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THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2014 by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Paulines Publications Africa for permission to reprint an excerpt from “A Song of the Lion” from The Gabra: Camel Nomads of Northern Kenya by Paul Tablino (Nairobi: Paulines Publications, 1999). Reprinted by permission of Paulines Publications Africa.
Portions of this work previously appeared, in significantly different form, in the Literary Review (Winter 2009); in Internazionale Magazine (December 2010); and in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern (April 2011).
Owuor, Yvonne Adhiambo.
Dust / Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-307-96120-4
eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-96121-1
1. Kenya—Fiction. 2. Kenya—Social life and customs—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PR9381.9.098D87 2014
823′.92—dc23 2013027871
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Jacket design by Linda Huang
v3.1
First, this book is dedicated to you,
La Caridad.
Beautiful, beautiful, beloved Tom Diju Owuor
(Couldn’t you tarry,
Just a little bit, Daddy?)
1936–2012
My dazzling, adored, life-hope-beauty-breathing mama,
Mary Sero Owuor
For you my cherished siblings,
Vivian Awiti, Caroline Alango, Genevieve Audi,
Joanne Achieng, Alison Ojany, Chris Ganda, and Patrick Laja;
Joseph Alaro, François Delaroque, Rob de Vries,
and John Primrose. The next generation angels,
Karla, Angelina, Taya, Nyla.
For those gone ahead, for the ones still to come.
Thank you
“You will hear the voice of my memories
stronger than the voice of my death—that is, if death ever had a voice.”
—JUAN RULFO, Pedro Páramo
Follow my tracks in the sand that lead
Beyond thought and space.
—HAFEZ
Chon gi lala …
—LUO STORY BEGINNINGS
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
PROLOGUE
HE LEAPS OVER TWO FIRE-PAINTED BLOSSOMS RESTING ON THE stark cracked city pavement. Roused, these unfurl into late-Christmas-season orange-and-black butterflies that flutter into the violet shade of a smog-encrusted roadside jacaranda tree. A thrum becomes a hum becomes thumping footsteps, and soon he is entangled in a thicket of jeers and tossed gray, black, and brown stones as he flees toward a still-distant night. It is said that in combat some soldiers shoot over their enemies’ heads in order to avoid killing them. Some don’t even fire at all. Moses Ebewesit Odidi Oganda’s fingers tremble on the trigger of an old, shiny AK-47. He hurls the gun away with an “Urgh!” The weapon spills across the road—a low-pitched, guttural noise.
From behind Odidi, a wail, “Odi, man! Cover!”
Other chords of voices echo:
Hao! There they are.
Waue! Kill them.
Wezi! Thieves.
Odidi runs.
Three weeks ago the rifle was in the hands of a minor Somali warlord turned Eastleigh-based vendor of off-season Turkish designer women’s wear. The ex-warlord had given Odidi the weapon as compensation for camel water songs, which Odidi had sung inside the trader’s shop while he was picking up lacy feminine things for Justina, his girl. Odidi’s music caused wistful chirping sounds to come out of the refugee—lamentations for lost, happy pastoral yesterdays.
The taciturn man had approached Odidi. “You sing as if you know water,” he had said.
“I do,” Odidi answered.
“These were our old songs.… How did they find you?”
“A visiting man.”
“He has a name?”
Odidi paused. That name came with a torrent of buried history. A curt reply: “Ali Dida Hada.”
“Degodia,” concluded the warlord, naming a clan.
“No. No.” Odidi frowned at yellow, pink, black, and red panties and brassieres, his mind struggling. Then he said, “No! A stranger of too many lands.” And faces.
The trader leaned forward. “You know the song of Kormamaddo, the sky camel?”
Odidi had winked before whistling an overture. The man had pounced on nostalgia’s lyrics and belted them out. They had then ventured into and mangled other water songs.
“Desert ghost of yesteryear/Dredge the dunes/Draw sweet truth out.”
An hour later, as Odidi was paying half-price for Justina’s fripperies, the ex-warlord had muttered, “Wait.” He leaned down, hefted up a canvas-and-newspaper-wrapped, hard, four-part object and closed Odidi’s hand over it. “From my heart. Open it alone. God shield your songs and your wife.” He dabbed tears off his face, partly of relief because he had also offloaded a problem.
Now.
“Waue!” The pursuing Nairobi mob howls.
Odidi runs.
Not feeling the ground. Soaring.
Swish, zip, pop, rattle.
Bullets.
Grunt, thud. A man falls.
Ratatatata … Screams.
Odidi runs.
Tears flood. Terror-rage-love fuse.
The fallen ones are his men.
Guilt. Fury. Sorrow.
“Urgh!” The sound a captain makes when he falters and loses the team. Still, Odidi does not go for the pistol strapped to his chest. Odidi runs. Strength in his arms, his legs pistons, he sprints down Haile Selassie Avenue, jumps over prone, cowering citizens, pities them, the bullets aimed at him raining down upon them. He runs through the stench of decay, the perfume of earth hoping for rain, habits and dreams of Nairobi’s people: smoke, rot, trade, worry, resi
dues of laughter, and overbrewed Ketepa tea. Odidi runs.
