Nyipir nods. He hauls down orange and red luggage and nods at the pilot over and over. And then Nyipir waits, a solitary form. Soon, the plane taxies, wobbles, and then lurches skyward. The pilot circles Wuoth Ogik, offers a lilt and waggle. Nyipir brings his hand up to his forehead and returns the salute.
Five kilometers away, a slow-moving dust-devil giant lops over the land. Ten minutes later, the formerly green, now rust-colored family Land Rover, long in tooth and loud in rattle, bounds toward the waiting pair. Nyipir faces the car, not breathing. The Land Rover creaks to a stop and emits the smell of a burning clutch. Two people emerge: Galgalu, who had grafted himself onto the family before the children were born, and Nyipir Oganda’s wife, Akai Lokorijom.
She flows like magma, every movement considered, as if it has come from the root of the world. Tall, willowy, wasp-waisted, her breasts still large and firm, she is made of and colored by the earth itself. Something ferocious peers out of dark-brown eyes, so that even her most tender glance scalds. Her voice, a bassoon-sounding, gravel-colored afterthought. At unpredictable moments, for nameless reasons, she might erupt with molten-rock fury, belching fire that damaged everything it encountered. Akai was as dark, difficult, and dangerous as one of those few mountains where God shows up, and just as mystifying.
When he sees Akai, Nyipir’s hands pour sweat. Ajany’s bags slip from his grip and tumble to the ground.
Galgalu, carrying a lit kerosene lamp behind Akai, lifts a hand to Nyipir in greeting, but Nyipir’s eyes are fixed on the bald patches on Akai-ma’s scalp where she has torn out her hair. Scratches and tear marks on her face. Blood cakes her body in thin strips. One of Nyipir’s AK-47s, the four-kilogram 1952 with a wooden butt stock and hand guard, is strapped to her body, cradled in a green kanga with an aphorism written on it: Udongo uwahi umaji, “Work with wet clay.”
Nyipir shambles toward his wife. He is preparing to steer away from echoes of a conversation that started one day in August 1998, after a distant-living coward detonated a bomb in Nairobi. He should have known it was a forewarning.
“My son!” Akai-ma had wailed at him then, while a BBC Radio news bulletin retold the story of an explosion in Nairobi. “I want my son.”
“He’s safe,” Nyipir had answered.
Akai Lokorijom had said nothing. Disappeared, reappeared — Vaselined and fresh, with a small bag, ready for a journey.
“Now where’re you going?” Nyipir had asked.
“To find my son.”
Nyipir grunted, “I’ll go.”
He had started toward Nairobi, the city that had tried to kill him. He’d made it past shifting dunes into the North Horr airstrip when he bumped into Ali Dida Hada, who was also on his way to Nairobi, summoned to the Kenya National Police headquarters at Vigilance House.
“As if we don’t have enough fools of our own,” Ali Dida Hada griped, not commenting on Nyipir’s sweat-bleeding body, his tremulous voice.
“He’s my only son,” explained Nyipir.
“I’ll look.”
“Akai would die …”
“I’ll find him.”
“Moses Ebewesit Odidi Oganda.”
“I know him.”
“She’ll break if something has hurt him.”
“I know.”
A tacit admission of a situation that neither would acknowledge existed. “I’ll look. I’ll call you,” said Ali Dida Hada.
They had parted.
They had not shaken hands.
Nyipir had changed directions, slunk off toward Maralal to monitor the news. Eight days later, with a crackle of the radio, Ali Dida Hada informed Nyipir that Odidi Oganda was safe, and contributing to the after-attack relief efforts. He also said Odidi was a successful Nairobi engineer servicing large contracts.
A pause. “You saw him?
“I did.”
“What did he say?”
Silence.
Nyipir now inhales the orange sun, the dry grasslands, and the chirping of early-evening crickets, to escape, for even a second, the horror of the story he must repeat to a mother: the roiling country, the murdered son. The fire in Galgalu’s kerosene lamp wavers. Nyipir circles the area, hurries to shield Akai from seeing the coffin.
Her mother. In Ajany, a concentration of absences from seven and a half years twinge in her heart like a torn string clanging lost music. She exhales and bounds over, an eager dog closing in on its mistress. Akai-ma pivots. Another direction. Ajany stops.
Nyipir stretches out his arms. “Akai.” He starts his explanation.
Akai shoves him aside.
He stumbles.
She reaches the coffin. Wind hurls dust around, a pair of creamy butterflies. Silence. Soft voice. “Who is it?”
Nyipir enters the breach. “Our son. Odidi.” He bows his head.
Akai asks, “Who is it?”
“Odidi.”
“Who?”
“Akai …” pleads Nyipir.
“No!” she explodes.
She glares at them all, paces up and down a portion of the field, her arms thrown up and then down; then she returns and pinches Nyipir’s arm, her eyes sly. “Where’s my son?” She won’t wait for his reply. She returns to the coffin, clutching her waist, scratching her left arm.
“Mama,” Ajany calls.
Akai waves a hand at the noise. “Nyipir, where’s my son?”
Nyipir’s head swings left, right, left, right. “I tried everything, I tried,” he croaks, hands gesturing upward. “Akai …”
“Nyipir! I told you, ‘Bring my son home.’ Didn’t you hear me?”
Nyipir’s hands move upward again. His mouth opens and closes. Saliva clings to his jaw.
“Nyipir—where’s my child?” Akai’s eyes bulge.
“M-mama?” stutters Ajany.
Akai points at the coffin. “Who?”
Galgalu moves closer. He props the lantern against the tree. Uses his whole arm to wipe tears off his face. He had known it would come to this. He had known.
Akai hobbles past. “Show. Me.”
Galgalu unscrews the large bolts and opens the coffin lid.
No time. No space.
Akai-ma falls, arms stretched forward. She crawls, leans over Odidi’s body, reaches in, takes it by the shoulders, holding him to her breast, keening in intermittent groans, lips on Odidi’s forehead. She rocks her son, strokes his face, rocks her son. Odidi, she croons. Odidi, wake up. Son. Listen. Ebewesit. I’m calling you.
To name something is to bring it to life.
A churning heat, like heartburn with a rusty aftertaste, grows in Ajany’s gullet. Cry, Ajany tells herself. An ugly jealousy, of wanting to be the dead one held by her mother, being invoked to life by such sounds. Shame. Akai’s whimper. Cry, Ajany tells herself. Watches her brother limp in her mother’s arms. Live, she commands Odidi. But her eyes are dry.
Akai-ma moans furiously. She batters the earth with one hand, while the other grips Odidi. “Take me. Here, you thing, take me.” Akai holds Odidi with dust-stained hands as if he were just born. She adjusts his shirt, moves his headrest, and swabs invisible drops from his face. She holds him to her breast, her head resting on his. She hums, her voice large, deep, husky, and ancient. She stares at the sky, rubs her face with her son’s hands. All of a sudden she looks over her shoulder and stares with intent at Nyipir.
Ajany flinches at what hurtles between them. Nyipir shakes his head, palms out. “Akai.” A gray shadow descends around him. From his mouth, a whistling of deflation, and then his face is sunken and old.