DOROTHEA
Dorothea looked at Kessy’s hands on the steering wheel. The smooth, even brown skin. He was handsome. She wanted him to know how afraid she was even though he couldn’t take that fear away. But he was excited, he was confident. He glanced at her now and smiled. ‘Only a few more miles.’
Her hands were flat against her thighs. She felt the sweat of her palms through her trousers. Her whole body was flooding with adrenaline. It was as if the years of loss had condensed. Sludge now filled her veins.
The old white man had come last week in this car, a Land Rover. ‘Hello, I’m Harry,’ he’d said and handed her the keys. ‘This is for you.’ Dorothea thought he must be mad; certainly he exuded the kind of manic buoyancy that marked certain kinds of mental illness. But he was insistent: the car was a gift. He refused to say from whom. He seemed to think she really wouldn’t guess.
‘But what will you do without your car?’ she said to him.
‘It’s not my car,’ he said, laughing. ‘It’s your car.’
‘There is only the bus on Thursday,’ she said.
‘I’ll walk.’
She thought he was joking. ‘Can I drive you?’
‘I used to walk everywhere,’ he said. ‘Once from Juba to Addis. Heck of a slog.’
Then he’d bought some bottled water and a loaf of bread, put them in his backpack and headed back toward Butiama on foot. A puppy with a piece of string tied too tightly around its neck followed him. He bent down, took off the string and tried once to shoo it away. But the puppy refused to leave him so he picked it up and carried it on his shoulder.
‘Simama,’ she said now to Kessy. ‘Stop. I just need you to stop for a moment.’
He did as she said. She got out of the car and stood looking around her at Kenya. They were only a hundred miles from the border but the land did not look like Tanzania. Every inch of soil was cultivated and the soil itself was darker, denser. The people who passed on foot or on bicycle looked different, too, for they were Luo, big-boned with wide faces and very dark skin. They were Isaac’s tribe. Hadn’t she loved that about him? His otherness? That they were forging a new Africa, trans-tribe, trans-border. What the colonials had done with red pens on maps, Isaac and Dorothea were going to un-do. The borders of countries would always exist but people like them would transcend them.
Luke and Ezekiel were a mixture of her earth and Isaac’s. He would rub her swelling belly and murmur to them in his language and then she would put her hand on top of his and speak to her babies in her’s. Luke was born dark like his father and Ezekiel was paler like her, with a faint red tint to his hair. Myeusi and Myeupe, she would call them. Black and white, dark and light.
Far away she could just make out Lake Victoria, a thin slice of silver-blue marking the western horizon. Between here and there, small hills rolled and lifted, a quilt of shambas and dirt roads and villages. She had never come here with Isaac. Had he kept her from this place on purpose? Or had it simply been that they were both busy, young medical residents in Dar? He had this land in his mind, in his body, this sky, this view, his legs accustomed to its rise and fall. He knew its smells and seasons, the feel of its mud and dust under his bare feet. He’d been a poor boy, and it had taken him many extra years to finish his education, waiting for sponsors, always begging, always pushing, always scrounging.
Though she had been poor as a child, her family did well when Nyerere stepped down and the country opened itself to capitalism. It was because of their new wealth that she did not introduce them to Isaac. She’d felt instinctively that he would resent her parents’ gated yard and satellite dish. She had also wanted to protect him from it so he wouldn’t believe she could find a better man than him.
But the consequence had been that their families had no ties. He did not know the name of her village and she did not know the name of his.
Please, she wanted to call out. She wanted to fall on her knees on this Kenyan earth and beg God, oh please please please let me hold them let me smell them let me let me let it be okay. But you could not hope, you could not pray. And suddenly, she did not want the car, she did not want the possibility, she had grown accustomed to the hollow in herself. She did not want it carved out again, carved deeper. She was learning, slowly, to live with what had happened.
The day she’d come home, the day they had not been there — she relived this day so many times that it never became past. She’d called for them—Ezekiel? Luke? Ezza? Luke? — and there had been no answer. It was odd how she’d known right away, known they were not out at the market or the playground, had not gone to the beach. Her very first thought was that Isaac had taken them. She had suspected he would. In the silent apartment she felt careless, that she deserved this. But the boys did not, her small, sweet boys. And then she felt panic and she ran through the rooms. In the boys’ room she saw that Isaac had forgotten Ezekiel’s blanket, the one he could not sleep without. She grabbed this and ran out, down the stairs, into the street. She must find them to give Ezza his blanket. She ran along the street waving the blanket, down Mosque Street, onto Tom Mboya Avenue, she was pushing past people and in some crazy way she assumed she would catch up to them. She ran whichever way the traffic lights allowed her, as if momentum was gravity and would inevitably pull her toward her children. She was in a kind of dream and when she woke she was standing on a traffic island soaked with sweat, gasping for breath, holding a blanket. The traffic crawled past her, the machinga weaving in and out of cars, selling sunglasses and bottles of water and oranges and ornaments for the rearview mirror. The filthy, smog-choked air stung her eyes. People hustled past her. She sank to her knees. She wasn’t crying — that would come later. She was astounded. She did not know how long she sat there before coins hit her head and clinked onto the pavement. A passing driver had thought she was a beggar.
Kessy took her hand and pulled her back toward the Land Rover. ‘Come,’ he said. She resisted — wanting to turn back, wanting to stay here, afraid.
‘What if it’s fine?’ he said.
They drove on, they drove into the village, they drove to Isaac’s family’s house. Kessy would never tell her who he had bribed. A superior in town, a local businessman trying to get illegal goods over the border. Dozens of people. It must have cost him in favors, in money — his policeman’s meager salary. He must have been persistent. He had done this for her. He had found Isaac’s village for her.
‘Wait here,’ he said.
She watched him walk into the simple mud house. Improvements had been made — the trickle down of Isaac’s success: real windows, electric lights. He could probably have built his mother a cement house, but old people didn’t like change, didn’t think the new was better than what had served them through seven decades of rain and drought.
A red toy car lay on its side between her and the house. Did that mean they were here? Or only that they had been here? Or only that a neighbor had children? She had a desire to run and grab the toy car and flee like a madwoman across the maize fields. Instead, she shut her eyes, she held on to the seat.
‘Mama!’ she heard. But she still could not open her eyes, could not move, could not bear the joke.
‘Mama!’
They were there, they were getting in the car, they were swarming all over her, kissing her. She was taking them into her skin, into her body, where they had come from.
She opened her eyes and saw Kessy talking with Isaac’s old mother. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, only the tall manner of Kessy’s posture and the stooped submission of the old woman. He was threatening her. For a moment, Dorothea wanted to call out to him to stop, because she was an old woman, she hadn’t taken the boys, she probably loved them. At least Isaac had brought them here to her, instead of to his house in Nairobi or Nakuru where he no doubt had another wife.