Incantation: Justina! Justina!
Shelter of faith.
The mob screams, “Hawa!”
Justina! Faith into sorrow into longing: I need to go home.
“Waue!” The answer.
Memory’s tricks. Odidi soars into the desiccated terrains of Wuoth Ogik, the home he had abandoned: his people reaching out for him, cowbells, bleating goats, sheep, and far mountains. He sees Kormamaddo, the grumpy family camel, dashing home from pasture. The sky of home, that endless dome. Flood tide in his blood. I want to go home. Odidi lifts his feet higher, trying to fly. Odidi runs.
Random humans in this slippery city of ephemeral doings crave his death. Ua! Something flutters and falls within Odidi like a startled, broken songbird. What have I ever done to them? He just wants to go home.
Justina!
Oasis.
He will cross spiderweb black roads to touch her.
Odidi runs.
He turns down Jogoo Road and glances upward, childhood habit born when Galgalu, the family herdsman, had told him that God was Akuj—Eternity Revealed as Sky. Up there now, orange dusk light’s bateleur eagles. Like marabou storks, they are prophet birds. Water in his eyes. Odidi blinks away Nairobi’s late-day drizzle. And the earth shivers behind him. A pitiful bellow, a goat protesting the injustice of a butcher’s knife. Death stinks of cold emptiness. Omosh: the last of his men. Odidi gulps down vomit. Tastes salt. Tears in his mouth, sticky, wet of hands, as if he has dipped them into blood. Was this the destination of all their wars?
Shadow and regret.
Stumbling.
He must move.
But the city, his city, has all of a sudden changed its shape and turned against him. Roads slither into hard walls; blocks of shadow scurry away to expose his next step to ravenous, carnivorous urban trolls. Faster, Odidi runs.
A whisper from his remote past like a brushstroke on his bare back: You can’t live in the songs of people who don’t know your name.… Odidi grabs at his throat, suffocating in a burst-of-fire clarity. What have I done? Odidi runs.
Glimpse of his fleeting shadow’s reflection on darkened glass panes. What had he done? Odidi runs. Louder: You can’t live in the songs of people who don’t know your name. He understands now that he must protect his family. Odidi runs. He must reach a stranger; stop him from boarding a flight from Heathrow to Nairobi. First, he must find the labyrinthine alleyways, his escape routes. Pounding steps behind him, sundown’s cool breeze on his arm and face. A moan within his throat—let me go home. Odidi runs. Damp-fisted hands propel him forward, and the city’s twilight rain saturates his skin at the same time that he hears a phone melody from within his coat pocket. Cesária Évora’s “Um Pincelada.” His sister’s calling tune.
Grim grin. Only Arabel Ajany Oganda would phone at a time like this. If he were to answer, he predicts her first words would be “Odi … what’s wrong?” He would have to say, “Nothing, I’m taking care of it,” as she expected him to, and he always did. And he was. Odidi runs. “Um Pincelada” plays. If he could, he would say, Hello, silly. After more than ten years of nothing, today he could tell her: I’m going home. She would laugh, and he with her. The music stops. Hello, silly.
They were chance offspring of northern-Kenya drylands. Growing up, Odidi and Ajany had been hemmed in by arid land geographies and essences. Freed from history, and the interference of Nairobi’s government, they had marveled at Anam Ka’alakol, the desert lake that swallowed three rivers—the Omo, Turkwel, and Kerio. They learned the memories of another river—the Ewaso Nyiro—four moody winds, the secret things of parents’ fears, throbbing shades of pasts, met assorted transient souls, and painted their existence on a massive canvas of glowing, rocky, heated earth upon which anything could and did happen. They mapped their earth with portions of wind, fire, sky, water, and nothingness, with light, piecing tales from stones, counting footsteps etched into rocks, peering into crevices to spy on the house of red rain. They lived in the absence of elders afflicted with persistent memories: no one to tell the children how it had been, what it meant, how it must be seen, or even what it was. Because of this, they re-created myths of beginnings. “The first Oganda was spoken into existence by flame,” Odidi once told Ajany. She believed him. His sister trusted everything he said. Glimmer of a smile.
“Hawa!”
He had forgotten where he was.
Odidi runs.
He jumps over mud-stained, crumpled election posters entangled in rotting foliage that show the bright face and pure-white teeth of one of the presidential candidates. Teeth do not rot in the grave. Where had he read that? To his left, a plastic-choked alleyway. He ducks into it. Song in his heart, a psalm of glee. This is his territory.
Justina!
A glance finds her among a seething mass. He knows most of them—gang associates. Justina is draped in her yellow muumuu with its ridiculous giant pink carnations. He adores that dress on her. He adores her. Her eyes are unusually large, luminous, and hollow. Her howl fragments his heart—Who has wounded her? Whom must he kill?—and then flames flare from his heart’s soul and engulf him, and after he screams out, he can no longer see Justina.
