The Dragonfly Sea

by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  The island was not to know that Muhidin had just been informed of the fate of his son Tawfiq, Ziriyab’s brother, which was why he had a new reason to be afraid about Ziriyab’s fate. Munira had told him how Tawfiq and his and Ziriyab’s families, including Muhidin’s unmet grandchildren, had been obliterated.

  “He didn’t tell me,” Muhidin had bleated several times.

  Munira had yelled back, “He wanted to forget.”

  “He told you,” Muhidin had accused.

  Munira had shouted, “I am his forgetting.”

  Ayaana, who had just walked in, heard Muhidin cry, “Aren’t I a person, too?,” as he poked a finger at Munira’s forehead. “You owe me a son,” he had cried as he tore out of the house.

  * * *

  —

  But Pate Island had never, ever kept its secrets as neat, secure packages. A serpentine coven of informants with grudges emerged, willing to hawk untruths. “Haki ya Mungu,” some vowed, Ziriyab, the incompetent fisherman, had drowned at sea. “As God is my witness,” insinuated others, Ziriyab was a thief who had died on the streets of Mombasa, victim of mob justice. A retired minor intelligence officer turned jeweler whispered to Ayaana to urge Muhidin to forget Ziriyab, because he had joined the mujahidin in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Iraq…somewhere. Ayaana had wondered, “How do you know?” She said nothing to Muhidin. The tailor later told her that “someone” had spotted Ziriyab in Cairo as he crossed the Qasr el Nil Street: “He was in a hurry.” Stealthy encounters. Intrusions in the lives of those who lived with the void of their “missing.” Unwanted intimacies with the incompetent, indifferent, and ill-informed state when the desperate went to search mortuaries, hospitals, mosques, police stations for their misplaced loved ones. They discovered unbending strangers with inflexible questions, a parade of uniformed idiots from assorted nations, the terrorist seekers: “When was the last time you saw him?” “Where did he sleep?” “Where did he pray?” “Who were his friends?” “Is he a terrorist?” As if the missing were guilty of future fratricide. Aspersions. “And you, are you really Kenyan?” Two men, former civil servants, had advised Munira, Muhidin, and Ayaana one humid evening that, in the matter of Ziriyab Raamis, a secret quest was the best approach. “Camouflage your inquiries. Imagine the world as a salt road, and yourselves as slugs crossing it,” one whispered.

  * * *

  Munira told everyone that Ziriyab would return. She insisted on it. With feral intent, she held up the previous world order, keeping it familiar for Ziriyab, so that nothing would be out of place, not even the weather, when he returned. She wore his ring. She still dressed up and perfumed herself, her clothes, and their bed. She carried out her beauty work. What had changed was her appetite: she would drink sugarless but spiced coffee, rice with a sprinkle of coconut and mchicha, and nothing else. Exactly two months after Ziriyab’s disappearance, Ayaana saw her mother sink to the ground in her kitchen, eyes staring. Giving in to gravity. With a cry, Ayaana flew to lift her up. But Munira abruptly rose before she reached her. “I stumbled,” she said. “I’m fine. A shower, maybe?” An hour and a half later, Ayaana had to go in to retrieve her mother from the stall, where she huddled in a corner, naked and cold, as water rained upon her.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana held conversations in her head, first with Munira and then Muhidin. She picked up the threads of ideas from eavesdropping. She spoke to an imaginary Tawfiq to ask him what sort of stupidity caused a man to shred skin, sinew, and the lives of everyone he loved. Life-blow-up. Why would a human being willfully destroy his life?

  * * *

  —

  Munira had receded into her bedroom, where she sat amid Ziriyab’s shoes, clothes, shirt, books, CDs, and two cell phones. She moved nothing. Now she did not move.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana woke up with the taste of lingering silence. Senseless noise, scattered emotions. She watched Munira and Muhidin become more and more like mere impressions on an unpolished surface. Everyone tiptoed around words. When the imam came to commiserate and exclaimed, “Mungu amlaze mahali pema…Inalilahi Wainailahi Rajiun…”—May the Lord rest his soul—before he could continue, Muhidin had lifted him up and, shaking him, growled, “Swallow those words! Don’t speak death. My son lives!” Ayaana dreaded the moments when skirmishes spilled over into public places, the public gaze. And time was memorialized as Before Ziriyab Disappeared, After Ziriyab Disappeared. Anguish was a buzzard circling them. Decomposition. Some words found shape in previously unimagined squabbles. Some were over drink: Munira informed Muhidin that she needed a tonic to help her sleep. Muhidin clung to his small bottles, refusing to share. Ayaana listened to them, huddling and petrified.

  * * *

  —

  Waiting.

  * * *

  —

  No rescuer had materialized to deliver them. And the island, stupefied, it seemed, by Muhidin’s daze particularly—he was the closest they had to an oracle—struggled with a grammar for this time of its existence; too much history had fallen over their lives all at once. But it took solace in its daily routines and the reassuring rhythm of its tides.

  * * *

  —

  Muhidin and Munira secured Ziriyab Raamis’s place through silences. To those who commiserated, they offered a courteous lie:

  “Tumeshapoa.”

