Ajany sees the travel packs on the floor. “You’re leaving.”
“Mandalay, 21° 59′ N 96° 6′ E, Rangoon, 16° 47′ N 96° 9′ E.”
“B-burma.”
He nods.
Her eyes widen in Petrus’s direction. “With him?”
Petrus purses his lips.
An awful stutter garbles Ajany’s words so tears show up in Nyipir’s eyes. She chokes out, “B-but when will you come back?”
When she was little, she would ask him this, and when she did, he promised to be home before the moon began to smile.
Nyipir reaches for both his daughter’s hands. “Today … today I don’t know.”
She stares. Huge tears floating in her eyes.
“I’ve something for you and Od … er …” Nyipir pulls out an old hard-covered black notebook held together by rubber bands. “Bank safety-deposit details. Odidi’s name. Yours also. Gemstones. Converted from money from … er … trading. Sign in with your ID when you go. It’s all been arranged.” Ajany’s hands hover over the notebooks. Soft-voiced, Nyipir leans close: “Or leave it. Begin something new. Something that’s yours.” A pause. “You decide.”
Silence stripped bare.
“Baba?”
“Yes.”
Stillness.
She says, “Akai-ma’s leaving.”
“Yes.”
“And Galgalu.”
“Yes.”
Ajany looks at tearstains spreading on their clothes.
What endures?
Silence.
Then Nyipir whispers. “Draw a picture for us,” he adds. “Yes, shade even death in … use the colors of the sun and … and …” He remembers. Grunts it out: “forgiveness.” Quiet. “Create room for trying again. Breathing.” They wait.
“Will you, nyara?”
She did not understand, but his brows were puckered, eyes searching hers. In them the past, the here and the faith. She speaks to faith, she says Yes.
In Nyipir’s age-etched eyes, new tears. So Ajany burrows her face into his shoulders.
Ajany will hold the memory of light and clouds visible from a window. She will remember her head on Baba’s shoulders, hear echoes of music, smell pilgrimage, mystery, and all the worlds a father contains on musty travel clothes. She will savor this departure, the texture of old salt, and the weightless inability to say the word “Goodbye.” She remembers Nyipir repeating, “Ah, nyathina,” a rumbling voice calling her his own, and when she glances at Petrus once more, he has become another sign of faith.
Before Nyipir crossed the threshold that separated Wuoth Ogik from the rest of the world, Ajany gave him her sketchbook. Inside were two watercolors: one an impression of his brother, Theophilus, and the other his father, Agoro, revealed in colors taken from shades of longing within Baba’s voice. He inserted Odidi’s folded photograph into the pages: all the Oganda men in one place.
What endures? Echoes of footsteps leading out of a cracking courtyard, and the sound a house makes when it is falling down.
What endures?
Starting again.
Galgalu pivots sharply and moves to his left down a fire-eaten trail, which had those many years ago brought him into Wuoth Ogik. He crosses the space which takes him past the place where the Trader’s tukul had been, where he had seen that death was also fire, and it warmed the face of life. He looked and saw that the wind still came to scatter the ash and dust.
Akai Lokorijom dispossesses herself even of stories she had buried in the earth. She tells these to Ali Dida Hada as they walk with slow steps. He receives them. When she stops speaking, he is still there. So they walk some more. As they walk, Ali Dida Hada tells Akai about beginnings. Tells her that if she wants he will tell her his original name, the one he had forgotten. She tilts her head so he can whisper it into her left ear. She hears it and laughs, and he with her. They walk and walk until, one day, near a gorge with secret, sweet water streams, they cross into a land where the fire makers lived, a short distance from a forge. Akai and Ali Dida Hada see pale-yellow moonflowers thriving on the shadow side of a conical green hill.
46
AJANY AND ISAIAH ARE THE LAST TO LEAVE WUOTH OGIK. THEY leave so the fire burning down the house can finish its work. The house glows. Resin-infused flames. Everything — wood, books, art, chairs, memories — turns to ash. At first the fire had mesmerized them. They watched it from their campsite, and Isaiah dragged out his battered camera to take pictures. But then, seduced by the fire’s frenzied freedom, they had danced before it giddy as children, and in their dancing there was fire and the spirit in the fire found bodies stripped bare to weave into replete landscapes, into which untiring desire roared in visceral rites of exorcism. The next night — just after midnight, when it was coolest — they set out for North Horr. They walked into the morning and past the evening. If they had left even three days after the others had, or if they had waited at Wuoth Ogik one more hour, they might have escaped the weight and waves of the flash flood. The mighty water was from a deluge that had ripped apart an ancient bridge, and caused the Ewaso Nyiro to rise and spread inland over a fifty-kilometer radius for the first time in remembered history.
A rushed, endless plunge.
Later, at the tip of the water, the woman called out to the man. Her voice was smooth, as if newborn. Her eyes contained the shine that marked those who emerge out of chasms. It took an eternity before he answered. Dripping water, he asked if this was the road that led to the place where journeys ended.
Twelve days later, in the northern reaches of Kenya, rain clouds withdraw. The earth gulps down and stores water for later. A congregation of birds chirp, a raucous choir in need of a sane conductor. Transient storm-rivers disappear as the Ewaso Nyiro starts its reluctant crawl back to old boundaries. Oryx gambol; giraffes browse on the extended banks of streams, among pockets of flowering shrubs of all hues, mostly peach, a desert supernova of frozen flame, fragile blossoms, frantic in bloom, as if they were angels relishing a temporary reprieve from celestial certainty. A golden finger-of-God stirs clouds.
A hundred kilometers away, a helicopter hovers. A Cajun-accented foreigner surveys the area. The Jacobses’ mission station is underwater. The helicopter drifts to where the house should have been and circles the area at least thirteen times before setting course again for Nairobi. It is assumed that the Jacobses, together with an elderly intelligence man, a local named Petrus Keah, were some of the many human, floral, and animal casualties of a sudden desert storm in Africa: Requiescant in pacem.
In this landscape, a dog and camel saunter ahead of two tall gray-haired, ebony-skinned elders, one of whom, bare-chested, traverses the land in shiny black shoes set off by red socks. The camel, separated by the storm from its herd, is a good-natured juvenile now renamed Kormamaddo II by his itinerant, self-styled new owners. The travelers approach Lake Ka’alakol, which glowers, unmoved by nature’s theatrics. One of the men, with his fedora and cane, is debonair in a tattered kind of way. He has to remind the other to “Move, move.” The shirtless one gawks at day and night skies. Two evenings ago, he swore he saw the amused face of Existence looking down on itself. The night before that, he heard the clamoring of wounded souls who had taken residence in his being. They had offered him a truce: the idea of peace if he would speak out their names. It was a deal. Afterward, and for the first time in a terrible and long while, he heard silence. “See those clouds,” he demands of his companion.