Odidi limps.
He grips his shattered right shoulder. Protrusion of bone. Blood trail. Trickle from his mouth. It is said that in the throes of battle dying men cry out for their mothers. Akai-ma, Odidi groans. She wards off ghouls and bad night entities, wrestles God, casts ancient devils into hell before their time, and kicks aside sea waves so her son will pass unhindered. Akai-ma. Throb in the back of Odidi’s left leg. Searing that eats the base of his spine. Damp from his chest. And even though his leg is heavier than a tree trunk, he tries to carry it home. He grapples with a thought that keeps sliding away. He seizes it. Justina!
The finish line. He will make it because he is Shifta the Winger, rugby finisher, and scorer. His forwards and backs have thrown him the ball. Although they have fallen out of play, they depend on him to end the game. He is the quickest, the trickiest, the best Shifta the Winger, dancing through adversaries. Before Jonah Lomu made it right to have large wingers, there was Shifta the Kenyan Winger, who carried the game into the face of opponents, and who scored try after try after try while crowds chanted Shifta! Thump, thump! Winger! Thump! Thump! And later, when he heard the Kenyan national anthem, felt it resound in his spirit, he had wept tears that traveled past his lips and reached the earth.
Shifta! Thump!
Winger! Thump!
Odidi hobbles to the center of a pathway, his twisted leg dragging. Warm liquid runs down, stains his trousers, leaving a visible patch. Piss. Out of his control. Akai-ma! She fixes everything. Retrieves those who belong to her. Dim shadows, like bateleur eagles surveying grassy plains, circle in. They herd him into a trap.
A succinct ratata.
Odidi’s good knee gives out.
He crumbles.
Exhales on a gurgle.
It is said.
That when a person begins to die, all his life races past him in spaceless time and timeless space, and he can feel again, only much faster, and with sunlike light, all he has felt before. On the tarmac, Odidi Oganda’s knuckles scrape hot stone. His left leg faces the opposite direction. A single spurt of sound becomes a blaze that cuts through Odidi’s middle, and his entire existence spirals down a hole that becomes smaller and smaller. His body jerks backward and then forward. He sighs, exhausted now, fingers folding into themselves.
Music.
A replay of Cesária Évora.
Ajany.
His sister.
Words congeal, become blocks of thought. Heart-speak. Poor ’Jany. He must warn her. Poor ’Jany. Music. Akai-ma will be mad. Flicker of laughter. She was mad. Akai-ma. Galgalu will be waiting for him. He had said he would watch the sky for signs of Odidi’s homecoming. Later, they would travel with the cows to the Chalbi Desert salts and debate life, its loves and crevices.
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Music.
Cesária Évora.
Ajany.
His sister.
Once upon a time, long, long ago, when he was only four years old, Odidi, carrying Ajany, had screamed at his mother: This is my baby! She was, for he had wandered a long, long way to bring her back home, having, with Galgalu the herdsman, retrieved her from the fixed gaze of five waiting vultures.
Odidi savors the ringing.
It tastes of ordinary things.
Like presence.
He listens.
And listens.
The music stops.
No, he thinks, No, ’Jany, continue.
The drone of a million flies now buzzing in his ear. What’ll he tell his sister? He’ll say, “The land woke up at dusk and said to itself, ‘Today I’ll be Arabel Ajany. And the lake looked at the land that was Ajany and said, ‘Today I’ll be Odidi Ebewesit.’ That is why we roam. Because sometimes we are places, not people.” She would believe him. She always did. He would say …
Anonymous murmurs.
Someone moves close to him, kicks at a numbing portion of his body.
“Ameaga?” Is he dead?
“Bado.” Not yet.
They arrange objects around Odidi that ping when they fall. He squints through an overwhelming dark-red veil at the moving misshapen shapes.
Simpler needs: Help me.
Foot on his numb body.
Smaller longings: Touch me.
Minuscule hope: Stay with me.
Murmurs.
Stay. Odidi hiccups.
Ache becomes pining, every straggling breath now consecrated to presence, a single word bursting through—Baba! The sound dissolves resistance. Baba! Misery pouring out of Odidi’s mouth is the color of rotting blood. It stains his coat and T-shirt. Red tears. Streaks make his face a grotesque duo-toned mask.
Odd memory.
Old music.
Fela Kuti.
Moses Odidi Oganda was eighteen years old, a first-year University of Nairobi engineering student, when, in a room full of books and silences in his coral-hued desert home, Wuoth Ogik, he had dived into a story of machines and found, tucked into inner pages, an alien painted vision. He had ripped it from a page that age had glued it into, his breathing all of a sudden disgruntled, pained, and potholed. Before he could further contemplate what the image meant, he heard the hard tread on stone of his father’s footsteps. He had returned the piece to its mute page and walked out with the book.