  We have healed.

  * * *

  —

  A corrosive rumor: Ziriyab had freed himself from Munira and her spells and fled for dear life. Mama Suleiman started and fueled this fire. She had turned up in the middle of a windstorm, adorned in gold and emerald, to announce that Ziriyab Raamis had taken up with a good and holy woman from a fine family from Vanga. She said he had gone because a son had been born to them. The woman, whose name was Nadhifa Waseema, was a real lady, with a sweet voice, who lived in Tudor, near the docks in Mombasa. Munira, intoxicated by the details, chartered a leaky boat to Lamu the next afternoon. From there she took a bus to Mombasa.

  Munira returned ten days later, to prowl the island, her lips thin, her eyes mean. She found Mama Suleiman holding forth on how to tell real from fake Bint El Sudan with Hudhaifa. Munira slapped Mama Suleiman.

  Mama Suleiman touched her burning face. Motionless. Then: “Travel well?” A laugh. “I swear, peasant, one day I’ll crush your pathetic corpse under my foot. Watch your back, dear.”

  Munira replied, “Make it soon.”

  She strode home, ignoring the stares. Munira entered her house and slumped over a table. On her face, a look of resignation.

  * * *

  —

  Muhidin dressed up in a never-before-seen gray suit. He told Ayaana and Munira that he was going to Mombasa to make inquiries. When he landed in Mombasa’s old harbor, he did not go to the police station. He went into Old Town to look for and hire a private investigator. In the evening, he proceeded to Malindi, to hire an inquirer of and negotiator with timeless spirit worlds. Both men guaranteed that they would locate Ziriyab, dead or alive. When Muhidin returned to Pate Island, four days later, he was eerily triumphant. But days and nights turned into months without tangible results from the pair, whose updates seemed to draw from the same nebulous source: “We are getting closer and closer to a vision of the target, who has advanced beyond an immense wall made out of a thicket of shadows.” And then there was nothing. Nothing. Muhidin’s phone calls to them always encountered a busy signal.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana had to become an emissary between worlds for the heart-wounded. Twice in a day she lifted Muhidin’s unshaven face from his vomit, cleaned the mess on the table, and wiped his mouth. His eyes skimmed over everything. He stank of booze—light, as if it had been sprayed on skin. When he was not lost in thoughts, he tinkered with his electronics: fixing them, pulling apart components, and fixing them again
. At night they all listened for the unexpected sounds a returning human might make: a knock, a creak, a crash, a scrape, a bump, anything to suggest the return of Ziriyab.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana organized her guardians’ businesses. She dispensed their blends to needy clients. She sold Muhidin’s books and suggested healing words, most of which she improvised from Hafiz’s poetry. She calmed Munira’s overwrought females, as she touched them with hands warmed by sweet jasmine oil and created, with henna, symbols that spelled hope, on feet, backs, and hands. Ayaana also found in some of these people the unexpected ways of human tenderness—the extra payments, food wrapped up and left behind, muttered prayers, and hands that blessed.

  * * *

  —

  Thunder, lightning, two days of rain.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana jumped over rain puddles. An unusual blue mist covered part of the island, adorning it with a damned sort of beauty. She hurried across the island, looking over her shoulder, scratchiness in her throat, cold in her spine, surrounded by the miasma of the Thing of Fear that sometimes spoke to her in the sibilant whispers of Fazul the Egyptian. Creeping guilt, as if she had something to do with these disappearances. Yes, she had prayed for Ziriyab Raamis to get lost so she and Muhidin would have Munira again, as before. It was not as if she had known her prayers would be answered. In communal conversation they had become “the family of the missing Ziriyab.” Ayaana pretended there was an end to “missing.” Those who approached the family spoke deliberately of other things— the weather, fishing news, arrivals, births, and news from Palestine, which before the “War on Terror” had not occupied the islanders’ imaginings.

  * * *

  Ayaana read. She inhabited characters’ lives so that she might escape her world. She studied their words. She carried a moth-damaged copy of The Story of Layla and Majnun by Nizam that she had taken off Muhidin’s bookshelf. In it she read of desire and need not unlike her mother’s, and anguishes that surpassed Muhidin’s. The words introduced her to new questions without answer. Later, Ayaana lay under the stars—the house was oppressive—listening to the night wind. This was the first of the nights when she heard the crying of the djinns in those high notes that sometimes ascend from the bottom of the sea. Listening to them, breath by breath, that night, she also found a cell of silence, a soft capsule that separated her from the rest of the world. The sea stirred. Moon on water. Mahtabi. Akmar.

  * * *

  —

  Otherworlds. Betterworlds.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana hid from the daylight so she would not have to conjure up answers for the inquisitive.

  * * *

  —

  She lifted up her arms to the night sky. She imagined she was throwing out feelers across life’s uneven contours, reaching for the sense of Ziriyab Raamis. Up and down the coast Ayaana walked, combing the beach, crossing dunes, poking into crevices, immersed in sound, renouncing her secret sin, those jealous prayers uttered to God to take Ziriyab away. Now his absence was desolation; she was praying him back home. Come back. Below, waves spattered themselves against rocks. High-whistle winds. In the splintering of light on black water, for the second time, she heard the sigh of djinns. Joining them, she wailed out a longing to be swept into the soul of a storm so she might be fearless, formless, and strong.

