neck, he drags her to him. Rubbing his face against hers. Breathing her.
His house, she thinks. His Wuoth Ogik.
Bitterness.
It passes.
Echoes.
Fragrant aftertaste, this burnt-earth flavor of home.
It is this.
But it is not hers.
Not anymore.
Where will I go now? A fleeting thought.
Her head against his, readying for more absences.
“Here.” He pulls out a folded square of paper from his shirt pocket. He explains, “Wuoth Ogik’s title deed. Your father gave it to me.”
She takes the document. Hands trembling, heart spinning. Will you learn the faces of our stones or the passageway of old footsteps and repeat the prayers of our earth-covered dead? She squints at the page, deciphering the words Lieutenant Colonel (ret.) Hugh Aubrey Francis Bolton.
Memory: a lonely, broken face inside a dark Kalacha cave.
Relinquishment.
She will not grieve.
Small voice. “May I still visit Odidi here?” Small tears.
Isaiah’s fingers touch her face, drawing lines with her tears. “Maybe.” His head resting on hers. “What can a person do with falling stones?”
The watery mumbles of a distant spring, the sheltering gaze of sky. Silence as presence. Listening, she offers, “B-build?”
“Takes time,” he answers.
Myriad stars.
He says, “But we have time.”
Stillness.
She finally hears Isaiah.
“We?”
“Mhh.”
Silence.
Then, “Why?” Soft break in her voice.
“We’re here now.”
“Murderers?”
“Impostors.”
“Who?”
“Me. If I remember, I’ll tell you all about it.”
“Amnesia?”
“Exorcism.”
“Atonement.”
“Sounds right.”
Night crickets, cicadas, cooling earth. Another breach. Life pushing at thresholds, encircling two beings. In a shared gaze, denuded presence. Accepting all as it is, even the haunted streaks, Ajany cups Isaiah’s face with both her hands. She traces its shape, its uneven edges, skin — warmth, texture. Stubble. When he clasps her to his body, her arms wrap around him. After that, everything he whispers into her ear and mouth and skin she sees in the glow of fireflies, hears in the call of night birds, the yowling of four winds, and the secret silent songs of stars that are not as distant as they first appear to be.
Later.
“Arabel,” Isaiah murmurs, “where’s Bernardo now?”
She recoils. A tiny shard of that strangeness is still lodged somewhere inside her. But it is working its way out. She gives Isaiah a limpid look, and her hands seek his, and his fit around hers.
Doum palms creak.
She says, “Ghosts lurk.”
“We’ll watch them together,” he says.
“Wildlife?”
“Old friends.”
Ajany’s laugh is throaty.
Isaiah chuckles with her. He says, “Nothing left to run away from now. No shadows.”
Her fingers stroke Isaiah’s skin. “How did you find me?” she asks.
“Your mother.” Ajany bucks. Isaiah’s arms tighten around her. “She says I’m to enfold you. Like this.” He squeezes Ajany to himself.
Breath squashed, she gasps, “What?”
“Or she’d dethrone me.”
“Dethrone?”
“From the hand gesture she made, I believe it means ‘to castrate.’ ”
Tears flood Ajany’s eyes.
“I’ll kiss you now,” Isaiah tells her.
Ajany waits.
“Dethrone,” murmurs Isaiah.
Giggles color the darkness. It pours into so many emptinesses.
45
WAVE OF DEPARTURES. NYIPIR SLIPS ON HIS OLD FEDORA, adjusts a frayed military jacket over a pale-brown shirt. A large green rucksack lies on the floor, stuffed with basics: knife, a snub-nosed pistol, rope, water bottle, a tattered black Bible, lighters, packs of newspaper-wrapped dried meat, three different passports, four identity cards, two credit cards, Maasai blankets, a rolled-up reed map, green coffee beans. From the depths of an old suitcase, Nyipir plucks out and unwraps the mouth organ.
He lifts it to his mouth and picks out chords he has given names to: Petronilla, Ajany, Odidi, Theo, Agoro. Akai, Galgalu … He evokes a tune.
Petrus Keah approaches the room and stops to listen. Eyes shut, he leans against the wall. Then he straightens up and saunters in, newly shaven, shirt unbuttoned, chest exposed, a white-and-gray Somali kikoi wrapped around his waist, red socks and gleaming black shoes adorning his feet.
Nyipir sees Petrus. His music stops.
Petrus bays an old regimental marching song off-key:
Fungua safari / Sisi vijana … / Amri ya nani …
Start the march / We young soldiers … / Whose order are these …
Nyipir accompanies him, looking him up and down. A frown of distaste spreads across his face. The music stops again.
“Keah, red socks, sooaly?”
Petrus turns his heels, indicates the ensemble, gestures with a finger.
“Everything ‘Made in Italy,’ osiepna.”
Nothing to add, Nyipir resumes their music.
“B-baba?” Ajany hears the music on her way to her father, and, like Petrus, halts to listen. Here it was. The soul of Odidi’s music. She tiptoes into the room. And falters. There. No lines, no contours, intensity of pale-orange light from the window shines upon dust fragments floating inside the space. Her father, Petrus, glimpses of backlit, blue-shadowed otherness, as if time had loosened its hold on the both of them. She gasps.
“Nyara.” Nyipir turns. He slips the mouth organ into the rucksack. “I’ve been waiting for you.”