  She dared.

  She dived.

  The sea was liquid charcoal spattered with the innards of moonlight. She tumbled into the seduction of the deep, craving its feel. Pulsing water. No gaps in the ocean, no distances between beings. She sank deeper, losing the sense of up or down. The sea. Its iridescent layers. A creature burning an inner fire floated past. Her ears popped in the cooler waters below. Water citizens of many shapes and hues swam around her, an eel-like translucent being, round eyes on her, a shoal of tiny silver fish nibbling at her bare feet, tickling her skin. Soft, serene sinking, and familiar calmness oozed into her, dissolving time and trouble. The ocean pressed hard against her lungs, but she had borrowed enough air from the surface not to mind. She settled into the arms of her ocean. Cocooned stillness. It was easier to drop than it was to ascend. Homecoming. The murmur of djinns. She remembered then to twist her body to propel it back to the surface, kicking the water, tears melting into the sea, just as light had done before her. Bursting for breath, almost swallowing water. She surfaced. She let her body choose its direction. Drifting. Every day was the same day, every night the same color of nothing. Ayaana discovered that “nowhere” was also an inhabited space.

  * * *

  —

  Somehow, a year slipped by.

  [ 23 ]

  Muhidin had decided to do the one thing he had imagined he would never do again: he left Pate Island. Muhidin showed up at Munira’s door when Ayaana was at school. He muttered that he was going to Nairobi to settle the truth once and for all; he did not know when he would be back. Munira retreated into pride. She would not beg him to stay. Did not say that she was afraid, that she had run out of money. That Ziriyab’s debt was 73,080 shillings, without adding interest. Munira said, “Fine,” in a high voice. “Go.”

  Muhidin stood waiting, as if for something more.

  He then pulled out a note he had written for Ayaana—he had chosen to leave while she was in class. He left Munira his house keys. “For Ayaana.” He said, “The house and everything in it.” The keys clanged between them. “In case…”

  You do not return, Munira thought, and nodded quickly.

  Muhidin left.

  * * *

  —

  Munira unsealed the note Muhidin had left for Ayaana. She read it through a lens of tears. “Abeerah, I’ve gone to find our Ziriyab. I shall return. Be brave. Protect your mother. Study hard. It is I who am your father, Muhidin.”

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana watched green water churn in the pan. Mwarubaini. Neem, the malaria deterrent, which also treated thirty-nine other ailments. She boiled its leaves, its bark, and seed. The bitter elixir healed most anything. However, it could not cure grief.

  Mtupie Mungu kilio, sio binadamu mwenzi.

  Cry out to God; what can a human being do?

  [ 24 ]

  Ayaana suffered a midnight asthma attack in March, after Munira explained to her that there was no extra money to cover the fees for her second term at school. Wheezing under blankets, her frame supported by Munira, steam rising, heavy breathing.

  “I’ll find a way,” Munira said.

  They breathed in aromatic steam—inhale, exhale—absorbing shades of shame, of fear. “I’ll read every day,” Ayaana gasped. She coughed. “But I will help you with the work.”

  * * *

  Twice a day, Ayaana sat and waited on Muhidin’s stone step.

  She dialed his phone number: “Mteja hapatikani kwa sasa.”

  The subscriber is unavailable.

  The year flowed.

  The year went.

  Another New Year’s morning.

  Twice a day, Ayaana sat on Muhidin’s stone step.

  She dialed his phone number: “Mteja hapatikani kwa sasa.”

  The subscriber is unavailable.

  * * *

  Kaskazi season.

  * * *

  —

  Two unexpected visitors showed up and stepped out of a small white-and-Egyptian-blue yacht named Bathsheba moored at the decrepit jetty, attended to by unspeaking uniformed crew members in navy blue and white. The pair smelled of new leather, gold, and a perfume with the freshness of crisp banknotes. Signs of casual wealth adorned their being: embossed sleeves, crafted ties, engraved rings, and monogrammed shirts. “Wa Mashriq.” That is what the island called them, although they might have come from another place.

  * * *

  —

 
Five days later. In clipped and whispery English, one of the men drawled, “It is true, so true…” Munira’s feet faltered on the dirt track. She could see her house a distance away. “The women here…” The man inhaled, shutting his eyes, pursing his lips, simulating ecstasy. “We heard. We came to see for ourselves. We are collectors. What do we find?” He smiled.

  Munira frowned. Ignored the tickle of pleasure: were the words for her? Mild irritation. No place for blandishments in her life. Forward step.

  The man called again. “We must talk. You and I. In seriousness.”

  She turned to squint at him. Saw scars crisscrossing his face, intricate, and elegant on skin the color of golden syrup. Deliberate, as if the man had chosen the patterns himself. Even teeth, almost yellow eyes, like a contented predator, manicured hands folded over each other, resting near his heart. He said, “Beauty such as this is meant to be beheld.”